YouSaid · the spoken record

Bruce Springsteen

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72
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2025-12-14
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2025-12-14
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  1. “Some of them might have even made a demo tape. Some might have lucked out and gotten a record deal. A few of those might have sold some records and done some touring. A few of those might have had a small hit, a short career in music, and managed to eke out a modest living. A very few of those might have managed to make a life as a musician, and a very, very few might have had some continuing success that brought them fame, fortune, and deep gratification. And tonight one of those ended up standing between Mick Jagger and George Harrison, a rolling stone and a beetle. I did not fool myself about what the odds were back in nineteen sixty four, that that one would have been the acne faced fifteen year old kid. a cheap guitar from Freehold, New Jersey. My parents were right, my chances were one, one in a million, one in many millions”

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  2. “Had come marching in and blessed us for the hard times we had endured. I suppose they had. Many years later at a ceremony for the rock and roll hall of fame, I stood on stage between Mick Jagger and George Harrison, all of us together on one mic, singing. I was thinking what's wrong with this picture? How did a kid from New Jersey end up on this evening between these two men whose work had driven so deeply into his soul that he had to follow the road they laid out before him? Follow it with everything he had. Look at it like this in nineteen sixty four when Bruce started. Millions of kids saw the rolling stones and the beetles and decided that looks like fun. Some of them went out and bought instruments. Some of them learned to play a little. Some of them got good enough to maybe join a local band.”

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  3. “This is the final takeaway on his father's life, and it's devastating. My dad was ill but wily. He held us hostage for many years. In my mom's case, right up until he died, and she never called him on it. The other life my mom seemed built for and could have had, the life of dining, dancing, laughter, adult partnership, the equal sharing of life's burdens. She was not compelled to pursue. There is so much of my own mom's life in what he's describing right now. We don't always want what seems best suited for us. We want what we need. You make your choices and you pay the piper. She chose and she paid. We all did. My mother stood behind my wildest dreams, accepted me at face value for who I truly was, and nurtured the unlikely scenario I held deepest in my heart that I was going to make music and that someone somewhere was going to want to hear it. She shone her light on me at a time when it was all the light there was. When I hit it big, my mom believed the same.”

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  4. “Way through hard work and Patty's great love, I have overcome much of this, though not all of it. I have days when my boundaries wobble, my darkness and blues seem to beckon and I seek to medicate myself in any way I can. But on my best days I can freely enjoy the slow passing of time, the tenderness that is in life. I can feel the love I'm a part of surrounding me, and flowing through me. Something that feels almost like being free. Those whose love we wanted but could not get we emulate. It is dangerous, it stakes our claim upon that which was rightfully ours but denied.”

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  5. “And to warn me to be careful to do better, to not make the same painful mistakes that he had made, and I try to honor that. We honor our parents by carrying their best forward and laying the rest down, by fighting and taming the demons that laid them low and now reside in us. I learned many rough lessons from my father, a deep attraction to silence, secretness and secretiveness. You always withhold something, you do not lower your mask. This distorted idea that the beautiful things in your life, the love itself you struggled to win to create will turn and possess you, robbing you of your imagined, long fought for freedom. All of that leads ultimately to a wreck of a life. I can't lay this all on my dad's feet plenty of it is my own weakness and inability to put this all away.”

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  6. “Nonstop from California to leave a note on my door saying, sorry I missed you. Then he drove over to my mom's relatives, which is another town in New Jersey, cursed them out, then got in the car, and drove non stop back to the west coast. He zipped around the country like a madman. And so his dad, without warning, would just like drive hundreds of miles, and he would just show up unannounced. And so one time he did this right before Bruce was about to become a father. And so he just shows up unannounced at Bruce's house in LA. And he says, Bruce, you've been very good to us. He continued, and I wasn't very good to you. You did the best you could, I said. That was it. That was all I needed. All that was necessary. I was blessed on that day and given something by my father that I thought I'd never see. A brief recognition of the truth. It is why he had come five hundred miles that morning. He'd come to tell me on the eve of my fatherhood that he loved me.”

