YouSaid · the spoken record

Bruce Springsteen

lines on the record: 72
first: 2025-12-14
most recent: 2025-12-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'm not afraid that you're better than me. I'm afraid that I'm not going to reach my potential. I was concerned with not maximizing my own abilities, not having a broader intelligent enough vision of what I was capable of. I was all I had. This is why it's so important. I'm not done in the middle of this either. This is why it's so important to tie people's work and the ideas they come up with to their life story. I was all that I had. There is a quote that I save on my phone as a reminder to myself. It says, I cannot afford to give up. I don't have a backup. I am the backup. Bruce is saying the exact same thing. I was all I had. I had only one talent. I was not a natural genius. I would have to use every ounce of what was in me, my cunning, my musical skills, my showmanship, my intellect, my heart, my willingness, night after night to push myself harder, to work with more intensity than the next guy just to survive in the world that I lived in. As I sat there in the pitch black”
2025-12-14 · Founders · #407 Bruce Springsteen Repairs the Hole in Himself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As good or better. That hadn't happened in a long while and it was going to take some mental realignment. And his response here was so important is why he was able to sustain success for multiple decades. It's not that he didn't expect to come up against superior talent. That happens. It's the way God planned it. I was fast, but like the old gunslingers knew there's always somebody faster. And if you can do it better than me, you earn my respect and admiration and you inspire me to work harder. I wasn't afraid of that. I was concerned with not maximizing my own abilities, not having a broad or intelligent enough vision of what I was capable of. Listen to what he's saying.”
2025-12-14 · Founders · #407 Bruce Springsteen Repairs the Hole in Himself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to go to California and hit it big. And so they go to California, they start doing auditions, and they realize there's other bands undiscovered bands better than them. And so after losing, he goes and tries to go to sleep and he lays awake at night. And this is what he's thinking. They were better than us. And I hadn't seen anybody, certainly anybody who was still unknown that was better than us. Better than me in a long time. The guy doing the booking was right. My confidence was mildly shaken and I had to make room for a rather unpleasant thought. We were not going to be the big dogs we were back in our little hometown. We were going to be one of many very competent, very creative musical groups fighting over a very small bone reality check. I was good, very good, but maybe not quite as good as exceptional as I'd gotten used to people telling me or as I thought. Right here in this city there were guys who in their own right were”
2025-12-14 · Founders · #407 Bruce Springsteen Repairs the Hole in Himself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We felt we were the best undiscovered thing we had ever seen. This is another very important part of Bruce Reasink. He was very, very confident. Michael Jordan has this great quote where he says, work ethic eliminates fear. And Bruce's practice and his work ethic helped him develop very real talent and skill. And even before other people saw it, he believed in himself. And it's interesting. He's the exact same age. So one of my favorite lines from Michael Dell's autobiography is the fact that, you know, he starts his company. He's 19 years old. He's got $1,000. He's going to compete with IBM, the biggest company in the world of time, and he's going to do it from his dorm room. And in his autobiography, Michael Dell writes, was I little full of myself at nineteen? Sure I was. I think you have to be to do anything important. Bruce Freenstein is the exact same age when he says we were cocky as hell and sure we were good enough to make our mark anywhere. We felt we were the best undiscovered thing we'd ever seen. And so a very important thing happens. We're dominating this like little section in the east coast.”
2025-12-14 · Founders · #407 Bruce Springsteen Repairs the Hole in Himself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wasn't looking for outside stimulants to help me lose or find anything. Music was going to get me as high as I needed to go. And so he's just relentlessly practicing. He's relentlessly focused. All he does is play and practice and play and practice. At this time, the band is called Still Mill. They start getting like they don't have any albums. They start getting a very devoted local fan base. So we began to draw and draw big first hundreds, then thousands came to our impromptu appearances in parks at the local armory, at the college, or any other location that we'd hold our growing tribe. We became something people wanted to see. We had a raw stage show and songs that were memorable enough for people to want to come back, to hear them again, to memorize their lyrics and sing their choruses. We began to attract and hold real fans. We would draw up to three thousand people at our concerts with no album to our name. We were cocky as hell and sure we were good enough to make our mark anywhere.”
