Born to Interface: An analysis of Bruce Springsteen's autobiography, Born to Run

Born to Interface: An analysis of Bruce Springsteen's autobiography, Born to Run

- V. Shruti Devi

In true Brechtian form, one shall begin with a transparent description of how and why one read Springsteen’s book. Bring backstage to the front, as it were, while weaving ways forward for the nation and the party. Oh, and the planet.

I choose to write and upload Part 1 of this essay onto my political blog on the 15^th of August, 2017, the seventieth anniversary of India’s Independence. Independence Day. When Nation means India, and Party means the Indian National Congress Party, of which one is a member, a worker, dream-weaver, course-corrector and interpreter-of-things-in-retrospect. It’s a democratic party.

So one emerged from a many-year hiatus from long-book-reading (while reading and analysing news almost twenty-four-seven), to dive into Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, Born to Run, that was released last year.

Back in the 1980s, 1988, to be precise, was the Amnesty International Human Rights Now concert tour that included Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (the main draw at that time), and they performed at the Jawahar Lal Nehru stadium of New Delhi on the 30^th of September of that year.

Springsteen had caught the attention of school kids of my generation with his 1985 Grammy Award win and performance, and the Born in the USA album.

In the days when the country was barely forty years into independence, and found the need for a stringent version of democratic socialism, there used to be only one, and later two, government-run television channels. Doordarshan 1 and DD 2 ran with fixed timings, and the government relayed cultural events and programmes in keeping with whatever the country’s current foreign policy thrust required.

For one spell of Sundays, there were interviews and music of the Pakistani singer, Nazia Hasan and her brother; Russian ballets were a staple; the Japanese programme, Giant Robot for kids, as well as the American programme, Star Trek, and Carl Sagan’s futuristic shows were all watched, discussed, and absorbed. There were also British programmes like Fawlty Towers, Jane Eyre movies, and The Jewel in the Crown. And the Old Fox detective serial about the German Herr.

 These are only snippets that I mention here, of the entire mix that was broadcast, in the true tradition of the Non-aligned Movement (NAM), that India valued, especially against the back-drop of the waning days of the cold war.

Then came Hot Tracks. From what I recall, just four songs every Friday, divided by an ad-break. The entire school (or so we thought), waited to tune in, and hold forth the next day, starting at the bus-stop, and thereafter (in this case, possibly into the hereafter, given that one is still writing on the topic!).

And there was Bruce Springsteen. On stage on the screen, singing Dancing in the Dark, and Born in the USA. A leftist aunt passing by said look at you, you’re a fan! And a gawking fan was described, and thus born.

One identified with the fact that The Boss (that’s the moniker), wrote lyrics for and about the working class and the masses. As a teenager, one saw one’s own role as a poet-politician in the making, much influenced by the fact that one’s family was a political one, and that we were in New Delhi because my dad represented our hometown, a faraway constituency, at India’s temple of democracy.

Some of my closest friends were kids of politicians, and politicians of all hues walked through our doors, giving one the opportunity to listen to debates and discussions that were to, in retrospect, have global impacts.

The then deputy-PM of the USSR and his delegation, for example, graced the government bungalow in New Delhi that we lived in those days, 15 AB Pandara Road, with their presence one evening for dinner. Socialistic Indian political leaders who went on to become ministers and leaders of parties, and of the country used to air their views on world politics and the state of what was described those days as the Third World.

Frankly, much of what they said sounded like another Bruce Springsteen song. This, along with the influence of Christian educational institutions, served to make one ponder, perhaps more than many of one’s contemporaries, over the state of the world, famines in Ethiopia, the Constitution of India, the state of the Environment, and the work of the United Nations.

As a teenager, one had UNEP Save our Seas stickers alongside every Springsteen poster that was available in Khan Market for room décor those days. One was in the school band, struggling to play the guitar, with our school, Mater Dei Convent, shining on at the inter-school Bang Club competitions, playing numbers like Come Young Citizens of the World, We Are One at the Siri Fort auditorium where Obama, in the next century, made his New Delhi address.

So when the much-awaited Springsteen Human Rights concert came our way in ‘88, thanks to Amnesty, off went the gang, all excited and decked up, to listen to, and watch The Boss!

More on the concert later, now back to the book at hand.

For those who believe in upholding the values of freedom, justice, equality (and diversity), it becomes evident (and that debate is held often and by many), that the best way forward is, indeed, the Rule of Law.

But for the rule of law to be truly actualized, you also need Truth (or Satya), a value that Mahatma Gandhi stood for. Honesty. Satya and Ahimsa. Truth and non-violence. And so we are a democracy that’s proud of our Defence Forces. They’re there to keep the peace. We owe our forces and our martyrs a country that practices good governance.

India has always played a pivotal role in world politics, and when we speak for the rule of law, we do not do so as lackeys of any greater power, but as the ever-evolving spirit of the roots of grassroots democracy that took a giant leap towards the parliamentary system when it drove the British away, and gave itself a Constitution and the present parliamentary system. (Ironically, some elements of colonial media are, as I write, referring to these dates in history as the days of India and Pakistan’s partition, rather than drawing attention to the freedom movement and the era of new democracy worldwide). And the historic musical event of a generation (that Springsteen refers to in his book) also requires a mention. The one as Max Yasgur’s farm. Better known as Woodstock. 15^th August.

We learn from Born to Run (Springsteen’s autobiography titled after a successful album by the same name, and an article on public transport that I wrote for a leading news daily in India in the 1990s), that before embarking on the Amnesty tour, the performers had to go back to school, in a manner of speaking, and study the human rights situations in all the countries of South America, Africa, Asia and Europe that they were to perform in.

Springsteen writes that Roy Bittan was the only one in the band with a college education, which is why he’s known as The Professor. Bruce himself had done a year at a community college, and was largely self-taught thereafter. For this, (or possibly despite this, and minus the self-consciousness of the demands of snobbery), Springsteen’s lyrics that speak of the blue-collar working class ring true. They stem from a world of real experience.

In India, for decades, the best education has been available to people only via the English language. This colonial legacy has served to empower those who speak English. In the 1980s, it was automatically assumed that those who spoke English were from the higher echelons of society (whatever that might be).

Today, The Republic has progressed to valuing the roots of it’s linguistic culture, though there’s a lot that remains to be done in the field of the rights of linguistic minorities. Especially tribal communities. The inter-relatedness between a language, and a way of life…a culture: human interactions, as well as human interactions with the rest of creation, and how different languages play different roles in shaping these…the basic thread of connection is probably understood through the prism of science. Sound, light, matter, and the sounds and syllables uttered by humans. Even in these sounds, languages vary. From individual to individual, continent to continent.

One syllable that prevails is breath, to use the language of science. Or, as understood through yoga, the syllable Aum.

When Bruce met a Hopi boy at the fringe of a Navajo reservation, and in answer to the question “how much” (to play the role of a tourist guide), the Hopi boy answered, in translation from the languages probably closer to the surface in his awareness, than communities whose grooves are in a different state of evolution: “whatever it’s worth to you”. A bit like the code of honour Springsteen talks about, to describe the method that one of his bands employed, to share the money that they earned.

There is, indeed, much to be said for incorporating the best practices from everywhere, while making decisions, especially those that impact entire civilizations. Case in point: The Constitution of India. And also how each country places itself and its people in the emerging scenarios as far as the world economy goes. The country of Bhutan, for instance, has a Happiness Index, which is an official concept in the country’s world of finance.

