Born to Run: Bruce Springsteen on his life and music
Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography shows him to be a complex artist with a passion for music, family and the USA.
Two years ago, while on holiday in Ireland with his wife Patti Scialfa, Bruce Springsteen hit the wall. After 40 years of touring, recording and channelling the great American struggle, the rock ’n’ roll superstar had a breakdown. “For the first time, I felt I understood what drives people toward the abyss,” Springsteen writes in Born to Run. “The fact that I understood this, that I could feel this, emptied my heart out and left me in a cold fright.”
From this revelation, which comes towards the end of the singer’s autobiography, we are left in little doubt that the Boss’s journey from New Jersey wannabe to globally revered rock veteran has not been easy. The fame, adulation and critical acclaim that have been almost constant since Springsteen’s career took off in the mid-1970s have been tempered by bouts of depression and anxiety. Therapy and medication have been Springsteen’s crutches, periodically anyway, for decades.
When he announced Born to Run, a book that took seven years to write, Springsteen promised to show the reader his mind. This he has done, not solely by writing about the uncertainties and conflicts within it, but also by eloquently and entertainingly unravelling the songwriting method that made him a star, a slowly dawning process that he explains here with as much passion and attention to detail as any of his lengthy stage performances.
Here he is, for example, on the shaping of that signature song that gives the book its title:
I wanted to use the classic rock ’n’ roll images, the road, the car, the girl … what else is there? It was a language enshrined by Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys, Hank Williams and every lost highwayman going back to the invention of the wheel. But to make these images matter I would have to shape them into something fresh, something that transcended nostalgia, sentimentality and familiarity.
It took him a further six months, but few could argue that he didn’t get there in the end. Springsteen was now a writer of conscience. The US of the 1960s and 70s, of the Kennedy assassinations, of Vietnam, of race riots and of financial uncertainty — that was Springsteen’s agenda. “If I was going to put my characters out on THAT highway,” he writes, “I was going to have to put all of those things in the car with them. That’s what was due, what the time demanded.”
That social conscience has been the framework on which Springsteen has formed many of his lyrics and he explains the roots, the frustrations and his sense of accomplishment in many of them as his story unfolds.
Married to those lyrics, Springsteen’s immersion in and absorption of classic rock ’n’ roll (as a seven-year-old, seeing Elvis Presley on TheEd Sullivan Show was a pivotal moment) created a glorious hybrid, one that spawned successful albums such as Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River, Born in the USA and many others, each of which took as their starting point the shifting sands — the despair, euphoria, hardship, romance — of the American dream.
Joined for much of his career by the incomparable E Street Band, with whom he will tour Australia again early next year, Springsteen holds a place in rock ’n’ roll history as one of the most consistently uncompromising writers and performers. His relationship with his songwriting craft and with the musicians around him is at the heart of this book.
Springsteen’s life story runs parallel with that Steinbeckian search for the Promised Land, at least in the beginning. Early on, he wrote it as he lived it, until fame took hold and he became an observer, a translator in the best folk tradition of the American way of life.
Born to Run is divided into three “books”, the first of which documents his childhood. Springsteen grew up with his younger sisters in a working-class neighbourhood, Freehold in New Jersey, flitting between the houses of his parents — Irish/Dutch heritage father Doug and Italian heritage mother Adele — and his nearby grandparents.
An average kid growing up in a poor Catholic family in a dying industrial town, Springsteen dreamt of escape and found it through his teenage skills with a guitar, hustling gigs until it dawned on him that writing his own songs and singing them offered brighter prospects than playing in local jam bands. He even followed Tom Joad’s trail west several times in his quest to get his foot in the door of the music industry, but for a variety of reasons ended up back in New Jersey. During this musical apprenticeship he met fellow local musicians such as Steve Van Zandt and Danny Federici, later to become staples of the E Street fraternity.
After paying his dues for six or seven years, a grounding he cites as integral to his longstanding success, Springsteen, after auditioning for producer John Hammond, who had discovered Bob Dylan 10 years earlier, signed to Columbia Records in 1972. He released his debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. in early 1973, and followed it months later with The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle. Neither album set the world on fire. Born to Run, released in August 1975, did.
Book two is the real meat and potatoes of this autobiography. Springsteen picks up the pace of the story as his career takes off. One can almost feel the excitement as the album Born to Run changes everything and suddenly he is, as journalist and his future manager Jon Landau put it at the time, the “rock ’n’ roll future”.
Springsteen’s prose catches fire in the retelling of what must have been an incredible period in his life, from the writing of Born to Run in 1974 to the birth of his first child in 1990. Those 16 years form the axis of his commercial success, an astonishing run topped by Born in the USA, a hits-laden album unlike any other in his catalogue that catapulted Springsteen and the E Street Band into stadiums around the world.
Fans will delight in the detail behind his most famous songs, the shifting politics of band personnel, and in the behind-the-scenes moments. Although if you’re looking for Motley Crue-style X-rated confessions, you’ll be sadly disappointed. Springsteen didn’t even drink during his early career and late-night entanglements are mentioned only modestly. He does address his brief marriage to actress Julianne Phillips, in 1985, which immediately preceded his courtship with and later marriage to songwriter and his backing singer Scialfa.
There’s also a recurring need to reconcile with his father, whom he visits intermittently after his parents move to California. Springsteen explains more than once that throughout his life he has been careful not to repeat the mistakes of his father, who remained distant during his childhood.
Book three takes us from 1990 to the present, but with slightly less reflection and passion for detail when discussing albums such as The Rising, Wrecking Ball and High Hopes than in the context of The River and Born to Run.
Nevertheless Born to Run, the book, is a real page-turner. We know the success story; what we learn here is how that success was created through a lot of hard work and a passion for his craft. What’s inescapable through the 500 pages is that Springsteen cares — about music, about family and about America.
Throughout his career, in interviews Springsteen has often come across as inarticulate, something at odds with the carefully chosen words in his work. He has no such problem in explaining himself here.
Iain Shedden is The Australian’s music writer.
Born to Run
By Bruce Springsteen.
Simon & Schuster, 510pp, $49.99 (HB)
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