driver and a prison guard. Bruce was
the first of three children and his Italian
mother, Adele, worked hard to provide
a home for them all. His early life was
not without its inequities, however, and
Springsteen would later recall the harsh
nature of the Catholic school he attended
as a child. One story, in particular,
continued to haunt him into adulthood,
when, as an eight-year-old, he got his
Latin wrong and the nun who taught him
stood him in the wastebasket telling him,
‘that’s what you are worth.’
As a result, he loathed school and
learnt little other than what it was
like to be the victim of intolerance
and prejudice. When not in school, he
liked hanging around on the beach and
playing water sports. He was never a
talkative boy, preferring to watch and
listen, standing in the shadows taking
it all in. As Springsteen would often
explain to an audience in the mid-
seventies, just before launching into one
of his favourite songs from his childhood,
The Animals’ It’s My Life, ‘I grew up
in this small town about twenty miles
inland. I remember it was in this dumpy,
two-storey, two-family house, next door
to this gas station. And my mom, she was
a secretary and she worked downtown.
And my father, he worked a lotta
different places, worked in a rug mill for
a while, and he was a guard down at the
jail for a while. I can remember when
he worked down there, he used to come
back real pissed off, drunk, sit in the
kitchen. At night, about nine o’clock, he
used to shut off all the lights, every light
in the house. And he’d sit in the kitchenwith a six-pack and a cigarette. [When
I got home] I’d stand there in that
driveway, afraid to go in the house, and I
could see the screen door, I could see the
light of my pop’s cigarette. I used to slick
my hair back real tight so he couldn’t tell
how long it was gettin’ and try to sneak
through the kitchen. But the old man,
he’d catch me every night and he’d drag
me back into that kitchen. He’d make
me sit down at that table in the dark,
and he would sit there tellin’ me. And
I can remember just sittin’ there in the
dark, him tellin’ me... tellin’ me, tellin’
me, tellin’ me. ‘Pretty soon he’d ask me
what I thought I was doin’ with myself,
and we’d always end up screamin’ at each
other. My mother she’d always end up
runnin’ in from the front room, cryin’
and tryin’ to pull him off me, try to keep
us from fightin’ with each other. And I’d
always, I’d always end up runnin’ out
the back door, pullin’ away from him,
runnin’ down the driveway, screamin’ at
him, tellin’ him, tellin’ him, tellin’ him
how it was my life and I was gonna do
what I wanted to do.’
After seeing Elvis Presley on TV,
Springsteen was inspired to start playing
guitar at the age of nine. He got his first
blasts of loud music from listening to the
radio. ‘It took over my whole life,’ Bruce
later explained, ‘everything from then on
revolved around music.’ In those early
days, US radio was not just the home of
Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry; it was
a direct route to another world, aimed
at the very soul of a sprawling teenage
America, from the rural heartlands to
the inner city and boardwalks of Bruce’s
childhood. If it got on the radio that
meant it usually got onto the juke-boxes
of the numerous diners, soda fountains
and truck stops that littered the nation
too. This was where the teenage Bruce
first got the idea that rock ’n’ roll could
matter, as well as entertain; could make
you think as well as dance. It was a
lesson he absorbed quickly, and one
he never forgot: ‘What I heard in the
Drifters, in all that great radio music,
was the promise of something else. Not a
politician’s promise... I mean the promise
of possibilities... that the search and the
struggle matter, that they affirm your
life. That was the original spirit of rock
’n’ rol l.’
But if rock ’n’ roll spelled freedom
in the more general sense to countless
millions of teenagers in the cultural
melting pot of 1960s America, it took
on quite literal properties to Springsteen,
whose parents moved from Freehold
down to San Francisco when he wasBruce Springsteen backstage at Hammersmith Odeon in
London before his first UK show on 18 November 1975.