Springsteen prosifies his poetic life in his new autobiography, Born to Run.
There’s an old Randy Newman song that narrates a fictitious conversation with Bruce Springsteen at a posh L.A. hotel. Sighing, Springsteen says “Rand, I’m tired. How would you like to be the Boss for a while?” Many mornings I’ve awakened from this same dream, often burrowing into my pillow in a desperate attempt to fall back into my fantasy. Sometimes it slips into the shower with me. Shedding my consciousness as the water trickles down, I’ll gape at the grand stadium of fans projected across my eyelids. On more than a few occasions, I’ve posed opposite my mirror with my butterscotch blonde telecaster guitar—the Bruce guitar. If I squint tight enough, I can see Clarence Clemons at my side, egging me on as I rip the final solo to “Jungleland.” For the better part of my short life, I’ve longed to be the Boss. After reading Springsteen’s autobiography, Born to Run I’m suddenly not so sure.
I haven’t lost any respect for Springsteen—it’s quite the contrary, really. After poring over the stories of Springsteen’s life, I’ve come to comprehend the Boss’s heavy burden. For five decades, Bruce Springsteen has absorbed the insecurities of the American psyche. He takes the childhood regrets, the daydream delusions, and the working-class woes that live inside Americans’ minds and morphs them into morsels of musical hope. Fans flock to show after show not for a cheap thrill of entertainment, but for assurance. They arrive to see Springsteen transpose their own daily plight into rhyme and rock, and to see that plight validated by thousands of others singing in unison. Throughout this autobiography, Springsteen exhibits an awareness of his shamanistic powers. I’ll always yearn for his musical acumen and poetic potency, yet his role as a rock and roll cleric has responsibilities that I’d be hesitant to accept. Perhaps the fantastical fallacy of Newman’s lyric is that anyone could ever brave a day in the Boss’s shoes.
It may feel like I’m merely waxing poetic, but Springsteen’s autobiography corroborates his role as America’s sole doctor. In one of his most tender confession, Springsteen recalls his experiences on September 11th, 2001. Distressed and disoriented after hearing the grim news, he embarked on a drive to sort out his thoughts. While stopped at a light, a man called out to him from the lane over. “Bruce, we need you” the man begged. “I sort of knew what he meant, but . . .” pondered Bruce. Blanketed by the same morose miasma as the rest of the country, how could he rise to comfort Americans? Rise he did, lending his grief and hope to the songs that filled his twelfth studio album, The Rising. From the languid lament “My City of Ruins” to the innocent tune “Waiting on a Sunny Day,” The Rising extended an empathetic arm to a grieving America.
As a nation, we summon Springsteen in our most daunting moments. Yet, for a smaller group of steadfast devotees, Springsteen becomes a constant crutch of connection. Bruce pushes people together. I recall registering for classes on the first day of high school. Tripping and trembling with nervous energy, I stepped into the office of Mr. Standerski, my notoriously gruff academic advisor. As he fixed his beady eyes upon me, I fixed mine on a “my only boss is the boss” coffee mug sitting atop his desk. “You a fan?” I squeaked. His grimace instantly receded into the thick folds of his cheeks. He proceeded to pull from his desk a scrapbook of ticket stubs, photos, and other remnants from the thirty-some shows he attended. Only for the sake of Bruce Springsteen would the brusquest old man of my school take up scrapbooking. We sat together for half an hour hashing out our favorite tracks and albums like members spontaneously reunited members of the same cult. In the biodiverse jungle of music preferences, connecting with other die-hard Springsteen fans is a “Dr Livingstone, I presume” type of rarity. Our only formal meetings occur once every few years when we gather at our nearest stadium to see our deity himself. Thus, when we do find another one of us, the camaraderie is instant.
