Springsteen at the Circus

From Highway 61 to the Jersey Shore

Let me begin by thanking readers for your generous response to my previous piece on Joni Mitchell’s “Coyote.” According to every statistical measure that Substack gives me—views, likes, comments, restacks, subscriptions—this was by far the most popular post in the history of my site. I’m honored and delighted by your outpouring of support. For a hundred new subscribers since last month, and for all of my longtime loyal readers—welcome (back) to Shadow Chasing!

While we’re on the subject of support, please consider pre-ordering my forthcoming book Dylan in Cincinnati, due out this fall from the University Press of Mississippi. Click on the button below and use the coupon code CINCY30 for a 30% discount (this code expires April 30, 2026).

For our latest round of chasing shadows, I want to enlist the help of another beloved Dylan-adjacent artist: Bruce Springsteen. We begin at New York City’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel on January 20, 1988. A dapper 38-year-old Springsteen swaggered up to the podium to deliver a beautiful speech for Dylan’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Someone on the production team must have missed a cue because the first minute of the speech is shot entirely from behind. Not that I’m complaining. If you’re like me and have listened countless times to Born in the U.S.A. while staring at the album cover, then you’d know that ass anywhere!

The beginning of the speech perfectly captures Dylan’s magnetic appeal for teens in the mid-1960s:

The first time that I heard Bob Dylan I was in the car with my mother, and we were listening to, I think, maybe WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind, from “Like a Rolling Stone.” And my mother, who was—she was no stiff with rock and roll, she liked the music, she listened—she sat there for a minute, she looked at me, and she said, “That guy can’t sing.” But I knew she was wrong. I sat there, I didn’t say nothin’, but I knew that I was listening to the toughest voice that I had ever heard. It was lean, and it sounded somehow simultaneously young and adult.

The most frequently quoted passage from the speech puts it even more succinctly: “Dylan was a revolutionary: the way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind. He showed us that just because the music was innately physical, it did not mean that it was anti-intellect. He broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve.”

Dylan with his biggest fan at the recording session for “We Are the World” in 1985. Photo by Harry Benson.

Here’s the part of the speech that I really want us to think about: “When I was a kid, Bob’s voice, somehow, it thrilled and scared me. It made me feel kind of irresponsibly innocent. And it still does. It reached down and touched what little worldliness I think a 15-year-old kid in high school in New Jersey had in him at the time.”

It’s an endearing reaction, but also a puzzling one. I’ve listened to Highway 61 Revisited more than any other Dylan album, but if you ask me “How does it feel?” I would never answer: irresponsibly innocent. What does that mean?

Think of “I Contain Multitudes”: “I sing the songs of experience like William Blake / I have no apologies to make.” Just so: the songs of experience, not the songs of innocence. Dylan chronicles the fallen world outside the gates of Eden. He gives us shadows from “the broken mirror of innocence,” as he puts it in “Every Grain of Sand.” What does Springsteen see and hear that I’m missing? And how does his contrasting sensibility come through in his own music? Is Bruce looking into the broken mirror of Bob and seeing his own reflection?

Bruce Springsteen at the Hotel Navarro in New York City, 1978. Photo by Lynn Goldsmith.

The more I’ve pondered Springsteen’s “irresponsibly innocent” response to Dylan, the more I’ve found myself gravitating in an unexpected direction—toward the circus. Carnivals, circuses, amusement parks, and fairs were formative influences for both Dylan and Springsteen as kids. As adult artists, they’ve both made integral use of the circus in their work, though they tend to emphasize different aspects of the subject. I want to focus mostly on carnivalesque Springsteen, but in order to get there we first need to follow Dylan to the circus.

Wild Bobby’s Circus

In both Chronicles and No Direction Home, Dylan recalls the childhood thrill of attending the circus whenever it rolled through his hometown of Hibbing. The shape-shifting strangeness and itinerant freedom of carnival life left a lasting impression on the youngster, and we can trace this circus influence across his later art in multiple genres, all the way from “Dusty Old Fairgrounds” (1963) through The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022). For Dylan, the circus is a space for self-exploration, fluid identity, transgressing social norms, and constant movement.

