Introduction
I painted houses. If you want your house green, I paint it green.
But when I walk out onstage, I do what I want to do.
—Bruce Springsteen, 19751

“Well I Got This Guitar . . .”

Of all the figures to perform in the rock and roll arena, few have had as remarkable, or as paradoxical, a career as Bruce Springsteen. He is many things to many people. Iconic rocker. Archetypal American. Working-class hero. All-American sex symbol. Introspective lyricist and goofy showman. Compassionate chronicler of misfits, losers, and loners—hard people living hard lives—but also a bastion of hope, faith, and glory. The man who carries the mantle of Chuck Berry, Elvis, Woody Guthrie, and Bob Dylan on his shoulders. Unlike the Beatles or Dylan, however, he is not an innovator and never made any such claims. Rather, he considers himself a traditionalist—a synthesist—more a throwback to rock and roll glory than a harbinger of rock and roll future. “I like the whole idea of a rock and roll lineage. . . . I wasn’t interested in immediate success or how much each particular record sold. I was interested in becoming part of people’s lives and, hopefully, growing up with them—growing up together,” he told Neil Strauss in 1995.2
What is even more impressive is the breadth of Springsteen’s decades-spanning career and his extraordinary facility for growth. The person who created the dazzling wordplay of Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. differs greatly from the person who, years later, penned the largely somber songs of The Rising—separated by time, certainly, but also by vast degrees of maturity and worldly experience. We have watched him change over the years, just as we ourselves have changed.
Springsteen invests meaning in a musical form not generally known for its propensity for introspection. He does this not by preaching but by sharing stories, his own and others. Like Dylan, he is a great storyteller. Unlike the bard from Hibbing, Minnesota, however, he exudes sincerity, not cynicism. Never before has the artificial barrier between performer and audience been so transparent. To Springsteen, the audience has always been a key part of the equation. He writes for them, to them. They are, in essence, his mirror, personifying mutual trust. “Springsteen has always remained committed to his high standard of artistic integrity, sung about what he knew and what he strove to comprehend, and he has always asked more of his audience than most, if not all, other rock musicians,” writes Michael Newall.3
Springsteen pursued his rock and roll dream relentlessly, with a fury seldom seen. With the exception of a few weeks in 1968, when he toiled as a gardener, Springsteen, the great working-class icon of America, has never held a regular job. Rather, writes Josh Tyrangiel in Time, “His great gift—the one that makes him the best rock and roll singer of his era—is empathy.” 4 To Bono, that other great contemporary rock and roller, Springsteen created an alternative mythology, “one where ordinary lives became extraordinary and heroic.” 5 And Springsteen himself told Bill Flanagan, “I always felt the song was my fundamental means of communication.” 6

A JERSEY STATE OF MIND

Born of mixed Italian, Irish, and Dutch ancestry on September 23, 1949, in Long Branch, New Jersey, Bruce Frederick Springsteen was the firstborn child of Douglas and Adele Springsteen. He spent the first eighteen years of his life in the working-class and highly segregated town of Freehold, living in a lower-middle-class neighborhood called Texas because of the large number of Southerners who had settled there. “Texas,” wrote Springsteen biographer Dave Marsh, “was on the wrong side of the railroad tracks; it bordered the town’s black ghetto.”7
The local economy centered around a 3M factory, a rug mill, a Nescafé plant, and other small manufacturing companies. Douglas Springsteen, a taciturn loner, struggled to find his own place in his own hometown. He worked at various jobs: taxi driver, rug mill worker, bus driver, prison guard. Years later, at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, his now-famous son admitted that donning work clothes was a way to honor the memory of his father. “My parents’ experiences forged my own,” he said. “They shaped my politics. . . .” 8
The modest house at 87 Randolph Street that Bruce called home—it has since been demolished—was located near the center of town and had been in the family of his paternal grandparents for generations. When Bruce was six, the Springsteens moved to a two-bedroom coldwater duplex on nearby Institute Street. And when economic conditions forced his father’s parents to live with them—they previously had lived together at the Randolph Street address—they were once again on the move, this time to a house on South Street. Bruce lived here during his high school years. In his high school yearbook, Springsteen described himself as “quiet and shy,” someone who “liked to putter with cars.”
The moment that transformed the young boy’s life occurred on a Sunday night in the 1950s when he watched Elvis Presley perform on The Ed Sullivan Show. His mother bought him a guitar and arranged for lessons. But his hands were too small to maneuver around the frets. His obsession faded somewhat until the Beatles arrived. By then nothing could stop him. He went to the local pawn shop and bought a guitar for $18. That simple gesture could be construed as the start of something big. His cousin taught him his first few rudimentary chords. Late at night, with his radio stashed under his pillow, he would listen to Roy Orbison, the Drifters, and Smokey Robinson. The songs that he heard during those days and nights stayed with him. In their innocence and joyful release as well as their coded paeans to rebellion and forbidden passion, they seemed to promise a better life than the one that he understood. Every Wednesday night he would “religiously” write down the Top 20, and he would practice on his guitar incessantly—up to eight hours a day. Daydreamer and loner and the object of much derision at school, Springsteen soon learned that rock could save lives. He started with his own.
Springsteen joined his first band, the Castiles, when he was a teenager, playing at dances, junior highs and high schools, roller rinks, country clubs, local drive-ins, any place where he and the boys could get a gig. Other bands followed: the short-lived heavy-metal power-trio sound of Earth; the heavy-metal blues of Child, which later changed its name to Steel Mill and which enhanced Springsteen’s musical reputation considerably; the tongue-in-cheek, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach of Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom; and the ten-piece R&B of the Bruce Springsteen Band, complete with horns and female backup singers. It was from these close friendships and collegial associations that emerged the members of the E Street Band (David Sancious, the band’s original keyboard player, lived on E Street in Belmar, New Jersey). In addition to Sancious (later replaced by Roy Bittan), the core members of the band included saxophonist Clarence Clemons, bassist Garry Tallent, drummer Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez (replaced by Max Weinberg), organist Danny Federici, and, most crucially perhaps, guitarist Steve Van Zandt.
A favorite Jersey Shore hangout at the time was the Upstage, run by a local by the name of Tom Potter. It stayed open later than the other clubs along the Shore and, best yet, it allowed a semblance of creative freedom—you could play whatever you wanted—into the wee hours of the morning, usually from one to five. The musicians who formed part of this unique scene never amounted to much outside their small circle of friends and acquaintances, but to Springsteen they were local heroes “because they were each in their own way a living spirit of what, to me, rock and roll is all about,” he wrote in the liner notes to Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes’s I Don’t Want to Go Home. “It was music as survival and they lived it down in their souls, night after night.”9
By 1972, Springsteen began writing long, stream-of-consciousness songs. A wider world now beckoned.

