By Stuart Mitchner

In the foreword to his best-selling autobiography Born to Run (Simon & Schuster $32.50), Bruce Springsteen pictures himself on a hypothetical stage “face to face with eighty thousand (or eighty) screaming rock’n’roll fans” waiting for him to do his “magic trick,” which is “to provide proof of life to that ever elusive, never completely believable ‘us.’” The writing of his life, then, will be his big show, his spectacle, and at 508 pages, the intention is clear: he’s going to give us our money’s worth. 

Before riding his motorcycle into the November twilight of the epilogue, he brings his book’s “proof of life” mission full circle in the face-to-face closing sentences of the “long and noisy prayer” and “magic trick” he’s hoping will “rock your very soul and then pass on, its spirit rendered, to be read, heard, sung and altered by you and your blood, that it might strengthen and help make sense of your story. Go tell it.”

After five hundred-plus pages, the reader has gone from the never completely believable “us” to “you and your blood.” Performing the same unconventional departure from the standard second-person usage of “you” in an earlier chapter, he describes driving home on September 11 “to find my children, my wife, my people and you again.” Who is this “you”? Who else but the reader? It’s as if he’s entrusting his story, an article of faith, to a special friend in a personal letter, or it could be he’s looking beyond the artifice of the book to the executor of his creative estate. In the end, the most likely assumption is that he’s speaking one-on-one to his readers in “the only language” he’s ever known, the language of his songs, which are his way “to fight off the night terrors, real and imagined.” One of the songs he’ll write on the occasion of 9/11 for his album The Rising is titled “You’re Missing.”

We’re the Song

So, according to the presumed agreement between writer and reader that ends Born to Run, Springsteen’s story is ours to comprehend and carry with us through life. Reading it we own it. This is the essence of the “magic trick” he performs so powerfully in the song that gives the book its title. While Wendy and  the “tramps like us” he’s singing to in “Born to Run” may be a composite of girls he knows, they’re also the audience he’s giving “proof of life” to. As long as we’re encompassed by what he calls “the raging wall of guitars and drums,” the sound of a singer “fighting to be heard over a world that didn’t give a damn” in “that 747-engine-in-your-living-room rumble,” we’re in the song, it’s about us, he wants to be our friend, ours the “dreams and visions” he’s guarding. Whether you call it a 747 or a Harley or a comet, “Born to Run” picks us up and roars off with us. Like he says in the chapter about the making of the song, “Get yourself a great riff and you’re on your way.”

Our Money’s Worth

Halfway through Born to Run, readers, including even lifelong fans, may be wishing that Springsteen hadn’t felt obliged to spend so much space detailing various complex professional dealings as he goes from learner to band member to leader to star to mega-celebrity-legend and multimillionaire. It’s tempting to give less attention to the lulls in his road-of-life show, to skim over the band/agent/record company stuff, and in so doing to lose traction and make the mistake of assuming he’s going to fall into the name-dropping scene-making traps of the typical celebrity memoir. Not to worry — he knows better. He may spend a few years living the life in L.A. but when his kids are school age, he comes home to New Jersey. Have faith. Some of Born to Run’s most moving and arresting passages come in the last hundred pages, including the one on 9/11 (“The Rising”), the death of Clarence Clemons (“Losing the Rain”), and, especially “Western Man,” the chapter about his father, as true and inspired a composition as any song he ever wrote. Then there’s his account of the depression that crushed him when he turned sixty (“Zero to Sixty in Nothing Flat”), which includes this song-in-the-making on tears: “Buckets of ‘em, oceans of ‘em, black tears pouring down my face like tidewater rushing over Niagara any and all hours of the day. What was this about? It was like somebody opened the floodgates and ran off with the key. There was NO stopping it. Bambi tears … Old Yeller tears … Fried Green Tomatoes tears … rain … tears … sun … tears … I can’t find my keys … tears. Every mundane daily event, any bump in the sentimental road, became a cause to let it all hang out. It would’ve been funny except it wasn’t.”

There’s worse to come in the penultimate chapter (“Home Front”), where he gives us a frank account of the psychic nightmare he endured following “the most successful, well-attended and popular tour the E Street Band had ever done.” Because the shows are “an insane high,” a mild post-tour letdown is inevitable, but this was “something else altogether,” and he confides what he went through to us in unsparing detail.

