Confusing path from back streets to big time for Springsteen

Press, 10 February 1988, Page 24

Confusing path from back streets to big time for Springsteen

By

ROBIN CORRY

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN is the working class hero who lives in a $3 million mansion. He writes songs about hardship, and the exploitation of the workers, but when a girl working for him without pay was late with his pre-concert snack he fined her $lOO. The signs are that Springsteen, the world’s richest rock star, has found the journey from backstreets to the big time almost as confusing as did his idol, the tragic Elvis Presley, and his closest-earning rival, the increasingly eccentric Michael Jackson. Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen was born on September 23, 1949, the son of IrishItalian parents, although the name is Dutch, and grew up in the run-down town of Freehold, New Jersey, in “a dumpy, twostorey house next to a gas station.” He and his two younger sisters, Virginia and Pamela, lived in awe of their morose and bitter father, Douglas, who worked sporadically as a taxi driver, millhand, bus driver and prison guard, with lengthy spells out of work. Every evening, Springsteen senior would put all the lights out at 9 p.m. and sit in the darkened kitchen drinking beer and smoking. Bruce’s mother, Adele, who kept the family above the breadline working as a legal secretary, would fall asleep in front of the TV. His father was forever bickering with him, and has been the inspiration for a lot of Springsteen songs about the harsh realities of life for the under-privi-leged in America. “I guess the fact that my father had a succession of deadend jobs crippled his ego,” says Bruce. “So he came down hard on me. So much stuffing had been knocked out of him that he couldn’t accept that I had prospects.” . Unlike many stars who saw show business as an escape route from inner city blight, with Springsteen it was the music that came first. There was never a grim determination to make it to the top. The success and riches were almost incidental. He was aged eight when he bought his first record, Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock.” Soon afterwards, he saw Elvis on television

and told his mother: “I wanna be just like that,” begging her to buy him a guitar. She did, but insisted he took lessons. He hated them so much he gave it up. It was five years later that he found fresh inspiration, in the Beatles, bought a guitar for $lB from a pawnshop and taught himself to play by listening to records alone in his room for hours on end. He was a loner at his Catholic junior school, a daydreamer, and popular with neither the other kids nor the teachers, who were nuns. Once, one of the nuns stuffed him into a waste bin under her desk, saying that was where he belonged. Things were no better at high school, where his poor academic performance dashed his parent’s hopes of him becoming a lawyer. He was told not to attend graduation day because a teacher and his fellow students felt his long hair was disrespectful. At college, it was even worse. His solitariness made him so unpopular that his fellow students drew up a petition asking him to leave. He was happy to oblige, and devote himself to the guitar. Springsteen believes the early setbacks helped him persevere with his music when the going was tough. “I never got used to expecting success,” he says. “I got used to failing. Once you do that, the rest is real easy. It took a lot of the pressure off. I just said, ’Hell, I’m a loser. I don’t have to worry about anything.’ “But that’s not the same as giving up. You keep trying, but you don’t count on things,” Bruce says. At 16, he won an audition with his first band, The Castiles, because the leader had a crush on his sister, Virginia, but they told him to come back when he could play some songs. That night, he went back with seven songs he had learned off the radio that day, and was signed. Over the next several years, he played with a succession of heavy-metal bands before forming The Bruce Springsteen Band — which soon broke up. Drafted to fight in Vietnam — where a member of The Castiles had been killed — he escaped conscription partly because of injuries from a motorbike accident. i To make sure of being de-

clared unfit to serve, he also claimed to be homosexual, and that ever since he had seen his father kill a duck for Christmas he went crazy every time he saw a duck. If he saw a duck on the battlefield, he said, he might go crazy and start killing officers. He heard no more from the draft board. Years later, possibly suffering an attack of conscience, he raised $lOO,OOO for Vietnam veterans with a benefit concert. His big break came in 1972, when he was signed by John Hammond, of CBS Records. It was Hammond who, years earlier, had discovered Bob Dylan, who also became a multimillionaire singing anthems for the under-privileged, as well as Billie Holliday and Aretha Franklin. In 1975, his third album, “Born To Run,” was a. massive success in America, but made little impact elsewhere. His British tour that year was a flop. When he saw posters announcing, “At last London is ready for Bruce Springsteen” — which it obviously was not — he was so incensed he tore them down. For the next 10 years, he had only a cult following outside America until his hit single, “Dancing In The Dark,” in 1985. His five-album boxed set, “Bruce Springsteen And The E

Street Band Live — 1975-85,” was released the following year, and became the best-selling boxed set in Britain of all time. Today, with his fortune estimated at around $l2O million, much is made of his attachment to his working-class roots. He insists his favourite relaxation is still drinking beer and playing pool and pinball with mates from before he was famous. There are no Rolls-Royces, Porsches or Ferraris lined up in his driveway. He makes well-publicised donations of thousands of dollars a time to help the poor, homeless and jobless in every town he plays. He has given away nearly $4 million in the last two years. He sings free to raise money for unions and charities, and has played concerts against apartheid, against nuclear power, and for striking steelworkers. Against all that, his critics point out that his handouts are little more than loose change. They compare his support of unions with the fact that he will not let his own workers join a union. Against the spartan lifestyle he lives in public, can be set his two luxury homes — a $1 million Manhattan mansion, and a spacious five-bedroom house in the Hollywood Hills he bought recently for $3 million, with another $1 million set aside for renovations.

And there is the matter of his wife. In the tradition of rock superstars, when he married three years ago, he chose not a girl-next-door type from back home, but a stunning top model, Julianne Phillips. She is 10 years younger and from a completely different background — a comfortable middle-class family and the sophisticated world of a top New York cover girl earning $2OOO a day. But does any of this really matter? His millions of fans will forgive it all, and more. He has, after all, resisted many of the temptations to which rock stars often succumb. He drinks little, does not smoke, has never taken drugs, and has not been in a sex scandal. He saves himself for his incredibly energetic stage act, which lasts from three to four hours, during which he sheds up to 2.3 kg from his muscular, 178 cm frame. Then he eats three meals and sleeps round the clock. “Most of all I want people to have a good night out, to forget their worries and enjoy themselves,” Bruce says. “They can dance a bit, have some fun, sing along and have a good time with their date.” He sends the crowd home smiling, feeling they know him. And there is surely nothing wrong with that.