He had wanted a guitar to be his pen and sword ever since he first saw Elvis Presley, the scourge of all American parents who thought they had teenagers on a leash, on The Ed Sullivan Show. For him (and his generation), “It wasn’t just the way Elvis looked, it was the way he moved that made people crazy, pissed off, driven to screaming ecstasy, and profane revulsion. That was [the power of] television.” And, as he later recalled, “I had to get a guitar the next day. I stood in front of the mirror with that guitar on…and I knew that that was what had been missing. But then it was like I crawled back into the grave or something, until I was thirteen.”
Like many a baby-boomer, he discovered that big, cumbersome guitar around his neck looked nothing like it did when nonchalantly slung across his hip by a gyrating Elvis, while forming chords with his puny little fingers wore down his skin and sounded nothing like Elvis did: “My little six-year-old fingers wrapped themselves around a guitar neck for the first time, rented from Mike Deal’s Music in Freehold, New Jersey. They just wouldn’t fit. Failure with a capital F. So I just beat on it, and beat on it, and beat on it—in front of the mirror.” He put the guitar aside and went looking for another reason to believe: “I tried to play football and baseball and all those things. I checked out all the alleys and just didn’t fit. I was running through a maze. [But] music gave me something [else]. It was never just a hobby.”
Before he could nail his own manifesto to the doors of perception, though, he had first to reject the faith of his forefathers. By the age of thirteen, he had had enough of the liturgy of lessons he received at the convent school his mother had sent him to. As he put it to Bill Flanagan, recounting this experience, “That very literal translating of the Bible and the belief that, ‘This is it, this is all there is, and don’t try to step outside this thing!’ always seemed a little presumptuous. I [could]n’t see how that sort of arrogance—to believe that you’ve got the inside dope on what the word of God is—would line up with some sort of real spiritual feeling.”
He soon began to show a mile-wide rebellious streak. Initially, when he tried to challenge the authority of the nuns, they demoted him to an infants class and set his fellow pupils on him. So he took off: “I did a lot of running away. And a lot of being brought back…It started when I was in the sixth grade, I was eleven…They’d find me and I’d be brought back that afternoon…I hated [that] school. I had the big hate. I put up with it for years, but in eighth grade I started to wise off.” He finally announced to his parents that he’d had enough of old-time religious education and insisted on attending the local high school. Their reaction suggested he was, if not quite dead to them, a pariah on long-term probation:
Bruce Springsteen: I quit that [Catholic] stuff when I was in eighth grade. By the time you’re older than thirteen, it’s too ludicrous to go along with anymore. By the time I was in eighth grade I just lost it all. I decided to go to public high school, and that was a big deal…It was like, “Are you insane??! You are dirt! You are the worst! You’re a…barbarian!” [1978]
If his parents feared for the soul of the apostate in their midst, worse was to come. At the same time as he lost his faith, Bruce discovered the opposite sex and the true meaning of sin, though it would be some years before he would progress beyond a furtive fumble in the backseat of a borrowed car. After all, we’re still talking 1962. Only presidents got to fuck around. Still, he sensed that there was something more to girls than sharing a slow smooch at the end of an evening at the local Catholic social club. Placing himself back in just such a moment, one night in February 1975, he described to a female journalist precisely what was at stake:
“Okay, I’ve been staring this girl down for hours and I don’t aim my sights too high, if you know what I mean. It’s five to ten, five to eleven, whenever the dances used to end, and a song like this [turns up the radio] would come on. So I start walking across the dance floor, and let me tell you, that is a long walk. Many a night I never made it across. Y’know, I’d start walking and get halfway, then turn back. ’Cause you weren’t asking a girl, ‘Do you want to dance?’ You were asking her, ‘Do you wanta? My life is in your hands! We’re not talking about a dance; we’re talking about survival.’ If she said, No [he curls up in a ball]; but if she said Yes, you were saved. ’Cause man, dancing is more than just holding a girl in your arms.”
