I had a ten-piece band when I was 21 years old, the Bruce Springsteen Band. This is just a slightly expanded version of a band I had before I ever signed a record contract. We had singers and horns.
Clarence once mentioned to me during a negotiation but he should be paid not only for playing but for being Clarence.
This, I presented as my long and noisy prayer, my magic trick. Hoping it would rock your very soul and then pass on, its spirit rendered, to be read, heard, sung and altered by you and your blood, that it might strengthen and help make sense of your story. Go tell it. EPILOGUE A few weeks before Thanksgiving, a sunny late fall day springs upon Central Jersey. Sixty-degree.
The bride and her hero are whisked away in their long black limousine, the one that drops you off at the beginning of your life.
It didn’t take me long to figure it out: I didn’t want to meet the Beatles. I wanted to BE the Beatles.
Off the road, life was a puzzle. Without.
Writing about yourself is a funny business. At the end of the day it’s just another story, the story you’ve chosen from the events of your life. I haven’t told you “all” about myself. Discretion and the feelings of others don’t allow it. But in a project like this, the writer has made one promise: to show the reader his mind. In these pages I’ve tried to do that.
I turn the corner off the highway onto a dark country road. I hit my high beams, scan the flat farm fields looking for deer. All clear, I twist the throttle as rushing into my arms comes home.
Meaningless distraction drains you of the energy you should be placing into more serious things or using to simply enjoy the rewards of your labor.
A good song gathers the years in. It’s why you can sing it with such conviction 40 years after it’s been written. A good song takes on more meaning as the years pass by.
But if you have the talent, then will, ambition and the determination to expose yourself to new thoughts, counterargument, new influences, will strengthen and fortify your work, driving you closer to home.
As a child you don’t question your parents’ choices. You accept them. They are justified by the godlike status of parenthood.
As a child you don’t question your parents’ choices. You accept them. They.
We honor our parents by carrying their best forward and laying the rest down.
All you need to do, is risk being your true self.
We remain in the air, the empty space, in the dusty roots and deep earth, in the echo and stories, the songs of the time and place we have inhabited. My clan, my blood, my place, my people.
We are one sour breath of night and day, then dirt and stars, but we’re holding the new morning.
If I lose and have nothing when this is over, you can still drop me with my guitar by parachute anywhere in America; I’ll walk to the nearest roadhouse, find a pickup band and light up your night. Just because I can.
Max Weinberg, Garry Tallent, Steve Van Zandt, Danny Federici, Roy Bittan, Clarence Clemons. This was the core of the group that over the next forty years would evolve into the hard-rockin’, history-makin’, earth-shakin’, booty-quakin’, lovemakin’ and, yes, eventually, Viagra-takin’ legendary E Street Band.
At the end of the day, life trumps art... always.
We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school.