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  7. “I believed a lot of me wasn't so nice to know, my self centeredness, my narcissism, my isolation. Still, Patty tended to be alone to herself, and this gave her a pretty good heads up on how to handle me. She was strong and had proven she could stand against my less than constructive behavior. She was confident in us, and that gave me confidence that we would be all right. Patty had changed my life in a way that no one else ever had. She inspired me to be a better man, turned the dial away down on my running while still leaving me room to move. She took care of me perhaps more than I deserved. And so as he's trying to fix himself, as he's trying to have longstanding relationship, as he's trying to still build his career, he's still dealing with his father. And once his dad was diagnosed as schizophrenic, he says finally it all began to make sense, but there's just unbelievable stories in the book. Here's just one of them. Once he drove all the way from New Jersey.”

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  8. “Heal, fight again, love, refit, then go at it one more time. We were both broken in a lot of ways, but we hoped with work our broken pieces might fit together in a way that could create something workable, something wonderful, and they did. We created a life and a love fit for a couple of emotional outlaws. That similarity bound and binds us very close. I had let Patty know me like I'd never done with anyone else. This frightened me.”

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  9. “Loves, who loves him, which causes this profound realization that is unexpected to come from somebody like him. Work is not life, life is life. Work is an important part but only a part and I need to find out how to build a great life. To me that's what he's been talking about and what he finds in Patty. He says we love those in whose company is reflected the best of us. For a couple of loners and musicians they were both loners, they're both musicians, we've made it pretty far. She had plenty of admirers and was a tough dance card if you tried to tame her independence. She lived alone and like a musician she was not domestic. I liked all of this. There was a lot of emotional dueling and plenty of arguing. We tested our ability to withstand each other's insecurities hard. It was good. We could fight, surprise, disappoint, raise up, bring down, withhold, surrender, hurt”

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  10. “You're almost 400 pages into the book. You understand his life story. This is the sentence that grabs you, that ties everything together. This is a holy shit full circle moment. He says, work is work, but life is life, and life trumps art always. This is the full circle moment. If you think about everything he's talked about in the book up until this point, a viciously unhappy childhood and a family life that causes him to retreat into work in an extreme way as he searches for control and success. He gets everything he ever wants professionally and then falls into a deep depression, retreats back into work, but finds the reprieve temporary. Demons follow him everywhere he runs. He finally stops and faces them, realizes what he truly wants and that he was lying to himself. For the first time in his life he's able to have a healthy relationship with someone.”

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  11. “A few years later their son is born, listen to how he describes what having a kid is like making life fills you with humility, balls, arrogance, a mighty manliness, confidence, terror, joy, dread, love, a sense of calm and reckless adventure. Isn't anything possible now? If we can populate the world, can't we create and shape it”

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  12. “But clear thinking part of me asked Where the hell do you think you're going? The road, the bar? I still enjoyed them, but it wasn't a life. I'd been there, seen all they had to offer. What was conceivably going to be different? Was I going to get back on the hamster wheel of indecision, of lying to myself that it would all never grow old? And throw away the best thing, the best woman I'd ever known? I stayed it was the sanest decision of my life. Together we settled into a reassuring quiet, not trying to push each other too hard or make too much of things. We gave each other a lot of room and something happened. It was a sweet surrender, and I've always felt that it was there at that time in the gentle days and nights we spent at the sea, that Patty and I emotionally married. I loved her. I was lucky she loved me. The rest was paperwork.”

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  13. “Over the years I had come to the realization that there was a part of me, a significant part, that was capable of great carelessness and emotional cruelty, that sought to reap damage and harvest shame, that wanted to wound and hurt and make sure those who loved me paid for it. It was all straight out of my dad's playbook. My father led us to believe he despised us for loving him, would punish us for it. It seemed like he could be driven crazy by it, and so could I. When I tasted this part of myself it made me scared and sick. And so at this point they were spending half the year in New Jersey and half the years in California, just going on for quite a while. So it took a while and one massive end all blowout of an argument where Patty finally fed up with my bullshit threw down the gauntlet and laid it out. Stay or go. This is what I'd push her toward, and with one foot out the door, I stopped for a moment.”

