Music and its Meaning---Walk Like a Man: Coming of Age with the Music of Bruce Springsteen

Oddly enough, I've just read two books in a row in which the music of Bruce Springsteen is discussed at some length.  The other book was Prozac Nation.  While I don't dislike his music, I'm not a fan.  His lyrics have never spoken to me.  I always thought that his fans were girls exactly like the one portrayed by Courtney Cox in his "Dancing in the Dark" video.    This was before she went Hollywood and thus still  had the wholesome, scrubbed look of a  Noxema girl  or whatever product she used to sell in Seventeen magazine in her teen model days.  It was the music of the girls that wore pastel Gap clothing and scrubbed their sneakers with toothbrushes.  I, on the other hand, picked up my black trench coat at the Sally Ann.  I looked like /hoodlum number three in "A Hatful of Rain."  This was music for couples who went to the shore/lake/river to park, and where The Boy would loving drape her shoulders with his varsity jacket.  No---as my friend Scott laughingly pointed out to me the first time he heard the song, I was the girl in "U2's."  The  End of the World.   I had no relation to those perky girls with their nasty side-eye in the same way that Lou Grant told Mary Richards that he hated spunk.
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So, why did I pick up this book?  Robert Wiersema is a well known and recognized Canadian writer.  That's not why I got it, however.  I ordered this book from Amazon because I work with his father.  I've never met him, but somebody I know has spoken to him at a writers' convention they both attended.  I figured it was about time I picked up one of his novels.  This book is a memoir, and I like that genre.
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This is a book about the love of music and how it interfaces with our lives...mostly, our youth.  Robert writes about growing up in a small town and not fitting in because he did not play sports.  By the way, the town is around this area.  He stated something very similiar to a feeling that I've expressed numerous times---that the sound of teenage girls laughing still makes him nervous and thus he wears headphones when he's on public tansportation.  I cannot remember the fairly famous comic who stated it, but he had been bullied when he was young and said that no matter how famous he was, he too still got stressed out by teenage girls.  Robert Wiersema found solace in Bruce Springsteen and his lyrics.
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I recall how music meant so much more to me when I was young.  I would try to pull in stations from further away so that I could actually pick up the newest alternative releases.  I'd make lists of the songs I wanted to buy when I made it into the city.  Robert Wiersema would be on the hunt for bootlegs by Bruce.
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There is a lot of detailed discussion of specific lyrics, songs and concerts.  The Bruce  affecionado would benefit more from this than I did. 
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He writes of how this changes as we age....he married and had a child.  Music stilll means a lot to him, but it lacks the same passion.  I guess that's a good thing.  I mean, there's  something endearing in the stoned eighteen year old couple tht follows the Greatful Dead for a summer in a pseudo sixties van.  It lacks the same effect in a woman with long, stringy gray hair who isn't sporting a bra.  At some point, life happens and unless one has a trust fund, money has to be earned.  The music is still there; , the fat lady hasn't sung and it isn't over.  I guess that it becomes the stuff of the background soundtrack.
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This made me recall those days of laying on the floor with the lights off as I picked apart the nuance of every lyric.
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Here's a link to a story on him:
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Walk Like a Man - Robert Wiersema
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Globe and Mail Review of Walk Like a Man