Born to Run: Biography

A legal showdown between Appel and Springsteen results in depositions and courtroom hearings. The biggest obstacle to Springsteen’s victory is his excessive empathy for his opponents—his attempt to see all points of view, not just his own. The lawsuit drags on for years. He takes comfort in knowing that, win or lose, no one can take his talent and drive from him.

Settlement

Appel eventually realizes the relationship is over, and they finalize their “divorce.” Appel retains most of the money, but Springsteen wins the rights to his songs and to guide his own career. Despite their legal fight, however, some remnant of their friendship remains. They have too much in common and have traveled too long a path together to forsake it completely.

For his fourth album, Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), Springsteen draws on the neighborhoods and eccentric characters of his youth. He feels an obligation to address their lives, and he wants a “leaner” sound that resonates with the cynicism and personal battles these people fight daily. With money finally rolling in, Springsteen receives bills for back taxes, debts, studio fees, touring expenses, and lawyers—bills onerous that they “would keep me broke until 1982” (263).

After two years of inactivity, the band is rusty and struggles to produce acceptable music in the studio, although they record 60 songs. With no real engineering experience, recording is a largely trial-and-error process. The music that inspires results is folk and country—Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie—which accurately depicts the lives of Springsteen’s characters. Starting with his parents, he addresses the social and political forces that held people down and prevented their hard labor from amounting to anything. This grounds Springsteen in his true identity and precludes his music’s becoming lifeless and “anemic.”

Closing In

For the album, Springsteen whittles 60 songs down to 10. He cuts all frivolity or sentiment, keeping everything essential and personal. He feels rock music has become too “abstract” in 1978 and desperately needs a revolution—hence, the punk movement. He takes inspiration from punk’s angry, bare-bones style, striving to make it his own. With Darkness, he realizes the elemental factors that create his identity—home, family, community, hard work—will always be with him and have a place in his music.

Darkness on the Edge of Town is an album of firsts: the first time recording the tracks as a “full band” and working collaboratively with Jon Landau—and the first album without Mike Appel. For the album cover, he uses a “stark” photograph of himself taken by New Jersey photographer Frank Stefanko, a photo that strips away artifice and leaves only “true grit.” Reluctant to risk the explosive publicity of Born to Run, he nevertheless agrees to minimal promotion, reaching out to deejays across the country.

Touring

Although Darkness is less fan friendly than Born to Run, the band tours relentlessly, playing the new songs “until the audience recognized them as their own” (270). After three years of musical silence and public speculation about whether Springsteen is a one-hit wonder, he’s back with powerful live shows and positive reviews.

The restlessness that drives Springsteen’s creativity and performances becomes problematic during his downtime. He realizes it stems from his rootlessness—no home, no family—and thinks about having a family of his own, which scares him. Itinerant for his entire adult life, he has no role models for a successful family man. His pattern is to bail out when relationships get too intimate, but he’s beginning to understand the emotional pain underlying that history. Touring and recording are a perfect escape from the “claustrophobia” of commitment, but with downtime, he can no longer run from these truths. The “theater” he creates every night, although wonderful and transporting, is a pale imitation of life.

Springsteen’s next album, The River (1980), focuses on anxieties about love, family, and relationships. Wanting a rougher sound—rather than the “tightly controlled” sound of the previous album—Springsteen sets the band loose, “striking a perfect balance between a garage band and the professionalism required to make good records” (276). Defying the production techniques prevalent at the time—controlled instrument separation, minimal echo—Springsteen wants a “messier” sound in which instruments battle it out and the room is an integral part of the sound, not eliminated from it.

The final cut of The River, however, lacks coherence. With several years between albums, Springsteen feels obligated to deliver not just his “latest songs” but a thematic statement. As he seeks a coherent direction, he records everything he has been writing and sifts through it—The River is now a double album—to hone a theme about lovers and hard workers confronting their lives, relationships, and mortality. After months of mixing to achieve the perfect sound, Jimmy Iovine (now a producer) comments that the vocals are unintelligible. Frustrated, they persist until the mix has the sound they want—and finally, after months of tinkering, finish The River. That perfectionism, Springsteen notes, comes from a desperate search for answers that he must ask through his music. However, he poured much of his own money into its production, and Landau informs him that he has $20,000 to his name: “The clock had run out. Time to make some money” (282).

Break Time

After the “torturous” production of The River, Springsteen relaxes in Los Angeles, avoiding the usual rock star traps—hip clubs, the Playboy Mansion. He wants to stay rooted in reality, not celebrity. Reality is his muse, and his obsession with control precludes out-of-control behavior. He sets similar boundaries with the band, prohibiting anything that might damage its work—the reason, he feels, that E Street is still playing together. He does, however, use alcohol occasionally to feel the freedom that his compulsions won’t otherwise allow; but the real release comes onstage. Performance, for Springsteen, provides the only meaningful high.