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DNA, your natural ability, the study of your craft,
a development of and devotion to an aesthetic philosophy.
Balls.
Naked desire for fame, love, adoration,
attention, women,
sex, a buck.
Then, if you want to take it all the way out to the end of the night,
you will need a furious fire in your belly
that just don't quit burning.
These are some of the elements that will come in handy
should you come face-to-face
with 80,000 screaming rock 'n' roll fans.
Because these are fans who are waiting for you to pull something out of your hat,
out of thin air, something out of this world.
Something that, before the faithful were gathered here today,
was just a song-fueled rumor.
Now, I come from a boardwalk town
where everything is tinged with just a bit of fraud.
So am I.
In 1972, I wasn't any race-car-driving rebel.
I wasn't any corner street punk.
I was a guitar player on the streets of Asbury Park.
But I held four clean aces.
I had youth, I had a decade of hard-core bar band experience
already behind me.
I had a great group of musicians and friends
who really knew my playing style, and I had a magic trick.
Now I'm here tonight to provide proof of life
to that ever-elusive, never completely believable,
particularly these days, us.
That's my magic trick.
And like all good magic tricks,
it begins with a setup.
Now, I've never held an honest job in my entire life.
I've never done any hard labor.
I've never worked nine to five.
I've never worked five days a week until right now.
I don't like it.
I've never seen the inside of a factory, and yet, it's all I've ever written about.
Standing before you is a man
who has become wildly and absurdly successful
writing about something of which he has had...
absolutely no personal experience.
I-- I made it all up.
That's how good I am.
Now, how?
I'm sure you're wondering, how did this great miracle come to pass?
Well...
in the beginning...
there was a great darkness upon the waters.
As a child, there was Christmas, your birthday, summer vacation,
but the rest of life was a lifeless, sucking black hole.
A lifeless, sucking black hole of homework, church,
school, homework, church,
school, green beans,
green beans, fucking green beans.
But then, in a blinding flash of sanctified light,
a human being and just a kid,
just a kid from the southern sticks.
But, a... new kind of man. And he split the world in two.
And suddenly...
a new world existed.
The one below your belt.
And...
above your heart.
On a Sunday night in 1956,
at 39 1/2 Institute Street, into a cold-water flat
and into the mind of a seven-year-old kid.
The revolution had been televised!
Right under the noses
of the powers that be!
Who, if they'd have known what was actually happening
and the great changes...
the changes that were about to come,
they would have shut this shit down.
Or more likely signed it up real quick.
Because we, the unwashed, the invisible, the powerless, the kids,
would want more.
Now more life...
more love and more sex and more hope...
and more truth...
and more power.
And more soul.
And most of all, more rock 'n' roll.
So I sat with my mom, my little seven-year-old mind on fire,
staring into a blue tube as fun happened.
Fun, the real kind.
The joyful, life-affirming, hip-shaking,
ass-quaking, guitar-playing,
mind- and heart-changing, race-challenging, soul-lifting bliss
of a freer existence.
A freer existence exploded into unsuspecting homes
all across America.
On a regular Sunday night.
The world had fucking changed.
In an instant.
In a sweating, wet orgasm of fun.
And all you needed to do
to get a taste of it...
was to risk being your true self.
Because a rock 'n' roll genie had been let out of the bottle
and he told us that if you were...
...my fellow citizens, these feelings, these freedoms,
this fun...
was your birthright.
I listened, I believed, and I heard a mighty call
to action.
So I studied my new hero.
I know today he's got the same two arms, two legs, two eyes that I got.
Yes, he's a human Adonis.
And I'm...
...pathetically creepy.
But I'll figure that part out, all right?
The one thing he had that I didn't have was strapped
around his waist.
It was the guitar!
The guitar, or as my father had christened it,
"that fucking guitar."
But that fucking guitar was the key!
It was the sword in the stone!
It was the staff of righteousness!
And they sell 'em at Western Auto downtown
for 25 dollars!
So I begged and I pleaded with my mother
just to rent me, 'cause we couldn't afford to buy,
a guitar from Mike Diehl's Music School on South Street.
One Saturday afternoon, I brought it home.
And I sat on the living room couch,
and I unlatched its full alligator case,
and I slowly opened it up,
and up from the green velvet lining...
came the sweet smell...
of a cherry wood cocktail of power,
pleasure, salvation,
dreams, and dreams and dreams.
So I took lessons, dedicatedly.
I took lessons for two solid weeks...
and I quit.
It was too fucking hard.
Learning the guitar, not only was it fucking hard,
but the lessons were boring!
Just give me the three magic chords, please!
And let me twist...
and shout!
But I was a seven-year-old kid and my hands barely fit around the neck
and I couldn't waste my mother's hard-earned cash week after week,
so very shortly, I knew. That back it was gonna have to go.
But the morning before I returned it, I strapped it on one more time.
I took it out into the backyard where the neighborhood kids were,
and I put on my first show.
Whoo!
I slapped it, I shook it, I shouted,
I sang voodoo nonsense.
I burned a hole in the grass,
I shook my little seven-year-old ass.
Most importantly, I posed with it!
That's the shit!
I danced with it, I did everything but play it.
I couldn't do that.
I sucked so bad and the kids laughed and laughed and laughed
at my silly ass.
And we brought it back that afternoon.
But riding back home with my mom in the car...
I sat in the backseat and I was quiet.
I was thinking...
I was a little disappointed in myself.
But somewhere inside...
somewhere inside, I knew that for a moment,
just a moment,
in front of those kids in that backyard...
Mm... I smelled blood.
And it was bye-bye, New Jersey,
I'm gonna be airborne!
Now, everybody...
everybody has a love-hate relationship with their hometown.
It's just built into the equation of growing up.
