Born to Run
“Love the music, love the man, read the book. “
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” —Attributed to many
In explaining the purpose of writing Born to Run, Springsteen says, “One of the questions I’m asked over and over again by fans in the street is ‘How do you do it?’ In the following pages I will try to shed a little light on how and, more important, why.”
The result is, to no surprise, excellent. Bruce Springsteen turns out to be a mighty fine prose writer—though you might have guessed it from his lyrics. Born to Run is divided into three sections, Growing Up, Born to Run, and Living Proof, which besides being titles of his songs, match Bruce’s life story: youth, fame, and what comes after.
The Springsteen name is of Dutch origin, but Bruce’s roots are Irish-Italian. His childhood influences were family and the Church. Bruce tells us about his family: his grandparents, father, mother and sisters, and shares their life stories and influence on the values he learned, “Truthfulness, consistency, professionalism, kindness, compassion, manners, thoughtfulness, pride in yourself, honor, love, faith in and fidelity to your family, commitment, joy in your work, and never-say-die thirst for life. These are some of the things my mother taught me and that I struggle to live up to.”
Bruce grew up in poverty and was raised by his grandparents who took responsibility over him from his parents. He says, “It ruined me and made me.”
Bruce had a complicated relationship with his father. He felt as a child that, “When my dad looked at me he didn’t see what he needed to see, this was my crime.”
Catholic school turned him into an unintentional rebel. “I am alienating, alienated and socially homeless . . . I am seven years old . . . This was the world I found the beginnings of my song.”
At age seven, Bruce saw Elvis perform on the Ed Sullivan TV show. Readers will recognize this event as important in young Bruce’s life because adult Bruce signals its importance by typing in ALL CAPS and EXCLAMATION POINTS! The next day Bruce convinces his mother to get him a guitar, a rental. “I took it home. Opened its case. Smelled its wood (still the one of the sweetest and most promising smells in the world), felt its magic, sensed its hidden power.”
But Bruce couldn’t play. After a few weeks of music lessons, his mother brought the guitar back. He says, “It was over for now, but for a moment, just a moment . . . I smelled blood.”
A few years later it’s The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. Their first album in the U.S. was Meet the Beatles. Bruce tells us, “It didn’t take me long to figure it out. I didn’t want to meet the Beatles, I wanted to BE the Beatles.”
Unsurprisingly, readers will learn a lot about Bruce’s guitars. Bruce buys his first acoustic guitar from Western Auto Supplies for $18. His second cousin, an accordionist, teaches him how to tune, read a chord chart, and play. The first song he learns is “Greensleeves” from the American Folk Music Collection book. His first rock and roll song is “Twist and Shout.”
Bruce purchases an electric guitar and joins his first bands: the Merchants, the Rogues, and the Castiles. He plays at the Freehold, New Jersey Elks club, and at the Regional High School gym. The Castiles first gig was “at the Angle-Inn Trailer Park on Route 33, just east of the Shore Drive-In. It was a summer afternoon cookout social for the locals.” The Castiles’ drummer, Bart Haynes quit the band to join the marines, Bruce tells us that Bart was the first soldier from Freehold, N.J., to die in the Vietnam War.
As a teenager Bruce regularly took bus trips into NYC to listen to bands. He didn’t attend his high school graduation. Cautioned to stay away by his principal, he instead spent the day of his graduation in NYC. Bruce’s first gig outside of New Jersey was in in 1968, in New York City, at Café Wha?, in Greenwich Village. He played for free.
The Castiles breaks up. He buys another guitar, a Gibson that had a longer-than-usual neck. He later finds out that it wasn’t a guitar but a six-string bass.
Bruce spends some time in community college but finds he doesn’t fit in there either. “I was once again one of a small handful of freaks in a low tolerance zone.” He drops out of college to become a full time musician. As he is not in college and as the Vietnam War was still active, Bruce was eligible for the draft. Bruce recounts his attempt to achieve a 1Y deferment (what he calls a “mental disqualification” but according to Wikipedia was more of a catchall intended to disqualify homosexuals and criminals). Bruce is not given a 1Y, but instead a 4F, a physical disqualification.
When Bruce 19 years old his family moves to California, but he chooses to stay in New Jersey. “. . . all I remember is mainly feeling excited to be left on my own.” At 19, Bruce does not drink or take drugs, telling us, “I was barely holding on to myself as it was.”
This is it, more or less, Bruce providing the reader story after story, personal vignettes. Bruce cycles through band managers, plays more gigs, and makes a connection with a record producer.
Fronting the band Steel Mill, Bruce’s drummer is arrested in Virginia for scuffling with the police over the decision of when to end a show—the police wanting to end it right now, cutting the lights, the drummer not, and throwing the lights back on. Having no money to bail out the drummer, Bruce next holds a “Free Mad Dog” concert. That show ends in a riot and a warrant goes out for the organ player, Danny Federici. In his next concert, Bruce is able to raise bail money for the drummer, but now the organist goes on the lam.
Bruce goes through a number of band formations, outgrowing Steel Mill and wanting to move from Rock to Soul and R & B. He forms the Bruce Springsteen Band and adds a horn section but realizes he can’t afford to pay a larger band. Even with a smaller band he finds it difficult finding an audience that wants to listen to an R&B playlist.
