NO ORDINARY MAN
found it quite moving. Always enjoyed that part. I used to love to drift around, bump into people, see what their lives were like, wander into their lives for a few moments, then drift back out. It appealed to the transient nature of my personality. I liked the idea of being here and then being gone, this little spirit moving through the world.”
A couple of days before we meet, he opens the European leg of his promo jaunt with an event in front of an invited audience of journalists in London, where he notes that when the fans have met him, one of the commonest responses has been: “You’re shorter than I expected.” Here, too, the reverence is striking. When questions are opened to the floor, someone identifying himself as “Eddie from Ireland” tells Springsteen: “Such is the affection that the people of Ireland have for you, that if you ran for president of Ireland in the morning, you’d be elected.” When the event winds up, a throng of middle-aged men gathers at the front of the stage to get their copies of Born to Run signed. It is a pretty decent book, in a genre the rock autobiography replete with stinkers. (But then, you’d hope it would be a pretty decent book, given that Springsteen was reportedly paid $10m to write it.) It deserves to have topped the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic, for its honesty about Springsteen’s difficult childhood, his troubled relationship with his father, his struggles with depression, and his unyielding faith in the redemptive power of rock ’n’ roll.
He writes about the first time depression struck, in the early 1980s, in a way that resonates powerfully: he is on a road trip with a friend, stopping at a small-town fair, when, “From nowhere, a despair overcomes me; I feel an envy of these men and women and their latesummer ritual, the small pleasures that bind them and this town together. Now, for all I know, these folks may hate this one-dog dump and each other’s guts and be screwing one another’s husbands and wives like rabbits. Why wouldn’t they? But right now, all I can think of is that I want to be amongst them, of them, and I can’t. I can only watch”.
That depression still haunts him, fended off by performing in the book, he talks of being “crushed between 60 and 62, good for a year, and out again from 63 to 64” and I want to ask what his favoured antidepressant is, whether Sertraline performed the miracles for him it did for me. But there doesn’t really seem to be a good way to ask about a hero’s pill regimen.
Springsteen notes that he’s been asked about Donald Trump a lot as he’s promoted his book. And, despite a reputation for political engagement, he’s evidently a little tired of it. In fact, he’s was relatively quiet during the election. Though he appeared at campaign events for both Barack Obama and John Kerry, he didn’t stump up for Hillary Clinton much, barring an 11th-hour rally in Philadelphia.
Arguably the biggest influence on his politics was his manager, Jon Landau, the former music writer whom he met when he was studying a gig review pinned up outside a Boston club before his appearance in April 1974. Landau, the review’s writer, sidled up and asked the young musician what he thought. Thus began a friendship that transformed into a professional relationship, and something more: in Born to Run, Springsteen speaks of him being “the Clark to my Lewis”. It’s not so much that Landau told Springsteen what to think, more that he guided him to the books and films that might provoke him to think.
One of the binds of that, though, is the number of heartland American fans
the ones who voted Trump who believe Springsteen would think like them if only, as one contributor to the Backstreets fansite recently suggested, he hadn’t been “brainwashed” into liberalism by Landau and others in his inner circle. On the other hand, there are those who think it outrageous that someone whose songs display an extraordinary empathy for ordinary people should dare to have homes in New Jersey, Florida and Los Angeles, and charge over €100 per ticket to see him (the guarantee he demands from promoters for live shows is reputed to be among the largest in music).
For Springsteen, politics seems to be about the way you live your life as much as anything. It’s about being decent. About being fair to others. Being a good man. So what does being a good man entail? “That’s a big question.” It is. “I guess, really . . . I probably learned the best answers to that from my mother. My mother was basically decent, compassionate, strong, wilful. She insisted on creating a world where she could make her children feel as safe as possible, even though she certainly had her faults in that area. But she was consistent. You could count on her. Day after day after day. And she was very strong. The best part of me picked up a lot of those characteristics, and I struggle to live up to them today. So I think dependability, strength, wilfulness . . . put in the service of something good those are the things that matter to me.”
His mother had to be the rock because his childhood in New Jersey was, to say the least, peculiar. He spent a chunk of it in the early 1950s living in Freehold with a paternal grandmother who loved him too much, compensating for the death of her daughter in 1927 (“It was very emotionally incestuous, and a lot of parental roles got crossed,” he told the writer Peter Ames Carlin); school was cruel, his father, Doug consumed by an often silent rage against the world, and against the son who mystified him crueller still, emotionally at least.
Born to Run paints a picture of a childhood that is semi-feral, where Springsteen might refuse to go to school, and his grandmother would back him up. “I think I was a little unusual in that I went into rock ’n’ roll music to create order out of my life,” he says. “My younger life felt rather chaotic, so I was in search of some stability, actually, some order.”
As a kid, he felt invisible. That stopped when he started playing guitar. “Suddenly I was able to make a very loud noise, and a noise that was not so easy to ignore,” he says. “I had my little rock ’n’ roll band, and we were playing to a small gym full of dancers and their friends, and they immediately looked at you as a presence in their lives.”
When he was 19, his parents moved to California, and he was free to pursue music, to become as he would say on stage, years later a “prisoner . . . a prisoner of rock ’n’ roll”.
Politics started entering Springsteen’s music, though far from explicitly, with his fourth album, Darkness on the Edge of
Town, in 1978. That was when his music ceased to be the myth-making epics of his first three albums, and he started writing instead about ordinary people and their struggles. He wasn’t informed by reading political tracts. “I just referred to my experiences growing up my parents’ lives, my sister’s life.”
His parents had struggled to make ends meet, his mother working as a legal secretary, his father in a succession of blue-collar jobs. His sister had married in her teens, and she and her husband’s travails inspired his masterly song
River, about a couple trying to face up to the wedge that joblessness drives into relationships. “I was surrounded by people who were youthful, but living very complicated adult lives,” he says. “They were having kids at young ages, and trying to build a work life and a home life that was very adult. It was very easy to draw upon. It wasn’t a stretch or a strain.”
The songs about ordinary lives combined with Springsteen’s revelatory, ecstatic live performances built the bond with his audience that has lasted more than 40 years, and itself became the subject of an extraordinarily moving film in 2013, Springsteen & I. I don’t think he takes that relationship for granted. He understands that people want a piece of him for themselves: at that event in London in 2010, Springsteen came to the bar afterwards; while his entourage sat in the corner, talking to one another, he perched on the back of a sofa, facing the room. A receiving line of people queueing for a photo and autograph formed, and he stayed until everyone had their moment (my photo was out of focus; I got the autograph for my sister).
People think they know Springsteen. They have an image of Bob Dylan (inscrutable); Neil Young (irascible); Paul McCartney (wearingly cheerful; Springsteen laughs when I use the old