If you take me.
I'm Mr. Born to Run.
I'm Mr. Thunder fucking Road.
I was born...
to run, not to stay.
My home, New Jersey...
it's a death trap.
It's a suicide rap.
Listen to the lyrics, all right?
I gotta get out, I gotta hit the highway,
I'm a road running man, I got the white line fever in my veins.
I am gonna bring my girl and I have had enough
of the shit that this place dishes out.
I am gonna run, run, run, and I'm...
well, I'm never coming back.
I currently live ten minutes from my hometown.
But, uh... "Born to Come Back" or, uh...
Who would have bought that shit?
Nobody.
Nobody, nobody.
In our front yard, only a few feet from our porch
stood the grandest tree in town.
It was a towering, beautiful copper beech tree.
And on sunny days, I lived under its branches.
Its roots were a fort for my soldiers and a corral for my horses.
And I was the first on my block
to climb high into its upper reaches,
leaving behind a world that...
I didn't care for much already.
And up near the top, I had the wind in my face
and I had all the dreaming room
that you could want.
On slow summer nights, I'd sit beneath its arms
with my pals like the cavalry at dusk,
just listening and listening...
for the evening bells of the ice cream man,
and my grandmother's voice calling me in to bed.
I lived on Randolph Street with my sister, Virginia,
she was a year younger than me,
my parents, Adele and Douglas, my grandparents, Fred and Alice,
and my trusty dog Saddle.
We lived spitting distance from the Catholic Church,
the priest's rectory, the nuns' convent,
the St. Rose of Lima Grammar School, all of it
just a football's toss away,
across a field of wild grass.
I literally grew up surrounded by God.
Surrounded by God...
and my relatives.
'Cause we had cousins and aunts and uncles
and grandmas and grandpas
and great-grandmas and great-grandpas,
all of us were jammed into five little houses
on two adjoining streets.
And when the church bells rang, the whole clan would hustle up the street
to stand witness to every wedding and every funeral
that arrived like a state occasion
in our little neighborhood.
My sister and I, we'd pick up the thrown rice from the weddings,
pack it away in small brown paper bags and take it home and save it,
and run up the street and throw it at the next wedding...
and the next wedding...
and the next wedding.
We also had front row seats to watch the townsmen
in their Sunday suits carry out an endless array...
of dark wooden boxes
to be slipped into the rear of the Freeman's Funeral Home
long black Cadillac
for the short ride
to St. Rose Cemetery hill on the edge of town.
And there...
all our Catholic neighbors, all the Zerillis,
all the McNicholases, all the Springsteens who came before...
they patiently waited for us.
On Sundays,
as my mom tended to our graves,
my sister and I...
we played hide-and-seek amongst the gravestones.
I gotcha.
Now, when it rains in Freehold...
When it rains,
the moisture in the humid air blankets the whole town
with the smell of moist coffee grounds wafting in from the Nescafé plant
on the town's eastern edge.
Now, I don't like coffee,
but I loved that smell.
It was comforting. It united our town,
just like our clanging rug mill,
in a common sensory experience. There was a place here.
You could hear it, you could smell it.
A place where people made lives
and where they worked and where they danced
and where they enjoyed small pleasures and played baseball and...
and suffered pain.
Where they had their hearts broke
and where they made love,
had kids...
where they died...
and drank themselves drunk on spring nights.
And where they did their very best,
the best that they could,
to hold off the demons, outside and inside,
that sought to destroy them...
and their homes, their families,
and their town.
Here, we lived in the shadow of the steeple,
crookedly blessed in God's good mercy, one and all.
In the heart-stopping, pants-dropping,
race-rioting, freak-hating,
soul-shaking, redneck,
love-and-fear-making,
heartbreaking town...
of Freehold, New Jersey.
My father worked as a 16-year-old floor boy
in that rug mill.
And then he went off to war. When he came home, he got married.
They shut the rug mill down, and so he went to work
on the Ford Motor plant line in New Brunswick.
Then he worked at the Nescafé plant in Freehold,
worked in a plastics factory in town.
He was a truck driver, a bus driver, drove a taxi.
He lived mostly at home, except for his second home,
which was a little local bar in the center of town.
Now, to a child, bars in Freehold were these citadels of great mystery.
When you walked through barroom doors in my hometown,
you entered the mystical realm of men.
On the rare night that my mother would call my father home,
we would slowly drive through town until we drew to a stop
outside of a single lit door.
She'd look at me and say, "Go in and get your dad."
This both thrilled and terrified me.
Thrilled me, because I had been given the license
by my mother,
the law...
...to go into the bar!
I'm a kid!
But it terrified me,
because to enter the bar
is to enter my father's privileged, private, and sacred space.
He was not to be disturbed when he's down at the bar.
Everybody knew that.
So, I would walk in.
And I was waist-high, and like a Jack who climbed some dark beanstalk
into a land of giants,
all I remember is the men towering over me on their way out the door.
Now, once you were in, to the left against the wall
was a line of red leather booths
that were filled with husband and wife tag team drinkers.
Now, they were your hard-core regulars,
there night after night after night, all right?
Now, to the right was the bar,
a line of stools filled by a barricade of broad working-class backs,
clinking glasses, too loud laughter, and very few women.
I would stand there lost in the noise and the hustle of the crowd
and I would drink in that dim smell of beer
and booze and aftershave.
That, to a kid, that was the scent of adulthood.
It was the scent of manhood.
I wanted some of that, you know?
Finally, somebody would notice me and draw me over to my pop.
Now, my view from the floor was the first thing I'd see
is the chrome legs of the barstool.
Then I'd see his black shoes, white socks, dark green work trousers,
powerful legs and haunches.
My dad, till the day he died, had the legs and an ass of a rhinoceros.
