The Ghost Town and the Gaudy Night
Early in 2012, at a decommissioned Army base on the New Jersey coast called Fort Monmouth — twelve hundred acres of abandoned barracks and steel goose-decoys, a ghost town that had once employed Julius Rosenberg and thousands of militarized carrier pigeons — Bruce Springsteen was rehearsing for what he suspected might be the most difficult tour of his life. The theatre was unlovely. The musicians noodled with the languid air of outfielders warming up in the sun. Max Weinberg, the volcanic drummer who had endured open-heart surgery, prostate-cancer treatment, two failed back operations, and seven hand operations, wore the generous jeans of a dad at a weekend barbecue. Steve Van Zandt, Springsteen's childhood friend and guitarist-wingman, seemed weary under a piratical purple head scarf. Nils Lofgren, both hips replaced, both shoulders wrecked, was on the phone trying to figure out flights to Scottsdale. Backstage was less a green room than a MASH unit — ice packs, heating pads, Bengay tubes, masseuses on call. Jon Landau, Springsteen's manager and closest friend for nearly four decades, was recovering from brain surgery that had cost him the vision in one eye. Danny Federici, who had played organ and accordion with Springsteen for forty years, was dead. The body man, a Special Forces veteran named Terry Magovern, was dead. The trainer was dead at forty. And Clarence Clemons — six-four, a former football player, the saxophone colossus whose raspy tone was reminiscent of King Curtis, whose sheer stage presence had given Springsteen a mythic companion embodying the fraternal spirit of the band — Clarence was dead at sixty-nine, felled by a stroke the previous June. In his final concerts, Clemons had been driven through arena tunnels in a golf cart, had sat on a stool banging a tambourine when his lungs failed him, had told a friend after one show, "I deserve a God-damned Academy Award." He said he felt like Mickey Rourke's character in The Wrestler — portraying power while falling apart.
And here was Springsteen, five-nine, walking with a rolling rodeo gait, greeting his diminished army with a quick hello and that distinctive cackle. He was sixty-two. His hairline was receding. His muscle tone approximated a fresh tennis ball. Van Zandt says he is "the only guy I know — I think the only guy I know at all — who never did drugs." He had followed more or less the same exercise regimen for thirty years: treadmill, weights, a trainer. He remained dispiritingly handsome, preposterously fit. But fit for what? The concerts he was contemplating would last in excess of three hours, without a break — dancing, screaming, imploring, mugging, kicking, windmilling, crowd-surfing, climbing drum risers, jumping on amps, leaping off Roy Bittan's piano. "Think of it this way," he said, slumping into a chair twenty rows back from the stage. "Performing is like sprinting while screaming for three, four minutes. And then you do it again. And then you do it again. And then you walk a little, shouting the whole time. And so on. Your adrenaline quickly overwhelms your conditioning."
He was not remotely close to ready.
Forty-seven years earlier, in this same facility, a teen-aged Springsteen had played for officers' children at the Fort Monmouth teen club — dancing, no liquor — with a band called the Castiles. Now the Castiles' guitarist was a multimillionaire populist rock star whose lyric sheets and old cars were displayed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame like snippets of the Shroud. The distance between those two performances contains the essential Springsteen paradox: a man who has spent six decades sprinting away from where he started while compulsively circling back to it, who built an empire on the theme of escape and then never left New Jersey, who made himself into the most extravagant performer in American rock by channeling the depressive silences of a father who could barely speak.
By the Numbers
The Boss's Empire
$1.1BEstimated net worth (Forbes, 2024)
$500MCatalogue sale to Sony Music (December 2021)
150M+Records sold worldwide
20Grammy Awards (51 nominations)
3,603Total performances logged (Brucebase)
$700M+Gross revenue, most recent world tour
30+Years in psychotherapy
The Dark Kitchen on Institute Street
The past, for Springsteen, is anything but past. "My parents' struggles, it's the subject of my life," he has said. "It's the thing that eats at me and always will."
He was born Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen on September 23, 1949, in Long Branch, New Jersey — a coastal community along the Shore — and raised in Freehold, an industrial mill town half an hour inland from the boardwalk carnies and the sea. The neighborhood was called Texas, because its first settlers were hillbilly migrants from the South. His family occupied a dingy two-family house next to a gas station. The house was, by Springsteen's own account, noticeably decrepit. For long stretches of his childhood, his paternal grandparents lived with them, and the dead were more present than the living: Virginia Springsteen, Doug's five-year-old sister, had been struck by a truck while riding a tricycle in Freehold in 1927, and the portrait of the dead girl hung on the wall, always front and center. The family visited her grave every weekend. Bruce always sensed that the affection he received from his grandparents was a way "to replace the lost child," which was confusing. The ghost of a girl he never knew shadowed his earliest sense of being loved.
