Born to Run, by Bruce Springsteen, Simon & Schuster, 510 pages, $39.99
Early this summer, while performing at the AccorHotels Arena in Paris, Bruce Springsteen was plunged into darkness. During a performance of Ramrod, the power surged, a fuse blew, and the stadium's lights and sound cut out. Undaunted, the band carried on. Springsteen signed autographs, casually chatted with the adoring throngs, and even joined members of his E Street Band in an impromptu conga line through the crowd.
Who needs lights, amps, speakers or a stable electric current? Bruce Springsteen is his own power source.
It's less an opinion than a matter of fact that Bruce Springsteen occupies the highest echelon of fame and general renown. He's a certifiable American icon. Were they to commission a new Mount Rushmore you could chisel his stony, hunky face right in there, alongside General Washington, the Walmart guy, and a cheeseburger – which is, unsurprisingly, Bruce Springsteen's favourite food.
His is the story of the self-made man, and the man-made myth. It's equal parts Horatio Alger, Paul Bunyan and Elvis Presley. Is it any wonder a publisher would gladly pay him an unfathomable sum, reportedly somewhere around the $10-million mark, to tell it?
Bruce Springsteen performs at the 9th Annual Stand Up For Heroes event in New York in 2015.
Greg Allen/Greg Allen/Invision/AP
The question of whether Springsteen's long-awaited autobiography "earns" its eight-figure price tag strikes me as ludicrous. Unless its pages contain a recipe for an infinitely renewable biofuel that also cures cancer, it's impossible to imagine this, or any book, being worth 10 million dollars.
What most distinguishes this big-ticket celebrity tell-all, beyond the jaw-dropping advance and the calibre of the celebrity, is the quality of the writing. Completed sans ghostwriter, over the course of seven years, Born To Run cements Springsteen's status as one of pop's premiere observationalists, attuned as much to the fine details of American life as the mythic-seeming meanings that hide inside them.
Early on, he paints a picture of his working-class, Irish-Italian New Jersey hometown as something out of The Sopranos, a place of "olive-skinned beauties, belly-busting husbands and the thick Jersey accent of my Italian brothers and sisters wafting through the air on cigar smoke." Later, he describes the severe depressions and corresponding crying jags that befall him in his 60s: "Every meaningless thing becomes the subject of a world-shattering existential crisis filling me with an awful profound foreboding and sadness." It's the sort of writing that feels true. And not only to Springsteen's personal experiences as a megamillionaire entertainer, but to life itself.
Such a feeling radiates through Born To Run. It's not only a good, readable, page-turning autobiography, but a Major Work. Because it is, in ways both knowing and not, engaged with the looming, unruly idea of America Itself. Bruce Springsteen is, after all, as American as apple pie and blue jeans and wanton gun violence. If he didn't exist, America would have to invent him. And so his long-form deep-delve into his own psychology offers, I think, persuasive insights into something like the collective American psyche – the nation's shared myths, values and neuroses.
In this photo released by Shorefire Media, a young Bruce Springsteen performs at New York City’s Bottom Line in 1975.
PETER CUNNINGHAM/AP
Springsteen uses the word "Machiavellian" in Born To Run. Although not in reference to himself. He's talking about rock 'n' roll managers, long depicted as the superstar's uneasy ally and music's necessary evil. Niccolo Machiavelli wrote the literal book on necessary evils. His Renaissance-era governance how-to, The Prince, helped normalize immorality as business-as-usual when it comes to the dirty work of running the state.
Springsteen casts early manager Mike Appel as such a conniving wheeler-dealer. As soon as he saw a manager trying to exert unnecessary sway over his career, he became edgy. "I was motivated by powerful, internal forces to determine the arc of my work and the life I was going to lead," he writes. "I'd let you help me, I'd need your help, but I needed the certainty of being firmly in control."
Throughout Born To Run, Springsteen reveals his own crudely Machiavellian tendencies. He's un-shy, even proud, about his "overweening need for control," especially in matters of music and performance. There's a reason it's "Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band." There's a reason he's the Boss.
"Democracy in rock bands," Springsteen writes, "is often a ticking time bomb." The E Street Band is not a by-the-band-for-the-band. Springsteen calls it a "benevolent dictatorship." And so Springsteen is, in his own terms, a kind of old school enlightened despot in the Machiavellian mould. This well-meaning tyranny defines Springsteen's performances, his public persona, his image and iconography. It is the very essence of his appeal.
If Elvis, who grew corpulent on pills and fried peanut-butter sandwiches before dying on the toilet a bloated grotesque, was America's pop King, then Springsteen, calculating and charismatic, exacting and absolutist to the last, is its Prince.
Detail of photo of Bruce Springsteen by Eric Meola
In 1974, on the edge of superstardom, Springsteen laid out his approach to songwriting and performing to Melody Maker magazine. "You can't conform to the formula of always giving the audience what it wants," he explained, "or you're killing yourself and you're killing the audience. Because they don't really want it either. Just because they respond to something doesn't mean they want it."
