Springsteen’s memoir shows writing talent isn’t restricted to songs

It stands to reason that Bruce Springsteen, without help from a co-author, would be more than capable of writing a rocking version of his life story.

For decades, the Boss has been beloved for his brand of narrative story songs. And onstage, he often regales concertgoers with colorful anecdotes before launching into another of his many hits.

But it might surprise some readers to experience the literary chops that Springsteen shows off in Born To Run, his newly released memoir (which just as easily could have been titled Glory Days).

If the guy weren’t such a gifted songwriter, singer and guitar player, we might go so far as to suggest that he missed his calling when he chose music over a career in literature.

Particularly in the first half of the book, Springsteen goes beyond just telling what happened. He writes so vividly about his hometown of Freehold, N.J., and about people in his life, from family to members of his famous E Street Band, that they practically burst off the page and take three-dimensional form.

Springsteen shares all of the requisite tales:

He tells about his musical heroes, from Elvis Presley (“the small part of the world I inhabit has stumbled on an irreversible moment”) to the Beatles (“I first laid ears on them while driving with my mom up South Street, the radio burning brighter before my eyes as it strained to contain the sound, the harmonies, of I Want To Hold Your Hand), to Bob Dylan (“he planted a flag, wrote the songs, sang the words that were essential to the times, to the emotional and spiritual survival of so many young Americans”) to Woody Guthrie (“the subtle writing, raw honesty, humor and empathy that’s made his music eternal”).

He tells the story of composing and recording his signature song, 1975’s Born To Run. Can it really have been four full decades ago? “I wanted to craft a record that sounded like the last record on Earth, like the last record you might hear ... the last one you’d ever NEED to hear.”

He tells the story of forming the “hard-rockin’, history-makin’, earth-shakin’, booty-quakin’, lovemakin’ and, yes, eventually Viagra-takin’ ” E Street Band.

He tells about the genesis of Born in the U.S.A. The song title was lifted from the cover page of a movie script by Paul Schrader (although the Michael J. Fox film was ultimately released as Light of Day). He also expresses his dismay about how then-President Reagan’s re-election campaign co-opted this music, mistaking a Vietnam protest song for something super-patriotic.

And he tells about the glorious fan-boy moment he had in 1988 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, jamming to the strains of I Saw Her Standing There alongside Mick Jagger and George Harrison.

“Look at it like this,” Springsteen writes. “In 1964, millions of kids saw the Stones and the Beatles and decided, ‘That looks like fun.’ Some of them went out and bought instruments. Some of them learned to play a little. Some got good enough to maybe join a local band.

“And tonight, one of those ended up standing between Mick Jagger and George Harrison, a Stone and a Beatle. ... My chances were ONE, ONE in a MILLION, in MANY MILLIONS.”

That last anecdote in particular comes to mind when we point out that Springsteen breaks an unofficial rule about writing one’s memoirs.

The way it’s usually done in a book like this is to open with an I’m-on-top-of-the-world story, then take a moment to whimsically muse, “How did I get from the humble place I started to way up here?” And from there, the author backtracks to a childhood of hunger and hard times but an inner drive to succeed.

Typical Springsteen, he does it his way and he makes it work — in large part because there’s no substitute for an early story as good as the one about getting his first guitar.

“The next day [after seeing Elvis on Ed Sullivan] I convinced my mom to take me to Diehl’s Music store on South Street in Freehold,” he writes. “There, with no money to spend, we rented a guitar. I took it home. Opened its case. Smelled its wood (still one of the sweetest and most promising smells in the world), felt its magic, sensed its hidden power.

“Took a few weeks of music lessons ... and quit. It was TOO [expletive] HARD!”

This story was originally published October 5, 2016 at 5:35 PM with the headline "Springsteen’s memoir shows writing talent isn’t restricted to songs."