The Secret Truth About Bruce Springsteen.

 I've been having some odd thoughts about Bruce Springsteen.

 This is where those of you who know me say "Oh God, he's finally going to admit to his gay crush on Bruce Springsteen!" Well, nice try, suckers, but I'm never going to admit to being behind the critically panned novella "Dogging on Thunder Road: A Love Story."


 [NB: This is where I was going to mock up a cover for what that book would look like. After ten minutes of trying to find dogging pictures that were "funny" rather than "disturbing," I gave up and went to take a long, retching shower.]


 No, my current weird thoughts about Bruce are of a cleaner and more medically worrying variety.

 Bruce is many things; a working class hero, a rock'n'roll messiah, and a voice of hope and comfort to the working man. He's also, by my reckoning, the longest running case of un-diagnosed amnesia in medical history.

 Like a lot of un-diagnosed conditions, it's not immediately obvious what's wrong, but here are some examples of clear cut evidence that other sites aren't drunk, crazy, or legally fearless enough to bring you.


1. Who's Mary?!

 Throughout Bruce's career, there have been a disproportionate number of Marys in his songs. From "Mary Queen of Arkansas" on his debut album, through the Mary who's dress waves as the screen door slams on the opening track of "Born to Run," to the Mary the narrator got pregnant on the title track of "The River," Mary the doubting spouse of an ex-convict in "Straight Time," the matriarch in "Mary's Place," to... look, there's a lot of fucking Marys involved, alright?! And it's never the rhyme. It's not like he ever needed it to finish off a line that was a counterpart to "scary" or "fairy" or "antiquary." He genuinely seems to only be able to remember one woman's name, which is a little disconcerting considering he's never been married to anyone named Mary.


2. He Could Never Seem To Remember Clarence's Name...

 Clarence Clemons, the longtime saxophone player for Bruce's E-Street Band, died in 2011. Whilst many assume that such an integral figure in the E-Street sound and mythos would stick in the mind, these people don't have severe memory problems like Bruce does.

 Take, for example, 1999's "Live In New York City" album. During a sprawling, 16-minute rendition of "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out," Bruce took time to introduce all the members of the band before, as he so often did, drawing a blank when it came to Clarence.

 "Do I have to say his name?!" Bruce exhorts the crowd, in what many mistook for showmanship. In actuality, a slightly desperate Bruce was just checking if this giant saxophonist was anyone he needed to acknowledge.

"Who's the hell are you?!"

 "CLA-RENCE!" the crowd chant in response, but Bruce, presumably experiencing an especially intense moment of short-term memory loss (or just stymied by the noise of the band or poor acoustics in Madison Square Garden) can only respond "Say WHO?!"

"No... No, I've definitely never seen this guy before..."

 This "Clarence/Say who?!" back-and-forth continues for a few moments before Bruce gives up and returns to the song with the line "They made the change uptown and the Big Man joined the band..."

 This can be heard again and again on record - Bruce turning to call a saxophone solo and realising he has no idea who this guy is, and simply yelling "Big man!" as a cover. For further evidence, on the back of Bruce's second album, Clarence is listed as "Nick Clemons" for no discernable reason.

 Since Clarence Clemons' death, he has been replaced by his nephew, and one wonders if Bruce is aware of this fact. In the back of his mind, he's probably just worried that that big guy with the saxophone is looking thin and pale lately.

"I'm sure there's something different about whats-his-name..."

3. The Never-Ending Concerts.

 In 2012, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band broke their own (already impressive) record with their longest ever gig, clocking in four hours and six minutes and encompassing 33 songs.

 That's fucking ridiculous. It's bordering on suicidal. Many praise Bruce's dedication and energy, but for a man who was 62 years old at the time to play for four hours without a break is almost superhuman. How could he possibly stay fresh?!

 The answer, of course, is that someone with that kind of amnesia can't remember how long he's been playing for. After two and a half hours, he probably thinks he's only finishing the opening number and should stretch for time, just to make sure people get their money's worth. This is why Springsteen gigs habitually run to three hours, and occasionally more than four.

 This is only possible because...

4. He Doesn't Age.

Bruce seems to have spent at least the last thirty years looking at least twenty years younger than he is, a feat which is almost mathematically impossible.

 He claims to have never done any drugs, which could be why he looks superhumanly youthful while Keith Richards looks like a ball-sack's elbow. Or it could just be that his amnesia has progressed to the cellular level and his own body has begun forgetting to age. This is why he's still running around and jumping off pianos; he is biologically ignorant of the fact that he isn't still 25.

 For further proof, here he is frolicking in the ocean a few months back. He's sixty-fucking-four.

"I used to know a guy. Played the sax. I wanna say his name was Nick something..."

5. There's Something Familliar About Certain Songs.

 Here's "Factory," from 1978's "Darkness on the Edge of Town."

 And here's the never-released track "Come On (Let's Go Tonight)" from the boxed set "The Promise," a series of songs that were left off of the "Darkness" record.

 Bruce is famously obsessive about track listings, writing far more songs for most albums than ever make the final cut, but it could just be a case of him picking the ones that sound original out of twenty songs in a row that are, in fact, identical.




 I think I've offered ample evidence that Bruce is, indeed, completely incapable of remembering anything at all, and I'm hoping that will keep me safe from the lawsuit this post might otherwise result in. The only other explanation I can find for all of the above is that Bruce is a hyper-sophisticated cyborg, built with the absolute pinnacle of mid-seventies technology. It would explain the lack of aging, and also the fact that he seems to have less memory than a ZX Spectrum. If this is the case, we can't be too far from an army of fully-functioning, high-memory robot clones.

 Soon, robot Bruce Springsteens will dominate us all.

 I'd be lying if I said I wasn't looking forward to it...