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mattycakesbooks's review against another edition
3.0
Obviously, if you're reading this, you're going to be a fairly huge Bruce fan, so in that sense, it's hard to really dislike this. That said, I found myself kind of frustrated and annoyed at the end of the book. A few years ago, at the beginning of the Wrecking Ball tour, I read a New Yorker article that I feel got a little bit deeper into the musician's personal life and psyche than this book, at a solid 460 pages longer did (here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/07/30/120730fa_fact_remnick?currentPage=all).
I know this is a big task, and I know that a lot of it depends on the access he has to his sources. But this book seems hamstrung by its promotional line, that it was the first biography to have Bruce's cooperation. It just doesn't go deep enough for that to be the case. There are times that Bruce being a bit of a dick and prima donna sneak through, but he excuses them. He actively defends Bruce against negative reviews published a decade ago. He barely touches on Bruce's serious mental illnesses until the last chapter, and when he mentions a brief bout of depression in the early 90's, he says friends used the word "suicidal" and then doesn't expand.
The relationships between him, Jon Landau, and Steve Van Zandt seem relatively well fleshed out as well, but it was strange reading a book where both Clarence and Patti seemed like peripheral characters. It was particularly frustrating because of how much detail each recording session got. We're familiar with his music, we want to hear about him.
It's possible I'm being too hard on this book. It just seems like it missed a lot of the stuff that I was looking for when I bought a Bruce Springsteen biography.
I know this is a big task, and I know that a lot of it depends on the access he has to his sources. But this book seems hamstrung by its promotional line, that it was the first biography to have Bruce's cooperation. It just doesn't go deep enough for that to be the case. There are times that Bruce being a bit of a dick and prima donna sneak through, but he excuses them. He actively defends Bruce against negative reviews published a decade ago. He barely touches on Bruce's serious mental illnesses until the last chapter, and when he mentions a brief bout of depression in the early 90's, he says friends used the word "suicidal" and then doesn't expand.
The relationships between him, Jon Landau, and Steve Van Zandt seem relatively well fleshed out as well, but it was strange reading a book where both Clarence and Patti seemed like peripheral characters. It was particularly frustrating because of how much detail each recording session got. We're familiar with his music, we want to hear about him.
It's possible I'm being too hard on this book. It just seems like it missed a lot of the stuff that I was looking for when I bought a Bruce Springsteen biography.
egumeny's review against another edition
4.0
I enjoyed it, though it felt a bit rushed at the end and Carlin's prose wasn't always the clearest. All in all, though, pretty solid.
marie_gg's review against another edition
3.0
http://mariesbookgarden.blogspot.com/2013/02/bruce.html
Somehow, I'm not sure why, I was late to the Bruce Springsteen train. I knew his more popular songs and liked them, but it wasn't until I went to my first Springsteen concert with my teenage son last November that I became a convert.
Peter Ames Carlin, a writer for the Oregonian and author of several musician bios, interviewed Bruce and his colleagues and pored over the albums, articles, and interviews to create this exhaustive (and some say, exhausting) biography. At times Carlin uses sentence fragments, which I'm not crazy about, and he does tend to go on at times...perhaps a more diehard Springsteen fan would have gotten more out of the long stories about various concert tours and people who helped him along the way. It was interesting to read about how Bruce made it big, gradually and with a lot of hard work and a loyal fan base in New Jersey.
One reviewer (and local New Jerseyite) wrote about how this book was book-ended by death...starting out with the childhood death of Bruce's aunt, which affected his whole family forevermore, and ending with the death of his beloved friends and bandmates Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons. Reading about Clarence's death (and Bruce bringing his guitar into the hospital room to sing Clarence out during the last 3 hours of his life) brought me to tears, as did the poignant description of how Bruce's dad asked him to sit on his lap one night (as an adult) after a lifetime of conflict and tense silence between the two of them.
I'm still amazed that I'm a Springsteen newbie. He stands for so much of what I believe in. From representing the common American working person to singing a song for the movie "Philadelphia," before most of Hollywood became gay friendly, from engaging with and advocating for Vietnam vets and Amnesty International, to continuing to sing about the underprivileged even after he hit it big, and for showcasing a local charity at each of his concerts...he is a strong voice of social justice.
