Bruceology

A WILD LIGHT is burning in the eyes of LaurieAnn Yeisley-Drogin, and her blonde hair vehemently swings. ''Why does Bruce use the same lines in different songs? Why does he tell the same story over and over again?" Her passion-illumined gaze searches our faces. ''Because there is only one story out there in the world, and it's always the same! It's the story of trying to get back into your father's house and finding the door closed!"

Yeisley-Drogin is minister of the Joy in Christ Lutheran Church in Abington, but her congregation today is not a religious one. Devout, certainly, but not religious, because today she is addressing one of the breakout sessions at ''Glory Days," the three-day Bruce Springsteen Symposium presented by Penn State and hosted by Monmouth University in West Long Branch, N.J., last weekend.

This is Room 231 of the university's Bey Hall, drab, staticky, where old lessons smear the blackboard, but we're on a high here-we're peaking. In a few minutes there will be some Q&A, and a burly man will murmur ''For me, with Bruce's music, it's an ongoing relationship. It's all him, everything he's put out." ''It's all of us," Yeisley-Drogin will assure him, ''and we don't want it to end."

But right now she's preaching. ''We're all seeking," she declares. ''We're all orphaned." And as her voice expands and her outline flames prophetic in the schoolroom neon, Yeisley-Drogin begins to channel the Boss directly: ''Because we were all sprung from cages on Highway 9, we are tramps like us...and baby" - she pauses, inhales-"we were born to run."

. . .

The Boss is vast. If three days spent discussing Springsteen down in his home territory, deep in the North Jersey sprawl, made anything clear, it is that-like him or not-he contains multitudes. At different moments during ''Glory Days" Springsteen was variously perceived as a giant of liberalism, a Catholic shaman carrying the nation's pain, a hip-swivelling litterateur, and an average Joe writ large.

Images and aspects of Bruce towered across the mental horizon. Ben Eicher, a speaker at a General Session on ''Bruce and Catholicism," claimed that Springsteen's years of charitable work (in the form of donations, benefit shows, promotion of grass-roots organizations, and so forth) proved ''the absolute linkage of humanity and community." Eicher, who teaches religion at a Catholic high school in Rapid City and is also Theological Consultant to the TV show ''Joan of Arcadia," was moved to quote the prophet Jeremiah, Chapter 20, Verse 8: ''Whenever I speak I must cry out...and outrage is my message."

At the same session, Bill Ayres, executive director of the antipoverty nonprofit World Hunger Year, spoke of Springsteen's backstage encounter with a group of 9/11 widows, and was unexpectedly brought to tears at the memory: ''He hugged them with his arms and with his heart. He gave them his presence ....This is a man who touches the human spirit in his music and in his life."

Elsewhere, more conventional academic business was going on. In a paper called ''What's Flesh and What's Fantasy: Unresolved Contradiction in Bruce Springsteen," John Engle reprised the ''Born To Run" theme, this time as an indicator of the Boss's existential poise. ''We are literally 'born to run,"' said (or read) Engle, who is an associate professor at France's Universite du Sud-Toulon-Var, cautioning that this did not imply ''a sterile flight into a constantly receding future" but rather ''an alert, on-the-toes resistance in the present to smug simplicity and the easy answer."

At a session on ''Musicology and Springsteen" the writer Caryn Rose presented her paper ''Action in the Streets: Bruce Springsteen and Punk Rock," in the course of which we were surprised to learn that Alan Vega, dire beer-bottle-smashing frontman of New York synth-terrorists Suicide, once opined that ''Bruce is the man." Rose also revealed that Joe Strummer, who incorporated some of the young Springsteen's sweat and muscle into the Clash live show, was another advocate: ''If you don't like Bruce Springsteen," Strummer once said, ''you don't understand rock'n'roll!"

There is no safe predictor for Springsteen-worship. It will take some long-discredited science, like phrenology or the theory of the humours, to explain why there are people who dig the Boss and people who don't. Perhaps it's glandular; one man puts on ''Born In The USA" and hears rock'n'roll's promise renewed, another hears only a rude blaring of saxophone, aortic strain in the vocals, bruiser piano, and oofing, triumphalist drums. Making the unbeliever's case in a tribute issue of Spin magazine, the critic Richard Meltzer wrote in 1985 that he had ''rarely been able to even look at [Springsteen] without muttering expressions like 'master of ersatz,' 'the absolute voice of the status quo,' or 'the emperor's new jeans and workshirt."'

