True Bruce

Springsteen goes deep on the revelations in his new memoir– from his childhood trauma to the future of E Street.

- Brian Hiatt

ENTER BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, WHISTLING. He’s cradling a couple of leather jackets for a photo shoot and looks a touch tired, probably because he was just on a stadium stage outside Boston 36 hours ago, wrapping up the last in a series of four-hour-plus concerts with the E Street Band. A week before his 67th birthday, Springsteen is back on his farm in New Jersey’s Monmouth County, on a cloudless mid-September afternoon lovely enough to justify allegiance to his oft- maligned home state. He has a gray shadow of a goatee, and is dressed as you’d expect him to be dressed: black T-shirt, slightly stretched at the neck; dark jeans; boots. ¶ He’s just trekked over from his actual home to his home studio, housed in a garage like structure made of pristine blond-on-blond wood. It is, overall, a long way from the four-track cassette machine he used to record Nebraska. ¶ The main lounge is filled with memorabilia, most of it devoted to Elvis Presley or Springsteen himself (the couch has a Greetings From Asbury Park pillow, and there are Bruce-and-Clarence out takes from the Born to Run photo shoot on the wall). The room is overflowing with books, many of them music-themed, from Chuck Berry’s autobiography to Gerri Hirshey’s soul history Nowhere to Run to When We Were Good, a study of the Sixties folk revival.

Springsteen just wrote a perfect addition to this collection: his lucid, earthy, anecdote-stuffed autobiography, Born to Run. Along with rock & roll tales (no drugs, some sex, precisely one smashed guitar), it offers a psychological recipe for the creation of a self-flagellating superstar: overly worshipful grandmother; withholding dad who turns out to have been mentally ill rather than just a hard-hat hardass; indefatigable mom who adheres to an “ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive” ethos.