“I don’t know what you guys think about what happened last night, but I think it’s pretty frightening.” – Bruce Springsteen

That quote wasn’t taken from the Springsteen UK show that made news for his on-stage comments last week. It wasn’t taken from either Trump term. Or even from the Dubya era, when on top of the usual Republican shenanigans, we invaded the wrong damn country.

No, he said it at a November 1980 show in Tempe, AZ on The River tour, the night after Ronald Reagan got elected.

It’s always a little surprising to watch the light bulb (dim as it may be) click on when a right-winger finally realizes that Bruce Springsteen has personal politics, and as much as said right-winger enjoyed fist-pumping to certain songs over the years, Bruce’s politics are vastly different from his own.

Well, OK, when you stop and think about it, maybe it’s not that much of a surprise. Anyone who can maintain a surface-level Springsteen fandom for four or five decades and not catch the clue is actually a logical candidate to take politics and policy just seriously enough to have an opinion and just wrong enough to make that opinion underinformed and bad.

“Don’t bore us, get to the chorus” is the perfect metaphor for the perpetually soundbite- and symbol-driven GOP, isn’t it?

Or to put it another way: “In Texas, we don’t do nuance.”

Or yet another way: Keep it simple, (I’m) stupid.

Maybe this is where we recall that Mr. “Never liked him, never liked his music” Trump was using “Born In The U.S.A.” at campaign rallies without permission in 2016. It’s the quintessential misunderstood rock song, and to be fair, Mr. Springsteen is largely accountable for the subsequent confusion. However, I’ll cut him some slack and put the onus on the listener after, what, maybe a quarter century.

In 1978, Bruce Springsteen was slaying audiences across the U.S. on the Darkness On The Edge Of Town tour and reading Ron Kovic’s Born on The 4^th Of July. (Serendipitously, the two men would meet at a hotel pool that summer.)

In 1978, Donald Trump was collecting a broker’s fee for selling a plot of land to New York City to build the Jacob Javitz Convention Center. He was the frontman for the deal because his daddy’s reputation was in the dumps.

In 1981, Bruce Springsteen was reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Of The United States, looking around at what “Morning In America” really meant, and writing the songs that would become Nebraska and a chunk of Born In The U.S.A.

In 1981, Donald Trump was in the process of deciding to build Harrah’s At Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. The next time you start to think that Donald Trump isn’t anything special, go make a list of the people who have managed to own a failed casino. Hope springs eternal, but perhaps especially in folks who have the least to gamble.

Let’s not even get into Trump’s pouty recent attempts at insults toward Springsteen’s physical appearance. Or his putting his fundamental ignorance regarding campaign contributions (in-kind or otherwise) on display for all to see.

(Random thought: Is Donald Trump the only man in history to have “written” more books than he’s read?)

After the Born In The USA Tour had collected every casual fan imaginable and finally wound to a close, the Springsteen camp compiled the 1975-85 automatic best-selling live LP box set. The obligatory live cash-in ran a full five albums, as bulked-up as the man himself had gotten, and still not big enough to capture the last decade.

Diehards debate its flaws, but this much is true: Right at the heart of it, on Side 5, the listener could also find the heart of Bruce Springsteen’s songwriting identity. At the end of the day, it’s just as true now as it was then. The side runs:

1/ Badlands
2/ Because The Night
3/ Candy’s Room
4/ Darkness On The Edge Of Town
5/ Racing In The Street

All of those recordings came from The River tour, where I’ll argue Springsteen’s core Darkness material truly was its most fully realized in a live setting. And after three increasingly popular tours going from theaters to arenas to stadiums, which version of “Badlands” did they select over all the others?

The one performed on that November 1980 night in Tempe, AZ.

Last week in Manchester, Springsteen said, “The America I’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real, and regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people. So we’ll survive this moment. Now, I have hope, because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said. He said, ‘In this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.’”

And that’s true. But for better and for worse, in an age where the clowns and the devils are the same people, those truly concerned have to live it every day.