Doug Springsteen — described in the biographical literature with adjectives like "taciturn" and "disappointed," but more accurately understood as bipolar, capable of terrible rages often aimed at his son — had dropped out of school after ninth grade. He drove a cab, worked in a rug mill, was a guard at the county jail. He was an Army driver in Europe during the Second World War who came home and seethed at his crabbed circumstances. The doctors prescribed medication for his illness, but Doug didn't always take it. At nine o'clock every evening, he would shut off every light in the house, sit in the kitchen with a six-pack and a cigarette, turn on the gas stove and close all the doors so the room got hot, and wait in the dark. Bruce would sit across from him. No matter how long they sat there, he could never see his father's face. They would talk about nothing much. Pretty soon Doug would ask what he thought he was doing with himself. They would end up screaming at each other. His mother, Adele, would come running from the front room, crying, trying to pull them apart. Bruce would run out the back door, pulling away, screaming that it was his life and he was going to do what he wanted.
Adele Zerilli Springsteen — the daughter of Italian immigrants, a legal secretary who was the steadiest earner and the mediator in the house, the source of optimism and survival — gave Bruce his first instrument. In 1964, when he was fifteen, she took out a bank loan for sixty dollars to buy him a Kent guitar. "When people hear 'Rosalita,'" Springsteen has said, "they're hearing my mother's spirit." Doug gave him a different inheritance. "My father loved me but he couldn't stand me," Springsteen wrote in his memoir. "He felt we competed for my mother's affections. We did. He also saw in me too much of his real self." Inside, beyond the rage, Doug harbored a gentleness, timidity, shyness, and a dreamy insecurity — precisely the qualities Bruce wore on the outside, the soft things that repelled a man who had been brought up soft himself. A mama's boy recognizing a mama's boy.
I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I.
Doug Springsteen lives in his son's songs in a way that no amount of therapy has been able to exorcise. In "Independence Day," the son must escape his father's house because "we were just too much of the same kind." In the ferocious "Adam Raised a Cain," the father "walks these empty rooms / looking for something to blame / You inherit the sins / You inherit the flames." The songs were a way of talking to the silent father. "My dad was very nonverbal — you couldn't really have a conversation with him," Springsteen has said. "I had to make my peace with that, but I had to have a conversation with him, because I needed to have one. It ain't the best way to go about it, but that was the only way I could, so I did, and eventually he did respond. He might not have liked the songs, but I think he liked that they existed. It meant that he mattered." When asked what his favorite songs were, Doug would say, "The ones that are about me."
When Bruce was nineteen, Doug and Adele left Freehold for California — three thousand dollars, an old Rambler, Bruce's little sister, two nights sleeping in the car, one night in a motel. "It was like moving to another planet for them," Springsteen recalled. "But I think that's what my father wanted to do. He wanted to move to another planet." The escape that Springsteen would mythologize in "Born to Run" — his father lived it first, and without a song to dignify the attempt.
Doug Springsteen died in 1998, at seventy-three, after years of illness including a stroke and heart disease. "T-Bone Burnett said that rock and roll is all about 'Daaaaddy!'" Springsteen has observed. "It's one embarrassing scream of 'Daaaaddy!' It's just fathers and sons, and you're out there proving something to somebody in the most intense way possible. It's, like, 'Hey, I was worth a little more attention than I got! You blew that one, big guy!'"
The Upstage and the Ascent
The place where Springsteen went looking for his future was just a short drive east of Freehold — the Asbury Park music scene, his Liverpool, his Tupelo, his Hibbing. In the late sixties and early seventies, dozens of bands played the bars along the boardwalk, and the hub of it all was a place called the Upstage Club, above a Thom McAn shoe store. It was at the Upstage, in 1969, that a drummer named Vini "Mad Dog" Lopez — fresh out of jail, head shaved, standing in the Mermaid Room — invited Springsteen to jam with his outfit,
Speed Limit 25. Springsteen was broke. He was interested.
Lopez, the unluckiest man in the E Street saga, would later be fired from the band just before it broke through. He would spend his remaining years as a caddy, playing weekends in a band called License to Chill whose mascot was Tippy the Banana. ("We're at the bottom of the food chain," he would tell a reporter. "We like to say that we're exclusive but inexpensive.") When asked about how Springsteen's other bandmates would become millionaires while he worked for tips, Lopez was philosophical in the way of men who have spent too long being philosophical. The drummer who made it for the long haul, Max Weinberg, would own houses in the New Jersey countryside and Tuscany. Lopez would pull up to interviews in a beat-up Saturn.
