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Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The revelatory and wildly bestselling memoir by legendary rock star Bruce Springsteen: "Glorious...a philosophically rich ramble through a rock 'n roll life...It's the lyric he was born to write" ( USA TODAY , 4 out of 4 stars).
Over the past seven years, Bruce Springsteen has privately devoted himself to writing the story of his life. The result is "an utterly unique, endlessly exhilarating, last-chance-power-drive of a memoir" ( Rolling Stone ) that offers the same honesty, humor, and originality found in his songs.
He describes growing up Catholic in Freehold, New Jersey, amid the poetry, danger, and darkness that fueled his imagination, leading up to the moment he refers to as "The Big Bang": seeing Elvis Presley's debut on The Ed Sullivan Show . He vividly recounts his relentless drive to become a musician, his early days as a bar band king in Asbury Park, and the rise of the E Street Band. With disarming candor, he also tells for the first time the story of the personal struggles that inspired his best work.
Rarely has a performer told his own story with such force and sweep. Like many of his songs ("Thunder Road," "Badlands," "Darkness on the Edge of Town," "The River" "Born in the U.S.A," "The Rising," and "The Ghost of Tom Joad," to name just a few), Bruce Springsteen's autobiography is written with the lyricism of a singular songwriter and the wisdom of a man who has thought deeply about his experiences.
"Both an entertaining account of Springsteen's marathon race to the top and a reminder that the one thing you can't run away from is yourself" ( Entertainment Weekly ), Born to Run is much more than a legendary rock star's memoir. This book is a "a virtuoso performance, the 508-page equivalent to one of Springsteen and the E Street Band's famous four-hour concerts: Nothing is left onstage, and diehard fans and first-timers alike depart for home sated and yet somehow already aching for more" (NPR).
Author Notes
Bruce Springsteen has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the New Jersey Hall of Fame. He is the recipient of twenty Grammy Awards. Springsteen is the author of bestsellers Texas Pete and Born to Run.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In his long-awaited memoir, Springsteen takes readers on an entertaining, high-octane journey from the streets of New Jersey to all over the world. A natural storyteller, Springsteen commands our attention, regaling us with his tales of growing up poor with a misanthropic father and a mother who had endless faith in people. The Boss delights us with humorous stories of his first guitar-which he couldn't get his seven-year-old fingers around-and his inspiration to become a musician after seeing Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show: "I WANTED... I NEEDED... TO ROCK! NOW!" Once he's hooked, he can't give up this insatiable hunger to rock like Chuck Berry, or the Rolling Stones, or the Beatles; soon he's playing in his first band, the Castiles, and eventually with another band, Steel Mill, opening up for Grand Funk Railroad, Ike & Tina Turner, and Iron Butterfly. Springsteen weaves a captivating story, introducing us to the essential people in his life: Patti Scialfa, Clarence Clemons, Steven Van Zandt, and producer/managers Mike Appel and Jon Landau, among many others. He offers absorbing accounts of the making of each album, and he considers Born to Run as the dividing line between musical styles, as well as the mark of the beginning of his success; he also admits that his bands were never democracies and that he makes the decisions. Most insightful, he reveals his ongoing battles with depression-"shortly after my sixtieth I slipped into a depression like I hadn't experienced"-and his eventual ability to live with this condition. Springsteen writes with the same powerful lyrical quality of his music. (Sept. 27) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Has anyone in contemporary pop culture pursued the rock 'n' roll life with such determination as Bruce Springsteen? He has said he had no choice since he couldn't do anything else. In this long (but not long enough) and entertaining autobiography, Springsteen begins in his hometown of Freehold, New Jersey, on Randolph Street (my street). This is where he grew up. This is where he learned the ways of the world as filtered through his pessimistic father and optimistic mother and the extended family of people descended mostly from Irish and Italian immigrants and a grandmother who spoiled him with unconditional love. He describes the sounds and smells of his New Jersey home as well as the family's constant struggle to get by (We were pretty poor, though I never thought about it). The dark poetry of Catholicism first kindled his imagination and would serve as a source of imagery for many of his songs. He also shares early memories of his father, sitting along with other men in silence in a smoke-filled bar, his powerful legs, a face slightly discolored and misshapen by alcohol, and always suggesting the possibility