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  14. “And so originally they start living together in New York City. And he says, in New York City, I was a magic rat in his maze. I couldn't get the sky. I couldn't see the sun and couldn't run. So he's like, I'm not a city boy. He goes, this is my one try, my only try becoming a city boy, and it was a no-go. So we packed up our bags and headed back to Jersey, where she and I spent a summer. With me up to some of my old ways and thoughtless behavior, Patty was patient to a point. Patty and I fought a lot, which was a good thing. I never argued much in most of my other relationships and it had proved detrimental. Too many issues simmering unresolved beneath the surface always proved poisonous. And so he starts to hurt her. These incidents occurred only with people I cared about, people I loved. That was the point. I wanted to kill what loved me because I couldn't stand being loved. It infuriated and outraged me. Someone having the temerity to love me. It was ugly and a red flag for the poison I had running through my veins and my”

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  15. “He understands the cause of his inability to form healthy relationships. He doesn't like this he doesn't want to be like this. He wants to fix it, and he does. And so he immediately goes back to his old habits. When Julie was filming on location, I'd be at home in New Jersey slowly slipping back to my old ways, the bars, the late nights, nothing serious, just my usual drifting, but it wasn't married life. It was during one of these periods Patty and I got together under the excuse of working on our duets, so Paddy was a musician, she is in Bruce's band, and even after all the women that you can imagine a rock star has been with, he never found another person like her. They are still together to this day forty years after the events in the book that he's talking about now. He says, in my life, Patty is a singularity. And so that leads him to...”

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  16. “That's not even his top priority in life. And of course, if he feels this way, he's not the only human being that feels this way. This is why these stories are so important. Once again, it was the fear of having something, allowing something into my life, someone loving that was setting off a myriad of bells and whistles and a fierce reaction. Who would care for me? Who would love me, the real me, the me I knew who resided inside my easy going facade? He has a mask. I was scared but I did not want to scare the wits out of my young bride. It was the wrong way to handle it and created a psychological distance at just the moment when I was trying to let someone into my life. How did this paragraph start? I tried my best to hide them. That was a mistake. How does it end? It was the wrong way to handle it and created a psychological distance at just the moment I was trying to let someone into my life. This is why he has spent so much time talking about his childhood and how much his family fucked him up.”

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  17. “And couldn't center myself around the truth. I was sliding back towards a chasm where fear, rage, distrust, insecurity made war with my better angels. Once again it was the fear of having something. He italicizes a lot of these words and he's talking about what he's fearful of. Staying is italicized lot. Having is italicized a lot. Loving is italicized a lot. I mean, I don't know if it's, I'm pretty sure I'll go over this later. He literally talks about the fact that he thought he was so unlovable that he would start to hate the people that loved him because he didn't think he deserved it. And yet at the same time, it's what he wants most in the world, which is where the book really flips and catches you by surprise. Because you think that work, we're 400 pages, 332 pages into the book. So far it's all been, I'm obsessed with work. All I want to do is work. And you realize.”

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  18. “I also had shades of my dad's paranoid delusions that scared me. His dad is going to wind up being diagnosed later on as paranoid schizophrenic. And there's cases, this is also in the movie, but in the book, where his dad would just disappear. And Bruce Muscin is, again, world-famous musician has to fly across the country and like search of San Francisco, trying to locate his dad. And again, we go back into things. These are just things that people would not admit when they're happening. He's in his mid-30s. He's married now, and his mind is playing tricks on him. One evening while I sat across my beautiful wife in an upscale Los Angeles restaurant, a conversation formed silently inside my head. There as we politely chatted, hand in hand a part of me tried to convince myself that she was simply using me to further her career. Nothing could have been further from the truth Julian loved me and didn't have an exploitive or malicious bone in her body. Inside I knew that, but I was out where the buses don't run, he's lost in his mind.”

