American Skin (41 Shots)

I saw the first ever performance of American Skin (41 Shots) in Atlanta on June 4, 2000. This is a song about how we as Americans are inadvertently trained and conditioned to have false/blind fear, and that the pressures of day-to-day life might cause us to shoot before asking questions. Sometimes literally. Springsteen uses the Amadou Diallo case as an example. (Diallo was shot 41 times by NYC police, who wrongly suspected he had a gun, when he was just reaching for his wallet.) The song is in the same key and has the same tempo/feel of My Hometown from BORN IN THE USA, and indeed when the song began on 6/4/00, I may have thought it was MH for a second or two. The phrase "41 shots" is repeated so many times that you can get it stuck in your head after just one listen. Obviously, I really like the song. Very haunting and catchy, and has sentimental value. I learned it on the guitar as soon as possible, which was more difficult in those days. YouTube didn't exist and from my dial-up connection, one mp3 took about 45 minutes to download. Not to mention I knew nothing about where to find downloadable bootlegs.

Despite never being released on any album and having only one live performance, word about the song travelled to NYC, where Springsteen was getting ready to do 10 nights at Madison Square Garden right after the Atlanta show. Just like the telephone game where the original message gets distorted by the end, the song got grossly misinterpreted. Most of the NYC cops, and even fans, didn't take too kindly to the song because they thought it was an anti-cop song in bad taste. Some security guys walked out, some turned their back on Springsteen for that song, and when one of my bosses at the restaurant I work at saw the song at Giants Stadium on THE RISING tour, he stormed out to the concession stand until the song was over to go do some shots (hopefully not 41). But anyone who pays attention to the song and the words knows that it's very sympathetic to cops and the human condition.

Below is a performance from one of the final New York shows in June/July 2000, which appeared on the LIVE IN NEW YORK CITY CD/DVD. Springsteen looks surprisingly young to my eyes, looking back on it. And to think I thought he looked and sounded very old at the time. He's 61 now, but was a spring chicken at 50 in the vid.



And here's audio of me performing the song, live on July 8, 2000 - just a month and 4 days after its world premiere, and probably just a week or so after the performance you saw above.