And-- and his trousers always looked like they were stretched,
stretched over those legs and ass somehow. I don't know how.
He was always busting out, you know?
Uh, then I would see his black Garrison work belt,
his green work shirt, and then his face.
By the time I got there, his face was flushed red,
red as a tomato because he was Irish,
and whatever he drank went straight to his face.
All right? He couldn't hide a thing when he came home, you know? Uh...
And not only was it red, but it was like...
...it was, like, distorted, too, into some sort of booze mask, you know,
by... by Mr. Schlitz and-- and...
It was so foreign to me as a child that, uh...
He...
Fuck, I don't know!
But it was scary, and he'd be peering down over his shoulder,
down through cigarette smoke and he'd be looking at me like,
"I've never seen you before in my fuckin' life."
I'd then uttered the immortal words that I was sent to deliver,
"Mom wants you to come home."
I'd hear, "Go outside. I will be right out."
And I would follow my breadcrumb trail back out the barroom door,
I would hop into the backseat and I would inform my mother...
"Um, he'll be right out. He'll be right out."
Now, those whose love we wanted but didn't get,
we emulate them.
It's the only way we have in our power
to get the closeness and the love that we needed and desired.
So, when I was a young man and looking for a voice
to meld with mine, to sing my songs, and to tell my stories,
well, I chose my father's voice.
Because there was something sacred in it to me.
When I went looking for something to wear,
I put on a factory worker's clothes,
because they were my dad's clothes.
And all we know about manhood is what we have seen
and what we have learned
from our fathers, and my father was my hero
and my greatest foe.
Not long after he died, I had this dream.
I'm on stage, I'm in front of thousands of people
and my dad's back from the dead, and he's sitting in the audience.
And suddenly, I'm kneeling next to him in the aisle.
And for a moment, we both watch the man on fire on stage.
And then, to my dad, who for years,
he sat at that kitchen table, unreachable,
in what I was too young
and I was too stupid to understand was his depression.
Well, I kneel next to him in the aisle...
and I brush his forearm...
and I say, "Look, Dad,
that guy on stage.
That's how I see you."
Now, my mom was a different story altogether.
I'm gonna release you from suicide watch right now.
Snap out of it! Come on.
Because my mother was bright, happy.
She'd merrily make conversation with a broom handle.
She believed that there was good faith, good heart, good hope in all citizens.
She gave the world a lot more credit, perhaps, than it deserves,
but that was her way.
Now, on school mornings-- I hated school.
That's just Rock Star 101.
If you don't hate school in my business,
please keep your fucking day job, all right?
Because it's a sign. It's a sign that, brother,
you're going nowhere, man. Nowhere.
You need to have hatred in your heart
to get to the top where I am, all right?
You've got to hate, all right? Uh...
So, of course I hated getting up.
And, uh, my mom had perfected this technique in the morning
where she'd stand over my bed with a glass of ice water
and give me 30 seconds.
You know, "Five, four, three, two..."
Boom! Niagara Falls.
I would get dressed, I would drift downstairs to breakfast,
where I would feast daily on a huge bowl of Sugar Pops.
A fine product...
...with just one problem.
They don't put enough sugar in those Sugar Pops.
So, I wasn't content until I snowed more sugar
on my Sugar Pops until they looked like the Himalayas.
- And then... Mmm! - "Good!"
With a buzz on and a kiss from my mom,
I was off
with my sister, lumbering up the street with our book bags
as my mom's high heels clicked lightly in the other direction
toward Lawyers Title Insurance Company in town center.
She was a legal secretary.
That was the job she did since the day she got out of high school,
50 years that followed.
Goes to work, doesn't miss a day, never sick,
never down, never complains.
Work doesn't appear to be a burden for her,
but it's a source of energy and of social pleasure.
Now, some evenings, I would meet my mother at closing time,
and we would be the last to leave the office,
and this was always a great privilege to me.
I would have my mother all to myself.
And with the building empty, her high heels would echo
down the long linoleum hallway.
And with the fluorescent lights out, lawyers' cubicles empty,
secretaries' desks empty, typewriters covered,
silent, the building was so still after all the noise of the day.
You know, it was so-- It got so quiet, it was as if...
It-- It was as if the building itself was resting
after a long day of service in the interests of our town.
And then suddenly, we'd be through the front door
and out on Main Street
in the five o'clock rush hour, and she would stride along,
statuesque, and I would be running alongside her just...
trying to keep up and I would be, you know, looking up at her.
And, uh, it's a sight that I've never, never forgotten.
My mother walking home from work.
It had some...
just some eternal impact on me.
You know? Uh...
She-- She always had these very ethnic features.
She had...
coal-black hair, Italian olive skin, and when she was young,
she wore that red lipstick that was very fashionable
in the '50s.
And she'd be looking down at me with a look that, for me,
was like the grace of Mary, you know?
Made me understand, for the first time, how good it feels
to feel pride in somebody that you love,
and who loves you back.
You know, she let the town know that we are handsome,
responsible members of this shit-dog burgh,
pulling our own individual weight
doing what has to be done day after day.
We have a place here that we have earned!
And we have a reason to open our eyes at the break of each day
and breathe in a life that's steady and good.
Now, my mom was truthfulness, consistency, good humor,
professionalism, grace, kindness, optimism, civility,
fairness, pride in yourself,
responsibility, love, faith in your family,
commitment, joy in your work, and a never-say-die thirst
for living, for living and for life.
And most importantly, for dancing.
My mother and her two sisters were dancing machines, all right?
They grew up in the '40s with the big bands and the swing bands
and they-- they learned to jitterbug and-- and...
It was in their bones, you know?
My mom is seven years into Alzheimer's.
And she's 93.
