Peter Ames Carlin: Bruce

Peter Ames Carlin Bruce, Simon & Schuster 2012, Hardback 494 pages £20.

When someone is as well known and widely recognised as Bruce Springsteen, it might be wondered what is to be learned from a new biography.  Surely the stories of the journey from the early days of the rock and roll Rat Pack on the Jersey Shore to stadium megastar and cultural symbol have all been well mined and assigned to the Springsteen canon?  However, what distinguishes this latest contribution from many earlier offerings is the unprecedented access to Springsteen that Peter Ames Carlin enjoyed, and the fact that he is an excellent storyteller. 

Speaking at the Glory Days Symposium at Monmouth University, New Jersey, back in September, Carlin read aloud from the opening chapter, and it was more like listening to a novel or a screenplay.  Carlin established his focus not by immediately describing the arrival of Bruce Springsteen (on the 23^rd September 1949), but by examining events that had happened in his family a generation earlier.  The death in 1927 of five year old Virginia Springsteen (the older sister of Bruce’s father Douglas) as the result of her tricycle being hit by a truck, cast a long shadow that arguably shaped the psychology and character first of Douglas (effectively rejected by his grieving parents, Fred and Alice, and brought up in his early years by aunts), and later of Bruce himself who became the obsessive focus of his grandparents’ love for their lost child and was all but stolen as an infant from his parents.  The grandparents did more than love the child – they worshipped him; he could do no wrong and had no boundaries.  It was a strange life for a small boy and one destined to shape him as an introspective outsider with a “very vibrant internal life.”

Springsteen has spoken frequently – particularly in recent years – of the ferocious work ethic which drives him and ensures he always gives his utmost all the time (particularly evident in the legendary live shows of an intensity and duration unmatched by other bands).  He learnt that ethic from his mother; he certainly didn’t see any evidence of it in his early years in his grandparents’ home where “no one goes to work and no one is coming home, the clock is never relevant.”  The young Bruce had no structure, no rules, no constraints and no expectations of his behaviour.  No wonder when his mother reclaimed him aged six from Fred and Alice and enrolled him in school (something the grandparents had viewed as totally unnecessary) that Bruce’s relationship with authority in general and the Catholic Church in particular (he was educated by nuns) would be confrontational and miserable, and a matter of huge ambivalence to this day.

Such a childhood certainly provided fertile ground for Springsteen’s creative development and the references in his work to these early experiences are everywhere.  His relationship with his father too surfaces in many of his songs.  Often describing the tensions and their mutual lack of understanding (captured in the song Independence Day), while also respecting and acknowledging the battles Doug had in finding work and keeping his family together (Factory and Used Cars for example).  It was clear that Bruce struggled to find a connection with his father who had major demons and psychological traumas of his own and was probably bipolar.  While Doug hated the music his teenage son tried to play, his Mother Adele indulged her only son but also shared and encouraged his joy of music.

Carlin tells the full story from Bruce’s early bands of The Castilles, Earth, Child, Steel Mill, and Dr Zoom and the Sonic Boom, and many followers of Springsteen will be familiar with many of the tales.  Carlin, however, seems to have spoken to everyone still living who had anything to do with those days, and the richness of the multi-layered stories is striking.

When Springsteen signed to Columbia records as a solo artist in 1972 he also signed the now infamous management contract with Mike Appel and Laurel Canyon, and did so without the benefit of independent legal advice.  Astonishingly, the contract assigned outright ownership of Bruce’s songs to Appel.  The naive Springsteen went along with it, trusting Appel’s word that the contract was fair and honourable.  Perhaps because Bruce’s desire for success had always been about the music and recognition rather than the pursuit of money or ‘stardom’, he failed to take seriously the implications of a contract.  It was something he would come to regret deeply.  The painful experience that led to the total breakdown of trust between the two men in 1976, saw Appel issuing an injunction preventing Bruce entering a recording studio with his new producer Jon Landau, while Springsteen responded by citing multiple counts of fraud and breach of trust. Eventually in May 1977 the case was settled out of court, and while Springsteen regained his creative freedom in production and publishing, he lost his innocence and someone he had thought to be a friend.  The two eventually reconciled, or perhaps reached an accommodation, but the damage ran deep and the betrayal is etched in Springsteen’s work (particularly in The Promise).

Some of the stories re-told here have already attained near legendary status – like the tale of the night Bruce met the Big Man – saxophonist Clarence Clemons - on a stormy night in Asbury Park.  Playing at the Student Prince, the wind was howling, and – so the story goes – as Clarence pulled open the door to step into the club, it flew off its hinges and according to Clemons “blew down Kingsley.  Tumbling north toward the Wonder Bar.”  It’s one way to make a memorable entrance.  If it isn’t true – and both the late Clarence Clemons and Bruce swear it is gospel – then it should be true.  As Carlin observes, “Given the gleam in his eyes, it was difficult to figure if Clemons intended the story to be a journalistic account of actual events or an allegorical tall tale about his spiritual bond to Bruce.”  