IT’S HARD TO BE A SAINT IN THE CITY

With the formidable assistance of his aggressive manager, Mike Appel, Springsteen walked into the New York City offices of John Hammond, the legendary Columbia Records executive who had “discovered” Billie Holiday, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan, among others. It was a spring day in early May 1972. It was also a day that Springsteen would never forget.
“It was a big, big day for me . . . ,” Springsteen admitted many years later in an interview with Mark Hagen of MOJO. “I was twenty-two and come up on the bus with an acoustic guitar with no case which I’d borrowed from the drummer from the Castiles. I was embarrassed carrying it around the city.” He remembers that the engineers at Columbia were “very old fashioned: everybody in ties and shirts. I felt I’d written some good songs and this was my shot. I had nothing to lose and it was like the beginning of something.”10
Despite the offensive behavior of Appel (“For God’s sake, just stop it!” an exasperated Hammond bellowed at one point. “You’re going to make me hate you.”), Hammond was very encouraging toward the young singer. “[S]imply being in that room with him at the board,” said Springsteen, “was one of my greatest recording experiences.”
Springsteen was signed, although both Hammond and Appel initially saw him as more a folk than rock act. In truth, Springsteen possessed too complex an image for anyone to get a full handle on. But the record company needed a peg that was simple and direct—an easy hook. Hence, Columbia’s promotional department came up with the disastrous “new Dylan” tag.
Springsteen now began writing music that required attention from the audience—in other words, music that didn’t go over too well in a noisy club or bar. “[I] felt if I was going to take a real shot at it, I was going to have to do something very distinctive and original,” he told Hagen. “I wanted the independence, the individuality of a solo career, and that’s when I began to write some of the initial songs for Greetings from Asbury Park.”11
He did most of his writing in the back of a beauty salon beneath his Asbury Park apartment, “amidst the old hair dryers and washing sinks. . . . I had an Aeolian spinet piano my aunt had given me . . . ,” he recalled in Songs.12 Greetings was the only album for which Springsteen wrote the lyrics first and then set them to music. Most of the songs, he says, were “twisted autobiographies. . . . I wrote impressionistically. . . .” He told Hagen, “Basically, it was street music,”13 populated by the types of characters he knew from days and nights at the Shore.
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (1973) was recorded in just three weeks. An extended adolescent fantasy consisting of the street, the beach, and the boardwalk, it contained such now-classic Springsteen songs as “Spirit in the Night,” “Growin’ Up,” “For You,” “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City,” and “Lost in the Flood.” The influences were impressive: critics heard Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, the Band, as well as the Stax/Volt sound set against an R&B rhythm.
The songs from Greetings were written, according to Springsteen, “in a style that had developed out of my earlier acoustic writing. From the late ’60s on, I always had a notebook full of acoustic songs. I’d do the occasional coffeehouse, but mostly that material went unused.” Significantly, he would later remark that he “never wrote in that style again. . . . Your early songs come out of a moment when you’re writing with no sure prospect of ever being heard. Up until then, it’s just you and your music. That only happens once.”14
The reviews were mostly excellent. Lester Bangs, in Rolling Stone, called Springsteen “a bold new talent with more than a mouthful to say. . . .”15
Springsteen may have considered the songs and the sound his own, but the record company and aspects of the media continued to think otherwise, branding him with the dreaded “new Dylan” curse that seemed to plague every singer/songwriter with a thought in his head and a guitar in his hand. Nor did it help that, with his dark curly hair, scraggly beard, and thin-as-a-rake frame, he was a dead ringer for Dylan. It was a label that would take considerable effort, and years, to shake.
Later, though, he turned away from the florid type of writing that characterized the early albums, paring down the imagery and adopting a more straightforward, storytelling approach. Truth be told, the Dylan comparisons stung. “If you go back and listen, it’s really not like Dylan at all,” he told Hagen, “but at the time I was very sensitive about creating my own identity. . . . It still comes up in ‘Born to Run’ and ‘Jungleland’ and a few other places, but by the time you get to ‘Darkness’ it’s just about gone.”16
Later that same year, in July, Springsteen went back into the studio to record his second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. Like Greetings, it also was made on the quick: recorded in less than two months on a slight budget. This time, though, he seemed to have a better idea of what he wanted the album to sound like (Springsteen’s inexperience in the recording studio showed on Greetings). Some still consider Wild his best album, as he portrays a particular place (life as lived on the Jersey Shore) at a particular time (the early 1970s) and the fleeting end of adolescence and the summer romances that permeate it. At that time, blues, R&B, and soul were still heard up and down the Shore. Crowds along the boardwalk were dwindling though—Asbury Park had suffered the economic and social consequences of the race riots that plagued the town in the late ’60s and early ’70s—and, according to Springsteen, “[m]any of the usual summer vacationers were now passing Asbury Park by for less troubled locations farther south along the coast.”17
Wild was a buoyantly exuberant album, at turns folksy and bluesy—an acoustic record with a particularly strong rhythm section that added to its overall festive carnival sound. Once again, it received mostly positive reviews but, as with Greetings, sales were disappointing.
Enter Jon Landau, not quite twenty-seven, an influential critic and record review editor for Rolling Stone as well as columnist for Boston’s respected alternative weekly, The Real Paper. He had already written a positive review of The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle that had appeared in the paper, but he had not yet seen Springsteen perform live.
On May 9, 1974, Springsteen played a full set as the opening act for Bonnie Raitt at the Harvard Square Theatre in Cambridge. Fate was about to intervene.
“Last Thursday, at the Harvard Square theatre, I saw my rock ’n’ roll past flash before my eyes,” Landau wrote in the quote that made rock and roll history. “And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time.”
He continued.
“When his two-hour set ended I could only think, can anyone really be this good; can anyone say this much to me; can rock ’n’ roll still speak with this kind of power and glory? And then I felt the sores on my thighs where I had been pounding my hands for the entire concert and knew that the answer was yes.”
Springsteen, in Landau’s estimation, was the complete rock and roller: “He is a rock ’n’ roll punk, a Latin street poet, a ballet dancer, an actor, a joker, bar band leader, hot-shit rhythm guitar player, extraordinary singer, and a truly great rock ’n’ roll composer. He leads a band like he has been doing it forever. I racked my brains but simply can’t think of a white artist who does so many things so superbly.”
And then he describes Springsteen’s distinctive appearance: “Bruce Springsteen is a wonder to look at. Skinny, dressed like a reject from Sha Na Na, he parades in front of his all-star rhythm band like a cross between Chuck Berry, early Bob Dylan, and Marlon Brando.”18

