Born to Run

by Bruce Springsteen

  The distractions and seductions of fame and success as I’d seen them displayed felt dangerous to me and looked like fool’s gold. The newspapers and rock rags were constantly filled with tales of good lives that had lost focus and were stumblingly lived, all to keep the gods (and the people!) entertained and laughing. I yearned for something more elegant, more graceful and seemingly simpler. Of course in the end, nobody gets away clean, and I’d eventually take my own enjoyment (and provide my share of laughs) in fame’s distractions and seductions, but not until I was sure I could handle them. Then they just become the good life, and if you’ve worked hard for them, they’re there at your pleasure. But for the time being my indulgences were modest, and I worked to make myself aware of fortune’s distorting powers and to temper its hold over me.

  It wasn’t that hard. On the Irish side of my immediate family, saying no was in our DNA. No doctors, no cities, no strangers, no travel, “the world is out there and it’s a monster, waiting to eat you alive. You’ll see.” It’s yes that doesn’t come very easy to us. But I was also extremely protective of my music and what I’d begun to create. I valued it, seriously, almost to a fault, above most other things . . . maybe everything. Still, caution and sobriety have their blessings and their purposes, and for the time being, they had their moment. That wariness, that slight outsider’s perspective, would help me retain the vitality and currency of my own work and keep me in the trenches and close to my audience.

  In my writing I was increasingly interested in the place where “This Land Is Your Land” and “The River” intersected, where the political and personal came together to spill clear water into the muddy river of history. By the end of the River tour, I thought perhaps mapping that territory, the distance between the American dream and American reality, might be my service, one I could provide that would accompany the entertainment and the good times I brought my fans. I hoped it might give roots and mission to our band.

  Beyond this, I personally needed to know where my family—my grandparents, my mom, dad and sisters—fell in the arc of American experience and what that meant for me, the fortunate son.

  FORTY-TWO

  HELLO WALLS

  I returned to New Jersey after the River tour. While on the road, I’d been tossed from my farmhouse and transplanted to a ranch house in Colts Neck, rented sight unseen. The place sat nicely on a reservoir, just a spit from the rope swing my surfing pals and I would visit with our girlfriends on the days the Atlantic lay flat upon the shore. The tour had made sure I finally had my creditors paid and what felt to me like a small fortune in the bank. I’d have to find some new things to worry about. I’d driven strictly vintage automobiles my whole life. My two-thousand-dollar ’57 Chevy morphed into my six-thousand-dollar ’Vette, backed by my 1970 Ford pickup as a daily driver. In the winter I’d load my truck bed with tree trunks for rear-wheel traction and run the icy roads of Monmouth County. Debts paid, career established, all should have been pretty free and easy, but I’m not free and easy. So, I sat around and anguished over whether I should spend ten thousand dollars on a new car. I was thirty-one and I’d never owned a new car in my life. For that matter, outside of studio expenses, I’d never spent ten thousand dollars on myself. I didn’t know anyone who was making more than they could live on, so the money I’d made left me feeling uncomfortably different and somewhat embarrassed. Still, I bit the bullet, rode down to the dealer and drove away in a 1982 Chevy Z28 Camaro. I felt as conspicuous as if I were driving a solid-gold Rolls-Royce.

  A House Is Not a Home

  My ranch house was wall-to-wall orange shag carpet. I know, it was Frank Sinatra’s favorite color, but I could feel a serial killing comin’ on. I decided I needed a permanent home. I found a real estate agent, several real estate agents, and started looking. I scoured the state and looked at everything from the humble to the high and mighty. Every available crib in Central and Western New Jersey was cleared of its inhabitants, invaded and scrutinized. Nothing. They were all either too big, too small, too old, too new, too cheap, too expensive, too far or too close. At first, I felt like, “Well, I just didn’t see anything I liked.” It took a while and some mental probing, but I came to see that NO HOME BUILT BY MAN! was going to hold/satisfy the Jersey Devil. As was my way, I turned the minutest of decisions into full-blown identity issues: What car? What shirt? What house? What girl? I had not mastered the simple principle that to live shy of insanity, to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a cigar needs to be just a cigar.

  At the end of the day, I was simply a guy who was rarely comfortable in his own skin, whatever skin that might be. The idea of home itself, like much else, filled me with distrust and a bucket load of grief. I’d long convinced myself . . . almost . . . that homes were for everybody else. But now, something was fucking with my movie. (That movie would be the one where I play an itinerant musician, unlucky at love but fabulously and unrewardingly talented; a charismatic man whose happy-go-lucky exterior covers a bruised but noble soul. As I drift from town to town, two things regularly occur. One, a beautiful woman always falls helplessly in love with me, a love that I cannot reciprocate due to the fact that my “heart” belongs to the highway. And two, I transform the life of everyone I meet to such a degree that they welcome me into their homes, feed me, lay upon my brow laurels, give me their girlfriends and will “always remember” me. I nod my head in humble acknowledgment, then travel on, whistling, suitcase in hand, along the dusty back roads of America, lonely but free, to seek out my next adventure. I lived that masterpiece for a long time.)

