Even the Boss has secrets

NONFICTION AUTOBIOGRAPHY with his fans, exploring forces of life and love and loss in blistering fourminute rock songs that spoke to a journey that both singer and sung-to recognized as shared.

But everyone has secrets. And for all of Springsteen’s fame, there is much about his story — about the people and events and dreams and fears that shaped him — that isn’t widely known.

Randolph Street in Freehold, N.J., where he knew “every crack, bone and crevice in the crumbling sidewalk,” is where Springsteen launches “Born to Run,” his new autobiography, which will be released Tuesday. It’s a 508-page offering that, like his four-hour concerts, delivers enough punch and laughter, sorrow and succor, to satisfy your soul and still, somehow, leave you wanting more. Fans are greedy that way.

Desperate and unforgiving, the run-down underbelly of the American Dream, Freehold is a recurring character in Springsteen’s story. It is the town he escaped in his teens and has been running from ever since. And yet with its ties to generations of his Irish Italian family, his hard-hit neighbors and the long-gone smoke-belching factories that shaped his blue-collar identity, it is the town to which he often returns in memories and dreams and late-night drives past his childhood homes and haunts.

Freehold is where his taciturn father drank a “sacred six-pack” in the pitch dark every night and then wanted to see him. “It was always the same,” Springsteen writes. “A few moments of feigned parental concern for my well-being followed by the real deal: the hostility and raw anger toward his son.”

Throughout the book, Springsteen brings moments such as these to life with memories that put you in the room, whether it’s a whispered aside from Bob Dylan at the Kennedy Center Honors, arguments with record company executives over what to do with an album, or a rare guitar-throwing tantrum directed at his friend and longtime manager Jon Landau. Having lived for his music and not much else for long stretches at a time, he is particularly adept at recalling the recording process and decision-making of each of his albums, a boon for hardcore fans who crave that detail.

“I haven’t told you ‘all’ about myself,” Springsteen writes near the end of the book. “Discretion and the feelings of others don’t allow it. But in a project like this, the writer has made one promise: to show the reader his mind. In these pages I’ve tried to do that.”

It turns out Springsteen fans did need an autobiography after all.