FOLLOW THAT DREAM

By this time in his fledgling career, Springsteen felt he was ready to make a great rock album, that he was on the verge of something big—that is, if only he could capture the mesmerizing power of his live shows. It was now or never. The album that was swirling in his fervent imagination would combine Phil Spector’s wall of sound, the intelligence of Dylan’s lyrics, and the twangy guitars of Duane Eddy. Emotionally, it would be for anyone who ever had a dream, who ever yearned for something that seemed perennially out of reach.
Born to Run was written in the summer of 1974 but recorded over an interminable period of time—from June 1974 to July 1975. Although he shared coproducing credits with both Springsteen and Mike Appel, Jon Landau also played a pivotal role in bringing the project to completion. The Born to Run sessions were a far cry from the muddled proceedings that dominated Springsteen’s two previous albums. The many layers of guitars and strings, the dense, complex sound, and the anthemic songwriting all came together. Although there was a point at which the perfectionist in Springsteen, still not satisfied after many months of recording, felt tempted to scrap it altogether and start over, cooler heads prevailed.
“The orchestral sound of Born to Run came from most of the songs being written on piano,” Springsteen would later recall. “It was on the keyboard that I could find the arrangements needed to accompany the stories I was writing.”19 Springsteen later recalled the pressure associated with recording Born to Run as “the most horrible period of my life. . . .”20
Born to Run sold 700,000 copies in its first two months. And, in a remarkable feat, the Jersey rocker appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek during the same week, an achievement usually reserved for heads of state and other such luminaries (Appel, the ever-diligent bulldog, had orchestrated a “no cover, no interview” strategy). The Newsweek piece by staffer Maureen Orth emphasized the hype more than the artist, while Jay Cocks of Time filed a more flattering straight-ahead portrait. Both articles appear in this volume.
The critics wasted no time in voicing their opinions. Greil Marcus called Born to Run “exhilarating.” Admitting that the stories Springsteen told treaded familiar terrain—the thrill of the night, the romance of the open road, “one thousand and one American nights, one long night of fear and love”—he nonetheless proclaimed that the songs rang true. “What is new,” he wrote, “is the majesty Springsteen and his band have brought to this story. . . . For all it owes to Phil Spector, it can be compared only to the music that Bob Dylan and the Hawks made onstage in 1965 and ’66. With that sound, Springsteen has achieved something very special. He has touched his world with glory, without glorifying anything. . . .”21
Eric Alterman agreed that although Born to Run could not be considered innovative or groundbreaking like Sergeant Pepper, “It was—and remains—perhaps the most powerful explication of the pure spirit of rock ’n’ roll that any artist has been able to capture since the night in July 1954 at the Sun Records studio in Memphis, when an unknown nineteen-year-old-kid with the unlikely name of Elvis Presley let loose on Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup’s ‘That’s All Right.’ ”22
And what about the hype? Perhaps Paul Nelson said it best, and prophetically so, in The Real Paper: “What most people don’t realize is that Springsteen is here to stay—all that publicity doesn’t make him a one-shot artist.”23
Unfortunately, legal issues with Mike Appel delayed the release of Springsteen’s next album, as the two filed countersuits against each other. Appel stated that, under the terms of his contract, Springsteen could not record with Landau.24 At the height of his popularity, Springsteen was prevented from recording for ten long months. In the meantime, he and the band continued to barnstorm across the country. In May 1977, after much emotional hand-wringing, the lawsuit was settled. By this time, Springsteen’s sound was changing as well as his writing style. He began composing shorter, more tightly constructed songs. His mood had altered, too. Darkness, alienation, isolation, and a healthy dose of cynicism—but always leavened with a smidgen of hope—were prominently featured.
“After Born to Run I wanted to write about life in the close confines of the small towns I grew up in. . . . I felt a sense of accountability to the people I’d grown up alongside of . . . ,” he recalled. “I began to listen seriously to country music. . . . I discovered Hank Williams. I liked the fact that country dealt with adult topics, and I wanted to write songs that would resonate down the road. . . . After Born to Run, I wanted to ensure that my music continued to have value and a sense of place.”25
He also began reading about the life and music of Woody Guthrie and discovered the type of writing that he felt most comfortable with. Maintaining “a loose continuity from record to record,” he told Mark Hagen, became increasingly important to him.26 He admired too the colloquial writing style of Robbie Robertson. “It sounded like people telling stories and talking about themselves, as if you were sitting on the couch.”27
But now too the stakes were raised. His fans and especially the record company demanded more from him. Whether he liked it or not, he was a commodity, and a hot one at that. “All of a sudden you’re being watched a lot more closely; all of a sudden your actions have implications. I began to think about who I was and where I came from,” he told Hagen.28
Feeling invisible as a child, he had picked up the guitar in order to be heard. But now that he had an audience—a huge audience—who wanted to listen, he felt at his most vulnerable, at his most isolated. “How you handle it from that point on has a lot to do with the course your music takes. . . . It was a central moment when my writing took a fundamental turn—which has continued for the rest of my work.”29
Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) was a continuation of the characters from Born to Run but several years further down the road, and not necessarily wiser either. Essentially, they were the people left behind. Some 20 years after the fact, Joyce Millman could look back and describe the songs on Darkness as “urban folk music that quotes rock and roll the way Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams quoted black and Appalachian spirituals.”30
The River, released in August 1980, revealed the thirty-year-old Springsteen’s paradoxical and ambivalent attitude toward life, which was amply reflected by the eclecticism of the music. A double album, The River was full of darkly romantic fatalism as well as traditional ’60s-style love songs. Like life itself, it reflected different moods: at times somber and exuberant, at other times deadly serious and hysterically funny. To Stephen Holden, it conjured up a strictly American world, a provincial universe, “of a guy, a girl, and a car hurtling into the night, fleeing time itself.”31 During the period Springsteen wrote The River he was living on a farm in rural Holmdel, New Jersey, watching old John Ford films and listening to the music of Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, and Johnny Cash. “The River,” writes Holden, “makes emotional sense: the spirits of James Dean and Elvis merge in the body of a warmhearted hood from a backwater seashore town.”32
The River also spawned Springsteen’s first top-five single, “Hungry Heart.”