While one has been aware of much of the back-ground of Springsteen’s work and influences, it still came as a surprise to me, in the year 2017, to learn, from Born to Run, that Bruce:

a)       lived in a house, during his childhood, where the living area was heated by a kerosene stove;

b)      lived in a house where cooking was done on wood coals;

c)       had no hot water at home in New Jersey;

d)      was once so broke, as a struggling musician, that he couldn’t pay rent, and slept on the beach;

e)      lived in a neighbourhood where people only left their houses in suits if they were going to church;

f)        sometimes had girlfriends who used to tip him money for food;

g)       had never met anyone who’d been on an airplane…this was in the mid-70s;

h)      used to sometimes be slipped free broken ice cream cones by the Jersey Freeze ice cream guy

It appears that Springsteen takes pride in asserting this aspect of his identity in his overall language and writing, not just through his lyrics, but in his autobiography as well.

What some might consider to be the unduly macho tone of the rockstar’s remembered “way of the road” (people lending people their girlfriends, all said in utmost good humour, but decidedly darkly medieval), is tinged with what might be cringed at by some as the working class rebel’s benign linguistic crassness (talking to the -albeit intimate- public reading this book, about “the little round tit popping out from the T-shirt” of someone called Margaret). Similarly, the perceived political incorrectness of the context of the use of the word spastic…though it is possible that the fans reading the book would intuit that this is a sardonic allusion to how some sections of society used to converse at given points of time.

Born to Run traces Springsteen’s music, and that of the surrounding trends and events of contemporary music in a first-hand sort of way. The book, from this point of view, would be instructive, not only for practitioners of governance, administration, activism, and the promoters of the rule of law in general, as this article seeks to draw attention to, but primarily for students (and fans) of the journey of certain kinds of music through several decades. It is an experientially authoritative work on this count, and I’d put it on the syllabus, without going into further detail here.

The book is intelligently structured. Divided into three broad “phases”, there is a very slow chronologically sequential progression, but with eddies and whirls that flit back and forth in time. The three divisions have chapters, and sub-chapters. Most of these deal with: people in his life, or those who have influenced him (family; people from the music business whom he has interacted with, and, on occasion, formed friendships with; idols from the world of music); his bands, albums, songs, tours, and the stories and thoughts behind them; rites of passage in his life.

There is an interesting three-dream sequence presented entirely in italics. There’s also a capsule that  verges on a miniature genre-within-a-genre format of writing: his description of his seafaring trip with his father to Mexico. This could be described as an astutely crafted literary tool that has been fitted into the narrative with elan. The writer seems to be aware of having tossed in this ingredient, as he describes the incident itself as having fulfilled a part of his father’s seafaring fantasy.

Springsteen talks about his preoccupation with the interface between the personal and the political. To him, the political was centred around issues of identity in America. The other great influence in his life is his mother, and, of course, the omnipresent Catholic church.

In the book, there is a repeated use of not just church-inspired phraseology like “let the service begin”, but also an eternal dwelling on concepts of magic, miracles, mystery, mysticism.

From drawing attention to the wonders of science (refurbished radios), to guitars, to those of musical talent, it’s magic all the way. There even exists a Springsteen album entitled Magic. 

The father’s bar hangout is thought of as a mystical hangout of men; the mother is a miracle, the sounds of her getting ready for work are sounds of mystery; there’s talk of guitar wizardry; of words like voodoo to describe the music of one of his earlier his bands, Steel Mill; the mix of black and white influences in the music of the band when it had Boom as a drummer was magic; there was something shamanistic about Clarence’s role in the band; even running into an old school friend who used to be a cheerleader at school is described in mock-comic style as a miracle having occurred; the music of another early band, The Castiles, was “raw, rudimentary, local but effective magic”.

California introduces him to the concepts of the musician as a psychic facilitator, and to music being used as an instrument for consciousness-raising, but his catholic upbringing prevents him from comprehending these phenomena at the time.

He describes the world of the priests and nuns: “…a world where all you have is at risk, a world filled with the unknown bliss of resurrection, eternity and the unending fires of perdition, of exciting sexually tinged torture, immaculate conceptions and miracles. A world where men turn into gods and gods into devils….”

While referring to England as the musical mother country, the cities that had been home to their beat heroes are described as mystical destinations.

One is satisfied that one is not the only myth-maker on the loose!

Born to Interface Part 2

Bruce Springsteen points out that his hit number of the mid-1980s, the protest song, Born in the USA, is one of his most misunderstood numbers, but that later acoustic renditions do serve to demonstrate that there are no inherent contradictions in the things that his music says.

Bruce was inspired to write Born in the USA ten years after the Vietnam war, after meeting two people: Ron Kovic and Bobby Muller.

Ron Kovic, the author of Born on the Fourth of July, was a Vietnam vet whom Springsteen met by sheer coincidence just a few days after he’d bought the memoir at a shop while driving through the Arizona desert. Ron went on to take him to the vet centre at Venice, California, to meet the So Cal vets.

Bobby Muller, who’d been shot in Vietnam, he met backstage in New Jersey. Muller had been in anti-war protests with John Kerry (the Secretary of State of the USA during Obama’s time), and had started the Vietnam Veterans of America, and a concert for the Vietnam Veterans of America was held in Los Angeles on 20^th August, 1981. Bruce opened the concert with CCR’s (Creedence Clearwater Revival’s) “Who’ll Stop the Rain”.

The CCR, I’m told, was in India in the 1960s, touring with the Moral Re-armament Movement (MRA), a sort of cultural group, and visited places such as Ooty, where the third order of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary (FMM) was founded, though the groups performed elsewhere, and the event was widely publicised at the time.

Springsteen first came across navy SEAL, Terry Magovern when he returned from his second great trip to California, having visited his parents who had moved to the Bay Area, and after having accompanied his father on a Mexican holiday. Terry was also the manager of the Captain’s Garter in Neptune, New Jersey, where Bruce joined Steve, Southside and their Sundance Blues Band soon after his return from San Francisco. Terry later became his assistant and close friend for twenty-three years. “Terry’s Song” was written for Magovern for the album Magic, after Terry’s passing away.

Bruce refers to himself as the Jersey draft dodger number one, and his memoir records the event of him (like quite a few others), successfully managing to dodge being sent off to fight the war. There is mention of “survivor’s guilt” at least twice in the book, in the context of the rest of his work and life, but no regret for the dodge.

Friends of Springsteen who went to war include Bart Haynes, who was a drummer for his early band, The Castiles. He was the first soldier from New Jersey to die in Vietnam (Mortar shelling in Quang Tri province).

Walter Cichon of The Motifs also received a head wound in Kontum province of South Vietnam, was left for dead, and was among the list of those missing in action.

When one compares the essences of the greatest democracies of the world, one of the parameters against which my country scores higher, is that we, in India, do not draft people to the armed forces. (The unrelated fact that our Constitution has Emergency provisions- wherein fundamental rights can be temporarily suspended by the government- is arguably the most debatable article of our otherwise exemplary document. This is a provision that has been called into use only once in history, and is seen as one of the darkest phases that the nation has gone through).

While talking of the dodge of the draft, Springsteen has his reasons, and noteworthy today, is the bit where his perception was: “…bodies were needed to stem the perceived Communist menace in South Asia”. Today, decades after the war, it is evident that eventually. It is not wars, but multi-pronged global approaches towards sustainable development and human rights that bridge gaps amongst people and nations.

Bruce describes his present wife (he continues to use this old-fashioned term, as do quite a few people), and band-member, Patti Scialfa, as ”…a one-woman, red-haired revolution”. The accomplished musician happens to be the daughter of a Coast Guard lieutenant commander. After Born in the USA, Springsteen says there was an intentional left-turn, which, along with his growing relationship with Patti, was disorienting for the band.