There have been hints over the years of the darkness that lurks in Bruce (most recently in July in the extended profile for The New Yorker by David Remnick).  His need to be in control (and hence his avoidance of drugs throughout his life); his obsessive tendencies, his need to seek solitude, and his demands for perfection (what Carlin terms “the extreme focus” he brings to his work), all point towards significant issues and – at times – a troubled soul.  On the occasions when his control breaks, the resulting melt down has frequently been intense and sometimes in full public view.  Carlin relates the time when Springsteen went berserk during the depositions with Appel, and climbed on the conference table while screaming his fury.  It is hard not to think about the barely socialised pre-schooler who had never been taught control or learnt boundaries.  The other notorious incident was played out to a concert crowd on 23 September 1979 – already irritated by turning 30 and enduring public celebrations, Springsteen snapped when he saw his former girlfriend the photographer Lynn Goldsmith in the crowd.  Springsteen apparently dragged her roughly on stage, announced to the audience that this was his ex-girlfriend, and then ordered security to throw her out of the building.

His lack of skill in dealing with other people and their emotions is a recurrent theme, and the members of the E Street band have – for the first time in public - shared their hurt and distress with Carlin over the apparently peremptory manner in which he dismissed them in 1989 (and summonsed them in the same vein to return in 1995).  Some of the comments from E Street members shared with Carlin reveal the continuing pain.  Even Bruce’s beloved wingman Clarence Clemons couldn’t help but express his irritation that Bruce is in the Rock and Roll Hall of fame and deservedly so,  but what about the E Street Band?  The fact that Bruce is literally the boss and employs the other band members is also significant; and the stories of the demands he makes of everyone and “the allegations about Bruce’s penchant for fining employees who disappointed him” are at times less than edifying.

Springsteen’s response to the events of 9/11 are well known – they would lead to the release of The Rising, but in the immediate aftermath he was there to open the Telethon (with My City of Ruins), and in the days that followed a new mythology grew up around Bruce comforting the bereaved and heartbroken like some latter day Clarence Odbody.  He made unannounced telephone calls to the families of deceased fans; it is something that had considerable impact for many but something Bruce remains reluctant to discuss and which perhaps even he struggles to  understand, but maybe the obvious empathy and humanity of a mature individual was finally in charge.  When he spoke to an advance listening party with the Columbia/Sony executives prior to the record’s launch in July 2002 Bruce made it clear he wanted the disc to reach as wide an audience as possible: “It ain’t business”, he said “It’s personal.”

Carlin’s book is the first to really lift the veil on how Springsteen has dealt with his inner contradictions and turmoil.  He remains a man haunted by his early life; even at the height of his success he would drive back to his hometown of Freehold late at night and visit the empty space on Randolph Street where the house he had lived in with his grandparents used to stand, and to drive past other childhood homes.  He has had periods of intense psychological turmoil, and recognises that “things can come from way down in the well.  It’s in your DNA, in the way your body cycles.  You’re going along fine, and then, boom, it hits you.”  Springsteen has worked on finding redemption – both psychological and physical.  His pumped up intensely muscular body of Born in the USA era was the result of him discovering salvation in the gym and becoming “a big fan of meaningless, repetitive behaviour.”

Carlin observes that Bruce has “wrestled with his moods, and a psyche genetically prone to extremes, for most of his adult life.  Decades of psychotherapy helped reveal and cast light on some of his most primal traumas and conflicts, but his raw moods, and occasional descents into full-blown depression, never quite went away.”  Despite an extraordinarily productive period of his career since 2005, Springsteen knows he isn’t free of his black dog: “You manage it, you learn and evolve, but another recognition you gotta have is that these are the cards you were dealt.  These things are never going to be out of your life.  You gotta be constantly vigilant and realistic about these things.”

He is flawed, as we all are, but the periodic revelations of those flaws are – Carlin suggests – disconcerting.  There is a tension or mismatch between “the Bruce in your head” – the one created by magazine profiles, “tales of regular-guy benevolence” and by “his own musical meditations on right and wrong.”  That Bruce “doesn’t do that kind of thing.”  The expectation would be too great for anyone to bear, and as Carlin acknowledges it creates “a nearly impossible burden.” Springsteen describes at one point feeling ‘Bruced out’ by the way his image took over while he felt “Hey, that’s not me. It was never me.”  Only to add in his next breath that “It might be a little more of me than I think.”

This is a book that will be seized upon by the many loyal fans that follow Springsteen through the years, but it will also find a wider audience perhaps of those intrigued by this enigmatic, at times troubled, but essentially brilliantly creative musician and story teller.  Carlin has woven a tight and compelling tale but not hidden from view some of the contradictions, tensions and paradoxes which characterise Springsteen.  Springsteen himself welcomed Carlin into his world, shared his reflections and experiences and did all he could to ensure the writer could do his job.  As Carlin observes, in return “Bruce Springsteen made it clear that the only thing I owed him was an honest account of his life.”  Carlin seems to have honoured that expectation and deserves full credit for doing so, but the greatest respect perhaps should be given to Springsteen himself for being prepared to reveal himself so fully and imperfectly.