Born to Run

by Bruce Springsteen

  The Honeymooners

  We honeymooned fifties-style in a little log cabin Abe Lincoln himself could have been born in, in Yosemite Park. It was fun, but we also suffered a week of simultaneous and funny anxiety attacks when we looked at each other as husband and wife. Somewhere inside we were still two loners trying something new. We traveled, staying in little roadside motels, listening to our favorite music, as I drank Jack Daniel’s and we played 500 Rummy on the motel lawns as the sun set on the desert across the highway. We did miss our Evan, so five days later we pulled back into our LA digs just as an anonymous sky writer etched a huge heart in the flat blue sky over our home. What timing! We found Evan on a blanket in the grass inside a small courtyard, playing with his grandma Pat. We spent the rest of the afternoon there with our family. At one point I leaned over and, with Evan between us, I kissed Patti. From here on in I wouldn’t be alone.

  Pony Girl

  On December 30, 1991, Jessica Rae Springsteen was born. A red-faced, coal-black-haired baby girl, she popped out with her furrowed brow and fretting hands belying the beautiful young woman and self-confident athlete she’d become. Stubborn to the bone, then and now, while still in her high chair, she would scream and fume if you unbuckled her little safety belt for her. She couldn’t speak! But still, she would sit there, her complexion turning Bazooka-bubblegum pink as her stubby little digits, pulling and tugging, struggled with the buckle and she exerted her tiny, mighty little will to DO IT HERSELF! . . . And she usually would. That’s never changed.

  Patti and I are sitting in our Rumson living room directly beneath Jessica’s bedroom. We hear a thud. I go up and see she’s climbed the wooden bars of her crib and thrown herself out. I place her back in and return downstairs. Five minutes later, thud. I climb the stairs, I place her back in. Five minutes . . . thud . . . I watch as she toddles herself to a single bed on the far side of the room and, struggling, climbs in. The crib is done, for good. That’s the way she rolls.

  When Jess is four years old, Patti and I, searching for some land, visit a local farm on Middletown’s Navesink River Road. A horse is quietly grazing in its small meadow. Jess asks, “Can I go see?” With the owner’s acquiescence, we climb over the fence and walk through calf-high grass, and as we reach the horse, Jess closes her eyes and places her tiny palms flat upon its flanks. She stands there in meditation, offering up . . . a wish? A prayer? Then, “Can I get on?” . . . a nod from the owner . . . okay. I lift her and set her on bareback. She sits quietly, then, after twenty years of five-thirty a.m. mornings, countless barns, hundreds of hooves picked and manes and coats brushed, and thousands of miles traveled throughout the Northeast and Europe, she is an excellent and lifelong horsewoman, an internationally recognized equestrian, defying gravity, taking fifteen-hundred-pound animals five feet into the air . . . a natural. She has no memory of never having ridden.

  • • •

  Patti and I drive Jess one Saturday morning when she is five years old to the Meadowlands, scene of many E Street triumphs. There is a horse show, her first. I tell her, “Jess, when we get there, if you don’t want to do this . . .” We arrive; she slips quickly into her riding gear, then walks, a small elegant figure, down the concrete ramp leading to the arena’s underbelly, where, over the years, we’ve unloaded tons of rock ’n’ roll gear on many a victorious night. In the staging area, she’s lifted onto her pony; the lights in the complex are on full. The floor, usually the province of screaming fans, is covered in eight-inch-deep dirt footing, front to back. Dad moves close and says, “Now, Jess . . .” I receive no acknowledgment whatsoever and I witness for the first time the game face she wears to this day. Patti and I move into the stands and the name Springsteen, Jessica Springsteen, echoes around the cavernous spaces of our hometown stomping grounds. Patti and I sit, arm in arm, dumbstruck. Jess competes in the very beginning of the equestrian competition, the day’s lead-line class. She captures a green ribbon and places sixth. The ride home is quiet as she sits in her riding gear, mysteriously humming. We tell her how well she did, how proud we are. She says nothing. Then, from the musical quiet in the backseat come two questions: “What was the name of the girl who won?” and “What did she do to win?”