The Tunnel of Love album tour, after Born in the USA, merged into the Amnesty International Human Rights Now world tour, and though Springsteen had acquired his largest audience with Born in the USA, the greater significance of the 1988 tour could be though of as organically evolving and revealing itself in the present day.

It is no coincidence that on the 9^th of August, 2017 (the UN-declared International Day of Indigenous People), Springsteen’s Twitter account and Facebook page announced that he will make his Broadway debut this year. Through most of October and November, these acoustic shows to smaller audiences are timed to coincide with the annual general assembly of the United Nations at New York.

The grand orchestra that is the development sector has an instinct for leveraging ongoing events to bring about desired results by way of impromptu gatherings of an otherwise-difficult-to-bring-together bunch of nationalities or interest groups.

By Springsteen’s own admission, when large crowds attend Bruce Springsteen concerts, there are bound to be not just Democrats (who he campaigns for, and supports), but also Republicans, amongst the audience. Similarly, he draws audiences from countries that might be in conflict, such as countries with boundary disputes: India and Pakistan.

When Springsteen was recording the number, Worlds Apart, for his post-nine-eleven album, The Rising, a Pakistani Sufi music group happened to be in Los Angeles on exactly the day that he needed a particular kind of sound for the number. They thus recorded the number with Bruce.

The unifying power of music, and its ability to work beyond boundaries of nationality, and, indeed, of trans-nationality, equate it with the world of Nature and the Environment, of which it is an essential part.

Cross-planetary forces of destruction caused by the dirtying of rivers, or the melting of glaciers do not recognize borders of countries or states in their destruction. Music, in its reach and appeal, can, and often, does work beyond such demarcations as well.

It is therefore significant (and useful) that Bruce has not been handed out any very significant UN-centric honours or ambassadorships, as the Boss continues to play Magician in the theatre of the World.

Springsteen’s Foreword to the book describes his town as one where “almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud”, and says of himself, that he was ”…a member in good standing amongst those who ‘lie’ in service of the truth…artists with a small ‘a’”. 

As one ruminates over the meaning and implications of this admission (or brag?), one finds that truth, authenticity and honesty surface often as recurring themes in the thought processes of the singer-songwriter through the writing of the book, Born to Run.

Some of these ideas are explained to the reader when Bruce writes of his first foreign tour when he was twenty-five, and nervous. He writes, “…I know I’m good but I’m also a poser. That’s artistic balance! In the second half of the twentieth century, ‘authenticity’ would be what you made of it, a hall of mirrors", and he proceeds to talk of the experience of being aware of his ‘performance self’, and his ‘true self’ while on stage, and of the ‘multiple personalities…fighting to take turns at the microphone’.

While Springsteen might have mastered the art of striking the right balance between the demands of communication that go with a particular situation, and those of ‘authenticity’, the articulation here does indicate that he sees these as ongoing challenges that are renewed at each live show. One begins to gain a better understanding of what is at the root of the quest of his continuing live performance saga.

Springsteen says: “In the 1960s the first version of my country that struck me as truthful and unfiltered was the one I heard in songs by artists like Bob Dylan…”, and that certain songs “…let me know that someone, somewhere, was speaking in tongues and that absurd ecstasy had been snuck into the Constitution’s First Amendment and was an American birthright. I heard it on the radio”.

In India, the first association with the word ‘birthright’, are the words of a renowned freedom fighter, Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who declared: “Freedom is my birthright, and I shall have it”. As far as we are concerned, it was a term that Tilak coined, that has gained global currency.

If Springsteen was made aware of these events of Indian history as a part of the crash-course on human rights he went through before he played at the Amnesty International’s Human Rights Now concert at New Delhi in 1988, then this is an interesting linguistic connection being made in a sentence where he refers to the American Constitution’s First Amendment. It is my guess that he was thinking of the rule of law worldwide, of India, and of Mahatma Gandhi. The overall context is, after all, a discussion on Truth.

For those amongst us with the most exacting standards for Truth and Honesty, even Reality Theatre is an ambiguous phenomenon, where only a version that announces itself as being reality theatre passes the moral test.

Sometimes, however, possibly in the name of using art for social change, one cannot rule out the fact that reality theatre oversteps the limits of truth. In the context of attempts to bring about social change, this might just be another form of ‘astro-turfing’ (not to cherry-pick and dredge facts, but, in this case, to showcase desired reality by bringing it about).

For example, if policewomen in plainclothes, or any group of women, were to occupy public spaces that are not considered safe for women, at times of day that are not safe for women on a regular basis, preferably in empowering, revealing clothing, they would be able to eventually reclaim the space and time as being available equally to all.

Mahatma Gandhi, too, had said something to the effect of ‘be the change you want to see in the world’. Gandhi had attended an important international conference in only a loin-cloth, and was disparagingly referred to as a half-naked fakir. The benchmark for women to be what they want to be in public is a task more difficult than this.

Springsteen’s interesting and unexpected preoccupation with dress will feature later in this series.

Other than the speaking-in-tongues kind of biblical imagery that runs through the book, there are noteworthy instances of development-sector-UN-inspired imagery:

He describes the Upstage Club as “an incredible clearinghouse for musicians”. ‘Clearinghouse’ is a part of the oft-used jargon of the development sector, and is used to describe a bulk of existing documents, talent, connections or networks that are made available on a platform to be accessed, sorted or added value to.

When he was with his father on what he describes as “his seafaring fantasy”, he talks of how his “…dad was lowered, like a sack of United Nations grain, into the tender…”.

Echoes of this, and other UN-centric imagery lead one to glean an element of the aspirational (or the associative), in how the writer interprets his own role in history so far.

Regarding his work in music, he speaks of having been in a ‘transient field’, where he was meant for the ‘long haul’, and says, at one point of the book, that ‘the above case studies prove, no matter who you are, that’s not as easy as it sounds’.

Project-cycles in the UN are often looked at as short, medium and long term, where long-term would mean twenty years.

Further on in the book, Springsteen writes: “I was interested in what it meant to be an American, one small participant in current history at a time when the future seemed as hazy and shape-shifting as that thin line on the horizon. Can a rock ‘n’ roll artist sculpt that line, shade its direction? How much?”.

Springsteen flags a part of his role in world politics in terms of his drives past Checkpoint Charlie, his concerts divided by approximately seven years, and the eventual falling of the wall that divided (the Communist) East Germany from West Germany.

About driving through Checkpoint Charlie, he writes, “you knew the oppression was real…we didn’t forget; we’d be back in 1988 to play for a horizonless field of Eastern Bloc faces…a year later the wall fell”. Springsteen also mentions that the first trip through Checkpoint Charlie had had a deep impact on his friend and band-mate, Steve Van Zandt.

Other than the fact that when bands travel to places to play, there is a cultural interaction and inter-personal exchange of conversations and ideas, perhaps contacts, amongst all those involved at various levels in the immediate logistics of the conducting of a show, the primary impact, in this case, is most likely the impact of Springsteen’s words, and the band’s performance, the energy and assurance that a better world is possible, that played a key role in bringing about seismic socio-political change along this highway (or wall) of history.

This was, however, about the same time as when Springsteen says his music had taken an intentional left turn. Scholars of political science might be able to throw more light on, or confirm the existence of a school of thought that opines that of all the forms of government/state/law (using all the terms in a loosely interchangeable fashion here) that exist, it is prudent to ensure that the best (or most moderate version) of the worst form of government should also be kept alive in some (albeit rudimentary) form in the crucible of civilization.