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  19. “And this is where he's trying to form long term relationships. I wanted something serious. I met Julianne Phillips. She was 24 years old, tall, blonde, educated, talented, a beautiful and charming young woman. We hit it off and began seeing each other. Six months into dating, I proposed and we were married. Following our wedding, I was struck by a series of severe anxiety attacks. I fought my way through with my doctor's help. I tried to hide them as best as I could, and that was a mistake.”

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  20. “This is where the entire book comes together. So he starts meeting with Dr. Wayne Myers. And over many meetings and long-distance phone calls during the next 25 years, Doc Myers and I would fight many demons together until he passed in two thousand eight. In all psychological wars, it is never over. There's just this day, this time, and a hesitant belief in your own ability to change. It is not an arena where the unsure should go looking for absolutes and there are no permanent victories. It is about a living change filled with insecurities. The chaos of our own personalities, the results of my work with doctor Myers and my debt to him are at the heart of this book.”

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  21. “There was a lot of sadness at what had happened, at what had been done, and what I had done to myself. But there was good news also how resilient I'd been, how I turned so much of it into music, into love, and smiles. I'd mostly beaten the hell out of myself and my loved ones. However, I understood what had recently drawn me so far down had also rallied to my defence as a child, had covered my heart and provided shelter when I needed it. For that I was thankful. But now those wayward blessings were standing squarely between me and a home and a life that I needed. The question was could I tolerate those things? I needed to find out.”

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  22. “I started talking and it helped immediately over the next few weeks I regained some equilibrium. I felt myself steady, riding myself. I had danced and driven my way all on my own to the brink of my big black sea, but I didn't jump in. By the grace of God and the light of friends, I wouldn't live and die there. So began thirty years of one of the biggest adventures of my life, canvassing the squirrely terrain inside my own head for signs of life not a song, not a performance, not a story, but a life. I worked hard, dedicatedly, and I began to learn things. I began to map a previously unknown internal world, a world that when it showed its weight in mass, its ability to hide. plain sight and its sway over my behavior stunned me.”

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  23. “At my request he makes a call. I get a number and two days later I drive fifteen minutes west to a residential home in a suburb of Los Angeles. I walk in, look into the eyes of a kindly white haired, mustached, complete stranger sit down and burst into tears.”

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  24. “towards for a long time I call John Landau. Remember how I told you how important it was to find that person in his life? I've broached these subjects in several long conversations with John in the past. He gets it. It's dark and getting darker. My well of emotion is no longer being channeled in safely pipelined to the surface. There's been an event and my depression is spewing like an oil spill all over the beautiful turquoise green gulf of my carefully planned and controlled existence. Its black sludge is threatening to smother every last living part of me. John advises you need professional help.”

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  25. “Story so fascinating, he finally confronts and then fixes this. So he gets to his house in California. I immediately start thinking about leaving. Where am I going to go anywhere as long as it's away from this home that seems to be asking me for something I find so disturbing I cannot submit to or surrender to. It wants me to stay and I don't stay. I don't stay for this house. I don't stay for anyone. That's for everyone else. I go. The only thing that stops me is knowing that if I get in the car and make that long trip back east once my toes tickle the Atlantic, I'd be driven to turn around and return here in a never ending cycle of wheel spinning madness. I am existentially spent my emotional well of tricks dry. There is no tor to hide behind, no music to save me, I'm face up against the wall I've been inching.”

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  26. “All I do know is that as we age the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier, much heavier. With each passing year the price of our refusal to do that sorting rises higher and higher. This is such great writing. Long ago the defenses I built to withstand the stress of my childhood to save what I had of myself outlived their usefulness, and I'd become an abuser of their once life saving powers. I relied on them to wrongly isolate myself, to cut me off from life, to contain my emotions to a damaging degree. Now the bill collector is knocking, and his payment will be in tears. He leaves Jersey, he travels across to California, he is running from his problems. On this road trip, he realizes I can't run from this anymore. But when he gets to California, he reacts just like he's always reacted. This is what makes us.”

