Born from the USA
BOOKS For many, Bruce Springsteen is not just a musician, he’s a way of life. Giles Harvey surveys two new biographies of the Boss.
IN AMERICA, home of the bacon milkshake and the $5 million bra, there is a radio station that plays nothing but Bruce Springsteen. It makes sense when you think about it. E Street Radio caters to a longstanding American addiction and it does so with this nation’s characteristic thoroughness in matters of appetite. Besides wallto-wall Springsteen hits, the station offers the commentary of Springsteen experts, guest appearances by Springsteen insiders, and what can only be described as testimonials from Springsteen fans who call in to share the manifold ways in which, through joblessness and bankruptcy, illness and bereavement, they have felt Springsteen’s spirit at work in their lives. For such people, and many like them, ‘‘Bruce’’ is less a recording artist than an avatar, a creed, a whole way of life.
In one sense, two new biographies – Peter Ames Carlin’s Bruce and Marc Dolan’s Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock ’n’ Roll – are testimonials, stretched out to a combined total of more than 1000 pages. Both are the work of fans, and both bring home, with an occasionally numbing force, the etymology of that word: ‘‘abbr of fanatic’’, as my OED has it.
Springsteen was born in 1949, in Freehold, New Jersey, a small industrial town about which noone seems to have anything nice to say. His mother, Adele, was a legal secretary; his father, Doug, a World War II vet and high-school dropout, ‘‘didn’t have a career’’, Dolan writes. ‘‘He had jobs.’’ None of them was very congenial – cab driver, jail guard, assembly line worker at a rug mill – and Doug’s disappointment with life set the emotional tone for Springsteen’s childhood. Years later, on stage, Springsteen would describe his father’s nightly ritual of turning off all the lights and hunkering down at the kitchen table with a six-pack and cigarettes. Sometimes Doug forced his son to join him. ‘‘No matter how long I sat there,’’ he recalled, ‘‘I never could see his face.’’
Springsteen went to a Catholic school, where, like many children entrusted to nuns, he became an ardent anti-Catholic. Elvis, whom he first saw on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1957, spoke to him in a way, and about things, that the nuns never could. ‘‘It was an early signal that you could just be different,’’ Springsteen told Carlin (who, unlike Dolan, got to talk to his subject). ‘‘Suddenly there was some cachet just through your own uniqueness.’’
In the late 1960s and early 70s, Springsteen worked the Jersey bar circuit with bands whose very names – Child, Steel Mill, Dr Zoom and the Sonic Boom – seemed to pre-doom them to obscurity. He drew crowds and received enthusiastic local press but remained what Chekhov once said was the most intolerable kind of person: a provincial celebrity. Around this time, he came across Tony Scaduto’s biography of Bob Dylan. The book’s portrait of the young singer ‘‘as someone who sought fame, almost to the exclusion of anything or anyone else’’, Dolan smartly speculates, may have done a lot to license Springsteen’s own ambition.
Escape velocity was finally achieved in 1972, after Springsteen’s manager, Mike Appel, tall-talked his way into an audition with John Hammond of Columbia Records, the man who discovered Dylan, among a pantheon of others. Appel almost blew the opportunity before his client had the chance to prove himself. ‘‘So you’re the man who is supposed to have discovered Bob Dylan,’’ he said on meeting Hammond. ‘‘Now, I wanna see if you’ve got any ears, ’cause I’ve got somebody better than Dylan.’’ ‘‘I don’t know what you’re trying to prove,’’ Hammond replied, ‘‘but you’re succeeding in making me dislike you.’’ Then Springsteen played It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City. Hammond’s prodigious responsiveness did not fail him.
When his first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, was released the following year, Columbia tried to market Springsteen as ‘‘the new Dylan’’. The comparison is clearly bogus, but it does throw into relief something essential about the Boss: his temperamental incapacity for spitefulness. Springsteen can do anger, certainly, both righteous ( Badlands, American Skin) and otherwise ( Adam Raised a Cain), but contempt is wholly absent from his music; he has no Idiot Wind, no Ballad of a Thin Man.