A RESTLESS YEARNING

But Springsteen was still not satisfied with his own life or the direction that the country seemed to be headed. In early 1982, he was living alone in a rented house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, when he asked one of his assistants for equipment that would allow for cheap and easy home recording. In the isolation of his New Jersey home, and using a four-track Teac tape machine—“a little tape player about three or four times the size of a book” is how Springsteen described it 33—he recorded the follow-up to The River. After completing the demo tape, he tried to convert the songs into rock settings. But it didn’t work—it seemed strained and unnatural.
Springsteen had also picked up additional literary and musical influences. He read the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, fascinated by the Southern writer’s dark spirituality and grotesque characters; listened intently to the eerie ballads and laments that so dominated Harry Smith’s seminal Anthology of American Folk Music; and identified with the unbearable sadness of the darkest of the blues.
“The songs [in Nebraska] had religious and political overtones. . . . I thought of John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson—records that sounded so good with the lights out,” he wrote. “I wanted to let the listener hear the characters think, to get inside their heads, so you could hear and feel their thoughts, their choices. . . . If there’s a theme that runs through the record, it’s the thin line between stability and that moment when time stops and everything goes to black, when the things that connect you to your world—your job, your family, your faith, the love and grace in your heart—fail you. I wanted the music to feel like a waking dream and the record to move like poetry. I wanted the blood on it to feel destined and fateful.” 34
Springsteen has often called Nebraska his most personal record, as he dug deeply into recollections of his childhood and the house in Freehold where he grew up. In various interviews, he said he felt disconnected at the time. “I just wasn’t any good, right at the moment that record occurred. . . . There are things that make sense of life for people: their friends, the work they do, your community, your relationship with your partner. What if you lose those things,” he asked, “then what are you left with?”35
In a word, Nebraska.
Seven years earlier, in 1992, Springsteen told James Henke, “I tend to be an isolationist by nature. And it’s not about money or where you live or how you live. It’s about psychology. My dad was certainly the same way. You don’t need a ton of dough and walls around your house to be isolated. I know plenty of people who are isolated with a six-pack of beer and a television set.”36
He said much the same thing to Dave Marsh when he discussed the dangerous consequences of living a life in isolation and what he perceived to be the loss of community in the United States. “Nebraska was about that American isolation: what happens to people when they’re alienated from their friends and their community and their government and their job. Because those are the things that keep you sane, that give meaning to life in some fashion. And if they slip away, and you start to exist in some void where the basic constraints of society are a joke, then life becomes kind of a joke. And anything can happen.”37
Mikal Gilmore in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner called Nebraska “the most successful attempt at making a sizable statement about American life that popular music has yet produced.”38 To Steve Pond of Rolling Stone it was “a violent, acid-etched portrait of a wounded America . . .” and “. . . a vocabulary derived from the plain-spoken folk music of Woody Guthrie and the dark hillbilly laments of Hank Williams.”39

A WIDE-OPEN COUNTRY

Springsteen’s biggest heroes—from Sinatra to Elvis to Dylan—connected with huge audiences during their respective careers. Reaching a mass community of like-minded souls meant something to him. It was, he thought, a worthwhile and worthy goal.
Springsteen had savored his first real taste of mainstream success with Born to Run, of course. Born in the U.S.A. (1984), though, was something altogether different. But he was ready for it.
Born in the U.S.A. stayed on the Billboard charts for a mesmerizing two years and spawned seven top-ten singles. In short, it captured the imagination of America as well as much of the Western world, with its irresistible combination of rousing rockers, catchy pop melodies, and heart-on-the-sleeve romanticism. It became Columbia’s biggest-selling record ever up to that point.
Despite its mass appeal, Born in the U.S.A. was also about the people left behind by Reaganomics. The record, wrote Stephen Holden in the New York Times, had “transfused rock and roll and social realism into one another. . . .” Holden cited Springsteen as “one of a very small number of rock performers who uses rock to express an ongoing epic vision of this country, individual social roots and the possibility of heroic self-creation.” 40

HEART SONGS

The mid-’80s was a tumultuous time for Springsteen on the domestic front. The elusive wanderer settled down to presumably married bliss in May 1985, only to separate less than two years later, finally divorcing in 1989.
As always, he turned to music to reconcile the roiling emotions of a failed relationship. Tunnel of Love (1987) is about love gone wrong. But these were fully developed songs—full of considerable weight and insight—that explored the complexity of lives intertwined, of trust compromised, of struggles confronted.
Some consider Tunnel of Love, recorded in three weeks at his makeshift home studio in Rumson, New Jersey, his most perceptive album, certainly his most mature. To Eric Alterman, Tunnel consists of “a series of quickly sketched short stories—reminiscent of the works of Raymond Carver in their deceptive simplicity—about people struggling to find themselves a physical, emotional, and spiritual place in the world. The theme of emotional and spiritual—as opposed to physical—searching is what permeates all these stories.”41 The Seattle Times called the record “as genuine a statement as any rocker has ever made and one of the most truthful LPs in rock history. . . .”42
Springsteen continued plumbing domesticity with two albums released simultaneously in 1992: Human Touch and Lucky Town. “Human Touch began as an exercise to get myself back into writing and recording,” he recalled. “I wrote a variety of music in genres that I had always liked: soul, rock, pop, R&B. The record, once again, took awhile because I was finding my way to the songs. I also worked for the first time with musicians other than the E Street Band. I felt I needed to see what other people brought with them into the studio and how my music would be affected by collaborating with different talents and personalities.”43
To these ears, though, Human Touch is his weakest effort, an uneven collection, with the exception of the title track, of mediocre rockers and lackluster ballads. Thematically, the two records act as bookends. The songs on Human Touch reflect a fall from grace and subsequently the courage to face rejection and betrayal, while the vastly superior Lucky Town represents redemption, a form of spiritual rebirth. It’s one of his most joyful and optimistic recordings, full of such first-rate songs as “Living Proof,” “If I Should Fall Behind,” “Book of Dreams,” and “My Beautiful Reward.”