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  27. “and in to the dark, and this is where he does this cross-country trip. This is what the movie's about. And he falls into the deepest depression of his life. He says, this was the trip where the ambivalence, trouble and toxic confusion I had volcanically bubbling up for thirty two years would finally reach critical mass. I felt a deeper anxiety than I had ever known. Why here? Why tonight? Thirty four years later, I still don't know.”

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  28. “On my neck. I'd roll through its streets listening for the voices of my father, my mother and me as a child. I would daydream of purchasing a house, moving back away from all the noise that I had created, bringing it all full circle, fixing things, finding love one that would last, marrying and walking through town. My children in my arms, my woman at my side, it was a pleasant fantasy, and I suppose I took comfort in the illusion that I could go back. But I've been around long enough to know history is sealed and unchangeable. You can move on with a heart stronger in the places it's been broken, create new love. You can hammer pain and trauma into a righteous sword and use it in defense of life, love, human grace, and God's blessing. But nobody gets a do over. Nobody gets to go back. There's only one road out.”

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  29. “Love had brought me, and had be free. I'd switch partners, hit rewind, and take her from the top, telling myself this time it'll be different. Then it would be high times and laughs until fate and that unbearable anxiety came knocking, and it'd be one more for the road. And in the very next paragraph he goes back to this hold that his traumatic childhood has on him as a grown man, as a rock star, a world famous musician. This is what he's doing, goes back to the little town Freehold, New Jersey, where he grew up. I still spend many hours on the edges of my birth city. He's in the car again. Mine was a pathetic and quasi religious compulsion. On my visits to my hometown I would never leave the confines of my car. My car was the sealed time capsule from whose seats I could experience the little town that had its crushing boots.”

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  30. “Easier to just keep rolling. I had it down. I'd routinely and roughly failed perfectly fine women over and over again. I figured needing people too much might not provide the best payoff, better off playing defense, but it was getting harder and harder to pretend nothing was amiss. Two years inside of any relationship and would all simply stop. As soon as I get close to exploring my frailties, I was gone. It was rarely the women themselves I was trying to get away from. At work I could take on all the responsibility you could load on my shoulders, but in life all I could find was a present that I could take no comfort in. This goes on for dozens and dozens of pages. This is what he's explaining to us like this is sad. He does not want to live this way. He wants to find a way to fix it. With the end of each affair, I'd feel a sad relief from the suffocating claustrophobia.”

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  31. “I just wasn't any good at it. He's talking about his inability up until this point to actually establish meaningful relationships and connections with other people. I had only my father's experience to go on and no intimate knowledge of men who were at ease with family life. I didn't trust myself to bear the burden or the responsibility for other people's lives. My experience with relationships and love to that point all told me I wasn't built for it. I grew very uncomfortable very fast. All of this sat nicely on a top of a sea of fear and depression so vast I hadn't begun to contemplate it much less consider what I should do about it.”

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  32. “No one you have been and no place you've ever gone ever leaves you. The new parts of you simply jump in the car and go along for the rest of the ride and this is where he realizes where he's getting all the professional success that he ever dreamed of and he's miserable. Off the road life was a puzzle. Without that nightly hit of adrenaline the show provided I was at loose ends. And whatever was that was always eating at me rose up and came calling. Eventually I had to come to grips with the fact that at rest I was not at ease. And to be at ease I could not rest. The show centered and calm me, but it could not solve my problems. I had no family, no home, no real life. I was a runner, not a stayer. Family was a terrifying and compelling thought for me in nineteen eighty. Yet on this album I began to write about that life, a part of me truly admired it and felt it was where real manhood lies.”