Carlin's book does not paint him as a perfect man...he can be narcissistic, demanding and selfish. He hurt the members of his band when he cut them off for several years to pursue his solo work. He has exacting standards for everyone who works with him.
But he is clearly a musical genius, prolific in his song writing and creative in his musical arrangements, and a true poet of the people.
The one thing the book was lacking was more about his family. Carlin writes about the birth of Bruce and Patti's first son, but doesn't go beyond that. I'm guessing that Bruce asked Carlin to keep his family out of the book...but it would have made this bio much more comprehensive. We hear about his initial relationship with Patti, but in later years not much.
Now I'm going to go listen to the albums painstakingly described in the book, and they will mean much more to me.
Somehow, I'm not sure why, I was late to the Bruce Springsteen train. I knew his more popular songs and liked them, but it wasn't until I went to my first Springsteen concert with my teenage son last November that I became a convert.
Peter Ames Carlin, a writer for the Oregonian and author of several musician bios, interviewed Bruce and his colleagues and pored over the albums, articles, and interviews to create this exhaustive (and some say, exhausting) biography. At times Carlin uses sentence fragments, which I'm not crazy about, and he does tend to go on at times...perhaps a more diehard Springsteen fan would have gotten more out of the long stories about various concert tours and people who helped him along the way. It was interesting to read about how Bruce made it big, gradually and with a lot of hard work and a loyal fan base in New Jersey.
One reviewer (and local New Jerseyite) wrote about how this book was book-ended by death...starting out with the childhood death of Bruce's aunt, which affected his whole family forevermore, and ending with the death of his beloved friends and bandmates Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons. Reading about Clarence's death (and Bruce bringing his guitar into the hospital room to sing Clarence out during the last 3 hours of his life) brought me to tears, as did the poignant description of how Bruce's dad asked him to sit on his lap one night (as an adult) after a lifetime of conflict and tense silence between the two of them.
I'm still amazed that I'm a Springsteen newbie. He stands for so much of what I believe in. From representing the common American working person to singing a song for the movie "Philadelphia," before most of Hollywood became gay friendly, from engaging with and advocating for Vietnam vets and Amnesty International, to continuing to sing about the underprivileged even after he hit it big, and for showcasing a local charity at each of his concerts...he is a strong voice of social justice.
Carlin's book does not paint him as a perfect man...he can be narcissistic, demanding and selfish. He hurt the members of his band when he cut them off for several years to pursue his solo work. He has exacting standards for everyone who works with him.
But he is clearly a musical genius, prolific in his song writing and creative in his musical arrangements, and a true poet of the people.
The one thing the book was lacking was more about his family. Carlin writes about the birth of Bruce and Patti's first son, but doesn't go beyond that. I'm guessing that Bruce asked Carlin to keep his family out of the book...but it would have made this bio much more comprehensive. We hear about his initial relationship with Patti, but in later years not much.
Now I'm going to go listen to the albums painstakingly described in the book, and they will mean much more to me.
jerzgrl626's review against another edition
5.0
I loved this so much! I thought it was very comprehensive and gave me a look at many sides of Bruce that I never would have expected of him. My favorite part was learning the meaning of all the songs- they have now taken on a totally different sound for me after reading this!
eroston's review
A passionate, thoughtful overview, with subject access, particularly for the probably nine other people like me who never knew anything about or listened to Bruce Springsteen.
princesszinza's review
2.0
Bruce Springsteen was the man who introduced me to rock music. I got Born to Run when I was 12 in 1975 and was the biggest Bruce fan ever until he disappointed me with Born in the U.S.A. in the early 1980's. I enjoyed reading about Bruce's early years. I learned a lot from this book that I didn't know before about Bruce's dysfunctional childhood. I didn't like the later part of the book as much. Peter Carlin's analysis of Bruce's lp's doesn't jive with my thoughts at all. He doesn't even mention "Lost in the Flood" off Greetings from Asbury Park, one of Bruce's most interesting early songs! His loving defense of Mike Appel's actions regarding Bruce's contracts also did not ring true to me. Overall his characterization of Bruce's personality and career was overly fawning (and this is from a huge fan) and felt flat. I would recommend the first chapters and would skip the rest.
