Born to run

FOR MOST OF us nine jillion Bruce Springsteen fans who've stood through years of his barn-burning, bombs-dropping, ceiling-cracking, ozone-splitting three-hour mega-extravaganza concerts, in all manner of nasty weather and good, who've bought and rebought album after album, who've pored over lyrics, mused over his complex musical and band life, as well as his privacy-shrouded marital, familial and psychic forays, and who've demarked sovereign occasions in our own lives with the strains of "No Surrender" running through our hectic brains - for all of us in his global audience - the perpetual fascination of Bruce (I've never, I give you my word, shouted that out at a performance) is simply: How the hell do you get from Freehold, N.J., to this in only 50 short years? It's reminiscent of the old Maine farmer who, when asked directions to the next town over the hill, allows that you can't get there from here. Really, in Springsteen's or anybody's life, you can't get there from here. But, well . . . here he is. Are we not all present to testify? The Boss's new autobiography, "Born to Run," ought at its heart to penetrate and lay bare this mystery housed in a paradox. And to a great extent it nicely does. Pretty much everybody who encountered Bruce Springsteen over the many years, from the proprietors of the gritty Upstage in '69 Asbury Park, to the iconic Columbia hitmakers John Hammond and Clive Davis, to his ever-loyal, ever-querulous, suffering but indispensable E Street sidemen, to Ronald Reagan, to Pete Seeger, all the way to Barack Obama, has recognized Springsteen as somebody way special - somebody who proved it all night onstage, owned major chops, was a guy you couldn't take your eyes off, and somehow couldn't stay mad at, even though he possessed charmingly immodest valuations of his young abilities, treated his band mates like favored employees and could go all moody, isolated 'n' stuff when things rubbed him the wrong way. You could say the same thing - using different words - about the Morrison brothers, Jim and Van, about Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Janis Joplin, even about Eric Burdon and no doubt the Big Bopper. They are and were all special - in their way. But "special" doesn't get you Bruce Springsteen in front of 90,000 people for 30-plus years in 40 different countries, and still going strong as late as last Wednesday afternoon. People who see art from the outside - from the spectator seats where we're intended to see it - often don't get the making of art very right. Which is a victimless crime. But it's partly because we don't quite get it that hosts of fans are drawn to Springsteen. His work's entirety - the songs, the music, the guitar, the voice, the persona, the gyrations, the recitativos, the whole artifice of "the act," or what Springsteen calls the "sum of all my parts" - is so dense, involved and authentic-seeming as to all but defy what we think we know about how regular human beings make things at ground level. Having been present at many of his performances, I can attest that you're often close to being overwhelmed by what you're hearing and seeing. It's an experience that draws you toward itself - to taste the best and richest stuff, but also naturally enough to find things out, such as if you're being deceived. In "Born to Run," Springsteen seems at his most actual when he's telling us how in fact one gets to be him. He's preoccupied by his own and his music's "authenticity," even though he understands that the act is ever the act. He's close to humble about his musician's "journeyman" status, about how rock music is at heart "escapist entertainment," and concedes that rock 'n' roll itself as a vehicle for ideas (always questionable to me) is in serious decline. But he's also straight up and smart about just what the whole Springsteen enterprise requires. Talent. O.K., that's one. A great band behind you for all the years. Two. But also alarming self-certainty at a preposterously young age ("It is ultimately my stage," "my band," "my will," "my musicians"). Near-feral discipline he's more than willing to impose on self and anybody else in earshot - especially the band. Studious and encyclopedic knowledge of the genre and rock history. An ungodly number of irreplaceable life hours spent practicing, practicing, practicing in small, ill-lit rooms. A ruthless calculation to be nothing less than great, powered by a conviction that greatness can exist and be redeeming. A willingness to imagine himself as a dutiful and grateful avatar of his own adored fan base. An ease with his influences, teachers and heroes. An uncommon awareness of his personal frailties ("About my voice. First of all, I don't have much of one"). A Picasso-like certainty that all art comes out of a "rambunctious gang feeling" born of the neighborhood. And a complex fear of failure mingled with the understanding that success is often the enemy of the very authenticity he's seeking-so you gotta stay on your guard 24-7. Or, at least, from 1967 to now. "If