About an hour before every concert, Bruce Springsteen draws up a set
list of 31 songs, written in big, scrawly letters in marker ink and soon
thereafter distributed to his musicians and crew in typed-up,
printed-out form. But this list is really just a loose framework. Over
the course of an evening, Springsteen might shake up the order, drop a
song, call a few audibles to his seasoned, ready-for-anything E Street
Band, or take a request or two from fans holding handwritten signs in
the pit near the front of the stage. Or he might do all of the above and
then some—as he did on the first of the two nights that I saw him
perform in Gothenburg, Sweden, this summer.
That night, at the last minute, Springsteen jettisoned his plan to open with a full-band version of “Prove It All Night,” from his 1978 album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and instead began the show solo at the piano with “The Promise,” a fan-beloved Darkness outtake. Eight songs in, he again went off-list, playing a stretched-out, gospelized version of “Spirit in the Night,” from his first album, 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., which he followed with “Save My Love,” a sign request. Onward he went with tweaks and spontaneous additions, to the point where, by the time the show was over, it was past midnight and Springsteen, a man approaching his 67th birthday, had played for nearly four hours—his second-longest concert ever.
“Yikes!” said Springsteen with mock alarm when I relayed this fact to him the next day, at his hotel in the Swedish port city. “I’m always in search of something, in search of losing myself to the music. I think we hit a spot last night where I was trying some songs we hadn’t played in a while, where maybe you’re struggling more. And then suddenly”—he snapped his fingers—“you catch it, and then, once you do, you may not want to stop.”
“You have to create the show anew, and find it anew, on a nightly basis,” Springsteen said. “And sometimes,” he concluded, laughing, “it takes me longer than I thought it would.”
There is one song, though, whose place and inclusion are never in doubt: “Born to Run.” Springsteen always slots it in near the start of his encore set, the clutch of seven or eight songs that see out the night. “It’s still at the center of my work, that song,” he said. “When it comes up every night, within the show, it’s monumental.” By design, every concert, no matter what its shape, builds up to “Born to Run” as the climax, with the songs that follow serving as a decompression from its operatic intensity.
It is not uncommon for an artist to grow wary of a signature song—Robert Plant has referred to “Stairway to Heaven” as “that wedding song,” and Frank Sinatra called “Strangers in the Night” a “piece of shit”—but Springsteen has never tired of “Born to Run,” which he wrote at age 24 in a small rental cottage in West Long Branch, New Jersey. Expressly conceived as an important work, it took him six months to piece together all of its elements, from the twangy, Duane Eddy-inspired guitar figure with which it announces itself, to its “tramps like us” refrain, to its appropriations of imagery from the B movies that Springsteen adored as a kid, pulpy road pictures like Gun Crazy, with John Dall and Peggy Cummins.
“A good song gathers the years in,” Springsteen said. “It’s why you can sing it with such conviction 40 years after it’s been written. A good song takes on more meaning as the years pass by.”
What has made “Born to Run” endure, Springsteen believes, are the words with which his nameless narrator implores his girl, Wendy, to join him on the road: “Will you walk with me out on the wire? / ‘Cause baby, I’m just a scared and lonely rider / But I gotta know how it feels / I want to know if love is wild / Babe, I want to know if love is real.”
“That question gets asked every single night, between me and all those people that are out there,” Springsteen said. “Every night, I watch the crowd sing it. Sing it word for word. It’s just something that connected.”
It’s true. In Gothenburg, over two nights, I watched 120,000 Swedes surrender, full-throatedly and with fists pumping, to “I want to know if love is real”—notwithstanding the song’s otherwise acutely New Jersey-specific references to Highway 9 and the Palace, a now demolished Asbury Park amusement hall.
Springsteen’s new autobiography, to be published this month by Simon & Schuster, is also called Born to Run. Naming your book after your most famous song and the breakthrough album to which it lent its title could be seen as a sign of cash-grab expediency or outright laziness—plus, there is already a well-known Springsteen book called Born to Run, a biography by the rock critic Dave Marsh from 1979. But to Springsteen there was no other choice. Those three words have an emotional resonance for him beyond the song itself. They’re a sort of thumbnail memoir—a shorthand for a lifelong sense of unrest.
To be sure, the latter-day Springsteen projects health and contentment. Onstage, he’s as limber and high-energy as ever: leaping and sliding in his concert uniform of black jeans, brown boots, black muscle T, gray vest, and gray neckerchief, and pulling in close to share a microphone with his wife, the singer Patti Scialfa, or his oldest friend in the band, the guitarist Steven Van Zandt. Offstage, across a table, he looks just as fantastic as he does from a distance, favoring formfitting snap-button western shirts that few other men his age could get away with; in one of our meetings, he even rocked the red-bandanna headband of his Born in the U.S.A. years.
