Man, the dude can write. This shouldn’t come as a surprise given decades of rock and roll poetry blazed onto the zeitgeist, but … the dude can write. The riff on Elvis’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show alone is worth the price of admission. I’m still pretty early in the book, still in the origin stories, but he made me feel all over again what it was like to be a young teenager in America when rock and roll blew everything wide open. He’s a little older, and was across the Hudson in Jersey while I was in Manhattan, but I felt it, I was there too, and he nails that sense of sweet disruption and limitless possibility that so many of us of a certain age shared, and some still do.
I’m not even much of a Springsteen junkie. I like a lot of his work but much of his catalog just doesn’t do much for me. This book reaches well beyond that. His writing is generous and wistful, funny, sad, and accurate, cultural archaeology as well as personal memoir. Whether you’re a Boss fan or not, you should check it out.
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