Looking back to Newman’s lyric, it another deception should be acknowledged: the idea that Bruce Springsteen could ever exhaust himself. Those who have graced one of his many four-hour, multi-encore concerts can’t help but wonder what source of strength is propelling America’s sturdiest musical workhorse into the most raucous years of his seventies. In Born to Run, Springsteen finally pries the hood on his chrome-plated parts, revealing the secret sealant that holds him together show after show. “If you want to take it all the way out to the end of the night,” as Bruce so often does, you’ll need “a furious fire in the hole that just… don’t… quit… burning.”
If you were curious from that last sentence, the answer is yes: Bruce frames much of his writing as if he were shouting it to a crowd in between songs, often capitalizing whole sentences. Even in prose, he’s a performer. Nonetheless, Bruce’s declaration of a “fire in the hole” is more than syntactical showmanship. It is an axiom that he proves page after page. From days living on the street while he penned his first recorded songs to nights in the studio meticulously making his masterstroke album, Born to Run, we hear story after story of Springsteen’s everlasting resolve. This immutable inertia that tethers him to his craft appeared long before he could sell out a stadium—even before he could strum a single chord. His “Big Bang,” as he refers to it, was watching Elvis, and later The Beatles, debut on the Ed Sullivan Show. The sensual spirit of TV Rock & Roll shattered the stale air of his New Jersey childhood home. Soon thereafter, Springsteen strapped on his Beatle Boots and began shaking his hips like the King.
Before long, Springsteen a king in his own right, seizing a stretch of the New Jersey boardwalk as his fiefdom. Before ever signing a record deal, he reigned atop the bottle-strewn stages of the seaside bars each night, playing to surfers and greasers who shored up from the tide to have a drink and hear his music. Here, Springsteen scouted for fellow musicians who could keep time amidst the police raids and drunken melees. Those brute enough to brave the end of the gig would move on to form the tightest troupe in the land: the E Street Band.
Springsteen’s stretch as a Bohemian beach bum is perhaps the most captivating segment of the entire autobiography. He describes this era as a time when he was completely off the grid—no phone bill, no performing contract, no responsibility to anyone minus the audiophilic night owls flocking to listen to him rock the New Jersey jukes. It’s not hard to imagine that even the most titanic rock stars would dream to enter this easy atmosphere of salt-crusted days at the shore and muggy nights at a microphone. One can still find imprints of this formative time upon Springsteen’s music in the jingle of a quick rhyme and the jangle of a twangy electric guitar.
Out of these early days rises the emotive climax of the book. As Springsteen narrates, it was a “dark and stormy night” on the boardwalk. Waves from the beach collapsed over the ramshackle boards of the dock. An icy wind stirred trash and tattered leaves into small swirling tornadoes, flinging bits of damp debris at unsuspecting passersby. Seeking refuge from the Friday night frigidity, lost souls sauntered into drinking holes across the boardwalk. Down on the corner, one bar’s windows shimmered with a particularly warm and welcoming incandescence. Inside, Bruce Springsteen tuned up his guitar and began his set. He was running through his routine, grooving with the crowd, when a sudden thwack of thunder splintered the soundscape. Almost instantaneously thereafter, as if the storm cloud had thrown a follow-up punch, a gust of wind slammed against the bar’s exterior, knocking the front door off its hinges. As the door rolled and rattled into the night, a new figure had taken its place. The shadow of the colossal Clarence Clemons and his saxophone shone over the entryway. As Springsteen continued to play, Clemons waltzed over to a barstool and turned his ear to the sound.
As the bar neared its final call, Bruce locked eyes with Clarence. Without needing to ask those around him to clear a path—something almost never needed for a man of his stature—Clemons traversed the floor and ascended the stage. When the two struck up a song, soundwaves shook the floorboards harder than any seaside storm. The Boss and the Big Man, side by side for the first time, rocked the bar through the night. Feeding off of each other’s energy and acumen, they forged a sound and show that neither could have achieved individually. As years passed, bars would turn into stadiums, songs would turn into anthems, and Springsteen and Clemons would turn into rock and roll legends. Yet, however circumstances evolved, they continued to awe crowds with their unparalleled synchronicity night after night.