2025-12-14 · Founders · #407 Bruce Springsteen Repairs the Hole in Himself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And dries off into the evening, fade to black just the way I liked it, and it takes him a very long time to realize that he had been lying to himself. At this point, he puts everything he has into his work. Most of the people in rock and roll are obviously doing a lot of drugs and alcohol. He doesn't do anything. He says there would be no wasted days and no wasted nights for me. I'd seen that and I'd wanted no part of it. I didn't do any drugs or drink. One of my ex-roommates and a fellow guitarist would end it all with a gunshot to the head after a short life of ingesting far too many chemicals and ending up a wasted talent on the skids. I'd seen people mentally ruined, gone and not coming back. I was barely holding on myself as it was. I couldn't imagine introducing unknown agents into my system. I needed control. I was afraid of myself. What I might do or what might happen to me. I had already experienced enough personal chaos to not go in search of the unknown. I'd seen my dad and that was enough.”
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“Trauma and just trouble in his mind because he's pursuing this dream but he would constantly go back to this little town of Freehold, New Jersey. And he's going to do this for decades. And he would drive his car. He would never get out of his car. But he would drive his car late at night by himself through his old town. Keep in mind the book is called Born to Run. He is trying to outrun his problems. He does this for decades until he can't anymore. That's what the movie's about. That's what the last half of this book is about. He says I would drive as if the miles themselves could repair the damage done, write a different story, force these streets to give up their heavily guarded secrets. They couldn't. Only I could do that, and I was a long way from being ready. I would spend my life on the road, logging hundreds of thousands of miles, and my story was always the same. Man comes to town, detonates, man leaves town.”
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“He starts the band, and this is the band he says that would initially call itself child, then morph into steel mill, then the Bruce Springsteen band and eventually become the core of the original E Street band. Now it was right around this time where he feels his mom abandons him and his sister. His dad is deeply depressed, decides to move from New Jersey to California, and this is how he describes this. My mom and pops were bound by an unknowable thread. They made their deal a long time ago. She had her man who wouldn't leave, and he had his gal who couldn't leave. Those were the rules, and they superseded all others. Even motherhood. This was how it began, and this is how it would end. My father was able to draw from my mom a saving and selfless mother, her own ambivalence about family. And so then we get the first inclination that he's got some deep unresolved.”
2025-12-14 · Founders · #407 Bruce Springsteen Repairs the Hole in Himself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of my life. He met somebody that thought and believed and loved music like he did. I'd finally met someone who'd felt about music the way I did, needed it the way I did, respected its power in a way that was a notch above the attitudes of the other musicians that so far I'd come in contact with. Somebody I understood and I felt understood me, with Steve and me from the very beginning, it was heart to heart and soul to soul. It was all impassioned, endless arguments over the minutia of the groups that we loved, the deep delving into the smallest details of guitar sounds, style, image, the beautiful obsession of sharing with someone who was as single minded and crazy as you were, a passion that you simply could not get enough of. These were the things that you could not explain to outsiders. So he skips his high school graduation because he's playing music. He doesn't care about anything else but music. He knows what he's going to do in his life.”
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“One of my great guitar heroes, a real man with a life who took the time to pass down what he knew to a bunch of not necessarily promising kids. His brother Walter was another story entirely. The first true star I'd ever been close to, a full blooded rock and roll animal with the attitude, the sexuality, the toughness, the raw sensuality pouring out of him, scaring and thrilling all of us who came in contact with him. Walter was not your everyday guy but something vastly different. He lived like he wanted. Walter proved that you could stake a rebel's flag and make it stand, that you could be different, that you could be your own man. That is exactly what Bruce Freenstein is going to do. Another important thing that happens to him in his life, remember, I think he's like 17 years old when we're at in the story. He meets Steve Van Zant. And so he says, so began one of the longest and greatest friends.”