  New Band/New Day

  Six months earlier, from our LA auditions, I’d put together an excellent touring band filled with great musicians from a variety of backgrounds. The auditions were a lot of fun and I got a chance to play with the best the city had to offer. Great drummers, bass players and singers filed in, one after another. Afternoons of music stretched on and on and I really learned a lot about what an individual player can and cannot bring. With drummers I found a fascinating rule of law. There were those who could groove and keep time like you wouldn’t believe but when asked to open up in a rock vein, à la Keith Moon (or Max Weinberg), they subtly dropped the ball. Then you had guys who could really rock and hit hard but were slightly time challenged. I found it fascinating that more of these, the very best guys, couldn’t cover both territories, but modern records at the time had moved away from drum fills; click tracks (electronic timekeepers) were in vogue in recording, so most of these players were probably rarely asked for unassisted Al Jackson time threaded with a Hal Blaine–like perfect storm of record-ending drum thunder. Finally, Zach Alford, a young kid with both hard rock and funk experience, came in and perfectly fit the bill.

  The rest of the group consisted of Shane Fontayne on guitar; Tommy Sims on bass; Crystal Taliefero on guitar, vocals and percussion; and Bobby King, Carol Dennis, Cleopatra Kennedy, Gia Ciambotti and Angel Rogers on background vocals. Nice folks, excellent musicians and great singers all.

  We hit the road on June 15, 1992. I enjoyed touring with them and benefiting from their musical experience. We’d sit on the bus and pass the beatbox around, and everyone would take a turn playing their favorite music. Tommy Sims was all Ohio Players, Parliament Funkadelic and seventies funk, music I wasn’t that familiar with; he also brought deep knowledge of the slick Philly soul epitomized by the Chi-Lites, the Delfonics and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, heirs to the Motown hit machine. Tommy gave me a new appreciation for those records.

  Cleopatra Kennedy and Carol Dennis would bring the high gospel. Bobby King was straight, hard soul music. He was a stocky, gospel-trained weight lifter and we spent a good deal of time in a variety of hole-in-the-wall gyms together. He was also one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, a great raconteur, a street philosopher, with a lot of life experience to back it up. We became great friends, still speak on the phone regularly, and I’ve tried many times to persuade him to come back to tour and sing with me. Sometime after the Human Touch tour, Bobby quit singing secular music, recommitted himself to his Lord, his street mission and his family. He works in construction and still lives down in Louisiana, visiting prisons while bringing gospel music and God’s word to those in need. God bless you, Bobby.

  It was a lot of good shows, good company and good times. I felt momentarily free of the baggage I’d collected with my good friends on E Street. Then one day, while playing in Germany to a crowd of sixty thousand, I wandered off to the far side of the stage’s runway. The sound of my new band, projected by tons of stage-front sound equipment, drifted far off into the late afternoon, and the setting sun was turning everything and everyone in the large crowd golden, but there on a green hill, high at the edge of the amphitheater, stood a lone fan, holding aloft a sign that simply read, “E Street.” He was a true-blue loyalist. I waved and smiled. There would be other times and places.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  EARTHQUAKE SAM

  Our life in Los Angeles had settled into a comfortable rhythm when on January 5, 1994, Sam Ryan Springsteen was born. Long seconds passed as I watched him slide into the doctor’s hands, umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, trailing his fleshy tether behind him.

  Sam came forth a little hard-faced character with a moon-round kisser, Irish to the bone. As he grew, with his hair slicked back off h
is forehead, he looked like a Joycean urchin off the streets of Dublin. Twelve days after Sam clocked in at seven pounds, fifteen ounces, the 6.7-magnitude Northridge earthquake shook Southern California. Northridge was just over the hill from our California home. At 4:31 a.m., I woke to hear what I thought was our two dogs in a hell of a fight directly under our bed. The night had been broken by their “early alarm” howling and the mattress beneath us quaking like somewhere under there, two pit bulls were fucking a porcupine. I swung my head over the side of the bed, peered under and saw . . . nothing, empty floor. Then seconds later, the freight train rumble and room-shattering shake of the biggest quake I’d ever experienced hit us.

