Springsteen tells his own story in ‘Born to Run’
Anyone who has ever experienced the uniquely soulstirring amalgam of musical celebration, spiritual rejuvenation, intellectual provocation and physical release-to-the-point-of-exhaustion that is a concert by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band will feel right at home in the 508 pages of “Born to Run” (Simon & Schuster, $32.50), his 67-years-in-themaking autobiography.
On the most superficial level, this richly rewarding rock tome could be subtitled “The Collected and Expanded Between-Song Sermons.” That's how integral to his fabled marathon performances over the last 40-plus years are his rippedfrom-New-Jersey-life fables of spirit-shaping battles with his father, his comradeship with his bandmates, his fitful attempts to unravel the mysteries of love and, binding them all together, his DNA-deep passion for music, especially that strain called rock 'n' roll.
Throughout his career, the once-scrawny kid who was born in Long Branch, N.J., and grew up in nearby Freehold has relied on music as a source of inspiration, a platform for understanding the world around him and a forum for self-examination and expression.
We're told on the book jacket that his 2009 performance at the Super Bowl was what started him writing, specifically about that show and what it meant to him at the time.
“Since the inception of our band,” he writes late in the book about his group's performance at the event that typically draws the largest global audience of any other, “it's been our ambition to play for everyone. We've achieved a lot, but we haven't achieved that.
“Our audience remains tribal ... that is, predominantly white. On occasion,” he notes, “I looked out and sang `Promised Land' to the audience I intended it for: young people, old people, black, white, brown, cutting across religious and class lines. That's who I'm singing to today.”
It's been his hubris from the outset that Springsteen believed to his soul that he had something to offer to the world and his supreme gift that he fought and scraped his way onto stages across the globe to realize that dream.
Given his Catholic upbringing, it's fitting that the book is divided into three parts, his own literary Holy Trinity, as he lays out his life story essentially in chronological order.
Book One is titled “Growin' Up,” recounting his early family life and apprenticeship as a budding musician; Book Two, “Born to Run,” continues with his rise to a level of fame and fortune he probably did conceive, but only in his wildest dreams; and Book Three, “Living Proof,” looks into adult life as one of pop music's biggest stars and the often diametrically opposed realities of his on- and offstage lives.
Unapologetic rock 'n' roller that he is, Springsteen often crafts chapters like good pop songs — most take just three or four minutes to finish, there are catchy hooks and typically snappy endings, usually with a grain of life's truth dropped in along the way.
His book offers none of the surreal flights of imagination found in Bob Dylan's unconventional 2004 memoir, “Chronicles, Vol. 1,” or Neil Young's 2012 self-narrative, “Waging Heavy Peace.”
What emerges unequivocally is his almost singleminded devotion not to scoring hits or finding fame and fortune, but to creating a body of music that matters.
At the core of this story is his combative relationship with his father, Doug Springsteen, whom he describes sitting night after night in the kitchen of their workingclass household puffing on a cigarette and sucking down beers until he would unpredictably but frequently explode at the nearest target of his outrage, which often was his only son.
“My dad's desire to engage with me almost always came after the nightly religious ritual of the `sacred sixpack,' ” Springsteen writes. “One beer after another in the pitch dark of our kitchen. It was always then that he wanted to see me and it was always the same. A few moments of feigned parental concern for my well-being followed by the real deal: the hostility and raw anger toward his son, the only other man in the house. It was a shame,” Springsteen writes evenhandedly. “He loved me but he couldn't stand me.”
The power in Springsteen's book emerges from his steadfast refusal simply to create villains who embody the antagonistic forces he railed against as a youth. He transcends the bitterness that could have consumed him through an honest curiosity about the life forces that shaped his father, and a real wish not to let the sins of the father become those of the son.
With active, objective exploration as his guiding principle, Springsteen comes to the conclusion that “I haven't been completely fair to my father in my songs, treating him as an archetype of the neglecting, domineering parent. It was an `East of Eden' recasting of our relationship, a way of `universalizing' my childhood experience. Our story is much more complicated. Not in the details of what happened, but in the `why' of it all.”
Perhaps the most poignant moment, among many he shares, is their reconciliation, years after his father and mother, Adele, had quit New Jersey and started a new life across the country, with his younger sister, Pam, in San Mateo, Calif.
He recounts a visit from his father, who was increasingly battling various illnesses, yet still made the drive from the Bay Area to see his now-famous son in Los Angeles.
“Bruce, you've been very good to us,” the elder Springsteen tells his son, “and I wasn't very good to you,” to which Bruce responds: “You did the best you could.”
“That was it,” Springsteen writes. “It was all I needed, all that was necessary.”
Although he reveals that much of this inner and outerworld analysis grew out of psychological counseling he underwent as an adult, the book also gives us a vivid picture of just how crucial music was as a life-renewing force for him.
“I began to feel the empowerment the instrument and my work were bringing me,” he says about woodshedding his guitar chops. “I had a secret ... there was something I could do, something I might be good at. I fell asleep at night with dreams of rock 'n' roll glory in my head.”