"Born To Run" book review & fan view about Springsteen

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"Born To Run" book review & fan view about Springsteen

#1523690

Post by elvis4life »

After clicking this link: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/oct-4-baseball-donald-trump-syria-article-1.2816198 , scroll down till you see:

“The Boss rules

Los Angeles: As far as I am concerned, there is no other rock star who has a heart like Bruce Springsteen (“Bruce Springsteen signs absentee note for fifth-grader who skipped school to meet him,” Oct. 2). The man has a heart — a very hungry heart. Not for fame, but for sheer joy to his fans. Monday a a very sad day that I couldn’t even see or get a photo with the big Boss. I truly wish for a miracle that I get to meet Bruce one day. I wish more people would care for people the way Bruce does. I wish him nothing but health, happiness and a beautiful day. A very big die-hard fan — for life! Nancy Kaiser”

Now read the "Born To Run" article:

http://nypost.com/2016/10/01/bruce-springsteens-memoir-reveals-a-troubled-man/

Bruce Springsteen in 1978
Photo: Everett Collection

Bruce Springsteen’s memoir reveals a troubled man

By Billy Heller

October 1, 2016 | 2:54pm

Bruce Springsteen’s memoir reveals a troubled man

When fans experience one of Bruce Springsteen’s epic, four-hour concerts, it’s a joyous occasion. And as far as they can tell, Springsteen himself is having a grand old time telling stories of the Jersey Shore, about blue collar workers and rockin’ out with every fiber of his being. What they don’t see is a troubled man.

In his new memoir, “Born To Run,” the Boss lifts the lid on his anxiety and depression. He reveals how he failed at his first marriage, as well as how pancakes helped make him a better father. Plus he talks about the girl who inspired “Rosalita.”

Here are eight facts he reveals in his book that will surprise some of his biggest fans.

Rosalita is based on the girl who deflowered him

Springsteen in 1978
Photo: Getty Images

While Springsteen says Sandy in “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” is a composite of girls he’d known down the Jersey Shore, he is more specific about the girl behind “Rosalita,” which he calls his “musical biography.”

When he was a teen, he had a girlfriend whose mother threatened to get a court injunction to keep him away from her daughter. That girl, he says, “was a sweet blonde who I believe was the first gal I had successful intercourse with one fumbling afternoon at chez mama (though due to the fog of war, I can’t be absolutely sure).”

His dad had a violent temper

Springsteen in 1984
Photo: WireImage

Springsteen’s father was a troubled man. He held a series of blue collar jobs and suffered from depression. His mother, on the other hand, was a joy full of life and love. “My mother would read romance novels and swoon to the latest hits on the radio,” Springsteen writes. “My dad would go so far as to explain to me that love songs on the radio were part of a government ploy to get you to marry and pay taxes.” It was young Bruce’s mother who rented his first guitar for him (they couldn’t afford to buy one) after Bruce saw Elvis on Ed Sullivan in 1956.

Naturally, Bruce defended his mother in any problem with his father. One night after his father was home from one of his regular evenings at the local tavern, he heard them “violently arguing in the kitchen.” He was 9 or 10 and feared for himself and his mother. He went downstairs to the kitchen clutching a baseball bat in his hands. “I shouted at him to stop. Then I let him have it square between his broad shoulders, a sick thud.” His father turned and just laughed. It was far from a normal relationship.

And that made Bruce shy with women

Springsteen admits in the book that growing up scared him.
Photo: Getty Images

His father’s troubles affected Springsteen’s ability later to have normal relationships. “I’d routinely and roughly failed perfectly fine women,” he writes. “Two years inside of any relationship and it would all simply stop.

“I had many lovely girlfriends I cared for and who really cared for me. It was what they triggered, the emotional exposure, the implications of a life of commitments and family burdens.”

Basically, Springsteen says, he was only comfortable onstage or in the studio or just making music and hanging out with his buddies. Growing up kind of scared him.

He had cold feet after his first wedding

Springsteen performs with Clarence Clemons in 1981.
Photo: ZumaPress.com

But he gave it a go at age 34 when he met actress Julianne Phillips, 10 years his junior. Springsteen describes her as “tall, blond, educated, talented, a beautiful and charming young woman.” He proposed to her just six months after they started dating. “Following our wedding,” he reveals, “I was struck by a series of severe anxiety attacks . . . I tried to hide them as best I could . . . I also had (shades of my pop) paranoid delusions that scared me.”  Then, Julianne was away, filming on location and Bruce was back in Jersey — Patti Scialfa had already joined the E Street Band. “Patti and I got together under the ostensible excuse of working on our ‘duets,’” Springsteen writes. “We hung out, sat in my little bar, talked and pretty soon, I could feel something was on.”  Scialfa, who Springsteen went on to marry after he’d divorced his first wife, was just a couple of years younger than him. They’d know each other casually over the years — encountering each other for the first time when 17-year-old Patti answered an ad Springsteen put in the Asbury Park Press looking for a singer. He told her to stay in school.