But dancing and the desire and need to dance is something that...
it hasn't left her.
Remains an essential, primal part of who she is.
It's beyond language. It's more powerful than memory.
And when she comes in the door, we make sure there's music on.
She wants to dance, you know?
Uh, these things were the embodiment of my mother.
They were her heart.
She carried on and she carries on as if they never,
never deserted her.
There's nothing like being young and leaving someplace.
That was a feeling that, oh,
I loved.
Maybe that's why I became a musician.
Um...
Sleep late, stay up late.
And you do an awful lot of leaving.
Night I left Freehold for the last time,
I laid back on the couch, it was perched high atop a load
of the band's junk furniture
in the back of an open flatbed truck on a beautiful summer night.
I was 19 years old.
Ooh... that felt pretty good.
Soft ocean breeze of the shore was reaching all the way inland.
And as we drew through town,
for the very last time,
we were stopped by the police...
...who informed us that there was a law against moving after dark.
What the fuck?
Who the fuck would know that?
Don't move your shit after dark?
What are we running off with, Freehold's great antiquities?
The sun goes down,
they'll bust your ass in Freehold, son.
Anyway, they, uh... They sent us on our way.
Glad to be rid of the town hippies, I guess.
And so, I lay back on my couch
and I was watching the tree branches rush above me
and the stars scrolling in the night sky, and I remember
I felt absolutely wonderful.
I had nothing, no parents.
They had moved away with my little sister Pam
to California in 1969.
My sister Virginia, great soul that she is,
she got pregnant and had a baby at 18.
She left high school, married a competitive bull rider
and they moved into the wilds of southern New Jersey,
because that's where the cowboys live.
I ain't kidding.
The real joke is, 50 years later,
they're still together and they still go to the rodeo.
Well, I had no money and no family and no realistic future.
But yet, I remember laying on that couch with the summer wind rushing over me
and, you know, that-- that saltwater smell in the air
of the shore coming on, and thinking...
I was just happy.
I was happy.
I got it all, you know? Maybe I did, you know?
Maybe there's nothing like that moment in your life of being young and...
leaving someplace, all that youthful freedom.
You feel-- Finally being untethered from everything you've ever known:
the life you've lived, your past, your parents,
the world you've gotten used to and that you've loved and hated.
Your life laying before you like a blank page.
It's the one thing I miss about getting older,
I miss the beauty of that blank page.
So much life in front of you.
Its promise, its possibilities, its mysteries, its adventures.
That blank page...
just laying there.
Daring you to write on it.
So... So, I'm 20 years old
and I'm living and playing on the Jersey Shore
and I'm waiting to be discovered.
Now, I have some confidence.
I've been around a bit.
And without a doubt,
I am definitely the best thing that I've ever seen.
I've already played in front of every conceivable audience.
I have played firemen's fairs,
midnight madness, supermarket openings, drive-in movies,
uh, in front of the concession stand in between films.
I've played beach parties, officers' clubs,
pizza parlors, coffee shops,
bowling alleys, trailer parks, roller rinks, VFW halls,
CYO canteens, the Elks Lodge, YMCA gymnasiums,
hockey rinks, county fairs, carnivals, high school dances, weddings,
fraternity parties, bar mitzvahs...
...soul revues, battle of the bands,
Sing Sing Prison, and Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital.
Send me your murderers and your maniacs and let me entertain them, all right?
That's what I do. That's all true.
That's all before I was 23 years old.
I'm frustrated. I listen to the radio
and I think, "I'm as good as that guy.
I'm better than that guy.
So why not me?"
Because I live in the fucking boondocks, all right?
Let me explain this to you. I live in the boondocks.
There's nobody here, and no one comes down here.
It's a grave.
There was no Jersey, Jersey, Jersey Shore, Jersey Almighty shit.
I invented that.
Before me...
Jersey was Jeserkhistan.
Jeserkhistan!
One of the little -stan things that nobody knows a fucking thing about.
You know?
And New York was a million miles away
from the Jersey Shore. In my little town as a child,
we knew no one who had ever been to New York City.
Jesus Christ, it was-- it was only an hour away!
But no, you might as well have said you're going to the fucking Moon.
"Hey, we're going to the Moon, you wanna go?" "No, no, no.
No, New York. No..."
We were provincial.
Everybody was afraid of the big city.
And there was no Internet, there was no ET, or MTV,
or cable TV, or satellite, or...
This is before anyone and everyone's ass crack from Anyplace, USA...
could be seen all over the world,
uh, should they choose, in the push of a key, in the next instant.
So who was gonna come to the Jersey Shore
to discover the next big thing in 1971?
You're correct.
No-fucking-body.
All we heard down there was the sound of...
one hand clapping.
Wasn't gonna happen.
I had one shot.
My girlfriend at the time did me a great favor.
Brought a guy who had a successful recording band
down to the Student Prince, our club in Asbury Park,
to discover us.
We got up on a little stage in a club that fit 150 people.
It was about half full.
And we played for this guy
like we were at Madison Square Garden.
Everything we had, all night long.
We played five sets, from 9:00 p.m. till 3:00 a.m.
At the end of the night, I was soaked to my bones.
I got off the bandstand, this guy walked up to me.
He looked me in the eye, shook my hand and said,
"You guys are the best unsigned band I've ever seen."
Then he slept with my girlfriend and left town.
That's the end of that story.
It's a sad ending.
I mean, I don't-- But that was enough for me.
I gathered together the men...
and I said, "Gentlemen, we are going to have to leave
the confines of the Jersey Shore
and venture into parts unknown...
if we want to be seen,
heard by anybody or discovered."
I found a manager, surfboard manufacturer from the West Coast--
he'd moved East-- by the name of Carl Virgil "Tinker" West.
