Born to Run: Biography

“Here your rejection by the boys is a badge of sensitivity and can be played like a coveted ace for the perks of young geekdom.”

Bullied by boys at school for shyness and sensitivity, Springsteen discovers these traits appeal to girls. The girls, he argues, stand in for his doting Italian grandmother, who showers him with attention. He learns to use his shyness to attract their attention. In addition, it confirms that his introversion and identity as a “softhearted dreamer” are characteristics worth cultivating. Indeed, those characteristics prove indispensable to him as a creative artist.

“There is a strength, fear and desperate joy in all this hard spirit and soul that naturally found its way into my work.”

The book is as much about Springsteen’s music as the people and events that inform it. He describes the “work, faith, family” (24) creed that he inherits from his mother and her sisters, which influences his artistry and dogged work ethic. His mother’s optimism in the face of many obstacles gives him the persistence to push forward despite adversity. His evocation of dreamers and lost souls soldiering on through a life that continues to smack them down suggests an endurance born of necessity: Life is hard for the working-class people, but they have no choice but to persevere.

“Wall Stadium, that smoky, rubber-burning circle of love where families came together in common purpose and things were as God intended them.”

Wall Stadium, the local arena for stock car races and demolition derbies, gives Springsteen his first taste of car culture, an element present in much of his music. The destruction, “high-octane” atmosphere, and “garage-built American steel” (28) thrill young Springsteen, for whom the town of Freehold holds little excitement. This fascination with cars informs several of his artistic themes, including the promise of the road and an appreciation for American industry (as well as the heartbreak of plant closures), and exemplifies how he conflates passion with religion (Wall Stadium and its diesel-fumed atmosphere is what “God intended”).

“A riot ensued. Women, young girls and many men screaming for what the cameras refused to show, for what their very timidity confirmed and promised…ANOTHER WORLD…the one below your waist and above your heart.”

Springsteen describes the rapturous, transformative experience of watching Elvis Presley for the first time. It’s more than a performance, it’s a paradigm shift. It’s one man showing the world—particularly the youth—something they’ve needed to see and hear but didn’t know until that moment. In a world of “half-assed circus acts [and] the anemic singers” (39), Elvis reveals the charade of “bloodless” entertainment that seems utterly lifeless next to his sexually charged gyrations and blues-inspired vocals. He pulls the veil from the staid values of suburbia and gives a generation hope.

“That was one of the revolutions the Beatles brought with them when they came to America. Your wrote the songs, you sang the songs, you played the songs.”

In Springsteen’s corner of New Jersey, the music scene consisted of singers, instrumentalists, and backing bands—but the three never converged. The Beatles showed Springsteen what a rock and roll band was: a group of musicians who performed their own compositions. Without this revelation, he may have become just another musician strumming along to a vocalist, but the bands of the British invasion revealed another possibility: He could write, play, and sing his own music, a remarkable opportunity and a colossal responsibility. Springsteen accepts both challenges.

“When life comes knockin’, it’s the heartbroken doo-wop singer who understands regret and the price of loving, the hard-living soul man who understands ‘I take what I want, I’m a bad go-getter, yeah…’ and the Motown divas, men and women, who know you’ve got to play a little bit of the white man’s/rich man’s game.”

In 1966—two years after The Beatles stormed America’s shores—doo-wop, soul, and Motown are still king in New Jersey’s IB Club, and Springsteen’s band, The Castiles, must tailor their music to the audience’s tastes. Springsteen intuitively grasps not only musical genres but the music’s social and cultural appeal. Born of Black cultural roots, the music appeals to the “greasers” of east New Jersey, who revel in its tight harmonies and sublime sexuality. The crowd—working-class people, many of whom are second-generation immigrants—identifies with the music’s implicit messages: struggle, compromise, and resolve.

“I felt filled with the freedom of being young and leaving something, of my new detachment from a place I loved and hated and where I’d found so much comfort and pain.”

When Springsteen moves out of his parents’ house, he experiences the thrill of independence. While a bit nostalgic for the good times, he’s glad to leave behind painful memories—the bullying, his father’s indifference—and move toward the future. That future is uncertain, but he knows he’ll at least have the freedom to pursue his passion—and at 19, nothing else matters.

“Music was going to get me as high as I needed to go.”

For various reasons, drugs are an aspect of the rock and roll lifestyle that Springsteen refuses. Having witnessed the destructive results of addiction (suicide, broken careers), he fears them. He needs to maintain control over himself and his music—and stimulants, he feels, will hinder, not help, his creative process. Additionally, he knows his own destructive impulses and is haunted by memories of his father, so he wisely refrains from anything that might damage his future. For Springsteen, the music is paramount, and the lifestyle’s perks are simply indulgences he can live without.