THE CIRCLE IS UNBROKEN

With The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995), Springsteen returned to the social realism that so imbued Darkness on the Edge of Town, Nebraska, and portions of The River and Born in the U.S.A. The primary difference was not the themes but the faces and ethnicity of the down-on-their-luck characters that Springsteen portrayed: bewildered members of the new underclass as well as Mexican and Asian immigrants lost in George H. W. Bush’s “new world order.” The music was stark, at times the melodies barely discernible. The plain and austere rhythms, according to Springsteen, “defined who these characters were and how they expressed themselves. . . . [The] songs completed a circle, bringing me back to 1978 and the inspiration I’d gotten from Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Their skin was darker and their language had changed, but these were people trapped by the same brutal circumstances.”44 Many critics consider Joad his boldest work to date.
It would be seven years before Springsteen made a record of entirely new material. In between, he released the four-CD set Tracks (1998), sixty-six cuts that span twenty-five years, augmented by 18 Tracks in 1999, and Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Live in New York City in 2001.
The Rising (2002), written in the aftermath of 9/11, is about many things: faith, duty, love, death, survival, loss, decency, resurrection, redemption, suffering, hope—the litanies and incantations that comprise the whole. On many levels, The Rising exemplifies what sets Springsteen apart from the rock and roll pack. It captures the heart and soul of his music. He writes about the essentials, the fundamentals, what is worth preserving in a society. Ultimately, his best songs are about finding meaning in one’s personal life, in one’s community, and in the larger world.

Drive All Night

“An American changes his residence ceaselessly.”
Few people would argue with that statement. It was written, though, by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
“[I]solation is a big part of the American character,” Springsteen told interviewer Mark Hagen. “Everyone wakes up on one of those mornings when you just feel like you want to walk away and start brand new.”45 In other words, to move and keep on moving.
The cult of the new, the need to forget the past and begin again, to reinvent oneself, is of course a common theme that runs throughout much of American literature. To William Leach it is the restless urge to “be free to imagine,”46 while Lewis Lapham refers to “the invention of self.” “Who else,” he asks, “is the American hero if not a wandering pilgrim who goes forth on a perpetual quest?”47
Springsteen belongs to this class of edgy wanderers and free spirits who traverse the nation’s highways, a company of like-minded souls that ranges from Walt Whitman to Jack London, Mark Twain to Jack Kerouac, Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan.
Given Springsteen’s strong sense of place, it is ironic that so many of his characters long for roots and yet feel essentially rootless. They remain most at home on the open road and attempt to postpone the responsibilities of adulthood as long as possible. He understands that impulse well. “I was trying to avoid responsibility, that was why I became a musician,” he tells Hagen.48 The romantic escape is fully on display in “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” “Rosalita,” “Born to Run,” and so many other songs in the Springsteen canon. But where does the road to nowhere lead? At its most fundamental level, Springsteen’s work embodies the quintessentially American paradox of forgetting the past while ignoring the future. Springsteen knows better than most that you pay a price for living exclusively in the moment.

Dreaming with Eyes Open

Springsteen has always been the most cinematic—and literary—of rock composers. In songs such as “Meeting Across the River,” “Born to Run,” “Stolen Car,” “Johnny 99,” “State Trooper,” “Highway 29,” and “Straight Time,” he creates strong characters and vividly rendered scenes in a matter of minutes. Notes the independent film director John Sayles, “ ‘Jungleland’ and ‘Meeting Across the River’ pack as much punch in a few minutes as I got into City of Hope, which is a whole movie.”49 Springsteen himself has acknowledged the influence of the cinema in general and film noir (Out of the Past), B pictures (Gun Crazy), and John Ford westerns (The Searchers) in particular on his songwriting. What’s more, entire albums have a strong cinematic quality about them, especially Nebraska, with its attention to narrative detail and intricate pacing.
The cinema is important to Springsteen in other ways, too. His songs appear on the sound tracks of numerous movies (see the Discography for a selected list), and he has written songs directly for the screen, including the title track for Paul Schrader’s Light of Day, “Streets of Philadelphia” for Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia, and the title track for Tim Robbins’s Dead Man Walking. One song, “Highway Patrolman,” was adapted in 1991 into a film called The Indian Runner, written and directed by Sean Penn.
The title track from Nebraska was inspired by the deadly escapades of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, although they remain unnamed in the song itself. Springsteen had read a book about Fugate, Caril, which led him to write the song “Nebraska.” Indeed, “Nebraska” is Springsteen’s musical equivalent of Terence Malick’s 1973 film classic Badlands, which starred Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, and is in turn a fictionalized account of the couple’s 1958 killing spree that stretched from Lincoln, Nebraska, to eastern Wyoming, leaving ten people dead in eight days. Extending the connection further, Springsteen opens the song with an image taken directly from the film (“I saw her standin’ on her front lawn just twirlin’ her baton”).
As he would in The Ghost of Tom Joad and again in The Rising, Springsteen did his own research to flesh out the story, even going so far as to contact Ninette Beaver, one of the authors of Caril. By that time, some twenty-five years after the crimes had taken place, she was an assignment editor at KMTV in Omaha. They reportedly talked for about a half hour, and when Springsteen played Lincoln in 1984, he invited her to the show as his guest and dedicated “Nebraska” to her. 50
“There’s was something about that song that was the center of the record,” he told Mark Hagen, “but I couldn’t say specifically what it was, outside of the fact that I’d read something that moved me. I think in my own life I had reached where it felt like I was teetering on this void. I felt a deep sense of isolation, and that led me to those characters and to those stories—people I remembered growing up, my father’s side of the family, a certain way they spoke, a certain way they approached life, and that resonated through that music.”51
A few years later, in 1987’s Tunnel of Love, Springsteen turned to Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955) for inspiration for the cut “Cautious Man.” Like the Robert Mitchum character in the film, the song’s troubled protagonist, Bill Horton, the “cautious man” of the title, has the word “love” tattooed on his right hand and “fear” on his left hand. And as Springsteen has made clear numerous times, The Ghost of Tom Joad was inspired mostly by John Ford’s film adaptation rather than Steinbeck’s classic book.