of violence. His relationship with his moody father became the topic of many of his songs and in these pages he conjures up images of him with equal amounts of fear, anger, respect, and, ultimately, love. But he makes it clear that his father did not understand the young Bruce: When my dad looked at me, he didn't see what he needed to see. This was my crime. From his gregarious mother he learned what it meant to be truthful, kind, and compassionate, and to have pride in yourself and your work. And from her side of the family, he also learned that he loved to entertain. Springsteen discusses with great honesty his own shortcomings, including his long-held fear of relationships, his passive-aggressiveness, and his capacity for emotional cruelty. Like other family members, a black melancholy hung over him. Bouts of depression occurred numerous times over the decades: first when he was 16 and again shortly after his 60th birthday and, most devastatingly, a few years ago. He also makes light of his singing voice. I have a bar-man's power, range and durability . . . . My voice gets the job done. Much here will be well known to most Springsteen fans, but what makes it different, what makes it stand out, is to read Springsteen's own take on familiar events, whether watching Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show, meeting the iconic E Street sax man Clarence Clemons for the first time (It was a dark and stormy night), or his audition for the legendary John Hammond at Columbia Records. He discusses each album in chronological order, as well as the endless touring. But Born to Run is singular, like its author. Anyone who knows Springsteen's songs will recognize his voice: the cadences, the rhythms all recall his unique songwriting style. It is also full of small and big insights. Like his songs, one sentence can reveal everything you need to know about his upbringing (I never saw a man leave a house in a jacket and tie unless it was Sunday or he was in trouble). Despite his seriousness, Springsteen often acts the clown: goofy, self-deprecating, and humble. The memoir shows this side of his big personality in funny little comments and asides. And so many of his sentences sing, such as when he describes the birth of his youngest child, Sam, as having a moon-round kisser, Irish to the bone. As he grew older, he looked like a Joycean urchin off the streets of Dublin. Through the magic of his songs, and now the wizardry of his prose, Springsteen has healed many a heart by reimagining moments from his own life. I'm a repairman, he writes. That's part of my job. Touching and full of light and shadows, Born to Run will bring tears and laughter to even the most cursory of Springsteen fans.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FOR MOST OF us nine jillion Bruce Springsteen fans who've stood through years of his barn-burning, bombs-dropping, ceiling-cracking, ozone-splitting three-hour mega-extravaganza concerts, in all manner of nasty weather and good, who've bought and rebought album after album, who've pored over lyrics, mused over his complex musical and band life, as well as his privacy-shrouded marital, familial and psychic forays, and who've demarked sovereign occasions in our own lives with the strains of "No Surrender" running through our hectic brains - for all of us in his global audience - the perpetual fascination of Bruce (I've never, I give you my word, shouted that out at a performance) is simply: How the hell do you get from Freehold, N.J., to this in only 50 short years? It's reminiscent of the old Maine farmer who, when asked directions to the next town over the hill, allows that you can't get there from here. Really, in Springsteen's or anybody's life, you can't get there from here. But, well . . . here he is. Are we not all present to testify? The Boss's new autobiography, "Born to Run," ought at its heart to penetrate and lay bare this mystery housed in a paradox. And to a great extent it nicely does. Pretty much everybody who encountered Bruce Springsteen over the many years, from the proprietors of the gritty Upstage in '69 Asbury Park, to the iconic Columbia hitmakers John Hammond and Clive Davis, to his ever-loyal, ever-querulous, suffering but indispensable E Street sidemen, to Ronald Reagan, to Pete Seeger, all the way to Barack Obama, has recognized Springsteen as somebody way special - somebody who proved it all night onstage, owned major chops, was a guy you couldn't take your eyes off, and somehow couldn't stay mad at, even though he possessed charmingly immodest valuations of his young abilities, treated his band mates like favored employees and could go all moody, isolated 'n' stuff when things rubbed him the wrong way. You could say the same thing - using different words - about the Morrison brothers, Jim and Van, about Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Janis Joplin, even about Eric Burdon and no doubt the Big Bopper. They are and were all special - in their way. But "special" doesn't get you Bruce Springsteen in front of 90,000 people for 30-plus years in 40 different countries, and still going