Now, together, he, Mad Dog Lopez, and myself
we lived in the surfboard factory.
In the industrial wastelands of Wanamassa, New Jersey.
Tinker said he had some remaining rock 'n' roll contacts in San Francisco.
So we all got excited, and he said if we could get there,
something might happen.
So we saved up all our money until we had $100.
All right?
And then me, Danny Federici, Mad Dog Lopez,
Little Vinnie Roslin, our bass player,
rigged out Danny's station wagon for the drive.
Put a mattress in the back for the drivers to spell each other
and to sleep in on the way out there.
We rigged Tinker's old '40s flatbed to carry our equipment
and we had three days to make it across the country
for a New Year's Eve gig in Big Sur, California.
Now, three days means
those are gonna be thousand-mile days.
You can make it, but you can't stop.
You stop for gas and for nothing else.
You drive, drive, drive, drive, 72 hours straight.
Somebody's driving all the time around the clock.
Now, of course, we lost Danny
and the entire station wagon full of drivers
in Nashville, Tennessee.
Now, there's no cellular phones.
Young people, take a moment.
Let's try it.
Imagine a world without the cellular phone.
When you lose someone
in that world without the cellular phone...
oh, they're fucking lost.
There's no device.
You can't get in touch with them. They're gone!
Out of your life!
Into the ether.
So now, it's just Tinker and me, Tinker's dog,
thousands of miles to go,
and we got several problems. One is I have no license.
Second problem is I don't have a clue as to how to drive.
And by that, I mean the man
who would very, very shortly write "Racing in the Street"...
That's how good I am.
Because, at 21, I had never driven a fucking block.
Around 1:00 or 2:00 a.m.,
Tinker's eyes glass over and he says, "I'm fried.
I need to get some sleep. It's your turn to drive."
I go, "Tink, I can't drive."
He says, "Springsteen, there's nothing to it.
Idiots all over the world are doing it, all right?"
He pulls me into a parking lot. He puts me behind the wheel.
I start grinding gears, pumping the clutch,
jerking the truck all over the lot-- It's a 1940s manual transmission.
I can't get past first gear!
After a moment Tinker says, "This isn't going to work,
but I got another idea."
He gets in the driver's seat.
He slips in the clutch. He smoothly shifts it into first.
He eases out on the clutch.
He gets that truck going on a sweet little roll,
looks at me and says, "Now let's switch seats."
And that's what we did.
I was fine in second, third, and fourth and I could keep it in between the lines
as long as I didn't have to stop or go near first gear.
If I've gotta do either of those things, I have to wake up Mr. West.
All right? Now, it doesn't matter
because he's awake anyway,
because the guy who can't drive is driving!
You're not gonna sleep through that!
So...
You'd be surprised how far you can go across this big country
without having to stop. You know, it's...
it's a long ways between things out there,
and, man, I drove my share
of 2,000 miles...
in second, third, and fourth gear.
Without killing anybody.
Uh... And we made it on time, you know, but, uh...
that trip was...
...was where I saw the United States at its fullest
and as a young man, I was overwhelmed by its size and its beauty, and...
this is a short piece from the book about...
riding across the country for the very first time.
The country was beautiful.
And I felt a great elation at the wheel as we crossed the western desert at dawn.
The deep blue, purple shadowed canyons.
The pale yellow morning sky
with all of its color drawn out,
leaving just the black silhouetted mountains
in your rearview mirror.
Then with the eastern sun rising at our backs,
the deep reds and the browns of the plains and the hills
came to life slowly in front of us.
Your palms turn salty white on the wheel from the aridity.
Morning woke the Earth into this muted color.
And then came the flat light of the midday sun
and everything stood revealed as pure horizon.
Just sky, sky, sky, and more sky.
Lowering onto two lanes of blacktop
and disappearing into nothing.
My favorite thing.
Then the evening with the sun burning red into your eyes
and dropping gold into the western hills in front of you.
All felt like home to me.
And I fell into a lasting love affair with the desert.
So, it's-- it's 1980.
I'm 30 years old, I'm on another cross-country trip with a buddy of mine
and we stop outside of Phoenix to gas up.
Go into a small-town drugstore,
I'm rifling through a rack of paperback books,
I come across a book called Born on the Fourth of July
by a Vietnam veteran named Ron Kovic.
Now, his book was a testimony of the experience
that he'd had as a combat infantryman in Southeast Asia.
A week or two later,
I'm bunked in at the fabulous Sunset Marquis motel in Los Angeles.
Uh-- For the uninformed, it's kind of an upscale,
lowlife rock star hangout, all right?
Uh, small world theory.
Small world theory proves itself once again.
I'd been seeing a young guy with shoulder-length hair
sitting in a wheelchair by the pool for several days.
So, one afternoon he rolled up to me and said, "Hi, I'm Ron Kovic.
I wrote a book called Born on the Fourth of July."
I said, "Jeez. I just-- I just read it. And it-- it destroyed me."
He spent the afternoon talking to me about many returned soldiers
who were struggling with a wide variety of problems,
and he wanted to know if I'd take a drive with him to the vet center in Venice...
meet some of the Southern California veterans.
So I said, "Sure." The next day, we headed out there,
and I'm usually pretty easy with people, but once we were at the center,
I didn't know how to respond to what I was seeing. Uh...
Talking about my own life to these guys seemed frivolous.
You know?
There was homelessness and drug problems and post-traumatic stress and...
young guys my age dealing with life-changing...
physical injuries.
And it made me think about my own friends from back home.
Walter Cichon.
Walter Cichon was the greatest rock 'n' roll front man
on the Jersey Shore in the bar band '60s.
He was in a group called The Motifs,
and he was the first real rock star that I ever laid my eyes on.
He just had it in his bones. He had it in his blood.