Long-Distance Salvation

Springsteen fans are among the most loyal in the fickle world of rock and roll. Not surprisingly, then, a Springsteen concert has often been compared to a revival meeting of kindred souls. In Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and American Song, a fascinating analysis of the work of the two artists, Larry David Smith describes Springsteen’s early shows as a “blend of spirituality, theatricality, and musicality” that “was a direct extension of the Southern black church and its long, joyous, liberating communal rituals.”52
He goes on: “Springsteen-the-preacher uses working-class stories that are articulated through a working-class vernacular that probes his emotional autobiography in an attempt to invoke universal principles of use to his constituency.”53 Springsteen himself has admitted that the spiritual intensity of his shows had their origins in soul music, “. . . the idea of going for both your spirit and your gut. . . . My idea was the show should be part circus, part political rally, part spiritual meeting, part dance party. . . .”54 In his most fervent songs, he pays witness, cajoles, pleads, and implores for salvation or at least some form of transformation. The “ministry of rock ’n’ roll” makes anything possible. And by extension, members of his own band celebrate the universal concept of community, in a sense, acting as the embodiment of the democratic ideal.
Some find Springsteen’s music to be identifiably moral, “. . . not because it does anything as simplistic as espouse a particular ethic . . . but because it creates a form of address . . . whose greatest concern and sympathy have to do with consequences: What happens when we act out of passion or cowardice, weakness or strength, love or hate, the crazed desire for redemption and transcendence? How do we deal with guilt? And what happens when all these things flow into one another, when they become part of what Springsteen calls . . . the Big Muddy? Rock ’n’ roll isn’t supposed to be about consequences, but Springsteen has turned it to moral account in a way which forces its Dionysian passion to face the disasters that often follow in its wake.”55
Springsteen is both seeker and skeptic. Like a good Catholic boy, he creates concerts that are one prolonged ritual in search of a transcendent moment, but more than this, Springsteen seems to be trying to create a transcendent—albeit a necessarily temporary—community. Dave Marsh offers some food for thought. “In the Pentecostal churches whose gospel music spawned so much of rock and roll,” he writes, “the purpose of music is to enhance interaction between congregation and performers. What Springsteen idealized in early rock and roll music were attempts to achieve something similar. . . . Springsteen seemed a throwback because it was his intention to regain that dialogue with the audience. It was as if he couldn’t rest until the distance between artist and onlooker was obliterated.”56
Steve Pond finds Tunnel of Love to be a particularly Catholic record and one that best sheds light on Springsteen’s Catholic upbringing, as “lovers pray for deliverance, romance is depicted as a manifestation of God’s grace, and love brings with it doubt and guilt.”57 (For a more detailed examination of Springsteen’s “Catholic imagination,” see the Andrew Greeley essay in this volume.) Indeed, the language on Tunnel is in sharp contrast to the petulant rantings and ravings that sprinkle Springsteen’s early work (who can forget the striking image of “nuns” running “bald through Vatican halls pregnant, pleadin’ Immaculate Conception” or the “fire alley virgins on a midnight vamp”?). The harsh criticism of the past—the Church’s rigid rules that he rebelled against—has been replaced by the more generous attitudes of compassion and forgiveness, of a human being humbled by the unknown and in the thralls of a great mystery. Like the human race itself, Springsteen seems to be saying the universe is essentially an inscrutable place.
“I’m now a believer in all the rituals and things. I think they’re really valuable . . . ,” he told James Henke in 1992. “I don’t buy into all the dogmatic aspects, but I like the idea of people coming together for some sort of spiritual enrichment or enlightenment or even just to say hi once a week.”58
It is no secret that Springsteen takes rock and roll and its majestic power seriously; that he firmly believes it can—and does—save lives, including his own; that it is truly redemptive and can lead to salvation. He uses a Christian idiom in a rock setting, of camaraderie and people coming together, while working the crowd like a possessed gospel singer or a Pentecostal preacher waiting for the sky to fall in on him. The church of rock and roll (what Larry David Smith calls Springsteen’s “Rock Church” and what Eric Alterman calls Springsteen’s “invisible church”) is, after all, a very public ideal of community stoked by the rock and roll beat. In Springsteen’s world, rock and roll and community go hand in hand, along with faith in himself, faith in his music, faith in his audience, and ultimately faith in the community he has created. But it’s a two-way street. As Springsteen has shouted in concert at the top of his lungs, “I want you to go with me because I need to go with you—that’s why I’m here.”
In an article that ran in Time, Springsteen tells Josh Tyrangiel that he sometimes feels like a rock and roll preacher when he’s onstage, complete with the fire-and-brimstone sermon and call-and-response monologue. “It was one of those things that was joking but serious at the same time. I think it fits in with the concept of our band as a group of witnesses. That’s one of our functions.”59
If Springsteen is, as he has insisted scores of times during his concerts, “just a prisoner of rock and roll,” then his fans are willing companions on the journey. While the frenzy that is so common at Springsteen concerts should not be confused with religion itself, it does involve the same kind of unexpressed urges and needs—a sense of belonging, shared values, a form of devotion (albeit secular), and, most important, a way of creating meaning in everyday life. Music, especially rock, writes Jefferson Cowie, can offer a “collective salvation from the isolation and loneliness of our seemingly individual struggles.”60
Born to Run is often interpreted as a tale of desperate characters trying to escape from their desperate surroundings. But it is also a search for answers and the struggle to maintain an element of faith and hope in an increasingly angry world. Springsteen once described the album as “religiously based, in a funny kind of way. Not like orthodox religion, but it’s about basic things, you know? That searchin’, and faith, and the idea of hope . . . people tryin’ to find some sort of consolation, some sort of comfort in each other.”61 More recently, he referred to the verses of the songs on The Rising as “the blues, the chorus is the gospel.”62
There have been countless references to fans whose lives were “saved” by Springsteen and his music. “He had been a source of hope and inspiration, of friendship and . . . exhilaration,” writes Eric Alterman in It Ain’t No Sin to Be Glad You’re Alive. After attending a Springsteen concert at Madison Square Garden, he admits, “This was not just music anymore. It was something bigger, more powerful, more . . . like religion.”63
Cowie, though, sees something else going on. “There is,” he writes, “a solidarity in the individual,” and in Springsteen’s lyrics a “perhaps uniquely American struggle to make one’s way in an often mean world. It is an odd solidarity in that one is not alone: that when the house lights go up, there are thousands of others singing the same lyrics and asking the same questions.
“The travails of Springsteen’s characters may not offer any real solutions to concrete problems of working people, but they paint a portrait of alienation and a sensitivity to class not seen in popular culture since the passing of the elder Hank Williams.”64
And yet, in 1988, Springsteen came to a personal and professional fork in the proverbial road when he realized that music wasn’t enough anymore. “I guess I used to think that rock could save you. . . . I don’t believe it can anymore. It can do a lot. It’s certainly done a lot for me—gave me focus and direction and energy and purpose. . . . But as you get older, you realize that it is not enough. Music alone—you can take some shelter there, and you can find some comfort and happiness . . . but you can’t hide in it. . . . You can use all your powers to isolate yourself, to surround yourself with luxury, to intoxicate yourself in any particular fashion that you so desire. But it just starts eating away inside, because there is something you get from engagement with people, from a connection with a person, that you cannot get anyplace else.”65
Brother Bruce’s expansive universe is big enough to hold anyone who wants to join him: white and black, male and female, young and old, employer and employee, the rich and the poor, the native and the immigrant, saints and sinners. In his lyrics, in his music, in his world, we are all somehow connected—if only by the link of our common humanity. And to Springsteen, that is apparently enough.

