The Boss will see you now: Jersey to Jozi

Rock behemoth Bruce Springsteen will occupy South Africa for the first time next week - and life-long fan Kevin Bloom is on fire with nostalgia

'Hi once again from the Pop Shop team." The year was 1984, and a bookish 11-year-old boy was about to do something stupid. This boy's best friend, you see, had two teenage brothers, jocks who had their rules about "the only show worth watching on South African TV". For instance, comments from a person whose voice hadn't dropped were prohibited. As such a person, to open one's mouth was to invite humiliations both verbal and physical.

"People tell me I look like him," said the boy, while pointing at the man on the screen.

For a long and terrible moment, the brothers' gaze turned in unison on the boy, then back to the screen, then back on the boy again.

Where the man on screen had biceps bulging from a tight leather shirt, the boy's arms were buried in the folds of a nylon tracksuit. Where the man projected an aura of iron potency, the boy was sexless, without presence. Where the man sang of a land in which the brothers, too, wished they'd been born, the boy had been born around the corner.

It seems Born in the USA, the album that went multi-platinum off a record-breaking seven Top 10 hits, had this effect when it was released 30 years ago - it inspired a global spike in half-witted statements. In the US it was the commander-in-chief himself who took the prize, when he rolled through New Jersey on his reelection campaign tour.

"America's future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts," said President Ronald Reagan. "It rests in the message of hope in the songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about."

Like my 11-year-old self, Reagan had chosen to balance the deficit in his own grasping self by taking a loan on the persona of Bruce Springsteen. Like my friend's older brothers, he had heard only the chorus to the title track, not its verses.

The bitter irony in the final verse, where the track's protagonist, a Vietnam War veteran, howls that he's "10 years burning down the road/ nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go," was as meaningless to the Republican incumbent as Springsteen's statement in 1980 that he found the incoming administration "frightening".

Decades later, years after Reagan had died, Springsteen would tell his biographer Peter Carlin: "He got his picture taken with the red, white and blue balloons, and he mentioned me. It was part of a shopping list of things that needed to be done for the six o'clock news. And I didn't want to be part of the shopping list, y'know?"

Springsteen, it turns out, never forgot. Ever since Jon Landau, who in 1974 wrote the most prescient line in the annals of rock criticism - "I saw rock'n'roll's future and its name is Bruce Springsteen" - was asked to help out with song arrangements, Springsteen's lyrics have reflected his working-class roots.

On the break-out 1975 album Born to Run, which established him as a superstar and more than fulfilled Landau's prediction, he was already gearing up on the plight of the working man while gearing down on the (tired) American dream of cars and girls.

But Carlin, comparing Born to Run's title track to a mash-up of Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone and the Beach Boys's Good Vibrations, nailed what we'll term for now "The Reagan Problem": "As in the former, the imagist lyrics ... define a strikingly new vocabulary. And like the latter, the layered music is powerful enough to make lyrics all but unnecessary."

SO what do you do if you're The Boss and millions of your so-called fans have no clue what you're singing about? Put another way, how do you remain relevant to the laid-off worker from the Rust Belt when you're more popular than Madonna, richer than Croesus?

Here's an idea: don't apologise. In 1990, after he'd paid $14-million for a sprawling Beverly Hills estate and Entertainment Weekly had asked on its cover, "Whatever Happened to Bruce?", Springsteen retorted: "I've made a lot of money and bought a big house. And I love it."

Here's another: don't pretend that The Reagan Problem doesn't exist. In 1984, at the concert in Pittsburgh directly following the president's attempt to hitch a free campaign ride, Springsteen was on it five songs into the first set. "I kind of got to wondering what [Reagan's] favourite album of mine must've been, you know? I don't think it was the Nebraska album. I don't think it was this one." He then belted out the harmonica intro to Johnny 99, which, as his most devoted fans would have known, was about to kick into these lyrics: Well they closed down the auto plant in Mahwah late that month/ Ralph went out lookin' for a job but he couldn't find none/ He came home too drunk from mixin'/ Tanqueray and wine/ He got a gun shot a night clerk now they call him Johnny 99.

So much for Reaganomics.