“He stepped up onto the bandstand, took his place to my right and let loose with a tone that sounded like a force of nature pouring out of his horn.”

Springsteen describes his first time playing with Clarence Clemons. He wanted to add horns to his sound, and the first notes Clemons plays convince Springsteen that he’s the perfect fit. Springsteen trusts his instincts, and his first impressions are correct. He not only invites Clemons to join his band but forms a long-lasting bond with The Big Man, a friendship that transcends being mere bandmates. They become soulmates.

“I’d pay anything to be able to walk that ship with my father again I would treasure every step, want to know every detail, hear every word and memory he’d share, but back then I was still too young to put the past away, too young to recognize my dad as a man and to honor his story.”

On their trip to Mexico, Springsteen and his father stop at the Queen Mary, docked in Long Beach, California—the ship that carried his father to Europe for his deployment in World War II. The ship has great sentimental value for his father, but Springsteen can’t see the value in sentiment and spends the entire tour of the ship complaining. In hindsight, he regrets his behavior. Not only does he ruin his father’s experience, but his selfishness prevents him from appreciating one of the most significant moments of his father’s life.

“He put his boot on the stultifying politeness and daily routine that covered corruption and decay. The world he described was all on view, in my little town, and spread out over the television that beamed into our isolated homes, but it went uncommented on and silently tolerated.”

When Springsteen decides to seriously focus on songwriting, his hero and guru is Bob Dylan, “the father of my country” (166). Dylan’s ability to see beyond the artifice of everyday life, beyond the polite facade that masks the dark underbelly of American society, gives Springsteen an artistic goal. He sees the same lies perpetuated in his corner of the world—the lies of the American Dream, of the greatest country in the history of the world—and he strives to reveal those lies in the stories of his music.

“Your early songs emerge from a moment when you’re writing with no sure prospect of ever being heard. Up until then, it’s been just you and your music. That only happens once.”

Reflecting on the writing process for his first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, Springsteen acknowledges that he wrote these first songs for himself, as “twisted autobiographies,” not caring about marketing or radio play. When Columbia executive Clive Davis tells him that Greetings has no certifiable hit songs, Springsteen quickly writes “Blinded by the Light” and “Spirit in the Night.” While always striving to stay true to his heart and his muse, writing for his first album with no outside pressure or influence is a unique and one-time-only experience.

“Music on the radio is a shared fever dream, a collective hallucination, a secret amongst millions and a whisper in the whole country’s ear.”

Growing up before the Internet and music streaming, Springsteen is both nostalgic and philosophical about the power of radio. Radio is the sole platform for the widespread sharing of music—and that music has an entire generation in its grip—so it’s no wonder that getting a song on the radio means so much. When Springsteen hears “Spirit in the Night” playing on the radio for the first time, it marks a crucial milestone in his career. His audience grows from a few hundred to millions in the single spin of a .45.

“It’s a life-giving, joyful, sweat-drenched, muscle-aching, voice-blowing, mind-clearing, exhausting, soul-invigorating, cathartic pleasure and privilege every night.”

Fans celebrate Springsteen’s concerts for their energy and length, ranging between two and three hours, sometimes more. Comedian Jon Stewart said that Springsteen “empties the tank every time” (Stewart, Jon. Bruce Springsteen Tribute, Kennedy Center. December 2009). For Springsteen, these “exhausting” marathons aren’t work, they’re “play.” (Work is nine-to-five, punching a clock, anything other than music.) The joy of performing before thousands of fans eager to hear his music is worth the exhaustion.

“But to make these images matter, I would have to shape them into something fresh, something that transcended nostalgia, sentiment, and familiarity.”

Inspired by the sonic landscape of Phil Spector and the tight, well-crafted songs of Roy Orbison and Duane Eddy, Springsteen seeks to craft songs that have the same heft and lack of self-indulgence yet remain true to the stories he wants to tell. “Born to Run” results from these writing sessions, but stories of kids on the open road aren’t new. He must make the old rock and roll trope new again, so he incorporates the social issues of the day—economic inequality, racism, the death of political and social leaders—and infuses that national cynicism into the song’s bones: Two lovers flee the darkness (the “death trap”) of a besieged nation, seeking not only solace and redemption but a place of “personal and historical accountability” (209).

