By Anne W. Semmes
This past week New York’s Madison Square Garden featured legendary rock star Billy Joel, with tickets in the hundreds of dollars. His contemporary Bruce Springsteen is kicking off his 2024 tour in March heading west then traveling across Europe through the summer. The popularity of these two musicians is now stretching across half a century. The uncanny parallel phenomenon of their talents is seen in a new history written by a teacher of high school history at Greenwich Country Day School, Dr. Jim Cullen.
Cullen’s book is entitled “Bridge & Tunnel Boys – Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the Metropolitan Sound of the American Century.” These two talents grew up in the burgeoning suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey, where to access Manhattan, they had to cross bodies of water by ferry, rail or car – hence they’re being tagged the bridge and tunnel boys.
“I’m a native Long Islander,” tells Cullen. “Billy Joel was part of the wallpaper of my life.” Being a Springsteen fan in high school and college – he earned a doctorate in American Studies – Cullen would author a history of … “Springsteen and the American Tradition.” As a teacher he says he tries “to stitch various subjects together. And that includes things like music and film, but it also includes things like literature or history.”
But now comes his new book “Bridge & Tunnel Boys,” wherein he masterfully stitches together the lives of Joel and Springsteen, while no doubt hearing their songs play out in his head. That includes Springsteen’s song, “This Hard Land” he describes as a, “loving but unsentimental look at the American Dream.” He cites the formative bedrock of their suburban lives that led to their successes. “These guys are born within a few months of each other, in 1949, which is the real dawn of suburbia, certainly a post-war suburbia….and Greenwich was kind of part of that.”
Billy Joel’s turf was Hicksville, NY and Springsteen’s Freehold, NJ. “But they really have parallel experiences,” Cullen says. “They both grew up in a world where farms were still on the horizon and watched as the subdivisions went up that they were both a part of.” And the record industry was thriving, bringing the sound of the Beatles and Bob Dylan.
“And they grew up in the shadow of the Beatles and Bob Dylan for whom writing your own music was important,” he adds, “and also, they were a product of the early 1970s when the singer-songwriter was at its zenith. Both of them were basically signed to be singer-songwriters, but neither of them wanted to be pigeonholed that way. Both of them were committed to being in rock bands. And so, they were both a product of, and to some degree resisted the culture of which they came of age.”
But what reads as self-evident in Cullen’s history is how these songwriters, with their bands, were documenting their life stories, their times, and their places in their songs. Theirs was storytelling music. Early in the book Springsteen addresses seeing his adopted town of three years Asbury Park suffer “serious race rioting and begin to close down.” Springsteen would describe his resulting song, “Fourth of July, Asbury Park” as “a goodbye to my adopted hometown and the life I’d lived there before I recorded.”
In their mid-1980 heydays, Cullen writes, “Joel’s “The Bridge” [song] and Springsteen’s “’Tunnel of Love” were both explorations of marriage.” And “why they managed to retain loyal audiences: they told stories to which aging Boomer (and post-Boomers) could relate.”
Cullen adds, “In some fundamental sense, both of them were instinctive historians. They really wanted to chronicle the country in which they came of age. And as they grew older and grew more self-conscious, they were able to do that a little bit more skillfully.”
Both musicians Cullen believes “were taking their cue, more from Bob Dylan, who even by the time they were growing up, had already had a long career. This notion of a livelihood extending over a long period of time and going through phases, that their music would be a way of chronicling not just their country’s experience, but their own experience as young men into old men, that was very much part of their agenda for themselves in terms of their careers.”
Cullen is surprised with their lasting appeal. “It’s not surprising that they would be listened to by their peers generationally, but they really do have followings that continue. And I think that speaks to our moment as well. When they came of age, there was a real generation gap, and I think there’s a little bit less so of one now.”
Also surprising to this reporter was how other artists were drawn to them over the years to use their talents for songs for films, for dance such as by choreographer Twyla Tharp. “Yes,” says Cullen. “They both have attracted artists and other media, filmmakers, novelists.” But he’s not aware that either of these musicians has a direct heir “the way you could say that Springsteen is Bob Dylan’s heir, or that Billy Joel is the Beatles heir. But nevertheless, I think they both have a lot of broader cultural currency.”
So how might he connect Joel and Springsteen to Beyonce and Taylor Swift? He cites Swift as “really following their playbook, both in terms of the long haul and also very self-consciously chronicling phases of her life.” He also sees “an established record of the mutual admiration between Springsteen and Swift, and Joel and Swift.”
Looking at the metropolitan age of these two musicians Cullen conjectures, “If Billy Joel had been born earlier, he would’ve been a Broadway tune spinner like Hammerstein. Billy Joel’s signature accomplishment as a popular musician is his melodies and the sturdiness of his songwriting. He has classical training, and you see that in his songs. Springsteen has less formal training, and overall, his music is less complex. But Springsteen has the deeper, more resonant lyrics. If he had been born a different time, he probably would’ve been a short story writer rather than a rock and roll musician. But by virtue of being born right smack in the middle of the American century, he became a rock and roll star instead.”
Cullen comes back to that suburban significance he sees in his new teaching town of Greenwich. “Greenwich is very much a part of this story as the outer frontier of metropolitan New York.” He mentions Rudy Vallee coming out of Connecticut. He’s “happy that the local community here is just part of this really compelling story.” After all, isn’t that how Greenwich’s popular diner got its name of “Glory Days” from that song by Bruce Springsteen? (Thanks to Patricia Triantafillou, a Springsteen fan and wife of diner owner Nick Triantafillou!)
