Bruce Springsteen hates San Diego

Guest contributor Brendan Dentino explains how The Boss might know this city better than the fans who live here

Please enjoy this guest post by Brendan Dentino, who writes Out In Left—a newsletter of long-form sports writing and analysis through a sociopolitical lens. I’m probably the least sports-minded person you’ll ever know, but Brendan’s talent for contextualizing sports through both the political and personal has made me a quick fan.

So it’s an honor to publish this insightful essay. I hope you dig it as much as I do, and please subscribe to Out In Left.

Bruce Springsteen once humbly described his concerts as “part-circus, part-political rally, part spiritual meeting, [and] part dance party.” San Diegans are rarely invited. On par with the megacities of Omaha, Nebraska and Antwerp, Belgium, the United States’ eighth largest city has hosted Springsteen just four times in his fifty-plus year touring career.

Until Springsteen belatedly announced a San Diego show for his tour this year, fans like me thought we’d have to yet again schlep to Los Angeles or Phoenix to see our guy. Springsteen’s disregard of San Diego is especially annoying when listening to “Rosalita,” a barnburner off 1973’s The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. For eight desperate minutes, the song’s protagonist tries convincing his Rosie to escape “the swamps of Jersey” to “a pretty little place in Southern California down San Diego way.” We are useful to Springsteen as the Valhalla that his characters can chase after, if not actually arrive at. The lyrics also suggest a new tourism slogan–“San Diego: It’s Not New Jersey.”

Since his first year as a recording artist we’ve been tied together and that’s no coincidence. There may be no fan base more lily-white than Springsteen’s, and there may have been no city more lily-white during his ascent and prime than San Diego. And when the city began diversifying in earnest after the 1980s, so too did Springsteen’s characters. We’re even featured prominently in his best album of the 1990s (not that that’s saying much about his output that decade). So why has he always skipped us?

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In 2016, San Diego Union-Tribune music critic George Varga penned an open letter titled, “Dear Bruce Springsteen: What’s wrong with San Diego?” Well, a lot, but it is a legitimate question for Springsteen considering his legendary touring act and his reputation as a road warrior.

His first three concerts in San Diego were at the Sports Arena, or whatever it’s officially called this month. In 1978, he was promoting Darkness on the Edge of Town; in 1981, The River; and in 1992, the albums Human Touch (ugh) and Lucky Town (eh). The latest concert was almost thirty years ago in 1996 at the Civic Theater, where he played bleak, whispery songs on acoustic guitar to support The Ghost of Tom Joad.

Conversely, Springsteen first played Los Angeles in 1973 and hasn’t stopped since. At the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena alone he played thirty-four times, including for the venue’s final performance in 2016. Los Angeles gets at least two more shows this year. Even Phoenix, that boiling bastion of Sunbelt suburbanism–the kind of place some of Springsteen’s characters may have been desperate to escape–has received more love. Springsteen cited it as one of his first toeholds outside of the Northeast during his rise to fame, and he canonized its status by releasing a concert film recorded at Arizona State University in 1980. At least he lamented Ronald Reagan’s election that night.

In trying to be fair, Varga pointed out that Los Angeles isn’t all that far from San Diego, and there aren’t many venues in town that can accommodate him. Each claim strains credulity. Petco Park in recent years has hosted Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney, Billy Joel, and Bad Bunny, who are all in the Pop Star God Tier with Springsteen. The indoor San Diego Sports Arena holds 15,000. Springsteen’s beloved Los Angeles Sports Arena held the same amount. And if he didn’t stage concerts in Philly because it’s only ninety miles from New York, then there would be civil war on the Turnpike. 

His neglect of San Diego led to my making stupid decisions to catch his last tour in 2016. While in Newport, Rhode Island, for Navy training, I rushed to the airport after class on a Friday to make an unauthorized trip to Philly, where Springsteen was playing Citizens Bank Park that night. Earlier in the year, he played on a weekday in Phoenix, so I told my bosses I didn’t feel well, got changed in the bathroom of the McDonald’s on base, and made the six-hour drive to Arizona. Springsteen played until 11:00 p.m., at which point I doubled back to San Diego to make muster in the morning. With the windows down, I screamed song lyrics and punched the roof of my car to avoid falling asleep. 

Maybe his aversion to San Diego is as simple as it being more lucrative to homestead his act in Los Angeles for a week and attract Southern Californians like moths to a flame. After all, he didn’t express sympathy when ticket prices to his 2023 tour caused an uproar. But if he’s going to sing our city’s name every night, then I expect royalties in the form of concerts.

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During his pre-Born to Run years, Springsteen was what journalist Paul de Noyer characterized as a “Byronic grease monkey,” a young man who had a lot to say about the small world of which he was a product–his parents moving to California and leaving an eighteen-year-old Bruce in New Jersey undoubtedly influenced “Rosalita.” 

