The terror attacks on September 11, 2001, affected me more deeply than perhaps I realised on the day. Then, I was living in California, and like so many other people in America - and indeed around the world - it all seemed to happen in vivid, searing real-time. Like everyone else, I'd consumed the news coverage of the Twin Towers being attacked and destroyed. Afterwards it was hard to focus on anything, such was the collective fear that the attacks were only just the beginning of a more sustained onslaught. Over the following weeks and months I was restless. Concentrating at work was a struggle as I fought with a constant need to go to online to see what new developments there were in the aftermath of the single-biggest terrorist mass murder in history.
The hijackings and their attacks on New York and the Pentagon, plus, we presume, the targeting of Washington DC, cast a pall over me. A medical professional might have even called it a form of depression. There had been something so brutal and violent about the taking of those 2,977 lives, most in a city I loved to visit for its relentless energy and verve. I was struggling to properly process what had happened. But then, right smack in the middle of the following July, I heard the song The Rising for the first time, and was moved. An anthemic song, majestic, and yet conversely concerned with a theme so dark and somewhat surreal, that of a doomed New York firefighter entering the World Trade Center just after the hijacked planes had come slamming in. And, yet, I felt uplifted by the song, released, even, from the gloom that had descended upon me ever since that grim Tuesday morning the September before.
I bought the album The Rising on the day it came out at the end of July. I soon discovered the 9/11 narrative within it. It became the catharsis I’d been lacking. Its title song, along with Lonesome Day, You’re Missing and My City In Ruins provided tangible expression of what the world had so brutally witnessed collectively. And in doing so, these songs opened the curtains wide on what it was that had propelled Bruce Springsteen to his exalted status as America’s greatest rock star.
So, suddenly, my eyes - more pertinently, my ears - were open. I was no newcomer to Springsteen - the radio hits like Born In The USA, Dancing In The Dark, Born To Run, Cover Me and Brilliant Disguise, had just been that, radio hits. Like everyone else, I’d gone with Born In The USA as simplistic, fist-pumping patriotism without giving too much thought to its real meaning about a Vietnam veteran struggling for acceptance. And Born To Run - unexpectedly popularised by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, of all bands - was simply a rollicking good rock song. It was only later that I started to place that song into a wider context about Springsteen’s songwriting. That came when I belatedly got around to seeing Cop Land, the superb crime thriller starring Sylvester Stallone as a partially deaf local sheriff living amongst a nest of corrupt New York cops (De Niro, Keitel, Liotta et al) in the small New Jersey community he also polices. The local connection with Springsteen was made by the inclusion of Drive All Night and Stolen Car from Springsteen’s album The River. This prompted me to buy The River itself, along with Born To Run, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, Nebraska and Springsteen’s debut Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. The river, so to speak, had burst its banks.
Vicariously, I had began to immerse myself in an America I’d hitherto not been exposed to. My first visits to the country had been to California and the golden West, not the industrial, grey-skied badlands of the north-east. I have since driven up Highway 9 in New Jersey, heading north from Springsteen's hometown of Freehold to the outer suburbs of Newark. Hardly a last-chance power drive, but it seemed to fall into place with the oil-stained, denim-clad ordinality of Springsteen’s music.
Like many of America’s greatest songwriters, Springsteen can conjure romance out of the most mundane. Freeways, diners and dance halls possess a thrill and zeal that British motorways, greasy-spoon cafés and provincial discos do not. Cadillacs and Chevys, Lincolns and Fords, already immortalised in the classics of rock and roll, were part of the furniture of the ‘real’ America Springsteen wrote about. His cast of characters were the downtrodden and the poor, the dreamers and the ill-fated lovers.
Springsteen’s music is nothing new and never has been. A song like Brilliant Disguise is pure Roy Orbison, and of course his signature sound was cast with the Born To Run album and its unashamed purloining of Phil Spector. But then rock’n’roll has ever been thus. More or less any artist you like can point to Elvis Presley as the source, Chuck Berry and Little Richard as the catalyst, and The Beatles as the perfect application of the art. Even The Clash and the Sex Pistols can hold their hands up and agree that Presley influenced their look and Berry influenced their guitar solos. The Beatles' Helter Skelter even provided the blueprint for most punk songs.