Today, as the world is witness to a mixture of disruptive energies where it appears that the axis has begun to veer, and that nomenclatures of capitalist, socialist, communist and various permutations and combinations of these seem to be caught in a bizarre dance with labels of democracy, monarchy, military dictatorship, all surging towards One World, space, outer space and cyberspace, we need to look at the constructive energy that might exist in All Things Russian Mentioned in Born To Run!

Springsteen describes Bruce at the age of thirty-four as a serial monogamist, and attributes this to the culture of shame and guilt that was imbibed in him by the Catholic church.

While discussing the role of religion in his life, he recounts a few unpleasant incidents of how he (and other children) were treated by the authorities at the grammar school that he attended. Springsteen says that while these violent admonishments ‘estranged’ him forever from the church, the institution was so all-pervasive, that there was no real escape, and that he “came to ruefully and bemusedly understand that once you’re a Catholic, you’re always a Catholic”. He also goes on to admit that “deep inside”, he’s “still on the team”, and says that his mother and her sisters lived and preached the credo of work, faith and family.

In relating events connected to negotiations he tried to make with Mike Appel, his manager, for a new round of contracts, he uses concepts and phrases from the language of Buddhism such as “the middle way” (reminiscent of the Middle Path propounded by The Buddha), and moderation, but in the nick of time, for the culminating sentence of the same paragraph and chapter, he reverts back to Christian imagery, and describes his band and his extended team as his apostles. The manner of the use of language mirrors the reality of his religious grounding that he seems to have come to terms with.

Springsteen’s album, Magic, was his “…state-of-nation dissent over the Iraq War and the Bush years.” In the course of the Magic tour, in the context of counselling a band member, Danny Federici, who had contracted melanoma (and had earlier been “overstating his expenses and skimming off the top”), Bruce says that “As a leader, even of a rock ‘n’ roll band, there is always a little of the ‘padrone’ in your job description, but it’s a fine line.”

This healing touch, Springsteen has brought with his music, to shape, respond to, and pave the way in synch with a growing collection of world events.

The concert that he did for the Vietnam vets in LA was on the 20^th of August, 1981. 20^th of Aug. happens to be the birthday of one of the past leaders of the Indian National Congress party, the late Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, and is being celebrated in India today as one writes.

Thirty-six years after the LA concert, and nineteen years after the New Delhi concert, Springsteen continues to perform on significant occasions such as for the inauguration ceremony of President Obama, and at the half-time of the American Super Bowl.

When he went back to East Berlin for his second concert, after which the German wall fell, Springsteen seems to have been quite surprised to notice that the tickets said that they were being presented by the Young Communist League, and that they were playing a “concert for the Sandinistas” (question-mark, exclamation mark!)

Back home in the USA, those who hailed from the Russian steppes in his state of New Jersey were people who included descendants of Genghis Khan, and belonged to the Mongolian race. “Persecuted” by Stalin, and rescued by Tolstoy’s daughter from the Soviets, they lived south of Bruce’s town of Freehold, on Freewood Acres, as a “planned community”. He describes them as being “rabidly anti-Communist”, and we are told that they “were sprung from Stalin’s cages”. Springsteen says many of the children from Freewood Acres were his school-mates.

In the context of describing some of his father’s behaviour as “paranoid delusion”, Springsteen mentions how his father thought that a teenage Russian friend of Bruce’s was a spy.

Springsteen recalls a year when he did “a holiday show for the locals at a Russian social club called Rova Farms on the outskirts of town”.

One finds that Richard Blackwell played the congas that evening for Bruce at Rova Farms. The same Richard Blackwell that Springsteen had fortuitously run into far away from home, a familiar face from New Jersey, on his first trip to San Francisco. (More on San Francisco, and Springsteen’s tryst with nature and the environment in the next part of this series).

Springsteen was thus, even in his statedly insular early life, familiar with a thing or two that was Russian, as opposed to what the rest of the world might expect of an everyday American’s exposure to Russian people or culture of any kind during the days of the cold war.

We find, in Chapter Forty, The River, that in true Springsteenian form, he draws attention to the Three Mile Island nuclear accident (and environmental disaster) that took place in the USA, through the life of an everyday character. He describes his song, “Roulette”, as the “portrait of a family man caught in the shadow of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident”.

Thus, a number about an American nuclear disaster (an environmental issue), was his debut, in his words, “into the public political arena”. Bruce Springsteen performed Roulette at Madison Square Garden for Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE).

Somehow, via the title, Roulette, and the Power of Suggestion of the artist, the reader’s mind moves to the Chernobyl disaster, and, indeed, to thoughts on the negative aspects of the role of civil nuclear energy in the emerging energy mix of our planet.

By the time Springsteen got news of his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, his repertoire in the public political arena had expanded to include the Human Rights Now tour that had served not only to extend solidarity, but to also legally empower people who stood in need of strength or liberation, or just music, across the globe.

Springsteen, at twenty-one, made his first foray out west with a bunch of comrades, and one of their dogs. The three-day journey sounds like a rough ride in two vehicles, with no extra money for stop-overs, and one of the human beings not knowing how to drive, but doing so anyway.

In California, Springsteen says, “…we stood speechless before what we saw. Giant old-growth trees, vegetation so lush you’d get lost a few feet in off the walking path…I’d never stood in the midst of nature like this and you could feel its humbling and intoxicating power. I approached a tree the likes of which I’d never seen before…thousands of butterflies exploded off its branches and shot into the hard blue sky. This was another world.”

They were at a “human potential spa”. Springsteen writes that there were “hot springs tucked into the side of a cliff overlooking the sea. There were the springs, a cold bath, and everybody naked.”

Their band played for the locals and the paying guests in the evening, and “it all broke loose West Coast-style…we played the crowd into a frenzy”. Springsteen remarks that at this place, “music was a part of a larger tribal ‘consciousness raising’ event”.

From the grandest scale, cut to the microscopic. He describes himself scrutinizing an army of ants as he waits for his parents, by then in the Bay Area, to collect him from the highway. In his book, however, Springsteen dedicates a chapter entitled Eastern Woman to his mother, and describes her as a “raw, rough wonder”.

The elasticity in the way Springsteen writes here about nature: grandiose descriptions of sweeping landscapes, distant mountains and the heavens, then the (albeit unleashed) butterflies, right down to the marching armies of ants, is mirrored by his observations of human actions: Unhindered trance-dancers; meditative seekers; “groups of people curled up on a green lawn in white sheets returning to their ‘amoeba stage’”.

One would hazard a guess, and go so far as to speculate over whether this might have, retrospectively, been a turning-point of sorts for Bruce.  A peep into the fact that everything is possible, that while recognizing and honouring the minutiae of things or circumstances, it was alright, and possible, and do-able, to insist on the pursuit of the largest, the highest, the seemingly impossible goal/s.

The frustration of a person with high aspirations being conditioned to (and resisting) the scaling-down that one’s circumstances, religion, socio-political order or upbringing impose on one are hinted at at the very outset, when, in the opening paragraph of chapter one, he writes: “…my world sprawls on into infinity, or at least to Peter McDermott’s house…one block up”.

A rudimentary parallel might be drawn, between the approaches of Capitalism and Communism, in the application of the concept of absolutes having been created in terms of the individual versus the collective; the small-scale versus the large-scale; the selfless versus the selfish…and these may then be juxtaposed against other cultural and social constructs that also have a bearing on how people and areas are governed or not governed: the synthesis; the many avatars of the permutations and combinations of the required mix of the required ingredients of the public and the personal, whether in music, in society, or vis-a-vis the world economy.

