By Angela Barbuti

Bruce Springsteen gets a lot of play—literally. Even President Obama has said, “I’m the president, but he’s the Boss.” And now, after more than 30 years of research, Peter Ames Carlin finally put his respect for the musician down on paper. Replete with interviews from Bruce’s family, the E Street Band and Bruce himself, Carlin has recorded a biography that lives up to all the hype it has generated. Bruce, released Oct. 30, has won the honor of a four-star rating from Rolling Stone. On Nov. 14, the author will be at Barnes & Noble at 18th Street to sign his book, which is the perfect holiday gift for the Bruce fan in your life.

You began writing the book in the fall of 2009, but your interest in Bruce dates back to when you went to a concert of his in 1978. 

I had been collecting material and knowledge starting as a 15-year-old, when I saw Bruce’s show in the fall of ’78 on the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour. The show was kind of—I don’t want to say “life changing,” that’s a bit much—but it altered my sense of music and possibility. It resonated with me, and I carried that for decades.

After a year and a half of writing on your own, Bruce’s manager, Jon Landau, called you.

I was doing research on my own with no connection at all to Bruce. I was speaking to a ton of people before that—old friends, people from Freehold and Asbury Park, and veterans from Columbia Records who were extremely eager to talk. The phone rang in January of 2011 while I was sitting in my office—my basement here in Portland—and it was Jon. We got together the next week for a drink, and from that point on, Jon became super-helpful and gave the green light to friends, collaborators and band members.

What surprised you about Bruce?

We spent a lot of time together. Everyone told me along the way that he’s pretty much exactly who you think he is. In a way, that was very true. It was clear to me from his work that he’s a very intense, complicated and, in some ways, conflicted person. He is enormously charming, but there’s also a distance around him to a degree. He wears his moods and inner tension close to the surface.

Photo by Elizabeth S. Ames

You conducted the last major interview with Clarence Clemons. What was he like?

I had a couple days’ worth of interviews with him just a couple of months before he died. Physically, he was a little compromised; he had just had another bout of surgery. He was doing a lot of physical therapy, trying to get in shape for this tour. Mentally, he was incredibly smart, funny, sensitive and intense. He had a lot to talk about and was very excited to do so, which was cool.

You list Bruce’s many accomplishments—120 million albums sold, 20 Grammys, two Golden Globes and an Academy Award. Why do you think he’s able to do so much?

Bruce is, in a lot of ways, a self-invented human being. But these threads—the energy, drive and passion—come from his mom’s side of the family. The part that helps him work onstage for three to four hours a night and pursue his art for 50 years now. His mom’s side is this very vibrant, hilarious, hard-working Italian family. His dad had a lot of emotional problems, and there has been a lot of darkness on that side of the family. The disturbance in Bruce’s soul that has branded him came through his dad’s side.

You dedicate the book to your wife, Sarah, and thank her for thinking of the title. Besides that, did she help along the way?

[Laughs] She helped me by making it okay for me to disappear for weeks on end. And there was a point halfway through the process where I quit the job I had for 10-plus years at The Oregonian. Things had gotten kind of unpleasant there for me, and I knew it was time to move on. When the Bruce thing really got rolling, I had the sense that if anything is worth throwing all your eggs in a basket for, it’s this book that no one else had the chance to do yet. My wife encouraged me to do exactly that.

You mention Café Wha? and Kenny’s Castaways as part of Bruce’s early life. What role do you see New York City as having in his development? 

Oh my gosh—a big role. As big as his earlier bands were in New Jersey and the South, they never tried to play New York for some reason. When he started building his career as a professional recording artist, that drew him to New York. His becoming familiar with it and seeing the world from that perspective transformed his sense of possibility. If you listen to “New York City Serenade” and “Incident on 57th Street,” the impact is everywhere.

Did you listen to Bruce’s music as you were writing his biography? 

Well, sure. I mean, I listened to Bruce music when I was writing about everything else over the years. [Laughs] It’s just part of my internal soundtrack.

What is your favorite Bruce song?

[Laughs] It sort of depends on the day or the hour. The songs have been part of my life on a step-by-step basis since I was a sophomore in high school. “Racing in the Streets” from Darkness. I just feel that there’s something vital in that song that comes from so deep.

What do you think the future holds for Bruce and the E Street Band?

At this point, it seems he’s very committed to the band and to keeping the group going. Bruce himself as an artist, songwriter, musician and performer—he’ll do that for the rest of his life. Because that’s who he is—it’s what makes him alive.

Photo courtesy Monique Carboni

David Rabe’s quest for Fire should probe further

I don’t know if there’s a hill or a set of tracks in the nameless Midwestern town where Danny (Theo Stockmann) has returned since dropping out of college, but he’s definitely on the low end or the wrong side of it. Having dropped out of college and moved back home with his German immigrant father Pop (a wonderful but ill-used Gordon Clapp), sleeping on a foldout couch in the cozy family living room and wearing the few garments he can shove into a meager closet, this aspiring writer doesn’t have a whole lot of forward movement. He may be the central character in An Early History of Fire, the latest David Rabe play, but he’s more likely to be found in a Bruce Springsteen song.

As are the tramps he cavorts with in this townful of losers. Fire, directed by Jo Bonney of the New Group, offers little more than a slow simmer in its depiction of Danny’s motley crew. It’s 1962, and this group of twentysomethings, with their burgeoning knowledge of drugs and alcohol, clumsy experiences with sex and limited knowledge of the world around them, knows they’re just spinning their wheels. Unfortunately, the play itself begins to feel stale as well. Fire is a character-driven piece, rather than a plot-fueled one, which makes it hard to be engaged when the characters lack any major discovery or changes.

