Saturday 1 October 2016

* The Boss sings passionately about the joy and heartbreak of everyday life

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James Sullivan
Several times in his rowdy, witty and frequently heartstring-strumming autobiography, “Born to Run,” Bruce Springsteen returns to one of his favorite subjects: nothingness. He writes of gazing out from the Jersey shore into the empty Atlantic Ocean at night, and of finding himself, years later, once again, having drifted into the middle of a psychic nowhere.

It might seem an odd preoccupation for an entertainer so well known for substance: his conviction, his work ethic, the hardy songs about recognizable characters with real desires and vexing hurdles. But one of the true rewards of this long-awaited memoir is Springsteen’s exemplary ability to make sense of himself — and acknowledge the times when he couldn’t.


The book’s 500 pages fly by with all the sustained exuberance of a live “Rosalita,” with everyone’s favorite lunch-pail rock star romping through his career highlights and missteps, exalting the people and places that shaped him, and taking good care to ground himself at every turn.

“I was not a natural genius,” he writes, recalling one eye-opening self-assessment after an early, pre-record-deal trip to San Francisco to try and find some rock ’n’ roll glory. “I would have to use every ounce of what was in me — my cunning, my musical skills, my showmanship, my intellect, my heart, my willingness,” just to survive.

But his success can’t be attributed only to burning gas; as the writing in this book confirms, he has talent to burn, too. “Born to Run” can take its place alongside Bob Dylan’s “Chronicles Volume 1” and Patti Smith’s “Just Kids” as a truly lovely work of prose from a top-flight songwriter.

There’s a lot of poetry in Springsteen’s account, from his recollections of being sent as a kid into the neighborhood watering hole to retrieve his distant, volatile father (“I’d stand there, drinking in the dim smell of beer, booze, blues and aftershave”) to his description of his beloved onstage counterpart, the saxophonist Clarence Clemons: “It was the face of an exotic emperor, an island king, a heavyweight boxer, a shaman, a chain-gang convict, a fifties bluesman and a deep soul survivor. It held one million secrets and none at all.”

Even when he’s typing IN ALL CAPS!, there’s a sweet kind of familiarity that transcends the hyperbole. On, for instance, his decision to credit his albums to “Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band” rather than just himself: “It said there was a party going on, a meeting taking place, a congregation being called forth, YOU WERE BRINGING YOUR GANG!”

The guy’s always been excitable, at least onstage. That’s what fans love about him most. In taking stock of the making of his third album, 1975’s “Born to Run” — the one that got the previously obscure young street urchin from Asbury Park plastered on the cover of both Time and Newsweek, and would lend its title to this book four decades later — he crystallizes the yearning behind the songs.

They were, he notes, compelled into existence by identity issues: “who am I, who we are, what and where is home, what constitutes manhood, adulthood, what are your freedoms and your responsibilities. I was interested in what it meant to be an American.”

Within a few years, he writes, he’d realized that his usefulness as a performer had become his knack for navigating “the distance between the American dream and American reality.” Sometimes that distance can seem to be a vast desert, which might explain why so much of Springsteen’s later work involves the imagery of wide-open spaces.

Just when he’s getting all deep on us — just like the flow of one of his legendarily marathon concerts, come to think of it — he’ll crack you up with his self-deprecation. Learning to be domesticated by his then-new bride, Patti Scialfa, he recounts the day she told him he might want to alter his lifelong rock-star habit of sleeping in, now that he had kids.

He was going to regret missing mornings with his children, she told him. And she firmly suggested he make the pancakes.

“Make the pancakes?” he writes. “I’d never made anything but music my entire life.”

In another rock star’s biography, the fur might have flown. If Springsteen is a hero, it’s partly because he seized his opportunities to learn a new skill. He posted a recipe on the fridge.

“After some early cementlike results,” he writes of his flapjack technique, “I dialed it in.” Now proud to say he’s perfectly capable with a spatula and a frying pan, he submits that he could get he could get himself hired at any diner in America “should the whole music thing go south.”

The autobiography is neatly partitioned into Books One, Two and Three: “Growin’ Up,” “Born to Run” and “Living Proof.” For longtime fans, the milestones won’t surprise: there’s the signing of the record contract with industry titan John Hammond, the relentless self-promotion of the “Born in the U.S.A.” era, the long hiatus from the E Street band in the 1990s as the frontman turned inward, the renewed sense of purpose in recent years. (The one big reveal: hilariously, the man who practically caricatured the concept of the rocker singing about girls and cars divulges that he didn’t learn to drive until well into adulthood.)

The basic chords are all struck, but for diehards and casual fans alike, the real gift of Springsteen’s book might lie in the grace notes — his perfect description of his stark 1978 album “Darkness on the Edge of Town” as his “samurai” record, say, or his comic tale of taking an ill-fated, but ultimately healing, deep-sea fishing excursion off the coast of Mexico with his old man, late in his life.

His pop, Springsteen writes, wasn’t quite dressed for the occasion: white socks, dress pants, suspenders. “He looked great for a Polish picnic in Queens,” he razzes, “230 pounds of nickels in Sears slacks.” The boat was a wooden crate, a rust bucket. His dad had booked them onto a “death trap,” he writes, not so subtly alluding to one of his most famous lyrics, in the song that gave the album, and this book, their title.

There are many more moments of beauty spiced with humor — of sheer human feeling — in these pages. And that, despite the author’s occasional admissions of uncertainty, is certainly not nothing.

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