It was in the way that he carried himself.
On stage, he just was deadly.
He was raw and sexual and dangerous,
and in our little area he taught us, by the way that he lived,
that you could live your life the way you chose.
You could look the way you wanted to look,
you could play the music you wanted to play,
you could be who you wanted to be,
and you could tell anyone who didn't like it
to go fuck themselves.
Walter had a...
guitar-playing brother, Raymond.
Raymond was...
tall, tall, kind of sweetly clumsy guy,
one of those big guys who just isn't comfortable with his size.
You know, uh, he's always, like, "Ooh. Ooh."
Knocking into shit wherever he is. And wherever that is,
there is just not enough space for Raymond, for some reason.
And, uh...
But the strange thing was he was always dressed impeccably
with a pastel shirt, long pointed collar, sharkskin pants, nylon socks,
spit-shined pointy-toed shoes, slicked-back black hair
with a little curl that would come down when he was playing the guitar.
Uh, Raymond was my guitar hero.
He was just a shoe salesman in the day.
And, uh, Walter, I think, worked construction.
They were only a little bit older than we were,
never had any national hit records, never did any big tours,
but they were gods to me.
And...
the hours I spent standing in front of their band,
studying, studying, studying, class in session.
Night after night, watching Ray's fingers fly
over the fretboard, and Walter would scare...
the shit out of half the crowd.
Oh, man.
They were essential to my development as a young musician.
I learned so much from Walter and from Ray.
And my dream,
my dream was I just wanted to play like Ray
and walk like Walter.
And then there was Bart Haynes.
Bart Haynes was the drummer from my first band, The Castiles.
He was the first real drummer I ever played with.
He was an absurdly funny kid,
classic class clown, was a good, good drummer...
with one strange quirk-- couldn't play "Wipe Out" by The Surfaris.
This may not seem so critical to you right now, I understand.
But in those days,
your skills, your mettle,
your self-worth as a drummer and as a human being
was tested in front of your peers once an evening
by your performance of "Wipe Out."
Now, Bart could play every other fucking thing,
but when it came to "Wipe Out"...
beyond his capabilities!
It was tragic.
You know, uh...
One day he got off...
got up off the drum stool, he joined the Marines, and...
Walter and Bart...
...they were both killed in the war in 1967 and '68.
Bart was the first young man from our hometown
to give his life in Vietnam.
So, I really didn't know what to say to the guys that I was meeting in Venice.
I sat there for most of the afternoon and I just listened.
Then in 1982, I wrote and I recorded my soldier story.
It was a protest song, a GI blues.
The verses are just an accounting of events.
The choruses were a declaration of your birthplace...
and the right to all of the blood and the confusion
and the pride and the shame and the grace...
that comes with birthplace.
In 1969, Mad Dog, Little Vinnie, and myself,
we were all drafted on the exact same day.
All three of us.
We rode together early one Monday morning from the Selective Service Office
on probably the unhappiest bus that ever pulled out of Asbury Park,
because we were on our way
to what we were sure was going to be our funeral.
We'd seen it already, up very close.
When we got to the Newark Draft Board, we did everything we could not to go.
And we succeeded, all three of us.
When I go to Washington,
and I have the occasion to visit Walter and Bart,
I'm glad that Mad Dog's, Little Vinnie's,
for that matter, my name isn't up on... on that wall.
But it was 1969, and thousands and thousands of young men to come
would be called, simply sacrificed,
just to save face for the powers that be
who, by then, already knew.
They knew it was a lost cause.
And still, thousands and thousands...
of more young boys.
So, uh...
So I do sometimes wonder who went in my place.
Because somebody did.
Now...
a real rock 'n' roll band evolves out of a common place and time.
Bands come out of towns, out of a city, out of a neighborhood.
And they come along at a particular moment, you know?
Bands are all about what happens when musicians
who come from the same streets,
with the same passions and influences, go in search of lightning and thunder!
They come together in a whole
that is greater than the sum of their parts.
They may not be the best players. That's not necessary.
They need to be the right players and when they play together,
there is a communion of souls
and a natural brotherhood and sisterhood manifests itself,
and a quest, a quest is begun.
You're in search of something,
an adventure's undertaken.
And you ride shotgun.
In a real band, the principles of math get stood on their head.
And one plus one equals three.
Now one plus one equals two, that happens every day.
That is not magic. That's the grind.
That's when you get up, one,
go to work, one, go to bed...
Two.
Two, geniuses, two.
But when one plus one equals three, that's when your life changes
and you see everything new.
And these are days when you are visited by visions...
when the world around you brings down the spirit,
and you feel blessed to be alive.
It is the essential equation of love.
There is no love without one plus one equaling three.
It's the essential equation of art.
It's the essential equation of rock 'n' roll.
It's the reason the universe will never be fully comprehensible.
It's the reason "Louie Louie" will never be fully comprehensible.
And it's the reason true rock 'n' roll
and true rock 'n' roll bands will never die.
Now, Gary, Danny, Little Steven, Mighty Max, Professor Roy,
Nils Lofgren, Patti Scialfa, that is my one plus one equals...
- Three! - Excellent, grasshopper.
But nobody captured my audience's imagination
or their hearts like Clarence.
Clarence was...
Clarence was a figure out of a rock 'n' roll storybook,
and together, we told a story that was bigger than...
any of the ones I'd written in my songs.
It was the story where, not only did Scooter and the Big Man
bust the city in half...
but we remade the city.
We remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place
where our friendship and our love for one another
wouldn't have been such an exceptional thing.
First night I saw Clarence, he came walking out of the shadows
towards the bandstand,
nodded to me, got up, stood to my right for the very first time.
He picked up his saxophone.
And when he played...
When he played, he whispered that story in my ear.
