Born To Run

Bruce Springsteen

Simon & Schuster, £20

Review by Brian Morton

LAST month, Bruce Springsteen finished a record-breaking tour that saw a 67-year-old perform the rock and roll equivalent of industrial shifts, four-hour sets that included a complete live retread of his 1980 album The River. Up until now, most of us assumed that it was his autobiography. But it turns out that since The Boss turned 60, he has been making jottings in notebooks that, edited together, make up Born To Run. In unselfconscious candour, warmth and total absence of the eighth deadly sin (false modesty), it puts to eternal shame most of the current run of celebrity memoirs, whether by rock stars or TV inquisitors.

It helps that, armed with a C, F and G chord, you can pretty much sing your way through its 500 pages. It helps, too, that Springsteen is as direct and un-oblique as we’d hoped. Unlike Bob Dylan, an early influence, he doesn’t swathe songs in metaphor, and so when the metaphors come, like the rapturous river which fixes for all time that great American trope about skinnydipping as solace and redemption from industrial grime and woe, they’re all the more powerful. And it’s deeply touching to learn that the boy-and-girl story of The River is pretty much exactly the story of his beloved sister and her guy.

Born To Run takes him from birth in Long Branch, a Catholic upbringing in Freehold, New Jersey, which sounds like a Sopranos lot; the epiphany of Elvis on Ed Sullivan; escape, on graduation day, into the longhair world of rock and roll. The young David Jones was addressed as “darling” and “Miss” in Bromley. In industrial New Jersey, Springsteen’s locks were the mark of the Beast, with sodomy and damnation just around the bend.

The irony is that, instead of dabbling with gender and identity and costume-as-persona, Springsteen began to punch the clock with a variety of bar bands, working long, late hours for little initial reward. He couldn’t have worked much harder if he had slaved in a factory. He made an early reputation with the Castiles (named after a soap brand), before the more convincingly labelled Steel Mill put him at the heart and front of what became the E Street Band and steered him to stadium stardom.

Like Elvis, Springsteen combined black music with a white cultural sensibility. Perhaps too much attention has been paid to his album covers, but Eric Meola’s photograph of Bruce buddying up with saxophonist Clarence Clemons, used on the cover of Born To Run in 1975, shows how Springsteen, after a dip of form in the conservative 1990s, came to be the poster act of the Obama years. We’re never allowed to forget that Freehold was a race-riot town, and the E Street Band its own kind of rainbow coalition. The deaths of Clemons and organist Danny Federici are among the most moving moments in the book. Springsteen’s recounting of his relationship and marriage to Patti Scialfa likewise: not an idealised relationship, but a convincing one forged in fights, forgiveness and what looks like unshakable loyalty. Here’s a man who made a couple of albums that dreamed about happiness, a couple more that seemed to fear its domesticating pull, who then embraced it but found it blunted his songwriting; or maybe it was just that American life from the end of Ronald Reagan’s reign to the end of George W Bush’s didn’t quite have the right cast for Springsteen’s Steinbeckian vision. When the great rocker went downbeat with Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad, the younger fans shied away a bit. When he made Lucky Town, everyone thought he had settled down and might be buying slippers and a lawn mower.

What the songs “mean” has always been the $64 question. There’s no spoiler in saying that Springsteen himself nails the issue of Born In The USA, which has exercised cultural studies types for 30 years. The title song has Springsteen’s character sing about killing the yellow man and about the yellow glare of the refinery, which is the heat that awaits you when (if) you get back alive.

So is this a redneck song, a jingoistic hymn of the new Right? No, said the academics. Andrea Klein’s brilliant album cover shows a headless Springsteen in blue jeans and white T with a baseball cap hanging out of his pocket, but against only a small corner of the American flag, so this is a subversive song, ambiguous and ironic. Come on. Springsteen isn’t Shostakovich. Here’s the answer, from the horse’s mouth: “It was a protest song . . . a GI blues, the verses an accounting, the choruses a declaration of one sure thing that could not be denied . . . birthplace, and the right to all of the blood, confusion, blessings and grace that come with it.”

There it is; but who understands it better, Hillary or Donald? Or neither of them?