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“Could do something I might be good at. I fell asleep at night with dreams of rock and roll glory in my head. This is the start of that determined work ethic, and so he forms another band. Their first gig is at a trailer park. And after that they would take any gig they could get. He says it was YMCAs, high schools, ice rinks, supermarket openings, drive in theaters, mental hospitals, beach clubs, and any place you could set up a five piece band that wanted decent local entertainment at a cheap price. He is still in high school. He meets these older guys that are in this legendary local band called the motifs. It's these two brothers. One would teach Bruce about the guitar, and the other one would provide Bruce what being a rock star was like. The first brother his name is Ray Shishom, and Ray would share his great guitar knowledge which with undeserving young wannabes like us. That's how Bruce is describing himself at this point.”
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“Bands that play for a crowd of about 75 locals. After this his band was booked at a high school dance. Very shortly after that, his bandmates decide to vote him out of the band. They said his guitar was too cheap and it wouldn't stay in tune, and he describes his response to being kicked out of the band. I was going to make it work. That night I went home, pulled out a rolling stones album, put it on, and taught myself the guitar solo from the song It's all over now. It took me all night but by midnight I had a reasonable copy of it down. Fuck them I was going to play lead guitar. For the next several years I would spend every available hour cradling my guitar, twisting and torturing the strings until they broke or until I fell back on my bed asleep with it in my arms. While other kids were hanging out, I would rush home to my room and I'd stay there and play until the early morning. I had a secret. There was something that I”
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“Can say that we committed all of ourselves to something. I sat there transfixed in front of the television, my mind on fire. The next day I convinced my mom to take me down to this small store. There with no money to spend, we rented a guitar. I took it home, opened its case, smelled its wood, still one of the sweetest and most promising smells in the world. I felt its magic and I sensed its hidden power. And it is very shortly after that he realizes he is different from other people. His response to things is almost always different. This is in the middle of Beetle Mania, and this is what he says. I didn't want to meet the Beatles. I wanted to be the Beatles. So at 15 years old, he's going to join a band and he starts performing. And he is so obsessed, he's willing to play any and everywhere. And so for the very first time he performs, it's at the Elks Club. And there's a series of...”
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“And that I struggle to live up to. And so he goes back to describing a childhood. He knows he does not have the things that he needs. I never saw the inside of a restaurant until I was well into my 20s. My father was a misanthrope who shunned most of humankind, and so he knows he doesn't have what he wants, and then he sees a glimpse of a better life, and he describes this in such an incredible way, and this is when his life really begins. His life begins when he sees Elvis Presley perform for the very first time on TV. Bruce calls Presley a human earthquake. And so he says the small part of the world I inhabit has stumbled upon an irreversible moment. I don't know what his thoughts were, I don't know whether he thought about the broader implications of his actions. I do know this. He lived a life he was driven to live and brought forth the truth that was within him and the possibilities within us.”
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“The argument stopped. It became one of his favorite stories, and he'd always tell me Don't let anyone hurt your mom. And so Bruce always loves his mother deeply. He had a complicated relationship with her because she was his largest supporter, but she also would put her husband above the needs of her children. And he kind of wrestles with this throughout the book. But one thing you realize early on is that the way that his mom approached her work sounds a lot like the way he approaches his. She goes to work. She does not miss a day. She is never sick. She is never down. She never complains. Work does not appear to be a burden for her, but a source of energy and pleasure. Truthfulness, consistency, professionalism, kindness, compassion, manners, thoughtfulness, pride in yourself, honor, love, faith in and fidelity to your family, commitment, joy in your work, and endeavored, say die thirst for life. These are some of the things my mother taught me.”
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“Listen to this writing about children they ask. It's incredible. Children bring with them grace, patience, transcendence, second chances, rebirth, and a reawakening of the love that is in your heart. They are God giving you another shot. At forty five years old, my father was friendless. My father was truly ill, and his father was also abusive to his mother, so he tells the story. They were standing in the kitchen. My father's back to me. My mother inches away from his face while he was yelling at the top of his lungs. I shouted at him to stop. Then I let him have it he went and go grabbed a baseball bat. He's got a baseball bat in his hand. I think he said he was ten years old when this was happening. A sick thud, and everything grew quiet. He turned, his face red. The moment lengthened, then he started laughing.”
