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Long dark highways and thin white lines; fire roads and Interstates; the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets; barefoot girls sitting on the hoods of Dodges; pink Cadillacs; last-chance power drives; men who go out for a ride and never come back.
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Bruce Springsteen’s song lyrics have injected more drama and mystery into the myths of the American road than any figure since Jack Kerouac. He knows this, of course. So it’s one of the running jokes in his big, loose, rangy and intensely satisfying new memoir, “Born to Run” (what else was he going to call it?), that he didn’t begin to drive until he was well into his 20s — around the time he landed simultaneously on the covers of Time and Newsweek.
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His brooding and violent father had been too impatient to teach him and, anyway, he couldn’t afford a car. When Mr. Springsteen was forced to sneak behind the wheel, licenseless, to handle some of the driving on his earliest tours, his ineptitude terrified his band members. He did not exactly, when young and virile, ride through mansions of glory on suicide machines. He mostly stuck out his thumb. He’d been born to hitch.
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“Every sort of rube, redneck, responsible citizen and hell-raiser the Jersey Shore had to offer, I rode with ’em,” he writes in “Born to Run.” These rides matter because Mr. Springsteen’s songs, like the blue-collar poetry of Philip Levine, are intensely peopled. Wild Billy and Crazy Janey, Johnny 99, Mary from “Thunder Road,” Wayne from “Darlington County,” Jimmy the Saint and Bobby Jean had to come from somewhere. This memoir suggests Mr. Springsteen met many of them while cackling over there in the shotgun seat.
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The headline news in “Born to Run,” to judge by the early news media tweets, is that Mr. Springsteen, who turns 67 on Friday, has suffered periodically from serious depression. I will admit that this information shook me. If Bruce Springsteen has to resort to Klonopin, what hope is there for anyone? But these sections are not the reason to come to “Born to Run.”
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The book is like one of Mr. Springsteen’s shows — long, ecstatic, exhausting, filled with peaks and valleys. It’s part séance and part keg party, and then the house lights come up and you realize that, A) you look ridiculous dancing to “Twist and Shout” and, B) you will be driving home in a minivan and not a Camaro.
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His writing voice is much like his speaking voice; there’s a big, raspy laugh on at least every other page. There’s some raunch here. This book has not been utterly sanitized for anyone’s protection, and many of the best lines won’t be printed in this newspaper. Most important, “Born to Run” is, like his finest songs, closely observed from end to end. His story is intimate and personal, but he has an interest in other people and a gift for sizing them up.
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Here’s just one example, chosen nearly at random. When Mr. Springsteen meets a future girlfriend on the boardwalk in Asbury Park, N.J. (one of innumerable girlfriends on display here), he delivers this electric introduction: “She was Italian, funny, a beatific tomboy, with just the hint of a lazy eye, and wore a pair of glasses that made me think of the wonders of the library.” Well, hello, you think.
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