This is a shame, sine Rabe’s works, like his Vietnam trilogy (The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones, Streamers) were vital theatrical works, and his druggie Hollywood manifesto Hurlyburly was acidic and cutting (The New Group mounted a revival of this Tony-winner seven seasons ago). Fire feels, well, tired by comparison. Danny meets Karen (Claire van der Boom), a college student back home visiting her wealthy family at a bus stop. She confounds him – she’s sexually liberated and literary in ways that intimidate but attract him, much like Karen herself and asks her out. Karen then invites him to a dinner with her family, and it’s clear he’s in over his head: he has to rely on Pop to pick up his suit from the cleaners (he doesn’t), he arrives late to the dinner and nervously sits in his car for all to see, and borrows his friend’s father’s suit. Danny’s clearly not a good fit in his present state, and things need to change. I’m pretty sure that’s a message Rabe wants to extend to the country at large a half-century ago, but if he does, it’s a thesis that requires further enlightenment.

I believe there’s a strong play within Fire, and as evidence, I turn to the first half of the second act, which seems to be little more than Danny and Karen hanging out with his lunkhead pals Terry (Jonny Orsini) and Jake (Dennis Staroselsky), and Shirley (Erin Darke), Jonny’s high school girlfriend. Recently widowed, Shirley has turned to prostitution both to make a living and escape from life that has already both confined and defined her. It’s a lazy night, full of pot and booze, and probably how these guys spend many a night. But it is also a vivid dissection of the life Danny and his friends know, one that is full of wonder but lacking in awe. These supporting actors, particularly Darke, who has the most with which to work, do yeoman’s work with Rabe’s material, making us care about these young adults with nowhere lives and allowing us to intuit everything they know and fear. Stockmann, too, gives a sturdy performance, but Elliott’s scenes with just him and Van der Boom feel under-rehearsed and stagey in ways that fade when the whole ensemble (which also includes Devin Ratray as a friend of Pop’s) is onstage. It’s an odd conundrum – the people that Danny seems determined to leave behind are the ones that keep us the most plugged in to Rabe’s ambitious but tepid Fire.

An Early History of Fire

Acorn Theatre, Theatre Row, 410 West 42nd Street (between 9th and 10th Aves). Thru May 26. $61.25. http://www.thenewgroup.org/season3.htm

Springsteen’s New Album Wrecks Faith

“Why does he sing like that, he’s from New Jersey!” a friend cracked when Bruce Springsteen‘s Nebraska debuted in 1982. Nebraska’s affected Oakie drawl–fashioning a down-home, pessimistic response to President Reagan’s “Morning in America”–has since become Springsteen’s formal vocal register. His method-acted empathy with our mythic depressed underclass marked the turning point when Springsteen stopped being simply a rock star and began running for public office. His new album Wrecking Ball resembles a candidate’s campaign strategy through its 11 stump speech tracks in which Springsteen mouths Occupy Wall Street rhetoric, endorsing without stopping to examine it.

Never mind that millionaire Springsteen belongs to the 1 percent elite OWS villainizes, or that his nickname “The Boss” perpetuates the hierarchy working folk both acquiesce to and resent. (Remember President Obama’s smiley complicity with Bruce about his whip-cracking soubriquet? Springsteen recently returned the compliment, dedicating the new album to Obama’s reelection bid.) Springsteen’s legendary romanticism (based on albums that made a magnanimous jamboree of rock-n-roll ethos) usually allows him to slip past such hypocrisies. Until now.

Wrecking Ball repackages the cant emanating from OWS. Even  its fawning reviews evince the way sentimentality obscures the  movement, pushing Springsteen past an artist’s openmindedness. Pity and hostility defines Springsteen’s new no-name characters. Their sob stories are lachrymose more than realistic. They are the rhetorical equivalent of crocodile tears–emotionalizing facts of struggle and hardship that once were the definition of American character.

Springsteen’s underclass guise on Wrecking Ball is meant to be an act of solidarity with OWS, yet it embraces so much pessimism and contrived anger, that instead of sounding quintessentially American, it feels as ersatz that New Jersey Turnpike lonesome prairie drawl. He wants to endow OWS with the same romantic rebellion that Nebraska gave to its alienated, post-60s American malcontents. The new album goes from rallying cries to fatalistic ballads, dirges to gospelly rants–transparent efforts of populist suasion. It’s all an attempt at modern mythification, unsurprisingly praised in the media as part of the mass delusion that has overtaken Left politics for the past 12 years.

Like OWS, Springsteen attempts snatching back the glory days of ‘60s dissent without the ethical commitment and emotional sacrifice once required. Sacrifice might be felt by the current recession, but minus the ‘60s moral impulse (spiritual inspiration, love), this purely political abreaction lacks equivalent impact. Neither the movement, nor the album, are galvanizing.

Having misjudged the motivations of disenfranchised Americans who are incensed more than informed, Springsteen soft-headedly emulates their plaint; his corroboration turns sour. Touted as his “angriest” album yet, it also sounds like a slick politician’s con. On Wrecking Ball, Springsteen slips down the rabbit hole of Liberal piety, unaware how querulous and downright anti-social it has become. The sorrowful lyrics echo those who are certain of their aggrieved moral superiority to an irritating degree. This stance has coarsened Springsteen’s once heartfelt artistry (the double-vision of “Highway Patrolman” and “Ties That Bind“) into mere propaganda.

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