And then we whispered it into your ear.
And we carried it together for a long...
a long, good time.
The Big Man was big.
Everything about him.
His personality, his size, his laugh...
the sound of his saxophone.
When I first heard it, I thought it was the biggest sound I ever heard.
And it was.
His heart and his problems, they were big.
But he was elemental in my life.
And losing him was like losing the rain.
If I were a mystic...
If I were a mystic, I guess Clarence and my's friendship
would lead me to believe that we-- we stood together
in other older times.
You know, in, uh...
in other lives.
Along other rivers.
In other ancient cities.
In other fields...
working side by side,
with the sun setting,
doing our modest version of God's work.
I'll see you in the next life, Big Man.
Ladies and gentlemen, let's hear it for the biggest man you ever saw.
Clarence "Big Man" Clemons!
And the legendary...
- E... - Street Band!
That's it!
All right, all right, she is the queen of my heart!
She is my flaming beauty!
- Patricia! - My Jersey girl.
She is a great songwriter.
She's one of the loveliest voices I've ever heard.
She is smart, tough... but fragile.
Don't forget that part.
If we love those in whose company's reflected the best of us,
that's the light that she shines on me.
In 1984 one night, I'm hanging out at the Stone Pony
and this beautiful redhead shows up, sits in with the Sunday night house band.
And that is the night I fell in love with Patti's voice.
She got on stage, this blaze of red.
She performed a great version of The Exciters' hit song "Tell Him."
So the first line of the first song I ever heard Patti sing was...
She does. Ladies and gentlemen, Patti Scialfa.
Thank you.
Yeah, trust...
Trust in a relationship's a fragile thing.
Uh... Always been a little complicated for me
because trust requires allowing others
to see as much of our real selves as we have the courage to reveal.
But, I mean, uh...
I don't want to see my real self. Why would...?
- Why would others want to? - You know? But...
But it means allowing others to see behind our many masks,
the masks we wear, overcoming that fear.
Or rather, learning how to love and how to trust in spite of it.
That takes a little courage...
and a very strong partner.
'Cause in this life, you make your choices,
you take your stand,
and you awaken from that youthful spell of immortality
where it feels like the road is gonna go on forever.
And you walk alongside your chosen partner with the clock ticking.
And you recognize that life is finite, that you've got just so much time.
And so together...
you name the things that will give your life in that time its meaning,
its purpose, its fullness, its very reality.
And this is what you build together. This is...
what your love consists of.
This is what you...
This is your life, you know?
And these are things that you can hold onto
when the storms come,
as they will.
Patti Scialfa!
She's a badass!
Gonna add this song to our set tonight.
All right, this is the final days of Patti's first pregnancy.
I receive a surprise visit from my father at my home in LA.
You know, he had driven 500 miles, unannounced,
to knock on my door.
That's his style.
So at 11:00 a.m., we sit
in the sunlit dining room and we're nursing morning beers.
That's his style.
It's my father's breakfast of champions.
When my dad, never a talkative man, right, blurted out,
"You've been very good to us."
And I nodded that I had, you know? And, uh...
And then he says, "And I wasn't very good to you."
And the room just...
well, stood still...
as to my shock, the unacknowledgeable was being acknowledged.
If I...
If I didn't know better, I would have sworn an apology...
of some sort was being made.
And it was.
Here in the last days, before I was...
to become a father, my own father was visiting me...
to warn me of the mistakes that he had made,
and to warn me not to make them with my own children.
To release them from the chain of our sins,
my father's and mine and our fathers' before.
That they may be free...
to make their own choices and to live their own lives.
We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children's lives.
We either lay our mistakes, our burdens upon them
and we haunt them.
Or we assist them in laying those old burdens down,
and we free them from the chain of our own flawed behavior.
And as ancestors, we walk alongside of them,
and we assist them in finding their own way
and some transcendence.
My father...
on that day, was petitioning me
for an ancestral role in my life
after being a ghost for a long, long time.
He wanted me to write a new end to our relationship,
and he wanted me to be ready for the new beginning
that I was about to experience.
It was the greatest moment in my life with my dad.
And it was all that I needed.
Yeah.
All right.
I never believed that people come to my shows
or to rock shows in general to be told anything.
But...
I do believe that they come to be reminded of things,
to be reminded of who they are at their most joyous,
at their deepest when life feels full.
It's a good place to get in touch with your heart and your spirit.
It's good to be amongst the crowd,
be reminded of who we are and who we can be collectively.
Music does those things pretty well.
Sometimes, they can come in pretty handy.
And particularly these days, when some reminding
of who we are and who we can be isn't such a bad thing.
You know?
I-- I refer back to the weekend of the March for Our Lives
when we saw all those young people in Washington,
and citizens all around the country,
remind us of what faith in America
and what real faith in American democracy
and how sacred that is.
You know...
that weekend, you just saw what it actually looked and felt like.
It was just encouraging
to see all those people out on the street
and all that righteous passion alive in the service of something good.
To see it's still there,
at the center of the beating heart of our country...
and...
in spite of what we've been going through. And it was a good day, you know?
It was just...
it was just one good day.
But it was a necessary day.
Because these are times when we've also seen folks marching,
and in the highest offices of our land, who want to speak to our darkest angels,
who want to call up the ugliest and the most divisive ghosts
of America's past. And they want to destroy the idea
of an America for all. That's their intention.
That's what we've been seeing, in the outrage
of the broken families on the border,
and in hate-filled marches on American streets this year.
Things I never thought I would see again in my lifetime.
Things that I thought were dead and gone...
forever, on the ash heap of history.
You know...
We've come too far and worked too hard,
too many good people paid too high a price,
paid with their lives, to allow this to happen now.
You know...
