By Barry Donnelly '71

I admit to being something more than a casual fan of Bruce Springsteen. I own 83 CDs (studio releases and concert bootlegs), two complete I-pods full of only Springsteen music, five box sets, eleven concert DVDs, thirty-five books about the Bruuuuuuuce (I’ve read them all!), and I’ve seen thirty-five Springsteen concerts,
including all three of the epic Met-Life shows this summer.  With that in mind, I approached Springsteen’s biography Born to Run with fairly mild expectations.
What, after all, could I possibly have to learn about the man they call The Boss?  In one sense, the answer is “not much.” Diehards fans know all the essential stories: the simultaneous 1975 Time and Newsweek covers and the infamous Jon Landau “I have seen the future of rock ‘n roll, and his name is Bruce Springsteen” review; Springsteen’s Freehold, N.J. childhood and troubled relationship with his father; the break-up of the E Street band in 1990; the legend of “The Big Man” Clarence Clemons, and the effect of his death (and Danny Federici’s) on E Street.
On the other hand, the book is unmistakably written by Springsteen, and very much in his voice. The flights of poetic language and imagery that mark his songs are very much in evidence here, and so this “first person” account of his public persona has a value that distinguishes this from all the other Springsteen tracts.
And I did find out some things I didn’t know.  Until reading the book, I didn’t fully realize that Springsteen has made his living as a full time musician since he was 17 years old. His family moved to California when he was just out of high school; he stayed in New Jersey and survived on his own by playing with a host of bar bands at the shore. He never “worked” a day in his life that didn’t revolve around music.  I didn’t fully realize the impact that his relationship with his
father had on Springsteen’s life, or the fact that the relationship was largely defined by what was ultimately diagnosed as his father’s depression. Nor was I aware of Springsteen’s own battle with depression, mostly in the last six or seven years of his life. Indeed, given the exuberance and physicality of his performances on stage, it’s almost impossible to believe even as you are turning the page and reading about it.
I also never knew that just a couple of years ago, Springsteen underwent surgery for cervical disc problems that had numbed the nerves on the left side of his body. The procedure affected his vocal cords (“your voice is gone for a couple of nerve-wracking months”) and the simple paragraph Springsteen devotes to the operation belies the incredible risk taken by someone whose entire life, indeed, whose entire being, is all about music and performance. It’s probably good we fans didn’t know; facing the prospect of no more Springsteen music would have been only slightly less terrifying for us than it must have been for him.  One of the things that comes across very powerfully in Born to Run is the life-long commitment Springsteen has made to his art, and the responsibility he feels toward his audience.
It is, no doubt, the reason why he has had such an astonishingly vital career, and why he is so much beloved and respected by virtually everyone.
Near the end of the book, Springsteen notes, “Writing about yourself is a funny business. I haven’t told you ‘all’ about myself. 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 that.”
There’s no doubt that Bruce Springsteen was “born to write.”  Indeed, in his songs, and now in this book, he has spent a lifetime “showing his mind” and sharing his heart and soul with the legions of fans who were “born to run” along with him.