  I’d been in earthquakes plenty of times: in a high-rise hotel in Japan, in the studio in LA, at my Hollywood Hills house, in the early morning after filming Roy Orbison’s Black and White Night. On that occasion, right around dawn, the house started rocking and I was greeted by the vision of a hysterical Matt Delia at the foot of my bed, naked but for one pillow over his privates and one over his ass. He wanted to run into the street but the quake ceased before Matt’s gnarly physique had a chance to damage the psyches of my LA neighbors. Despite these experiences, the Northridge quake was something else. It seemed to last a long time, long enough for me to make my way to the kids’ room, where three-year-old Evan was up in the middle of the floor, arms outstretched, balancing himself like he was surfing a wave. He didn’t appear frightened, just in wonder, mystified. I snatched him up, then grabbed Jessie, who was standing, awake and crying, in her crib as Patti held Sam, who so far had been managing to sleep through the whole thing. Then we did it all wrong, running down the shaking stairs out of the house and into the yard before it ceased. There, for most of the morning, we camped, as one aftershock after another rolled through, rattling our nerves every twenty minutes or so. Over the next few days, there were hundreds, big and small, and we kept Sam in the kitchen, in a basket, below a solid oak coffee table, near the yard.

  We were visited by friends, some of whom were truly in shock. We heard horror stories from those we knew at the beach, where the sand beneath their homes liquefied to jelly, turning large pieces of furniture into deadly projectiles tumbling and shooting around the room. Our chimney cracked straight through the center of the house and took months to repair. The aftershocks continued night and day. At first we had no television service and so little information we had to phone friends back east to get news about what was going on where we lived. Finally, after three days of shake, rattle and roll, Patti, recuperating from her pregnancy, barely two weeks out of the hospital, mother of a newborn child and two more still in diapers, looked at me and said, “Get us out of here.” I said, “Aw, honey, we can tough it out.” She said, “You tough it out, I’ve got three children to consider.”

  The city was on edge; there had been reports that the Northridge quake could be just a preliminary to something bigger to come! That thought was disconcerting. I did not want my new family to end up the first citizens of the new Atlantis. I pulled the emergency cord. I called Mr. Tommy Mottola, then president of Sony Records, and three hours later, a Sony jet pulled up in Burbank to pick up a valuable rock star and his brood. Patti and I, fortunate and responsible parents, headed back to the Garden State. Adios, Estado Dorado. New Jersey may have the Mafia, street gangs, insane property taxes, belching industrial areas and crazy, crooked politicians galore, but the land beneath all this insanity is relatively stable. That can make up for a wide variety of shortcomings, so with the newly christened “Earthquake Sam” riding the jet stream Nile like the baby Moses in his basket, we flew back to the land of his blood brethren and relief.

  I’d ridden out plenty of earthquakes before with no noticeable aftereffects, but once we were ensconced again in our Rumson home, I noticed a strange trace from our experience. If Patti’s leg moved in the bed at night, if the furnace in the basement turned on with a low house-shaking rumble, my heart rate would spike, and I’d jolt to consciousness, veins filled with adrenaline in a fight-or-flight response to the slightest stimulus. Soon I realized I’d contracted a very mild form of post-traumatic stress. It took me the better part of six months to completely calm.