But, inherently, Springsteen is a brooder: a serious, unglib man given to puzzling out the mixed-up thoughts in his head. In other words, a born memoirist. When I asked him, for example, about the genesis of that pumped-up Born in the U.S.A. look, I was surprised by how considered a response I received. I was posing the question from a superficial, stagecraft angle: Was his evolution from the scrawny chancer on the cover of Darkness on the Edge of Town to the muscle-bound W.P.A.-poster hero of the mid-80s a sort of less extreme version of David Bowie-style shape-shifting? Was it a conscious image reboot? Springsteen’s initial reply was that, first and foremost, he was trying to get healthy as his metabolism slowed, so he took to lifting weights, and “I had a body that just kind of popped in six months.”
“But if you want to get into it deeper,” he continued, “my father was built big, so there was some element of ‘O.K., I’m 34. I’m a man now.’ I remember my father at that age. There was the idea of creating a man’s body to a certain degree. I suppose I was measuring that after my dad. And also, perhaps, in some way, trying to please him.”
Then Springsteen went deeper still. “I also found that I simply enjoyed the exercise,” he said. “It was perfectly Sisyphean for my personality—lifting something heavy up and putting it down in the same spot for no particularly good reason. I’ve always felt a lot in common with Sisyphus. I’m always rolling that rock, man. One way or another, I’m always rolling that rock.”
The germ of Born to Run, the book, lies in a short, diaristic piece Springsteen wrote for his Web site in 2009, after he and the E Street Band played the halftime show of Super Bowl XLIII. The logistics and pressure of doing the 12-minute show threw even as battle-tested a performer as Springsteen for a loop, and he thought the experience would make for a good yarn to share. “Fifteen minutes . . . oh, by the way, I’m somewhat terrified,” he wrote in one passage. “It’s not the usual pre-show jitters, not ‘butterflies,’ not wardrobe malfunction nervousness, I’m talking about five minutes to beach landing, ‘Right Stuff,’ ‘Lord Don’t Let Me Screw the Pooch in Front of 100 Million People,’ ‘One of the biggest television audiences since dinosaurs first screwed on earth’ kind of terror.”
Doing the Super Bowl show, Springsteen said, led him to discover a “pretty good voice to write in.” With time on his hands after the big game, he kept at it, writing down vignettes from his life in longhand while he and Scialfa were staying in Florida, where their daughter, Jessica, a competitive equestrian, was participating in show-jumping events. He was pleased with the results. In fits and starts, back at home in New Jersey and on tour over the next seven years, a full-blown, 500-page autobiography eventually took shape, with no ghost or collaborator. Every word in the book is his own.
There’s no shortage of levity in Born to Run. We learn that young Bruce, for all his romantic association with cars and the road, was a terrible driver who didn’t manage to get his license until he was in his 20s, and that current Bruce, like many a passionate baby-boomer in the vicinity of a computer keyboard, is a fan of caps lock. On the seismic impact of Elvis Presley’s initial appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show: “Somewhere in between the mundane variety acts on a routine Sunday night in the year of our Lord 1956 . . . THE REVOLUTION HAS BEEN TELEVISED!! Right underneath the nose of the guardians of all that ‘IS,’ who, if they were aware of the powers they were about to unleash, would call out the national gestapo to SHUT THIS SHIT DOWN!! . . . or . . . SIGN IT UP QUICK!!”
But it’s the less jocular stuff in Springsteen’s life, the material germane to his autobiography’s title, that gives Born to Run its depth—and Springsteen knows this. “I knew I was gonna ‘go there’ in the book,” he told me. “I had to find the roots of my own troubles and issues—and the joyful things that have allowed me to put on the kind of shows that we put on.”
Van Zandt remembers the Springsteen he befriended in their teens as “shut down and closed in.” This was on the central-New Jersey garage-band circuit of the mid-1960s, when Springsteen was playing guitar in a combo called the Castiles and Van Zandt fronted a group called the Shadows. “You remember the grunge guys, with the long hair, staring down at their shoes? That was him,” Van Zandt said. “People were always wondering ‘Why are you hanging out with him? He’s such a weirdo.’ Some people thought he was mental.”
What Van Zandt quickly came to realize was that Springsteen was preternaturally focused, regarding rock music as his only way forward. “What inspired me about him, which nobody could really understand, was that he was completely dedicated,” Van Zandt said. “He’s the only guy I know who never had another job. I had to do some other jobs and fight to do it full-time, where he was always full-time. I got strength from that.”
