When fans experience one of Bruce Springsteen’s epic, four-hour concerts, it’s a joyous occasion. And as far as they can tell, Springsteen himself is having a grand old time telling stories of the Jersey Shore, about blue collar workers and rockin’ out with every fiber of his being. What they don’t see is a troubled man.
In his new memoir, “Born To Run,” the Boss lifts the lid on his anxiety and depression. He reveals how he failed at his first marriage, as well as how pancakes helped make him a better father. Plus he talks about the girl who inspired “Rosalita.”
Here are eight facts he reveals in his book that will surprise some of his biggest fans.
Rosalita is based on the girl who deflowered him
While Springsteen says Sandy in “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” is a composite of girls he’d known down the Jersey Shore, he is more specific about the girl behind “Rosalita,” which he calls his “musical biography.”
When he was a teen, he had a girlfriend whose mother threatened to get a court injunction to keep him away from her daughter. That girl, he says, “was a sweet blonde who I believe was the first gal I had successful intercourse with one fumbling afternoon at chez mama (though due to the fog of war, I can’t be absolutely sure).”
His dad had a violent temper
Springsteen’s father was a troubled man. He held a series of blue collar jobs and suffered from depression. His mother, on the other hand, was a joy full of life and love. “My mother would read romance novels and swoon to the latest hits on the radio,” Springsteen writes. “My dad would go so far as to explain to me that love songs on the radio were part of a government ploy to get you to marry and pay taxes.” It was young Bruce’s mother who rented his first guitar for him (they couldn’t afford to buy one) after Bruce saw Elvis on Ed Sullivan in 1956.
Naturally, Bruce defended his mother in any problem with his father. One night after his father was home from one of his regular evenings at the local tavern, he heard them “violently arguing in the kitchen.” He was 9 or 10 and feared for himself and his mother. He went downstairs to the kitchen clutching a baseball bat in his hands. “I shouted at him to stop. Then I let him have it square between his broad shoulders, a sick thud.” His father turned and just laughed. It was far from a normal relationship.
And that made Bruce shy with women
His father’s troubles affected Springsteen’s ability later to have normal relationships. “I’d routinely and roughly failed perfectly fine women,” he writes. “Two years inside of any relationship and it would all simply stop.
“I had many lovely girlfriends I cared for and who really cared for me. It was what they triggered, the emotional exposure, the implications of a life of commitments and family burdens.”
Basically, Springsteen says, he was only comfortable onstage or in the studio or just making music and hanging out with his buddies. Growing up kind of scared him.
He had cold feet after his first wedding
But he gave it a go at age 34 when he met actress Julianne Phillips, 10 years his junior. Springsteen describes her as “tall, blond, educated, talented, a beautiful and charming young woman.” He proposed to her just six months after they started dating. “Following our wedding,” he reveals, “I was struck by a series of severe anxiety attacks . . . I tried to hide them as best I could . . . I also had (shades of my pop) paranoid delusions that scared me.” Then, Julianne was away, filming on location and Bruce was back in Jersey — Patti Scialfa had already joined the E Street Band. “Patti and I got together under the ostensible excuse of working on our ‘duets,’” Springsteen writes. “We hung out, sat in my little bar, talked and pretty soon, I could feel something was on.” Scialfa, who Springsteen went on to marry after he’d divorced his first wife, was just a couple of years younger than him. They’d know each other casually over the years — encountering each other for the first time when 17-year-old Patti answered an ad Springsteen put in the Asbury Park Press looking for a singer. He told her to stay in school.
He didn’t love partying
After he finished recording “The River,” the Boss needed a breather. He was hanging around in Los Angeles and got an invitation to visit the Playboy Mansion. He stayed away. “For me,” he explains, “it wasn’t the sex, it wasn’t the drugs . . . it was the ROCK ‘N’ ROLL.” He wasn’t the type to go the the hippest clubs and make the scene. “I didn’t really think I was that different from my fans except for some hard work, luck and natural ability at my gig. They didn’t get to go to the Playboy Mansion, so why should I?” Of course when he told this to his friends, they demanded, “What the f–k is wrong with you?” He says, “I had my principles . . . but a part of me always wished on occasion I hadn’t followed them so severely.”
After success, he got depressed
After Springsteen bought his first house — a small cottage in the Hollywood Hills once owned by actor Sidney Toller, who played Charlie Chan in the movies — he experienced what he calls “an event . . . depression is spewing like an oil spill . . .”
On advice from his pal and manager Jon Landau he sought professional help. At the Los Angeles office of a therapist, Sprinsteen writes, “I walk in; look into the eyes of a kindly, white-haired, mustached, complete stranger; sit down; and burst into tears.” This beginning of 30 years of therapy helped.
Pills were the soultion
The anxiety, moods and depression never left entirely. And not long after Springsteen turned 60, he experienced depression that lasted for a year and a half. During a depression, he writes, “I can be cruel . . .” And he also experienced lengthy periods when almost anything would set him into uncontrollable weeping. He reveals he’s been taking antidepressants for the last 12 to 15 years. “They work,” he says. “the worst of my destructive behavior curtails itself and my humanity returns.”
He’d be a great cook at a diner
After the Bruce and Patti had children (Evan, Jessica and Sam), he says he still kept “musician’s hours” — to bed at 4 a.m. or so, awake after noon. That worked when the kids were little; he could take the nighttime-parent shift. But when they no longer needed him at night, the parenting burden fell more on Patti. She told Bruce that morning was when the kids needed him the most.
The next morning he somehow managed to get up at 7 and into the kitchen. “What do I do?” he asked his wife.
She told him to make pancakes. He wasn’t sure. “I’d never made anything but music my entire life. I . . . I . . . I . . . don’t know how!”
After she told him to “learn,” Springsteen asked the family’s cook at the time for a recipe. “After some early cementlike results,” he says, “I dialed it in, expanded my menu and am now proud to say that should the whole music thing go south, I will be able to hold down a job between the hours of five and eleven a.m. at any diner in America.”