  Sam developed into a pug-faced little bruiser. Upon becoming frustrated with his older brother’s systematic tortures, he could build up enough steam to let a gut punch go into his intimidating sibling’s solar plexus. Evan, ever the sophisticated sadist, played the affronted gentleman perfectly. Rather than whomping on his overmatched little bro’s head, he would drolly report, “Dad, Sam’s hitting me,” and leave it to the authorities. He could be emotionally rough, but physically he cut his little brother quite a bit of slack. Sam is a good, intelligent soul and as a young child he impressed upon me a great lesson. Initially, Sam was the only child I could not get to respect me or my requests. When it came time to give dad his “props,” he resisted. This angered and frustrated the old-school part of me terribly. Children should respect their parents! It seemed he would not give me my tribute. He would ignore me, disobey me and generally look upon me as a bossy, annoying stranger who held little influence over his young developing soul. Patti interceded. I was behind with Sam, and that’s what he was telling me. He was schooling me on what it would take to be his dad. I wasn’t showing my respect for him and so he was reciprocating. To children, respect is shown through love and caring over the smallest elements in their lives. That’s how they feel honored. I wasn’t honoring my son so he wasn’t honoring me. This worried me deeply.

  Long ago, I’d promised myself that I would never lose my children in the way my father had lost me. It would’ve been a devastating personal failure, one for which I would have had no excuse, and I would not have been able to forgive myself. We began having our children late—I was forty, Patti thirty-six—and that was a wise decision. I knew enough about myself to understand that I was neither mature nor stable enough to parent well at any earlier point in my life. Once they were here, Patti and I knew our children would be our first priority. All of our tours would be booked around school schedules, children’s events, birthdays, and because of Patti’s insistence, planning and dedication, we made it work. I worked hard not to be an absentee dad, but in my business, that’s not always possible and Patti picked up the slack. She also guided me when she thought I was falling short. For years, I’d kept musician’s hours, a midnight rambler; I’d rarely get to bed before four a.m. and often sleep to noon or beyond. In the early days, when the children were up at night, I found it easy to do my part in taking care of them. After dawn, Patti was on duty. Once they got older, the night shift became unnecessary and the burden tilted unfairly toward the morning hours.

  Finally, one day she came to me as I lay in bed around noon and simply said, “You’re gonna miss it.”

  I answered, “Miss what?”

  She said, “The kids, the morning, it’s the best time, it’s when they need you the most. They’re different in the morning than at any other time of the day and if you don’t get up to see it, well then . . . you’re gonna miss it.”

  The next morning, mumbling, grumbling, stolid faced, I rolled out of bed at seven a.m. and found my way downstairs. “What do I do?”

  She looked at me and said, “Make the pancakes.”

  Make the pancakes? I’d never made anything but music my entire life. I . . . I . . . I . . . don’t know how!

  “Learn.”

  That evening, I queried the gentleman who was cooking for us at the time for his recipe for pancakes and I posted it on the side of the refrigerator. After some early cementlike results, I dialed it in, expanded my menu and am now proud to say that should the whole music thing go south, I will be able to hold down a job between the hours of five and eleven a.m. at any diner in America. Feeding your children is an act of great intimacy and I received my rewards, the sounds of forks clattering on breakfast plates, toast popping out of the toaster, and the silent approval of morning ritual. If I hadn’t gotten up, I woul
d’ve missed it.

  Rule: when you’re on tour, you’re king, and when you’re home, you’re not. This takes some adjustment or your “royalness” will ruin everything. The longer I was gone, the more I returned home a drifter and the harder it would be to move myself into the family upon my return. It is my nature to “dissemble” (a.k.a. fuck up), then bring roses, blow kisses and do backward somersaults in a manic frenzy trying to charm my way out of the hole I’ve dug. That’s no good with kids (or a wife either). Patti had counseled me to “do one consistent thing a day with Sam.” I knew he had a habit of waking in the night, wanting a bottle and then coming into our bed, so I started to make these nightly forays with him. Down into the kitchen we’d go, getting the milk, then it was back to his bedroom, where I’d tell him a story and he’d slip peacefully back off to sleep. The whole thing would take about forty-five minutes, but in less than a week, he began to respond, looking for me in the late hour, depending on me. My commitment had been all he was really looking for. Luckily for parents, children have great resilience and a generous ability to forgive. My wife guided me in this and my son taught me.