April 26, 1998—In Belmont, Calif., across the
continent from the state that confined his spirit for years, Douglas
Springsteen, a onetime WII Army driver, mill worker, cab driver and prison guard, died of cancer.
He left a wife, two daughters, and a rock ‘n’ roller son whose life was
overshadowed by their love-hate relationship: Bruce Springsteen.
The 1978 album by The Boss, Darkness on the Edge of Town,
marked a departure from three prior studio LPs not merely because he had gained
his freedom from manager Mike Appel and was concentrating on shorter, more radio-friendly
tunes, but also because he began to mine more insistently from his own life and
environment. Two songs from the album, though they did not receive as much
radio play as the singles "Badlands" and “Prove It All Night,” reflected his relationship with his
father.
“Factory,” slow and mournful, trembles with
ambivalence about the cost of Douglas Springsteen’s work: His job may give him “life,”
by allowing him to support his family, but at the end of the day, when the workers
leave “with death in their eyes,” there’s a clear sense of foreboding: “Somebody’s
gonna get hurt tonight.” It signals Bruce's eventual role as the poet laureate of
the working class.
“Adam Raised a Cain,” filled with a guitar as angry as a buzzsaw, accompanied lyrics as raw as any he had written to date
(“Well, Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain,/Now he walks these
empty halls looking for something to blame”). The lyrics not only allude to the
father-and-son tale of Genesis, but also to a fictional and cinematic retelling
of it: East of Eden.
Over the years, Springsteen would relate to
audiences stories about his father sitting in the house with the lights off,
silently smoking and drinking. The image recalls nothing so much as the opening
of Carly Simon’s first major hit, “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be”:
“My
father sits at night with no lights on
His
cigarette glows in the dark.
The
living room is still;
I
walk by, no remark.”
In
a prior post, I discussed how the
father of the songstress, publisher Richard Simon, came to this pass of depression
and withdrawal: marginalization after his company was acquired, and his growing
awareness that his wife had taken a youthful companion for their son as her own
lover.
The
Springsteens didn’t share the Simons’ upper-middle-class milieu, and certainly not their psychosexual dynamics, but they were
just as deeply affected by the problems of their patriarch. Bruce engaged in constant clashes with his father,
especially about his hair and guitar.
Hearing his father often complaining about “My f----n' boss,”
Bruce told promoter John Scher in the early ‘70s, according to a 1998 article
by Daily News writer David Hinckley,
that someday he would be “the f---n’
boss.” And so it proved.
Like Simon, Springsteen felt unmoored at the height
of his fame, even considering suicide at one point. Last summer, in an interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker,
he revealed that one reason why he avoided drugs was because he “worried that
he would not escape the thread of mental instability that ran through his
family.” (The hard factory life was only one factor that weighed on Doug
Springsteen: he was haunted for years by the death of his five-year-old sister,
who had been hit by a truck in Freehold, NJ.) Remnick suggests that Doug
Springsteen was, in fact, bipolar.
In
the late 1970s, Springsteen and his taciturn father reconciled. That emotional movement
was captured beautifully in “Independence Day,” from the 1980 album The River. (“Papa now I know the things
you wanted that you could not say.”) At the time of Douglas’ death Bruce issued a
statement that he felt “lucky to have been so close to my dad as I became a man
and a father myself.”
“Death
ends a life, but it does not end a relationship,” observes Gene Garrison, the father-troubled
middle-aged professor played by Gene Hackman, in the 1970 film I Never Sang for My Father. Assessing
his own successes and failures as husband and father, Bruce Springsteen would
surely endorse that sentiment. He and his father had been “prisoners of love”
in his youth. In time, the son would make his fellow prisoner “the most famous
civilian father in the history of rock 'n' roll,” in Hinckley’s words.
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