Born to Run: Bruce Springsteen's long-awaited autobiography

Mon, 08/22/2016 - 9:16am by eapearce

Bruce Springsteen fans rejoice! Born to Run, the musician’s long-awaited autobiography, hits shelves on September 27, and you can place your hold on it in the catalog now! Bruce started quietly working on Born to Run in 2008 (not to be confused with the 1975 album of the same name) and has been laboring carefully over it ever since. He announced recently that the book will be accompanied by the release of a companion album, Chapter and Verse, featuring songs from throughout his career, from all the way back to when he played with one of his very first bands, Steel Mill, to performances from his albums of the aughts along with some of his greatest hits from the 1970s and 1980s.

Bruce has never held a job besides being a musician; his storied career began back in the 1960s when he was in high school. His first band, The Castiles, played venues around his hometown of Freehold, New Jersey (“I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud,” he writes), along the Jersey Shore, and in small New York City bars. Bruce remained singularly focused on music from then onward, playing in various bands for years before eventually gathering the exact right combination of friends and musicians to become The E Street Band. Despite his talent, which was obvious to anyone who saw him perform, Bruce’s fame did not come easily. His first two albums, Greetings From Asbury Park and The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, were released to critical acclaim but minor commercial success, and his first successful album, Born to Run, was almost two years in the making (Bruce had so much material for it that he and the band recorded hundreds of songs and debated for months over which ones to cut and which ones to keep on the record). It was really in the 1980s that Bruce was catapulted into superstardom, when he launched the Born in the USA album, tour and era in 1984 and traveled the world blasting the biggest noise imaginable. Bruce is known today for his epic three and four hour performances, something that he’s been doing since he was a teenager. Once, after playing for three and a half hours, he turned to saxophonist Clarence Clemons and asked him of the audience, “Are they still standing?!” They were, and Bruce and the E Street Band played for another hour and a half.

Bruce is lauded for his poetic lyrics that describe the trials, tribulations, heartbreaks, victories and experiences of average Americans. He’s not without his own troubles; he had a difficult childhood marred by family mental illness and he’s struggled with his share of the inheritance of that. His life and career are marked with intensely difficult, solitary periods spent traveling alone or holed up with his guitar somewhere in New Jersey or California. Fans can hope to learn more about the intricate workings of such a simultaneously brilliant and troubled mind in Born to Run: “Writing about yourself is funny business,” he says at the beginning of the book. “But in a project like this, the writer has made one promise, to show the reader his mind. In these pages, I've tried to do this.”

He’s become more political over the years, using his music to make statements about the state of our nation and encourage people to do what they can to make a difference, while still focusing on the heartland America that he identifies with so intimately. “One of the questions I’m asked over and over again by fans on the street is ‘How do you do it?’” Bruce says in the foreward to Born to Run. “ In the following pages I will try to shed a little light on how and, more important, why. The rock’n’roll survival kit [is] DNA, natural ability, study of craft, development of and devotion to an aesthetic philosophy, naked desire for . . . fame? . . . love? . . . admiration? . . . attention? . . . women? . . . 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.”

If you’re not yet a Bruce fan (how could you not be?!) or just want more Bruce in your life (how could you not?!), check out his great 2012 biography by Peter Carlin, Bruce, or listen to his albums on CD (try The River, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and of course, Born to Run) or on vinyl (the AADL has Greetings from Asbury Park, The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle, and Born in the USA all on LP record).