Freehold 

As is often true of memoirs, the chapters on childhood in Born to Run are among its richest. Of the “towering” copper beech in the front yard, “the grandest tree in town,” he writes, “On nights when thunder rolls and lightning turns our family bedroom cobalt blue, I watch its arms move and come to life in the wind and white flashes as I lie awake worrying about my friend the monster outside” — “monster” because “one bolt of well-placed lightning and we’d all be dead as snails crushed beneath God’s litle finger.” In the book’s last chapter, he comes back to find the tree “gone, cut to the street …. A square of musty earth, carved into the parking lot blacktop at the pavement’s edge, was all that remained. It still held small snakes of root slightly submerged by dust and dirt, and there the arc of my tree, my life, lay plainly visible. My great tree’s life by county dictum or blade could not be ended or erased. Its history, its magic, was too old and too strong.”

Heavy Lifting

There’s a well-timed visit to Freehold, his “Rosebud,” a little over halfway through the book. His account of his clandestine return, “a four-wheeled phantom on the edges of my birth city,” is like music compared to the prose equivalent of holding the road, laboring to keep the narrative in the lane, a telling example of which occurs around the time he meets his eventual co-producer, manager, and close friend, the rock critic Jon Landau, who penned the line that helped put him on the map, “I have seen the future of rock and roll and his name is Bruce Springsteen.”

Here’s what happens to Springseen’s prose when he’s introducing Landau: “Jon would serve me as a friend and mentor, someone who’d been exposed to and held information I felt would augment my creativity and deepen the truth seeking I was trying to make a part of my music … if you have the talent, then will, ambition, and the determination to expose yourself to new thoughts, counterarguments, new influences, will strengthen and fortify your work, driving you closer to home.”

The best way to get past passages of “heavy lifting” like that is to keep believing in someone whose book is going to “rock your very soul.” Another way to keep your spirits up is to go to the library, as I did, and check out a DVD of the 1975 Hammersmith Odeon concert, which reveals the magic no recording could ever duplicate as Bruce dives, crawls, ties himself up and breaks through the chains like a rock’n’roll Houdini.

Working-Class Lives

And you can always go to the albums. I found something in his words about the inspiration driving Darkness on the Edge of Town that sent me from a post-election funk back to the music. In that chapter, haunted by the presence of his father, “taxi driver, assembly line worker, autoworker, jail guard, bus driver, truck driver,” he sees the way ahead: “Here was where I wanted to make my stand musically and search for my own questions and answers. I didn’t want out. I wanted in. I didn’t want to erase, escape, forget, or reject. I wanted to understand. What were the social forces that held my parents’ lives in check? Why was it so hard? In my search I would blur the lines between the personal and psychological factors that made my father’s life so difficult and the political issues that kept a tight clamp on working-class lives across the United States.”

Try reading that passage without thinking of the issues that led to the election of Donald Trump. It’s a connection Springsteen is acutely aware of, as he makes clear in a mid-October 2016 interview with Matt Frei, even while declaring his absolute certainty that Trump is going to lose. But the conviction with which he admits the appeal of Trump’s message to the workers who have lost their jobs (“That’s your life walking away from you”) casts a certain doubt on his optimism about the election.

Election Eve

At the time of the Frei interview, Springsteen expresses little interest in helping out Hillary. My guess is that what finally brought him to the election eve rally in Philadelphia was the devastating hit delivered by FBI director Comey. Although he performed surrounded by a crowd giddy with the prospect of victory, he played and sang his three songs as if he knew better. Unplugged, the anthemic excitement is missing from “Thunder Road,” same with the usually wildly infectious “Dancing in the Dark,” where his laid-back vocal brings out the negatives like “I ain’t nothing but tired,” not to mention “crying over a broken heart” and “little world falling apart.” The third song, “A Long Way Home,” which he introduced as “a prayer for the post-election,” sounded more like prophecy than prayer, if you take “home” to mean the White House.

Bruce at Morven

You can see the Frank Stefanko photograph used for the cover of Born to Run in all its full-scale glory in Bruce Springsteen: A Photographic Journey, which will be at Morven Museum and Garden through May 21, 2017.