This is not a love song

 

Running from birth

I’m not going to write a formal review of the Springsteen autobiography, there are hundreds of those available pretty much anywhere you care to look. I do need to say something, however, about how deeply I was affected by reading it.

Born to Run is a magnificent book. I’ve read more than my fair share of works on the subject of Bruce Springsteen – many of them very good indeed – but all pale in comparison to this first-hand account of the life (and more importantly the mindset) of one of Rocks greatest legends.

It’s being described in the superficial mainstream media as a “tell-all” which serves only to trivialize what is, in fact, a masterful and lyrical account of the life of a proverbial everyman who broke the mold (though, certainly not without consequences) and escaped the stifling confines of his blue collar world. In doing so he also had a not inconsiderable hand in shaping the way America sees itself.

So what did I personally get out of the book?

There are certain events that occurred in Springsteen’s life that mirror aspects of my own. We both had fathers who were emotionally withholding and borderline abusive. How we differ is in the way we allowed this to shape the men we became.

Springsteen used his father’s internalized voice as the engine room and driver of his creative life. His desire to prove wrong his father’s poor opinion of him propelled the young musician – like some anxious skyrocket – into the stratospheric world of fame and success.

That is not what I did.

I too internalized my father’s voice (stepfather to be exact, my real father having abandoned us when I was small). However, for whatever reason, I was never able to turn that negative energy into rocket fuel. Instead, I pushed the voice down until I could barely even make it out and tried to get on with my life.

Ignored is not the same as negated, however, and the black energy would manifest as acts of self-sabotage whenever I came close to anything like success.

It was fascinating to read Springsteen’s account of his own trajectory, his single-minded pursuit of uncompromising greatness exemplified in the marathon concerts fueled by white hot anxiety and flat out fear. His fear literally made him fearless and that fearless  determination to achieve launched one of the greatest musical careers of all time.

The soaring brilliance of this accomplishment cannot be overstated. I’ve been to his hometown, it is a place with almost no propensity for greatness. To have escaped the gravitational pull of Freehold, New Jersey and then used that very same gravity to slingshot his music into the orbit of the great American legends (Dylan, Elvis, James Brown) was a labor that Hercules himself might have considered a smidge ambitious.

As I implied at the beginning, these things tend to exact a cost. For Springsteen, the cost of the long-delayed reckoning with his haunted past was an emotional breakdown and subsequent epic bouts of clinical depression.

This is another point of intersection between Springsteen’s life and my own. I too suffered a breakdown followed by several years of crippling depression. I found my way through those trials (and if I could have just five minutes with the Boss, I’d impress upon him just what a boon acupuncture can be in treating deep-seated depression) and became a better person for having made the journey.

It gave me a feeling, not unlike assuagement to realise that even people of Bruce Springsteen’s stature are no more immune to these tidal forces than are we lesser folk. And to see him write so openly about it (much as I try to do here) was extremely heartening. It’s so important for people going through difficult times to see that others have walked that path before them.

So that’s what I took away with me from Born to Run. My hero has feet of clay (which is the way I tend to like ’em) but a generous heart and spirit (though that clearly was not always the case). I was happy to discover that the man is not so very different (a little more human perhaps) to the impression we all have of him.

©2016

Born to write

 

From a house on a hill a sacred light shines
I walk through these rooms but none of them are mine
Down empty hallways I went from door to door
Searching for my beautiful reward
Searching for my beautiful reward

Springsteen, My beautiful reward

 

As the entire world must know by now, Springsteen has released his much-anticipated autobiography Born to Run and, as expected, it’s a massive hit. No real surprise there. What I personally wasn’t expecting was just how good it has turned out to be. This isn’t really a review because, well, I haven’t actually finished it yet (it’s a big tome) but what I’ve read so far has been truly wonderful and remarkably poetic.

Many books have been produced about the life and music of this unique and brilliant man but all of the information came second hand and much of it was contradictory. This is the man himself writing about his life as he experienced it and to say it fills in the gaps is an understatement.

I was particularly interested in his early life in Freehold NJ and this book does not disappoint on that score. You get a warts and all journey through the low rent streets of the unlikely town that birthed a legend. And it’s all seen from the perspective of an alienated teen who had a burning need to get the hell out of Dodge. A teen who just had to show the world what he’d been hiding under that awkward, acne riddled, and insecure exterior his whole young and unexceptional life. It’s great stuff.

Glad I was that Jersey girl and I had had the opportunity to visit Freehold before I sat down to read this book. His descriptions of home life – the very real seeds of so much of his music – were all the more vivid for my having visited the town and particularly the house on South Street. I could see so many of the scenes he describes playing out before my eyes simply because I know the places where they took place.

 

68 South Street Springsteen’s family home throughout most of the 60’s.

 

He writes about the first time he ever played in front of an actual audience and sang lead (on the Beatles’ twist and shout). That took place here at the Freehold Elks Lodge. It was an unexceptional beginning for such a stellar career (as is so often the case with such stories).

 

 

He writes about a bullet coming through the glass of his front door one Saturday night just moments after he’d walked past to go up to bed.

 

 

Other writers have mentioned this as some sort of mysterious, unexplained event but here we get the Springsteen take that it was probably tied to his father’s involvement in a labour dispute at his factory job.

Then there is his love-hate relationship with the nuns of St Rose of Lima, the Catholic school he attended just up the road from his house. Again, I had the chance to visit this place and so his recounting of the time he spent at that torturous institution is that much more vivid.

To be sure, most people are probably more interested in the later periods of his life when he had already become a bona fide rock god but I’ve always been interested in the how and the where of  these things. What propelled the pimply faced Bruce out of a life of mundane isolation onto the international stage? How did this barely educated boy become such a prolifically talented and erudite storyteller?

And make no mistake, this is very good writing. The same remarkable talent that produced songs like The River and Jungleland is very much in evidence between these pages. I think anyone with even a vague interest in Bruce will probably read this book. I know I’ll be reading it more than a few times. It’s brutally honest much of the time and full of the self-examination we’ve come to expect from Mr. Springsteen over the years.

If you think you know the story already, I’m fairly confident you’re quite mistaken. This book rips the band-aids off old wounds, exposing a Bruce that has hitherto only been hinted at.

It was a good day.

 

I’ll have more to say on this subject once I’ve delved deeper.

Words and images are my own.

©2016