E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Read Online Free

the front, we used to have to come in around the screen door into the kitchen and I’d stand there in the driveway and I could see him, I could see the light of his cigarette butt through the door…and I’d slick my hair back real tight and hope I could get through the kitchen before he’d stop me. And he’d always wait till I was just about in the living room and he’d call my name. Then he’d start asking me where I was getting my money from, what I thought I was doing with myself. He wanted to know where I was going all the time, and we’d start screaming at each other, and my mother’d be coming in from the front room to try and keep us from fighting with each other, and pretty soon I’d be running out the back door, telling him how it was my life and I could do what I wanted…
It’s a hard world to get a break in
.”
    That rap was performed at a Red Bank show, when one suspects at least one family member was in the audience and knew whereof he spoke, the long-suffering Virginia, the elder of his sisters. Other nights he could be even more explicit, describing how close he and his father came to exchanging blows. One that Dave Marsh claims he heard began with Bruce talking about how his father “used to always come home real pissed off, drunk, sit in the kitchen,” and built up to Bruce expressing just how this made him feel, “I just couldn’t wait until I was old enough to take him out once.” Not that he ever did. Even at seventeen, he was a writer not a fighter. As to whether his father beat the crap out of his young charge, the fortunate son has kept decidedly schtum, though in recent years he
has
talked about the atmosphere of violence. In 1987, he told
Musician
’s esteemed editor, “The side of my work that is angry comes from that sense of [a] wasted life; so to a certain degree there’s a
revenge
motive going on,” a highly curious way of putting it. Later on, he would tend to drop into therapy-speak when suggesting how such experiences infused much of his work, post-
Darkness
:
    Bruce Springsteen : I lived in a house where there was a lot of struggle to find work, where the results of not being able to find your place in society manifested themselves with the resulting lack of self-worth, with anger, with violence. And as I grew up, I said, “Hey, that’s my song….” I still probably do my best work when I’m working inside of those things, which must be because that’s where I’m connected. That’s just the lights I go by. [1996]
    If feelings of anger and violence took a long time to manifest themselves in song, he learned to feel differently about himself the minute he picked up an instrument: “When you’re young, you feel powerless…Your house, no matter how small it is, it seems so big. Your parents seem huge. I don’t believe this feeling ever quite leaves you. And I think what happens is, when you get around fifteen or sixteen, a lot of your fantasies are power fantasies…You don’t know how to channel that powerlessness—how to channel it into either a social concern or creating something for yourself. I was lucky. I was able to deal with it with the guitar.”
    After his second Ed Sullivan epiphany, he again picked up that iconic instrument. This time he didn’t look half as dumb, while his fingers could now grip the neck. In fact, he held on for dear life as he set about learning the most important lesson, “Dig yourself.” It was a process that initially led him inward: “When I got the [first] guitar, I wasn’t getting out of myself. I was already out of myself. I knew myself, and I did not dig me. I was getting into myself.” Post-
Darkness
, he went further, venturing to suggest: “When I started to play, it was like a gift. I started to feel alive. It was like some guy stumbling down a street and finding a key. Rock ’n’ roll was the only thing I ever liked about myself.”
    If The Beatles represented the vanguard, by the summer of 1964 there were