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“a gentleness, timidity, shyness, and a dreamy insecurity. These were all the things I were on the outside and the reflection of those qualities in his boy repelled him. It made him angry. It was soft, and he hated soft. Now remember he's writing this as almost a seventy year old man. He's thinking about his childhood through that experience. He wasn't a child anymore. He is now a father. He actually has his own children. And so he's contrasting. He's like, why do my dad feel this way about me? And he's got beautiful writing about this. So he actually said on Howard Stern, he's got this great interview on Howard Stern that he did a few months ago. And he said that his greatest achievement was not going into the rock and roll of fame, was not selling 150 million records, was not being unbelievably famous and wealthy and rich. He said his greatest achievement was not passing down the problems of his family to his own children. His greatest achievement, he said, was from breaking the children.”
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“Those of us who are here seemingly randomly pick off a cousin, an aunt, a son, a grandma, and unfortunately my dad. I was not my father's favorite citizen. When my dad looked at me, he didn't see what he needed to see. I don't remember if it was in this book or if it was in this interview that I saw Bruce Giff, but he said that during his entire childhood his dad said less than a thousand words to him. And when he did speak to him it was like this Unfortunately my dad's desire to engage with me almost always came after the nightly religious ritual of the sacred six pack. So his dad had a job he hated, had a life that he hated, would come home, sit at the kitchen table, smoke cigarette after cigarette, and drink beer after beer. He had hostility and raw anger towards his son. He couldn't stand me. He also saw too much of his real self in me. Beyond his rage.”
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“About what he learned from his family and how it influenced his work. There is a strength, fear, and desperate joy in all of this hard spirit and soul that naturally found its way into my work. We push until we can go no further, stand strong until our bones give way, reach and hold until our muscles fatigue, twist, shout, and laugh until we can no more, until the very end. Now what is masterful about the storytelling in this book is he is describing his family. I didn't understand this till I reread everything. And a huge part of the book is just this disastrous relationship that he has with his father. And so the beginning is describing his life, describing his work the second half of the book is the toll that all of this took on him because he tried to bury it and never dealt with it. I'm 25 pages into this book and he starts describing something that I didn't know affected him too. So he says, I don't know where this started, but a serious strain of mental illness drifts through.”
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“Not part of the passive, aggressive, wandering, lost male tribe that populated much of the rest of my life. He was a force of nature. So what if he got into a little trouble? The real world was full of trouble, and if you wanted, if you hungered, you'd better be ready for it. You'd best be ready to stake your claim and not let go because, quote, they were not going to give it to you for free. You would have to risk and to pay. His love of living, the intensity of his presence, his engagement in the day and his dominion over his family made him a unique male figure in my life. He was exciting, scary, theatrical, self mythologizing, bragging. He was like a rock star. And what you realize when you read this book is every single experience that Bruce encounters. He pulls into his work. There is no separation between him and his work.”
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“He describes the traits that he had as a child, that he has for most of his life. I would say he's disagreeable, defiant, nonconformist, and independent, and he was like that since he was a kid. He says, I will not conform to the way things are. I don't know shit nor care about the way things are. And so he has two sides of his family. He's primarily Italian and Irish. The Irish side is full of these soft, kind of weak demour men. So when he starts spending time with the Italian side of his family, he sees a different way of being. And so his Italian grandfather, this is very fascinating, says he was my grandfather, and he's able to tell an entire story in a few words, describing his grandfather. He says he served three years in the Navy, had three wives, spent three years in Sing Sing prison. And so he continues to talk about the influence of spending time with his grandfather when he was a very little kid, right? He says something made him seem grand.”
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“In my music, it was a desperate, lifelong effort to rebuild, for my grandmother's love I abandoned my parents, my sister, and much of the world itself. Then that world came crashing in. My grandparents became ill. Soon my grandfather would be dead and my grandmother would be filled with cancer.”
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