you want to burn bright, hard and long," the Boss writes, "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." And if that sounds a bit too much like the Gotham Writers' Workshop, add this: "In the beginning I knew I wanted something more than a solo act and less than a oneman-one-vote democratic band. I'd been there and it didn't fit me. Democracy in rock bands, with very few exceptions, is often a ticking time bomb- A moderate in most other aspects of my life, here I was extreme." So much for a band of brothers in that shining rock 'n' roll mansion on the hill. "We all grow up," Springsteen later adds, "and we know 'it's only rock 'n' roll'... but it's not." IT SHOULD BE said, just to keep my own credibility flickering, that all this I've just spun out here is long and well known (probably memorized catechistically) by the great sea of Springsteen faithful. At a recent concert at the Barclays Center - attended by me, my wife, Governor Christie, Steve Earle and 18,000 strangers - the Boss brought a 10-year-old girl up onto the stage and stood by admiringly as she sang, apparently spontaneously, all the verses to "Blinded by the Light" - 547 dizzying words. Which means it's going to be hard for most of the insider intel in "Born to Run" not to be already long-assimilated by the ever-vigilant and protectively gimlet-eyed "Springsteen fan." It's also likely that if you've never heard of Bruce Springsteen - in whatever dark-ops lazaretto you might've been held captive in for four decades - you might not pick up this book at all. Which isn't to say that Springsteen shouldn't have written it - if only as a love letter to his legions; or that the publishers won't be printing money from September on. All Springsteen fans will read this book. Though it's fair to say that "Born to Run's" focus audience is likely us punters in the middle; those for whom "Independence Day," "Wild Billy's Circus Story," "Bobby Jean," "Nebraska," "Streets of Philadelphia," "Hungry Heart" and "Born in the U.S.A." have been the emotive background music - and for some of us the foreground music - of a lifetime, but who as yet haven't dedicated our entire lives to Bruce. We'll feel better, though, when we learn that the Boss can't really read music, that "Born in the U.S.A." and "Nebraska" were recorded at the same time, that Springsteen has a daughter who's a champion equestrian, that he's spent years in therapy, can forgive those who've wronged him, thinks of his career as a "service" performed for others who're like him, and owns a supple sense of humor capable of poking fun at himself (at least when the mood's right). It helps that Springsteen can write - not just life-imprinting song lyrics but good, solid prose that travels all the way to the right margin. I mean, you'd think a guy who wrote "Spanish Johnny drove in from the underworld last night/With bruised arms and broken rhythm and a beat-up old Buick ..." could navigate his way around a complete and creditable American sentence. And you'd be right. Oh, there are a few gassy bits here and there, a jot too much couch-inspired hooey about the "terrain inside my own head." A tad more rock 'n' roll highfalutin than this reader really needs - though the Bruce enthusiasts down in Sea-Clift won't agree with me. No way. But nothing in "Born to Run" rings to me as unmeant or punch-pulling. If anything, Springsteen wants credit for telling it the way it really is and was. And like a fabled Springsteen concert - always notable for its deck-clearing thoroughness - "Born to Run" achieves the sensation that all the relevant questions have been answered by the time the lights are turned out. He delivers the story of Bruce - in digestibly short chapters - via an informally steadfast Jersey plainspeak that's worked and deftly detailed and intimate with its readers - clear eyed enough to say what it means when it has hard stories to tell, yet supple enough to rise to occasions requiring eloquence - sometimes rather pleasingly subsiding into the syntax and rhythms of a Bruce Springsteen song: "So we all made do," he writes about his parents' abrupt move from Freehold to California, in 1969, leaving him behind. "My sister vanished into 'Cowtown' - the South Jersey hinterlands - and I pretended none of it really mattered. You were on your own - now and forever. This sealed it. Plus, a part of me was truly glad for them, for my dad. Get out, Pops! Out of this [expletive] dump." It's the family parts that mean most to me in "Born to Run," the parts that add ballast to Springsteen's claim that when audiences see him they see themselves. Just like we're frequently wrong about how art gets made, we also often can't reliably say where it comes from. We might not stay interested in it very long if we could. And nothing here conveys the whole secret of how you get from Freehold, 1964, strumming a $69 Kent guitar, to the Meadowlands with a Telecaster, standing in front of a multitude. But one place art can come from is a life full of forces-difficult-to-make-fit-together, a