Monday, July 23, 2012

Brucuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuze

There's a 17,000 word article in the New Yorker about Bruce "The Boss" Springsteen, whom I've met btw, in which the author drops such bombs as:

1) Springsteen plays long shows
2) He always has
3) He's probably playing one right now
4) His band is a collection of fellow Jersey rats
5) He was close to someone named Clarence Clemons
6) Jon Landau once declared that he saw the future of rock n roll, and it was Bruce "The Boss" Springsteen
7) Born to Run was a make or break album for Bruce "The Boss" Springsteen
8) He had a somewhat uneasy relationship with his father
9) Springsteen is a man of the peoplezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I man for fuck's sake, the only interesting note in the whole thing is that the author for some reason drops in print the town of Middleburg, last noted here.

To be fair, his openness about depression is somewhat new. Well, if you haven't already read about 60 books about him, I reckon...
Doug Springsteen is described with adjectives like “taciturn” and “disappointed.” In fact, he seems to have been bipolar, and he was capable of terrible rages, often aimed at his son.

[Bruce] Springsteen was also experiencing intervals of depression that were far more serious than the occasional guilt trip about being “a rich man in a poor man’s shirt,” as he sings in “Better Days.” A cloud of crisis hovered as Springsteen was finishing his acoustic masterpiece “Nebraska,” in 1982. And he could not let go of the past, either—a sense that he had inherited his father’s depressive self-isolation. For years, he would drive at night past his parents’ old house in Freehold, sometimes three or four times a week. In 1982, he started seeing a psychotherapist. At a concert years later, Springsteen introduced his song “My Father’s House” by recalling what the therapist had told him about those nighttime trips to Freehold: “He said, ‘What you’re doing is that something bad happened, and you’re going back, thinking that you can make it right again. Something went wrong, and you keep going back to see if you can fix it or somehow make it right.’ And I sat there and I said, ‘That is what I’m doing.’ And he said, ‘Well, you can’t.’ ”

Extreme wealth may have satisfied every pink-Cadillac dream, but it did little to chase off the black dog. Springsteen was playing concerts that went nearly four hours, driven, he has said, by “pure fear and self-loathing and self-hatred.” He played that long not just to thrill the audience but also to burn himself out. Onstage, he held real life at bay.


I asked Patti how he finally succeeded. “Obviously, therapy,” she said. “He was able to look at himself and battle it out.” And yet none of this has allowed Springsteen to pronounce himself free and clear. “That didn’t scare me,” Scialfa said. “I suffered from depression myself, so I knew what that was about. Clinical depression—I knew what that was about. I felt very akin to him.”

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