strong as late as last Wednesday afternoon. People who see art from the outside - from the spectator seats where we're intended to see it - often don't get the making of art very right. Which is a victimless crime. But it's partly because we don't quite get it that hosts of fans are drawn to Springsteen. His work's entirety - the songs, the music, the guitar, the voice, the persona, the gyrations, the recitativos, the whole artifice of "the act," or what Springsteen calls the "sum of all my parts" - is so dense, involved and authentic-seeming as to all but defy what we think we know about how regular human beings make things at ground level. Having been present at many of his performances, I can attest that you're often close to being overwhelmed by what you're hearing and seeing. It's an experience that draws you toward itself - to taste the best and richest stuff, but also naturally enough to find things out, such as if you're being deceived. In "Born to Run," Springsteen seems at his most actual when he's telling us how in fact one gets to be him. He's preoccupied by his own and his music's "authenticity," even though he understands that the act is ever the act. He's close to humble about his musician's "journeyman" status, about how rock music is at heart "escapist entertainment," and concedes that rock 'n' roll itself as a vehicle for ideas (always questionable to me) is in serious decline. But he's also straight up and smart about just what the whole Springsteen enterprise requires. Talent. O.K., that's one. A great band behind you for all the years. Two. But also alarming self-certainty at a preposterously young age ("It is ultimately my stage," "my band," "my will," "my musicians"). Near-feral discipline he's more than willing to impose on self and anybody else in earshot - especially the band. Studious and encyclopedic knowledge of the genre and rock history. An ungodly number of irreplaceable life hours spent practicing, practicing, practicing in small, ill-lit rooms. A ruthless calculation to be nothing less than great, powered by a conviction that greatness can exist and be redeeming. A willingness to imagine himself as a dutiful and grateful avatar of his own adored fan base. An ease with his influences, teachers and heroes. An uncommon awareness of his personal frailties ("About my voice. First of all, I don't have much of one"). A Picasso-like certainty that all art comes out of a "rambunctious gang feeling" born of the neighborhood. And a complex fear of failure mingled with the understanding that success is often the enemy of the very authenticity he's seeking-so you gotta stay on your guard 24-7. Or, at least, from 1967 to now. "If you want to burn bright, hard and long," the Boss writes, "you will need to depend upon more than your initial instincts. You will need to develop some craft and a creative intelligence that will lead you farther when things get dicey." And if that sounds a bit too much like the Gotham Writers' Workshop, add this: "In the beginning I knew I wanted something more than a solo act and less than a oneman-one-vote democratic band. I'd been there and it didn't fit me. Democracy in rock bands, with very few exceptions, is often a ticking time bomb- A moderate in most other aspects of my life, here I was extreme." So much for a band of brothers in that shining rock 'n' roll mansion on the hill. "We all grow up," Springsteen later adds, "and we know 'it's only rock 'n' roll'... but it's not." IT SHOULD BE said, just to keep my own credibility flickering, that all this I've just spun out here is long and well known (probably memorized catechistically) by the great sea of Springsteen faithful. At a recent concert at the Barclays Center - attended by me, my wife, Governor Christie, Steve Earle and 18,000 strangers - the Boss brought a 10-year-old girl up onto the stage and stood by admiringly as she sang, apparently spontaneously, all the verses to "Blinded by the Light" - 547 dizzying words. Which means it's going to be hard for most of the insider intel in "Born to Run" not to be already long-assimilated by the ever-vigilant and protectively gimlet-eyed "Springsteen fan." It's also likely that if you've never heard of Bruce Springsteen - in whatever dark-ops lazaretto you might've been held captive in for four decades - you might not pick up this book at all. Which isn't to say that Springsteen shouldn't have written it - if only as a love letter to his legions; or that the publishers won't be printing money from September on. All Springsteen fans will read this book. Though it's fair to say that "Born to Run's" focus audience is likely us punters in the middle; those for whom "Independence Day," "Wild Billy's Circus Story," "Bobby Jean," "Nebraska," "Streets of Philadelphia," "Hungry Heart" and "Born in the U.S.A." have been the emotive background music - and for some of us the foreground music - of a lifetime, but who as yet haven't dedicated our entire lives to Bruce. We'll feel better, though, when we learn that the Boss can't really read music, that "Born in the U.S.A." and "Nebraska" were recorded at the same time, that Springsteen