I recently taught I’m Not There and was reminded of how central the circus is to Todd Haynes’s vision of Dylan, particularly for the scenes set in Riddle Township. The circus is a recurring reference point in Dylan’s own films, too. Think especially of Masked and Anonymous, where the carnival is an omnipresent backdrop to the action. Michael Glover Smith informs us that, as far back as 1967 while editing Eat the Document, Dylan was simultaneously shooting a separate film labeled in the archives as Bob Dylan’s Circus Movie (Smith 160).

Dylan essentially mounted his own traveling circus in 1975 called the Rolling Thunder Revue. In Scorsese’s RTR film, Allen Ginsberg describes the concept as “something like a con man, carnie, medicine show of old, just get in a bus or carriage and go from town to town.” That’s exactly how Joni Mitchell experienced the tour. In her introduction to “Coyote” in Montreal, she told the audience, “I came to this tour in New Haven, and I just hitched along for the rest of the distance. It’s kind of like running away from home to join the circus.” For Mitchell fans, New Haven is important as the night Joni joined the circus. For Springsteen fans, that same show is memorable as the night Bruce first met Bob.

Backstage on the Rolling Thunder Revue, Veterans Memorial Coliseum, New Haven, CT (November 13, 1975). Photos by Ken Regan.

In his memoir Born to Run, Springsteen offers this profound tribute to Dylan:

Bob Dylan is the father of my country. Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home were not only great records, but they were the first time I can remember being exposed to a truthful vision of the place I lived. The darkness and light were all there, the veil of illusion and deception ripped aside. He put his boot on the stultifying politeness and daily routine that covered corruption and decay. The world he described was all on view, in my little town, and spread out over the television that beamed into our isolated homes, but it went uncommented on and silently tolerated. He inspired me and gave me hope. He asked the questions everyone else was too frightened to ask, especially to a fifteen-year-old. “How does it feel . . . to be on your own?” (166)

Young Springsteen turned to Dylan as a guide for navigating his way through adolescence in a world gone wrong:

A seismic gap had opened up between generations and you suddenly felt orphaned, abandoned amid the flow of history, your compass spinning, internally homeless. Bob pointed true north and served as a beacon to assist you in making your way through the new wilderness America had become. He planted a flag, wrote the songs, sang the words that were essential to the times, to the emotional and spiritual survival of so many young Americans at that moment. (167)

Dylan inspired Springsteen with his authentic and unsparing vision of contemporary America. On the practical level of songcraft, Dylan also taught Springsteen how to use the circus as a vehicle for expressing a distinctly American vision. The template is Highway 61 Revisited.

Dylan’s groundbreaking 1965 album presents a kaleidoscopic mashup of history, literature, myth, and fever dream, depicting mid-sixties America as a surreal circus. The first line of the album is “Once upon a time,” but what follows is less fairy tale than freak show, where deflowered Ophelia and slipperless Cinderella cavort with a rogue’s gallery of geeks, gropers, swindlers, and sword swallowers.

“Ballad of a Thin Man” plunges the clueless Mr. Jones into a bizarre circus side show, like a combination of Tod Browning’s Freaks, a sadomasochistic dungeon, and a queer bathhouse. “You know that something’s happening here / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?” But Dylan seems to know. Black Panther Huey P. Newton believed he knew, too. He heard the song as an astute allegory for American race relations (Seale 183-87). Todd Haynes deftly incorporated both the circus imagery and social commentary of “Ballad of a Thin Man” in this sequence from I’m Not There:

The culmination of Dylan’s carnivalesque approach on Highway 61 Revisited comes in the closing song “Desolation Row.” He establishes the theme in the opening verse:

They’re selling postcards of the hanging

They’re painting the passports brown

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors

The circus is in town

Desolation Row doubles as a carnival midway, and each verse features a new booth or tent populated by sordid characters engaged in unsavory acts.

As many Shadow Chasing readers will know, the first verse of “Desolation Row” alludes to the notorious 1920 lynching in Duluth, Dylan’s birthplace. Three Black employees from a traveling circus were falsely accused of raping a white woman. An angry mob stormed the jail, abducted the prisoners, and hung Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie from lampposts downtown. And yes, photos of the gruesome scene were turned into postcards for sale. Dylan took Highway 61 back home, following in the footsteps of those murdered circus workers, to reckon with ghosts that continued to haunt 1965 America.

Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial in Duluth. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith.

