The first time I meet Bruce Springsteen is backstage at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York, where he is in the homestretch of performing his one-man show, Springsteen on Broadway. It is a few weeks before I am supposed to sit with him for an interview, but his publicist has asked me to come by before this performance so he can, I deduce, check me out. I arrive at 7:00 and am directed to a small couch near the backstage bathroom. Finally, five minutes before curtain, I see, coming down the stairs that lead to his dressing room, a pair of black work boots and black-legged jeans. Springsteen ducks his head beneath a low arch and walks toward me, extending his hand and saying, “I’m Bruce.” We shake hands, and then there is silence. He looks at me and I look at him, not sure what to say. At five-foot-ten, he’s taller than you think he’ll be; somehow, he remains the runty-scrawny kid in the leather jacket, possibly dwarfed in our minds due to the years he spent leaning against Clarence Clemons.
That evening, Springsteen is weeks from notching his sixty-ninth birthday. And as we stand there, I find it impossible not to think that the journey he has undertaken in this decade of his life has been nothing short of miraculous. He entered his sixties struggling to survive a crippling depression, and now here he is approaching his seventies in triumph—mostly thanks to the success of this powerful, intimate show, which is not a concert but an epic dramatic monologue, punctuated with his songs. After a year of sold-out shows, he will close it out on December 15, the same night it will debut on Netflix as a film. He at last breaks the awkward silence by giving a small nod and saying to me—but more to himself, just as we all kind of say it to ourselves as we head out the door each day—“Well, I guess I better go to work.” And with that he ambles toward stage right. (...)
That evening, Springsteen is weeks from notching his sixty-ninth birthday. And as we stand there, I find it impossible not to think that the journey he has undertaken in this decade of his life has been nothing short of miraculous. He entered his sixties struggling to survive a crippling depression, and now here he is approaching his seventies in triumph—mostly thanks to the success of this powerful, intimate show, which is not a concert but an epic dramatic monologue, punctuated with his songs. After a year of sold-out shows, he will close it out on December 15, the same night it will debut on Netflix as a film. He at last breaks the awkward silence by giving a small nod and saying to me—but more to himself, just as we all kind of say it to ourselves as we head out the door each day—“Well, I guess I better go to work.” And with that he ambles toward stage right. (...)
Springsteen’s first breakdown came upon him at age thirty- two, around the time he released Nebraska. It is 1982, and he and his buddy Matt Delia are driving from New Jersey to Los Angeles in a 1969 Ford XL. On a late- summer night, in remote Texas, they come across a small town where a fair is happening. A band plays. Men and women hold each other and dance lazily, happily, beneath the stars. Children run and laugh. From the distance of the car, Springsteen gazes at all the living and happiness. And then: Something in him cracks open. As he writes, in this moment his lifetime as “an observer . . . away from the normal messiness of living and loving, reveals its cost to me.” All these years later, he still doesn’t exactly know why he fell into an abyss that night. “All I do know is as we age, the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier . . . much heavier. With each passing year, the price of our refusal to do that sorting rises higher and higher. . . . Long ago, the defenses I built to withstand the stress of my childhood, to save what I had of myself, outlived their usefulness, and I’ve become an abuser of their once lifesaving powers. I relied on them wrongly to isolate myself, seal my alienation, cut me off from life, control others, and contain my emotions to a damaging degree. Now the bill collector is knocking, and his payment’ll be in tears.” (...)
As Springsteen confesses to me, “I have come close enough to [mental illness] where I know I am not completely well myself. I’ve had to deal with a lot of it over the years, and I’m on a variety of medications that keep me on an even keel; otherwise I can swing rather dramatically and . . . just . . . the wheels can come off a little bit. So we have to watch, in our family. I have to watch my kids, and I’ve been lucky there. It ran in my family going way before my dad.” (...)
Springsteen tells me he has found purpose through his children. He is the father of two sons and a daughter: Evan, twenty- eight, works for SiriusXM; Sam, twenty- four, is a firefighter in New Jersey; and Jessica, twenty-six, is an equestrian. He says he promised himself long ago that he would not lose his children the way his father lost him. Much of his struggle to become a good father had to do with the hurt and anger he had to work through. He was fighting what he calls “the worst of my destructive behavior.” His father sent him a message that a woman, a family, weakens a man. As he says, for years the idea of a home filled him “with distrust and a bucketload of grief.”
As Springsteen confesses to me, “I have come close enough to [mental illness] where I know I am not completely well myself. I’ve had to deal with a lot of it over the years, and I’m on a variety of medications that keep me on an even keel; otherwise I can swing rather dramatically and . . . just . . . the wheels can come off a little bit. So we have to watch, in our family. I have to watch my kids, and I’ve been lucky there. It ran in my family going way before my dad.” (...)
Springsteen tells me he has found purpose through his children. He is the father of two sons and a daughter: Evan, twenty- eight, works for SiriusXM; Sam, twenty- four, is a firefighter in New Jersey; and Jessica, twenty-six, is an equestrian. He says he promised himself long ago that he would not lose his children the way his father lost him. Much of his struggle to become a good father had to do with the hurt and anger he had to work through. He was fighting what he calls “the worst of my destructive behavior.” His father sent him a message that a woman, a family, weakens a man. As he says, for years the idea of a home filled him “with distrust and a bucketload of grief.”