From the Upstage came the nucleus: Lopez on drums, Danny Federici on organ and accordion, Van Zandt on bass, and then a rotating cast that would eventually crystallize into the E Street Band — named for the street where keyboardist David Sancious's mother lived in Belmar. Sancious — a young Black man who, in 1968 Asbury Park, which was not a peaceful place, crossed the tracks in search of musical adventure — was the only member of the group who ever actually lived on E Street. Garry Tallent on bass. Roy Bittan on piano. And eventually, on a rainy night at a bar called the Student Prince, Clarence Clemons, who walked in carrying a saxophone and looking like he'd been sent by central casting to embody everything Springsteen couldn't be alone.
The Springsteen that Lopez and Van Zandt describe from those years was a young man of uncommon ambition who was also prone to bouts of withdrawal. He would arrive at a party where people were doing all kinds of things and just go off with his guitar. "Bruce would come to a party where people were doing all kinds of things, and he would just go off with his guitar," Lopez recalled. He never worked a real job. ("The future working-class clarion never really worked," David Remnick observed.) He was consumed. Van Zandt recognized in Springsteen a drive to create original work that transcended mere copying: "Bruce was never good at it. He had a weird ear. He would hear different chords, but he could never hear the right chords. When you have that ability or inability, you immediately become more original. Well, in the long run, guess what: in the long run, original wins."
By 1972, Springsteen had dissolved his bar bands — including the wonderfully named Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom, a Noah's-ark carnival act featuring two of everything plus a baton twirler and two guys who played Monopoly onstage — and re-formed as a solo artist with a backing band. He wasn't a big reader at the time, but he was so consumed by
Bob Dylan's songs that he read Anthony Scaduto's biography and was transfixed by Dylan's coming-to-New-York saga: the snowstorm arrival from the Midwest, the pilgrimages to Woody Guthrie's bedside, the audition for John Hammond at Columbia Records. He wanted some version of that.
His manager was a rambunctious hustler named Mike Appel. Before joining Springsteen, Appel had written jingles for Kleenex and a song for the Partridge Family. He was old school — passionate but exploitative, signing Springsteen to lopsided contracts. Yet he was so ballsy in his devotion that he once called a producer at NBC to suggest the network have Springsteen perform his antiwar song "Balboa vs. the Earth Slayer" at the Super Bowl. NBC declined. Somehow, Appel did manage to get an appointment with John Hammond.
On May 2, 1972, Springsteen travelled to New York by bus, carrying a borrowed acoustic guitar with no case. Hammond — a patrician of Vanderbilt stock — was pressed for time and repelled by Appel's hard sell. But when Springsteen sat on a stool across from the desk and sang "If I Was a Priest," the vibe changed entirely. "Bruce, that's the damnedest song I've ever heard," Hammond said. "Were you brought up by nuns?" Columbia signed him. They tried to promote him as "the new Dylan." He was not the only one. ("The old Dylan was only thirty," Springsteen notes, "so I don't even know why they needed a fucking new Dylan.")
A Critic, a Review, and the Invention of a Partnership
Jon Landau began his life in a profession that didn't really exist. Even by 1966, three years after the rise of the Beatles, there was no such thing as rock criticism. Landau was a precocious teenager from Lexington, Massachusetts, the son of a left-wing history teacher who had moved the family from Brooklyn during the blacklists and found work at Acoustic Research. Young Landau grew up on folk music and attended every rock concert he could afford. At a Cambridge music store called Briggs & Briggs, he met a Swarthmore student named Paul Williams who had just started a mimeographed, three-staple magazine called Crawdaddy! — perhaps the first publication devoted to rock criticism. By the time he was a junior at Brandeis, Landau was writing for Jann Wenner's new biweekly, Rolling Stone.
As a critic, Landau was nothing if not bold. For the inaugural issue of
Rolling Stone in 1967, he panned
Jimi Hendrix's classic "Are You Experienced?" The next year, he walloped Cream for the loose bombast of their live shows, declaring Eric Clapton — then universally known as "God" — "a master of the blues clichés." The review gave God a fit of self-doubt. "The ring of truth just knocked me backward," Clapton said years later. "I was in a restaurant and I fainted. And after I woke up, I immediately decided that that was the end of the band." Cream broke up.
Springsteen's first two albums — Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, both released in 1973 — hardly sold at all. He was, at best, a gifted obscurity running out of chances. Landau, ailing with Crohn's disease and watching his marriage to the critic Janet Maslin fall apart, accepted an invitation to see Springsteen play at Charley's, a club in Cambridge, in early 1974. "I went to this club, and it was completely empty," Landau recalled. Before the show, he spotted Springsteen standing outside in the cold — a skinny bearded guy in jeans and a T-shirt, hopping up and down to keep warm, reading Landau's review of his second record, which the management had taped in the window. "I stood next to him and said, 'What do you think?'" Landau recounted. "And he said, 'This guy is usually pretty good, but I've seen better.'" They laughed. The next day, Springsteen called him. "We talked for hours," Landau said. "About music, about philosophy. The core of him then was the same as it is now."
