Bruce is still the Boss

The first record I bought was “The Green Fields of France”. It was a single recorded by The Furey Brothers and Davey Arthur and I bought it sometime in the 1970’s, when I held down a pub job for pocket money. Most of my mates were into punk, ska or the other weird forms of music that were knocking around at the time. But for reasons unknown to me, I was a fan of traditional Irish music.

I didn’t pick this up from my parents. They seemed to be into the sort of country music were everybody mentioned in the song was dead by the end of the song and most of them horribly mutilated into the bargain. Our house was full of vinyl records by women who only appeared to have first names and men with large cowboy hats. My older brother, who might also have influenced me, was into a strange combination of psychedelic and heavy metal music. So if my friends and family weren’t to blame, who was? It’s not as though Trad music was cool. Its practitioners were shaggy haired drunks in thick woollen sweaters and generally the only place you could hear the music was in smoky pubs (although not the one I worked in). So I don’t know where I developed a taste for it. Perhaps it was the first awakening of my national pride.

Over the years I have drifted more towards country folk. But every now and again I wander into Youtube and bathe in some nostalgia. That led me to the guy who wrote the “Green Fields of France”; a Scottish gentleman by the name of Eric Bogle. To my immense surprise Mr Bogle and the lead singer from the Furey Brothers were booked to play at this year’s Port Fairy Folk Festival and for old time’s sake, I thought I’d better go.

Port Fairy is a lovely little seaside town in Western Victoria that hosts a dinky little festival each March that attracts folkies and aging hippies from all over Australia. All the food is authentically ethnic and people actually talk to each other in the queue for the toilet. Most people bring little chairs to sit on and many can be seen doing the cryptic crossword in The Age in between and sometimes during shows. I think it’s fair to say that everyone who goes to Port Fairy does the cryptic rather than the ordinary crossword.

So all in all, it’s the perfect music festival for people who don’t like music festivals.

We had planned to camp, but the forecast was for 35c and as we had a 15 month old baby with us, we made a late decision to book into a motel. We found a place in Warrnambool that I suspect was last used as the set for Psycho and spent two days listening to great music (my favourites were Chris Smither and Xavier Rudd if you fancy a bit of Youtube surfing). Eric Bogle and Finbarr Fury were both fantastic, although sadly neither sang The Fields.

But Port Fairy wasn’t my only musical outing in March. Last week I had to pleasure of seeing Bruce Springsteen for the 5^th time. My previous visits to The Boss had been in Ireland and Britain and were all outdoor, including his legendary gig at Slane in 1985. My only memory of that day (apart from the realisation that all his songs mentioned cars) was that my then girlfriend wanted to go up the front to join in the mosh pit. I was a timid lad even then and offered to look after her bag while she ventured forward. She returned about an hour later, covered in mud and missing her jeans. The relationship didn’t last long enough to get an explanation for that.

Bruce played at two venues in Melbourne. The iconic Hanging Rock, made famous by the Peter Weir movie and the less iconic but highly functional Rod Laver arena, home of the Australian Open tennis. Because I’m old and crabbity, I decided that Hanging Rock, being 100km from Melbourne, would be too hard to get home from late at night, so I opted for the indoor charms of Rod Lever.

The first thing I noticed was the average age of the crowd. Bruce is 63 these days and it looked like most of the audience had been to school with him. In Ireland, the profile would have been a lot younger. Irish people don’t mind following acts that their parents were into and if it’s good old fashioned rock and roll like Springsteen, then they’d love to be up the front sporting inflatable guitars as a tribute to Steve Van Zant.

The other thing I noticed is that Australian crowds at stadium concerts like to pretend that they are in Idaho or Colorado. Maybe they were just trying to make Bruce feel at home, but holding pieces of coloured card with handwritten messages is a cringingly American habit. Most were requests for particular songs, some of which he picked at random and performed, as though the concert was a late night radio phone in request show. Some were expressions of love or longing, or plaintive requests for a hug. And some were just funny, like the one that said “The Guy behind me can’t see”.

But I was willing to put up with all of that, just to wallow in three hours of majestic music. Bruce Springsteen has been a part of my life since I was sixteen when I first heard “The River”. I bought “Tunnel of Love” on cassette in 1988 and played it endlessly in my first car and I think it’s fair to say that the acoustic version of “Thunder Road” is probably my favourite piece of music.

I’m feeling older these days, but when the opening chords of “Born to Run” play like they did during the encore last week, I felt like I was transported back to 1985 and age doesn’t matter.