But the walls of Jersey’s Jericho did not tumble so easily. As he told a small Boston club crowd one particularly gregarious night in January 1974, “At the parochial school dances—like the [Catholic Youth Organization] things—they had this one woman that would come around and embarrass you, pull you out of your chair and pull you into the middle of the room…And then, when you go back to school on Monday; and the girls would all sit over there, and boys would all sit over here, and you had those little green ties…and green pants.” No wonder he wanted out. There was another problem with the dances organized by the likes of the CYO—the music. It was strictly for squares. And by 1963, he was starting to hear music on his mother’s preferred morning radio station, WNEW, that didn’t sound like it had been recorded in Squaresville, daddy-o:
Bruce Springsteen: We never had a record player in the house, never had records or anything like that, not until I was thirteen or fourteen. But I remember my mother always listened to the radio—she always listened to the AM stations. Elvis was big then, in the early sixties, and the Ronettes, all the Spector stuff, and the girl groups from New York, which is what for me is a big part of my background. The Ronettes, the Shirelles, the Crystals, the Chiffons, who put out a lot of great music at the time. And then the big English thing happened, the Beatles and all that stuff, and the Stones, Manfred Mann…So the music that got me was what was on AM from 1959 to 1965…My roots were formed by then: Roy Orbison; the great English singles bands; the girl groups from New York; Chuck Berry, of course. [1975]
No longer a dead man walking, the teenage Bruce had been saved by the blood, sweat and tears of Spector, Leiber and Stoller. Nor is salvation too strong a word for how he came to feel. Indeed, when on his first English tour he described that Damascene radio experience to England’s preeminent rock critic, Nick Kent. And his choice of words is telling indeed: “The music on the radio gave me my first real reason for being alive…Whenever I heard a new record—now we’re talking about the early to mid-sixties, all that stuff from Elvis to Spector…Tamla, Stax, all the British bands—that music sounded so miraculous that it sucked me out of my surroundings and presented me with this sense of…wonderment.”
However, if it was Elvis who again provided the parameters for further Pop lessons, it was a very different Elvis from the one he had previously seen on Ed’s primetime weekly bulletin. This was the Hollywood Elvis; the one who sang cheesy fare like “Can’t Help Falling In Love,” “Viva Las Vegas” and “Follow That Dream,” not the life-affirming promise of “Hound Dog,” “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Jailhouse Rock.” And though Springsteen would cover all three of these post-army soundtrack songs in the post-River era, it was hearing “the British bands” that banished Movie Elvis from his thoughts.
And once again it took that snake-oil salesman Ed Sullivan to show him the way. For it was on February 9, 1964 that Ed turned over his show to four boys from Liverpool with tight trousers and even tighter harmonies, The Beatles. Just eleven weeks after an assassin’s bullet (or three) snatched away JFK, and seemingly the hopes and dreams of a generation, this fab foursome landed on a distant shore and shook the shifting sands of American youth, for good. Like many a contemporary, a stunned Springsteen had been waiting a lifetime for something like this: “This was different, shifted the lay of the land. Four guys, playing and singing, writing their own material.” Indeed, he would spend the next twenty years trying to create a similar explosion in someone else’s soul:
Bruce Springsteen: The Beatles opened doors…If any stuff I do could ever do that for somebody, that’s the best…Rock ’n’ roll motivates. It’s the big gigantic motivator,
at least it was for me…That’s the real spirit of the music. You have to click that little trigger, that little mechanism. [1978]
The message had a profound effect on an entire demographic, but in the long run most then-kids got on with living the life their parents had mapped out for them, reserving their little rebellions for their nights out dancing or in relationships with unsuitable suitors (a subject the Jersey devil would explore thoroughly at the sessions for The River). But it took the fourteen-year-old Springsteen over, and stayed with him for the next two decades. His reasoning was simple, but profound: “Rock ’n’ roll came to my house where there seemed to be no way out. It just seemed like a dead end street…nothing I wanted to do except roll over and go to sleep, or something. And it came into my house—snuck in, ya know—and opened up a whole world of possibilities.”