Darkness on the Edge of Town, released in 1978, marks the beginning of Springsteen’s reign as the pop culture champion of the working class. There’s a song called “Factory” on it, for Christ’s sake. June Skinner Sawyers, in her book Racing in the Street: The Bruce Springsteen Reader, notes, “Springsteen’s body of work can be viewed … as an ongoing exploration, via popular song, of the very heart of the American psyche.” If not incorrect, then that assertion possesses the same conceit as “Rosalita”—for better or worse, it’s the white American psyche he is exploring.

In the early 70s, Springsteen was dreaming of escape because he could afford to, if not financially, then at least socially: he was white. And for his two characters that dream led to San Diego, wittingly or not. San Diego County was over 90% white at the 1970 census, and Bruce Springsteen’s New Jersey was a tick below that. (“My Hometown” mentions a 1969 race-based shooting in his native Freehold.) Why Richard Nixon considered San Diego his “lucky city” shouldn’t be up for much debate.

By 1984’s Born in the USA, or when Bruce Springsteen became Bruce Springsteen®, he seemed to gain a self-awareness about who he was singing for and about. Through the eyes of a veteran who’s been “beat too much,” the album’s title song takes subtle digs at the Vietnam War and an American society that was often hostile toward those who fought in it. So subtle were these messages, apparently, that it was famously mistaken by President Reagan’s reelection campaign as a patriotic anthem. Dan McLaughlin, a columnist at the conservative blog Red State, blames not Reagan, but Springsteen for this confusion:

“… if he didn’t want it to be heard as a hymn to underappreciated patriots, he should have thought twice about releasing a video full of warm, fuzzy Americana where he played in front of the flag; about putting Old Glory on the cover of the record, and as the backdrop to the stage show, and as the backdrop to the tour posters, all at a time when the ‘USA! USA!’ chant was at its highest ebb.”

In other words, it’s Springsteen’s fault that white supremacists are incapable of comprehending satire and nuance. That criticism doesn’t address the actual lyrics, which would have been particularly relevant to San Diego as a military town. It did, however, portend today’s era of pseudo-populism in which manufactured cultural rage diverts attention from uncomfortable truths, real problems, and possible solutions. Thankfully, most San Diegans today, and especially a younger, more diverse generation of San Diegans, have rejected that ideology and since the late 2000s have embraced–at least electorally–acceptance, tolerance, and compassion. The veteran in “Born in the U.S.A.” could have used those in his day.

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As the city has become less conservative and more dynamic and diverse, so too has Springsteen’s output. He recorded a podcast with Barack Obama–it’s the most boomer content ever, but we still love them–and has released ten studio albums since 2002, after putting out just three in the fifteen years before that. Among the heartland rock he basically invented, there are soul covers, folk interpretations and western ripoffs. Springsteen even predicted the 21st century San Diego, or at least saw it changing as some in his audience covered its eyes. “It’s a big story,” Springsteen said about The Ghost of Tom Joad after its release in 1995. “It’s a story of what this country is going to be: a big, multicultural place.”

San Diego references abound in that album, since it was inspired by his exploring the Southwest on a motorcycle in the early 90s. (Does Bruce Springsteen also listen to the “Jungleland” sax solo during emotional road trips?) No reference was more explicit than a song named after the city’s so-called “crown jewel.” Based on a 1993 Los Angeles Times article about immigrant youth who cross the border to sell drugs and their bodies to wealthy men, “Balboa Park” eviscerates the city’s sunny veneer. 

Springsteen’s main character is a boy nicknamed Spider. After setting up camp underneath the freeway–probably the 5—Spider heads into Balboa Park “where men in their Mercedes / come nightly to employ / in the cool San Diego evening / the services of the border boys.” In concluding the story, Springsteen mentions a “Twelfth Street”—probably Park Boulevard—where, in a raid, Spider gets hit by a border patrol vehicle and limps back to his camp tasting his own blood.

In the years since Tom Joad’s release, immigrant ostracization and subjugation have only increased, especially when Donald Trump ascended to the presidency. Of course, the hardline rhetoric and policies say more about us than it does about those we’re trying to exclude and persecute. Springsteen, the mouthpiece of the white working class, grasped this, believing that there is little difference between the disenchanted lovers on “Rosalita” and the immigrants he chronicled in “Balboa Park.” “Their skin is darker,” he once said, “and their language had changed, but these were people trapped by the same brutal circumstances.”

It was jarring, then, to be surrounded by so many white people at one of his recent shows in New York City, one of the most diverse cities on the planet. I couldn’t help but think that my fellow Bruce fans are the type of people back home in San Diego who, say, sue the city over and over and over again for trying to make it easier to build affordable housing. They feel for Spider and can’t stand vitriol toward immigrants. They just don’t want him living next to them.

When Springsteen takes the stage at his fifth and possibly final show in San Diego he will perform for an almost entirely white and aging audience. I don’t think he actually hates us. In fact, I think Springsteen understands San Diego more than any other famous person not from here, and after first idealizing it from afar, he later recognized a city reckoning with what it was once and may become. He just might be frustrated with an audience that too often forgets or ignores the self-proclaimed political part of an E Street Band concert. We want to preserve Springsteen in amber like we do the city, and that will never work.

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