Le Grand Chef

When I’m hiking, I tell people I’m from New Jersey. Europeans love New York, but for other Americans, and some Canadians, Jersey is better. My license is from Jersey, my father’s wedding announcement said he was from there, and the expected arrogance is at least different.

I’d rather not talk about rent and restaurants, but I’d love to chop it up about Springsteen and the Sopranos. I’m only on season 2, but I feel like I get the point.

I’ve got a far longer history with Springsteen, or “Bruce” to my family and me. Growing up, his Greatest Hits always played in the car. I imagined “Thunder Road” taking place in our backyard, and I associated the wrong turn in my sister’s onetime favorite, “Hungry Heart” with the road into a bit of nearby undeveloped marsh.

My parents took us to see Bruce at the Garden for my first concert, a miscalculation akin to sending one’s kid to kindergarten with Prosciutto di Parma and focaccia instead of a ham sandwich.

There are people paid to listen to the long list of things my family passed down that I’m not fond of, but for Bruce I am grateful. Like all artists, my interest in him ebbs and flows, but I know exactly which phase of my life corresponds to which album from Greetings up through Nebraska, and when I first heard each live recording released.

So, as we put our pea brains together to figure out how to surprise my father for his 60th birthday, traveling for a Bruce show was high on the list. After some light international intrigue, we landed on Paris as the best option. We would fly, we decided, to one of the most decadent cities in Europe to celebrate two men who instilled our New Jersey work ethic.

Whenever we told colleagues or friends, all of whom deftly kept the secret, they sensed a vague reason that Bruce Springsteen of collectivist working class anthems made sense in Paris of liberté, égalité, fraternité. The Parisians, in particular, were fresh off la grève, a strike pertaining to the rising retirement age.

To avoid any airport run-ins and so protect the secret, my sister and I flew out Friday night. The surprise landed Sunday morning to great amusement. Monday evening we got a ride to La Défense, where Bruce played in a rugby arena.

La Défense is a not-quite-new business district out on the edge of Paris; it’s basically if Hudson Yards were on the other end of the 7 train, in Flushing. After the Tour Montparnasse fiasco, the Parisians banded together to preserve their beloved Haussmann architecture, and they banished the rest of the tall glass buildings out beyond the Boulevard Périphérique.

They built one of those pedestrian-oriented shiny downtowns where unnamed streets are stacked vertically, it's unclear which lobby is the lobby, and the unfamiliar visitor runs into a great many “you can’t get there from here” situations.

We had been warned not to take a cab, but reasons came up, and we found ourselves bounding through the stadium to our seats at the eleventh hour, too late to buy beer in a commemorative cup, but just in time to hear him open with an unfamiliar song, “My Love Will Not Let You Down.”

It smelled like a Bruce song, and it sounded like a Bruce song, but the unfamiliarity gave it an AI-generated uncanniness that would persist throughout the show. Familiar faces in strange lands.

I studied French for some eight years in my youth, and I always found that the hardest part was not the vocabulary but rather the style: accent, unexpected idioms, confusing sentence structures. I could understand that they use “en fait” as a filler, but never could I grasp why.

So when everybody around us knew this first track, I was surprised, but not really.

My sister pointed out a couple of college-age types behind us who wore gray muscle tees and bandanas in their hair, like the Born in the USA tour. We laughed at the semantic difficulty of understanding whether they were dressed “like Born in the USA” or were dressed “like they were born in the USA.” Because as somebody born in the USA, I can tell you that I haven’t worn a muscle tee since I was about seven years old, crying in the Gap. I’d walked around belting out the title track, and the mall clerk facetiously asked where I was from.

Not everybody was as excited as the bandana teens. A couple in front of us not only sat for 90% of the show but even went so far as to grab a nearby high schooler by the shoulders and force him to “assieds toi s’il vous plaît!” He was blocking their view, and they didn’t care to stand, so he had, it appeared, no right to stand and dance. Not exactly what I expected, but I suppose it made sense amidst the French perception of freedom.

The tracks from BITUSA had the most approximated singing, though the band put some translated subtitles of other songs up on the screen, hoping that their message might be absorbed by these French.

A surprising high point in the show came when the band played “Pay Me My Money Down,” a Weavers cover, but originally a work song from Black dockworkers in the Georgia Sea Islands. Everybody in the joint knew the tune, because socialism. A few, though, mis-sung the words as “pay me / pay me / pay me my money back,” indicating that they knew enough English to know “back” would make sense, but not enough to believe that “down” was actually right.