Springsteen and his raw music enter San Francisco, the land of not only a plethora of environmental activists set in nature’s lap, and where “hippies ran free”, but of bands that, alas, seemed, at that time, to play more “sophisticated” music than Bruce did.

If Springsteen experienced a glorious desert-ride via Arizona on his first trip to California, he experienced a snow-storm (snow-storms, he writes, can be truly unnerving) on his ride to San Mateo, California, from New Jersey. New Jersey, the place where he was a local star, and people stood next to him, proclaiming: King of New Jersey! (We’re also told, in one of the early chapters, that the town of Freehold’s first church service and first funeral were held in their family's living room).

Of snow-storms, he writes: “Back east, we usually experience the freedom that comes with a good snowstorm. No work, no school, the world shutting its big mouth for a while…A lot of snow, however…That feeling of freeness turns to confinement. The sheer physical weight of the snow becomes existential and the dread of a dark, covered world sets in. I’ve felt it twice. Once in Idaho where it snowed circus clowns for seventy-two hours…”. Observations such as these that run through the book convince a reader that while Bruce Springsteen does not have any formal academic laurels to tom-tom, his analytical abilities are not restricted to being the product of field-based research such as knowing about the lives of common people from personal experience.

Springsteen’s environmentalism is not restricted to him being awestruck by the natural world. His concern for nuclear contamination is repeated in some of the imagery that he uses, such as when he talks of the vessel that he and his father sailed in on their Mexican holiday as “a bobbing rubber duck in a five-year-old’s bathtub". Most netizens would’ve come across some version or the other of the story of the (i think) Chinese cargo ship that was said to be carrying toy rubber ducks that capsized, and the fact that these rubber ducks are said to show up on far-flung shores, and remind humankind of the far-reaching impacts of any nuclear contamination of the seas.

The balance that must be struck between the rights of individuals, and the duties of individuals towards the community and the planet are at the heart of much of the enviornmental jurisprudence of countries such as India. These concepts require a greater amplification in order to meet challenges pertaining to human rights that people face world-wide.

Springsteen writes" "After the crash of 2008, I was furious at what had been done by a handful of trading companies on Wall Street. (The album) Wrecking Ball was a shot of anger at the injustice that continues on and has widened with deregulation, dysfunctional regulatory agencies and capitalism gone wild at the expense of hardworking Americans". Trump-esque in his concern specifically for the American working class (as perceived by an international observer). But clearly the very opposite of Trump in terms of there being no conflict of interest in the stands for the working class being taken by Bruce The Boss. 

Regarding the making of the album The River in 1979, he writes that he “began to steer the record into a rawer direction…striking the perfect balance between a garage band and the professionalism required to make good records…Along with ‘gravitas’, our shows were always filled with fun…”. This was a progression (or movement, in any case), in the music and style of performance, in comparison to what Springsteen had started out with. There are other indicators that he uses to trace movements and bolster his descriptions, and these include descriptions of garments, and of spaces.

The costumes in which he and his musicians perform, as well as the clothes people wear in general, seem to be of significance to the writer and the performer in him. As are the settings. Music as theatre.

In the days when he was in the band The Castiles (the name of a brand of shampoo), they dressed “more like a British R & B group” and played at places like the IB Club.

Closer to the present day, of when he was about to play at the Super Bowl, he writes: “I’m sitting in my trailer trying to decide which boots to wear. I’ve got a nice pair of cowboy boots my feet look really good in, but I’m concerned about their stability…I better go with the combat boots I always carry”.

 Half-way through the book, one finds less of a mention of garb, and this coincides with the overall chronology of the time from where his music takes “an intentional left turn”. Uniforms turn to individual choices, and Springsteen discontinues his practice of dictating wardrobe choices to his band-members. People’s clothes are suddenly not referred to as much as they were through the first half of the book. (He specifically mentions that he has been writing this autobiography since 2009 in long-hand, and one believes this, so one is convinced that the minor shift in this aspect of the narration is not the inadvertent oversight of ghost writers!).

The pure artistic eye for sartorial style calls for a special mention, and comes across as being one of the passions of the musician, worthy of follow-up commentary further on down this read.

Just as this ongoing commentary might prove to be a clarion call for direct political support for Springsteen, Bruce’s weekly jaunts with his grandfather to literally scavenge from piles of junk: wires, filament tubes and the like, and watch him recycle these into five-dollar radios for sale retrospectively place him on the high table of (and with) pioneering environmental entrepreneurs producing upcycled goods. An additional talking and rallying-point for a political sojourn.

The black migrant population that had immigrated into New Jersey from the ‘South’ came to think of Springsteen’s grandfather as the “radio man”, and were his main “patrons”. Bruce was “simply the protegee grandson of the ‘radio man’”.

Touching upon race relations while recounting his role in his grandfather’s rags-to-riches venture (Elements of the Bildungsroman have been skilfully woven in, and are reinforced in the narrative via mention of Charles Dickens elsewhere in the book), Springsteen writes: “Race relations, never great in Freehold, will explode ten years later into riotings and shootings, but for now, there is just a steady, uncomfortable quiet”.

Bruce writes: “We had black friends, though only rarely did we enter each other’s homes. There was détente in the streets. The white and black adults were cordial but distant. The children played together. There was a lot of easy racism amongst the kids…but I never ran into kids who wouldn’t play with black kids until I bumped into the middle and upper-middle class.” Springsteen understands these nuances of how race relations play out across various strata of society through personal association at all levels. From the radio-buying blacks in their “’Mickey Mouse’ camps”, to rubbing shoulders with President Obama, Springsteen understands it all. And is able to communicate it to the masses.

He describes the racism of the fifty’s as being “presumed and casual”, to the extent that kids who were excluded from a group-event by a particular person were conditioned to take this in their stride, and to socialize with the same group that had, in a sense, condoned the social exclusion, at future events as if nothing was the matter. This was considered normal.

Of his black friends when he was young, Springsteen says he was “pals” with the Blackwell brothers, was taken up by the jazz-like demeanour of Richard Blackwell, and reminisces over how he thought of him as “the pope of cool”.

He describes two distinct kinds of school gangs, “two socially incompatible teen cliques”, in great detail through the overlapping prisms of fashion, style and social status. He identified more with the ones that “copped their whole look from the school’s black community.” He writes of how the kids return from some of the unifying music on the dance floor “to their UN-designated square of gym floor”.

Dance, for Springsteen, was something he’d been initiated into at home by his aunts and his mother, and it was also a carefully honed skill. He does not hesitate to reveal that he went to great extents to practice his moves before he hit the dance floor. He used to attend dance “soirees” at the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO), and at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). Some of Springsteen’s music is, unsurprisingly, influenced by the sound of Gospel music.

But Springsteen’s two defining connects with the black community are his friendship and musical association with Clarence Clemons, and the flak that he drew from sections of the police (“usually a great part of my audience”), when he “stepped directly into the divide of race” with his number, American Skin, that drew attention to an incident of police brutality on the streets, perpetrated against an African immigrant.

The book also treads a political path when he holds forth on his views on government expenditure in his observations on the aftermath of the LA riots of 1992.

The lyrics of a number of Springsteen’s songs are, of course, about race and exclusion. The number My Hometown captures “the racial tension of late-sixties small-town New Jersey”. In writing about the album, The Ghost of Tom Joad, he says he “traced the lineage of some of his earlier characters to the Mexican immigrant experience in the new West”.

