SPRINGSTEEN’S STORY TOLD WITH LYRICAL INTIMACY
Memoir ‘ Born to Run’ traces a personal and musical journey
Anyone who has attended more than one Bruce Springsteen concert knows that somewhere in the show’s second half, The Boss will wax nostalgic.
He’ll call on a memory from his early — not his glory — days, and deliver a touching anecdote about his mom, his dad, or his hometown of Freehold, N. J., before counting the E Street Band into whatever song best captures the story’s emotion. In their way, those brief spoken tributes are every bit as good as the songs.
Now that narrative gift is on glorious display in Springsteen’s autobiography, Born to Run ( Simon & Schuster, 528 pp.,
out of four), a philosophically rich ramble through a rock ’ n’ roll life that began like many others, in small- town obscurity and near- poverty. By sweating it out on the streets of a runaway American dream, Bruce reached the superstardom he coveted themoment he saw Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show.
“FUN … it is waiting for you, Mr. and Mrs. Everyday American, and guess what? It is your birthright,” he writes of that galvanic Elvis moment. Springsteen’s familiar stage voice, leaps from the page in assessing what Elvis promised: “The life- blessing, wall- destroying, heart- changing, mind- opening bliss of a freer, more liberated existence.”
Springsteen chased that promise, and while still a teen became a fierce guitarslinger who led his early groups, The Castiles and Steel Mill, to success in the clubs of the Jersey shore. That was before he found his voice as a singer and songwriter with the E Street Band.
Solitary and self- disciplined, he stubbornly avoided alcohol and drugs. Throughout the book, Springsteen pays detailed homage to his bandmates, especially the departed: saxophonist “Big Man” Clarence Clemons and organist Danny Federici.
Ambivalence rules his recollections. Springsteen’s birthright was far from blissful, although he was doted upon by a grandmother and his mother, Adele. She held the family together in the deep shadow of a father, Doug, who drank silently and sullenly, often exploding with inarticulate rage. Doug, Springsteen writes, loved his son but “couldn’t stand me” for siphoning so much of the family’s female affection. In Springsteen’s telling, this Freudian drama defines his journey, and though his relationship with his father mellows, we learn that at 67, Springsteen has had to battle his own demons. Reading his look back on a remarkable yet troubled life, it’s clear that Springsteen’s aesthetic wouldn’t be complete without this longform Song of Springsteen. It’s the lyric he was born to write.