That they all knew the words to the opening track from an unpopular covers album makes less sense than the fact that the broad themes of industrial decline, small town escapes, and underdog love stories resonate. And for those who don’t understand the words, the sax solos hit.

Songs like “Born to Run” are about Liberté, while “Born in the USA” covers Égalité, and “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” with an accompanying Clarence Clemons montage safely address any concerns about Fraternité.

As the two squares in front of us tried to keep their neighbors down, I thought about how a French teacher once told me the Americans took the freedom, while the French kept the equality and brotherhood. Fair, unobstructed views take precedent over feeling and dance.

Fans in the standing-room only pit, though, were free to go crazy. Architects in La Défense were likewise permitted to build a stark black glass arch that shocked and appalled residents of the central arrondissements.

Beyond our Springsteen affinity, the other reason for our destination was a long, complicated family history of Francophilia. I’d visited Paris enough that I know I don’t know my way around, as it seems new landmarks materialize each time. When I first went to see the Eiffel Tower, I learned about the Pompidou. Another time, I learned about Montmartre.

It was not until a subsequent trip (blessed am I) that I found out about le Tour Montparnasse. This one is hard to swallow, as the whole point is that it’s a sore thumb in the middle of town, disrupting the Haussmannian rhythm.

Though world-class cities are supposed to be full of surprises, this oversight stinks to this day of Mandela effect.

The uproar about Montparnasse, which is visible from everywhere except the inside of the tower itself, is said to be part of what led to the zoning laws keeping the creativity in La Défense. Parisians decided to forego an agglomeration of Chicago-style skyscrapers in favor of a uniform brotherhood of buildings, the preservation of which brotherhood depends on limits to freedom.

The triumph of this consistency is that, popping out of the metro on a given street corner, I’ll know I’m in Paris, but I won’t know the neighborhood, arrondissement, or year. When I heard “My Love Will Not Let You Down” I knew I heard a Bruce song, and I could dance without finding the name, the words, or the album.

Halfway through Saturday’s anti-jet lag walk, we crossed the Seine and entered La Samaritaine, a recently-renovated department store on the site of an early water purification plant. Sammy seemed to know exactly what the store was and that it was there. I would have sworn I’d walked on that street before, but I’d never ever seen the gigantic sign out front.

We putzed about and bought some postcards. I gawked up at a beautifully restored steel staircase that rhymed with the Halloween-themed metro signs, and at the glass skylight that spared so many electric lights. In a uniform city, surprises don’t spring up as statements like the Aon Center Center but sit wedged into the 1st, hidden unexpectedly in plain sight like a custom Loro Piana suit on an intern.

Along with France and local geography, we really dig reusable commemorative cups, ash trays, and posters. On the way out, beerless, scanned the ground for cups, assuming that they were done selling alcohol, as would be true at home.

For the posters, one last souvenir stand outside stayed open, so my Dad could mark his 60th with an official poster 10-20 times as expensive as the purloined advertisements street entrepreneurs hawked at the metro. While he waited, I found a young man walking about the plaza, buckling under the weight of the keg on his back. He sold commemorative cups of beer after the show, outside of the venue, in paradise.

In Paris, those with seat assignments may not dance, but they never shut off the beer. The rules of equality and brotherhood may prevent in-your-face freedoms, but they open the door to simpler, more subtle liberty.

I’d stayed once in a sixth floor Airbnb in a classic Parisian building. My friends argued about who had first dibs on the one-seater elevator that went up the center of the stairwell. Other Parisian buildings remain of course walkups, while others gut the inside and install a regular elevator. In our hotel, I found for the first time a glass elevator appended on the back of the building, toward the courtyard. Peering out I spotted a maisonette, a detached house within a house that didn’t at all match the Haussmann street. Modest, distinct, and older, it was allowed to persist on the condition that it remain tucked away, out of sight.

No matter how much Bruce loves his band, it’s his name, then theirs. He’s the only one left in the bunch who can play a three hour show, so he tells a story and does an acoustic song to give Little Steven the chance to change his scarves.

Likewise, Paris only looks as it does because Napoleon III commissioned Baron Haussmann to renovate the place into its now famous style. The brotherhood and equality give us the freedom to drink in the street, but without sudden bouts of individualism, there’s no dancing.

By the end of the show, even the angry couple had stood up to boogie for the encore, reveling with one guy and his pals, the legendary E Street Band.