The Economist 20161001 ed79b8

Books and arts
78 The Economist October 1st 2016
Also in this section
79 Violence in England
79 Culture in Britain
80 Seamus Heaney’s HomePlace
81 A biography of Alan Greenspan
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Bruce Springsteen
A whole damn city crying
Born to Run. By Bruce Springsteen.
Simon & Schuster; 528 pages; $32.50 and
£20
administered therapy of music. “I’m a
repairman,” he says ofhis craft.
His mother rented his first guitar after,
aged seven, he saw Elvis, “a Saturday night
jukebox Dionysus”, on “The Ed Sullivan
Show”. Theirs was a house without hot
water or a phone, in a neighbourhood of
other Irish-Italian families where “I never
saw a man leave…in a jacket and tie unless
it was Sunday or he was in trouble.” The
Springsteens scavenged radios for his
grandfather to repair and sell to migrant
labourers. He hitchhiked with “every sort
of rube, redneck, responsible citizen and
hell-raiser the Jersey Shore had to offer”. A
grandmother smothered him with “horrible
unforgettable boundary-less love”;
Catholicism imbued a spirit of rebellion
and the ghost offaith.
In the end, for all the young men busting
out of town in his lyrics, it was his parents
who left him, moving to California in
1969 when he was19. His youngersisterVirginia
also stayed in Jersey. Soon, though, he
too rode out of Freehold, perched in the
darkon an old couch on the bed ofa truck.
In these passages the formula ofhis success
begins to crystallise: a darkalchemy of
indulgence and neglect, “the Fifties bluecollarworld
and Sixtiessocial experience”,
The timely autobiography of an American mythologist
LIKE much great art, Bruce Springsteen’s
finest songs transmute the particular
into the eternal. The more tightly local
their focus—those boys from the casino
dancing with their shirts open in “Sandy”,
that Tilt-a-Whirl down on the south beach
drag—the more universal they magically
become. As he puts it in “Born to Run”, his
new autobiography, he sings about “the
joy and heartbreak of everyday life”, of
humdrum defeat and defiance, the pull of
home and the road’s allure, familiar dichotomies
somehow elevated, in his ballads,
into a new American mythology.
As “Born to Run” recounts, those songs
feel authentic because they are. At the
heart of his oeuvre, and of his book, is his
painful relationship with his father, a
sometime pool shark whom, as a child, Mr
Springsteen fetched from bars in Freehold,
New Jersey, for his long-suffering mother.
He records their wars over his lengthening
hair, which culminate in Springsteen senior
calling in a barber when his son is incapacitated
by a motorbike accident; the
simmering silences and boozing; but also
his unexpected, curt reliefwhen Bruce fails
his army medical (“That’s good”), and the
old man’s crumpled awe when his son
produces the Oscar he won for “Philadelphia”
(“I’ll never tell anybody what to do
ever again”). Mr Springsteen explains how
he tried to dodge his inheritance of selfdestruction
and depression, treating the
latter with counselling, pills and the selffreedom
and hardship. He slept in a surfboard
factory and sometimes on the
beach. This was the Vietnam era: an early
drummer was killed by mortar fire, a manager
mutilated a toe to avoid the draft. All
those tensions, plus a staggering work ethic.
His bands played “firemen’s fairs, carnivals,
drive-ins, supermarket openings and
hole-in-the-walls”, and countless bars
where fistfights and police raids were common.
He understood his limits (“My voice
was never going to win any prizes”), but
knew and honed his talents, namely songwriting
and live performance.
He laid down the law to wayward band
members and predatory managers. “The
buck would stop here,” he decided, “if I
could make one.” After a long apprenticeship,
an American picaresque that encompassed
a flop in California, he was signed
by Columbia Records. The album “Born to
Run” made him a star. “Born in the USA”
launched him into the stratosphere.
The origin of poetry, thought William
Wordsworth, was emotion recollected in
tranquillity. That motto describes both Mr
Springsteen’s memoir and the appeal of
his songs, many of which look back on
youthful traumas from a mature perspective
and for older audiences. These days
many in their ranks are as mature as Mr
Springsteen himself, who at 67 still crowdsurfs
his way through three-hour shows.
“The exit in a blaze ofglory”, he says ofother
rockers’ early combustions, “is bullshit.”
The stories his songs tell, though, have
not aged: on the contrary. His great theme
is “the distance between the American
dream and American reality”. He is the
bard of deindustrialisation, of dreams
murdered, escapes thwarted and accomplished,
fates mastered and predetermined,
and factories closed, such as the
rug mill where his father once worked in
Freehold, a place, in his memory, defined 1