Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen (Simon and Schuster 2016)

We bring our best, everything we have…to remind you of everything you have, your best.

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With Springsteen, I’ve always assumed what you see is pretty much what you get. On stage his easygoing openness and joyful dynamism are offered to the audience with a kind of ease (albeit one that involves a lot of sweating and shouting). But this book reveals that onstage is about the only place he is like that – off it he’s almost the exact opposite.

The book blasts through chunks of social, musical, political and personal history, all with an energetic – sometimes lyrical – honesty that’s reminiscent of his songs. His father, ‘a blue-collar Buddha’, made evenings in his childhood home ‘unpredictable and quietly volatile’, and cast a shadow over Springsteen’s entire life. And, while the writing feels like an attempt to deal with the ‘unsorted baggage’ carried by both of them, it’s clear that music became his refuge from a bullying, bitter failure of a father. In fact, he claims that his career is simply what he had to do: ‘It was the only way I found momentary release and the purpose I was looking for.’ And, for my money, the crumbling, single-gas-burner New Jersey home he grew up in lends weight to the songs about the working man’s daily grind and thwarted dreams, no matter how far Springsteen’s now traveled from it.

Of course, he’s good on the nature of rock music (‘a house of dreams, illusions, delusions’) and why people go to rock concerts (‘to be reminded of something they already know and feel deep down in their gut’), but the strength of the book is its honesty about him. It seems he’s always been something of a control freak, a workaholic loner, fighting his own demons and taking his insecurities out on those close to him. He’s ashamed and apologetic, but reckons he couldn’t have been any other way; he’s honest about playing band members off against one another, being a coward and getting into his worst battles (generally legal ones) through his own naivety or wilfulness. But despite all this, it is people on the street who make up his milieu: he’s a hitchhiker and a bar-stool percher whose inspiration and solace derive from his fellow man. That’s his appeal.

And the body of his work, as well as the 40-year loyalty he’s commanded from the E Street Band, are impressive in themselves. Many of the chapters are named after albums or band members, and the portraits are coloured by admiration and affection that belie the ‘self-centredness…narcissism [and]…isolation’ he beats himself up about. On top of this there’s the joy of the gigs themselves. As he says, with characteristic capitalisation: ‘Friend, there’s a reason they don’t call it “working”, it’s called PLAYING!’ The love of performance, the heart in the music, the ‘tight knit, rigid little society’ of the band – these are enough to kennel the black dog (for him and for the reader). For him and for his crowds, ‘It’s a life-giving, joyful, sweat-drenched, muscle-aching, voice-blowing, mind-clearing, exhausting, soul-invigorating, cathartic pleasure and privilege every night.’