The Boss on Broadway
The poet of stadium rock finds new ways to tell his, and America’s, story
It took me a year to finish the damn thing.
Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, “Born To Run,” coming soon to a Broadway theatre near you. At first I couldn’t look at it. Five-hundred pages? Come on. This is a rock star memoir, not James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
How complicated could his insights possibly be?
He was shy. A loner. Then he heard Elvis. And The Beatles. He picked up a guitar. Women threw themselves at him. The End.
Intimidated by its size, and the fact I hadn’t read an actual book since university, I did my usual trick of reading the last chapter first, and proceeded backwards so I could cover his showbiz exploits without tedious reflections about his hardscrabble childhood. Been there, done that. But it turns out Bruce is a poet who can recreate not just the factual content of incidents that happened a lifetime ago, but the mood, the tone, the texture.
“I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud,” he writes in his inimitable New Jersey voice that, in a career move no one expected, has sparked an upcoming gig on Broadway.
“So am I. By 20, no race-car-driving rebel, I was a guitar player on the streets of Asbury Park and already a member in good standing among those who ‘lie’ in service of the truth ... artists, with a small ‘a’.”
I wrestled with the Keith Richards autobiography, “Life,” for months when it came out in 2010, without success.
Everyone had been raving about his ghostwritten reminiscences about life with the Rolling Stones — brilliant! Insightful! Keef is the coolest!
But to me it felt tossed off, a verbal transcription.
Informational, yes, but where was the poetry?
Springsteen, who wrote every word himself and spikes his tome with the same grit, urgency and bittersweet reflection that course through his music, is a revelation.
The anthemic spokesperson for a generation of disaffected Americans, sinewy pop rocker from the Reagan era, dusty street poet who created a world of desperate Jersey street characters, comes off like a regular guy.
But smart. Insightful. With a sharp,
critical eye. Holding nothing back. The J.D. Salinger of Stadium Rock. “He loved me but he couldn’t stand me,” he writes about his troubled relationship with his late father, and who among us doesn’t understand exactly what he means.
“He saw in me too much of his real self. Inside, however, beyond his rage, he harboured a gentleness, timidity, shyness and a dreamy insecurity. These were things I wore on the outside and the reflection of these qualities in his boy repelled him.
“I was ‘soft’ and he hated ‘soft.’ Of course, he’d been brought up ‘soft.’ A mama’s boy just like me.”
Topping bestseller lists last fall, the book sparked a companion album (“Chapter and Verse”), an HBO doc (“Bruce Springsteen: In His Own Words”) and, as of next month, a one-man Broadway show that has sparked controversy over exorbitant ticket prices that top out at $850 U.S. on official channels and $7,000-plus on the resale market.
But to me, the allegations of profiteering — and there are angry Springsteen fans out there — are less relevant than the fact his show has already extended its run by 10 weeks and is destined to sell out.
People want truth from their idols, authenticity — and they’ll pay anything to get it.
In this respect, the 67-year-old rock legend, who writes with disarming candour about his hungry years and bouts with depression, promises to deliver.
“Writing about yourself is a funny business,” notes the performer who built his reputation as a principled paragon in a sea of salacious spin.
“At the end of the day it’s just another story, the story you’ve chosen from the events of your life.
“But in a project like this, the writer has made one promise: to show the reader his mind.”
It’s about a singular voice: musically, anecdotally, novelistically.
And it has increased cache in an era where corporations dictate content and pop stars toe the line or find themselves eking out an existence as indie artists with no commercial traction. Springsteen is old school. He came along in the ’70s, when money wasn’t the only thing that mattered, when a saviour could rise from these streets to land on the covers of Time and Newsweek in the same week, when rock stars could stand for something besides bedding supermodels and boosting bottom lines.
“Born To Run,” “Backstreets,” “Born in the U.S.A.”
Passionate, engaged — occasionally enraged — his cinematic tone poems depicted the harsh underbelly of the American Dream, the darkness on the edge of town, a stark contrast to the sunny surf culture championed by the Beach Boys a generation earlier.
And for four and half decades, through good times and bad, his vision has endured.
The interesting thing, if you scan the list of 2017’s Top 10 U.S. concert draws, is that you see variations of the same theme over and over: legacy artists whose body of work speaks to fans on a personal level.
Guns N’ Roses, Coldplay, U2, Billy Joel, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stevie Nicks and country music’s own version of Springsteen, Eric Church, are acts who put their money where their mouths are, not prone to opportunistic trend-hopping.
The only contemporary artists, ironically, are Canadians — hip hop icon Drake and pop king Justin Bieber — whose longevity has yet to be road-tested across the decades.
So Springsteen, old codger that he is, is more in tune with the times than Top 40 artists like Cardi B, DJ Khaled or French Montana, who have hit records, but like Robin Thicke and Iggy Azalea, may find themselves forgotten a few months from now, let alone decades.
“I know that my life was changed in an instant by something that people thought was purely junk — pop music records,” the plainspeaking troubadour told The Guardian.
“And you can change someone’s life in three minutes with the right song. You can bend the course of their development, what they think is important, of how vital and alive they feel. You can contextualize very, very difficult experiences.”
These are cynical times. Bling is king, careers cursory and celebrity voices that speak truth to power few and far between.
It’s reassuring to see a rustic throwback like Springsteen telling his story — America’s story — in bold, inventive new ways.
When he kicks off his Broadway run Oct. 12 — ticket prices be damned — he’ll be giving the people what they want.
And the people, as the saying goes, are never wrong.