‘I’m the President, but he’s the Boss’, Barack Obama declared a couple of years ago, and most Spectator readers will know Bruce Springsteen as the President’s celebrity pop star friend. (One of the first of the many pleasures Peter Ames Carlin’s book affords is the story of how Springsteen came byhis nickname: he was a ruthless player of ‘Cut-throat’ Monopoly.)
Bruce Springsteen is much more than a celebrity, and Carlin’s book far from a dispiriting celebrity hagiography. Although written with the full co-operation of Springsteen himself, it pulls no punches in describing the singer’s faults and weaknesses, cruelties and mistakes. To his fans he can do no wrong (other than that awful video for Dancing in the Dark), but so driven a performer requires a robust ego. His temper is short and his judgment swift, and before his marriages he was a disagreeably jealous lover.
He admits to too much self-analysis, and yet his songs are invariably narrated either by a fictionalised first person or are about others. On his most recent album, Wrecking Ball, he assumes an ironic ‘we’ (meaning the USA) in ‘We Take Care of Our Own’, the voices of the dead oppressed in ‘We Are Alive’ and the persona (if that is possible) of the Giants Stadium (awaiting demolition at the time) in the title song. Even early songs, such as ‘Thunder Road’ and ‘Born to Run’ are fantasies of escape rather than records of actual experience.
Carlin’s book is first-rate for its first two thirds. As it approaches the present, Springsteen’s status as untouchable cultural icon begins to ossify the tale. Even here, however, it is superior to Clinton Heylin’s book, which is standard rock biography with its treacle of hyperbolic adjectives. That is not to say that die-hard fans will not enjoy it.
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