He didn’t love partying

Bruce Springsteen performs during his 1985 “Born in the U.S.A” tour.
Photo: WireImage

After he finished recording “The River,” the Boss needed a breather. He was hanging around in Los Angeles and got an invitation to visit the Playboy Mansion. He stayed away. “For me,” he explains, “it wasn’t the sex, it wasn’t the drugs . . . it was the ROCK ‘N’ ROLL.” He wasn’t the type to go the the hippest clubs and make the scene. “I didn’t really think I was that different from my fans except for some hard work, luck and natural ability at my gig. They didn’t get to go to the Playboy Mansion, so why should I?” Of course when he told this to his friends, they demanded, “What the f–k is wrong with you?” He says, “I had my principles . . . but a part of me always wished on occasion I hadn’t followed them so severely.”

After success, he got depressed

Springsteen’s been going to therapy for 30 years.
Photo: Getty Images

After Springsteen bought his first house — a small cottage in the Hollywood Hills once owned by actor Sidney Toller, who played Charlie Chan in the movies — he experienced what he calls “an event . . . depression is spewing like an oil spill . . .”

On advice from his pal and manager Jon Landau he sought professional help. At the Los Angeles office of a therapist, Sprinsteen writes, “I walk in; look into the eyes of a kindly, white-haired, mustached, complete stranger; sit down; and burst into tears.” This beginning of 30 years of therapy helped.

Pills were the solution

Springsteen says he’s been taking antidepressants for the last 12 to 15 years.
Photo: AP

The anxiety, moods and depression never left entirely. And not long after Springsteen turned 60, he experienced depression that lasted for a year and a half. During a depression, he writes, “I can be cruel . . .” And he also experienced lengthy periods when almost anything would set him into uncontrollable weeping. He reveals he’s been taking antidepressants for the last 12 to 15 years. “They work,” he says. “the worst of my destructive behavior curtails itself and my humanity returns.”

He’d be a great cook at a diner

Springsteen performs in Paris in July.
Photo: Getty Images

After the Bruce and Patti had children (Evan, Jessica and Sam), he says he still kept “musician’s hours” — to bed at 4 a.m. or so, awake after noon. That worked when the kids were little; he could take the nighttime-parent shift. But when they no longer needed him at night, the parenting burden fell more on Patti. She told Bruce that morning was when the kids needed him the most.

“Born To Run” by Bruce Springsteen (Simon & Schuster)

The next morning he somehow managed to get up at 7 and into the kitchen. “What do I do?” he asked his wife.

She told him to make pancakes. He wasn’t sure. “I’d never made anything but music my entire life. I . . . I . . . I . . . don’t know how!”

After she told him to “learn,” Springsteen asked the family’s cook at the time for a recipe. “After some early cementlike results,” he says, “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.”




r&b

Re: "Born To Run" book review & fan view about Springsteen

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Post by r&b »

Bruce has done his book tour in the USA. Has signed thousands of books and posed for photos with thousands of fans. The man really does give his all.



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Mike C
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Re: "Born To Run" book review & fan view about Springsteen

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Post by Mike C »

r&b wrote:Bruce has done his book tour in the USA. Has signed thousands of books and posed for photos with thousands of fans. The man really does give his all.

Yes, he does. I met him on 9/27 in Freehold at the first signing. He even paid for our parking. Nice guy!


"You go to school. I'm going out to make a buck!"
Elvis as Danny Fisher


r&b

Re: "Born To Run" book review & fan view about Springsteen

#1524358

Post by r&b »

Mike C wrote:
r&b wrote:Bruce has done his book tour in the USA. Has signed thousands of books and posed for photos with thousands of fans. The man really does give his all.

Yes, he does. I met him on 9/27 in Freehold at the first signing. He even paid for our parking. Nice guy!
Good for you. I missed out for the NJ & NY store tickets but was able to get a pre-order in to Barnes & Noble for the deluxe signed edition. Just arrived a few days ago



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Mike C
Posts: 9728
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Re: "Born To Run" book review & fan view about Springsteen

#1524359

Post by Mike C »

r&b wrote:
Mike C wrote:
r&b wrote:Bruce has done his book tour in the USA. Has signed thousands of books and posed for photos with thousands of fans. The man really does give his all.