A month later, on the eve of his twenty-seventh birthday, feeling prematurely worn out — Crohn's disease was making it hard to eat or work, his career stalled — Landau went to see Springsteen at the Harvard Square Theatre, opening for Bonnie Raitt. Springsteen played everything from the old Fats Domino tune "Let the Four Winds Blow" to a startling new song called "Born to Run." Landau went home and wrote the most famous review in the history of rock criticism:
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.
Columbia Records used the line as the centerpiece of an ad campaign. Landau quit criticism. He became, in essence, Springsteen's adjutant — his friend, his adviser in all things, his producer, and by 1978, his manager. After a prolonged legal battle, Appel was bought off and cast out.
The partnership is the most consequential and durable manager-artist relationship in rock history. Landau fed Springsteen's curiosity about the world beyond music — he gave him Steinbeck, Flannery O'Connor, John Ford Westerns — and pressed him to think of himself the way Otis Redding did: as both an artist and an entertainer on a large stage. Springsteen started to see his family's story in terms of class and American archetypes. The imagery and sense of place in those novels and films fueled the songs that made him. "The idea that he'd be manipulated is so preposterous," says Danny Goldberg, who has managed Nirvana and Sonic Youth. "It's Bruce who uses Jon, to achieve complete artistic control."
Landau's profits did not go up his nose. They went on the walls. His art collection — mainly Renaissance painting and sculpture, with some nineteenth-century French painting thrown in — is what is called "important." Works by Titian, Tintoretto, Tiepolo, Donatello, Ghiberti, Géricault, Delacroix, Corot, and Courbet. The rock critic from Lexington who heard the future in a Cambridge club wound up living among Venetian masters in northern Westchester.
The Shot at the Title
Born to Run, released in August 1975, was what Springsteen later called "my shot at the title, a 24-year-old kid aiming at the greatest rock 'n' roll record ever." It took him six months to record the title song alone. He kept rewriting lyrics, experimenting with sounds, composing epics — "Thunder Road," "Backstreets," "Jungleland" — and trying to tie them together thematically as his characters searched for love and connection and endured disappointment and heartbreak. When he was done, he hated the album. He threw a test pressing into a swimming pool. Landau convinced him to release it.
The week the album came out, Springsteen's face was on the covers of both Time and Newsweek. The ten-show stand at the Bottom Line that launched the tour remains a rock date to rival James Brown at the Apollo or Dylan at Newport. By adding Van Zandt as a second guitar player, Springsteen was liberated from some of his musical duties and became a full-throttle front man, leaping off amps and pianos, frog-hopping from one tabletop to the next. The album sold nine million copies. And yet, in his telling, the title track never stopped growing. "It's still at the center of my work, that song," he said decades later. "When it comes up every night, within the show, it's monumental." Unlike Robert Plant, who has called "Stairway to Heaven" "that wedding song," or Sinatra, who described "Strangers in the Night" as "a piece of shit," Springsteen has never tired of it.
"Born to Run" was added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry. Its opening riff is as recognizable as anything in the American songbook. But the song's deepest achievement may be something less obvious: it inaugurated a creative method that Springsteen would employ for fifty years — the translation of private torment into communal ecstasy, the alchemical trick of making an audience feel that their particular loneliness is shared.
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The Making of Born to Run
A six-month ordeal that almost never happened.
May 1974Jon Landau's famous "rock and roll future" review in The Real Paper.
Aug 1974Springsteen begins recording the title track at 914 Sound Studios, Blauvelt, NY.
Early 1975Landau brought in as co-producer; "Thunder Road" cut from seven minutes to four.
Aug 25, 1975Album released. Springsteen appears on covers of Time and Newsweek the same week.
Aug 1975Ten-show stand at the Bottom Line, New York — a defining moment in rock performance.
2003Title track added to Library of Congress National Recording Registry.
Rich Man in a Poor Man's Shirt
Someone once said to Paul McCartney that the Beatles were "anti-materialistic." McCartney had to laugh. "That's a huge myth," he replied. "John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.'"
Springsteen understood the economics of popularity better than his prophetic persona suggested. When he was writing the songs for Born in the U.S.A., Landau told him they had a great record but still didn't have a swimming pool. They needed a hit. "Look, I've written seventy songs," Springsteen replied. "You want another one, you write it!" Then he sulkily retreated to his hotel suite and wrote "Dancing in the Dark." The lyrics reflected the played-out frustration of an artist who "ain't got nothing to say," but the music — a pop confection buttressed by a hummable synthesizer line — went down easy. "It went as far in the direction of pop music as I wanted to go — and probably a little farther," Springsteen recalled. Born in the U.S.A. produced seven hit singles. It became the best-selling record of 1985 and of Springsteen's career. He was the biggest rock star in the world, selling out Giants Stadium ten shows in a row.