Meanwhile, down the Jersey Shore in 1965, 15-year-old Bruce Springsteen joined The Castiles and soon began his first experiments with songwriting and performing in a band. Dylan would serve him well as visionary mentor and pole star. Highway 61 Revisited not only set a high standard, but it also provided a blueprint for transforming the circus into a grand metaphor for America. Springsteen would take those lessons, adapt them for his own artistic vision, and apply them locally to Asbury Park, turning the carnival into a grand metaphor for his search for love.

Carnival Boys & Jersey Girls

Springsteen’s pursuit of love at the carnival was vexed from the start. However, it’s useful first to establish a baseline for the ideal, and there’s no better example than his gorgeous cover of Tom Waits’s “Jersey Girl.” Springsteen regularly showcased this ballad during his Born in the U.S.A. stadium tour. Growin’ up in rural Tennessee, I never got anywhere near that tour. But I fell in love with “Jersey Girl” from the box set Live 1975–85, where Springsteen serenades thousands of adoring fans at Meadowlands Arena in East Rutherford, NJ. If this doesn’t melt your heart, well then, I’m sorry, but I don’t think we can be friends:

Tonight I’m gonna take that ride

Across the river to the Jersey side

Take my baby to the carnival

And I’ll take her on all the rides

’Cause down the shore everything’s all right

You and your baby on a Saturday night

Nothing matters in this whole wide world

When you’re in love with a Jersey girl

According to Brucebase Wiki, Springsteen’s first public performance of “Jersey Girl” was at the wedding of his drummer Max Weinberg. What a perfect wedding song! “Jersey Girl” expresses a beatific dream of romantic love, where the carnival serves as Garden of Eden and our Jersey Adam and Eve never fall from grace. Springsteen’s own characters usually aren’t so lucky.

His first songs about the carnival appear on his second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (1973). Hmmm. Wild + Innocent = Irresponsibly Innocent? Maybe Springsteen really was looking in Dylan’s mirror and seeing his own reflection.

Springsteen’s The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (1973); Dylan in 1965, photo by Daniel Kramer.

Consider “Wild Billy’s Circus Story.” This song isn’t about pursuing love at the carnival so much as running away to find freedom on the road. This dilemma—staying vs. going—becomes a dominant tension animating all of Springsteen’s circus songs.

“Wild Billy’s Circus Story” spotlights a bizarre cast—the fire eater, the human cannonball, the ringmaster, the barker, and clowns—together with a roll call of eccentrics who would feel right at home on Highway 61 Revisited—Fat Lady, Big Mama, Missy Bimbo, Samson, Tiny Tim, Margarita, and the Flying Zambinis. The music also conjures up the circus, thanks to Danny Federici’s accordion and Garry Tallent’s tuba, leading the procession through Wild Billy’s hometown, like the Pied Piper passing through Hamelin.

In his memoir, Springsteen recalls the song’s initial inspiration:

“Wild Billy’s Circus” was a black comedy based on my memories of the fairs and the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus that visited Freehold every summer when I was a kid. They’d set up a midway and pitch their tents in a field across from the racetrack not far from my house. I was always curious about what was going on in the dim alleys off the midway. As I walked by, my hand enclosed in my mother’s, I felt the musky underbelly to the shining lights and life I’d just seen in the center ring. It all felt frightening, uneasy and secretly sexual. (192)

The fantasy here is to pull up stakes and hit the road, leaving one’s humdrum world behind in pursuit of novelty, adventure, and illicit sex. As Springsteen well knows, this is the same allure for the road life of a rock star. He told biographer Dave Marsh: “‘To me, the idea is you get a band, write some songs, and go out to people’s towns. It’s my favorite thing; it’s like a circus. You just kind of roll on, walk into somebody’s town, and bang! It’s heart to heart. Something can happen to you; something can happen to them’” (367).

Springsteen in Asbury Park, 1979. Photo by Joel Bernstein.

When it comes to carnival songs, Springsteen’s first major triumph was “4^th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy).” The song is steeped in symbolism. The setting on July 4^th marks it as a declaration of independence. The place the singer wants to leave behind is Asbury Park, at least on the literal level. But Springsteen transforms this beach town into a mythological realm. He announces those ambitions unmistakably in the opening lines: “Sandy, the fireworks are hailing over Little Eden tonight / Forcing a light into all those stony faces left stranded on this warm July.” Asbury Park is Little Eden on Independence Day. The symbolism tugs in seemingly opposite directions: one way toward freedom from stifling mediocrity, the other way toward exile from paradise.