Yes, he does. I met him on 9/27 in Freehold at the first signing. He even paid for our parking. Nice guy!
Good for you. I missed out for the NJ & NY store tickets but was able to get a pre-order in to Barnes & Noble for the deluxe signed edition. Just arrived a few days ago
What do you think of it?


"You go to school. I'm going out to make a buck!"
Elvis as Danny Fisher


r&b

Re: "Born To Run" book review & fan view about Springsteen

#1524365

Post by r&b »

Mike C wrote:
r&b wrote:
Mike C wrote:
r&b wrote:Bruce has done his book tour in the USA. Has signed thousands of books and posed for photos with thousands of fans. The man really does give his all.

Yes, he does. I met him on 9/27 in Freehold at the first signing. He even paid for our parking. Nice guy!
Good for you. I missed out for the NJ & NY store tickets but was able to get a pre-order in to Barnes & Noble for the deluxe signed edition. Just arrived a few days ago
What do you think of it?
The book? Havent started it yet, Still on the Fogerty book! (whom I met in NJ) Im sure Bruce will mention Elvis . Fogerty did as well as many other early rockers. As for the package, it is beautifully designed in a special box, numbered and includes an encased CD




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Re: "Born To Run" book review & fan view about Springsteen

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Post by elvis4life »

http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/bruce-springsteen-gives-his-life-story-the-boss-treatment-9207881

Bruce Springsteen Gives His Life Story the Boss Treatment

By Nick Murray
Wednesday, October 12, 2016 at 12:30 p.m.

Filip Perai?

The first 37 pages of Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen's enthusiastic, sprawling autobiography, amble through a typical life in suburban New Jersey, with the organizational help of chapters aptly titled "The Irish," "The Italians," and "The Church." Then, what he calls the Big Bang: Elvis Presley performs on The Ed Sullivan Show, and young Bruce, watching on TV at home, seemingly ages twenty years overnight, transforming before our eyes into a hyperbolizing rock 'n' roll hero with unconventional grammar.

"THE BARRICADES HAVE BEEN STORMED!!" he writes, beginning a caps-lock rampage that takes something like four pages to wear off. "A FREEDOM SONG HAS BEEN SUNG!! THE BELLS OF LIBERTY HAVE RUNG...THE REVOLUTION HAS BEEN TELEVISED!!" The next day, he convinces his mom to buy him "the master key, the sword in the stone, the sacred talisman, the staff of righteousness." Yes, she buys him an acoustic guitar. Let no one accuse this man of working with a ghostwriter.

Like his music, Springsteen's writing is earnest, often to the point of cheesiness; like his music, it's redeemed by how much he believes in his message. Divided into three sections, Born to Run takes the form of a country song: Part One ("Growin' Up") describes Bruce's childhood and adolescence; Part Two ("Born to Run") covers his most musically productive years and his attempts at personal independence; in Part Three ("Living Proof"), he marries, returns home, and raises children of his own. But unlike most of the country songs that make it to the radio, Bruce also explores the emotional burden weltering under the surface of this tried-and-true story cycle. Toward the book's end, after his kids go off to school, the avatar of dad-rock is briefly felled by dad issues of his own. His straightforward description of taking Klonopin and crying on the beach will no doubt go miles toward destigmatizing depression for other bottled-up old dudes.

In between such moments of struggle, he weaves about as much music as you'd expect. An accompanying playlist would stretch from "Greensleeves" (the first song he tried to learn on guitar) to Major Lance's "The Monkey Time," the horn-accented soul gem he ripped off — or at least riffed off — to create "The E Street Shuffle." When Springsteen describes his own music, he offers little studio insight, but he speaks eloquently of his ambitions and inspirations. Of "E Street Shuffle," he writes, "I wanted to describe a neighborhood, a way of life, and I wanted to invent a dance with no exact steps. It was just the dance you did every day and night to get by."

Bruce himself begins learning these steps by gigging with local rock bands in the mid-Sixties. Like so many ambitious working-class kids, he's an autodidact, using popular culture to expand his world while trying to figure out how to succeed — and later, what it means to succeed — in someone else's. His favorite records are innocent yet melancholy pop hits like the Drifters' "Up on the Roof." "This music was filled with deep longing, a casually transcendent spirit, mature resignation, and...hope," he writes, "hope for that girl, that moment, that place, that night when everything changes, life reveals itself to you, and you, in turn, are revealed." It's a very Catholic — and very familiar — form of displacement: He wants revelation, and he finds it in music where revelation is promised.