The contradictions compounded. He was so unthreatening to American values that George Will attended a concert wearing a bow tie, a double-breasted blazer, and earplugs, then wrote a column declaring Springsteen "no whiner" whose songs amounted to "a grand, cheerful affirmation: 'Born in the U.S.A.!'" A week later, Ronald Reagan cited Springsteen in a campaign speech. Springsteen was appalled. He called the title track "the most misunderstood song since 'Louie, Louie'" and began performing an acoustic version that stripped away the bombast and exposed the song's dark shadings — a bitter tale of a Vietnam veteran who comes home to nothing. "I don't think he's been listening to this one," Springsteen said from the stage. He played "Johnny 99," the bleak story of a laid-off autoworker who, in drunken despair, kills a night clerk.
By the mid-eighties, Springsteen had a fourteen-million-dollar estate in Beverly Hills, vintage cars and motorcycles, a state-of-the-art home recording studio, horses, organic farming. Tours grew to corporate scale: private jets, five-star hotels, elaborate catering, massage therapists, efficient management. Pink-Cadillac dreams fulfilled. And the comical contradiction haunted him: the multimillionaire who, in his theatrical self-presentation, is the voice of the dispossessed.
When Springsteen played Van Zandt a song called "Ain't Got You" — in which a fellow who gets "paid a king's ransom for doin' what comes naturally" and has "a house full of Rembrandt and priceless art" lacks the affections of his beloved — Van Zandt recognized the self-mockery and erupted. "We had one of our biggest fights of our lives," Van Zandt recalled. "I'm, like, 'What the fuck is this?' And he's, like, 'Well, what do you mean, it's the truth. It's just who I am, it's my life.' And I'm, like, 'This is bullshit. People don't need you talking about your life. Nobody gives a shit about your life. They need you for their lives. That's your thing. Giving some logic and reason and sympathy and passion to this cold, fragmented, confusing world — that's your gift. Explaining their lives to them. Their lives, not yours.'" They fought and fought. He says "Fuck you." I say "Fuck you." Something in what Van Zandt said probably resonated. It usually did.
The Black Dog and the Gas Stove
The depression came in waves. A cloud of crisis hovered as Springsteen was finishing Nebraska in 1982 — the stark acoustic album about death and desolation that he recorded alone on a four-track cassette recorder in his bedroom. He drove from the East Coast to California and then drove straight back. "He was feeling suicidal," Dave Marsh, Springsteen's friend and biographer, has said. "The depression wasn't shocking, per se. He was on a rocket ride, from nothing to something, and now you are getting your ass kissed day and night."
For years, Springsteen would drive at night past his parents' old house in Freehold, sometimes three or four times a week. In 1982, he started seeing a psychotherapist — then an almost unheard-of step for a man of his background and generation. The therapist told him: "What you're doing is that something bad happened, and you're going back, thinking that you can make it right again. Something went wrong, and you keep going back to see if you can fix it or somehow make it right." Springsteen sat there and said, "That is what I'm doing." And the therapist said, "Well, you can't."
He has been in therapy for more than thirty years. "I'm thirty years in analysis!" he told David Remnick in 2012. "Look, you cannot underestimate the fine power of self-loathing in all of this. You think, I don't like anything I'm seeing, I don't like anything I'm doing, but I need to change myself, I need to transform myself. I do not know a single artist who does not run on that fuel." Extreme wealth satisfied every pink-Cadillac dream but did little to chase off the black dog. He played concerts that went nearly four hours, driven, he has admitted, by "pure fear and self-loathing and self-hatred." He played that long not just to thrill the audience but to burn himself out. Onstage, he held real life at bay.
The worst bout came in his sixties. A year and a half off the road, home with his youngest son, Sam, during Sam's final year of high school. The internal weather was merciless. On Terry Gross's show, he was asked whether the depression was related to being off the road. "I tend to be not my own best company," he said quietly. "I can get a little lost when — if I don't have my work to occasionally focus me." Then the deflection, the dark joke: "Physical pain is my friend. I pursue it every night for four hours. That makes me feel good. I'm a good Catholic boy."
People see you onstage and, yeah, I'd want to be that guy. I want to be that guy myself very often. There's a big difference between what you see onstage and then my general daily existence.
"My issues weren't as obvious as drugs," he has said. "Mine were different, they were quieter — just as problematic, but quieter. With all artists, because of the undertow of history and self-loathing, there is a tremendous push toward self-obliteration that occurs onstage. It's both things: there's a tremendous finding of the self while also an abandonment of the self at the same time. You are free of yourself for those hours; all the voices in your head are gone. Just gone. There's no room for them. There's one voice, the voice you're speaking in."