“Aging is scary but fascinating, and great talent morphs in strange and often enlightening ways.”

The early death of so many rock icons—Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix—has created a mystique around the idea of rising to fame quickly and burning out even quicker. Age, Springsteen notes, is tricky to negotiate. To an artist for whom one of the biggest hits describes young love and escaping the trap of a perverse adult society, aging can be even trickier—but Springsteen values life more than mystique, and though age brings a more settled life (and an aching back), it also brings wisdom and a perspective that only time can bestow.

“We had as deep a relationship as I can imagine but we lived in the real world, where we’d experienced that nothing, not all the love in God’s heaven, obliterates race.”

Springsteen’s relationship with Clarence Clemons borders on spiritual. His bond with Clemons is so strong that he ponders the possibility they were friends in another life. Despite their deep friendship and unmistakable onstage chemistry, however, Springsteen can never cross the racial line dividing them. As the only Black member of the E Street Band (after David Sancious and Earl Carter depart), Clemons is alone in a way Springsteen can’t comprehend. He suggests that race—tolerance and anti-bias alliances notwithstanding—is always a barrier between Blacks and whites.

“No one you have been and no place you have gone ever leaves you. The new parts of you simply jump in the car and go along for the rest of the ride.”

Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen’s follow-up to Born to Run, explores the intersection of personal and political factors that affected not only his parents but much of their generation. Looking inward to his working-class roots, he realizes that despite his success, despite escaping the “confines of my small-town existence” (265), the struggles and fears of those factory workers and itinerant laborers are part of him.

“We beat the game; the rest was for ‘suckers’ strapped into the straight life. Yet on Darkness I’d begun to write about that life. A part of me truly admired it and felt it was where real manhood lies.”

Since his teenage years playing in bars and clubs, Springsteen has harbored the illusion that the rock and roll lifestyle—late nights, an endless road, and bachelorhood with perpetual groupies and one-night stands—is freedom. He associates marriage with the establishment—settling, kids, suburbia. Family represents a dilution of character. With Darkness on the Edge of Town, he addresses his conflicted feelings about family life and marriage, a struggle that takes him years to resolve. Rather than brush these feelings aside, however, he knows his instincts are leading him to explore these issues more deeply. Acknowledging them is a vital turning point, a crossroads, in his maturing process.

“I walk in someone else’s shoes down the sunny and dark roads I’m compelled to follow but may not want to end up living on. It’s one foot in the light, one foot in the darkness, in pursuit of the next day.”

Springsteen’s songs are frequently character studies—people he knows, people he wants to know better—and his next album, Nebraska, delves into the topics of “home, blood and marriage” (278). His writing process is exploratory, and to fully illustrate the lives he chooses to write about, he must explore their darkness as well as their light. His drive to understand contradictions and see people not as caricatures but as fully rounded human beings is integral to his artistic temperament.

“Long ago, the defenses I built to withstand the stress of my childhood, to save what I had of myself, outlived their usefulness, and I’ve become an abuser of their once lifesaving powers.”

During a cross-country road trip, Springsteen has an existential crisis just outside a small Texas town. The loneliness and despair he has held at bay for so long—by writing, touring, and performing—come crashing down on him, and he feels defenseless. He has no “rock ‘n’ roll meds” (305) with which to numb himself and must confront his psychological scars—his cut-off emotions, his obsession with control—in a way he’d always avoided.

“In this life (and there is only one), you make your choices, you take your stand and you awaken from the youthful spell of ‘immortality’ and its eternal present.”

After the blockbuster success of Born in the USA, on Tunnel of Love, Springsteen’s writing takes a more personal and intimate turn. He has been writing and performing for over two decades and begins to wrestle with his own mortality. Although only on the cusp of middle age, he’s old enough to look back on the follies of youth from a perspective of maturity and experience. He sees life as a moral proving ground, in which choices define one’s life and the end of that life creeps gradually closer. Implicit here is a subtle repudiation of his religious upbringing, a rejection of the afterlife concept: We must live with the life choices we make.

“We honor our parents by carrying their best forward and laying the rest down.”

Much of Springsteen’s inner conflict comes from unresolved issues with his father, issues that he confronts later in life. When he becomes a father himself, he receives a new perspective on his own father’s life as a man experiencing a mental health condition and the despair of unfulfilled dreams. However, he thinks scrutinizing and addressing generational trauma can reduce it in subsequent generations. He tries to bring his father’s positive qualities into his own family while discarding the damaging aspects. This is the best way he can find to honor his father’s life.