life that finds, in art, a providential instrument for reconciling the jagged bits. Springsteen's part Scots-Irish, part Italian family was a caldron of these bubbling forces. A silently brooding, unsuccessful, hostile, misanthropic father ("He loved me but he couldn't stand me"), an enormously loving mother whose first loyalty, however, was to the unhappy husband. Plus, a reticulated, extended, occasionally volatile but doting family of immigrant descendants - grandparents, aunts, uncles, sisters, one greaser brother-in-law - some of them, Springsteen says, with serious mental illness, "a black melancholy," to which he himself falls heir. All of these denizens encamped within a declining, postindustrial neighborhood of poor, rented, cold-water houses, in a "one-dog burg" down in that lost part of the Garden State you never thought about until you heard the words Bruce and Springsteen in that order. You could say of course, and again you'd be right, that this is nothing very remote from a lot of lives. Mine. Yours. Midcentury American Gothic. A "crap heap of a hometown that I loved." But therein lies at least a hint to the magic in the Springsteen mystery: the muscular rise to the small occasion, taking forceful dominion over your poky circumstance and championing your own responses to what would otherwise seem inevitable. "Those whose love we wanted but could not get," Springsteen writes, memorably, "we emulate. It is dangerous but it makes us feel closer, gives us an illusion of the intimacy we never had. It stakes our claim upon that which was rightfully ours but denied. In my 20s, as my song and my story began to take shape, I searched for the voice I would blend with mine to do the telling. It is a moment when through creativity and will you can rework, repossess and rebirth the conflicting voices of your childhood, to turn them into something alive, powerful and seeking light. I'm a repairman. That's part of my job. So I, who'd never done a week's worth of manual labor in my life... put on a factory worker's clothes, my father's clothes, and went to work." Seamus Heaney wrote once in a poem that the end of art is peace. But I think he'd have been willing to share the stage with Springsteen, and to admit that sometimes the end of art is also one heE of a legitimately great and soaring noise, a sound you just don't want to end. RICHARD FORD is a novelist. He teaches at Columbia University.

*Starred Review* Has anyone in contemporary pop culture pursued the rock 'n' roll life with such determination as Bruce Springsteen? He has said he had no choice since he couldn't do anything else. In this long (but not long enough) and entertaining autobiography, Springsteen begins in his hometown of Freehold, New Jersey, on Randolph Street (my street). This is where he grew up. This is where he learned the ways of the world as filtered through his pessimistic father and optimistic mother and the extended family of people descended mostly from Irish and Italian immigrants and a grandmother who spoiled him with unconditional love. He describes the sounds and smells of his New Jersey home as well as the family's constant struggle to get by (We were pretty poor, though I never thought about it). The dark poetry of Catholicism first kindled his imagination and would serve as a source of imagery for many of his songs. He also shares early memories of his father, sitting along with other men in silence in a smoke-filled bar, his powerful legs, a face slightly discolored and misshapen by alcohol, and always suggesting the possibility of violence. His relationship with his moody father became the topic of many of his songs and in these pages he conjures up images of him with equal amounts of fear, anger, respect, and, ultimately, love. But he makes it clear that his father did not understand the young Bruce: When my dad looked at me, he didn't see what he needed to see. This was my crime. From his gregarious mother he learned what it meant to be truthful, kind, and compassionate, and to have pride in yourself and your work. And from her side of the family, he also learned that he loved to entertain. Springsteen discusses with great honesty his own shortcomings, including his long-held fear of relationships, his passive-aggressiveness, and his capacity for emotional cruelty. Like other family members, a black melancholy hung over him. Bouts of depression occurred numerous times over the decades: first when he was 16 and again shortly after his 60th birthday and, most devastatingly, a few years ago. He also makes light of his singing voice. I have a bar-man's power, range and durability . . . . My voice gets the job done. Much here will be well known to most Springsteen fans, but what makes it different, what makes it stand out, is to read Springsteen's own take on familiar events, whether watching Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show, meeting the iconic E Street sax man Clarence Clemons for the first time (It was a dark and stormy night), or his audition for the legendary John