There's been too much hard work done,
and sacrifice.
There's a beautiful quote by Dr. King
that says, "The arc of the moral universe is long,
but it bends toward justice."
It is important to believe in those words and to carry yourself
and to act accordingly, to live with compassion.
And to have faith in that what we're seeing now,
it's just another hard chapter...
in the long, long, ongoing battle
for the soul of the nation.
I always-- I always thought I was a typical American,
and so I fought my whole life, and I studied and I played
and I worked,
'cause I wanted to hear and I wanted to know the whole American story.
I wanted to know my story and your story.
I felt like I needed to understand as much of it as I could
in order to understand myself.
You know? Who was I? And...
where I came from and what that meant.
What did it mean to my family? Where was I going?
Where were we going together as a people?
And-- and what did it mean to be an American?
And to be a part of that story in this place and in this time.
I wanted to be able to celebrate and honor its beauty,
its power.
And I wanted to be able to be a critical voice
when I thought that that's what the times called for.
But most of all,
more than anything else, I wanted to be able to tell that story well to you.
That was my young promise to myself.
And this was my young promise to you.
From when I was a very young man,
I took my fun very seriously.
You know?
And this is what I have pursued as my service.
I still believe in it as such. This is what I've presented to you
all these years as my long and noisy prayer,
as my magic trick.
I wanted...
I wanted to rock your very soul!
And have you bring it home and pass it on and...
I wanted it to be sung and altered by you and your folks and your children,
should they be interested.
I wanted it to be something that you could call on
when things were good.
And, uh...
and when things were not so good.
You know, that it might strengthen, help make sense of...
your story and your life the way that you strengthen me and help me
make sense of my life. You've provided me with purpose,
with meaning and with a great, great amount of joy.
I hope I've done that for you
and that I've been a good traveling companion.
Remember that the future is not yet written.
So when things look dark, do as my mighty mom would insist,
lace up your dancing shoes and get to work.
There's a joke here somewhere.
When I figure it out, I'll let you know.
Whoo!
Thank you.
Please...
be seated.
It was a beautiful fall November evening. It was during the writing of my book.
I drove back to my neighborhood where I grew up,
looking for, uh...
I still don't have a fucking clue.
All right?
But, uh...
All I know is the streets were dead empty
and the whole place looked like it had been locked down since 1955.
My corner church was silent and unchanged,
no weddings, no funerals. I...
rolled slowly another 50 yards up my block
to visit my great tree, and it was gone.
It had been cut to the street since the last time I had drove through.
So I got out of the car and I looked down and there was a...
square of musty earth that held the remaining snakes of its roots
on the edge of a parking lot.
So I reached down and I picked up a handful of dirt
and I just kind of ran it through my hands.
And my heart sank like...
like a kid who had suffered some irretrievable loss.
You know, like some...
some piece of me was gone.
Um...
I don't know. I guess I...
It was just it had been there long before I was.
I assumed it would be there long after I was gone.
And I liked that.
It-- It felt eternal.
It was at the center of our street and it had rooted
our neighborhood for so long.
So I sat there for a while just cursing the county.
And listening to the sounds of the evening come on,
and I looked again and I realized it was gone, but some...
some essential piece of it was still there,
the air and the space above its roots.
I could still feel the life and the soul and the light
of my childhood friend there.
It's just that its leaves, its branches and its massive trunk
were now outlined, shot through,
by evening stars and sky.
But my great tree's life couldn't be ended or erased so easily
from this place, because it's history,
and history matters.
Its imprint was too great.
It was too old and it was too strong, and it had been there too long...
to be done away with so easily.
It had stood witness
to everything that had happened on these small streets beneath its arms.
All the joy...
and all the heartbreak.
And all the life.
And we live amongst ghosts, always trying to reach us...
from that shadow world.
They're with us every step of the way.
You know, my dead father's still with me every day.
I miss him, and if I had a wish...
Oh, man...
I wish he could have been here to see this.
But I visit with him every night.
A little bit. That's a grace-filled thing.
And Clarence, I get to...
I get to see and be with Clarence a little bit every night.
And Danny...
Walter,
and Bart.
My own family, so many of them gone...
from these houses that are now filled by strangers, but the soul...
the soul is a stubborn thing.
It doesn't dissipate so quickly.
Souls remain.
They remain here in the air,
in empty space,
dusty roots,
in sidewalks that I knew every single inch of
like I knew my own body
as a child...
and in the songs that we sing.
You know... That is why we sing.
We sing for our blood and for our people.
Because that's all we have at the end of the day.
Each other, and...
maybe that's what I'm looking for when I go down there.
I just want to commune...
with the old spirits,
stand in their presence,
feel their hands on me...
one more time.
Anyway, once again, I stood in the shadow of my old church, you know?
You know what they say about Catholics?
Yeah, there's no getting out.
No, no. You know, once they got you, they got you.
The bastards got you when the gettin' was good.
They did their work hard and they did it well.
'Cause the words of a very strange but all too familiar benediction
came back to me that evening.
And I want to tell you, these were words that as a kid,
I mumbled these things, I singsonged them,
I... chanted them, bored out of my fucking mind
in an endless drone before class
every fucking day.
Every day, the green blazer, the green tie, the green trousers,
the green socks of all of St. Rose's unwilling disciples.
You know?
But for some damn reason
as I sat there on my street that night,
you know, mourning, mourning my old tree,
and once again surrounded by God,
those were the words that came back to me and they flowed differently.
It was "Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done on this Earth
as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day.
Just give us this day, and forgive us
our sins, our trespasses,
as we may forgive those who trespass against us.
Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil,
all of us,
forever and ever. Amen."
May God bless you, your family, and all those that you love.
And thanks for coming out tonight.
Bruce!
Thank you.