Born to Run

by Bruce Springsteen

When it rains, the moisture in the humid air blankets our town with the smell of damp coffee grounds wafting in from the Nescafé factory at the town’s eastern edge. I don’t like coffee but I like that smell. It’s comforting; it unites the town in a common sensory experience; it’s good industry, like the roaring rug mill that fills our ears, brings work and signals our town’s vitality. There is a place here—you can hear it, smell it—where people make lives, suffer pain, enjoy small pleasures, play baseball, die, make love, have kids, drink themselves drunk on spring nights and do their best to hold off the demons that seek to destroy us, our homes, our families, our town.

One evening my father was giving me a few boxing lessons in the living room. I was flattered, excited by his attention and eager to learn. Things were going well. And then he threw a few open-palmed punches to my face that landed just a little too hard. It stung; I wasn’t hurt, but a line had been crossed. I knew something was being communicated. We had slipped into the dark nether land beyond father and son. I sensed what was being said: I was an intruder, a stranger, a competitor in our home and a fearful disappointment. My heart broke and I crumpled. He walked away in disgust.

Children bring with them grace, patience, transcendence, second chances, rebirth and a reawakening of the love that’s in your heart and present in your home.

“Nobody’s any good, and so what if they are.”

I actually took a shot at the accordion one Christmas, ensuring job security for E Street keyboardist and accordionist Danny Federici forever after. It was impossible.)

Ray remains one of my great guitar heroes, not just because of his musicianship but because he was there, reachable, a tangible local icon, a real man with a life who took the time to pass down what he knew to a bunch of not necessarily promising kids. He was no distant guitar genius but a neighborhood guy with all his eccentricities and foibles on view who taught you that with a little help, timely mentoring and the right amount of work, you might be exceptional.

I’d finally met someone who felt about music the way I did, needed it the way I did, respected its power in a way that was a notch above the attitudes of the other musicians I’d come in contact with, somebody I understood and I felt understood me. With Steve and me, from the beginning, it was heart to heart and soul to soul. It was all impassioned, endless arguments over the minutiae of the groups we loved.

These were my boys and that summer they saved my life.

My dad would occasionally come to get me but that made matters even worse. In a rage at the inconvenience, he’d haul ass north on Route 9 toward home, pedal to the metal, using our old junker like it was a death-proof weapon of mass extinction.

I had some of the worst food and one of the best meals of my life.

I walked up onto the back porch and through the kitchen door of my house to my father. I called my mom in, told my parents where I’d been, that I’d hid it from them so that they might not worry and out of embarrassment that New York George and my big music plans had come to nothing. I told them I failed my draft physical. My dad, who often dismissively uttered the words “I can’t wait ’til the army gets ahold of you,” sat at the kitchen table, flicked the ash off of his cigarette, took a puff, slowly let the smoke escape from his lips and mumbled, “That’s good.”

The angels of mescal were circling around and informing my being; all the rest was bullshit.

When the music is great, a natural subversion of the controlled message broadcast daily by the powers that be, advertising agencies, mainstream media outlets, news organizations and the general mind-numbing, soul-freezing, life-denying keepers of the status quo takes place.

“Like a Rolling Stone” and “Louie Louie” let me know that someone, somewhere, was speaking in tongues and that absurd ecstasy had been snuck into the Constitution’s First Amendment and was an American birthright. I heard it on the radio.

I was ready to give up some eclecticness and looseness, some of the street party, for a tighter punch to the gut.

It’s not just business, it’s personal. When you came to work with me, I had to be assured you’d bring your heart. Heart sealed the deal. That’s why the E Street Band plays steamroller strong and undiminished, forty years in, night after night. We are more than an idea, an aesthetic. We are a philosophy, a collective, with a professional code of honor. It is based on the principle that we bring our best, everything we have, on this night, to remind you of everything you have, your best.

“Darkness on the Edge of Town” proposed that the setting for personal transformation is often found at the end of your rope.

Most of my writing is emotionally autobiographical. I’ve learned you’ve got to pull up the things that mean something to you in order for them to mean anything to your audience. That’s where the proof is. That’s how they know you’re not kidding.

Two years inside of any relationship and it would all simply stop. As soon as I got close to exploring my frailties, I was gone.

We wanted open room mikes, smashing drums (the snare sound on Elvis’s “Hound Dog” was my Holy Grail), crashing cymbals, instruments bleeding into one another and a voice sounding like it was fighting out from the middle of a brawling house party.

I wanted playfulness, good times, but also an underlying philosophical seriousness, a code of living, fusing it all together and making it more than just a collection of my ten latest songs.

The one thing I did learn was that we all need a little of our madness. Man cannot live by sobriety alone.

You can move on, with a heart stronger in the places it’s been broken, create new love. You can hammer pain and trauma into a righteous sword and use it in defense of life, love, human grace and God’s blessings. But nobody gets a do-over. Nobody gets to go back and there’s only one road out. Ahead, into the dark.

All I do know is as we age the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier . . . much heavier. With each passing year, the price of our refusal to do that sorting rises higher and higher.

We’re all honorary citizens of that primal forest, and our burdens and weaknesses always remain. They are an ineradicable part of ourselves, they are our humanity. But when we bring light, the day becomes ours and their power to determine our future is diminished.

I kept constant company with Mr. Jack Daniel’s and my old man was my only relief, for short of a planet-demolishing apocalypse nothing could ever change his kitchen-table demeanor. As the choppers buzzed overhead, I walked over and took a seat across from him at the brown plank table. He sat, his suit straining his girth, like it’d been sewn on over a rhinoceros; took a long drag on his Camel cigarette; and deadpanned, “Bruce . . . look what you’ve done now.