Should I stay or should I go? That is the question for both “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” and “4^th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy).” Movement vs. paralysis. But there’s a crucial distinction between the two songs. In “Wild Billy,” the circus is nomadic, here today and gone tomorrow. Joining the circus is Billy’s escape route out of Asbury Park. In “Sandy,” however, the carnival is a permanent fixture on the Jersey Shore. Join this circus and you ain’t goin’ nowhere. Call it independence or call it banishment, leaving Little Eden requires turning your back on the carnival lights and heading into the darkness on the edge of town. Springsteen sets up this exodus in the first chorus:

Sandy, the aurora is rising behind us

This pier lights our carnival life forever

Oh, love me tonight, for I may never see you again

Hey Sandy girl

My, my baby

Notice that the aurora is behind them, meaning that they’re not walking toward the carnival but away from it. The singer seems determined to leave, but at this point he doesn’t expect her (or even invite her) to join him.

Springsteen’s vocals are irresistibly seductive on “Sandy.” But lyrically he paints a deromanticized portrait of the Jersey Shore. The carnival isn’t a place for finding idyllic love: it’s a meat market for one-night stands. Asbury Park is the turf of “switchblade lovers, so fast, so shiny, so sharp,” where “the boys from the casino dance with their shirts open like Latin lovers on the shore / Chasing all them silly New York virgins by the score.” The singer himself is a hustler, confessing his sordid history of meaningless hookups on these familiar hunting grounds:

I just got tired of hanging in them dusty arcades

Banging them pleasure machines

Chasing the factory girls underneath the boardwalk

Where they all promise to unsnap their jeans

Springsteen at Asbury Park Casino, 1974. Photo by Mary Alfieri.

The singer mentions other conquests, including his boss’s daughter and a local waitress, but he’s not really bragging. His tone is melancholy, remorseful, and weary. The cheap thrill is long gone, and now he’s just going through the motions. Springsteen uses amusement park imagery to communicate the tedious cycle of loveless sex:

You know that Tilt-A-Whirl down on the south beach drag

I got on it last night and my shirt got caught

And they kept me spinning, babe

Didn’t think I’d ever get off

Why would the singer make all these incriminating confessions to his girlfriend? Maybe I’ve been wrong all this time in assuming that Sandy is simply his Jersey girl du jour. Maybe she works on another level as allegory for the Jersey Shore itself. After all, what better name to give a beach than “Sandy,” eh?

Having kept his distance earlier in the song, the singer dips his toe in the sea of love. He tentatively suggests that she might want to join him, leaving this lonesome spectacle behind in search of something real: “For me this boardwalk life’s through, babe / You ought to quit this scene too.” Notice the different phrasing in the final chorus:

Sandy, the aurora is rising behind us

This pier lights our carnival life forever

Oh, love me tonight

And I promise I’ll love you forever

Oh, I mean it Sandy girl

My, my, my, my, my baby

Yeah I promise Sandy girl

Sha la la la la baby

Sounds like a dream come true, with two lovers taking vows and walking into eternity on Sandy’s strand. Farewell Asbury Park!

But I can’t get past the fact that they’re walking away from the light, and all its associations with divine love for a Catholic schoolboy like Springsteen. His lyrics at London’s Hammersmith Odeon in 1975 add to the foreboding: “Sandy, the angels have lost their desire for us / I spoke to ’em last night / They said they won’t set themselves on fire for us anymore.”

Furthermore, if Sandy does indeed represent the Jersey Shore, then I suppose the singer isn’t committing himself to going but to staying. Maybe it’s like Mephistopheles’s description of hell in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, where damnation isn’t a place so much as a condition that you take with you wherever you go.

Faustus: Where are you damn’d?

Mephistopheles: In hell.

Faustus: How comes it, then that thou art out of hell?

Mephistopheles: Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.

Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,

And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,

In being deprived of everlasting bliss? (Marlowe 1.3.77-84)

In other words, you can take the boy out of Asbury Park, but you can’t take Asbury Park out of the boy.

Springsteen on the Asbury Park boardwalk, 1979. Photo by Joel Bernstein.

Born to Run

Springsteen’s carnivalesque masterpiece is “Born to Run.” Once again, he crafts a personal story with autobiographical roots and a local address, then turbocharges it into myth. Instead of Little Eden, Asbury Park is now Little America: “In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream / At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines.”

