I always appreciated Bruce Springsteen, but never saw him live or owned any of his records. My aunt Marie saw him many, many times, because she was best friends with Jon Landau’s mother; lots of my friends were devoted fans; and the music felt like something I should like more… but when I actually listened, it didn’t click with me. I’m sure if I’d seen him back when my friends first saw him, I’d have been hooked and that would have carried over to the records, but I didn’t and it didn’t.

As a result, this is the only Springsteen song I know, and I only know it because it was a staple of my friend Peter Keane’s sets, back when he was a college student in Cambridge, performing at the Nameless Coffeehouse. I’ve written about Peter before, and the audiences of young women who would scream and sigh at his Nameless sets — not at all the norm for that room, which was a free folk coffeehouse in a Unitarian church and tended to draw an older crowd and be more sedate.

This was one of Peter’s killer songs, and I still picture him singing it, squinting into the stage lights, tense and blond and sexy — like the screaming women, that description will embarrass him, but it was his choice to do the song and what the hell else is “I’m On Fire” about?

I heard Springsteen’s version after hearing Peter do it, not on a record but on MTV. As I recall, Springsteen had resisted MTV, insisting on them using live videos of his previous hits rather than lip-syncing to his studio recordings, but for this one he took a different tack: he still didn’t lip-sync, but appeared in a little movie, acting the part of a garage mechanic pining after a rich woman who leaves her car for him to fix.

I’ve had a bunch of arguments about Springsteen over the years with Jack Landron, who had an earlier career as Jackie Washington, Cambridge’s Black Latino folksinging star. Jack is endlessly irritated by Springsteen wearing jeans and a t-shirt onstage. “He always looks to me like he came to fix the car,” Jack says. And yes, he does, and it works fine for me and his fans, but I understand why Jack is irritated. Clarence Clemons never dressed like a car mechanic, because he would not have enjoyed being mistaken for a car mechanic.

Those arguments made me think about Springsteen’s relationship to Black music and musicians, and when I read his autobiography, he gets into that and his background in a way that pulled me in more directly than his records had. Around the same time, I was asked to contribute a piece to a Springsteen anthology, so I went back and listened to his early records and bootlegs of live shows, and wrote a piece called “American Skin: Springsteen and Blackness.” I hoped it would spark some conversations, but never met anyone who had read it, so now I’ve posted it, and if anyone wants to have a conversation about it, positively or negatively, you can find me on social media or my email is on the first page of my website.

Finally… this song worked great for Peter, back when he was in his early twenties, and obviously worked fine for Springsteen. But frankly, if you’re not entranced by the singer, the lyric is pretty creepy: “Hey little girl, is your daddy home? Did he go away and leave you all alone? Oh, I’ve got a bad desire…” So I’m posting it, because I know it and it reminds me of good times and Peter’s performances, and I do appreciate Springsteen… but otherwise I’ll let it alone.