Authors: Bruce Springsteen
Tags: #Composers & Musicians, #Personal Memoirs, #Individual Composer & Musician, #Biography & Autobiography, #Music
Born to Run
Born to Run
Bruce Springsteen
Simon & Schuster (2016)
Rating: ★★★★★
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Composers & Musicians, Personal Memoirs, Music, Individual Composer & Musician
Biography & Autobiographyttt Composers & Musiciansttt Personal Memoirsttt Musicttt Individual Composer & Musicianttt
“Writing about yourself is a funny business…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.” —Bruce Springsteen, from the pages of
Born to Run
In 2009, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at the Super Bowl’s halftime show. The experience was so exhilarating that Bruce decided to write about it. That’s how this extraordinary autobiography began.
Over the past seven years, Bruce Springsteen has privately devoted himself to writing the story of his life, bringing to these pages the same honesty, humor, and originality found in his songs.
He describes growing up Catholic in Freehold, New Jersey, amid the poetry, danger, and darkness that fueled his imagination, leading up to the moment he refers to as “The Big Bang”: seeing Elvis Presley’s debut on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. He vividly recounts his relentless drive to become a musician, his early days as a bar band king in Asbury Park, and the rise of the E Street Band. With disarming candor, he also tells for the first time the story of the personal struggles that inspired his best work, and shows us why the song “Born to Run” reveals more than we previously realized.
Born to Run
will be revelatory for anyone who has ever enjoyed Bruce Springsteen, but this book is much more than a legendary rock star’s memoir. This is a book for workers and dreamers, parents and children, lovers and loners, artists, freaks, or anyone who has ever wanted to be baptized in the holy river of rock and roll.
Rarely has a performer told his own story with such force and sweep. Like many of his songs (“Thunder Road,” “Badlands,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “The River,” “Born in the U.S.A,” “The Rising,” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” to name just a few), Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography is written with the lyricism of a singular songwriter and the wisdom of a man who has thought deeply about his experiences.
**
Review
“Astonishing.”
—Vanity Fair
“An utterly unique, endlessly exhilarating, last-chance-power-drive of a memoir.”
—Rolling Stone
“Frank and gripping.”
—David Brooks, *The Atlantic
*
“Intensely satisfying...
Born to Run
is, like his finest songs, closely observed from end to end. His story is intimate and personal, but he has an interest in other people and a gift for sizing them up..”
—Dwight Garner, *The New York Times
*
“Springsteen can write—not just life-imprinting song lyrics but good, solid prose that travels all the way to the right margic...And like a fabled Springsteen concert—always notable for its deck-clearing thoroughness —
Born to Run
achieves the sensation that all the relevant questions have been answered by the time the lights are turned out. He delivers the story of Bruce—in digestibly short chapters—via an informally steadfast Jersey plainspeak that’s worked and deftly detailed and intimate with its readers—cleareyed enough to say what it means when it has hard stories to tell, yet supple enough to rise to occasions requiring eloquence—sometimes rather pleasingly subsiding into the syntax and rhythms of a Bruce Springsteen song."
—Richard Ford, *The New York Times Book Review
*.
“A virtuoso performance, the 508-page equivalent to one of Springsteen and the E Street Band's famous four-hour concerts: Nothing is left onstage, and diehard fans and first-timers alike depart for home sated and yet somehow already aching for more.”
—*NPR
*
About the Author
Bruce Springsteen has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the New Jersey Hall of Fame. He is the recipient of 20 Grammy Awards, the Academy Award, and the Kennedy Center Honors. He lives in New Jersey with his family.
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CONTENTS
7.
The Big Bang (Have You Heard the News . . .)
10.
The Show Man (Lord of the Dance)
14.
Once There Was a Little Steven
22.
California Dreamin’ (Take Two)
27.
The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle
37.
Darkness on the Edge of Town
47.
Buona Fortuna, Fratello Mio
63.
King of New Jersey (Hollywood Days)
75.
Zero to Sixty in Nothing Flat
For Patti, Evan, Jess and Sam
FOREWORD
I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I. By twenty, no race-car-driving rebel, I was a guitar player on the streets of Asbury Park and already a member in good standing amongst those who “lie” in service of the truth . . . artists, with a small “a.” But I held four clean aces. I had youth, almost a decade of hard-core bar band experience,
a good group of homegrown musicians who were attuned to my performance style and a story to tell.