has a daughter who's a champion equestrian, that he's spent years in therapy, can forgive those who've wronged him, thinks of his career as a "service" performed for others who're like him, and owns a supple sense of humor capable of poking fun at himself (at least when the mood's right). It helps that Springsteen can write - not just life-imprinting song lyrics but good, solid prose that travels all the way to the right margin. I mean, you'd think a guy who wrote "Spanish Johnny drove in from the underworld last night/With bruised arms and broken rhythm and a beat-up old Buick ..." could navigate his way around a complete and creditable American sentence. And you'd be right. Oh, there are a few gassy bits here and there, a jot too much couch-inspired hooey about the "terrain inside my own head." A tad more rock 'n' roll highfalutin than this reader really needs - though the Bruce enthusiasts down in Sea-Clift won't agree with me. No way. But nothing in "Born to Run" rings to me as unmeant or punch-pulling. If anything, Springsteen wants credit for telling it the way it really is and was. And like a fabled Springsteen concert - always notable for its deck-clearing thoroughness - "Born to Run" achieves the sensation that all the relevant questions have been answered by the time the lights are turned out. He delivers the story of Bruce - in digestibly short chapters - via an informally steadfast Jersey plainspeak that's worked and deftly detailed and intimate with its readers - clear eyed enough to say what it means when it has hard stories to tell, yet supple enough to rise to occasions requiring eloquence - sometimes rather pleasingly subsiding into the syntax and rhythms of a Bruce Springsteen song: "So we all made do," he writes about his parents' abrupt move from Freehold to California, in 1969, leaving him behind. "My sister vanished into 'Cowtown' - the South Jersey hinterlands - and I pretended none of it really mattered. You were on your own - now and forever. This sealed it. Plus, a part of me was truly glad for them, for my dad. Get out, Pops! Out of this [expletive] dump." It's the family parts that mean most to me in "Born to Run," the parts that add ballast to Springsteen's claim that when audiences see him they see themselves. Just like we're frequently wrong about how art gets made, we also often can't reliably say where it comes from. We might not stay interested in it very long if we could. And nothing here conveys the whole secret of how you get from Freehold, 1964, strumming a $69 Kent guitar, to the Meadowlands with a Telecaster, standing in front of a multitude. But one place art can come from is a life full of forces-difficult-to-make-fit-together, a life that finds, in art, a providential instrument for reconciling the jagged bits. Springsteen's part Scots-Irish, part Italian family was a caldron of these bubbling forces. A silently brooding, unsuccessful, hostile, misanthropic father ("He loved me but he couldn't stand me"), an enormously loving mother whose first loyalty, however, was to the unhappy husband. Plus, a reticulated, extended, occasionally volatile but doting family of immigrant descendants - grandparents, aunts, uncles, sisters, one greaser brother-in-law - some of them, Springsteen says, with serious mental illness, "a black melancholy," to which he himself falls heir. All of these denizens encamped within a declining, postindustrial neighborhood of poor, rented, cold-water houses, in a "one-dog burg" down in that lost part of the Garden State you never thought about until you heard the words Bruce and Springsteen in that order. You could say of course, and again you'd be right, that this is nothing very remote from a lot of lives. Mine. Yours. Midcentury American Gothic. A "crap heap of a hometown that I loved." But therein lies at least a hint to the magic in the Springsteen mystery: the muscular rise to the small occasion, taking forceful dominion over your poky circumstance and championing your own responses to what would otherwise seem inevitable. "Those whose love we wanted but could not get," Springsteen writes, memorably, "we emulate. It is dangerous but it makes us feel closer, gives us an illusion of the intimacy we never had. It stakes our claim upon that which was rightfully ours but denied. In my 20s, as my song and my story began to take shape, I searched for the voice I would blend with mine to do the telling. It is a moment when through creativity and will you can rework, repossess and rebirth the conflicting voices of your childhood, to turn them into something alive, powerful and seeking light. I'm a repairman. That's part of my job. So I, who'd never done a week's worth of manual labor in my life... put on a factory worker's clothes, my father's clothes, and went to work." Seamus Heaney wrote once in a poem that the end of art is peace. But I think he'd have been willing to share the stage with Springsteen, and to admit that sometimes the end of art is also one heE of a legitimately great and soaring noise, a sound you just don't want to end. RICHARD FORD is a novelist. He teaches at Columbia University.