If you crave the Dionysian, if you want your rock stars heretical, wild, precariously feminized, wearing twisted crowns of feedback-Iggy, Lou Reed, Perry Farrell, Kurt Cobain-the Boss is not for you. Between the hard labor of his hours-long live shows and the rootsy thumpings of his band, he has always been more of a workhorse, more of a rocker than a rock star. He will not expose himself, like Jim Morrison, or stun you with an alien glare. But for those who need a closer, warmer fit between their lives and their music of choice, who like to see their abiding concerns reflected in a familiar sonic landscape, he does the job like no other.

From the beginning, with Springsteen, there has been worship and there has been skepticism. As his career took off in the mid-'70s, the music industry was a behemoth discovering its own strength. Label bosses, with the post-'60s mass market gaping before them and a cringing rock press behind, had unprecedented confidence in their own ability to manufacture and maintain a million-selling artist, and Springsteen was among the first to whom they gave the full power of the machine.

A month after CBS released ''Born To Run," his breakthrough third album, in 1975, he was simultaneously on the covers of Time and Newsweek. Lester Bangs, reviewing ''Born To Run" for Creem magazine, pronounced it ''the heady rush of another gifted urchin cruising at the peak of his powers"-but he also noted the ''cabal of rock critics...making extravagant claims for him, backed up by one of the biggest hypes in recent memory."

That Springsteen was good, perhaps amazingly good, only complicated the issue. Born in 1949 in Freehold Borough, N.J., to an apparently dead-end working-class existence, he had seized on rock'n'roll as the instrument of his redemption, and he played it with revivalist fire. The tingling, wide-screen grandeur of his sound, the greaser panorama of his lyrics, the reach of his ambition, were phenomena to equal or outmatch the scale of the marketing operation. And it is the peculiar enormity of his Boss-ness, his easy access to the archetypal, the apparently limitless space into which fans-and now scholars-can hurl their feverish or meticulously considered projections, that has always been the chief turn-off for the unbelievers.

There are plenty of rock fans who can only tolerate one Springsteen album: ''Nebraska," the downbeat acoustic record he made alone in his kitchen in 1982. For these listeners, the lonely wolf-whoops that ring out in the fading bars of ''State Trooper"-narrow, defiant, as if Springsteen is testing the depth of the vacancy around him-are the sharpest moments in the Bruce canon. (''If there'd been Prozac in 1982," pondered one speaker at ''Glory Days," ''would we still have 'Nebraska'?")

. . .

You don't have to come from the Jersey shore-or even America-to get it. For Amarjit Nar, a graduate student from Wolverhampton, England, who flew in (and paid a $145 registration fee) to attend the ''Glory Days" symposium, Springsteen is someone who has touched her, and who writes about real things. She gave me a copy of a poem she wrote about his last British tour: ''Rising like ghosts from a dream/An army marching through the streets/On a journey to see Springsteen/And worship at his feet...." (Nar, who was on her way to a session called ''Gender and Springsteen," professed herself ''highly satisfied" with the proceedings at Monmouth.)

Indeed, ''Glory Days," to judge from the atmosphere it generated and the number of people it drew, was a success. It's safe to say that it also set a precedent, both for the Springsteen-geeked academics who can now hold their heads high against the more senior and accredited Dylanologists, and for the realm of ''rock studies" in general. Who's next? ''Into The Mystic: a Van Morrison Symposium"? ''Obscured By Clouds: a Pink Floyd Symposium"? ''When Doves Cry: a Prince Symposium"? The field is wide open for the rock'n'roll profs.

But there were things going on at Monmouth last weekend-connections, and minor redemptions-that are unlikely to be repeated.

''What this is all about, folks," said Bill Ayres, genially vatic at the ''Bruce and Catholicism" session, ''is mystery. And a mystery is what you can't undo-you have to go into it. We're living inside a mystery."

Maybe this is Springsteen's achievement, to have injected into the great grim New Jersey Turnpike of American life a coursing strangeness, a touch of the other, whether that other be doom or the grace of God. It's in all his major metaphors: the line, the river, the edge of town. Between waking and sleeping a channel runs, like mercury, a slipstream in which faces waver and are distorted, and resolve themselves into other faces. Brief cities rise, the ''mansions of glory" that the lovers in ''Born To Run" ride through on their ''suicide machines."

Truer than Dylan? ''Everything dies, baby, that's a fact/Maybe everything that dies someday comes back/Put your make-up on, put your hair up pretty/And meet me tonight in Atlantic City.

Bob Dylan never wrote that. Bruce Springsteen did.

James Parker is a writer living in Brookline.