Live July 2018 version
So it's, it's 1980, I'm 30 years old, I'm on another cross-country trip with a buddy of mine and we stop outside of Phoenix to gas up. Go into a small-town drugstore, I'm rifling through a rack of paperback books, I come across a book called "Born On The Fourth Of July" by a Vietnam veteran named Ron Kovic. Now his book was a testimony of the experience that he'd had as a combat infantryman in Southeast Asia. A week or two later, I'm bunked in at the fabulous Sunset Marquis motel in Los Angeles. Uh, for the uninformed, it's kind of an upscale, lowlife rock star hangout, all right? Uh, small world theory. Small world theory proves itself once again. I'd been seeing a young guy with shoulder-length hair sitting in a wheelchair by the pool for several days. So, one afternoon he rolled up to me and said, "Hi, I'm Ron Kovic. I wrote a book called "Born On The Fourth Of July." I said, "Jeez. I just, I just read it. And when it, it destroyed me." And he spent the afternoon talking to me about many returned soldiers who were struggling with a wide variety of problems, and he wanted to know if I'd take a drive with him to the vet center in Venice, meet some of the Southern California veterans. So I said, "Sure." The next day, we headed out there, and I'm usually pretty easy with people, but once we were at the center, I didn't know how to respond to what I was seeing. Uh... talking about my own life to these guys seemed frivolous. You know? There was homelessness and drug problems and post-traumatic stress and young guys my age dealing with life-changing, physical injuries. And it made me think about my own friends from back home. Walter Cichon. Walter Cichon was the greatest rock and roll front man on the Jersey Shore in the bar band '60s. He was in a group called The Motifs, and he was the first real rock star that I ever laid my eyes on. He just had it in his bones. He had it in his blood. It was in the way that he carried himself. On stage, he just was deadly. He was raw and sexual and dangerous. And in our little area he taught us, by the way that he lived, that you could live your life the way you chose. You could look the way you wanted to look, you could play the music you wanted to play, you could be who you wanted to be, and you could tell anyone who didn't like it to go fuck themselves. Walter had a guitar-playing brother, Raymond. Raymond was tall, tall, kind of sweetly clumsy guy, one of those big guys who just isn't comfortable with his size. You know, uh, he's always, like, "Ooh. Ooh." Knocking into shit wherever he is. And wherever that is, there is just not enough space for Raymond, for some reason. And, uh... But, but another strange thing he was always dressed impeccably, you know, with a pastel shirt, long pointed collar, sharkskin pants, nylon socks, spit-shined pointy-toed shoes, slicked-back black hair with a little curl that would come down when he was playing the guitar. Uh, Raymond was my guitar hero. He was just a shoe salesman in the day. And uh, Walter, I think, worked construction. And they were only a little bit older than we were, never had any national hit records, never did any big tours, but they were gods to me. And uh... the hours I spent standing in front of their band, studying, studying, studying, class in session. Night after night, watching Ray's fingers fly over the fretboard, and Walter would scare the shit out of half the crowd. Oh, man. You know, they were essential to my development as a young musician. I learned so much from Walter and from Ray. And my dream, my dream was I just wanted to play like Ray and walk like Walter.
