Born To Run
By Bruce Springsteen
508 pages
Available at National Book Store
You wouldn’t peg Jersey rocker Bruce Springsteen as a candidate for the analyst’s couch. But he goes there a lot, both literally and figuratively, telling his own life story in Born to Run.
Like Tony Soprano, Springsteen by his 30s found he needed to sit down and tell his troubles to someone — or else possibly hit a bad end. The psychiatrist trip is just one interesting side journey of The Boss’s memoir.
Born to Run is, of course, also the name of Springsteen’s first breakout song and album from 1975, and it lifted him out of Italian-American obscurity in New Jersey into nationwide rock fame. Soon came Time and Newsweek magazine covers and music critics declaring him “the future of rock and roll.” It must have made Springsteen’s head spin, though he seemed to possess an abundance of charm, onstage grit and let’s call it healthy self-regard — enough to get him through some tough patches, moving from being a local hero to a global rock legend. (Perhaps not as big in the Philippines as he is in, say, Berlin or Barcelona.)
Coming up in the ‘60s, you can see Springsteen’s path will push him far from his small-town roots and family, especially an alcoholic dad who never gave him a single “attaboy” growing up. Female relationships were also problematic for the guy who wrote Rosalita and Hungry Heart — his mother used to joke, whenever he broke up with a steady girlfriend, “Three years, Bruce! That’s your limit!” As he gathered together a gypsy band of musicians who could echo his poetic take on rock’s roots — later known as the E Street Band — and began touring America in cars and vans, freezing in the desert between gigs, it became clear that “Born to run” was more than just a metaphor: even as fame beckoned, Springsteen would draw back inside himself, or run away, finding release only on a stage fronted by strangers (or with frequent one-night stands), but never feeling connected with any of it, never feeling roots he could stand to put down anywhere.
This is dramatically amplified in an incident while passing through a small Texas town, sometime around “The River” tour in 1980. He sees all the locals hanging out at a small-town fair, enjoying each other’s company, their lives intermingled and interlocking, and he’s just the rocker passing through — it makes him feel alienated, lost, and he practically has a nervous breakdown back in his plush hotel.
Yup, the tough world of the rock ’n’ roller, feeling alone out on The Road. Bon Jovi probably wrote a song about it.
Springsteen was never much for schoolin’, but he did have natural gifts: as a teen, he was good-looking, smiled a lot, and once he got hold of a guitar — acoustic, then electric — he found he could easily write songs. His first band was a metal outfit, and their prog leanings seemed to find their way into his next phase — the epic, multi-part songs that informed his second album, “The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle.” There was a theatricality to his take on the street parade, and stuff like New York Serenade and 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) showed he was influenced as much by West Side Story as by Dylan and Van Morrison. It helped that he lassoed an engaging band — Clarence Clemons on greasy sax, Roy Bittan on piano, Danny Federici on organ and future Sopranos consigliere “Little” Stevie Van Zandt on second guitar.
Springsteen is honest in judging his own abilities — he rates himself a pretty fair guitarist but says of his own voice, “I don’t have much of one.” But it was onstage that the inner performer came out.
I had one talent. I was not a natural genius. I would have to use every ounce of what was in me — my cunning, my showmanship, my intellect, my heart, my willingness — night after night, to push myself harder, to work with more intensity than the next guy just to survive…
He and the E Street Band mastered a kind of blitzkrieg approach to performing: concerts went on three hours or more; he wouldn’t leave the stage until everyone in the room was completely convinced. This early 10,000-hour training helped Springsteen rise above his peers, amassing a dedicated fan base, even dozens of albums later. Part of it, too, was pure image: to many critics, he was rock’s “Great White Hope” in the ‘70s, just before the advent of punk, disco and early hip-hop changed everything. He seems fastidious about tending to that image, talking about the photo session for the album “Born to Run” (the famous not-so-casual lean on sax player Clemons); the gritty photos for “Darkness on the Edge of Town”; and the back-pocket jeans shot by Annie Liebowitz for the cover of “Born in the USA” that brought him hordes of teenybopper fans, and apparently the admiration of lunkhead dudes who never actually listened to the verses of the title song, just its ironically flag-waving chorus.
Springsteen makes much of his entry into musical activism — speaking up for Vietnam vets, touring with Amnesty International and other benefit events — and it’s laudable, but he can seem provincial and patronizing at times, as when he notes that “We played in lots of European cities where English was, at best, a second language.” What did Bruce think? That all Europeans just naturally prefer to speak English? There’s something of the small-town dude in these passages, though Springsteen does get more sophisticated over time.
There is, of course, his short marriage to model Julianne Phillips that Springsteen dismisses as a dishonest mistake on his part; in time, he settles into a more adult life partnership with his backup singer, Patti Scialfa, that results in what seems like a happy ending, with three kids, making music with the woman he loves.
But it’s not that simple. Springsteen reveals that he’s suffered from depression most of his life — particularly dark passages where he resorts to antidepressants to pull back from the edge. It’s a condition that seems to pop up unannounced, even in his settled 60s. Who thought the guy who wrote joyous tunes like Thunder Road and Kitty’s Back was depressed half the time?
On the other hand, it takes a pretty healthy-sized ego to drive along a Jersey street a few days after 9/11, hear some stranger yell from his car window, “Bruce, we need you!” and decide that the country is desperately crying out for another album from him — like he’s the Batman of Rock City, or something.
You can fault Springsteen for being over-earnest, for taking his metaphors too seriously, for being pseudo-poetic, but as a writer, he at least paints smoothly and vividly on the page, with a dollop of self-deprecating humor. At the end he offers his life’s work as something to be taken up by the next generation (no false modesty there): “This, I pursued as my service. This, I presented as my long noisy prayer. My magic trick.” It’s good enough.
The Boss has also come out loudly against Donald Trump in concert and in the press. Invited to play at The Donald’s inauguration, non-fan Springsteen famously refused; after that, a Bruce cover band also refused an invitation to play, citing respect for the songwriter. Now, that’s pop culture power.
Springsteen the presidential spoiler? Only some scruffy kid from Jersey would have that kind of chutzpah.