What made Springsteen so determined? What was Bruce running from? For one thing, the dead-end, near-feudal circumstances into which he was born, living with his parents and paternal grandparents in a tumbledown house in Freehold, New Jersey. It sat on the same block as their church, St. Rose of Lima, and its affiliated convent, rectory, and school, as well as four other small houses, occupied by members of his father’s family. His father’s side was pretty much Irish-American, people named McNicholas, O’Hagan, and Farrell. His mother’s side, which lived just across the street, was Italian-American, people named Zerilli and Sorrentino.
That night, at the last minute, Springsteen jettisoned his plan to open with a full-band version of “Prove It All Night,” from his 1978 album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and instead began the show solo at the piano with “The Promise,” a fan-beloved Darkness outtake. Eight songs in, he again went off-list, playing a stretched-out, gospelized version of “Spirit in the Night,” from his first album, 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., which he followed with “Save My Love,” a sign request. Onward he went with tweaks and spontaneous additions, to the point where, by the time the show was over, it was past midnight and Springsteen, a man approaching his 67th birthday, had played for nearly four hours—his second-longest concert ever.
“Yikes!” said Springsteen with mock alarm when I relayed this fact to him the next day, at his hotel in the Swedish port city. “I’m always in search of something, in search of losing myself to the music. I think we hit a spot last night where I was trying some songs we hadn’t played in a while, where maybe you’re struggling more. And then suddenly”—he snapped his fingers—“you catch it, and then, once you do, you may not want to stop.”
“You have to create the show anew, and find it anew, on a nightly basis,” Springsteen said. “And sometimes,” he concluded, laughing, “it takes me longer than I thought it would.”
There is one song, though, whose place and inclusion are never in doubt: “Born to Run.” Springsteen always slots it in near the start of his encore set, the clutch of seven or eight songs that see out the night. “It’s still at the center of my work, that song,” he said. “When it comes up every night, within the show, it’s monumental.” By design, every concert, no matter what its shape, builds up to “Born to Run” as the climax, with the songs that follow serving as a decompression from its operatic intensity.
It is not uncommon for an artist to grow wary of a signature song—Robert Plant has referred to “Stairway to Heaven” as “that wedding song,” and Frank Sinatra called “Strangers in the Night” a “piece of shit”—but Springsteen has never tired of “Born to Run,” which he wrote at age 24 in a small rental cottage in West Long Branch, New Jersey. Expressly conceived as an important work, it took him six months to piece together all of its elements, from the twangy, Duane Eddy-inspired guitar figure with which it announces itself, to its “tramps like us” refrain, to its appropriations of imagery from the B movies that Springsteen adored as a kid, pulpy road pictures like Gun Crazy, with John Dall and Peggy Cummins.
“A good song gathers the years in,” Springsteen said. “It’s why you can sing it with such conviction 40 years after it’s been written. A good song takes on more meaning as the years pass by.”
What has made “Born to Run” endure, Springsteen believes, are the words with which his nameless narrator implores his girl, Wendy, to join him on the road: “Will you walk with me out on the wire? / ‘Cause baby, I’m just a scared and lonely rider / But I gotta know how it feels / I want to know if love is wild / Babe, I want to know if love is real.”
“That question gets asked every single night, between me and all those people that are out there,” Springsteen said. “Every night, I watch the crowd sing it. Sing it word for word. It’s just something that connected.”
It’s true. In Gothenburg, over two nights, I watched 120,000 Swedes surrender, full-throatedly and with fists pumping, to “I want to know if love is real”—notwithstanding the song’s otherwise acutely New Jersey-specific references to Highway 9 and the Palace, a now demolished Asbury Park amusement hall.
Springsteen’s new autobiography, to be published this month by Simon & Schuster, is also called Born to Run. Naming your book after your most famous song and the breakthrough album to which it lent its title could be seen as a sign of cash-grab expediency or outright laziness—plus, there is already a well-known Springsteen book called Born to Run, a biography by the rock critic Dave Marsh from 1979. But to Springsteen there was no other choice. Those three words have an emotional resonance for him beyond the song itself. They’re a sort of thumbnail memoir—a shorthand for a lifelong sense of unrest.
To be sure, the latter-day Springsteen projects health and contentment. Onstage, he’s as limber and high-energy as ever: leaping and sliding in his concert uniform of black jeans, brown boots, black muscle T, gray vest, and gray neckerchief, and pulling in close to share a microphone with his wife, the singer Patti Scialfa, or his oldest friend in the band, the guitarist Steven Van Zandt. Offstage, across a table, he looks just as fantastic as he does from a distance, favoring formfitting snap-button western shirts that few other men his age could get away with; in one of our meetings, he even rocked the red-bandanna headband of his Born in the U.S.A. years.