For “Sandy,” the competing impulses of staying vs. going remain in suspended animation. In “Born to Run,” however, the undeniable and unequivocal driving force is escape. In this case, the singer doesn’t want to go alone—he wants his lover to come with him:

Baby, this town rips the bones from your back

It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap

We gotta get out while we’re young

’Cause tramps like us

Baby, we were born to run

The singer’s bike is built for two, and he dare not attempt this journey by himself.

Wendy, let me in, I wanna be your friend

I wanna guard your dreams and visions

Just wrap your legs ’round these velvet rims

And strap your hands ’cross my engines

Together we could break this trap

We’ll run ’til we drop

Baby, we’ll never go back

One of the most interesting interpretations of “Born to Run” that I’ve come across appeared in Monmouth magazine in 2023. Monmouth University is the closest college to Asbury Park. It’s also now home to the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music. Monmouth is the alma mater of Carlee Migliorisi.

Carlee Migliorisi as a senior at Monmouth University in 2023. Photo by Matt Raspanti.

As a student archivist at the Springsteen Center, Migliorisi came across an out-of-print 1975 copy of Crawdaddy with a profile of the Boss by Peter Knobler. The journalist visited the room in Long Branch where Springsteen wrote “Born to Run”—presumably the same spot Dylan was looking for when he got busted in 2009 by the local police as a suspicious vagrant. Knobler’s detailed description of Springsteen’s room noted that a poster of Peter Pan and Wendy Darling hung above the bed where the song was composed.

Migliorisi pieced together the circumstantial evidence to speculate that the Wendy in “Born to Run” was inspired by the Wendy on the poster. “‘I think Wendy is more of a symbol. When you look at the lyrics, ‘Wendy, let me in / I want to be your friend / I want to guard your dreams and visions,’ to some extent, that is what Peter Pan is trying to do in the beloved classic story. . . . He doesn’t want Wendy to grow up.”

Love it! And there’s no better poster boy for “irresponsible innocence” than Peter Pan, right? But this story gets even cooler. Earlier this year Migliorisi got an opportunity to interview Springsteen for Salon. Of course, she couldn’t resist asking him about Wendy. Imagine her joy when the Boss confirmed her theory. He confided,

In a lot of my songs, I had a lot of different names for characters before reaching the final ones. When I was working on “Thunder Road,” it took me trying a few names before I landed on Mary. In this case, I was writing the song in my room and looking for a generic name, and I looked up and said, “Oh yeah, Wendy.”

Migliorisi asked the right follow-up question: does that make the singer Peter Pan? Springsteen stopped short there: “No, not really, but there’s a little bit of a Peter Pan subtext in ‘Born to Run’ if you look for it. It’s a song about searching for something better and running away. There’s this youthful eternity that you’re in pursuit of.’” I’m still counting that a win for Team Carlee! For an emerging Springsteen scholar, it’s hard to imagine a better fairy-tale ending.

“Together we could break this trap.” We: plural. He hopes what they have is the real thing, not just another boardwalk fling. He begs her to put their love to the test away from the garish carnival.

Baby, I’m just a scared and lonely rider

But I gotta find out how it feels

I wanna know if love is wild

Baby, I wanna know if love is real

How does it feel? It’s the quintessential Dylan question, and here we find it embedded in Springsteen’s greatest anthem. His answer is that it feels like love—maybe—if only he knew how love feels. Still, he’s willing to stake everything to find out with Wendy. Windy? Sandy and Windy sums up the Jersey Shore pretty effectively. But it remains to be seen if the answer is blowin’ in the Asbury Park wind.

Strap your hands ’cross my engine: Springsteen on his Triumph motorcycle, 1977. Photo by Eric Meola.

The singer’s epic battle for love is as geographically specific as the postcard on the cover of Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.:

Beyond the Palace hemi-powered drones

Scream down the boulevard

The girls comb their hairs in rearview mirrors

And the boys try to look so hard

The amusement park rises bold and stark

And kids are huddled on the beach in a mist

I wanna die with you Wendy on the street tonight

In an everlasting kiss

The beach, the amusement park, the Palace—it’s pure Americana and it’s unmistakably Asbury Park.

Palace Amusements, Asbury Park, 1979.

