Born to Run

by Bruce Springsteen

  The Last Town

  In the blue light of dusk, there is a river. By the river, there is a fair. At the fair, there is music, a small stage, filled by a local band playing for their neighbors on a balmy night. I watch men and women lazily dancing in each other’s arms, and I scan the crowd for the pretty local girls. I’m anonymous and then . . . I’m gone. From nowhere, a despair overcomes me; I feel an envy of these men and women and their late-summer ritual, the small pleasures that bind them and this town together. Now, for all I know, these folks may hate this one-dog dump and each other’s guts and be screwing one another’s husbands and wives like rabbits. Why wouldn’t they? But right now, all I can think of is that I want to be amongst them, of them, and I know I can’t. I can only watch. That’s what I do. I watch . . . and I record. I do not engage, and if and when I do, my terms are so stringent, they suck the lifeblood and possibility out of any good thing, any real thing, I might have. It’s here, in this little river town, that my life as an observer, an actor staying cautiously and safely out of the emotional fray, away from the consequences, the normal messiness of living and loving, reveals its cost to me. At thirty-two, in the middle of the USA, on this night, I’ve just exceeded the once-surefire soul-and-mind-numbing power of my rock ’n’ roll meds.

  • • •

  We leave town. The flat night highway rises up and it’s all headlights and white lines . . . white lines . . . white lines. I’ve just pulled a perfect swan dive into my abyss; my stomach is on rinse cycle and I’m going down, down, down. Finally, an hour out, still internally reeling, I ask Matt to go back, back to that last town. “Now, please.” Matt, God bless him, does not ask me to explain. Car wheels slide on roadside gravel, a perfect K turn is executed and we’re on our way back. We travel with the western sky black and pressing in around us, then I see lights. I need this town. Right now, it’s the most important town in America, in my life, in God’s firmament. Why, I don’t know, I just feel a need to get rooted somewhere, before I drift into ether. We reach the outskirts, but it’s now early morning, pitch-black, and no one’s in sight. We slow and park on a side street. I want to cry, but the tears won’t come. Worse, I want to go in the trunk and get the fucking teddy bear. Matt is silent, quietly staring out of the windshield onto a dusty little block that appears bused in from another dimension. I feel a deeper anxiety than I’ve ever known. Why here? Why tonight? Thirty-four years later, I still don’t know.

  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. Maybe I’d cut myself loose one too many times, depended on my unfailing magic act once too often, drifted that little bit too far from the smoke and mirrors holding me together. Or . . . I just got old . . . old enough to know better. Whatever the reason, I’d found myself, once again, stranded in the middle of . . . “nowhere,” but this time the euphoria and delusions that kept me oiled and running had ground to a halt.

  Beyond the hood of the Ford lie what looks like a million miles of uncharted space. There are several street lamps creating pools of light on a desert that passes for curb and front lawn on the street of my epiphany. I study them. A sandy-colored, hungry-looking dog wanders slowly through these small circles of eternity and then, its beige coat turning gray, slips into inky blackness. Matt and I sit . . . my cold sweat slowly drying, my despair subsiding, and looking down into the chasm beneath the dashboard, at the black rubber mat swallowing my boots like quicksand, I mumble, “Let’s go.”

  Two lonely cosmonauts circling the sun-scorched and abandoned Earth, we fire our engines and leave orbit. Our home destroyed, we now have to take our chances in the void. The rest of the trip is uneventful. The road, the free sky, the infinite chain of towns, Matt running the XL, top down, ninety miles per hour, through a cleansing rainstorm, its waters skimming over the windshield and misting down upon my face in the slipstream . . . none of it cures my blues or removes the specter of my evening at the fair. Long ago, the defenses I built to withstand the stress of my childhood, to save what I had of myself, outlived their usefulness, and I’ve become an abuser of their once lifesaving powers. I relied on them to wrongly isolate myself, seal my alienation, cut me off from life, control others and contain my emotions to a damaging degree. Now the bill collector is knocking, and his payment’ll be in tears.

