★★★★☆ Self-made man

Born to Run

Bruce Springsteen

I became a fan of Bruce Springsteen's music around 1985. I bought the album Born to Run by mistake. And I discovered something: Bruce Springsteen is a poet. Rock fans, as a general rule, are only vaguely aware that rock songs have lyrics, and don't care what they say. I, however, appreciate musicians like Paul Simon, the Indigo Girls, and Sting, who write poems. To that list I could now add Springsteen. Springsteen began performing at the age of 15, and continues to perform to this day, at 73. I was curious how he became and stayed successful, when so many successful rock musicians burn out. Some of the usual answers apply: he's talented, smart, hard-working, fanatic about his craft, and an excellent word-smith. He's also sober: his father, who suffered from mental illness, drank to excess and it hurt his family -- Springsteen accordingly was terrified of alcohol and was 23 years old before he first drank hard liquor. He likewise avoided drugs.

When he was a teenager, Springsteen and his mother bought the cheapest guitar and amplifier they could find, and he taught himself to play, at home in his room. It is not quite accurate to say he never had a lesson -- he had one or two before he realized it was not for him. But he is practically a self-taught musician. He still does not read music. This lack of formal training has a benefit for the reader. Springsteen talks about music a lot. (A musician once told me scornfully that "talking about music is like dancing about architecture". I suspect Springsteen would not approve this pronouncement.) But he writes of music in English -- his discussion of music is almost entirely nontechnical. He mentions an E-minor chord (only needs two fingers!) early in the book, and near the end he speaks of a "guitar crescendo" -- that is the extent of the technical musical language in this autobiography.

A thing I had not appreciated, since I have never been to a rock concert in my life, was how central live performance is to Springsteen and his career. He tells a story about his early days that I particularly enjoyed. Springsteen and his band were broke, and there was no money coming in.

Steve [Van Zandt] and I had an idea. We’d canvass Asbury on a peak summer-season Saturday night from one end to the other. The club that was doing the lousiest business was where we’d make our pitch to play. We worked north to south and around midnight, we walked into a bar called the Student Prince. It had just been purchased by a bricklayer from Freehold. He was bartending, and with exactly Steve, myself and one other bereft patron haunting a stool down the far end of the bar, we figured this was it. Outside, Asbury was buzzing, but here we had found its black hole. Our pitch was simple. He doesn’t pay us a dime. We charge one dollar at the door, play what we want, take the door receipts and go home. He can’t lose.

Within weeks, they were playing to capacity crowds three times a week. "Capacity" for the Student Prince was only 150, but that, divided among five band members, came to $90/week each, enough to live on.

In my mind Born to Run is divided into three parts, that do not correspond to the three books into which Springsteen divides it. The parts, as I would divide them are:

1. Self-made man, chapters 1-43
2. Mid-life crisis, chapters 44 - 52
3. Children make adults, chapters 53 - 80

If I were to rate these individually, they would be 5, 3 and 4 stars. The section I call "Self-made man" covers his difficult childhood, his first real success with Born to Run, through the writing and recording of Nebraska and Born in the USA. Although Born to Run was a success, Born in the USA was the album that made Springsteen a superstar and fabulously wealthy. After recording it, Springsteen fell into depression. For the rest of his life he would be in therapy and on antidepressant medication. He had never up until this point had a relationship with a woman that lasted longer than two years. In a classic midlife-crisis step, he married a young woman, Julianne Phillips. That marriage broke when he cheated on her with the woman who would eventually become his second wife, the mother of his children, and the love of his life, Patti Scialfa.

I call the third section "Children make adults" in reference to this quote

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.
-- Peter de Vries

Patti told him that she was pregnant, and Springsteen did some real quick growing up. This part is also different because Springsteen is now a fabulously wealthy man who chats with people like Frank Sinatra, Pete Townshend, and Barack Obama. He has three children, Evan, Jessica, and Sam, who are, of course, wonderful people, like the children of fond parents anywhere. This part paints a nice, ordinary, and generally healthy picture. To me Springsteen seems to have grown a little out of touch. For instance, he keeps a stable of horses and rides recreationally. This is not something he or his people could have imagined when he was a kid in a struggling family in Freehold, New Jersey.

Overall, Born to Run is an engaging self-portrait of a talented and thoughtful man. The audiobook, which won a Best Spoken Word Album Grammy, is read by Springsteen himself and is a treat.

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