He credits therapy — and, eventually, psychopharmacological medication — with saving his life and his marriage. The admission itself was the act. A man who had been raised in a tradition where you did not lower your mask, where emotional language was weakness, where the only acceptable male response to anguish was silence or rage, sat down in front of Terry Gross and described his interior life with a specificity that would have been unimaginable to Doug Springsteen. This, too, was an inheritance — not the illness but the insistence on doing something about it.
Patti, the Farm, and the Architecture of a Life
Patti Scialfa grew up near Freehold but with considerably more money — her father was a real-estate developer, and she had studied music at NYU. She was tall, slender, with a startling shock of red hair. She had busked on the streets of New York, waitressed, lived a musician's life. Springsteen met her on the Asbury Park circuit and brought her into the E Street Band in 1984 as a singer and guitar player. They married in 1991, after Springsteen's brief first marriage to the actress Julianne Phillips had dissolved. They have three children: Evan (born 1990, a Boston College graduate), Jessica (an international equestrian), and Sam (who attended Bard College).
"When you are that serious and that creative, and non-trusting on an intimate level, and your art has given you so much, your ability to create something becomes your medicine," Scialfa has said of her husband. "It's the only thing that's given you that stability, that joy, that self-esteem. And so you are, like, 'This part of me no one is going to touch.' When you're young, that works, because it gets you from A to B. When you get older, when you are trying to have a family and children, it doesn't work."
Springsteen agreed. "Now I see that two of the best days of my life were the day I picked up the guitar and the day that I learned how to put it down."
They live on a three-hundred-and-eighty-acre farm in Colts Neck, New Jersey. Horsey people live there. So does Queen Latifah. The Springsteens also own houses in Beverly Hills and Wellington, Florida. Patti hired Rose Tarlow, an interior designer who had worked for
David Geffen, to do the house. The garage complex was remade into a recording studio and sitting rooms — walls decorated with photographs of Bruce Springsteen, tables heavy with the literature of popular music, a big TV, an espresso machine, and a framed walking stick that Elvis Presley once owned and, in 1973, shattered in a fit of pique. It is, Springsteen told Terry Gross, surveying his guitar-lined paradise, "if I died when I was fifteen, went to heaven, this is where I think I would've ended up."
The domestic stability is genuine but not simple. Scialfa's position in the band is, as she puts it, "more figurative than it is musical." Onstage, her guitar is barely audible. She is one of many supporting voices. But no one in the crowd is unaware that she is Springsteen's wife — his "Jersey girl," his "red-headed woman" — and she expertly plays her role as Love Interest and Bemused Wife, just as Van Zandt plays Best Friend. In 2018, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer, and has had to limit her appearances. "That's the new normal for me right now," she said, "and I'm OK with that."
The Congregation and Its Rituals
A Springsteen concert is less a performance than a liturgy. Like pilgrims at a gigantic outdoor Mass — think John Paul II at Gdańsk — the audience knows its role: when to raise their hands, when to sway, when to sing, when to scream his name, when to bear his body, hand over hand, from the rear of the orchestra to the stage. "Messianic?" Van Zandt once said. "Is that the word you're looking for?"
Keith Richards works at seeming not to give a shit. He makes you wonder if it is harder to play the riffs for "Street Fighting Man" or to dangle a cigarette from his lips by a single thread of spit. Springsteen is the opposite. He is all about flagrant exertion. Anti-ironical. There always comes a moment — as there always did with James Brown — when he plays out a dumb show of the conflict between exhaustion and the urge to go on. Brown enacted it by dropping to his knees, awash in sweat, unable to dance another step, yet shooing away his cape bearer. Springsteen slumps against the mike stand, spent and still, then — No! It can't be! — shakes off the sweat and calls on the band for another verse, another song. He leaves the stage soaked, as if he had swum around the arena in his clothes while being chased by barracudas.
"I want an extreme experience," he says. He wants his audience to leave "with your hands hurting, your feet hurting, your back hurting, your voice sore, and your sexual organs stimulated!"
The set list is drawn up an hour before each show, written in big scrawly letters in marker ink, then typed and distributed. But it's just a framework. He might drop a song, call audibles, take requests from fans in the pit. He has never been stumped by a request. "You can take the band out of the bar," Van Zandt says, "but you can't take the bar out of the band." One hard drive carried by the sound engineer contains the lyrics and keys for hundreds of songs, displayed on TelePrompters when Springsteen calls for something off the cuff. Although more than half the show is the same from night to night, the rest is up for grabs. The one artificial sound in his act is a snare-drum trigger on "We Take Care of Our Own" that eluded easy reproduction.
"It's theatre, you know," he has said. "I'm a theatrical performer. I'm whispering in your ear, and you're dreaming my dreams, and then I'm getting a feeling for yours. I've been doing that for forty years."