And then there was Bart Haynes. Bart Haynes was the drummer from my first band, The Castiles. And he was the first real drummer I ever played with. He was an absurdly funny kid, classic class clown, was a good, good drummer, with one strange quirk. Couldn't play "Wipe Out" by The Surfaris. This may not seem so critical to you right now, I understand. But, in those days, your skills, your mettle, your self-worth as a drummer and as a human being was tested in front of your peers once an evening by your performance of "Wipe Out." Now, Bart could play every other fucking thing, but when it came to "Wipe Out"... beyond his capabilities! It was tragic. You know, uh... and one day he got off, got up off the drum stool, he joined the Marines, and uh... Walter and Bart, they were both killed in the war in 1967 and '68. Bart was the first young man from our hometown to give his life in Vietnam. So, I really didn't know what to say to the guys that I was meeting in Venice. I sat there for most of the afternoon, I just listened. Then in 1982, I wrote and I recorded my soldier story. It was a protest song, a GI blues. The verses are just an accounting of events. The choruses were a declaration of your birthplace. And the right to all of the blood and the confusion and the pride and the shame and the grace... that comes with birthplace. In 1969, Mad Dog, Little Vinnie, and myself, we were all drafted on the exact same day. All three of us. We rode together early one Monday morning from the Selective Service Office on probably the unhappiest bus that ever pulled out of Asbury Park, because we were on our way to what we were sure was going to be our funeral. We'd seen it already, up very close. When we got to the Newark Draft Board, we did everything we could not to go. And we succeeded, all three of us. When I go to Washington, and I have the occasion to visit Walter and Bart, I'm glad that Mad Dog's, Little Vinnie's, for that matter, my name isn't up on, on that wall. But it was 1969, and thousands and thousands of young men to come would be called, simply sacrificed, just to save face for the powers that be who by then already knew. They knew it was a lost cause. And still thousands and thousands of more young boys. So uh... so I do sometimes wonder who went in my place. Because somebody did.
Born down in a dead man's town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that's been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hands
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says, "Son if it was up to me"
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said, "Son don't you understand now"
I had a brother at Khe Sahn fighting off them Viet Cong
They're still there, he's all gone, gone
He had a woman he loved in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms, in her arms
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refineries
I'm forty years burning down the road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road
I've got nowhere to run, I've got nowhere to go
I'm a long gone Daddy in the U.S.A.
I'm a cool, cool rocking Daddy in the U.S.A.
The above lyrics are for the live July 2018 performance of BORN IN THE U.S.A. at Walter Kerr Theatre in New York City, NY, during Springsteen On Broadway. The song was played solo on 12-sting guitar with a bottleneck slide.
This performance of BORN IN THE U.S.A. was recorded on 17 or 18 July 2018 during the taping of the Springsteen On Broadway Netflix special. It was released on the Springsteen On Broadway album in 2018.
Springsteen On Broadway was a Bruce Springsteen concert residency held at Walter Kerr Theatre (in 2017-2018) and St. James Theatre (in 2021) in New York City, NY. The show consisted of Springsteen performing five shows a week, Tuesday through Saturday, at the Broadway theatres. The sold-out series of performances began with seven previews starting on 03 Oct 2017 and officially opened on 12 Oct 2017. It was extended three times after its initial eight-week run, running through 15 Dec 2018 and bringing the total number of performances at Walter Kerr Theatre to 238. On 10 Jun 2018, Springsteen received a special Tony Award for his Broadway show. In 2021, an additional limited run was announced, this time held at St. James Theatre instead of Walter Kerr Theatre. This new series of performances opened on 26 Jun 2021 and ran through 04 Sep 2021, bringing the total number of performances at both theatres to 268.
The show featured Springsteen, solo, playing guitar, piano, and harmonica, performing his music, restating incidents from his 2016 autobiography Born To Run, and performing other spoken reminiscences written for the show. His wife, Patti Scialfa, has also appeared at most shows, singing backing vocals on a total of three different songs.
Springsteen On Broadway, a Netflix special directed by Grammy- and Emmy-winning filmmaker Thom Zimny, was filmed during two special invitation-only shows on 17 and 18 Jul 2018. The film launched globally on Netflix on 16 Dec 2018 at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time, just hours after the final Broadway performance at Walter Kerr Theatre closed. Two days prior, on 14 Dec 2018, Columbia Records released Springsteen On Broadway, an audio album encompassing the full film soundtrack. The audio was mixed by Bob Clearmountain and mastered by Bob Ludwig. The album is available physically as a 2-disc CD set or a 4-disc LP set, as well as digitally.
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List of available versions of BORN IN THE U.S.A. on this website:
BORN IN THE U.S.A. [Album version]