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  33. “And these are the most valuable things to understand. He's being honest with what he actually wants. Stardom in all capital letters. Not a Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday gig at the local gin joint. Not a musical weekend warrior, not a college kid's download secret hero. Stardom, the impact, the hits, the fame, the money, the women, the recognition, and the freedom to live as I please, to take it to the limit or wherever all of this was leading me. Born to run lifted us into another league. And so now he starts talking about the struggles that are going on in his mind.”

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  34. “The record goes everywhere. They put him on the cover of Time and Newsweek magazines. And everybody around him is like, isn't this great? This is what Springsteen said. I looked at them and thought, oh my God. And immediately retired to my room. I was not comfortable. But what could a poor boy do? As Hyman Roth in the Godfather Part two says, This is the business we've chosen. Sure, I had nurtured my ambivalence. It made me happy. It gave me plausible deniability and granted me the illusion of staying one step removed from my ravenish ambitions. But this was the course I had striven towards relentlessly. This is what I mentioned where he's very, very honest. This is, again, the good and the bad. He's going to tell you things that no one else is going to tell you, and he probably could only say to a 70-year-old man that he could when he was 35. Or 25, or even forty-five. These are not the kind of things that you casually”

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  35. “Excellent advice, so I let it go. He is on the precipice of getting every single thing that he thought he wanted, and he's full of doubt and fear. I needed to find out what I had. Forty years later I did not want to be sitting in my rocking chair on a sunny afternoon with the wood shoulda could have blues. All I could think of was my dad covered in a cloak of cigarette smoke lamenting. I could have taken that job with the phone company, but I would have had to travel. So instead it was lights out depression, beer and resenting his own family for what he thought he could have accomplished dead meat. I worried, but in the end my ego, ambition, and fear of not taking my shot outweighed my insecurity.”

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  36. “Why having somebody that understands you is so important. John tried to patiently explain to me that art often works in mysterious ways. What makes something great may also be one of its weaknesses, just like in people.”

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  37. “To do is when I feel fear, I go towards it. Bruce did the same thing and it changed his life. We managed to finish the record that would put us on the map on the exact day our born to run tour was starting. That is not supposed to happen. The record should be ready months before you hit the road. Still, I wrestled with Borne to run for a few more months, rejecting it, refusing to release it, and finally throwing it into a hotel swimming pool in front of a panicked Jimmy Ivan. He had brought the finished master out on tour, but to hear it, the two of us had to go to a stereo store and beg them to let us use one of their record players. I stood in the back of the store, fretting, hemming and hawing as the record played. Jimmy's eyes plastered to every look on my face, begging, please just say yes and let it be done. Jimmy, John, and Mike got crazy, but I still couldn't release it. All I could hear was what I perceived as the record's flaws.”

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  38. “This was very hard for Bruce Springsteen to do. He does not let people into his life easily. He says I'm insular by nature and don't let new people in casually. And even though it may have been uncomfortable, it's one of the best decisions Bruce made in his entire life. And it's also when he's working on born around that he meets Jimmy Ivan, they're still friends to this day. And this is the other side of his life. He is no longer going to be unknown. He says, from here on in, it was going to be a lot more complicated. Born to run was the dividing line. But listen to his reaction to this. This is wild. This is his most important album. And all he could see were the flaws to the point where he almost didn't want to release it. This is also why I think Jimmy Aveen has his great advice that he trained himself when he feels fear. Most people run. And Jimmy's like, what I've trained myself.”

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  39. “That says, I know you. John was better educated than most of my homeboys. I was interested in doing my job better and being great. Not good. Whatever that took, I was in. Now if you don't have the raw talent, you can't will yourself there. But if you have the talent, then will, ambition, and the determination to expose yourself to new thoughts, counter arguments, new influences will strengthen and fortify your work driving you closer to home. In nineteen seventy four I was a young and developing musician. I was interested in forefathers, meaning the great people that came before him.”

