 "A rock star who is proud of son who became a fireman? That's Bruce Springsteen")
BORN TO RUN
A rock star who is proudest of the son who became a fireman? That’s Springsteen
A rock star who is proudest of the son who became a fireman? That’s Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen
Simon & Schuster
528, Rs 799
When Donald Trump held his victory celebration on the night he was elected president, his campaign chose to play You Can’t Always Get What You Want by the
Rolling Stones as his theme song. The choice was significant in two ways. First of all, it was illegal. Mick Jagger and Keith Richard own the rights to the song and have repeatedly objected to the Trump campaign’s theft of their intellectual property. No matter. The Trump people used it anyway.
The second significant thing about the choice of song was that it was also hideously inappropriate. Trump had got want he wanted. Against the odds he had become president of the United States. So why play a song called You Can’t Always Get What You Want?
For many people the sight of a cynical reactionary politician ripping off the music of a rock singer and twisting its meaning recalled a famous precedent.
The first rock star to have his music appropriated for a cause he did not like was Bruce Springsteen. Ronald Reagan stole Born In The USA for his presidential campaign without bothering to ask Springsteen, the copyright holder, for permission.
In Born to Run, his recently published autobiography, Springsteen writes about his reaction to hearing Reagan offer thanks for “the message of hope in the songs of New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen” before playing Born In The USA.
Writes Springsteen: “I declined the compliment paid me by President Reagan. His attention elicited from me two responses. The first was…..” (I suspect Business Standard may bleep out the words so let’s just say that it was an obscenity involving the President’s sainted mother that cannot be repeated in a family newspaper).
The second response was, of course, that the song was used in the wrong context. Reagan didn’t know the difference between rock and roll and the Rock of Gibraltar, so he had probably never heard the song he praised. But far from being a song of hope, Born In The USA was a song born out of anger, frustration and despair, based on the way the US mistreated veterans of the Vietnam War.
But Springsteen is used to being misunderstood: “Records are often auditory Rorschach tests; we hear what we want to hear”.
And perhaps he has spent too much of his life dealing with people who just don’t get it. The success of the 1975 hit Born to Run (from which this book gets its name) led people to see him as some glamorous rock and roll adventurer. (“At last, the world is ready for Bruce Springsteen” roared the posters for that album). And the mega-success of Born In The USA cemented his image as the king of stadium rock.
In fact, as this book reveals, he is a much more complex character. There is an awkward gene somewhere in the family: his father had mental health problems and Springsteen himself has battled depression for much of his life, requiring medication to keep functioning. As much as he likes the way his hit songs have become rock and roll classics, one part of him prefers the dark, brooding, non-rock music he produced on such downbeat albums as Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad.
He came to the politics of song-writing late and his views still echo his working class roots: he is suspicious of politicians, of big business and big money. If he has any role models, it is people like Pete Seeger (whose songs he has recorded) and Woody Guthrie (whose angry protest song, This Land Is Your
Land, was appropriated by the US establishment just as Springsteen’s Born In The USA would be, years later).
Fans of Springsteen’s music will love this massive (over 500 page) autobiography because it deals with the music in detail. It clarifies the legends that have surrounded his musical career. For instance, he confirms that his aggressive manager Mike Appel (with whom he would later fall out) got him a contract with Columbia Records by demanding to see the man who signed Bob Dylan and on the grounds that Springsteen was the next Dylan.
He admits that he tossed off Dancing In The Dark because his producer, Jon Landau, told him that the Born In The USA album needed a hit single. And so on.
Others less into Springsteen and his music might find the book, with its wealth of detail, a little heavy-going. If you have only heard the odd Springsteen song and have no interest in hearing about the genesis of, say, Thunder Road then you will find this book a bit of a bore.
On the other hand, it does offer an insight into Springsteen the man. There is now no doubt that, despite Mike Appel’s early claims, Springsteen is not the next Dylan. Rather, he is the first Springsteen. Unlike Dylan, who has said that he changed his name from Zimmerman to Dylan because he liked the poet Dylan
Thomas and who quotes Rimbaud and now has Nobel Laureate status, Springsteen’s words come from the streets. His greatest gift is to distil the American working class experience and to turn it into rock songs that we can dance to.
Oh yes, he has money now and fame, but at heart he still remains that New Jersey guy who respects people who work with their hands. At the end of this book, he writes about his kids; about his daughter Jessica who is a world class show jumper and his son Evan who has joined the music business.
But he seems proudest of his other son, Sam, who dropped out of college “feeling that he needed to do something with more immediate impact on people’s lives. He became a firefighter, re-entering the blue-collar world I’d known so well”.
A rock star who is proudest of the son who became a fireman? That’s Springsteen. He may now be a millionaire. But he has remained true to himself. And though he now has Gold Records, Grammies and an Oscar, he’s never been blinded by the light.