  A winter morning sun shines on a roadkill doe, its fur covered in a pink frost, as I drive toward my “Rosebud”—Freehold, New Jersey. I still spent many hours a four-wheeled phantom on the edges of my birth city. Mine was a pathetic and quasi-religious compulsion. On my visits to my hometown, I would never leave the confines of my car. That would’ve ruined it. My car was my sealed time capsule from whose bucket seats I could experience the little town that had its crushing boot on my neck in whatever mental time, space or moment I chose. Come evening I rolled through its streets, listening for the voices of my father, my mother, me as a child. I’d pass by the old stores and Victorian homes of Freehold and daydream . . . of purchasing a house, moving back, away from all the noise I’d created, bringing it all full circle, fixing things, receiving the blessings of these streets, finding a love, one that would last, marrying and walking through town, my children in my arms, my woman at my side. It was a pleasant fantasy and I suppose I took comfort in the illusion that I could go back. But I’d been around long enough to know history is sealed and unchangeable. 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.

  FORTY-THREE

  NEBRASKA

  Houseless and clueless about where to turn next, I decided to lose myself in the marginally more controllable terrain of my musical life. With the spiderweb of my past gumming up my works, I turned to a world I’d walked through as a child, remained on familiar terms with and heard calling to me now.

  Nebraska began as an unknowing meditation on my childhood and its mysteries. I had no conscious political agenda or social theme. I was after a feeling, a tone that felt like the world I’d known and still carried inside me. The remnants of that world were still only ten minutes and ten miles from where I was living. The ghosts of Nebraska were drawn from my many sojourns into the small-town streets I’d grown up on. My family, Dylan, Woody, Hank, the American gothic short stories of Flannery O’Connor, the noir novels of James M. Cain, the quiet violence of the films of Terrence Malick and the decayed fable of director Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter all guided my imagination. That and the flat, dead voice that drifted through my town on the nights I couldn’t sleep. The voice I heard wh
en I’d wander in a three a.m. trance out onto the front porch of my home to feel the sticky heat and listen to streets silent but for the occasional grinding gears of tractor-trailers groaning like dinosaurs beneath the dust cloud, pulling up South Street to Route 33 and out of town. Then . . . quiet.

  The songs of Nebraska were written quickly, all rising from the same ground. Each song took maybe three or four takes to record. I was only making “demos.” “Highway Patrolman” and “State Trooper” were recorded only once each. “Mansion on the Hill” was first, “My Father’s House” last, with the song “Nebraska” serving as the record’s heart. I tapped into white gospel, early Appalachian music and the blues. The writing was in the details; the twisting of a ring, the twirling of a baton, was where these songs found their character. As in The Night of the Hunter, I often wrote from a child’s point of view. “Mansion on the Hill,” “Used Cars” and “My Father’s House” were all stories that came out of my experience with my family.

  I wanted black bedtime stories. I thought of the records of John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson, music that sounded so good with the lights out. I wanted the listener to hear my characters think, to feel their thoughts, their choices. These songs were the opposite of the rock music I’d been writing. They were restrained, still on the surface, with a world of moral ambiguity and unease below. The tension running through the music’s core was the thin line between stability and that moment when the things that connect you to your world, your job, your family, your friends, the love and grace in your heart, fail you. I wanted the music to feel like a waking dream and to move like poetry. I wanted the blood in these songs to feel destined and fateful.

  Frustrated at blowing all my money on studio time, I sent my guitar tech out to get a recorder, a little less lo-fi than the cassette recorder I usually used to lay down my new song ideas. I needed a better and less expensive way to tell if my new material was record-worthy. He came back with a four-track Japanese Tascam 144 cassette recorder. We set it up in my bedroom; I’d sing, play, and with the two tracks left, I could add a backing vocal, an extra guitar or a tambourine. On four tracks, that’s all you could do. I mixed it through a guitar Echoplex unit onto a beat box like the kind you’d take to the beach, total cost for the project: about a grand. After that, I went into the studio, brought in the band, re-recorded and remixed everything. On listening, I realized I’d succeeded in doing nothing but damaging what I’d created. We got it to sound cleaner, more hi-fi, but not nearly as atmospheric, as authentic.

  All popular artists get caught between making records and making music. If you’re lucky, sometimes it’s the same thing. When you learn to craft your music into recordings, there’s always something gained and something lost. The ease of an unself-conscious voice gives way to the formality of presentation. On certain records, that trade-off may destroy the essential nature of what you’ve done. At the end of the day, satisfied I’d explored the music’s possibilities and every blind alley, I pulled out the original cassette I’d been carrying around in my jeans pocket and said, “This is it.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE

  Nebraska and the first half of Born in the USA were recorded at the same time. I thought I was working on one record but Nebraska’s intransigence to integration soon awakened me to the situation at hand. We toyed with the idea of a double record, the acoustic Nebraska and the electric Born in the USA in one package, but the tonality of the music was just too different, too oppositional. Nebraska had been so funkily recorded, it would not go onto an LP. It would distort, feed back and declare revolution on the common materials of recording. We discussed releasing it on cassette only, then Chuck Plotkin managed to find an old mastering lathe at Atlantic Studios and my lo-fi latest surrendered itself to vinyl. Nebraska entered respectably on the charts, got some pretty nice reviews and received little to no airplay. For the first time, I didn’t tour on a release. It felt too soon after The River, and Nebraska’s quiet stillness would take me a while longer to bring to the stage. Life went on.