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| Picture: Vanity Fair/Annie Leibowitz |
Springsteen isn’t, however, merely someone who has aggregated these influences, thrown in Dylan, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger for rustic authenticity and arrived at being the heart and soul of salt-of-the-earth America. But he has taken Americana as his canvass and then musically and lyrically fused the 1950s of his childhood with his adulthood and beyond. The screen doors slamming and motorbikes tearing up highways haven’t just been dutiful nods to the age of chrome fenders and billowing gathered skirts, but characters in mini operettas created around small town romances and economic reality. These were themes that I’d never paid much attention to previously, even listening to blues music, which is mostly only about such topics. There was another aspect, too, to the all-enveloping nature of Springsteen’s music: that they offered an incredible soundscape, the so-called “heartland rock” of the E-Street Band - Clarence’s sax, Roy Bittan’s chiming piano and the jangling guitars of The Boss himself. Having always been drawn to more introspective or, perhaps, more complicated, layered music, I had to change up a gear to appreciate Springsteen's music at its fullest.
In doing so, however, I came to see beyond the radio-friendly MTV star, bopping away with a young Courteney Cox in that still-excruciating Dancing In The Dark video. All of a sudden I realised that musically, Springsteen was every bit as compelling as those ‘classic’ British bands I’d considered without-question to be the greatest. There were parallels, I found, between Springsteen and, say, The Who. The British group’s music might have been tighter, even more intense, but to both there was a reflection on what it is to live in the real world. Punk, they say, was the embodiment of this spirit too.
I have a habit of coming to bands late. It’s partly the result of a stubborn blindspot I have which shuts out hype. Once the cognoscenti endorses something, I succumb to immediate suspicion and cast it to one side. The Springsteen myth - all that talk of legendary, four-hour concerts and blue-collar authenticity - had previously had a reverse effect on me and my cynicism. But with The Rising, its predecessors and its successors, I took to consuming Springsteen old and new at any opportunity. Live albums, albums with and without the E-Street Band, offshoots, box sets - you name it, I’ve come to absorb everything the man produces, musically and, perhaps more importantly, lyrically.
Inevitably, Born To Run, Bruce Springsteen’s long-awaited autobiography, out today, has taken me in too, but then I’m a sucker for a music memoir. And there’s always plenty to choose from - Keith Richards’ Life and Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace stand out as particular highlights of the genre, and there have been more recent entries by Chrissie Hynde, Linda Rondstadt, Donald Fagen and Graham Nash. Even Phil Collins and Johnny Marr are getting in on the act with their respective Not Dead Yet and Set The Boy Free tomes coming up in time for Christmas. And, of course, no shortage of weighty books about The Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Bowie and many more, many of which are still piled high on my dining table awaiting their turn.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Born To Run - which has taken Springsteen the better part of seven years to write - is exhaustive. And it unlocks something about this self-effacing and seemingly open rock star, who almost lives like we do (albeit on a 340-acre New Jersey farm and homes in gated communities in Florida and California...). In an era when celebrity can be created out of nothing (i.e. "starring" in reality television), someone of Springsteen's stature probably doesn't need to commit himself to an unexpurgated memoir. But the seed was planted in 2009, after Springsteen and the E-Street Band had played at that year's Super Bowl, and he wrote a blog post for his website about his experience of playing during the half-time show. Over the following months, he found himself keeping a diary of sorts, enjoyed writing it, and enjoyed the voice that it gave him. The writing process snowballed further, resulting in the book. Written entirely by Springsteen himself. No ghost writers.
A first glimpse of Springsteen's expanded writing "voice" came in March 2012 at South By Southwest in Austin, when he gave a mesmerising keynote speech - perhaps the ultimate essay on rock and roll. "In the beginning, every musician has their genesis moment," he outlined. "For you, it might have been the Sex Pistols, or Madonna, or Public Enemy. It's whatever initially inspires you to action. Mine was 1956, Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show. It was the evening I realized a white man could make magic, that you did not have to be constrained by your upbringing, by the way you looked, or by the social context that oppressed you. You could call upon your own powers of imagination, and you could create a transformative self."