What do love, happiness, and contentment truly feel like? He doesn’t have a clue, and there are no reliable road maps for getting there. But he no longer believes they’ll find love in this “town full of losers.” All they can do is follow their hearts—“two hearts are better than one”—and get their asses out of Asbury Park pronto:

Together Wendy we can live with the sadness

I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul

Someday girl, I don’t know when

We’re gonna get to that place

Where we really want to go

And we’ll walk in the sun

But ’til then tramps like us

Baby, we were born to run

This is the song and the album that changed Springsteen’s life, as he acknowledges in titling his memoir Born to Run. There he reflects: “In these songs were the beginnings of the characters whose lives I would trace in my work (along with the questions I’d be writing about—‘I want to know if love is real’) for the next four decades” (221). His artistic achievement in 1975 proved a crucial turning point—the end of something, and the beginning of something else—“where I left my adolescent definitions of love and freedom; from here on in, it was going to be a lot more complicated. Born to Run was the dividing line” (222).

Okay, you make it out of town, leave the carnival lights behind, cross the border . . . and then what? That’s the question Springsteen was forced to confront after his breakout hit. Because if you are “born to run,” then restless movement is your birthright and no destination feels safe, secure, or permanent. Adam raised a Cain. Out there on the road, east of Eden and west of Asbury Park, that way madness lies, where inner demons come out to play and whisper in your ear. As Springsteen told Dave Marsh, “‘I realized that you will die out there, simple as that. I understood that underneath this illusion of freedom was an oppressiveness that would kill me’” (479). Enter Darkness on the Edge of Town. Welcome to Nebraska. Watch your step as you descend into Tunnel of Love.

Tunnel of Love

A dozen years down the road from Born to Run, Springsteen followed his characters into their middle-aged domestic lives. They have left Asbury Park, but it hasn’t left them. Tunnel of Love (1987) was Springsteen’s first album as a married man. The characters in these songs are still asking is love real, or is it like a carnival ride you hop on and off with one partner after another. As he put it in his memoir, this new material “wasn’t centered around the man on the ‘road’ but the questions and concerns of the man in the ‘house.’ Tunnel of Love captured the ambivalence, love and fear brought on by my new life” (348).

“My first full record about men and women in love would be a pretty rough affair,” admits Springsteen.

I was no longer a kid and now neither were the people who populated my new songs. If they didn’t find a way to ground themselves, the things they needed—life, love and a home—could and would pass them by, rushing out the windows of all those cars I’d placed them in. The highway had revealed its secrets and as compelling as they were, I found its freedom and open spaces could become as overpoweringly claustrophobic as my most clichéd ideas of domesticity. All those roads, after all those years, when they converged, met down the end of the same dead-end street. (349)

Trouble in the Heartland: Springsteen stranded in the American West, 1977. Photo by Eric Meolo.

Searching for a guiding metaphor for marriage, Springsteen turned again to the carnival, specifically a dark ride called the Tunnel of Love at the Palace. The video for “Tunnel of Love” was shot there and at the Casino in Asbury Park.

You will immediately recognize the Palace as the same amusement park the singer and Wendy were running away from in Born to Run. But instead of finding sanctuary in Neverland, Peter Pan’s utopia of eternal youth, Springsteen’s characters find trouble in the heartland. They have grown noticeably older, anxious, suspicious, and restless.

As the name suggests, the Tunnel of Love is basically an excuse for couples to sneak off and make out in secluded darkness. But in Springsteen’s reimagination, the Tunnel of Love takes his couple on a psychological descent into the dark side of adult relationships: “Then the lights go out and it’s just the three of us / You and me and all that stuff we’re so scared of.”

The promise of “Born to Run” was that the lovers would eventually find contentment and walk in the sun. Not so for the couple in “Tunnel of Love,” who are lost in the dark: “There’s a room of shadows that get so dark brother / It’s easy for two people to lose each other / In this Tunnel of Love.” It’s not just that these lovers are drifting apart. The bigger problem is that they’re losing faith that love can be real and lasting.

It ought to be easy, ought to be simple enough

Man meets woman and they fall in love

But the house is haunted and the ride gets rough

You’ve got to learn to live with what you can’t rise above

If you ride on down, down in through this Tunnel of Love

Asbury Park’s Palace Amusements, featuring the Tunnel of Love. The Palace closed down in 1988 and was demolished in 2004.