The E Street Band members are not Springsteen's equals. "This is not the Beatles," as Weinberg puts it. They are salaried musicians. In 1989, they were fired en masse. They await his call to record, to tour, to rehearse. And the miracle is that they keep coming back. "Forget about bands breaking up," Springsteen has marveled. "Usually two people can't stay together. Simon can't stay with Garfunkel. Sam hated Dave. Phil Everly hated Don Everly. Hall don't like Oates. The Gallagher brothers — forget that." He counted on his fingers the reasons bands survive: "Money. Uh... money. And money." Then, more seriously: "In our case, we're lucky. Our band still legitimately likes one another."
The Raindrop and the Long Road
Springsteen's political evolution was gradual, reluctant, and incomplete — which is what makes it believable. In 1972, he played a small benefit for George McGovern at a movie theatre in Red Bank, but as a young man, his interest in music was almost entirely as a source of personal liberation. He had not yet made the connection between his father's drift and the politics of unemployment, between the depression of Freehold and the wave of deindustrialization. The 1970 Asbury Park race riots — young Blacks angry that summer jobs along the boardwalk were going to white kids — merely meant that certain clubs didn't open and certain ones did.
The awakening came through reading — Landau's enthusiasms played a critical role — and through country and folk music. Hank Williams. Woody Guthrie. Joe Klein's Guthrie biography. Memoirs by the civil-rights lawyer Morris Dees and the antiwar activist Ron Kovic. "As I listened again and again to Hank Williams," Springsteen said at SXSW in 2012, "the songs went from archival to alive." What had seemed cranky and old-fashioned now had depth and darkness; Williams represented "the adult blues," and the music of the working class. "Country by its nature appealed to me, country was provincial, and so was I. I felt I was an average guy with a slightly above-average gift."
The political vision that emerged across Darkness on the Edge of Town, Nebraska, Born in the U.S.A., and the later work was never radical. It was shot through with a liberal insistence that American patriotism has less to do with the primacy of markets than with a Rooseveltian sense of fairness and a communal sense of belonging. He sang of Vietnam veterans, migrant workers, AIDS ("Streets of Philadelphia," which won him an Academy Award and a Grammy in 1994), deindustrialized cities, and forgotten American towns — but never in an idiom that threatened "Bruce," the iconic family-friendly rock star.
Some detected in all this the stink of sanctimony. James Wolcott, a punk and New Wave enthusiast, wrote in Vanity Fair in 1985 that "piety has begun to collect around Springsteen's curly head like mist around a mountaintop. The mountain can't be blamed for the mist, but still — the reverence is getting awfully thick." Tom Carson argued that Springsteen "thought rock and roll was basically wholesome. It was an alternative, an escape — but not a rebellion." These criticisms were not wrong, exactly. They just didn't account for the scale of what Springsteen was doing with that particular kind of wholesomeness — the way he turned sincerity itself into a countercultural act in an age of irony.
When asked what he hoped his political songs would accomplish, Springsteen's answer was characteristically modest and precise: "They function at the very edges of politics at best, though they try to administer to its center. You have to be satisfied with that. You have to understand it's a long road, and there have been people doing some version of what we're doing on this tour going all the way back, and there will be people doing it after us. So these ideas are ever-present. And you are a raindrop."
The Shoes and the Shadow
During a break at the Fort Monmouth rehearsals, a young horn player with a considerable Afro, oblong eyewear, and an intent expression was wandering around nervously, playing snatches of familiar solos: "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out," "Jungleland," "Badlands," "Thunder Road." This was Jake Clemons, Clarence's thirty-two-year-old nephew. Raised on gospel in a family led by a Marine-band officer, he knew Springsteen's catalogue only casually. For years, he had been touring second-rate halls and clubs with his own band. Now he had the assignment of filling his uncle's shoes in front of audiences of fifty thousand.
He would do so literally. Jake wore his uncle's size-16 shoes — snakeskin boots, slick loafers, whatever was left to him. Nearly all of his horns had been gifts from Uncle Clarence.
In January 2012, Springsteen had invited Jake to his house, and they played long into the night. Bruce introduced the idea of his joining the band. "But you have to understand," Springsteen told him. "When you blow that sax onstage with us, people won't compare you to Clarence on the last tour. They'll compare you to their memory of Clarence, to their idea of Clarence."
That distinction — between what someone was and what an audience has made of them — is the central problem of Springsteen's late career, and arguably of his entire enterprise. He has spent fifty years building a mythology so powerful that it now exerts its own gravitational pull, shaping what people see even when the evidence of decay and loss is right in front of them. The E Street Band's most recent world tour grossed more than $700 million — the largest haul of Springsteen's career, exceeding even the Born in the U.S.A. juggernaut, achieved by a septuagenarian fronting a band whose surviving members require a MASH unit to function. People are not paying to hear the songs. They are paying to participate in the communal maintenance of an idea.