And so much for Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, who has been to more than 130 Springsteen concerts, and who almost certainly possesses a copy of Nebraska. Earlier this month, around the middle of January, Christie got his own version of the Reagan treatment - except this time Springsteen didn't trawl through his prodigious back-catalogue of working-man tracks to find the right one, he allowed a team of TV writers to lay down bespoke lyrics, setting them to the chords of Born to Run.

The parody debuted on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, with Fallon opening the duo performance in a Bruce get-up - sleeveless denim jacket, aviator shades, red bandana - and The Boss emerging from the wings a few bars in, dressed identically. You got Wall Street masters stuck cheek to cheek with blue-collar truckers, Christie's all-time favourite guitar hero sang. And man, I really gotta take a leak; but I can't/ I'm stuck in Governor Christie's Fort Lee, New Jersey, traffic jam.

There's little doubt that if he hadn't tried for so long to befriend Springsteen, which he had finally managed to do during the Hurricane Sandy crisis, Christie wouldn't have been so unforgettably eviscerated by his icon. But he did befriend Springsteen, and then he got caught using the state's highways in an apparent act of political retribution, which Springsteen couldn't abide. Some day, Governor, I don't know when, this will all end/ But till then, you are killing the working man.

These lyrics, at least, could not be misinterpreted. The YouTube video of the performance went viral, racking up more than two million views in three days, and showing a side of The Boss not often seen in a political context: his sense of humour.

IN Johannesburg and Cape Town, where Springsteen will appear in concert for the first time this week, will he have his sense of humour with him? Is he aware that when he performs Born in the USA - something he's likely to do, given that it's a guaranteed crowd-pleaser, and given his professional views on pleasing crowds - that thousands will be getting the words wrong? Will he deny South Africans their misplaced nationalism?

The Boss may or may not know that "Born in the RSA" was such a huge local trope in the '80s that Barney Simon staged a play under the title. He may or may not know that the play was about life here during the 1985 state of emergency, with characters running the gamut from police informers and anti-apartheid activists to schoolteachers and trade union leaders, or that the props - at once American and South African - included VCRs, discos, marijuana and fast food. The Boss, if he actually hears that we're shouting "R" instead of "U", may or may not get the irony.

Will we? Should we?

The thing about a Springsteen concert, having myself experienced all of one so far against Christie's 130-plus, is that it tends to evoke in the audience an almost euphoric sense of nostalgia. The word, a compound of two classical Greek terms meaning "homecoming" and "pain" or "ache," couldn't be more apt. To hear Glory Days sung live is to know that you too remember a girl down the block who could turn all the boys' heads and that she's also just split up with her husband (whose name, weirdly, is Bobby).

To hear Atlantic City live is also to sense how everything that dies maybe some day comes back. And to hear it all at FNB Stadium could be to feel that Springsteen's hometown - Freehold, New Jersey - is right now "your hometown", Johannesburg, South Africa.

But if nostalgia isn't your schtick - if, like my friend Lance, you passed up on seeing Springsteen in Zimbabwe in 1988 because you had an issue with the "sellout commercialism" of Born in the USA - there's always a chance that Springsteen will throw in a track or two from Nebraska or The Ghost of Tom Joad.

In fact the title track from the latter, the 1995 album that answered the critical disappointment of Human Touch with a collection of stripped-down modern folk tales even Woody Guthrie (Joad's main influence) would have admired, is a good bet for inclusion in the set - reason being, a redone version of it appears on Springsteen's latest album, High Hopes.

And unless he departs wildly from tradition, the first words South African audiences will hear The Boss sing are these: Monday morning runs to Sunday night/ Screaming slow me down before the new year dies.

It's another anthem, not quite of the strength of Born to Run or Born in the USA, although the chorus - I got high hopes - can tend to overpower the social message in the verses. Do America's middle-income earners still buy the "hope" offered by Barack Obama in 2008? If so, reckons Springsteen, what they're really doing is hoping against hope.

In the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy, where I saw Springsteen perform in July 2012, the concert opened with We Take Care of Our Own, the first track off the just-released Wrecking Ball. It was a sweltering Parisian night and Springsteen, then 62, didn't let up for a single minute of his 200-minute set. In that sense, he made a lot of people who were younger than him feel old. At the same time, of course, he did the opposite.

As Landau wrote in his famous 1974 review, before the name Springsteen was recognised outside New Jersey: "[On] a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time."

That's how I felt too: like an 11-year-old boy, who could be and do and say anything.