Born to Run: Biography

From his unheated bedroom, young Springsteen listens to his mother preparing for work as a legal secretary. He’s fascinated by the important business at her office (and how the other secretaries heap attention on him). Born into an upper middle-class family, she married into “near poverty” and now essentially raises the family alone while his father declines because of alcoholism and a mental health condition. She encourages her son’s artistic endeavors and protects him from her husband’s fits of rage. Springsteen returns the favor one night, clubbing his father with a baseball bat during an intense argument between his parents. Despite their starkly different personalities, however, they love each other, and Springsteen is confident that he’ll never leave her.

In epic, epiphanous language, Springsteen describes his first exposure to rock and roll—seeing Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show. It shakes him to his core, showing him “a new way of seeing, of feeling, of thinking […] of moving and of living” (38). Elvis challenges 1950s conformity and represents a community, a way out. He presages a “dangerous” new era—cultural exposure to Black music, the coming civil rights movement, and sexual awakening. Elvis’s frenetic, almost sexual rapport with the guitar inspires Springsteen to pick it up. He rents one but finds music lessons too dull and technique based, so he quits, temporarily—but the vision of Elvis and the feel of the guitar have a strong hold on him.

Although he’s a fan of pop music in general, the hope and aspiration of late 1950s and early 60s rock and roll—a “world of romance, metaphor, […] immortality, eternal youth, a seven-day weekend, and no adults” (45)—hooks young Springsteen. One of the family’s only sources of recreation is to cruise down Main Street and then drive to the edge of town or the shore. This ritual, coupled with the “beautiful sounds” of pop music, is the “calm before the storm of the Kennedy assassination” (46) and the cultural onslaught of The Beatles.

Glued with anticipation to The Ed Sullivan Show again, Springsteen sees The Beatles’ US debut. The music, the harmonies, and “THE HAIR” impress him. The hair signifies rebellion, but in “redneck” Freehold, that rebellion often incites ridicule and beatings. Springsteen’s father, however, has another concern—that the long hair may indicate his son is gay. Nevertheless, Springsteen remains obsessed, imagining himself a rock star performing alongside his idols.

When the family moves, the new neighborhood is ethnically mixed. The kids (but not necessarily the adults) tolerate the diversity. Racial lines ignored after school are strictly adhered to during school hours. Eventually, tensions begin to erupt.

Early on, Springsteen learns the allure to girls of a boy who can dance, and he practices his moves on the gym floor of the neighborhood YMCA. In the “death-defying clinches” (56) of the teenage slow-dance ritual, Springsteen experiences the angst and sexual yearning of his repressed youth.