The Boss goes prose
His depressed war vet father drove Bruce Springsteen to work hard, and then even harder. Ahead of his New Zealand shows next February, he tells why his marathon gigs make him happy.
Exclusive interview
Almost three years ago Bruce Springsteen stood centre stage at Mt Smart Stadium with an acoustic guitar, in front of a full house. The E Street Band were waiting in the wings as he delivered a bare bones reading of Lorde’s Royals.
Stripped of any pop artifice, the song could have been lifted from Springsteen’s starker-than-stark opus, Nebraska.
The move was one part ‘‘homage’’ and also illustrative of the dedication Springsteen devotes to his stagecraft night after night when, as the old soul song goes, ‘‘ninety nine and half’’ just won’t do.
At some point in his early 50s, Springsteen admits he had an epiphany. Once describing himself as a ‘‘card-carrying member of over thinkers anonymous’’, Bruce accepted that ‘‘the light at the end of the tunnel was, in fact . . . a train’’. That realisation has led to a terrific outpouring of new work over the last decade and a half.
Now, Springsteen is heading back to New Zealand to perform in Auckland and Christchurch. His autobiography Born To Run is on the shelves and there’s a companion album, Chapter And Verse, that sits alongside the book, featuring rarities among his more well known work.
Born To Run currently holds the top spot on the New York Times bestsellers list. With a refined gift for portraiture, in these pages Springsteen details his troubled childhood, his often traumatic relationship with his father, his battles with mental illness and the literal transformative power of rock ’n’ roll.
Springsteen began work on the book after he wrote an essay recounting his 12-minute performance at the 2009 Super Bowl. After posting the essay online, the idea of fleshing out the piece into a fully fledged memoir took shape.
‘‘I think all of my musical experience helped me shape sentences and paragraphs, and to find rhythm in the prose and it felt like a natural extension of what I’d done,’’ he explains from New York of the process.
‘‘I wrote that little essay and I just continued writing in the voice that I had found there. I just sat down, wrote from memory in long-hand about my life, and then I rewrote everything . . . I did that about two or three times.’’
As a young songwriter, Springsteen had a preternatural instinct to weave his autobiography into his songs, albums, and set-list. Solving the problem of himself provided a rich vein for the art that followed.
‘‘It was just what I needed to do. That kind of writing for me was all instinctive. [Writers] write what we need to hear, and I found that medicinal and helpful. ‘We’ are repairmen, and the first things we search for are the things that are going to repair us. In doing so, I hope it helps repair some of my audience.’’
Since the release of Peter Ames Carlin’s 2012 biography, Bruce, Springsteen’s struggle with mental illness has been public.
Here, in Born To Run, the artist explains that it’s taken ‘‘50 years of therapy and two psychologists’’ to get him to where he is today. Destructive and inevitable, his life is dotted with downward spirals, ‘‘I’ve just pulled a perfect swan dive into my abyss,’’ he writes around the time post-his-Born In The USA success.
‘‘My stomach is on rinse cycle and I’m going down, down, down.’’
Springsteen’s anxieties began early. Raised to a large degree by his paternal grandmother, who had lost her own young daughter in a road accident, Bruce was doted on. As a six-year old, he was allowed to go to bed at 3am and get up at 3pm. Anti-social times for a small child, it was perfectly suited for his rock ’n’ roll body clock later in life.
Bruce’s father, Doug, a World War II veteran, was often out of work, and suffered regular bouts of depression and paranoia. Doug drank ritually every night, and constantly berated his only son.
Bruce, as a boy, was nervous, blinking a hundred times a minute and routinely biting his knuckles until they bore calluses the size of marbles. The ‘I’ve got enough bad things running around my head; the show remains incredibly medicinal and centring. Once I book this show, I may be backstage, I may be tired, I may want to go to sleep, but that walk, whatever it is, 25 yards from the dressing room to the stage, it’s never failed me. Something turns on between those two points.’ family lived alongside many relatives, a mix of Italians and Irish folk who inhabited his Freehold, New Jersey, street. The St Rose of Lima Catholic school cast a shadow of influence, mystery, and misery over the young Springsteen’s life. School days included humiliation and occasional beatings from the nuns, while the streets he grew up on bred racial tension and violence – casual and fatal.
Springsteen admits that while time may or may not heal all wounds, a certain amount of success can make them more palatable.
‘‘I think that if your life is going well, it does,’’ he admits. ‘‘And it’s contingent on the arc of your life. I was lucky that the things that I dealt with and was struggling with, and the things that were difficult for me in my youth, all the pain I had to go through, I was able to resolve a lot of it.
‘‘I did that as my parents got older, [and] as I got older, which is fortunate because there are sins which aren’t redeemable and there are lives that can’t be reframed. I was very fortunate that I was able to have that experience.’’
Springsteen opens Born To Run with talk of a magic trick. It’s a magic trick that set the tone for his adult life. To pull the trick off, as a young man, he had four clean aces in his sleeve: ‘youth, a decade of hardcore bar band experience, good homegrown musicians, and a story to tell’. He had no ‘plan B’ for his life. ‘‘I wouldn’t advise someone else to never have another option,’’ he offers with a familiar chuckle. ‘‘I decided when I was very young that I did not have another option. [Music] was my skill, it was the only thing I seemed to be competent and good at. And, therefore, I was simply never going to stop, regardless of where it took me.
‘‘I don’t think that would have changed if I’d had success or not. ’’
Escape as a boy was the tall copper beech tree outside his childhood home. The young Springsteen climbed higher than any other kid in the neighbourhood.
Music became his solace and then sole ambition. Obsessed with the radio, as a child he would help his grandfather scavenge rubbish dumps to find parts to repair transistors, which they would then on-sell to workmen on building sites. The musical titans of the 1950s and 1960s, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan, then came along and set Bruce on a path that gave his life purpose.
When Bruce was 19, the physical grip of his father, if not the psychological one, was released. Doug needed ’’out’’ of Jersey and, with Springsteen’s mother Arlene and younger sister Pam, that portion of the Springsteen family moved to California.
Bruce Springsteen, who’d only just evaded the Vietnam draft, opted to stay put in the family home, populating it with future members of the E Street Band and sundry others. In Freehold, he earned his rock ’n’ roll stripes in bands The Castilles, Steel Mill, then Child. As the family’s 1960s era Rambler pulled away, Springsteen had no second thoughts of leaving.
‘‘I knew I wasn’t going to go because I had my own life,’’ he says today. ‘‘I had the band. I was making a living. I wasn’t going to be able to bring all those things with me to California, and I couldn’t leave them because I had already established myself. I was independent. I was young, I was only 19, but still, I was pretty well formed.’’