He had heard the good news, and a connection with some other shadows who passed across his peripheral vision at the public school he now attended; even if many remained immune to the message he heard in the subliminal signals coming through on his mother’s radio. As schoolmate Toni Hentz told biographer Christopher Sandford: “He was dirt-poor, wore britches [to school] and liked what we still called nigger music. You can imagine how it set him apart.” But if such antipathy affected Springsteen, he quickly learned not to let it show. Because he now had a secret he could call his own: “Music…provided me with a community, filled with people, and brothers and sisters who I didn’t know, but who I knew were out there. We had this enormous thing in common, this ‘thing’ that initially felt like a ‘secret.’”
Make no mistake, though, his (and others’) post-Sullivan epiphany placed him (and them) in immediate opposition with the town elders. Because, like it or not, he was stuck in “a real classic little town…very intent on maintaining the status quo, [where] everything was looked at as a threat; kids were [certainly] looked as a nuisance and a threat.” And the one immediate authority figure he could not avoid on a daily basis was his father, who had gradually seen his own life go down the drain and now thought he saw the mark of Cain on his increasingly willful son. What he actually saw was a grim determination from his galvanized seed that he would not end up like that:
Bruce Springsteen: It wasn’t until I started listening to the radio, and I heard something in the singers’ voices that said there is more to life than what my old man was doing…and they held out a promise—and it was a promise that every man has a right to live his life with some decency and some dignity. And it’s a promise that gets broken every day in the most violent way. But it’s a promise that never ever fuckin’ dies, and it’s always inside of you. But I watched my old man forget that. [1981]
The corrosive effect of witnessing a father’s impersonation of a pressure cooker night after night can only be imagined. In 1995 Springsteen suggested it might have been seeing his younger self staring back at him that actually set his father off: “Growing up, [it] was difficult for my Dad to accept that I wasn’t like him…Or maybe [that] I was like him, and he didn’t like that part of himself—more likely…[But] I was a sensitive kid…[and] for me, that lack of acceptance was devastating, really devastating.” The psychological scars were indelible enough to prompt a series of introductions to “Independence Day” on The River tour that were more intense than the performances of the song itself, perhaps because he had something important to communicate that the song merely hinted at:
“My father was only a little older than I am right now and he’d come home and just sit in the kitchen at night, like he was waiting for something. He’d send away for all these different books like ‘How To Be An Engineer’ or ‘How To Be…’ and try to learn how to do something…But for some reason, it seemed like he could never find that one thing that was gonna make him feel like he was living, instead of just dying a little bit every day. And it seems like in school, instead of trying to show you, help you find your place, they were teaching you stuff that was just to keep you in your place. I remember every day when I was young, I’d watch my parents, and it used to scare me so much that I tried to think of some way that I wasn’t gonna let it happen to me.”
This evidently wasn’t the only thing that scared Springsteen Junior at night. There was also the small matter of his father’s temper. In 1976, on the verge of pouring those feelings into his own compositions, he would perform a song at most concerts that he first heard on his mother’s radio back in the day, which spoke to him in a way that even The Beatles did not: The Animals’ October 1965 single, “It’s My Life.” And he would preface it with a rap that steadily built on a sense of urgency—and implicit violence—layer by layer, line by line, until he would explode into the song itself:
“I grew up in this small town, lived in this two-family house on Main Street. My Pop, he was a guard at the jail for a while, sometimes he worked in a plastics’ factory [or] in this old rug-mill, until they closed the place down…A lot of times he just stayed home…Every night he’d sit in the kitchen, shut out all the lights in the house around nine o’clock, he’d sit there at the kitchen table, used to drink beer all night, smoke cigarettes. I always knew my father’d be sitting there at that kitchen table waiting for me when I came home. Sometimes I’d come in around two in the morning, three in the morning. He’d lock up the front door so we couldn’t come in the front, we used to have to come in around the screen door into the kitchen and I’d stand there in the driveway and I could see him, I could see the light of his cigarette butt through the door…and I’d slick my hair back real tight and hope I could get through the kitchen before he’d stop me. And he’d always wait till I was just about in the living room and he’d call my name. Then he’d start asking me where I was getting my money from, what I thought I was doing with myself. He wanted to know where I was going all the time, and we’d start screaming at each other, and my mother’d be coming in from the front room to try and keep us from fighting with each other, and pretty soon I’d be running out the back door, telling him how it was my life and I could do what I wanted…It’s a hard world to get a break in.”