Hammond at Columbia Records. He discusses each album in chronological order, as well as the endless touring. But Born to Run is singular, like its author. Anyone who knows Springsteen's songs will recognize his voice: the cadences, the rhythms all recall his unique songwriting style. It is also full of small and big insights. Like his songs, one sentence can reveal everything you need to know about his upbringing (I never saw a man leave a house in a jacket and tie unless it was Sunday or he was in trouble). Despite his seriousness, Springsteen often acts the clown: goofy, self-deprecating, and humble. The memoir shows this side of his big personality in funny little comments and asides. And so many of his sentences sing, such as when he describes the birth of his youngest child, Sam, as having a moon-round kisser, Irish to the bone. As he grew older, he looked like a Joycean urchin off the streets of Dublin. Through the magic of his songs, and now the wizardry of his prose, Springsteen has healed many a heart by reimagining moments from his own life. I'm a repairman, he writes. That's part of my job. Touching and full of light and shadows, Born to Run will bring tears and laughter to even the most cursory of Springsteen fans.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2016 Booklist

In his long-awaited memoir, Springsteen takes readers on an entertaining, high-octane journey from the streets of New Jersey to all over the world. A natural storyteller, Springsteen commands our attention, regaling us with his tales of growing up poor with a misanthropic father and a mother who had endless faith in people. The Boss delights us with humorous stories of his first guitar-which he couldn't get his seven-year-old fingers around-and his inspiration to become a musician after seeing Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show: "I WANTED... I NEEDED... TO ROCK! NOW!" Once he's hooked, he can't give up this insatiable hunger to rock like Chuck Berry, or the Rolling Stones, or the Beatles; soon he's playing in his first band, the Castiles, and eventually with another band, Steel Mill, opening up for Grand Funk Railroad, Ike & Tina Turner, and Iron Butterfly. Springsteen weaves a captivating story, introducing us to the essential people in his life: Patti Scialfa, Clarence Clemons, Steven Van Zandt, and producer/managers Mike Appel and Jon Landau, among many others. He offers absorbing accounts of the making of each album, and he considers Born to Run as the dividing line between musical styles, as well as the mark of the beginning of his success; he also admits that his bands were never democracies and that he makes the decisions. Most insightful, he reveals his ongoing battles with depression-"shortly after my sixtieth I slipped into a depression like I hadn't experienced"-and his eventual ability to live with this condition. Springsteen writes with the same powerful lyrical quality of his music. (Sept. 27) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Foreword   I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I. By twenty, no race-car-driving rebel, I was a guitar player on the streets of Asbury Park and already a member in good standing amongst those who "lie" in service of the truth . . . artists, with a small "a." But I held four clean aces. I had youth, almost a decade of hard-core bar band experience, a good group of homegrown musicians who were attuned to my performance style and a story to tell. This book is both a continuation of that story and a search into its origins. I've taken as my parameters the events in my life I believe shaped that story and my performance work. One of the questions I'm asked over and over again by fans on the street is "How do you do it?" In the following pages I will try to shed a little light on how and, more important, why. DNA, natural ability, study of craft, development of and devotion to an aesthetic philosophy, naked desire for . . . fame? . . . love? . . . admiration? . . . attention? . . . women? . . . sex? . . . and oh, yeah . . . a buck. Then . . . if you want to take it all the way out to the end of the night, a furious fire in the hole that just . . . don't . . . quit . . . burning. These are some of the elements that will come in handy should you come face-to-face with eighty thousand (or eighty) screaming rock 'n' roll fans who are waiting for you to do your magic trick. Waiting for you to pull something out of your hat, out of thin air, out of this world, something that before the faithful were gathered here today was just a song-fueled rumor. I am here to provide proof of life to that ever elusive, never completely believable "us." That is my magic trick. And like all good magic tricks, it begins with a setup. So...   