The concerns of immigrants, of religious minorities, and those racially discriminated against have been an abiding concern for Springsteen.

He mentions how he once had a girlfriend who was “fabulously Jewish”, and how, unfortunately, he wasn’t able to conjure up much social bonhomie, in his youth, with another set of Jewish sisters whose family moved into his neighbourhood.

Springsteen talks of “day-dreaming over brown-skinned girls”, there are appreciative references to olive-skinned girls, and we are told that “…on the “Irish Riviera” of the Shore, the “Italians and the Irish meet and mate often…the fair-skinned and freckled can be found tossing down beers….”. Race was definitely on peoples’ minds, irrespective of how they treated the factor.

Bruce Springsteen points out that his song, “We Are Alive”, from the album Wrecking Ball, addresses “new voices of immigration, the civil rights movement and anyone who’d ever stuck their neck out for some righteous justice and was knocked down or killed for their effort.” The Boss urges people to “Listen and learn from the souls and spirits who’ve come before’.

Springsteen describes himself as a child of “Vietnam-era America, of the Kennedy, King and Malcolm X assassinations. The country no longer felt like the innocent place it was said to be in the Eisenhower fifties. Political murder, economic injustice and institutionalised racism were all powerfully and brutally present”. He views his work as being done in the service of humanity.

While his audience has largely been comprised of white people, he writes that when he sang Promised Land on an Obama campaign at Cleveland, his intended audience were: “young people, old people, black, white, brown, cutting across religious and class line”.

Through the book, Springsteen directly addresses the reader/s on a few occasions. The kind of interface with his audience that Springsteen attempts to craft, and revels in, make for fascinating reading and conjecture.

The book is a-rustle with sartorial detail, ranging from a passing mention of “Nehru suits” that the Beatles sported, to Bruce’s mother’s exclamations of delight over the picturesque wedding dresses that brides at the church near their house wore. His mother’s office, he associated with “perfumes, crisp white blouses, whispering skirts and stockings of the secretaries”.

There is an underlying social commentary and semi-political tone, a sociological point that’s made in almost every sentence of the writing of Born to Run.

Dress-wise, we find that the principal of his school didn’t take kindly to the idea of Bruce attending his graduation meet in his off-beat look. Bruce boycotted the event.

The police treatment towards “longhairs” in nineteen-sixtys New Jersey was “intemperate”. (Longhairs was not a reference to the long-haired men of the Sikh community at this stage). Inkwell Coffee House is lauded as a “longhair-friendly local institution”.

There was also the infuriating Disneyland experience, when he and Steve were asked to remove their bandanas. Springsteen says he refused to remove his “headscarf” (the Born in the USA “do-rag”), and they chose to avoid the place instead.

The get-up of the Rah-rah and Greaser teenage cliques is gone into in some amount of detail. The Rahs were “the jock, madras-wearing, cheerleading, college-bound slightly upscale teen contingent…who lorded it over most high schools”, and the Greasers, Springsteen remarks, “…were in deep pursuit of ‘uptown style’. The pristineness of the suits; the high-collared pink, lime green and baby blue shirts; the high-water trousers…”. Epic lists that comprised the ensembles of the greaser girls are also released: “teased bouffant hair, white lipstick, white skin, heavy eye shadow, leather boots, tight skirts, dive-bomber bras—think the Shangri-Las or Ronettes crossed with Amy Whitehouse.”

The Boss, it appears, enjoys an occasional jam or a ponder over who wore what where, and why, and why not. Here is further potential to expand his fan-base beyond the numbers of those who love his music.

His band was once placed amidst a group of dancers, The Exciters, and he recalls their “slinky gold lame gowns”, of which he declares: “(Teenage heart attacks and rock ‘n’ roll heaven!)”. And at another level, one might interpret these to be outwardly reflected flights of fantasy and human aspiration: gilded sheens of gossamer rising forth from amongst soggy-T-Shirt-wearers and roughers-out of denim.

Springsteen talks of his father’s ironed shirts and Brylcreemed hair, and also of how, when Bruce’s sister, Pam, was born, and his mother was in hospital, his father got him ready for school, and sent him off in his mother’s blouse by mistake.

Springsteen mentions that the book Born to Run is largely a product of many rounds of discussion he had on the couch with his good doctor of many years, and that he has done his best, in the narrative, to speak from the vantage point of issues (many connected to his troubled past with his father), having been resolved. Facts such as his father’s problem with alcohol, that are necessary for the big picture, of course, have been factored into the text. That said, the incident of his father having sent him to school in a girl’s blouse must have been absolute ignominy for a school kid, and mentioning it here definitely verges on the therapeutic.

Years later, another ladies’ blouse that finds a mention is when Springsteen says that “the Born in the USA tour was notable for the sartorial horror sweeping E Street nation…I’d grown weary of being a wardrobe Nazi…’fashion’ mayhem reigned”.

Artistic judgementalism (albeit mild, and said almost in jest) of this kind does not surface in any significant way when he discusses music. It is possible that he is less conscious while discussing aspects of creativity that do not directly demand the niceties of competitive diplomacy (one does not have specific musical debacles up for discussion yet).

Patti Scialfa (whom he would later marry), and who was a part of the Born in the USA gig, asked him, before a performance, for his opinion on what he describes as “a simple white peasant blouse” that she was in, which he thought “looked kind of…’girly’”. He promptly asked her to help herself to one of his own T-shirts that were “stuffed into a suitcase”. He goes on to say that he remembers thinking: "Patti looks terrific (in my T-shirt!)”.

Springsteen does, in the course of the book, offer retractions from some of his youthful attitudes that he describes as having been misogynistic. As with many cults, so with rock ‘n’ roll heroes…evolutions need to be declared from pulpits, and this, Springsteen does with subtle firmness for stragglers who, it is hoped, will also be readers of books such as Born to Run, and take the cue.

At the concert in New Delhi in 1988, Springsteen delighted the audience by appearing in costumes that were recognizable from music videos that had been broadcast by Doordarshan. A recent net-search indicates that Amnesty has come out with a set of recordings of the 1988 world tour that are on sale. Apparently, audience tapes also exist, but are not easily accessible, and one will have to check whether the Amnesty pack includes clips of the New Delhi audience. There is, on youtube, the Newstrack report of the event.

Of the mid-1990s, the days of the Streets of Philadelphia album, and his connections with his audience, Springsteen says: “I don’t write strictly for my audience’s desires but we are, at this point, engaged in a lifelong dialogue, so I take into consideration their voices”.

By this time, Bruce’s lifelong dialogue with the likes of me already had a decade of thoughts and endeavours, failures and successes, to show for.

Regarding the landmark concert of the 30^th of September, 1988, one recollects having gone to great lengths (and, through the lens of some later phase, cringeworthy), attempts to dress up for a rock show (technically, the setlist included most of his pop hits that resonated with a larger audience at that time).

A transparent, pink long crinkle-skirt, a loose-fitting white cotton long shirt with an elliptical geometric black print sprawled across the fabric, and full sleeves rolled up and tucked in, puffing out with the hint of a country-blouse look (the black-and-white effect, no doubt, indicative of one’s intended career-path of joining the legal community), and dangler-earrings, multi-coloured pastel wooden beads in a row. These might have been inspired by, or built upon the Kondapalli or Etikoppa woodcraft from the state of Andhra Pradesh. Today, they would be the banners of a rainbow coalition, in all its interpretative diversity.