That rap was performed at a Red Bank show, when one suspects at least one family member was in the audience and knew whereof he spoke, the long-suffering Virginia, the elder of his sisters. Other nights he could be even more explicit, describing how close he and his father came to exchanging blows. One that Dave Marsh claims he heard began with Bruce talking about how his father “used to always come home real pissed off, drunk, sit in the kitchen,” and built up to Bruce expressing just how this made him feel, “I just couldn’t wait until I was old enough to take him out once.” Not that he ever did. Even at seventeen, he was a writer not a fighter. As to whether his father beat the crap out of his young charge, the fortunate son has kept decidedly schtum, though in recent years he has talked about the atmosphere of violence. In 1987, he told Musician’s esteemed editor, “The side of my work that is angry comes from that sense of [a] wasted life; so to a certain degree there’s a revenge motive going on,” a highly curious way of putting it. Later on, he would tend to drop into therapy-speak when suggesting how such experiences infused much of his work, post-Darkness:
Bruce Springsteen: I lived in a house where there was a lot of struggle to find work, where the results of not being able to find your place in society manifested themselves with the resulting lack of self-worth, with anger, with violence. And as I grew up, I said, “Hey, that’s my song….” I still probably do my best work when I’m working inside of those things, which must be because that’s where I’m connected. That’s just the lights I go by. [1996]
If feelings of anger and violence took a long time to manifest themselves in song, he learned to feel differently about himself the minute he picked up an instrument: “When you’re young, you feel powerless…Your house, no matter how small it is, it seems so big. Your parents seem huge. I don’t believe this feeling ever quite leaves you. And I think what happens is, when you get around fifteen or sixteen, a lot of your fantasies
are power fantasies…You don’t know how to channel that powerlessness—how to channel it into either a social concern or creating something for yourself. I was lucky. I was able to deal with it with the guitar.”
After his second Ed Sullivan epiphany, he again picked up that iconic instrument. This time he didn’t look half as dumb, while his fingers could now grip the neck. In fact, he held on for dear life as he set about learning the most important lesson, “Dig yourself.” It was a process that initially led him inward: “When I got the [first] guitar, I wasn’t getting out of myself. I was already out of myself. I knew myself, and I did not dig me. I was getting into myself.” Post-Darkness, he went further, venturing to suggest: “When I started to play, it was like a gift. I started to feel alive. It was like some guy stumbling down a street and finding a key. Rock ’n’ roll was the only thing I ever liked about myself.”
If The Beatles represented the vanguard, by the summer of 1964 there were whole battalions of British beat-groups flying the flag, overwhelming America’s airwaves. And if he quickly learned to embrace The Beatles and the Stones, whose own Ed Sullivan debut in October of that year was equally seismic, he also explored obscurer byways of the British sound. As 1976 covers of “It’s My Life” and “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” explicated, he was a huge fan of The Animals long after “The House of the Rising Sun” closed its doors. In 2004, he was still championing “the class-conscious music of The Animals…I didn’t have a political education when I was young…It was something that, in truth, I [only] came to through popular music.” In 2012 he devoted a large chunk of a keynote speech at South By Southwest to lauding the Geordie lads:
E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Page 2