One My Street   I am ten years old and I know every crack, bone and crevice in the crumbling sidewalk running up and down Randolph Street, my street. Here, on passing afternoons I am Hannibal crossing the Alps, GIs locked in vicious mountain combat and countless cowboy heroes traversing the rocky trails of the Sierra Nevada. With my belly to the stone, alongside the tiny anthills that pop up volcanically where dirt and concrete meet, my world sprawls on into infinity, or at least to Peter McDermott's house on the corner of Lincoln and Randolph, one block up. On these streets I have been rolled in my baby carriage, learned to walk, been taught by my grandfather to ride a bike, and fought and run from some of my first fights. I learned the depth and comfort of real friendships, felt my early sexual stirrings and, on the evenings before air-conditioning, watched the porches fill with neighbors seeking conversation and respite from the summer heat. Here, in epic "gutter ball" tournaments, I slammed the first of a hundred Pinky rubber balls into my sidewalk's finely shaped curb. I climbed upon piles of dirty snow, swept high by midnight plows, walking corner to corner, the Edmund Hillary of New Jersey. My sister and I regularly stood like sideshow gawkers peering in through the huge wooden doors of our corner church, witnessing an eternal parade of baptisms, weddings and funerals. I followed my handsome, raggedly elegant grandfather as he tottered precariously around the block, left arm paralyzed against his chest, getting his "exercise" after a debilitating stroke he never came back from. In our front yard, only feet from our porch, stands the grandest tree in town, a towering copper beech. Its province over our home is such that one bolt of well-placed lightning and we'd all be dead as snails crushed beneath God's little finger. On  nights when thunder  rolls and lightning turns our family bedroom cobalt blue, I watch its arms move and come to life in the wind and white flashes as I lie awake worrying about my friend the monster outside. On sunny days, its roots are a fort for my soldiers, a corral for my horses and my second home. I hold the honor of being the first on our block to climb into its upper reaches. Here I find my escape from all below. I wander for hours amongst its branches, the sound of my buddies' muted voices drifting up from the sidewalk below as they try to track my progress. Beneath its slumbering arms, on slow summer nights we sit, my pals and I, the cavalry at dusk, waiting for the evening bells of the ice-cream man and bed. I hear my grandmother's voice calling me in, the last sound of the long day. I step up onto our front porch, our windows glowing in the summer twilight; I let the heavy front door open and then close behind me, and for an hour or so in front of the kerosene stove, with my grandfather in his big chair, we watch the small black-and-white television screen light up the room, throwing its specters upon the walls and ceiling. Then, I drift to sleep tucked inside the greatest and saddest sanctuary I have ever known, my grandparents' house. I live here with my sister, Virginia, one year younger; my parents, Adele and Douglas Springsteen; my grandparents, Fred and Alice; and my dog Saddle. We live, literally, in the bosom of the Catholic Church, with the priest's rectory, the nuns' convent, the St. Rose of Lima Church and gram- mar school all just a football's toss away across a field of wild grass. Though he towers above us, here God is surrounded by man--crazy men, to be exact. My family has five houses branching out in an L shape, anchored on the corner by the redbrick church. We are four houses of old- school Irish, the people who have raised me--McNicholases, O'Hagans, Farrells--and across the street, one lonely outpost of Italians, who peppered my upbringing. These are the Sorrentinos and the Zerillis, hailing from Sorrento, Italy, via Brooklyn via Ellis Island. Here dwell my mother's mother, Adelina Rosa Zerilli; my mother's older sister, Dora; Dora's husband, Warren (an Irishman of course); and their daughter, my older cousin Margaret. Margaret and my cousin Frank are championship jitterbug dancers, winning contests and trophies up and down the Jersey Shore. Though not unfriendly, the clans do not often cross the street to socialize with one another. The house I live in with my grandparents is owned by my great- grandmother "Nana" McNicholas, my grandmother's mother, alive and kicking just up the street. I've been told our town's first church service and first funeral were held in our living room. We live here beneath the lingering eyes of my father's older sister, my aunt Virginia, dead at five, killed by a truck while riding her tricycle past the corner gas station. Her portrait hovers, breathing a ghostly air into the room and shining her ill-fated destiny over our family gatherings. Hers is a sepia-toned formal portrait of a little girl in an old-fashioned child's white linen dress. Her seemingly benign gaze, in the light of events, now communicates, "Watch out! The world is a dangerous and unforgiving place that will knock your ass off your tricycle and into the dead black unknown and only these poor, misguided and unfortunate souls will miss you." Her mother,  my grandma, heard that message loud and clear. She spent