The Working Life

Springsteen, the lapsed Catholic, has taken the Protestant work ethic to dizzying heights. He has frequently referred to what he does as a job. He puts on his work clothes—faded jeans, flannel shirt, cowboy boots—and he goes to work. His songs are steeped in class-consciousness. But even from the Dylanesque beginnings, they had powerful political undercurrents. The runaway American dream of Born to Run often led to the soured American dreams of later albums.
“Without question,” write Michael R. Hemphill and Larry David Smith, “Springsteen’s version of the American Dream was distinct from that of most middle-class Americans. These characters never envisioned a college diploma that would lead to a job in corporate America.”66
And yet Springsteen suggested that all was not lost. Even when he was surrounded by utter darkness and despair, his songs offered hope. A large part of that hope, that self-effacing groundedness, came no doubt from his humble background. To most eyes, he seemed a solid figure, without pretenses. “Springsteen’s appeal,” writes Kevin Coyne, Freehold’s town historian, “has always rested on his Everyman qualities. . . . Springsteen seemed . . . to rise up from among us, a concentrated, pluperfect, ideal version of ourselves.”67
“I always saw myself as a nuts-and-bolts kind of person,” he told Mikal Gilmore. “I felt what I was going to accomplish I would accomplish over a long period of time. . . . To keep an even perspective on it all, I looked at it like a job—something that you do every day and over a long period of time. . . . My idea was that when I went on a stage, I wanted to deliver my best to pull out the best in you, whatever that may be.”68
During a monologue in Stockholm in 1981, Springsteen recalled growing up in Freehold: “I grew up in this little town,” he told the crowd. “As I got older, I started looking around me, and it didn’t seem there was any way I was going to get out of there. I looked back at my father, and the only time he got out of that town was to go to World War II. When he came out of the Army, he got married, settled down, and went to work in a plastics factory. And his father had done the same thing. It seemed that the one thing we had in common was that we didn’t have enough information; we didn’t have enough knowledge about the forces that were controlling our lives. I watched my old man end up a victim, and he didn’t even know it. . . .”69
For the last thirty or so years, Springsteen, the community college dropout, has been on the lookout for fresh ideas, for new twists to old theories. He finds transcendence in mundane, everyday events. Jim Cullen has called him “a direct inheritor” of the republican artistic tradition, whose visionary forebears included Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson—admittedly heady company—and further back to Stephen Foster, “whose songs about everyday life won him enormous popularity in the years preceding and following the Civil War.”70
Springsteen has always been interested in continuity and about connecting at some fundamentally profound level with an imagined community—the community that comprises his audience. But more than this, he wanted to create music—a body of work—that would last. He told a Minneapolis Star-Tribune reporter, “When I started, I wanted to document what it felt like to grow up in America during the time that I was growing up in. And I wanted to follow those characters, not just when they were teenagers or in their twenties, but into the middle parts of their lives, into their forties and on. The idea was to draw my own map and maybe help other people draw their maps.”71
At the end of the day, what is left behind is important to Springsteen.
“It’s about work—the work, working, working,” he told Ken Tucker. “Write that next song and put that next record out; speak to my audience and continue to have that conversation that’s been going on for so long.”72

The Promise

I think people listen to my music to find out about themselves.
—Bruce Springsteen, November 1992
 
Fame and the trappings of celebrity have dogged Springsteen for decades. Unlike others before and since, Springsteen has seemed to be able to take it all in stride. Poet David Wojahn has called rock “an allegory for the consequences of fame and power, stories for which there are very few happy endings.”73 By all accounts, Springsteen has proven to be the exception. Another poet, Peter Balakian, comments, “In its totality, American rock might be viewed as one long, never-to-be-finished American epic poem.”74 In a very real sense, Springsteen’s body of work can also be viewed that way, as an ongoing exploration, via popular song, of the very heart of the American psyche.
Rock and roll gave Springsteen a purpose. “It really gave me a sense of myself, and it allowed me to become useful, which I think most people want to be.”75 It was a pathway to respect, a defiant retort to the oblivion of anonymity. Ironically, it was Springsteen’s way of fitting in. For him, rock offered the best of both worlds. Naturally reserved (at least offstage), he could maintain the image of the loner, the outsider, and still connect. Onstage, with a guitar in his hands, he had everything. He was somebody.
Or, as a former high school classmate once remarked, “If he hadn’t turned out to be Bruce Springsteen, would I remember him? I can’t think of why I would. You have to remember, without a guitar in his hands, he had absolutely nothing to say.”76
Things have changed considerably since then. He has not only forever altered the lives of countless people throughout the world, he has offered hope, inspiration, and more than a little magic in the rock and roll night. He has been called the last of rock’s great innocents. Probably so. He is also the rock star with the undeniably human touch.
 