  The night and highway suck us up, the rain clears; I roll down my window and look at ash-gray stars, pop in my “Texas” cassette, and Bobby Fuller’s “I Fought the Law” murmurs at low volume through the XL’s interior.

  FORTY-FIVE

  CALIFORNIA

  Matt and I crawl through near-impenetrable smog, gridlocked traffic, onto an exit ramp off the LA freeway and head east. At Laurel Canyon, we wind our way through the Hollywood Hills to my small cottage. Ten days out of Jersey we step out of the dusty XL and stand amid butterflies and bougainvillea at the wooden door of the first home I’ve ever owned. It might as well be Hearst Castle. My modest new digs, previously home to Charlie Chan’s Sidney Toler, induce torrents of self-loathing in Doug Springsteen’s “number one son” and I want out . . . now. Once inside, I immediately start thinking about leaving. Where am I going? Anywhere, as long as it’s away from this lovely little home that seems to be asking me for something I find so primally disturbing I cannot submit or surrender to it. It wants me to stay . . . and I don’t stay, for this little house or for anyone. That’s for everyone else. I go. The only thing that stops me is I know if I get in the car and make that long trip back east, once my toes tickle the Atlantic, I’ll be driven to turn around and return here, in a never-ending cycle of wheel-spinning madness. With nowhere to go I am locked down inside my own miniature West Coast death row. I flop onto the couch I’ve recently purchased (along with every other stick of furniture in this joint in a two-hour spending spree at the local mall), existentially spent, my emotional well of tricks dry. There is no tour to hide behind, no music to “save” me. I’m face up against the wall I’ve been inching toward for a long time.

  Matt is privy to none of this. My road lieutenant is in the next room, clankily lifting my home weights, awaiting orders that ain’t coming. I return to my bedroom overlooking the foggy LA basin, stare out the window, and I phone Mr. Landau.

  I’ve broached these subjects in several long semianalytical conversations with Jon in the past. He gets the drift. It’s dark and getting darker. My well of emotion is no longer being channeled and safely pipelined to the surface. There’s been an “event,” and my depression is spewing like an oil spill all over the beautiful turquoise-green gulf of my carefully planned and controlled existence. Its black sludge is threatening to smother every last living part of me. Jon advises, “You need professional help.” At my request he makes a call, I get a number and two days later I drive fifteen minutes west to a residential home/office in a suburb of Los Angeles. I walk in; look into the eyes of a kindly, white-haired, mustached complete stranger; sit down; and burst into tears.

  Now, We Begin

  I started talking, and it helped. Immediately, over the next few weeks, I regained some equilibrium; I felt myself steadying, righting myself. I’d danced and driven my way, all on my own (sans drugs or alcohol), to the brink of my big black sea, but I hadn’t jumped in. By the grace of God and the light of friends, I wouldn’t live and die there . . . I hoped.

  So began thirty years of one of the biggest adventures of my life, canvassing the squirrely terrain inside my own head for signs of life. Life—not a song, not a performance, not a story, but a life. I worked hard, dedicatedly, and I began to learn things. I began to map a previously unknown internal world. A world that, when it showed its weight and mass, its ability to hide in plain sight and its sway over my behavior, stunned me. There was a lot of sadness, at what had happened, at what had been done and what I’d done to myself. But there was good news also: how resilient I’d been, how I’d turned so much of it
into music, love and smiles. I’d mostly beaten the hell out of myself and my loved ones, the usual victims. However, I understood what had recently drawn me so far down had also rallied to my defense as a child, had covered my heart and provided shelter when I needed it. For that, I was thankful, but now, those wayward blessings were standing squarely between me and a home and life I needed. The question was, could I tolerate those things? I needed to find out.