These are themes Springsteen comes back on in the book in large dollops. In particular, about not being constrained by upbringing and his background. "I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I," he writes in the foreword. "By 20, no race car-driving rebel, I was a guitar player on the streets of Asbury Park and already a member in good standing amongst those who 'lie' in service of the truth...artists with a small 'a'. But I held four clean aces. I had youth, almost a decade of hard-core bar band experience, a good group of homegrown musicians who were attuned to my performance style and a story to tell."
At this point, in many a rock memoir, the author would talk about chord shapes and grand visions for changing the world. But in trying to pick the lock of how he ended up "face-to-face with eighty thousand (or eighty) screaming rock'n'roll fans who are waiting for you to do your magic trick", Springsteen starts at the very beginning - the working class New Jersey family into which he was born, and the strained relationship he endured with his often violent and often unemployed father. Douglas Springsteen was of Dutch-Irish ancestry, while Bruce’s mother, Adele, was of Italian-American background. You probably couldn’t find a more atypical north-eastern American cocktail. Douglas worked different jobs, including driving buses and more often than not, no job at all. Adele worked as a legal secretary, and was invariably the family breadwinner. No surprise, then, that through this childhood in the town of Freehold, New Jersey, that the young Bruce - captivated by the music of Elvis and The Beatles - was drawn to “poetry, danger and darkness” to drive his imagination. Throughout his songbook, Springsteen comes back to paternal relationships, and in the book, he expounds on his own at some length. "I had to find the roots of my own troubles and issues," he recently told Vanity Fair while publicising the book, "and the joyful things that have allowed me to put on the kind of shows that we put on."
Even just four years before Time magazine put him on the cover declaring him in three simple words “Rock’s New Sensation”, Springsteen was still in the throes of poverty. Even once signed to Columbia Records, he didn’t have the single dollar needed to drive through the Holland tunnel to collect his record company advance. He had just 99 cents in loose change. Depression is another theme that Springsteen covers in depth in the book. It’s an affliction plenty of artists succumb to and have succumbed to - some almost as a badge of honour for their art - but in Springsteen’s case he talks about his occasional struggles with depression as a consequence of his family origins, and a need for control (for that, see my blog post from August last year on the 40th anniversary of the album Born To Run being released). The collapse of his first marriage, to actress Julianne Phillips, led to him “…sliding back toward the chasm where rage, fear, distrust, insecurity and family-patented misogyny made war with my better angels.” Armchair Freudians will no doubt want to study this section in detail.
One of the joys of Keith Richards’ Life was that it wasn’t just about - in fact it hardly was at all - ribald tales of life on the road as one of rock music’s greatest hell-raisers. In fact, there was more about life as a Stone in Ronnie Wood’s autobiography, Ronnie. Richards cast deep into his family origins, his upbringing in post-war, lower-middle class Dartford, of how an extended family was both a blessing and a curse. Born To Run covers very similar ground, in fact, in very similar geography. Like so many of that generation, rock music - especially Elvis - led them out of the darkness of austerity and 1950s strictness. Music became a beacon, a torch, and it’s no wonder that so much of that experience has been worked into Springsteen’s music. Most of it, he now admits, has been autobiographical (Rosalita, for example, is the account of losing his virginity), but there’s clearly been more to come forth, and that’s where the book Born To Run plays its part.
Funny in places, dark in others - especially when facing up to the bouts of depression that have come at him over the years, it transposes the man I saw on July 13 this year, bouncing about for almost four hours on stage in Paris, into someone you may never get to know personally, and yet will feel like you have done by the end of reading it. It will shed light on your own families, your own relationships with your own family. But most of all, in era when the people we most admire are tweeting what they have for breakfast, Born To Run goes some way to break down barriers between us and someone who can rightfully be described as one of the greatest rock stars in the history of rock stardom.