Springsteen doubled down on the carnival imagery on the Tunnel of Love Express Tour in 1988. Each concert began with a performance schtick, where band members came out on stage, handed a ticket to a carnie manning a booth at stage left, and then assumed their position on stage. When Patti Scialfa came out, she carried a bunch of heart-shaped balloons which she released into the air. The last customer was the Boss himself, who would hand over his ticket, throw a bouquet into the crowd, and launch into the opening number: “Tunnel of Love.” Here’s a video documenting the routine from August 1988 at Camp Nou in Barcelona. Also notice the scintillating stage chemistry between Bruce and Patti on their duet. More on that to follow.

“Tunnel of Love” is the first song on the second side of the album (the same position occupied by “Born to Run”). The four songs that follow—“Two Faces,” “Brilliant Disguise,” “One Step Up,” and “When You’re Alone”—read like a series of warning labels for marriage. Caution: may cause lying, cheating, deception, suspicion, self-loathing, and depression.

But cynicism isn’t Springsteen’s brand, is it? After a run of songs dominated by brooding pessimism, he recovers a measure of hope in the album’s closer “Valentine’s Day.” This is my personal favorite love song that Springsteen ever wrote.

The vibe is nocturnal and lonely. Indeed, the whole song—vocals, guitar, mandolin, bass, keyboards, harmonica, percussion—are played by Springsteen from the solitude of his multi-track home studio. The steady melody, slowly building in volume and intensity as more instruments get layered in, sounds like a circus calliope coming back to life. The music also feels like an echocardiogram of the singer’s damaged heart, battered but still beating, cold but gradually thawing as he dares to love again.

He lays his money down, buys another ticket, and takes another chance (with a different partner?) on the Tunnel of Love. The scared and lonely rider of “Valentine’s Day” is working his way back to the woman who jump-started his stalled heart:

I’m drivin’ a big lazy car rushin’ up the highway in the dark

I got one hand steady on the wheel and one hand’s tremblin’ over my heart

It’s poundin’ baby like it’s gonna bust right on through

And it ain’t gonna stop ’til I’m alone again with you

It’s a dark ride, but the singer of “Valentine’s Day” is headed toward the light of love. It’s parental love: “A friend of mine became a father last night / When he spoke in his voice I could hear the light.” It’s spiritual love: “Honey, last night I dreamed my eyes rolled straight back in my head / And God’s light came shinin’ on through / I woke up in the darkness scared and breathin’ and born anew.” But most of all, it’s the feeling he gets whenever he’s with this special woman, the very feeling that made him hop in his car and drive all night to be with her on Valentine’s Day.

How does it feel? It feels like love.

He had almost given up on the search, with some imagery that suggests suicidal despair. But his new lover has dredged him from the Sandy river bottom and restored him to the Windy fields where he is born anew:

It wasn’t the cold river bottom

I felt rushing over me

It wasn’t the bitterness of the dream

That didn’t come true

It wasn’t the wind in the grey fields

I felt rushing through my arms

No, no, baby

Baby it was you

So hold me close

Honey, say you’re forever mine

And tell me you’ll be my

Lonely valentine

Patti Scialfa and Bruce Springsteen on the Tunnel of Love Express Tour in 1988. Photo by John Atashian.

It’s hard to disentangle Tunnel of Love from the drama of Springsteen’s tumultuous love life around that time. He tied the knot with West Coast actress Julianne Phillips in 1985, but a few years later their marriage was in trouble. Somewhere during this period, Springsteen’s friendship and musical collaboration with Patti Scialfa developed into something more.

Like Springsteen, Scialfa is part Irish, part Italian, and all Jersey. They grew up near each other—he’s from Freehold (Freehold High class of 1967) and she’s from Deal (Asbury Park High class of 1971)—and both cut their chops in bar bands on the Jersey Shore. Bruce first met Patti in 1974, when she was 17 and he was 21. He had placed an ad to audition backup singers for the E Street Band. “She was lovely and very good but we ended up going with our regular lineup, not quite ready to break up the ‘lost boys’ yet” (371). Note that reference to Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, and score another point for Team Carlee!

The future couple next ran into each other a decade later at the Stone Pony in 1984. She caught his eye and ear as a singer in the house band, playing a rousing cover of the Exciters’ “Tell Him.” “We found ourselves standing in a buzzing crowd at the back bar as I introduced myself to her and the rest was a long, winding semi-courtship” (372). In his memoir, he concludes his first chapter devoted to Patti (titled “Redheaded Revolution”) with this touching observation: “The night I fell in love with Patti’s voice at the Stone Pony, the first line she sang was ‘I know something about love . . .’ She does” (373).