 
Notes
1 Quoted in John Rockwell, “New Dylan from New Jersey?,” Rolling Stone, October 9, 1975.
2 Neil Strauss, “The Springsteen Interview,” Guitar World, October 1995.
3 Michael Newall, “Between What’s Flesh and What’s Fantasy,” Backstreets, Summer 2000.
4 Josh Tyrangiel, “Bruce Rising: An Intimate Look at How Springsteen Turned 9/11 into a Message of Hope,” Time, August 5, 2002.
5 Bono, induction dinner, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City, March 15, 1999.
6 Bill Flanagan, “Ambition, Lies, and the Beautiful Reward: Bruce Springsteen’s Family Values,” Musician, November 1992.
7 Dave Marsh, Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s (New York: Pantheon, 1987), pp. 30-31.
8 Bruce Springsteen, induction dinner, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City, March 15, 1999.
9 Quoted in Dave Marsh, Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story (New York: Dell, 1981), p. 29.
10 Mark Hagen, “Interview,” MOJO, January 1999.
11 Ibid.
12 Bruce Springsteen, Songs (New York: Avon, 1998), p. 6.
13 Hagen, “Interview.”
14 Springsteen, Songs, p. 7.
15 Lester Bangs, “‘Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.’ Album Review,” in Bruce Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Files: The Ultimate Compendium of Interviews, Articles, Facts and Opinions from the Files of Rolling Stone. Edited by Parke Puterbaugh (New York: Hyperion, 1996), p. 33.
16 Hagen, “Interview.”
17 Springsteen, Songs, p. 25.
18 Jon Landau, “Growing Young with Rock and Roll,” The Real Paper, May 22, 1974. According to Christopher Sandford, English rock critic Richard Williams penned a rave review of Greetings in Melody Maker a year or so before Landau’s more famous review. He even referred to Springsteen as the “future of rock and roll.” See Christopher Sandford, Springsteen: Point Blank (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999), pp. 66, 85.
19 Springsteen, Songs, p. 46.
20 Robert Duncan, “Bruce Springsteen Is Not God (and Doesn’t Want to Be),” CREEM, January 1976.
21 Greil Marcus, “Springsteen’s Thousand and One American Nights,” Rolling Stone, October 9, 1975.
22 Eric Alterman, It Ain’t No Sin to Be Glad You’re Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999), p. 74.
23 Paul Nelson, “The Year’s Ten Best Albums,” The Real Paper, December 17, 1975. See also Nelson’s “Is Springsteen Worth the Hype?,” Village Voice, August 25, 1975.
24 For Mike Appel’s side of the story, see the lengthy piece published in Backstreets in November 1990, “Mike Appel: Interview by Charles R. Cross.” In Backstreets: Springsteen—The Man and His Music, by Charles R. Cross and the editors of Backstreets magazine (New York: Crown, 1992).
25 Springsteen, Songs, p. 66.
26 Hagen, “Interview.”
27 Flanagan, “Ambition, Lies.”
28 Hagen, “Interview.”
29 Ibid.
30 Quoted in Alterman, It Ain’t No Sin, p. 101.
31 Stephen Holden, “Springsteen Scans the American Dream,” New York Times, May 27, 1984.
32 Ibid.
33 Hagan, “Interview.”
34 Springsteen, Songs, pp. 138-39.
35 Hagen, “Interview.”
36 James Henke, “Bruce Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, August 6, 1992.
37 Marsh, Glory Days, p. 102.
38 Quoted in Alterman, It Ain’t No Sin, p. 138.
39 Steve Pond, “Nebraska Album Review: Springsteen Delivers His Bravest Record Yet,” Rolling Stone, October 28, 1982.
40 Quoted in Alterman, It Ain’t No Sin, p. 150.
41 Ibid., p. 185.
42 Quoted in Larry David Smith, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and American Song (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002), p. 181.
43 Springsteen, Songs, p. 216.
44 Ibid., p. 276.
45 Hagen, “Interview.”
46 William Leach, Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1999), p. 13.
47 Lewis Lapham, “Who and What Is an American?,” Harper’s, January 1992.
48 Hagen, “Interview.”
49 Quoted in Alterman, It Ain’t No Sin, p. 176.
50 Marsh, Glory Days, p. 98. Caril was cowritten by Ninette Beaver, B. K. Ripley, and Patrick Trese (New York: Lippincott, 1974). There have been other books written on the subject. See also William Allen, Starkweather: The Story of a Mass Murderer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). Charles Starkweather was executed in 1959; Caril Fugate served an eighteen-year prison sentence and was paroled in 1976.
51 Hagen, “Interview.”
52 Smith, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, p. 217.
53 Ibid., p. 218.
54 Ibid., p. 145.
55 Cornel Bonca, “Save Me Somebody: Bruce Springsteen’s Rock ’n’ Roll Covenant.” KillingtheBuddha.com, 2001.
56 Marsh, Glory Days, p. 17.
57 Steve Pond, “Tunnel of Love Album Review: Bruce’s Hard Look at Love,” Rolling Stone, December 3, 1987.
58 Henke, “The Rolling Stone Interview.”
59 Tyrangiel, “Bruce Rising.”
60 Jefferson Cowie, “Fandom, Faith, and Bruce Springsteen,” Dissent, Winter 2001.
61 Quoted in Smith, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, p. 149.
62 Jon Pareles, “His Kind of Heroes, His Kind of Songs,” New York Times, July 14, 2002.
63 Alterman, It Ain’t No Sin, p. 4.
64 Cowie, “Fandom, Faith.”
65 Quoted in Smith, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springstein, p. 151.
66 Michael R. Hemphill and Larry David Smith, “The Working American’s Elegy: The Rhetoric of Bruce Springsteen,” in Politics in Familiar Contexts. Edited by Robert L. Savage and Dan Nimmo (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1990).
67 Kevin Coyne, “The Faulkner of Freehold,” Asbury Park Press/Home News Tribune, March 14, 1999.
68 Mikal Gilmore, “Twentieth Anniversary Special: Bruce Springsteen Q&A,” Rolling Stone, November 5-December 10, 1987.
69 Smith, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, pp. 135-36.
70 Jim Cullen, Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 30.
71 Quoted in Smith, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, p. 148.
72 Ken Tucker, “Springsteen: The Interview,” Entertainment Weekly, February 28, 2003.
73 Quoted in Jim Elledge, ed., Sweet Nothings: An Anthology of Rock and Roll in American Poetry (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 267.
74 In Elledge, Sweet Nothings, p. 235.
75 Marsh, Glory Days, p. 90.
76 Alterman, It Ain’t No Sin, p. 16.