two years in bed after her daughter's death and sent my father, neglected, with rickets, off to the outskirts of town to live with other relatives while she recovered. Time passed; my father quit school at sixteen, working as a floor boy in the Karagheusian Rug Mill, a clanging factory of looms and deafening machinery that stretched across both sides of Center Street in a part of town called "Texas." At eighteen, he went to war, sailing on the Queen Mary out of New York City. He served as a truck driver at the Battle of the Bulge, saw what little of the world he was going to see and returned home. He played pool, very well, for money. He met and fell in love with my mother, promising that if she'd marry him, he'd get a real job (red flag!). He worked with his cousin, David "Dim" Cashion, on the line at the Ford Motor plant in Edison and I came along. For my grandmother, I was the firstborn child of her only son and the first baby in the house since the death of her daughter. My birth re- turned to her a life of purpose. She seized on me with a vengeance. Her mission became my ultimate protection from the world within and with- out. Sadly, her blind single-minded devotion would lead to hard feelings with my father and enormous family confusion. It would drag all of us down. When it rains, the moisture in the humid air blankets our town with the smell of damp coffee grounds wafting in from the Nescafé factory at the town's eastern edge. I don't like coffee but I like that smell. It's com- forting; it unites the town in a common sensory experience; it's good industry, like the roaring rug mill that fills our ears, brings work and signals our town's vitality. There is a place here--you can hear it, smell it--where people make lives, suffer pain, enjoy small pleasures, play baseball, die, make love, have kids, drink  themselves drunk  on spring nights and do their best to hold off the demons that seek to destroy us, our homes, our families, our town. Here  we  live in  the  shadow  of the  steeple,  where  the  holy  rubber meets the road, all crookedly blessed in God's  mercy, in the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, race-riot-creating, oddball-hating, soul-shaking, love-and­ fear-making, heartbreaking town of Freehold, New Jersey. Let the service begin.    Two My House   It's Thursday night, trash night.  We are fully mobilized and ready to go. We have gathered in my grandfather's 1940s sedan waiting to be deployed to dig through every trash heap overflowing from the curbs of our town. First, we're heading to Brinckerhoff Avenue; that's where the money is and the trash is finest. We have come for your radios, any radios, no matter the condition.  We will scavenge them from your junk pile, throw them into the trunk and bring them home to "the shed," my grandfather's six-by-six-foot unheated wooden cubicle in a tiny corner of our house. Here, winter and summer, magic occurs. Here in a "room" filled with electrical wire and filament tubes, I will sit studiously at his side. While he wires, solders and exchanges bad tubes for good, we wait together for the same moment: that instant when the whispering breath, the beautiful low static hum and warm sundown  glow of electricity will come surging back into the dead skeletons of radios we have pulled back from extinction.   Here at my grandfather's workbench, the resurrection is real. The vacuum silence will be drawn up and filled with the distant, crackling voices of Sunday preachers, blabbering pitchmen, Big Band music, early rock 'n' roll and serial dramas. It is the sound of the world outside straining to reach us, calling down into our little town and deeper, into our hermetically sealed universe here at 87 Randolph Street. Once returned to the living, all items will be sold for five dollars in the migrant camps that, come summer,  will dot the farm fields on the edge of our borough. The "radio man" is coming. That's how my grandfather is known amongst the mostly Southern black migrant population that returns by bus every season to harvest the crops of rural Monmouth County. Down the dirt farm roads to the shacks in the rear where dust-bowl thirties conditions live on, my mother drives my stroke- addled grandpa to do his business amongst "the blacks" in their "Mickey Mouse" camps. I went once and was frightened out of my wits, surrounded in the dusk by hard-worn black faces. Race relations, never great in Free- hold, will explode ten years later into rioting and shootings, but for now, there is just a steady, uncomfortable  quiet. I am simply the young protégé grandson of the "radio man," here amongst his patrons where my family scrambles to make ends meet. We were pretty near poor, though I never thought about it. We were clothed, fed and bedded. I had white and black friends worse off. My parents had jobs, my mother as a legal secretary and my father at Ford. Our house was old and soon to be noticeably decrepit. One kerosene stove in the living room was all we had to heat the whole place. Upstairs, where my family