The only thing eating at me was I knew I’d never made it past a two-or-three-year period in any of my other relationships. Usually, that was when the image of myself, physically and emotionally, would be punctured, and my flaws revealed. I was broken and so sadly punctual, my mom would rag me about it (“Bruce, it’s been two years!”).

After my guitar Armageddon, we went out and proceeded to literally destroy the Ullevi stadium. The jumping up and down and synchronized twisting of so many gonzo Swedes during “Twist and Shout” cracked its concrete foundation. That’ll teach ’em.

In this life (and there is only one), you make your choices, you take your stand and you awaken from the youthful spell of “immortality” and its eternal present. You walk away from the nether land of adolescence. You name the things beyond your work that will give your life its context, meaning . . . and the clock starts. You walk, now, not just at your partner’s side, but alongside your own mortal self. You fight to hold on to your newfound blessings while confronting your nihilism, your destructive desire to leave it all in ruins.

Patti told me I was always looking in “other fields” for companionship. I’d always had a lot of ideas about the who, what, when, where and why of my romantic choices that would prove in the long run irrelevant.

Oh . . . and I won an Oscar. When I traveled north from LA to show it to my folks, it showed up on the airport x-ray and I had to drag it out of my bag. Upon reaching San Mateo, I walked into the kitchen, where my father was still sitting and smoking like a blue-collar Buddha, and plopped it down on the table in front of him. He looked at it, looked at me and said, “I’ll never tell anybody what to do ever again.”

You lay claim to your stories; you honor, with your hard work and the best of your talent, their inspirations, and you fight to tell them well from a sense of indebtedness and thankfulness.

I sat with him in hospice during the last days of April as they brought into his bedroom the machines that would try to keep him alive a little longer. He looked at them, looked at me and said, “Bruce, am I gonna make it?” I answered, “You usually do.” But this time my dad didn’t make it. He would leave in his style, the old immutable presence, his body white and raw, final thoughts known only to my mother.

Suddenly, he said, “Bruce, you’ve been very good to us.” I acknowledged that I had. Pause. His eyes drifted out over the Los Angeles haze. He continued, “. . . And I wasn’t very good to you.” A small silence caught us. “You did the best you could,” I said. That was it. It was all I needed, all that was necessary. I was blessed on that day and given something by my father I thought I’d never live to see . . . a brief recognition of the truth. It was why he’d come five hundred miles that morning. He’d come to tell me, on the eve of my fatherhood, that he loved me, and to warn me to be careful, to do better, to not make the same painful mistakes he’d made. I try to honor it.

We honor our parents by carrying their best forward and laying the rest down.

I learned many a rough lesson from my father. The rigidity and the blue-collar narcissism of “manhood” 1950s-style. An inner yearning for isolation, for the world on your terms or not at all. A deep attraction to silence, secrets and secretiveness. You always withhold something, you do not lower your mask. The distorted idea that the beautiful things in your life, the love itself you struggled to win, to create, will turn and possess you, robbing you of your imagined long-fought-for freedoms.

Love has a great deal to do with humility.

“I can do this. I can bring this, this happiness, these smiles.”

Getting the E Street Band back together

One day I had one of my musicians come to me and explain he would need more money if he were to continue doing his work. I told him if he could find a more highly paid musician at his job in the world, I would gladly up his percentage. I also told him I could spare him the time to search. All he had to do was walk into the bathroom, close the door and walk over and take a look in the mirror. There he’d find the highest-paid musician in the world at his post. I told him, “That’s how it works in the real world.” He then looked straight at me and, without a trace of irony, asked, “What do we have to do with the real world?” At that moment I knew I had sheltered some of my colleagues perhaps a bit too much.

LESSON 1: Never get on a horse named “Lightning,” “Thunder,” “Widow Maker,” “Undertaker,” “Acid Trip,” “Hurricane” or “Sudden Death.” LESSON 2: Take a few lessons.

“We Shall Overcome” for Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger.

Shortly before we were to leave for Louisiana, I thought of the city’s unofficial theme song, “When the Saints Go Marching In.” I was compelled to seek out all the lyrics. I saw most of them had never been heard and that this was a much deeper piece of music than what had been popularly known over the years. I slowed the song down to a meditation on resilience, survival and commitment to a dream that lives on through storm, wreckage and ruin. It was a quiet hymn, the way we presented it, but it was our thanks and our prayer for the city that had birthed blues, jazz, rock ’n’ roll and so much of the most epic American culture.

Danny was a believer in the world as it stands.

As a leader, even of a rock ’n’ roll band, there is always a little of the padrone in your job description, but it’s a fine line. And the members for whom I played that role too fully usually fared the worst.

I had watched Danny fight and conquer some tough addictions. I watched him struggle to put his life together and, in the last decade, when the band reunited, thrive on sitting in his seat behind that big B3. I watched him fight his cancer without complaint and with great courage and spirit. He was a sunny-side-up fatalist. He never gave up, right to the end.

If we didn’t play together, the E Street Band would probably not know one another. We wouldn’t be in a room together. But we do . . . we do play together and every night at eight we walk out onstage together, and that, my friends, is a place where miracles occur . . . old and new miracles. And those you are with in the presence of miracles, you never forget. Life does not separate you. Death does not separate you. Those you are with who create miracles for you, like Danny did for me every night, you are honored to be amongst.

“Ladies and gentlemen, for the next twelve minutes we will be bringing the righteous and mighty power of the E Street Band into your beautiful home. I want you to step back from the guacamole dip. I want you to put the chicken fingers down! And turn the television ALL THE WAY UP!” Because, of course, there is just ONE thing I’ve got to know: “IS THERE ANYBODY ALIVE OUT THERE?!”

The blues don’t jump right on you. They come creeping.

I would do anything to get Churchill’s black dog’s teeth out of my ass.

As Clint Eastwood said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Then forget about them and walk on.