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An Intimate Interview: Beneath the Surface of Bruce Springsteen

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Dec 13, 2018
Category: Memoir

After a year on Broadway, the Bruce Springsteen evenings have come to an end. It’s an amazing show — I saw it in January and reviewed it here — and it’s completely unsurprising that it has made $113 million. On December 15, the show closes; the next day, the film of the show opens on Netflix.

If you’ve read his memoir, “Born to Run,” you know that many of the stories he tells in the show come, verbatim, from the book. [To buy the paperback, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.] Finally, there is a soundtrack recording of the show. [To buy the CD, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]

Would another word be overkill? Yes, if it’s just more fanboy praise. But Michael Hainey, the Executive Director of Editorial at Esquire Magazine, goes deep in a late-in-the-run conversation with Springsteen. Their dialogue is like a therapy session, which is appropriate considering Springsteen’s issues, and Hainey’s — he’s written a memoir about fathers and sons.

The entire interview is well worth your time. [To read it, click here.] What follows is a sample. Hainey starts by exploring the idea that, he believes, has dominated Springsteen’s life: “The central tension of ‘Springsteen on Broadway’ is the self we feel doomed to be through blood and family versus the self we can — if we have the courage and desire — will into existence. Springsteen, as he reveals here, has spent his entire life wrestling with that question that haunts so many of us: Will I be confined by my DNA, or will I define who I am?”

“DNA is a big part of what the show is about: turning yourself into a free agent. Or, as much as you can, into an adult, for lack of a better word. It’s a coming-of-age story, and I want to show how this — one’s coming of age — has to be earned. It’s not given to anyone. It takes a certain single-minded purpose. It takes self-awareness, a desire to go there. And a willingness to confront all the very fearsome and dangerous elements of your life — your past, your history — that you need to confront to become as much of a free agent as you can. This is what the show is about…It’s me reciting my ‘Song of Myself.’”

Hainey finds “the show is also about other tensions: solitude versus love (the ability to give it as well as receive it); the psychological versus the spiritual; the death force versus the life force; and, most of all, the father versus the son. Yes, it is about his struggle to find his true self, his identity. But most of all, it is about his father — and Springsteen’s search to find peace with the man who created him but, in many ways, almost destroyed him.”

“My mother was kind and compassionate and very considerate of others’ feelings. She trod through the world with purpose, but softly, lightly. All those were the things that aligned with my own spirit. That was who I was. They came naturally to me. My father looked at all those things as weaknesses. He was very dismissive of primarily who I was. And that sends you off on a lifelong quest to sort through that…. You have to put together a person from all the stuff that you’ve been handed.”

And yet, despite his tormented relationship with his father, Springsteen took him as a model of manhood. “Like too many of us, however, by choosing to mirror the identity of someone whose absent love he longed for, Springsteen ended up not knowing who he was,” Hainey writes. “He spent much of his life afraid to love or be anything more than an observer. It’s not surprising that he eventually spun out.”

“All I do know is as we age, the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier . . . much heavier. With each passing year, the price of our refusal to do that sorting rises higher and higher. . . . Long ago, the defenses I built to withstand the stress of my childhood, to save what I had of myself, outlived their usefulness, and I’ve become an abuser of their once lifesaving powers. I relied on them wrongly to isolate myself, seal my alienation, cut me off from life, control others, and contain my emotions to a damaging degree. Now the bill collector is knocking, and his payment’ll be in tears.”

Hainey asks: “Do you feel you have, at last, found your true self?”

“You never get there. Nobody does. You become more of yourself as time passes by. . . . In the arc of your life, there are so many places where you reach milestones that add to your authenticity and your presentation of who you really are. But I find myself still struggling just for obvious things that I should’ve had under my belt a long time ago. You know, when I get in those places where I’m not doing so well, I lose track of who I am. . . . The only thing in life that’s sure is: If you think you’ve got it, you don’t have it!”

Hainey asks Springsteen if he has spent his life trying to love that boy his father denied.

“Those were big moments that I had through my analysis. I saw myself as a child and experienced my own innocence and realized, Oh my God, I was so fragile. I was so easily broken and dismissed. My father taught me to hate that person. So it took me quite a while to come back around and make my peace with who I was. That was a lot of what I was doing through my playing — trying to come to a place where I could just stand myself. [Laughs] It was just developing a self that allowed me to live with myself in a way that a lot of the self-loathing didn’t allow. That’s just a part of my DNA. I do a lot better with it now, but it’s an ongoing struggle.”

And the value of analysis?

“You’re trying to take all this misunderstanding and loathing, and you’re trying to turn it into love—which is the wonderful thing that happens when you’re trying to make music out of the rough, hard, bad things. You’re trying to turn it into love. So along with that effort came the realization, through a lot of studying and analysis, of how rough I’d been on myself and had continued to be until a very late stage in life.”

Hainey tells Springsteen that “Born to Run” contains four words in one line that are the sum of him: sadness, love, madness, and soul: “Together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness / I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul.”

“Those are my lines. ‘Born to Run.’ That’s my epitaph, if you wanna know my epitaph. There it is. It still is, probably — I use the song at the end of the show every night as a summary. The idea is that it can contain all that has come before. And I believe that it does.”

What you’ll learn about Bruce Springsteen in this interview is considerable. It’s nothing compared to what you may learn about yourself.