Greetings was a succes d’estime, as was its follow-up, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle (1973), but commercially there was nothing doing. The label started shifting in its seat. Then, in 1975, Springsteen released Born to Run, and fame followed like the winnings from a slot machine. In October, Newsweek and Time put him on their covers in the same
‘Bruce’ is less a recording artist than an avatar, a creed, a whole way of life.
week. By singing about his longing to escape the small-town life for which he’d seemed destined, Springsteen had made it happen.
By 1984, when Born in the USA came out, Springsteen was so famous that even former US President Ronald Reagan had heard of him. After an adviser on his re-election campaign told him that this was a good idea, the Gipper started name-dropping ‘‘New Jersey’s own, Bruce Springsteen’’ on the stump and tried to identify the singer’s ‘‘message of hope’’ with his own ‘‘It’s-morning-in-America’’ hokum. Springsteen did his best to distance himself from the president (he came from a staunchly Democratic family), but the association lingers.
Reagan’s America is obviously a version of pastoral; Springsteen’s is an actual place, where pretty awful things happen for no good reason. What the conservative columnist and Reagan adviser George Will heard as ‘‘grand, cheerful affirmation’’ – ‘‘I was born in the USA’’ – is really closer to outrage. The ruined Vietnam vet in Springsteen’s song isn’t affirming anything; he’s asking: ‘‘So what happened to my birthright?’’
Springsteen’s main allegiance at this time was to his music, which had made him one of the biggest stars on the planet. In spite of this, the man, by all accounts, continued to live like a Mormon. Not only did he not do drugs, drink or tobacco; he undertook charity work, entered analysis, and began ‘‘pumping some serious iron’’ (Dolan). ‘‘Man, the other bands back then, they always wanted to get back to the party,’’ said Clarence Clemons, the E Street Band’s mighty saxophonist, who died last year. ‘‘But for us, the party was on stage. That was our joy. Not what might happen afterward.’’
But let’s give the Boss his due – and Carlin his, for he does not shrink from Springsteen’s sometimes shoddy treatment of women and musical personnel. At one show, he noticed an exgirlfriend in the wings, dragged her up on stage, introduced her to the crowd – and then told security to kick her out. When a tour manager ordered chicken cordon bleu instead of the preferred fried chicken, Springsteen (sounding rather like Elvis) demanded to know ‘‘What’s this shit?’’ before throwing it in the poor man’s face.
The same question might be asked of some of the music Springsteen has made in the past two decades. There has not been a significant album since 1987’s heartsick Tunnel of Love, about the breakup of his first marriage – though you could probably piece one together from Lucky Town (1992), Human Touch (1992), and The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995).
Somehow, the artistic sag has not damaged him. Our love for Springsteen remains evergreen. When, in the film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, the Boss appears to John Cusack at a moment of crisis and, nonchalantly coaxing a blues riff from his Telecaster, offers some much-needed guidance, the moment feels inevitable. Charmingly self-deprecating as it may be – it’s hard to imagine Dylan doing anything like this – the cameo seemed to confirm what was long suspected: the man had escaped into myth.
‘‘Show a little faith there’s magic in the night,’’ he implores in his best-loved song; but that’s the easy bit. Springsteen’s great theme, the one that has made him indispensable to so many people, is the way in which that faith (in the possibility of regeneration, in the staying power of love, in music) is tested by the long littleness of life.
There is a powerful story near the end of Carlin’s book. Reading the New York Times obituaries of those killed on 9/11, Springsteen was struck by how frequently his name was mentioned. Thomas H Bowden Jr, of Glen Ridge, NJ, was ‘‘deeply, openly, and emotionally loyal to Bruce Springsteen’’. Christopher Sean Caton, of Glen Rock, NJ, was a Kiss fan as a boy. ‘‘But he soon moved on to Bruce Springsteen.’’ After his death, his sister ‘‘found 35 ticket stubs to Springsteen concerts in his bedroom’’.
And on it went. Springsteen was so moved that he called up many of the victims’ families to offer his condolences. Hardly a heroic act, in the scheme of things, but still, it’s heartening to know, and somehow not surprising.