But, inherently, Springsteen is a brooder: a serious, unglib man given to puzzling out the mixed-up thoughts in his head. In other words, a born memoirist. When I asked him, for example, about the genesis of that pumped-up Born in the U.S.A. look, I was surprised by how considered a response I received. I was posing the question from a superficial, stagecraft angle: Was his evolution from the scrawny chancer on the cover of Darkness on the Edge of Town to the muscle-bound W.P.A.-poster hero of the mid-80s a sort of less extreme version of David Bowie-style shape-shifting? Was it a conscious image reboot? Springsteen’s initial reply was that, first and foremost, he was trying to get healthy as his metabolism slowed, so he took to lifting weights, and “I had a body that just kind of popped in six months.”
“But if you want to get into it deeper,” he continued, “my father was built big, so there was some element of ‘O.K., I’m 34. I’m a man now.’ I remember my father at that age. There was the idea of creating a man’s body to a certain degree. I suppose I was measuring that after my dad. And also, perhaps, in some way, trying to please him.”
Then Springsteen went deeper still. “I also found that I simply enjoyed the exercise,” he said. “It was perfectly Sisyphean for my personality—lifting something heavy up and putting it down in the same spot for no particularly good reason. I’ve always felt a lot in common with Sisyphus. I’m always rolling that rock, man. One way or another, I’m always rolling that rock.”
The germ of Born to Run, the book, lies in a short, diaristic piece Springsteen wrote for his Web site in 2009, after he and the E Street Band played the halftime show of Super Bowl XLIII. The logistics and pressure of doing the 12-minute show threw even as battle-tested a performer as Springsteen for a loop, and he thought the experience would make for a good yarn to share. “Fifteen minutes . . . oh, by the way, I’m somewhat terrified,” he wrote in one passage. “It’s not the usual pre-show jitters, not ‘butterflies,’ not wardrobe malfunction nervousness, I’m talking about five minutes to beach landing, ‘Right Stuff,’ ‘Lord Don’t Let Me Screw the Pooch in Front of 100 Million People,’ ‘One of the biggest television audiences since dinosaurs first screwed on earth’ kind of terror.”
Doing the Super Bowl show, Springsteen said, led him to discover a “pretty good voice to write in.” With time on his hands after the big game, he kept at it, writing down vignettes from his life in longhand while he and Scialfa were staying in Florida, where their daughter, Jessica, a competitive equestrian, was participating in show-jumping events. He was pleased with the results. In fits and starts, back at home in New Jersey and on tour over the next seven years, a full-blown, 500-page autobiography eventually took shape, with no ghost or collaborator. Every word in the book is his own.
There’s no shortage of levity in Born to Run. We learn that young Bruce, for all his romantic association with cars and the road, was a terrible driver who didn’t manage to get his license until he was in his 20s, and that current Bruce, like many a passionate baby-boomer in the vicinity of a computer keyboard, is a fan of caps lock. On the seismic impact of Elvis Presley’s initial appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show: “Somewhere in between the mundane variety acts on a routine Sunday night in the year of our Lord 1956 . . . THE REVOLUTION HAS BEEN TELEVISED!! Right underneath the nose of the guardians of all that ‘IS,’ who, if they were aware of the powers they were about to unleash, would call out the national gestapo to SHUT THIS SHIT DOWN!! . . . or . . . SIGN IT UP QUICK!!”
But it’s the less jocular stuff in Springsteen’s life, the material germane to his autobiography’s title, that gives Born to Run its depth—and Springsteen knows this. “I knew I was gonna ‘go there’ in the book,” he told me. “I had to find the roots of my own troubles and issues—and the joyful things that have allowed me to put on the kind of shows that we put on.”
Van Zandt remembers the Springsteen he befriended in their teens as “shut down and closed in.” This was on the central-New Jersey garage-band circuit of the mid-1960s, when Springsteen was playing guitar in a combo called the Castiles and Van Zandt fronted a group called the Shadows. “You remember the grunge guys, with the long hair, staring down at their shoes? That was him,” Van Zandt said. “People were always wondering ‘Why are you hanging out with him? He’s such a weirdo.’ Some people thought he was mental.”
What Van Zandt quickly came to realize was that Springsteen was preternaturally focused, regarding rock music as his only way forward. “What inspired me about him, which nobody could really understand, was that he was completely dedicated,” Van Zandt said. “He’s the only guy I know who never had another job. I had to do some other jobs and fight to do it full-time, where he was always full-time. I got strength from that.”
What made Springsteen so determined? What was Bruce running from? For one thing, the dead-end, near-feudal circumstances into which he was born, living with his parents and paternal grandparents in a tumbledown house in Freehold, New Jersey. It sat on the same block as their church, St. Rose of Lima, and its affiliated convent, rectory, and school, as well as four other small houses, occupied by members of his father’s family. His father’s side was pretty much Irish-American, people named McNicholas, O’Hagan, and Farrell. His mother’s side, which lived just across the street, was Italian-American, people named Zerilli and Sorrentino.
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