The Chimes of Freedom Flashing . . . .

The Poet Bloggers 2018 Revival Tour continues . . . .

In the city's melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched
With faces hidden as the walls were tightening
                                                – Bob Dylan

I have just been invited to speak at "Darkness on the Edge of Town" - An International Springsteen Symposium sponsored by the Pennsylvania State University and to be held in April at Monmouth University, on the New Jersey Shore. This will be my fourth presentation dealing with Springsteen and his music. Prior to this I have talked on the subject of Springsteen and John Steinbeck (at Monmouth and again in at a Steinbeck conference in Sun Valley Idaho), and on the Boss and Woody Guthrie. The topic this time around is "Chimes of Freedom: The Social and Political Impact of Bruce Springsteen’s 1988 East Berlin Concert."

Springsteen and the E Street Band performed across Europe in the early autumn of 1981 as part of its 1980-1981 The River Tour. This included four concerts in West Germany, one of these at the ICC Halle in West Berlin. Bruce and Steve Van Zandt took the opportunity of this gig to cross through the Berlin Wall into East Berlin for a short visit during which they walked about unnoticed (with the likely exception of the Stasi, East Germany’s ubiquitous Ministry of State Security).

Seven years later, Bruce brought the band back to Germany as part of the 1988 Tunnel of Love Express Tour, playing concerts at West Berlin’s Waldbühne and East Berlin’s Weissensee Velodrome, the latter before an enthusiastic audience of 160,000+ (in comparison to the rather sedate crowd of 17,000 in West Berlin). Bruce described the East Berlin audience as the largest he had ever played to . . . "I couldn’t see its end." In fact, it was the largest concert by a western artist in the entire 40 year history of the ill-fated German Democratic Republic.

Two months later Bruce would join several artists for the world-wide Amnesty International Human Rights Now! during which he made his first overt political statements . . . "trying to assert myself as a world citizen . . . This tour marks my graduation of sorts." But it was in East Berlin where Bruce Springsteen rang the chimes of freedom for the first time for all the world to hear. And just over a year later the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall came down for good.