Bruce Springsteen’s memoir Born to Run set to be book of the year

Written in secret, Bruce Springsteen’s memoir is already being hailed as the book of the year.

Bruce Springsteen on stage in New York last year. Picture: Getty

It’s a very Bruce way to do things. For the past seven years Bruce Springsteen has been working on a memoir, called, naturally, Born to Run. It’s not surprising that this top-flight rocker should be penning his thoughts in between sweating through stadium gigs and releasing albums filled with blue-collar anthems: within this decade alone Neil Young, Pete Townshend, Chrissie Hynde and Keith Richards have all produced books that have been years in the making.

What is surprising is how Springsteen did it on spec, writing in secret before so much as showing it to a publisher. As Simon & Schuster’s spokesman Cary Goldstein says: “I can’t think of anyone of Bruce’s stature who has done it this way.” Now it is to be published simultaneously in 22 countries. It is already being talked of as one of the books of the year and hardly anyone has read it.

Springsteen began writing about his life, in 500-page detail, after he and the E Street Band - his long-serving touring outfit featuring his wife, Patti Scialfa, and his childhood New Jersey friend “Little” Steven Van Zandt on guitar - performed at the US Super Bowl in 2009. Springsteen is a man who is used to being in charge - he regularly incurs fines for breaking concert curfews - and his lack of control at the Super Bowl scared him.

“I’m somewhat terrified,” he wrote in a blog about the performance. “‘One of the biggest audiences since dinosaurs first screwed on Earth’ kind of terror.” Pleased with the tone of his prose, Springsteen continued jotting down memories while on holiday in Florida with Scialfa and their daughter, Jessica. It grew from there.

He has made a lifetime’s work of doing it his way through absolute self-belief. Jon Landau, a former rock critic, has been Springsteen’s manager since seeing him one night in 1974. “I went down to see him in a club in Cambridge, Massachusetts,” he said when I spoke to him in Oslo, in 2013, shortly before Springsteen performed one of his arena shows. “About 15 people turned up. I’m outside and there’s Bruce, hopping up and down in his T-shirt on the street. I was in love with this guy’s music, but at the time Bruce was kind of isolated in New Jersey and [his record label] Columbia were about to drop him. I said: ‘How do you rate yourself: first rate, second rate or third rate?’ ‘Oh, I’m first rate, no doubt about that.’ I came in to help, he made the album Born to Run, and we’ve been off to the races ever since.”

Born to Run - the memoir, not the song about lovers escaping dead-end lives, or the album that made his name - will almost definitely cover his notorious work ethic. Springsteen’s abundance in concert, running through the crowd, picking out audience members to duet with, has made him a huge live draw. The 2016 The River tour grossed $US170 ($A225) million in the first six months alone.

I spoke to Springsteen that night in Oslo, between rehearsals, with him crouching down by the edge of the stage. My first question was how did he keep doing it, night after night?

“I don’t know. The energy just comes along,” said Springsteen, who decided to escape a life of low prospects and a fractious relationship with his father in New Jersey after hearing the Animals’ We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place. “I’m used to doing this. I’ve done it my whole life. It’s one of those things that I have no choice but to do. When the tour finishes I just carry on. I’ve got my songs, I go home, I go into the studio, and I continue the lifelong conversation with the audience. I don’t know where that conversation is going.”

The memoir is likely to touch on Springsteen’s role as the moral voice of working-class America. Albums such as Darkness on the Edge of Town from 1978 and The River from 1980 feature tales of blue-collar lives spinning out of control, while Wrecking Ball from 2012 covers America’s banking crisis and the collapse of industry.

Born in the USA, mistakenly taken up as an anthem of chest-beating patriotism, is about a Vietnam vet returning home and finding only desperation. From my standpoint of that Norwegian arena floor, I craned my neck and asked Springsteen how he could still be a spokesman for the common man now that he was a fabulously wealthy rock star.

“That is a fascinating question and one I get asked on every tour,” he said, with double-edged diplomacy. “The first 18 years of my life were spent in a small town with working-class parents, so I experienced that reality very closely. The other side of it is that you’re an artist, paid to use your imagination. I’ve lived long enough to see the thrust of American society, and the huge problem now in America is inequality, which has been increasing over the past 30 years. That is something I’m moved to write about.”

In a 2016 interview with Vanity Fair, Springsteen revealed that in Born to Run he has also been moved to write about the depression that has dogged him all his life. He says he was “crushed” from the ages of 60 to 62 without any band members bar Scialfa knowing it; the Wrecking Ball track This Depression is a portrait of personal despair couched as a song about industrial decline in New Jersey.

That depression, which he has suggested stems in part from having a damaged father who could never bring himself to say he loved his son, helps to explain why a 66-year-old man would push himself through four-hour stadium sets night after night. Few events are as euphoric as a Bruce Springsteen concert, so we can only imagine how they must feel for the man himself - and what the crash that follows them must be like. When Born to Run is finally published in late September, we’ll get to find out.

The Times

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are coming back to Australia for a national tour in January. See details here.