Guardian Review
This highly anticipated memoir is as rich in anecdote as it is in anguish. From shameful behaviour to life in therapy, the musician lays out his search for meaning Several days into a late-summer road trip across the US, a man in his early 30s stops at dusk to observe a fair taking place in a small Texas town. A band is playing. A couple dance. "From nowhere," the man recalls, "a despair overcomes me ... right now, all I can think is that I want to be amongst them, of them, and I know I can't. I can only watch. That's what I do. I do not engage, and if and when I do, my terms are so stringent, they suck the lifeblood and possibility out of any good thing, any real thing." A few days later, having reached home, he places a call. Bruce Springsteen is making his first appointment with a shrink. "So began 30 years of one of the biggest adventures of my life, canvassing the squirrely terrain inside my own head for signs of life," Springsteen writes at the midpoint of his autobiography, having set a scene that could have come from one of his darker ballads. Already he has introduced the reader to his troubled relationship with a Dutch-Irish father unable to escape a succession of blue-collar jobs -- bus driver, prison guard, factory worker -- in a nondescript part of New Jersey. It is in this harsh, cold, ungiving man that Springsteen locates the origin of his own flaws and fears. "As a boy, I figured it was just the way men were, distant, uncommunicative, busy with the currents of the grown-up world." And angry. At the wheel of a car, "I would use speed and recklessness to communicate my own rage ... with the sole purpose of terrorising my rider. It was gross, bullying, violent and humiliating behaviour that filled me with shame afterward ... Part of me was rebelliously proud of my emotionally violent behaviour, always aimed at the women in my life. It was all straight out of the old man's playbook." Late in life the father is forced to confront full-blown paranoid schizophrenia, but not before he has seen his son march into his house and place an Oscar statuette (awarded for the theme song to Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia) on the table. "I'll never tell anybody what to do ever again," the father declares, and the wounds begin to heal. His mother, whose parents were immigrants from Naples and Sorrento, taught him other lessons: "Truthfulness, consistency, professionalism, kindness, compassion, manners, thoughtfulness, pride in yourself, honour, love, faith in and fidelity to your family, commitment, joy in your work and a never-say-die thirst for life." Some of these qualities would be recognised by fans attending the arena concerts in which a man deep into his seventh decade can still spend close to four hours carrying his listeners on an emotional rollercoaster ride with a generosity, an energy, an intimacy and a gift for drama that none of his contemporaries can begin to match. In a book that bears the hallmarks of having been written by his own hand, Springsteen is particularly good at capturing the exhilaration of his rise to success with the E Street Band, formed as a "benevolent dictatorship" in 1972 after he had grown weary of playing in co-operative groups. "Democracy in rock bands, with very few exceptions, is often a ticking time-bomb," he writes. "If I was going to assume the workload and responsibility, I might as well assume the power. I've always believed the E Street Band's continued existence is partially due to the fact that there was little to no role confusion among its members. My bandmates were not always happy with the decisions I made and may have been angered by some of them, but nobody debated my right to make them." The book is as rich in anecdote and detail as in anguish and doubt. He opens by describing his 10-year-old self accompanying his grandfather to scavenge in rubbish tips for broken radio sets that can be repaired and sold to black workers in summer migrant camps. He talks about his experience as an altar boy with a Catholicism that surely encouraged his underlying sense of guilt and obligation ("I don't often participate in my religion but I know somewhere, deep inside, I'm still on the team"). Tribute is paid to his heroes -- Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones,Dylan and Van Morrison, whose 1968 album Astral Weeks was "the record that taught me to trust beauty" -- and he provides a (mostly) grateful boss's view of his long-term musical sidekicks, notably