"Born to Run"
by Bruce Springsteen
2016
Just when you thought the rock-memoir-as-genre was becoming a little stale and overdone, here comes "Born to Run" by Bruce Springsteen, promising to do to you the reader what Bruce does to you, the faithful, as a listener: inspire you, reinvigorate you, challenge you, lift you up into rock heaven. There he is, sitting (but surely not still) on his car, in beautiful black and white (ala the covers of Dylan's "Chronicles" and Keith's "Life," the most "serious" entries in the rock memoir canon, so far), beckoning you with this book as he does with his song of the same name. Will you heed the call of the Boss?
If you're a fan, you probably should. There are countless books about Bruce Springsteen by people who are not Bruce-- I've not read any of 'em!-- and I can't claim that "Born to Run" is the best, most elegantly written, or most thorough of them all. But Bruce's memoir is surely the Bruceist of the bunch, sounding, feeling, practically smelling the way a great Springsteen record or Springsteen show does. I did not for a second doubt the authorship of this book. Everything-- from the overdone CAPITALIZATIONS to the frequently corny asides-- reads exactly like Bruce, like a 511-page long ramble given at one of the man's legendary shows. This voice alone, perfectly captured, makes the trip more than worthwhile if, say, you can recite every word of "Thunder Road," or you think "Seaside Bar Song" is the greatest summer track known to the youth.
The book is so Bruce-ily rendered that a more probing critic-- someone who, say, believes "The River" would be a much better as a one-record album than a double, or who thinks the Manfred Mann version of "Blinded by the Light" is superior to the Boss's (fucker)-- might wonder if any of it is even real. The "Springsteen image," as heroically American working class as it may appear, is after all, just that... An image. Though Bruce admirably dives into his bouts with depression (I'd say a good five chapters are spent on this subject alone), and spends the first twenty pages or so describing his humble New Jersey beginnings in beautiful, sincere, unfakeable detail, he pulls back from a lot of places where a perhaps less-image-conscious artist might keep pushing. The infamous tensions between Bruce and E Street band, for example, are mentioned, but without a clear outline of who said what to who and why. For Bruce's fans, this is the mark of a gentleman: he doesn't show any bitterness toward old business associates who a lesser person might wanna savage in their tell-all. For his detractors, it might seem a great big put on... More working-class, normal-person mimicry from a man who left that world (never to return!) at least thirty years ago.
I could grant such a detractor that "Born to Run's" later chapters, in which Bruce often alludes to his vast fortune and incredible luck, as well as his anxieties about "tapping in" to a certain mindset that informed his earlier writing, are far less compelling than the book's first third. This allowance might simply be a testament to that first third's greatness, though. Because there's no doubt that Bruce earned his right to be part of rock's elite. From the most basic of American middle-class family situations, the Boss climbed, month-by-month, year-by-year, into a place of musical respectability and creative achievement. He did this by-- how else?-- the classic American way of working your ass off, not caring about anything else but your craft, and wanting to live like Elvis. (The early Elvis chapter will be in future anthologies about American pop culture, I swear. I've never read such a perfect distillation of the King's essence. You read Bruce's words and you get it... The guy, Elvis, killed, at least for a while there.) The chapters in which Bruce puts together "Greetings from Asbury Park" and "The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle" excited the hell out of me. Yes, the whole first section, "Growin' Up," is just alive with the spirit of rock and roll...
But yeah, there's the other two thirds of the book. Which I will admit are not as thrilling as the first. But Bruce knows this, too. He's not a fool-- Springsteen, the student of rock and roll, understands better than anyone how "it's better to burn out than to fade away." (Shit... He wrote a song that goes "I DON'T WANNA FADE AWAY!") Nothing is more interesting, at least to a white person, than the romance of rock and roll. When Bruce starts to move away from that-- in his book and in the life it describes-- the energy can't help but flag. But it's to "Born to Run's" credit that the energy hardly stops. Even as he settles down, raises his children, and releases a series of albums not nearly as good as "Darkness on the Edge of Town," Springsteen writes with verve and skill. Reading the last chapters of the book, I remembered how much of Bruce's career-- even the 70's albums-- is devoted to the flip-side of the rock and roll dream: to the lost souls, the never-go-anywheres, the painful realities of relationships and work and life. Of course Springsteen can tell the story of his psychological breakdowns with panache-- he's told that story through other perspective for decades! And of course his descriptions of Danny and Clarence in their final days are incredibly moving-- death is as real in a good Springsteen song as passionate, reckless, wondrous living!
(But where's my chapter on "Lucky Town," Bruce, huh???)
Rock memoirs are written by celebrities who have spent a good deal of their lives in the public eye. Their lives and careers are so premised on presenting a certain "character" to the public. Hence, "Chronicles" is allusive and mysterious and full of beat poetry, the way we want Dylan to be. (That there's a chapter on "Oh Mercy" and not "Blonde on Blonde" is just so very Dylan, isn't it?) And "Born to Run," even if it pulls some punches, does so in a way that we expect and desire from Bruce Springsteen. You could call it a flaw in the "rock memoir" model. Certainly, a serious scholar of the Boss would do better to consult other works before taking the man and the myth at his word. But goddammit, if you're just an average Joe or Jill living an average life, it feelings fucking GREAT to take the Boss at his word. Take his hand, and you're riding out tonight to chase the promised land, on his records and here, in this moving, warm, engagingly written, pretty great memoir.
