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By Nancy Imelda
Schafer Bruce Springsteen; known by most as "The Boss," (it's the law in Jersey) lives on as a legend in his own time. Being a born and raised
Jersey Girl, I feel it my sworn duty as such to profile and spotlight The Boss. When he
sings When Bruce sang "the amusement park rises bold and
stark," he was *not* singing about either the Palace or the Casino . . . he was
singing about the Asbury Amusement Park, a bona fide outdoor amusement park complete with
ferris wheel, roller coaster, tilt-a-whirl (that's the one in "Sandy"), sky ride,
and many other rides. He writes what he is. That is what makes him so good. Although it
was played to death in it's time, when I hear him belt out Born In The USA, I can't help
but feel proud to be an American. "This music is forever for me," Springsteen
said in a past interview, . "It's the stage thing, that rush moment that you Springsteen defies classification. This is one reason recognition was so long in coming. There is nothing simple to hold on to. He was discovered by Columbia Records Vice President of Talent Acquisition John Hammond, who also found Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman and Bob Dylan, among others. Hammond knew "at once that Bruce would last a generation" but thought of him first as a folk musician. Casting Springsteen as a rebel in a motorcycle jacket is easy enough -- it makes a neat fit for the character he adopted in "Born to Run" -- but it ignores a whole other side of his importance and of his music. "Music saved me," Bruce says. "From the beginning, my guitar was something I could go to. If I hadn't found music, I don't know what I would have done." He was born poor in Freehold, N.J., a working-class town
near the shore. His mother Adele ("Just like Superwoman, "My Daddy was a driver," Springsteen remembers. "He liked to get in the car and just drive. He got everybody else in the car too, and he made us drive. He made us all drive." These two-lane odysseys without destination only reinforced Springsteen's already flourishing sense of displacement. "I lived half of my first 13 years in a trance or something," he says now. "People thought I was weird because I always went around with this look on my face. I was thinking of things, but I was always on the outside, looking in."
The parents pulled up stakes and moved to California when Bruce was still in his teens. Bruce stayed behind, with some bad memories of hassles with nuns in parochial school, an $18 guitar and random dreams of a phantom father for company. By the time he was 18, he had some perspective on his father. "I figured out we were pretty much alike," Springsteen says, by which he means more than a shared cool skill at the pool table and a taste for long car rides. "My father never has much to say to me, but I know he thinks about a lot of things. I know he's driving himself almost crazy thinking about these things... and yet he sure ain't got much to say when we sit down to talk." The elder Springsteen currently drives a bus in San Mateo, a suburb south of San Francisco. Neither he nor his wife made it to Los Angeles for their son's big show. Bruce bunked in with friends back in Jersey and
tried to make it through public high school. He took off on In 1965, while he was still finishing high school, Springsteen began forming bands like the Castiles, which did gigs for short money in a Greenwich Village spot called the Cafe Wha?. He met up with Miami Steve Van Zandt, current lead guitarist of the E Street Band, around that time. "We were all playing anything we could to be part of the scene," Van Zandt recalls. "West Coast stuff, the English thing, R&B and blues. Bruce was writing five or ten songs a week. He would say, 'I'm gonna go home tonight and write a great song,' and he did. He was the Boss then, and he's the Boss now." A lot of the life Springsteen saw then and lived through
found its way into his songs, but indirectly. Filtered through an He remains adamantly indifferent to clothing and personal adornment, although he wears a small gold cross around his neck -- a vestigial remnant of Catholicism -- and, probably to challenge it, a small gold ring in his left ear, which gives him a little gypsy flash. Springsteen said; "I'm not a planning-type guy,"
he says. "You can't count on nothing in this life. I never have expectations when I
get involved in things. That way, I never have disappointments." His songs, which he
characterizes as being mostly As I sit reading past articles about The Boss, I have yet to find a past article, where the interviewer has sat and really asked Bruce what makes him tick when he writes. I am a writer. He is a writer. yes, his music is his skin, but the words and lyrics that swell his mind... are his blood. Bruce Springsteen once said it sounds as if he sings his words too fast. He went on to clarify that he has to, because there are so many words in a verse. This is true. He will not leave a few words out for the sake of fluid sounds. When he has a point to make, he does. And more than that, something I really like... he does not feel or see the need to force rhyme into every verse.
"I always felt that whole 'the Boss' thing is
fundamentally silly. I never for a second had the slightest idea or interest in going out
and trying to (duplicate that success). I knew what it was the minute it happened -- it
was an anomaly. I knew my audience would go back to its regular level. I didn't see that
it might happen. I knew that it would happen, " Bruce said in an article appearing in
LA TIMES. This is true. However, the time shares of history within the country he wrote
about are true and have left it's mark. The Boss. A Jersey Boy! [Credits: exerts taken from a TIME Magazine cover story by Jay Cocks, photos: boris babbic, addicted to noise, john fix 3rd.
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Jersey Girl, I feel
a sense of pride that is indescribable. Bruce writes and sings about what he knows best..
himself, where he is from, and where he dreams to be. Reading his lyrics, I feel very much
a part of them, as I have stomped through out Asbury Park many times. In the song
"Born To Run," he wrote: "beyond the Palace, hemi-powered drones scream
down the boulevard", he was definitely singing about all the cars that came screaming
down Lake Avenue, either on illegal drag races or heading out to join the action on
"the circuit".
live for. It never lasts, but that's what you live for."
[
she did everything, everywhere, all the time") worked through his
childhood as a secretary. His father, Douglas Springsteen (the name is Dutch), was "a
sure-money man" at the pool tables who drifted from job to job, stalked by
undetermined demons. 
weekend forays into Manhattan for his first strong taste of
big-city street life and began making music. He started writing his own because he could
not figure out how to tune his guitar to play anyone else's material accurately.
"Music was my way of keeping people from looking through and around me. I wanted the
heavies to know I was around." 
imagination that
discovered a crazy romanticism in the ragtag boardwalk life. For two years Springsteen
crisscrossed the country, enlarging his following with galvanic concerts. Early last year,
playing a small bar called Charley's in Cambridge, Mass.,
he picked up an important new fan. Jon Landau. a Rolling Stone editor, had reviewed
Bruce's second album favorably for a local paper, and Charley's put the notice in the
window. Landau remembers arriving at the club and seeing Springsteen hugging himself in
the cold and reading the review. A few weeks later, Landau wrote, "I saw the rock and
roll future and its name is Springsteen." [
about "survival, how to make it through the next
day," are written in bursts. "I ain't one of those guys who feels guilty if he
didn't write something today," he boasts. "That's all jive. If I didn't do
nothing all day, I feel great." Under all circumstances, he spins fiction in his
lyrics and is careful to avoid writing directly about daily experience. "You do
that," he cautions, "and this is what happens. First you write about struggling
along. Then you write about making it professionally. Then somebody's nice to you. You
write about that. It's a beautiful day, you write about that. That's about 20 songs in
all. Then you're out. You got nothing to write."