  Three Dreams

  I am standing on a rise behind my old farmhouse, the farmhouse where I wrote Darkness on the Edge of Town and lived during the late seventies. If you were standing there today, the ruddy soil would seem to have ceased growing its feed corn and soy and spontaneously sprouted McMansions. But in my dream, I look out over blue skies, green trees and falling farm fields to a distant black stand of woods. A child, perhaps six or seven, is standing at forest’s edge. It’s me. He doesn’t move. He waits, just showing himself. There’s a pause, then my boy raises his head, finds his thirty-two-year-old self in the distance, watches, then smiles. It’s a smile I know from the many faded black-and-white Polaroids in our family album.

  In my dream, I am young and unburdened by the original sins of my tribe. I am not my father’s, not my mother’s, nor my grandmother’s or grandfather’s. I am simply me; I am my own. It’s a sad dream. I have often brought the weight down, hard, on this little boy. I’ve taken over my father’s cruelest work and often done it too well. To do it well, you must mistake and distort your child, your most beloved treasure, into being something he is not, a competitor in the household. Then, when his eyes gaze up, past the garrison belt, beyond the buttons on the olive work shirt, up, until they meet the eyes that hold the answer to “Who am I?,” that answer comes clear and devastatingly hard, and is silently packed away and carried, until its weight overwhelms.

  From my bluff at the rear of my farmhouse, I receive a small wave from my younger self and a smile that signals, “It’s okay . . .” The smile is followed by a soft turn and an unfearful walk back into the trees. I wake. The dream repeats itself many years later, but this time, the boy who steps forward from the trees is in his late teens or early twenties; the wave and the smile are the same. “I’m okay . . .” Then years after, the dream comes again, but this time, I’m greeted by my forty-year-old adult self, staring from that distance back into my eyes. These images of my youth came to me in my dreams, having passed through my crucible, returning to say, “We’re okay. We lived, now it’s your turn” . . . to live.

  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. This is the way it works. The trick is, you can only brighten the forest from beneath the canopy of its trees . . . from within. To bring the light, you must first make your way through the bramble-filled darkness. Safe travels.

  What’s Up, Doc?

  In this way, I slowly acquired the skills that would eventually lead to a life of my own. That was still many tears, mistakes, heartbreaks away and often remains a struggle to this day. The price I paid for the time lost was just that. Time lost. You can blow your fortune, should you be lucky enough to obtain one, and make it back, damage your reputation and, with effort and dedication, often restore it. But time . . . time lost is gone for good.

  I had my winter in California, then returned to New Jersey. I was referred to a Dr. Wayne Myers, an avuncular, soft-spoken man with an easy smile, in New York City. And over many meetings and long-distance phone calls during the next twenty-five years Doc Myers and I would fight many demons together until his passing in 2008. When I was in town, we would sit face-to-face, with me staring into his understanding eyes patiently, painstakingly putting together a pretty good string of wins, along with some nagging defeats. We successfully slowed down that treadmill I’d been running on while never getting it to completely stop. In Doc Myers’s office, I got a head start on my new odyssey; his knowledge, along with his compassionate heart, guided me to the strength and freedom I needed to love things and be loved.

  In all psychological wars, it’s never over, there’s just this day, this time, and a hesitant belief in your own ability to change. It is not an arena where the unsure should go looking for absolutes and there are no permanent victories. It is about a living change, filled with the insecurities, the chaos, of our own personalities, and is always one step up, two steps back. The results of my work with Dr. Myers and my debt to him are at the heart of this book.

  FORTY-SIX

  BORN IN THE USA

  Some books, a few scattered guitar picks, and a harmonica rack jostled with the crumbs of the afternoon’s lunch, crowding my notebook for space. I shifted my weight and sat my stockinged feet up on the carved lion’s-claw base of the oak table I’ve written at for twenty-five years. An antique lamp laid dim light on the only other object on the tabletop, a film script. It’d been sent to me by screenwriter and director Paul Schrader. Paul had written Taxi Driver, and had written and directed Blue Collar, two of my favorite films from the seventies. I strummed a few chords on my sunburst Gibson J200, paged through my notebook, stopped and murmured a verse of a song I had under way about returning Vietnam vets. I glanced over at the unread script’s cover page and sang out its title; I was “born in the USA.”