"Everyone wants to be part of something bigger than themselves," Jake Clemons said. "A Springsteen show is a lot of things, and it's partly a religious experience. Maybe he comes from the line of David, a shepherd boy who could play beautiful music, so that the crazy become less crazy and Saul the king finally chills out."
At the 2014 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, Springsteen inducted the E Street Band — all ten past and present members — and delivered a speech that was simultaneously a love letter and an honest reckoning. He spoke of every musician by name, from the genesis point in the Mermaid Room of the Upstage Club to the losses that couldn't be undone. He told the story of meeting Clarence — the rainy night, the Student Prince, the mythology they built together. And he acknowledged what the band had cost its members: the firings, the reunions, the years of waiting by the phone. "This is not the Beatles," he said, echoing Weinberg. But it was, in its own way, something more durable — because the inequality was explicit, the hierarchy acknowledged, and the devotion somehow survived anyway.
The Catalogue and the Ride
In December 2021, Springsteen sold his entire music catalogue — master recordings and publishing rights for all twenty studio albums, encompassing more than 300 songs — to Sony Music for a reported $500 million, the most expensive such deal in history at the time. He had been with Sony's Columbia Records for the entirety of his career, nearly half a century. The deal provided immediate financial security to the artist and his estate while giving Sony the right to build new revenue streams through film and TV licensing, merchandise, cover versions, and performance royalties.
The sale confirmed what the touring grosses already demonstrated: Springsteen's value had only increased with age. Forbes estimated his net worth at $1.1 billion in 2024, making him one of the few rock musicians to cross that threshold. The kid who had collected food stamps in Asbury Park, who had twenty thousand dollars to his name at thirty, who couldn't pay his taxes until the IRS came calling — that kid was now a billionaire who had made his fortune singing about people who would never be billionaires.
He addressed the irony in his 2016 memoir,
Born to Run, with the same mix of self-awareness and defiance he brings to everything: "As my success increased, there was something about that 'rich man in a poor man's shirt' that left an uneasy taste in my mouth." But Patti Scialfa, whose family had money before Bruce did, offered the unanswerable rebuttal: "Who wrote
Anna Karenina? Tolstoy? He was an aristocrat! Did that make his work any less true? If you are lucky enough to have a real talent and you've fed it and mined it and protected it and been vigilant about it, can you lose it? Well, you can lose it by sitting outside and drinking Ripple! It doesn't have to be the high life."
The recent years have brought a new film — Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, starring Jeremy Allen White as a young Springsteen battling depression during the making of Nebraska, with Jeremy Strong as Landau. And they have brought Tracks II: The Lost Albums, a box set of seven complete unreleased records comprising seventy-four songs that Springsteen shelved between 1983 and 2018, genres he "hadn't quite dived into" — Western swing, Burt Bacharach-inspired sixties pop, acoustic experiments. "They were all these sort of outliers," he said, "and what do you do with them? I don't know. So this is how we ended up solving the problem." The sheer volume of the vault — forty-plus unused songs for every album released — is its own argument about craft. The songs that made it were the survivors of a ruthless internal selection process. The ones that didn't make it were, in many cases, excellent. They just didn't fit the picture Springsteen was assembling, the story he was telling himself about what each record needed to be.
He was asked, at seventy-five, about retirement. "You meet people who go, 'When are you going to retire?'" he said. "Are you still alive?" His answer is unequivocal: never. "At this late date, we're going to be rolling until the wheels come off."
The Sign on the Step
A couple of weeks before the first concert in Barcelona on the 2012 Wrecking Ball tour, one of Springsteen's beloved aunts died. The day before the show, Steve Van Zandt's mother, Mary, died in Red Bank. "When I was a child, deaths came regularly," Springsteen said. "Then there's a period, unless accidents happen, death doesn't happen, and then you reach a period where it just happens regularly again. We've entered that part."
Having changed from his regular jeans to his stage jeans, Springsteen walked with the band through a stadium tunnel toward the stage. The last thing he saw before heading to the mike and a blast of stage lights was a sign taped to the top step that read "Barcelona." A few years earlier, at an arena show in Auburn Hills, he had kept greeting the crowd with shouts of "Hello, Ohio!" Finally, Van Zandt pulled him aside and told him they were in Michigan.
Springsteen glanced at the step and stepped into the spotlight.
"Hola, Barcelona!" he cried out to a sea of forty-five thousand people. "Hola, Catalunya!"
Somewhere in the tunnels behind him, the ghost town of Fort Monmouth was gathering dust, and the teen club where the Castiles once played had long since closed, and his father's kitchen in Freehold sat dark and warm with the gas stove burning, and the dead girl's portrait still hung on someone's wall, and the barber his father had summoned was just a story now, and the size-16 snakeskin boots were laced on a younger man's feet, and the sign taped to the step said exactly where he was.