Compare this to the famous declaration of Joseph II of Austria, sovereign of the Holy Roman Empire, head of the house of Habsburg-Lorraine, and proponent of enlightened absolutism: "Everything for the people. Nothing by the people."
Born To Run offers some perfunctory, unconvincing overtures to the idea of the rock star being beholden to his audience, and the idea of a concert (at whatever scale) as some grand coming-together that dissolves differences between everyone in attendance. Yet more frequently, the author unashamedly explains that the core of his appeal is not breaking down the barriers between a guy playing packed-out hockey rinks and the people who pay $100 to see him, but simply making those people forget that those barriers exist. In his introduction, Springsteen says his professional mission is "to provide proof of life to that ever elusive, never completely believable 'us.' " He calls this his "magic trick."
For Springsteen, there's no grand communion of rock 'n' roll. There's no "us." There's only the Boss, and his staff. Still he presents an image of "working for the Man," even though he is the Man. On stage he sweats and smiles and struts around, visibly toiling. His singing voice, which he describes as possessing "a bar-man's power, range and durability" but short on "tonal beauty and finesse," is the voice of the people, recognizably (almost cartoonishly) working class and blue collar despite Springsteen's many-many-millions and superduper-star status. Springsteen's a burly bicep peeking out from under the cuffed sleeve of a workaday white T-shirt.
In this picture taken July 9, 2012, US rock singer Bruce Springsteen performs on stage during a concert at the Letzigrund stadium in Zurich, Switzerland.
Walter Bieri/AP
This would all seem much more sinister were Springsteen not compassionate, kind-hearted, and generally nice-seeming. Born To Run does a lot of work of reinforcing its author's image as the epitome of the Good Liberal: lamenting the lack of racial diversity in his fan base, stumping for Obama, setting out on a paragraph-long digression about the need for a more muscular American welfare state. As bosses go, he seems like an okay one. But a benevolent dictator is a dictator all the same.
What's most compelling about the Boss's self-mythologized image as America's heartland pop prince is how eagerly people respond to it, often in ways that escaped Springsteen's overweening control. Take the example of Born in the U.S.A., the flagship single from one of the bestselling albums of all time. Despite being penned as a mournful jeremiad for America's post-Vietnam existential crisis, it was widely adopted as precisely the opposite: a song of hollow, fist-pumping patriotism.
" Born in the U.S.A. remains one of my greatest and most misunderstood pieces of music," Springsteen writes. "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."
Springsteen tried throughout his career to regain control over the narrative of Born in the U.S.A. In the 1990s, he rejigged the song as a snarling acoustic number on Ghost of Tom Joad tour, and seems to have trimmed it from set lists in recent years. Yet the interpretation of these "carefree, less discerning listeners," the ones who made the record a hit, has always makes sense to me.
While the song's verses may indeed be "down," they're set against a pounding backbeat that's practically martial in its force. And Springsteen, ever the student of pop song-craft, can't genuinely feign surprise that it's the catchy choruses that worm their way into listeners hearts and minds. Born in the U.S.A. could very well have the most depressing lyrics in the world. But the musical arrangement, the form, is upbeat, empowering, triumphant.
A similar dynamic plays out with a more recent track like 2012's Wrecking Ball. On paper it's a song about the demolition of the American dream; but sing along to it in the shower and you feel indestructible. Performed by fist-pumping Springsteen and his turned-up-to-11 band, these songs have the appearance of being anthemic and patriotic. And as ol' Machiavelli says, "The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances."
Much the same holds true for Springsteen himself, or any entertainer occupying such stratospheres of superstardom. The content of one or another celebrity may be well and good, even noble. In the case of the Bruce Springsteen presented in Born To Run, we find a man who is talented, hard-working, at some level socially and politically conscious and, it turns out, quite a fine writer of non-fiction.
It's the form of celebrity and star-worship itself that's alarming and corrupt: that twinkle-eyed, steely-jawed charisma that keeps audiences fist-pumping, and chanting, and spending, that draws people toward its centre like a political strongman playing to the basest instincts of the populace. There's something about the way in which we're drawn to the Boss's music, concerts, and $10-million book, that lays bare the cultural and political sway of power, and our toxic obsession with it.
Springsteen's "trick," as he calls it, is just that. It's a temporary suspension of disbelief. It makes us, the vulgar crowds, believe that one of the biggest celebrities in the history of celebrity is just a tramp like us. It's a promise of hope perpetually deferred.
And for better or worse, Born To Run is another example of Springsteen's ability to magically transport us from the dreary realities of modern political life, to restore some glimmer of hope in that decaying idea of America Itself; to light a little spark in the blackness, make us forget the world, and keep us dancing in the dark.
Bruce Springsteen performs at the 12-12-12 The Concert for Sandy Relief at Madison Square Garden in New York on Dec. 12, 2012.
Dave Allocca/Starpix/AP
John Semley is a columnist with Globe Books and author of This Is a Book About the Kids in the Hall.