  I copped “Born in the USA” straight off the title page of that Paul Schrader script. The script was a story of the trials and tribulations of a local bar band in Cleveland, Ohio. The film would later be released as Light of Day, featuring my song of the same name, my polite attempt at paying Paul back for my fortuitous and career-boosting theft.

  The Hit Factory. I counted off; I had lyrics, a great title, two chords, a synth riff, but no real arrangement. It was our second take. A marshall wash of sound poured into my headphones. I started singing. The band watched me closely for an on-the-fly arrangement and Max Weinberg gave his greatest recorded drum performance. Four minutes and thirty-nine seconds later “Born in the USA” was in the can. We set down our instruments, walked into the control room and listened to lightning in a bottle.

  More than ten years after the end of the Vietnam War, inspired by Bobby Muller and Ron Kovic, I wrote and recorded my soldier’s story. It was a protest song, and when I heard it thundering back at me through the Hit Factory’s gargantuan studio speakers, I knew it was one of the best things I’d ever done. It was a GI blues, the verses an accounting, the choruses a declaration of the one sure thing that could not be denied . . . birthplace. Birthplace, and the right to all of the blood, confusion, blessings and grace that come with it. Having paid body and soul, you have earned, many times over, the right to claim and shape your piece of home ground.

  “Born in the USA” remains one of my greatest and most misunderstood pieces of music. The combination of its “down” blues verses and its “up” declarative choruses, its demand for the right of a “critical” patriotic voice along with pride of birth, was too seemingly conflicting (or just a bother!) for some of its more carefree, less discerning listeners. (This, my friend, is the way the pop political ball can often bounce.) Records are often auditory Rorschach tests; we hear what we want to hear.

  For years after the release of my biggest-selling album, come Halloween, I had little kids in red bandanas knocking at my door with their trick-or-treat bags singing, “I was born in the USA.” I guess the same fate awaited Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” around the campfire, but that didn’t make me feel any better. (When Pete Seeger and I sang “This Land Is Your Land” at President Barack Obama’s inauguration, one of Pete’s requests was that we sing all of Woody’s controversial verses. He wanted to reclaim the song’s radical text.) In 1984, add to this an election year, a Republican Party intent on co-opting a cow’s ass if it has the Stars and Stripes tattooed on it, sitting president Ronald Reagan cynically offering thanks for “the message of hop
e in songs of . . . New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen” on a campaign swing through the state and, well . . . you know the rest. Conversely, the first guy I played the finished version of “Born in the USA” for was Bobby Muller, then president of the Vietnam Veterans of America. He entered the studio and sat at the front of the console, and I turned up the volume. He listened for a few moments and a big smile crossed his face.

  A songwriter writes to be understood. Is presentation politics? Is the sound and form your song takes its content? Coming off Nebraska, I’d just done it both ways. I learned a hard lesson about how pop and pop image were perceived, but I still wouldn’t have made either of those records differently. Over the years, I’ve had an opportunity to reinterpret “Born in the USA,” particularly in acoustic versions that could not be misconstrued, but those interpretations always stood in relief against the original and gained some of their new power from the audience’s previous experience with the album version. On the album, “Born in the USA” was in its most powerful presentation. If I’d tried to undercut or change the music, I believe I would’ve had a record that would’ve been more easily understood but not as satisfying.

  Like my previous albums, Born in the USA took time. For the follow-up to Nebraska, which contained some of my strongest songs, I wanted to take its same themes and electrify them. The framework of that idea, along with many of Nebraska’s subtexts, can be found beneath the surface of “Working on the Highway” and “Downbound Train.” These songs both began their lives acoustically on that Japanese Tascam demo recorder.