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  40. “In a transient field I was suited for the long haul. I had years of study behind me. I was physically built to endure and by disposition was not an edge dweller. I was interested in what I might accomplish over a lifetime of music making. So assumption number one is you're going to keep breathing. He prioritized endurance, endurability, and longevity, and one of the most important things happens around this time of his life. He meets somebody that understands him. This is the beginning of his relationship with John Landau. John Landau was the first person I met who had a language for discussing these ideas in the life of the mine. Together we shared a belief in the bedrock values of musicianship, skill, the joy of hard work and the methodical application of one's talents. We also had that instant chemical connection.”

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  41. “Fear, hunger, and insecurity. That is a Molotov cocktail of confusion that can leave you unable to make or resistant to making the leap of consciousness a life in the field demands. After first contact knocks you on your ass, you better have a plan. Some personal development will be required if you expect to hang around any longer than your fifteen minutes. Now some guys five minutes are worth other guys fifty years. And while burning out in one brilliant supernova will send record sales to the roof, leave you living fast, dying young, leaving a beautiful corpse, there is something to be said for living. Personally, I like my gods old, grizzled, and here. Aging is scary, but fascinating, and great talent morphs in strange and often enlightening.”

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  42. “Is prevalent in the But if you want to burn bright, hard, and long, you will need to depend upon more than your initial instincts. You will need to develop some craft and a creative intelligence that will lead you farther when things get dicey. That's what will help you make crucial sense and powerful music as time passes, giving you the skills that may also keep you alive, creatively and physically. The failure of so many of Rock's artists to outlive their expiration date of a few years make more than a few great albums and avoid water treading or worse. I felt was due to the misfit nature of those drawn to the profession. I think this is also true for entrepreneurship, by the way. This is why I'm reading this to you. I felt that was due to the misfit nature of those drawn to the profession. These were strong, addictive personalities fired by compulsion, narcissism, license, passion, and an inbred entitlement all slammed over a world of”

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  43. “Was it these guys thought we were just going to go away, that we'd return to our day jobs, that we'd go back to school, that we'd disappear? They didn't understand they were dealing with men without homes, lives, any practical skills or talents that could bring a reliable paycheck in the straight world. We had nowhere to go, and we loved music. This was going to be it. There was no going back. This is when he starts working on his third album. This is what we see in that documentary Defiant Once. This is the album Born to Run, which obviously names this book after. This is why you see that fierce work ethic in the documentary. This is what Bruce was trying to do. I wanted to craft a record that sounded like the last record on Earth, like the last record you might hear, like the last one you would ever need to hear. And what he understands even this early in his career, he wants longevity, he wants durability. He does not want.”

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  44. “Again, I didn't understand it the first time I read it. Can it be hard? Yeah. Is everyone built for it physically and psychologically? No. Are there nights you don't want to go on? Yep. But on those nights there will come a moment when something happens the band takes flight. A face lights up in the audience, someone with their eyes closed singing along to the words The music that you've written and suddenly you're bound together by the feeling of the things that matter to you most. I was lucky to be doing what I loved most. Now here's the humans just can't help a messing up a good thing. He has a big fight with his record label. They don't like the direction he's taken his music. They stop promoting him. And what he realizes is like this is a mismatch of commitment. They thought they could get rid of us. We have nothing to lose and no alternatives. You can't get rid of somebody like that. And so he says the basic”

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  45. “You're completely in love with what you're doing. I was 23 and I was making a living playing music. Friend, there's a reason they don't call it working. It's called playing. I've left enough sweat on stages around the world to fill at least one of the seven C's. I've driven myself and my band to the limits and over the edge for more than forty years. We continue to do so, but it's still playing. It's life giving, joyful, sweat drenched, muscle aching, voice blowing, mind clearing, exhausting, soul invigorating, cathartic pleasure, and privilege every night. It is something that lets the sun in, that keeps you breathing, that lifts you in a way that can't be explained only experienced. It's something to live for, and it was my lifeline to the rest of humanity in the days when those connections were tough for me to make. That's another hint of where we're going.”