Added to this, were over-sized bronze high heeled party shoes borrowed from my friends, the Faleiro sisters, at whose place we congregated and prepared for the event, and probably raided their mum’s make-up kit and footwear collection! Shaila was a fan of Springsteen as well, and had managed to swing passes for us for the best seats, though we ran amuck into the audience on the field for a more real experience. Their mother, the late Muriel Faleiro, also happened to catch a glimpse of Springsteen by chance while he was shopping at the jewelry counter of Cottage Industries, and got his autograph for Shaila. These were the days when their dad, a lawyer and a politician from Goa, was a minister of the Union Govenment,  for, among other things, Banking and Finance. 

Sprignsteen comes across as a believer, and a person of faith. Coincidences and change happenings are specifically mentioned in the autobiography. Add to this, the many coincidences that his fans might be able to throw into the cauldron, and the world of theatre, at least, might be sitting on a golden treasury of chapter, verse and beyond.

Springsteen's daughter, Jessica, was born in the early 1990s on my birthday, and on the date of another year in history, when the USSR was formed. The 30th of December also happens to be my mother's brother's birthday.

However, one is not necessarily clutching at only straws such as these to examine the workings of the mathematical theory of synchronicity, also popularised though a work of fiction and pop-psychology when we were students, that was based on the belief-system of a South American tribe. The novel, The Celestine Prophecy, captured the imaginations of quite a few readers worldwide when it was released, and some of what it says might be read with some of what Springsteen says, to make sense of the random occurrences of the universe. To answer, even, questions such as: why me; why now, through the lens of pure Science...and to recognize what it takes to be human, and to continue in that effort...the fight against not only the words and deeds of human beings who oppress human beings, and thus maintain a certain order, but to also combat and course-correct the randomness and hegemony of the unknown, undiscovered, but theoretically existent tyranny of non-judgemental cosmic energy. This is sometimes beyond the comprehension of currently understood science. Music, and the sensations it causes, the power of individual human will, as well as the force of the collective consciousness are the kinds of things that come in handy when mere mortals strike out to realms beyond the known.

While countries and governments play to the eternal choir of Bend it like Beckham in terms of international geopolitics, at that point of time and space, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band and the other great artists at the concert, and the largely fledgling audience (for this kind of live music in India), revelled in the music and the cultural experience. The coincidences were yet to pan out....

The readers are thrown into a layer of suspended animation (or creative energy, or both, or, perhaps neither), when Springsteen ends the Foreword with (to me), an intriguing statement: “I am here to provide proof of life to that ever elusive, never completely believable ‘us’. This is my magic trick. And like all good magic tricks, it begins with a setup. So…”.

This interface that Springsteen shares with his audience, is at once the most tangible component of his life, beginning with the audiences at the bars that he played at regularly, and who put the “cheeseburgers” on the table, to the sell-out successes that turned him into a self-made multi-millionaire, but the interface is also intangible and ephemeral. And it is that intangibility that he seems to wish to decipher, and whose energetic auras he seems to aspire to body-surf.

Here, then, is an autobiography packed with as many coincidences as you might choose to notice, or discover, or just stonewall, as the reader/audience/fan.

He tells us, while talking about his story-telling technique in the writing of The Ghost of Tom Joad, that “The precision of the storytelling in these types of songs is very important…But all the telling detail in the world doesn’t matter if the song lacks an emotional centre. That’s something you have to pull out of yourself from the commonality you feel with the man or woman you’re writing about.”

Born to Run is an autobiography, a true story of Bruce’s life as observed and narrated by him. In his live shows, Springsteen “wanted the collective identity and living representations of the characters who populated my songs”. Dear character (or potential character, since the aspiration is for the audience to be as all-encompassing as possible), you are also informed, through the narration of the moments when he discovered Elvis Presley, that “You, my TV dinner-sucking, glaze-eyed friends, are living in…THE MATRIX”. 

As characters that populate Bruce Springsteen’s writings, those who, for whatever reason, are not in a position to expand the story and scope of their own lives and consciousness in concrete terms, or are in search of a launchpad, or of the experience of dipping their toes into a slipstream -or of drawing The Boss and Others into one of their own, in order to explore the multiverse, may choose to do so by spiralling the boundless energy of this here autobiography into worlds unknown! (I would, however, insist that this be carried out under the overall banner of truth, transparency and non-violence, and for democratically arrived-at and prioritised common agendas of the entire population).

Clearly, we listen to his music; attend his concerts if we’re lucky; watch and read his interviews and music-videos; perhaps follow him on Twitter and Facebook, and check his website if social media indicates that there’s something new on it. Springsteen’s audience-connect at his concerts is epic, legendary. Of course, there’s the fact that the fan base is, in some ways, a faceless mass, but as with all celebrities with a fan base, the thing that political planners notice is potential. In this case, political.

I think people are falling short of the right question when they ask him if he hopes to be the Governor of New Jersey. One is thinking more on the lines of World Parliament if and when it happens, or, at least, President, the latter being an any-time possibility in the days of anticipated impeachment. (Pardon the flight of fancy, there is, I believe, a presidential succession act in place). Bruce has thrown his hat in with the Democrats. So for the next elections, we’ll have to also look at who we think are his dopplegangers amongst the Republicans. And personally, I think BS (Bernie Sanders) is still a good idea.

I also think there is tremendous potential to look at how Springsteen could play a bigger and more visible role in facilitating the global inter-faith dialogue through his music.

Springsteen reminds us of how, when he once had a show at Pittsburgh, he “declined” a compliment paid to him by Ronald Reagan. I think some of Trump’s speeches have elements of Bruce Springsteen in them by way of tone as well as substance. But maybe that’s unintentional, and the influence of Springsteen’s language runs deep. Then again, Melania is said to have used almost the exact same speech that Michelle Obama delivered, on one occasion, so such things are blatantly possible.

Bruce’s amazed tone at the discovery of the existence of Elvis Presley takes one back to that time in his life for a page or three, and calls to mind, some of one’s own writings of the 1980s, on having discovered Bruce the Boss!

The larger number of Bruce-related writings from my diaries contain: pages and pages of just Bruce, Bruce, Bruce, written against the backdrop of evolving ideas on meditation, transcendental meditation and intent-creation; a rave scribbled in ball-point written in synch with Bruce Springsteen’s music (possibly inspired by the fact that the mega barefoot Indian artist, Hussain, had once painted to the sound of music on stage); a letter that I wrote to my uncle soon after the Springsteen concert, and that I requested be returned to me for my records, and that I have saved since the 1980s. Images and/or the entire documents are likely to be appended to a book of collected essays of mine that is scheduled for publication before Springsteen’s forthcoming Broadway debut.

There is something extremely energetic in the author’s writing. A particular quality of writing that one might associate with the compressed writing of the lyricist or the poet is sustained with ease through a more-than-five-hundred-page book, making it replete with quotable quotes. Not quite your blueberry hill or shrewsbury cookie, but the entire biodiversity park and bakery, and then some.

On another platform, I’d simply say read the whole book yourself, it’s worth the time. Would even recommend that it be translated to other languages. As far as the music goes, Bruce says that he’s played to audiences worldwide that have not always been English-speaking audiences, and that this has not been a barrier.

I think it is time for him to play at iconic spots globally, at countries he’s never played before, and where he might or might not have a large fan base. Since he seems to be focusing on the acoustic sound at the moment, a world tour of a series of gatherings to jam with folk artistes might be what is required.

Unlike the chronology that the book describes, of music being written, created, and then toured with, one might be looking at trying to explore how Springsteen could create music in collaboration with musicians from all continents as a part of a tour.