Bruce and Patti on the Born in the U.S.A Tour in 1984. Photo by Gary Gershoff.

There’s a section in “Valentine’s Day” where the singer chooses love over solitude, and that could come across as a recommitment to his marriage: “They say he travels fastest who travels alone / But tonight I miss my girl, mister / Tonight I miss my home.” However, an alternate interpretation—and given the personal context, a more persuasive reading—is that the singer is pining for a Jersey Girl who will lead him away from his current home and back toward his roots.

Bruce and Patti’s wild ride went public during the Tunnel of Love tour in 1988. During the European leg, paparazzi caught the new couple in various stages of undress and intimacy, and by the end of that tour they were scarcely attempting to hide their budding romance. Julianne Phillips’s publicist announced her split from Springsteen in June 1988, and the couple formally divorced in March 1989. Bruce and Patti had their first of three children together in 1990, and they’ll celebrate their 35^th wedding anniversary later this summer.

Patti & Bruce at home in Colts Neck, NJ, 2024. Photo from Hello! Magazine.

Irresponsibly Innocent

Springsteen couldn’t have foreseen where this would all lead back in 1988, but in retrospect we can connect some of the dots for him. On January 6, he announced his fateful tour, which would begin the following month, and which would essentially end his marriage with Julianne Phillips. Two weeks later, on January 20, Springsteen inducted Dylan into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Want to guess who attended with him? Patti Scialfa! I didn’t realize this until I was doing research for this piece and caught a glimpse of her during the all-star jam led by Mick Jagger on “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

If you want to know how it feels to be irresponsibly innocent, don’t listen to Highway 61 Revisited. Listen to “Valentine’s Day” from Tunnel of Love. Watch Bruce and Patti’s duets during the 1988 tour. Or just witness the love beaming from Springsteen below, as he stands between two of his brightest beacons, with his favorite Jersey Girl by his side.

Despite his desire to run off and join the circus as a young man, and his determination to escape the death trap and suicide rap of his hometown, Springsteen has remained remarkably faithful to the Jersey Shore. He has made Jersey the center of his artistic cosmos. He raised his family in Rumson and currently lives on a horse farm in Colts Neck, both just twelve miles from Asbury Park.

His early songs depicted the Shore as a neon cage, but his musical odyssey brought him back home time and again to the aurora of this carnival life on the water. The pathway hasn’t always been smooth. He has stumbled and fallen behind at times. But after several tries and against great odds, he found the love he was looking for, not at the circus but damn close to it. What an unlikely American Dream come true. Surely by now the most famous living Jersey Boy has earned the right to a little irresponsible innocence.

Baby, I’m just a scared and lonely rider

But I gotta find out how it feels

I wanna know if love is wild

Baby, I wanna know if love is real

Bruce & Patti riding at their Jersey home. Top: photo from Hello! Magazine. Bottom: photo by daughter Jessica Springsteen.

Works Cited

Brucebase Wiki, http://brucebase.wikidot.com//

Dylan, Bob. Official Lyrics. The Official Bob Dylan Website,

https://www.bobdylan.com/.

Marchetti, Tony. “Song Sleuth.” Monmouth (Fall/Winter 2023), https://www.monmouth.edu/magazine/song-sleuth/.

Marlowe, Christopher. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, https://www.owleyes.org/text/faustus.

Marsh, Dave. Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts. The Definitive Biography, 1972-2003. Routledge, 2004.

Migliorisi, Carlee. “Bruce Springsteen draws a line from ‘Peter Pan’ to ‘Born to Run.’” Salon (4 March 2026), https://www.salon.com/2026/03/04/bruce-springsteen-draws-a-line-from-peter-pan-to-born-to-run/.

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Netflix, 2019.

Seale, Bobby. Seize the Time: The Story of The Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. Black Classic Press, 1970.

Smith, Michael Glover. Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think. McNidder & Grace, 2026.

Springsteen, Bruce. Born to Run. Simon & Schuster, 2016.

---. Induction Speech for Bob Dylan (20 January 1988). Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, https://rockhall.com/inductees/bob-dylan/.

---. Springsteen Lyrics, https://www.springsteenlyrics.com/.