the late Clarence Clemons, the giant saxophonist whose appearance alongside Springsteen on the cover of Born to Run, the band's breakthrough album in 1975, helped to overlay "a nice little R&B -flavoured outfit" with the aura of myth. He remembers the name of the girl who gave him his first kiss, but anonymises his later intimacies, including the girlfriend who inspired the song "Rosalita", who he believes was the first girl with whom he had successful intercourse -- "though, due to the fog of war, I can't be absolutely sure". There's another who broke his heart in the days before success struck: "A drug-taking, hell-raising wild child who played by nobody's rules. She was a perfect antidote to the control freak in me. She was so alive, funny and broken, I couldn't resist her. She'd been around, knew a few grade-B-level rock stars, brought them down to 'discover' my band, then slept with them." Investigating the possibilities offered by a rock'n'roller's moral compass, he retaliated by sleeping with her friend. It takes him until page 501 to admit -- honourably, if a little deflatingly -- that "I haven't told you 'all' about myself. Discretion and the feelings of others don't allow it." The exceptions to the code of romantic anonymity are his two wives: the actor and model Julianne Phillips, whom he married in 1985; and the singer Patti Scialfa, with whom he took up when the first marriage was faltering and with whom he now has three grown-up children. The break-up with Phillips brings a bleak verdict on his own behaviour: "I dealt with it abysmally." Scialfa is portrayed as a figure of saintly forbearance and sensitivity. Overwriting and repetition sometimes make it feel as though he has chosen to issue the literary equivalent of the four-CD deluxe version, complete with demos and out-takes, instead of the finished album itself. The sentimental stuff about his kids could have been tightened up and the occasional splurges of capital letters and exclamation marks require understanding as an attempt to reproduce on the page the comic melodrama of his on-stage storytelling. His editor might have given him better advice on that, as well as correcting a few mistakes. For a songwriter in whose work automobiles have played such a powerful role, it's strange that a car that starts a journey as a Dodge at the top of a page should mysteriously have become a Pontiac by the bottom. And his British fans will tell him that it's Geno Washington, not Gino. But this is a man who, after watching other rock'n'rollers respond to material success by losing touch with reality, became determined to make his own music "a search for meaning and the future". He gave his services to righteous charities and themed entire albums in response to unemployment in the post-industrial wasteland, the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq war and the delinquency of Wall Street. Perhaps that sense of mission -- alongside sophisticated medication, the company of his family and the sharing of energy with his concert audiences -- is playing a part in repelling the bouts of depression that have continued into his 60s. As he writes: "I was never going to be Woody Guthrie -- I liked the pink Cadillac too much -- but there was work to be done." And still is. - Richard Williams.
Library Journal Review
Whomever critics deem the voice of his or her generation too often eventually fade into the woodwork or struggle to keep pace with the next musical trend. Springsteen has on rare occasion delivered a more pop sound ("Dancing in the Dark") and addressed issues of social justice ("Philadelphia"), but as his autobiography suggests, he has never struggled as have so many artists to maintain relevance and popularity. The Boss's real challenge has been on the personal side, for he, like some in his family, has dealt with depression. Doing a serviceable job at narration, Springsteen delves into his creative process and sheds light on his rise from bar bands to the Super Bowl halftime show. It is an energetic, anthemic ride, worthy of listening to full blast on a thunder road of one's choosing. Verdict Highly recommended. ["A rollicking ride from the glorious and the emotional to the fun and soaring; one of rock's finest and most memorable memoirs": LJ Xpress Reviews 10/28/16 review of the S. & S. hc.]-Kelly Sinclair, Temple P.L., TX © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