Bruce does find a following in the smallest bar in Asbury Park, making this pitch to the owner, “We charge one dollar at the door, we play what we want, take the door receipts, and go home. He can’t lose.” Playing Saturday nights, the first week’s audience was 15. The next Saturday saw 30 in attendance, then 80, growing to 100, 125, then starts playing Fridays and Saturdays, then Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays to audiences of 150. The band breaks up; Bruce breaks up with his girlfriend and heads to California.
Bruce can’t find work as a musician for pay in California and heads back to New Jersey.
Bruce signs his first record contract at the age of 22 to Columbia Records for Greetings from Asbury Park. He was naive and the contract came back later to bite him in the ass after he made real money with Born to Run. He says, “I didn’t look back until much later, and by then, of course, it was too late.”
Bruce describes the making of Greetings from Asbury Park. He was homeless, sleeping on the floor at a friend’s house. Greetings from Asbury Park was cut in three weeks; after he turned it in, the A&R manager told him that there were “no hits.” Bruce added two more cuts, “Spirit in the Night,” and “Blinded by the Light,” with Clarence Clemmons on saxophone. Bruce’s advance money from Greetings went to bail a friend from jail, “for some unremembered infraction.”
Greetings from Asbury Park sold 23,000 copies and was considered a flop by record company standards.
Bruce recounts the first time he heard his music on the radio. “. . . and forty-three years later I still get the same thrill when I hear new music of mine for the first time coming across the air waves.”
After playing in Harvard Square, Bruce received the review “heard ‘round the world,” by Jon Landau for The Real Paper. The review leads to a long friendship, with Jon Landau becoming the E Street band’s manager.
Record sales pick up. Bruce describes how the E Street band was formed, noting talent attracts talent. Bruce describes how Born to Run came to be. He tells the reader, “This was the album where I left behind my adolescent definitions of love and freedom.” Having second thoughts about releasing the album, there were months between finishing to release.
Bruce gets on the cover of both Time and Newsweek in the same week (Time and Newsweek were well regarded news magazines in their day). As for Bruce and his band, Bruce says, “I’d fixed it good so I couldn’t go back, only forward, so that’s where we went.”
In the section “Roll Call” Bruce gives each member of the E Street band a half-page spotlight, though to no surprise Clarence Clemmons becomes the subject of a whole chapter. There’s a chapter on the messy aftermath of his recording contract. Bruce says the lawsuit was not over money as much as it was over ownership of the music. The lawsuit went on for years but in the end Bruce retains ownership.
Bruce had never held a regular job and up until Born to Run had never a paid taxes. Profits from Darkness on the Edge of Night ended up going to pay back taxes, though he still owed a lot of money to a lot people. “That, along with piling up astronomical studio bills while we learned our craft would keep me broke until 1982 . . .”
Bruce explains why The River came out as a double album, and why the album took so long to finish. As with Born to Run, Springsteen was paralyzed by the many choices that go into an album’s production.
Along with increasing introspection, personal growth, and maturity—or perhaps as a consequence of these—Bruce at age 32 goes into a serious depression, attends talk therapy, and starts taking antidepressants.
Bruce writes about his first wife Julieanne and apologizes for treating her badly. He writes about his fling with Patti Scialfa (the first woman in his band and future second wife) while married to Julieanne, which ends his marriage.
He describes his first stadium show on the Born in the USA tour, and his first run-ins with the paparazzi. At one point the paparazzi made him so angry that he threw a guitar at his manager’s head.
Of the ending of the Born in the USA tour he writes, “It was the peak of something. I would never be here, this high, in the mainstream pop firmament again.”
After the Tunnel of Love tour, he is burnt out. Bruce breaks up the E Street Band, moves from New Jersey to California, and buys a house. The next chapter focuses on Patti, their wedding, honeymoon, and the birth of his first child.
In 1992 Bruce forms a new band, goes on tour, and moves back to New Jersey. He buys a horse ranch, hosts rodeos, and assures readers that the rodeos are small events. Bruce records the album, The Ghost in Tom Joad and goes on a solo acoustic tour. Of album’s theme he writes, “The debate centered on a single question: where does a rich man belong? . . . What is the work for us to do in our short time here?”
There’s a chapter on his father’s last years.
Springsteen pays homage to Bob Dylan. “I had the opportunity to sing ‘The Times They are A-Changin’’ for Bob when he received the Kennedy Center Honors. We were alone together for a brief moment walking down a back stairwell when he thanked me for being there and said, ‘If there’s anything I can ever do for you . . .’ I thought, ‘Are you kidding me?’ and answered, ‘It’s already been done.’” Springsteen inducts Bob Dylan and Roy Orbison into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. Springsteen himself is inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1998.
Bruce participates in the national telethon after the events of September 11, 2001, which led to the album The Rising.
Many years after the breakup of the E Street band, mindful that he did not want to form an “oldies” band, he reconstitutes the E Street band and goes on tour. He writes about the last days of E Street band member Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons.
Bruce describes the intensity of playing the Super Bowl halftime show. “I love playing long and hard but it was . . . thirty-five years in twelve minutes . . . give or take a few seconds.”
At best one can merely summarize the contents of Born to Run, but not nearly so well as what Bruce can tell you himself. Bruce’s autobiography is well paced and well told, at turns serious, funny, sad, rude, brash, but always heartfelt.
This review was completed while listening to a recording of Bruce’s 1978 LA Roxy show. Love the music, love the man, read the book.