  I drifted away from my very lovely twenty-year-old girlfriend and packed for a cross-country road trip. I’d recently purchased a small cottage in the Hollywood Hills and figured I’d winter out west in the California sunshine. This was the trip where the ambivalence, trouble and toxic confusion I’d had volcanically bubbling for thirty-two years would finally reach critical mass.

  The Trip

  It was a ’69 Ford XL with a white ragtop, sea green and Cadillac long. I’d bought it for a few grand and my friend and road buddy Matt Delia, along with his brothers Tony and Ed, fitted it out for the ride. In the midseventies, up in Bergen County, Matt, Tony and Ed owned the last Triumph motorcycle dealership in New Jersey. Introduced to me through Max Weinberg, Matt had set me up with a late-sixties Triumph Trophy, something clicked, and Matt, Tony and Ed became the brothers I never had.

  Matt was now a Goodyear dealer, and the morning of our departure, we hung at the shop, putting the finishing touches on the XL, taking farewell photos and doctoring the all-important sound system. It’d be just Matt and me making the crossing. It was fall; our plan was to run south, pick up some warm weather, drop the top and head west.

  I’m driving. Matt’s suffered a recent breakup with his girl and has fallen on some blue times. He spends most of our first day riding shotgun, arms locked around a huge teddy bear. Matt’s built like a block, with thick arms and forearms, and the sight of those ropes wrapped around a five-year-old’s toy bear emanates bad voodoo for our trip. I try to explain to him the teddy is throwing a kink into our Kerouac On the Road cool, but Matt’s committed to his blues and his bear, so we drive on.

  Matt

  My lifelong friend Matt Delia hails from smack-dab in the middle of a family of fourteen children. A mother prone to the arts and a father in the salvage business have left Matt with the talents and physique of a mechanic and the soul of a poet. For a living, he wrenches day and night on motorcycles and cars and is completely at home both dealing with the gearheads, dirt trackers and random motorcycle gang members who routinely show up at the shop’s front counter in search of his services and discussing music, politics and culture with the likes of me. Car-hoppin’ image aside, I, like many others confronting vehicular trouble, will reach not for the toolbox but for God’s gift to man, the cell phone. But I like to be on wheels, and in the ancient days about which I will soon regale you children, THERE WERE NO CELL PHONES! So, Matt is my partner and hands-on pipeline to the world of automotive freedom. It’s all Route 66, two guys in a convertible, magic as long as one of us can fix this fucker when it unromantically breaks down on the outskirts of nowheresville. Back in the day, when wheels got flat, radiators blew steam, fan belts shredded, carburetors clogged, engine blocks spewed oil and the automobile was a less trustworthy traveling companion, the Delia brothers, sturdy as tree trunks and many times more reliable, provided company and solace on several of the biggest road trips of my life. Matt, the eldest of the three, in his youth, bore a fleeting resemblance to In Cold Blood–era Robert Blake, and in our thirty-five years of friendship, we’ve driven the country together more than a few times. He is my Dean Moriarty.

  Driving

  We travel through South Jersey, across the Delaware Memorial Bridge, through Washington, heading all points south toward the first stop in our pilgrimage: “long-distance information, give me Memphis, Tennessee.” It’s the birthplace of rock ’n’ roll, it’s Elvis, the blues and Beale Street. We make a quick stop at the shuttered Sun Studio, take a few photos out front and travel on. We get nailed in Southern backcountry by a vicious late-summer thunderstorm and head to New Orleans. I’ve made cassette mixes featuring music from every part of the country we’ve planned to pass through. I drive as Matt drifts, and the sound of Memphis rockabilly gives way to Mississippi country blues. Then, before we know it, Professor Longhair’s piano is rolling us into Louisiana and the Big Easy. We spend a day and night in New Orleans, li
stening to sidewalk musicians and wandering in and out of the bars on Bourbon Street.

  We wake early the next morning and head west.

  This is where the country opens up and things get a little weird. I let off some steam at Matt for being momentarily worthless, wrestling away the teddy bear and depositing it in the trunk. Now Matt’s behind the wheel and driving, where he belongs. I’m feeling noticeably unsettled and that’s disconcerting. For years, music and travel have been my faithful companions and surefire medication. As Sisyphus can count on the rock, I can always count on the road, the music and the miles for whatever ails me.

  As we cross the Mississippi River and venture into the wide-open of Texas, it’s beginning to feel a little . . . wide open . . . out here. Our map’s a patchwork of the many towns we visit along the way. Matt, my usually silent partner (the exemplar of a friend you “don’t always have to talk to”), is on an endless, meandering ramble fed by his lovesick blues. He’s diseased, and it could be viral, so I threaten divorce and a return to Jersey. He stops. Together, we move on in silence. Then one evening . . . there is a town.