He credits Scialfa, his wife of twenty-seven years, with inspiring him to be a better man, with saving him. (“By her intelligence and love she showed me that our family was a sign of strength, that we were formidable and could take on and enjoy much of the world.”) It’s no wonder that he brings her out in the center of the show and duets with her on “Tougher Than the Rest” as well as “Brilliant Disguise.” You read his book and you see the wisdom and sensitivity she brought to their relationship. It’s Scialfa who, when the kids are small, goes to Bruce, the lifelong nocturnal creature, and says, “You’re going to miss it.” What? he asks. “The kids, the morning, it’s the best time, it’s when they need you the most.” Cut to: Bruce, remaking himself as the early- morning-breakfast dad. “Should the whole music thing go south, I will be able to hold a job between the hours of 5:00 and 11:00 a.m. at any diner in America. Feeding your children is an act of great intimacy, and I received my rewards: the sounds of forks clattering on breakfast plates, toast popping out of the toaster.”
And there it is: Bruce, no longer the son of scarcity but rather the father of abundance, reclaiming the kitchen for his family; transforming it from a fortress of darkness and silence into a land of brightness, filled with the sounds of life. Sitting here with me now, talking about his brood, he radiates joy. A father, proud of his children, grateful. I ask him, considering the current environment, what kinds of conversations he and his family are having around the kitchen table; what it means to be a man in society right now.
“My kids . . . we’re lucky. They’re solid citizens.”
But what would you say if you had to give advice to someone raising sons today?
“Be present. Be there. If I have any advice to give, that is it. I mean you have to be fully present in mind, spirit, and body. And you don’t have to do anything. [Laughs] I mean, you get a lotta credit just for showing up. Just by being present, you guide them. My children are transitioning into adulthood. But I’ve found my presence still carries a great deal of weight—on that rare occasion now when someone actually still asks me a question. [Laughs]” (...)
Do you feel you have, at last, found your true self?
“You never get there. Nobody does. You become more of yourself as time passes by. . . . In the arc of your life, there are so many places where you reach milestones that add to your authenticity and your presentation of who you really are. But I find myself still struggling just for obvious things that I should’ve had under my belt a long time ago. You know, when I get in those places where I’m not doing so well, I lose track of who I am. . . . The only thing in life that’s sure is: If you think you’ve got it, you don’t have it!”
I tell him I want to pause for a moment, because some people might say, “What are you talking about? You’re Bruce fucking Springsteen! How do you not know who you are?”
“Ugh.” Springsteen laughs and lets out a sigh. He drops his chin into his chest and then smiles and looks up. “Bruce fucking Springsteen is a creation. So it’s somewhat liquid—even though at this point you would imagine I have it pretty nailed down. But sometimes not necessarily. [Laughs] And personally—you’re in search of things like everybody else. Identity is a slippery thing no matter how long you’ve been at it. Parts of yourself can appear—like, whoa, who was that guy? Oh, he’s in the car with everybody else, but he doesn’t show his head too often, because he was so threatening to your stability. At the end of the day, identity is a construct we build to make ourselves feel at ease and at peace and reasonably stable in the world. But being is not a construct. Being is just being. In being, there’s a whole variety of wild and untamed things that remain in us. You bump into those in the night, and you can scare yourself.”
And there it is: Bruce, no longer the son of scarcity but rather the father of abundance, reclaiming the kitchen for his family; transforming it from a fortress of darkness and silence into a land of brightness, filled with the sounds of life. Sitting here with me now, talking about his brood, he radiates joy. A father, proud of his children, grateful. I ask him, considering the current environment, what kinds of conversations he and his family are having around the kitchen table; what it means to be a man in society right now.
“My kids . . . we’re lucky. They’re solid citizens.”
But what would you say if you had to give advice to someone raising sons today?
“Be present. Be there. If I have any advice to give, that is it. I mean you have to be fully present in mind, spirit, and body. And you don’t have to do anything. [Laughs] I mean, you get a lotta credit just for showing up. Just by being present, you guide them. My children are transitioning into adulthood. But I’ve found my presence still carries a great deal of weight—on that rare occasion now when someone actually still asks me a question. [Laughs]” (...)
Do you feel you have, at last, found your true self?
“You never get there. Nobody does. You become more of yourself as time passes by. . . . In the arc of your life, there are so many places where you reach milestones that add to your authenticity and your presentation of who you really are. But I find myself still struggling just for obvious things that I should’ve had under my belt a long time ago. You know, when I get in those places where I’m not doing so well, I lose track of who I am. . . . The only thing in life that’s sure is: If you think you’ve got it, you don’t have it!”
I tell him I want to pause for a moment, because some people might say, “What are you talking about? You’re Bruce fucking Springsteen! How do you not know who you are?”
“Ugh.” Springsteen laughs and lets out a sigh. He drops his chin into his chest and then smiles and looks up. “Bruce fucking Springsteen is a creation. So it’s somewhat liquid—even though at this point you would imagine I have it pretty nailed down. But sometimes not necessarily. [Laughs] And personally—you’re in search of things like everybody else. Identity is a slippery thing no matter how long you’ve been at it. Parts of yourself can appear—like, whoa, who was that guy? Oh, he’s in the car with everybody else, but he doesn’t show his head too often, because he was so threatening to your stability. At the end of the day, identity is a construct we build to make ourselves feel at ease and at peace and reasonably stable in the world. But being is not a construct. Being is just being. In being, there’s a whole variety of wild and untamed things that remain in us. You bump into those in the night, and you can scare yourself.”
by Michael Hainey, Esquire | Read more:
Image: Bruce Springsteen
