Bruce: I practised dancing in front of a mirror to woo girls
HE WOULD grow up to become one of the world’s biggest rock stars, able to entrance stadiums full of fans.
But Bruce Springsteen was once an awkward teenager who was embarrassed about his curly hair and would spend ages practising dance moves alone in the hope of attracting a girl.
And it worked. When he went to dances at the local YMCA, he says he nearly always won the girl, even if he often made a ‘complete fool of himself’.
His admission comes as he appears on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs today and speaks about his childhood in New Jersey. The starsays: ‘Before I played the guitar, I realised that girls loved to dance. So I spent quite a bit of time in my own mirror practising the different dance moves of the day [until] I was good enough to get the girl.’
But he tells presenter Kirsty Young he was less happy with the way he looked, saying he thought he was ‘pretty hideous’. He adds: ‘I would use my mother’s hairclips to pin my hair down and then I would sleep on it exactly right on the pillow, because I had Italian curly hair.’
Springsteen, 67, makes mainstream choices for his favourite songs, including It’s All Over Now by The Rolling Stones and I Want To Hold Your Hand by The Beatles.
For a book, he chooses Woody Guthrie: A Life, by Joe Klein, saying that it changed what he believed music could achieve, and his luxury item is a guitar.
Springsteen also speaks about how his performances have been influenced by the difficult relationship he had with his father.
He says: ‘I am trying to go back and make sense of things that at the time were unfathomable. That continues to this day. I constantly go back and I put my father’s clothes on and I walk out on stage and I present some version of him and myself to my audience.
‘Why am I doing that? I am trying to find the piece of it which would lead to a transcendence over the circumstances that I grew up in.’ His father Douglas was a bus driver of Dutch-Irish descent who resented his son’s ability to express the very feelings he was bottling up, the musician explains.
He adds: ‘My dad had a sort of gruff exterior but inside he could be quite soft and sensitive. The qualities he had inside were the things I wore on the outside. They were just difficult for him to deal with.’
He also talks about his battle with depression, and explains how his clean-cut life was a reaction to his chaotic childhood. ‘What I was interested in doing was creating some order and a safe environment for myself, because my childhood felt very unsafe,’ he says.