FOREWORD I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I. By twenty, no race-car-driving rebel, I was a guitar player on the streets of Asbury Park and already a member in good standing amongst those who "lie" in service of the truth . . . artists, with a small "a." But I held four clean aces. I had youth, almost a decade of hard-core bar band experience, a good group of homegrown musicians who were attuned to my performance style and a story to tell. This book is both a continuation of that story and a search into its origins. I've taken as my parameters the events in my life I believe shaped that story and my performance work. One of the questions I'm asked over and over again by fans on the street is "How do you do it?" In the following pages I will try to shed a little light on how and, more important, why. Rock 'n' Roll Survival Kit DNA, natural ability, study of craft, development of and devotion to an aesthetic philosophy, naked desire for . . . fame? . . . love? . . . admiration? . . . attention? . . . women? . . . sex? . . . and oh, yeah . . . a buck. Then . . . if you want to take it all the way out to the end of the night, a furious fire in the hole that just . . . don't . . . quit ... burning. These are some of the elements that will come in handy should you come face-to-face with eighty thousand (or eighty) screaming rock 'n' roll fans who are waiting for you to do your magic trick. Waiting for you to pull something out of your hat, out of thin air, out of this world, something that before the faithful were gathered here today was just a song-fueled rumor. I am here to provide proof of life to that ever elusive, never completely believable "us." That is my magic trick. And like all good magic tricks, it begins with a setup. So . . . Excerpted from Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
| Foreword | p. xi |
| Book 1 Growin' Up | |
| 1 My Street | p. 3 |
| 2 My House | p. 8 |
| 3 The Church | p. 13 |
| 4 The Italians | p. 19 |
| 5 The Irish | p. 23 |
| 6 My Mother | p. 33 |
| 7 The Big Bang (Have You Heard the News...) | p. 38 |
| 8 Radio Days | p. 44 |
| 9 The Second Coming | p. 48 |
| 10 The Show Man (Lord of the Dance) | p. 54 |
| 11 Workingman's Blues | p. 58 |
| 12 Where the Bands Are | p. 61 |
| 13 The Castiles | p. 68 |
| 14 Once There Was a Little Steven | p. 88 |
| 15 Earth | p. 96 |
| 16 The Upstage Club | p. 104 |
| 17 Tinker (Surfin' Safari) | p. 114 |
| 18 Steel Mill | p. 121 |
| 19 Homecoming | p. 139 |
| 20 Endless Summer | p. 147 |
| 21 Beatnik Deluxe | p. 153 |
| 22 California Dreamin' (Take Two) | p. 159 |
| 23 It's a Bar, You Idiots | p. 165 |
| 24 Onward and Upward | p. 170 |
| 25 Losing My Religion | p. 179 |
| 26 Road Work | p. 185 |
| 27 The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle | p. 190 |
| 23 The Satellite Lounge | p. 200 |
| Book 2 Born to Run | |
| 29 Born to Run | p. 207 |
| 30 Jon Landau | p. 212 |
| 31 Thunder Road | p. 219 |
| 32 Jackpot | p. 223 |
| 33 The E Street Band | p. 234 |
| 34 Clarence Clemons | p. 241 |
| 35 New Contracts | p. 246 |
| 36 Living with the Law | p. 254 |
| 37 Darkness on the Edge of Tom | p. 260 |
| 38 The Drop | p. 263 |
| 39 Downtime | p. 271 |
| 40 The River | p. 275 |
| 41 Hitsville | p. 286 |
| 42 Hello Walls | p. 295 |
| 43 Nebraska | p. 298 |
| 44 Deliver Me from Nowhere | p. 301 |
| 45 California | p. 308 |
| 46 Born in the USA | p. 313 |
| 47 Buona Fortuna, Fratelio Mio | p. 318 |
| 48 The Big Big Time | p. 321 |
| 49 Going Home | p. 338 |
| 50 Regresar a México | p. 343 |
| 51 Tunnel of Love | p. 343 |
| 52 Goin' Cali | p. 358 |
| Book 3 Living Proof | |
| 53 Living Proof | p. 367 |
| 54 Redheaded Revolution | p. 370 |
| 55 Changes | p. 374 |
| 56 LA Burning | p. 377 |
| 57 Going to the Chapel | p. 379 |
| 58 Earthquake Sam | p. 387 |
| 59 "Streets of Philadelphia" | p. 396 |
| 60 The Ghost of Tom Joad | p. 400 |
| 61 Western Man | p. 406 |
| 63 Eastern Woman | p. 415 |
| 63 King of New Jersey (Hollywood Days) | p. 418 |
| 64 Bringing It All Back Home | p. 421 |
| 65 Revival | p. 423 |
| 66 The Rising | p. 437 |
| 67 Wild East | p. 444 |
| 68 The Seeger Sessions | p. 449 |
| 69 Magic | p. 455 |
| 70 Super Bowl Sunday | p. 460 |
| 71 Moving On | p. 465 |
| 72 Wrecking Ball | p. 468 |
| 73 Losing the Rain | p. 471 |
| 74 The Wrecking Ball Tour | p. 476 |
| 75 Zero to Sixty in Nothing Flat | p. 484 |
| 76 Garage Land | p. 488 |
| 77 High Hopes | p. 491 |
| 78 Home Front | p. 497 |
| 79 Long Time Comin' | p. 502 |
| Epilogue | p. 506 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 509 |
| Photo Credits | p. 611 |