slept, you woke on winter mornings with your breath visible. One of my earliest childhood memories is the smell of kerosene and my grandfather standing there filling the spout in the rear of the stove. All of our cooking was done on a coal stove in the kitchen; as a child I'd shoot my water gun at its hot iron surface and watch the steam rise. We'd haul the ashes out the back door to the "ash heap." Daily I'd return from playing in that pile of dust pale from gray coal ash. We had a small box refrigerator and one of the first televisions in town. In an earlier life, before I was born, my granddad had been the proprietor of Springsteen Brothers Electrical Shop. So when TV hit, it arrived at our house first. My mother told me neighbors from up and down the block would stop by to see the new miracle, to watch Milton Berle, Kate Smith and Your Hit Parade . To see wrestlers like Bruno Sammartino face off against Haystacks Calhoun. By the time I was six I knew every word to the Kate Smith anthem, "When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain." In this house, due to order of birth and circumstance, I was lord, king and the messiah all rolled into one. Because I was the first grandchild, my grandmother  latched on to me to replace my dead aunt Virginia. Nothing was out of bounds. It was a terrible freedom for a young boy and I embraced it with everything I had. I stayed up until three a.m. and slept until three p.m. at five and six years old. I watched TV until it went off and I was left staring alone at the test pattern. I ate what and when I wanted. My parents and I became distant relatives and my mother, in her confusion and desire to keep the peace, ceded me to my grandmother's total dominion. A timid little tyrant, I soon felt like the rules were for the rest of the world, at least until my dad came home. He would lord sullenly over the kitchen, a monarch dethroned by his own firstborn son at his mother's insistence. Our ruin of a house and my own eccentricities and power at such a young age shamed and embarrassed me. I could see the rest of the world was running on a different clock and I was teased for my habits pretty thoroughly by my neighborhood pals. I loved my entitlement, but I knew it wasn't right. When I became of school age and had to conform to a time schedule, it sent me into an inner rage that lasted most of my school years. My mother knew we were all way overdue for a reckoning and, to her credit, tried to reclaim me. She moved us out of my grandmother's house to a small, half- shotgun-style house at 39½ Institute Street. No hot water, four tiny rooms, four blocks away from my grandparents. There she tried to set some normal boundaries. It was too late. Those four blocks might as well have been a million miles. I was roaring with anger and loss and every chance I got, I returned to stay with my grandparents. It was my true home and they felt like my real parents. I could and would not leave. The house by now was functional only in one room, the living room. The rest of the house, abandoned and draped off, was falling down, with one wintry and windblown bathroom, the only place to relieve yourself, and no functioning bath. My grandparents fell into a state of poor hygiene and care that would shock and repel me now. I remember my grandmother's soiled undergarments, just washed, hanging on the backyard line, frightening and embarrassing me, symbols of the inappropriate intimacies, physical and emotional, that made my grandparents' home so confusing and compelling. But I loved them and that house. My grandma slept on a worn spring couch with me tucked in at her side while my grandfather had a small cot across the room. This was it. This was what it had come to, my childhood limitlessness. This was where I needed to be to feel at home, safe, loved. The grinding hypnotic power of this ruined place and these people would never leave me. I visit it in my dreams today, returning over and over, wanting to go back. It was a place where I felt an ultimate security, full license and a horrible unforgettable boundary-less love. It ruined me and it made me. Ruined, in that for the rest of my life I would struggle to create boundaries for myself that would allow me a life of some normalcy in my relationships. It made me in the sense that it would set me off on a lifelong pursuit of a "singular" place of my own, giving me a raw hunger that drove me, hell-bent, in my music. It was a desperate, lifelong effort to rebuild, on embers of memory and longing, my temple of safety. 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. The whole family moved in together again, to another half house, at 68 South Street. Soon, my younger sister, Pam, would be born, my grandfather would be dead and my grandmother would be filled with cancer. My house, my backyard, my tree, my dirt, my earth, my sanctuary would be condemned  and the land sold, to be made into a parking lot for St. Rose of Lima Catholic church.     Excerpted from Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.