Word: springsteen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Casting Springsteen as a rebel in a motorcycle jacket is easy enough-it makes a neat fit for the character he adopted in Born to Run-but it ignores a whole other side of his importance and of his music...
Born to Run is a bridge between Springsteen the raffish rocker and the more ragged, introverted street poet of the first two albums. Although he maintains that he "hit the right spot" on Born to Run, it is the second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, that seems to go deepest. A sort of free-association autobiography, it comes closest to the wild fun-house refractions of Springsteen's imagination. In Wild Billy's Circus Song, when he sings, "He's gonna miss his fall, oh God save the human cannonball," Springsteen could...
...born poor in Freehold, N.J., a working-class town near the shore. His mother Adele ("Just like Superwoman, she did everything, everywhere, all the time") worked through his childhood as a secretary. His father, Douglas Springsteen (the name is Dutch), was "a sure-money man" at the pool tables who drifted from job to job stalked by undetermined demons...
...Daddy was a driver," Springsteen remembers. "He liked to get in the car and just drive. He got everybody else in the car too, and he made us drive. He made us all drive." These two-lane odysseys without destination only reinforced Springsteen's already flourishing sense of displacement. "I lived half of my first 13 years in a trance or something," he says now. "People thought I was weird because I always went around with this look on my face. I was thinking of things, but I was always on the outside, looking...
...teens. Bruce stayed behind, with some bad memories of hassles with nuns in parochial school, an $18 guitar and random dreams of a phantom father for company. By the time he was 18, he had some perspective on his father. "I figured out we were pretty much alike," Springsteen says, by which he means more than a shared cool skill at the pool table and a taste for long car rides. "My father never has much to say to me, but I know he thinks about a lot of things. I know he's driving himself almost crazy thinking...