Bruce
Springsteen has said that he penned all of his moving new autobiography himself—no
co-writer or ghostwriter—and anyone who has heard his between-song concert
monologues or his 2012 SXSW speech will believe him. This is the same storytelling,
exclamation-point-using, self-deprecating, and sometimes funny voice we know from
the stage patter.
You can hear
echoes of some of his songs here, too. For example, when Springsteen recalls his Freehold High School years and says, “There were harsh words spoken between
two cars at a South Street light and a gun was fired into a car full of black
kids,” fans will immediately conjure up the lyrics to “My Hometown."
But this book doesn’t simply give us more of the Springsteen
we’ve already met. As you know if you read my collection of his interviews, he has
been unusually forthright over the years about his personal life and career, but
Born to Run adds a wealth of intimate
detail about both—and some major surprises. Springsteen talks candidly about
his relationship with his supportive mother, his marriages, and his career
struggles. Most notably, we learn that his father was not simply difficult but
mentally ill, and that Bruce himself has struggled with intense depression,
including one bout in recent years that apparently left him contemplating
suicide.
This sad news serves as a reminder, if anyone needs it, that mental
illness has nothing to do with logic. Here’s a guy who has achieved incredible
heights in his career, has great wealth and a loving family, and has brought
happiness to millions. Yet sometimes he is miserable. Even he doesn’t really
know why, but he certainly knows how to describe the feeling.
He also does
a good job of limning his classic rags-to-riches story. In early chapters, he
talks of cold-water flats, unheated bedrooms, a house without a phone, and a
life that was pretty much bounded by the borders of his hometown. For a long
time, he couldn’t afford much of anything; at one point, he had trouble
scraping together the dollar toll needed to drive into Manhattan. In later
years, of course, Springsteen found himself in another universe, meeting with
accountants, flying on private jets, and buying assorted real estate, including
a horse farm.
One of the
book’s many strengths is the honesty that permeates it. Though he has nothing
but lavish praise for his wife and a few others, Springsteen often balances positive
comments with criticism when he talks about assorted friends, associates, and bandmates, and
he’s the same way about himself. He has justifiably high regard for his own musical talents, but he doesn’t hesitate to spell out his shortcomings. In fact, he’s sometimes
harder on himself here than anyone else, his father included.
One thing we
never quite learn is where that immense talent came from. How did a kid who
played so-so garage rock to audiences of a few dozen in the Castilles wind up
as arguably the best live performer in the history of rock and roll? And how
did he manage to write such masterpieces as “The River,” “Badlands,” and “The
Ghost of Tom Joad,” to name a few? The best the book can come up with are a lot
of tales that ultimately just reminded me of an old joke: Q. "How do you get to
Carnegie Hall?" A. "Practice." Springsteen did practice as hard as anyone—but of
course his accomplishments required something more. They required some kind of
magic.
So did the
writing of this book. I’ve encountered some excellent musician memoirs over the
years—Keith Richards’s Life and Bob
Dylan’s Chronicles come to mind—but Born to Run is in a class of its own. Whether
you’re interested in reading about rock and roll or about the inner life of one
of its best practitioners, you won’t be disappointed. As Springsteen says near
the end, “in a project like this, the writer has made one promise: to show the
reader his mind.” He delivers on that promise with a book that is as impressive
in its own way as the album of the same name.
*****
I can’t
speak quite as glowingly about the deftly titled Chapter & Verse CD, which is billed as an “audio companion” to
the book. Containing 18 selections from throughout Springsteen’s career, it
includes five previously unreleased early numbers, plus the demo recording of
“Growin’ Up” that first surfaced on the Tracks
box set and such later landmarks as “4th of July, Asbury Park
(Sandy),” “Badlands,” “The River,” “The Rising,” and, of course, “Born to Run.”
Serious fans
will want the early stuff, if only because it shows just how far Springsteen
has come. “Baby I” and Bo Diddley’s “You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover,” by the
Castilles, are energetic but ultimately run-of-the-mill period garage rock—the
sort of material that would have appeared on one of the Nuggets collections if it were a little more distinctive. Bruce’s
guitar and Danny Federici’s organ enliven Springsteen’s “He’s Guilty (The Judge
Song)” but we’re still in amateur-hour territory, with little hint of how far
the group’s leader would travel. The country-rock-tinged “Ballad of Jesse
James,” by an early version of the E Street Band, is better constructed and
more compelling—a step closer to the sound that would emerge on Springsteen's first
two albums. “Henry Boy,” which features only Bruce’s vocal and guitar, sounds
like an outtake from his debut LP.
If you’re
interested enough in Springsteen to read his autobiography, I suspect you don’t
need me to tell you that the rest of the music on Chapter & Verse is great; indeed, you probably already own most
or all of it. And that’s the problem with this package: though you can buy MP3s
of the five early tracks, you’ll likely have to purchase songs you already own
in order to get CD-quality copies of those numbers. (This is the same situation
fans faced with Springsteen’s Greatest
Hits and 18 Tracks, both of which
coupled a few new selections to material many fans had already purchased.) I’m
glad to have the five rare old recordings here, but I wish they’d been offered
separately on an EP, perhaps bundled with the autobiography. Like many fans, I already
had a shelf-full of “audio companions” to the book before Chapter & Verse came along.