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  46. “And the big bite I was trying to take, but damn, that is where the fun was. And I was a natural. It was in my bones. And so he actually gets signed to the same record label as Dylan's Columbia Records. He's describing what happens after. We climb to the heavens and spoke to the gods who told us that we were spitting thunder and throwing lightning bolts. It was on. It was all on. After the years of waiting, of struggling towards that something that I thought might never happen it had happened. And so Bruce is about to release his first album ever, and this is how he describes it. As my first album drew to a close, I was nervous about my rock and roll dream finally coming to fruition. Did I make a good record? On a national level, would I cut it? Was I who I thought I was? Who I wanted to be? I truly didn't know, but I knew I was about to find out. And that thrilled and frightened me. And so he releases the album and he starts touring in this paragraph that I'm about to reach you. This is what it sounds like when you.”

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  47. “Father of my country, and he talks about Bob Dylan's songs were the first time I can remember being exposed to a truthful vision of the place that I lived. That's kind of how I feel about his book. Bob Dylan inspired me and gave me hope. He asked me the questions everybody else was too frightened to ask. Bob pointed true north, and he served as a beacon to assist you in making your way through the wilderness. Many, many decades into the future, Springsteen says, I had the opportunity to sing for Bob when he received the Kennedy Center Honored Award. We were alone together for a brief moment walking down a back stairwell when he thanked me for being there and said if there's anything I could ever do for you, and I thought, Are you kidding me? And I answered him, It's already been done. So Bruce meets this guy named Mike Appel, who becomes his manager, who's also going to.”

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  48. “Is making three dollars a night per person, he says I still felt I was the best undiscovered player I'd ever seen. And so he's looking for his point of differentiation where he could stand out, how he can finally break through and not be this, you know, the greatest person no one's ever heard of, the undiscovered talent. That's not what he was going for. He's going to be very clear. This book's incredible. He's going to be very honest about what he wanted. And I think a lot of people lied to themselves about what they truly want. And so he's going to lean very heavily into what he thinks his differentiation is, which is songwriting. I decided the world was filled with plenty of good guitar players. Many of them matched me or were better. But how many good songwriters were there? Songwriters with their own voice, their own storytell, who could draw you into a world they created and sustain your interest in the things that obsess them. Not many a handful at best. And so obviously he's going to be inspired by people that came before him just like everybody else is. So he talks about Bob Dylan. He said Bob Dylan was preeminent amongst these type of writers. Bob Dylan is the”

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  49. “He says clarity ruled and allowed us to forge a bond based on the principle that we worked together but it was my band And he's willing to risk failure to do this. And he talks about, you know, here's a perfect example of how dangerous democracy could be in a band. And he's like, just look at the Beatles. So he stops using the name Steel Mill and he starts performing as Bruce Springsteen. Problem is there's no fans of Bruce Springsteen. So he has to start all the way over. So he says with Steel Mill, we had made as much as $3,000 a night with no recording contract. And when the money was split after expenses, band members went home with hundreds of dollars in their pockets. Do you know how long you could live on hundreds of dollars in 1971 or 1972 with no taxes, no dependence, and no rent? A long, long, long time. Now I sent my men home with three dollars. He's got to rebuild his fanbase from scratch and control over his work was so important to him that he was willing to go for making three thousand dollars a night to a hundred dollars a night. fifty dollars a night. And even when his band”

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  50. “I knew when we got home there would have to be changes made. And one of these things is he realizes he doesn't want to be part of a band. He is not made for democracy. He needs control. He understands that about himself, but he also understands about his industry. He says only the luckiest bands don't grow apart. Everyone moves differently and no two musicians' commitment is exactly the same. He says, I declare democracy and band names dead. I was leading the band, playing, singing, and writing everything we did. If I was going to carry the workload and responsibility, I might as well assume the power. I didn't want to get into any more decision-making squabbles or have any confusion about who set the creative direction of my music. I wanted the freedom to follow my muse without unnecessary argument. From now on, the buck would stop here. I look back on this as being one of the smartest decisions of my young life. It is Bruce Springsteen. He's going to be signed as a solo artist. It is Bruce Springsteen in the East Street.”

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