Concerts by India’s sitar maestro, Ravi Shankar, playing at the Kremlin and several other locations had a tremendous impact when it came to reinforcing the country’s diplomatic stances.

A few years ago, Springsteen toured with his album High Hopes, back to South America for the first time since the Amnesty tour, and for the first time ever to South Africa. These are, hopefully, encouraging indications that there’s already more being crafted for an international agenda.

Writing about his first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, Springsteen says that “Most of the songs were twisted autobiographies”, that he “wrote impressionistically”, and that he “worked to find something that was identifiably mine”. At the recording arena for this album, the advantage that Springsteen recognized that he had over many others was the fact that he’d “secretly built up years of rock ‘n’ roll experience out of view of the known world in front of every conceivable audience.” Very like the rare grassroots politician, lawyer or social worker who might not invest in media publicity, but whose hands-on knowledge commands respect, and diversifies the scope of the term ‘expertise’.

About Darkness on The Edge of Town, Springsteen writes: “The songs…remain at the core of our live performances today and are perhaps the purest distillation of what I wanted my rock ‘n’ roll music to be about.” Most of his writing in the album was “emotionally autobiographical”. Springsteen says that he had begun by insisting that there be no advertising, but Jon “explained” to him, that “no one will know the record exists.” Food for thought, indeed, for all those who rely purely on the grapevine. But then again, we’re talking about an era that preceded any kind of social media presence, and the Morse code wouldn’t exactly count as social media, I suppose.

Springsteen talks of a phase through which he “routinely and roughly failed perfectly fine women over and over again”, and that “With the end of each affair, I’d feel a sad relief from the suffocating claustrophobia love had brought me. And I’d be free to be…’nothing’…again”. He then talks of the “transient detachment” of being a performer who is always on the road to somewhere else. “You play; the evening culminates in merry psychosexual carnage, laughs, ecstasy and sweaty bliss; then it’s on to new faces and new towns. That, my friends, is why they call ‘em…ONE NIGHT STANDS!”

Interesting etymological observation noted. And if arrived at without precedent, to be attributed to the reliable source currently under discussion.

Which also reminds me that that although there is only a passing mention of India in the book (the 1988 tour), the language, phraseology, and, indeed, subtle linguistic almost-dialects of our urban Indian times have somehow found their way to the world of Bruce Springsteen.

One imagines that this is a part of how India is rapidly expanding in the field of the soft power of language.

There are subtle currents that are required, to incorporate, into the language of power, the twists and turns of myriad cultures. The unique coup of having marked as “Received”, unrecognizable brands of English, and of having made the resultant buffet a malleable, equalizing mish-mash of words is a spinoff of that the global community can thank India for.

Organically and historically speaking, of course, there was a time when it was newsworthy every time the Oxford English Dictionary announced that the next edition had included words from other languages, including from languages of India.

Springsteen uses the word Melee, which is from the Oriya-language term that means (people’s) Uprising. Oriya words being spoken across continents, however, might have nothing to do with the English language, as recorded history confirms.

Springsteen has served to bring the spoken language of working-class America into the everyday lives of listeners not only in the USA, but worldwide, through his lyrics.

Born to Run, the book, however, bubbles with experimentation and flare that expand the territory of the singer-songwriter into the territory of author par excellence, blending genres with ease within the book, and retaining a continuity in style nonetheless.

There are a few formatic bubbles that drift effortlessly through the book:

a peep into an idyllic Thomas Hardy-like rustic setting that Bruce and his friend, Matt Delia (whom he met through Max Weinberg, his drummer), tarry awhile at as observers driving through the country…an oak writing table that’s mentioned elsewhere in the book bounces back some of this sound;

a single sentence suspended in the space of a paragraph in the style of a mock mathematical equation (something I have only seen once before, ever in my life, in an essay that I wrote in 2013, what a coincidence!);

narrative elements reminiscent of Hollywood film scripts of the 1970s and 80s that teenagers of the time used to watch, like Footloose, Grease, High School USA, Breakdance and so on, in his descriptions of teen groups of New Jersey;

a do-it-yourself DIY-formatted narration while describing a part of his dodge of the draft (the ability to read and write instruction manuals is definitely a challenging task -or achievement- depending on where the writing originates, and where it’s headed, sometimes putting to rest all the demands of political correctness of how all-encompassing a language ought to be);

a three-dream sequence in italics, where memories of youth mingle with philosophical insight, and hold a seer-like quality that materialise into the written word through the mists of time and consciousness.

These are some of the techniques in the narrative that otherwise remains focused on chronicling and explaining the behind-the-scenes aspects of his life and music.

Strains of some of the music ring through the writing: “so back into the studio we went”, in the book, for instance, has echoes of “down to the river we ran” of The River; “one step up, two steps back” harks back to the song with those words while delving into profound concepts of psychology.

The symbol of a radio tower (with button-like ascending lights) serves to act as a silent, sound-emitting presence. (His mother describes it to him as "a tall dark giant invisible against the black night sky"). Like the future of the young Bruce Sprignsteen's music, it towers over the landscape, "a collective hallucination, a secret amongst millions and a whisper in the whole country's ear. When the music is great, a natural subversion of the controlled message broadcast daily by the powers that be...takes place". Sprignsteen as the symbolic lighthouse, the radiotower, that emits glory into the universe in time to come.

Bruce also plays part-literary-critic in that he puts forward his own critiques of his lyrics. This provides the reader with windows to the musical influences, intentions, and surrounding circumstances and socio-political views that moulded the lyrics of each of his albums. A comprehensive analysis of those trajectories will call for the writing of an entire tome, and this, perhaps, is already in the works somewhere or the other.

Through this written piece, one has only skimmed the surface of the scope that exists, for the literary interpretation of Born to Run. That task is probably already being performed by those who have recognized and seized the opportunity of sinking their literary teeth into this platter of ever-reappearing steaks and loaves.

Springsteen grapples with questions about the extent to which the private and personal merge in his life. He thinks aloud about whether presentation is politics, and he touches upon a key question, the question, to me, which could well be at the heart of the entire work: “Is the most political act an individual one, something that happens in the dark, in the quiet, when someone makes a particular decision that affects his immediate world?”

This is the question, he writes, that he asks via his song “Galveston Bay”. The song is about a man who “With great difficulty and against his own grain…transcends his circumstances. He finds the strength and grace to save himself and the part of the world that he touches”. To me, the answer is Yes. Individual, tough decisions that go unadvertised and unrecognized, but that have global impacts are a core component of real political activity and productivity.

Springsteen, the singer-songwriter, is already a political personality of sorts. Will he step into the electoral scenario himself? Does he prefer party politics? The answers to these questions, he probably needs to derive from widespread consultations.

He writes that he chooses to play the role of a benevolent dictator in the band. But unlike Trump, who seems to be under the impression that it’s worth trying to run the presidency almost single-handedly, Springsteen would hopefully fare differently in purely political heels.

In the meantime, I think it would be worth building and expanding his international presence, primarily through his music, but also through his book.

In conclusion, Springsteen writes: “This, I presented as my long and noisy prayer, my magic trick. Hoping it would rock your very soul and then pass on, its spirit rendered, to be read, heard, sung and altered by you and your blood, that it might strengthen and help make sense of your story. Go tell it.”

And this, my friends, is my cue to strum up my epic list of coincidences gleaned from Born to Run... to put observations that have astonished me into creative perspective...perhaps bring them centre-stage…but in another publication, at another venue…one could keep you posted on this blog….

You were reading Born to Interface Part 9 (Concluded)