WCP: Springsteen’s Born to Run: Memoir as “Repair”

Posted in Labor Studies Visiting Scholars  |  Tagged Blue Collar, Bruce Springsteen, John Russo, Music, Pamela Fox, Sherry Linkon, WCP, Working-Class Perspectives

Bruce Springsteen has long been dubbed as America’s working-class troubadour. In this weeks’ Working-Class Perspective, Pamela Fox explores the insights of Springsteen’s extraordinary memoir on blue-collar identity, mental illness, and working-class life.

As his devout fans know all too well, the “Boss” rejected his father’s life path from an early age.  He hardly romanticized the grinding, often demeaning jobs available in Freehold, NJ.  But while his realized dream of rock stardom clearly serves as a central outlet for his manic energy and artistic ambitions, the memoir reveals that Bruce envisions musicianship as physical labor.  His sweat-drenched, four-hour concerts insistently announce his work ethic. 

In the memoir, two striking boyhood memories invoke his father’s complex legacy in shaping Bruce’s liminal class position. The first recalls bringing a modest lunch to his father working on the factory floor, where the din prevents them from hearing each other.  The second functions as a rhapsodic ode to his father’s delivery truck, which makes a similar “metallic roar” as he proudly drives with his ‘pop’: “I’m riding with the king. My dad has taken me to work. Oh, what a world it could’ve been” (260-61).  These twin vignettes encompass both the estrangement and enthrallment of his classed identity formation, his father equal parts cautionary tale and proletarian hero.  As an adult, ‘putting on the working man’s shirt’ came to feel duplicitous once Springsteen ‘hit the big time,’ but he is repeatedly driven to revisit the neighborhood of his youth–not simply as a sentimental touchstone of his ‘past’ but, as he comes to see, a perpetual community that throbs inside of him.

As Tim Strangleman and Sherry Linkon note of deindustrialization narratives, the children of mid-twentieth century manual workers face a profoundly transformed local landscape and often describe their own grief, anger, and nostalgia over what their families have lost.  Born to Run functions in part as a working-class autobiography because his class heritage–and its literal erasure in his hometown’s closed factories–equally informs his polarized sense of self. The book’s photographs of Springsteen’s favorite local music clubs—his teenage haunts and stages–serve as their own kind of postindustrial memorials of working–class cultural spaces that no longer exist.  As he looks back on the threshold of his profoundly transformed class circumstances, he recalls: “I didn’t want out. I wanted in. … I wanted to understand. What were the social forces that held my parents’ lives in check? … I was determined to be the enlightened, compassionate voice of reason and revenge” (264).

However, the memoir reveals that he only gradually reckons with the gendering of this ‘reauthenticated’ class self.  Studies of deindustrialized communities pinpoint the loss of traditional masculinity, along with class pride, when manual labor vanishes. Springsteen frequently associates being off the road with bouts of depression, and given his understanding of stage performance as a highly masculinized mode of labor alongside his E Street ‘brotherhood,’ he may also have experienced his non-touring life as a kind of emasculation.  He recalls his father’s taunts of being feminine or ‘queer’ when he was a long-haired, introspective teenager. “When my dad looked at me,” he writes, “he didn’t see what he needed to see” (28).  But he also recognizes that his father actually saw the qualities that he himself repressed due to normative gender codes that held sway at the mill and the tavern. Still, it takes him far too long—into his late thirties–to understand that women are actually human beings.

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