In Bruce Springsteen’s Memoir Born To Run, Passion On Every Page

Updated:

September 30, 2016 2:19 pm

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By now, we know that if Bruce Springsteen is going to take on something like writing an autobiography, he is not going to do it half-assed. A man setting new performance records in his 60s — stretching into 4-hour sweatfests, without a break! — does not do half-assed.

But in the first few pages of Born To Run, released just days after Springsteen’s 67th birthday, it becomes clear he didn’t settle for average, either. Once again, he went the extra mile. There’s no ghostwriter, no sense of another hand guiding its content. And no sense of self-aggrandizement, of an exercise in publishing just for the sake of it.

Instead, Bruce has produced a remarkable document of his life, an honest account that’s not only interesting, but filled with language every bit as poetic as the street symphonies its author has been composing since he was a teenager. Talking about playing in his Freehold, New Jersey neighborhood as a child, he gives us this: “I climbed upon piles of dirty snow, swept high by midnight plows, walking corner to corner, the Edmund Hillary of New Jersey.”

That instantly evokes not only the scene, but the feeling — the Everest-conquering explorer fantasy almost every kid experienced, turning mounds into mountains and reaching for the stars.

Throughout the book, he gives us something else: an extraordinary sense that he’s never stopped reaching for the stars, or lost his sense of awe at managing to grab a few.

The very trait that so endears fans all over the world — passion — is evident on nearly every page, right alongside his clear-eyed, 20-20 hindsight assessment of his rather hardscrabble upbringing: the miserable Catholic school years, the adversarial relationship with his father, the Elvis- and Beatles-fueled revelation that rock and roll could save his soul and his early attempts to ascend the musical mountain he would eventually climb to its peak.

When he talks about breathlessly awaiting the release of each new Beatles single, he does it in a way that captures exactly the fever those of us alive then remember. But his description also serves to relay the feeling to those who weren’t. He cleverly captures the zeitgeist by repeating “The Beatles,” followed by the sentence: “In 1964, there were no more magical words in the English language (well … maybe ‘Yes, you can touch me there’).”

For those who know Springteen’s body of work well and have studied articles, books and his own lyrics, there might not be many discoveries; even the bouts of depression he discusses have been referenced before. But the insights nevertheless seem fresh when told from his perspective, when he places them in full context. Explaining how his older sister got pregnant at 17, married (and stayed married) to her baby’s construction-worker father, he talks of how they struggled, how he became a school janitor and she worked at K-mart while they raised three children. “She found the strength my mother and her sisters have always carried with them. She became a living incarnation of Jersey soul: I wrote ‘The River’ in her and my brother-in-law’s honor,” he writes.

We’ve always known Bruce’s ability to speak to the experiences of the “common man” even after he became wealthy was rooted in his own working-class background. But knowing that song is about his own sister and brother-in-law somehow makes it even more powerful, more touching.

When he talks about his rites of passage — first drink, first time he hears “Spirit In The Night” on the radio — he brings those experiences to vivid life, just as he brings to life the struggles and crises of conscience that infuse some of his greatest compositions. Describing how he wrote “Born To Run,” he expresses the mood of the nation, the fear that gripped a citizenry buffeted by “political murder, economic injustice and institutionalized racism.” He also captures the “ambition to make a world-shaking mighty noise.”

“I wanted to craft a record that sounded like the last record on Earth, like the last record you might hear … the last one you’re ever NEED to hear.”

We know how that turned out. And yet, we also know that he’s never lost the sense he describes on page 428, of being that one in a million dreamers who somehow climbed high enough to stand between two heroes (Jagger and Harrison) at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, while thinking, “THESE, THESE WERE THE GODS, and I was, well … one hardworking guitar man.”

“I carried the journeyman in me for better or for worse, and I always would,” he writes. Then he describes playing the Apollo Theater, his “holy house of soul.”

“From this stage, Sam and Dave schooled the crowd on what it took to be a ‘soul man,’” he notes. “Soul man, soul man, soul man … that’s the term. As an R&B singer, I will never be more than ‘pretty close,’ but ‘soul man’ is a much broader term. It encompasses your life, your work and the way you approach both. Joe Strummer, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Mick and Keith, Joey Ramone, John and Paul — all white boys who could rest comfortably with that sobriquet. It’s all-inclusive, and I’d be perfectly happy with just those two words on my gravestone.”

Anyone who’s attended even one Bruce Springsteen show, with or without the E Street Band, knows just how accurate an epitaph that would be.

Springsteen Chapter and Verse

The album released to accompany the book reinforces Springsteen’s status as one of our greatest living soul men. It’s almost his One, but with a difference. The 18-track chronology, covering his earliest recorded work with the Castiles and Steel Mill through 2012, documents a career progression that sounds even more remarkable when these songs are heard side-by-side.

Together, they almost make you want to swear, fuck Bob Dylan. Bruce really is the Dylan who’s still bringing it, over and over and over, his voice every bit as dynamic as it was when he recorded some of those early tracks — the first five never before released. As he progresses from the surf-rock of “Baby I” to the Humble Pie sonics of “He’s Guilty (The Judge Song),” to “The Ballad of Jesse James,” in which he starts to sound like the Bruce we know and love, to “Henry Boy,” an early version of “Rosalita” in melody and delivery, and then to “Growin’ Up,” we hear the trajectory of magic.

On track 8, “Born to Run,” he near-shrieks the line, “I wanna know if love is real.” It’s doubtful there could be a more definitive delivery of the question at the core of human existence. Really. If that sounds like hyperbole, so be it. The album starts to get a little uneven after that, mainly because, for example, a song like “Badlands” simply can’t hold its own between “Born to Run” and “The River.” And on any other album, “Brilliant Disguise” would be outstanding, but on this collection, it’s a lesser offering. Still, the insights are worthwhile. And the songs, well, they speak for themselves.