Certainly many Springsteen fans will be able to relate. Almost the entirety of the singer's Seventies output is premised on that idea: that a song about salvation can stand in for salvation itself. This is how we arrive at the anthem that gives the book its title, the closest thing Springsteen has to an Exhibit A. "I wanted to craft a record that sounded like the last record on Earth," he tells us, "like the last record you might hear...the last one you'd ever NEED to hear."

The lead-up to "Born to Run" (the song) is slow, as if to emphasize that the story of Springsteen's life — and, because he's always trying to universalize, your life too — is much more than a single accomplishment. (In fact, only about one-third of the book deals with the period for which the author is best known, the thirteen-year stretch that began with the recording of his debut studio album, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., in 1972 and ended when the Born in the U.S.A. Tour finished in 1985.) We follow him on teenage bus trips to Greenwich Village, into his twenties for a tumultuous gig in which organist Danny Federici topples amplifiers onto charging cops, and through a lot of nights spent sleeping on the beach — as he waits for what's next. Springsteen has always narrated this moment, this sense of being on the cusp of the unknown, as adeptly as anyone in music, telling versions of this story in "The Promised Land," "Night," "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)," and more. When we finally reach "Born to Run," the steady narrative pacing allows us to approach it as a new song by a nervous kid, rather than the obelisk it's become.

And then the story continues, all the way up to the writing of the book itself. If Springsteen loved songs like "Up on the Roof" and "Under the Boardwalk" for the way they "longed for some honest place...somewhere above or below the harsh glare of the adult world," then, slowly, influenced by psychoanalysis, he comes to understand that the adult world may not be that bad after all. With numbers like 1978's "Racing in the Street," a Sixties-style car song doubling as a desperate stagflation ballad, he begins to accept a new artistic mission: ushering the rock of his youth along into middle age. Born to Run shows us just how directly Springsteen's music emerges from his life; in doing so, it provides a hefty clue as to why so many of his fans have brought Springsteen into theirs.

Born to Run
By Bruce Springsteen
510 pp., Simon & Schuster




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Re: "Born To Run" book review & fan view about Springsteen

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Post by elvis4life »

http://www.aarp.org/entertainment/music/info-2016/bruce-springsteen-interview.html

Bruce Springsteen: What I Know Now
The Boss discusses his new memoir, his family ties and his path to mental health
by Bruce Springsteen, AARP The Magazine, December 2016

"If I don't do anything stupid, my body will do everything I need so I can put on the kind of show I did when I was 35. — Greg Allen/AP

Life as an open book

I didn't start writing the book with any grand plans. I thought maybe it would be something for the kids [Evan, 26; Jessica, 24; and Sam, 22]. I took about seven years. I had some ambivalence about whether I really wanted to get into it. I've been pretty private for most of my life.

How well do you know The Boss? Take our Bruce Springsteen quiz and find out!: http://www.aarp.org/entertainment/music/info-2016/bruce-springsteen-quiz.html#quest1

Tight genes

I write about my family and how it affected me. My mother was a tremendous source of positivity and joy through the toughest times. When people hear "Rosalita," they're hearing my mother's spirit. My father gave me another perspective that I've used to write some of my darker material. The person you're distant from, like my father, whose love you want, you try to get close to by emulating. Eventually, I had to understand that something that might be positive in my writing could be destructive in real life.

Jersey state of mind

The first 18 years really shape you forever. It's like a glass of water filled with mud. You can pour clear water in until it appears clear, but there's still mud there.

Battling the blues

When I first started to get help for depression and anxiety, I was very uncomfortable. I was 32. I look back and think, What was all the fuss? Now it's something I don't mind talking about. Therapy has been very helpful, along with psychopharmacological medicines that allowed me to be more effective in my family life and more present in the world. It's been a huge part of my life experience.

Love and marriage

I'd experienced a lot of failure in my early relationships. Patti [Scialfa, the E Street Band singer he wed in 1991] was something very different. She was very smart and very tough. When we got together, we decided this was something we wanted to make work. She had a pure kind of love you couldn't argue with — and I was ready to have something permanent.

Raise 'em up

We never made a fuss over what we did professionally, and the kids grew up to be solid citizens. The house wasn't full of musical mementos. They'd go to the shows when they were young. They were interested for a few songs, then they wanted to go backstage and play video games, which was fine with us.

Still on fire

If I don't do anything stupid, my body will do everything I need so I can put on the kind of show I did when I was 35. It has a lot to do with what I do when I'm not onstage. I work out carefully to the needs of my body. The rest of the time, I try to give it a break.

—As told to Edna Gundersen

Bruce Springsteen's memoir, Born to Run, was published in September by Simon & Schuster.


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