hungryheart87's review
4.0
A brilliant book. Would've been 5 stars but I felt the mid-1980s to present day were rushed.
adamz24's review against another edition
4.0
Most rock bios I've read have a pretty simple formula: tell a bunch of outrageous rock n' roll stories, and add some element of reflection and personal epiphany along the way, with a cursory examination of the artist's/band's music. But you can't do that with Bruce, a guy who drinks little, has never smoked or done any drugs, whose most outrageous antics seem to have been limited to onstage anger at an ex-girlfriend's presence in the audience, controversial politicking, and some instances of Bruce being less jovial on stage than usual. So what emerges is something more like a literary biography, tracing Springsteen's development and changes from 'new Dylan' folkie to street/boardwalk poet clad in Converse sneakers to social commentator inspired in part by Woody Guthrie, Flannery O'Connor, and John Ford movies to rock n' roll superstar to folkie recluse again to the Springsteen rocking the world's stages right now, the guy who at present seems to finally be comfortable with every iteration of himself and his public persona, and unusually committed to his chosen role of rocker and poet committed to the values of empathy, connectedness, community, and belief it turns out he's been committed to all along. I don't know what I would've thought of Springsteen if I was my age in the 70s or 80s. I know that now I think he's genuinely one of the most inspiring and important popular artists around, and has developed a body of writing (in his song lyrics) as diverse and interesting as any of the important American novelists of the last thirty or forty years.
Carlin's bio reminds me more of Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, the recent David Foster Wallace bio, than any rock bio I've read. It's just a book that tries to understand the public and private person behind a non-ironized, totally sincere and committed approach to addressing serious cultural issues and what it means to be a human being in a world like ours. Both books necessarily tackle their subjects' depression and sadness and personal and relationship troubles, but still focus more heavily on the work. The difference is that Springsteen, unlike Wallace, is hard to even make into a tragic, romantic figure, and hard to find any surprising anecdotes on. Springsteen, for all his riches, really does seem to be a regular guy, or at least a guy who's managed to put on a convincing act, maybe, and so this book's personal aspect is of little gossipy interest to anyone who isn't already a Springsteen fan. Perhaps its greatest value in that respect is in demonstrating what many of us suspected to be Springsteen's nature: he is a pretty ordinary outsider who struggles with depression and loneliness, who sees an ugly real world and an ideal dream world, and tries to find a psychic compromise rooted in the real humanity and compassion he's seen in the everyday folk he never quite lost touch with, tries to point to a way out, while never taking any injustice lightly.
It's not the kind of book that'll make somebody who isn't interested in Bruce magically interested in his writing or his music, and it contains no surprises whatsoever, but it's a fine bio, a good summary of a guy whose role in our cultural world is far from done, whose simple but incredibly sincere and serious and honest message seems to find a new appreciation and audience every time it seems he might have become totally irrelevant and historical. That he matters, on such deep and personal levels, to as many people as he does forty years after his first album emerged surely is testament to his importance as an artist. That he continues to add new fans, to inspire present-day rockers' ethos, is testament to his being something more.
Carlin's bio reminds me more of Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, the recent David Foster Wallace bio, than any rock bio I've read. It's just a book that tries to understand the public and private person behind a non-ironized, totally sincere and committed approach to addressing serious cultural issues and what it means to be a human being in a world like ours. Both books necessarily tackle their subjects' depression and sadness and personal and relationship troubles, but still focus more heavily on the work. The difference is that Springsteen, unlike Wallace, is hard to even make into a tragic, romantic figure, and hard to find any surprising anecdotes on. Springsteen, for all his riches, really does seem to be a regular guy, or at least a guy who's managed to put on a convincing act, maybe, and so this book's personal aspect is of little gossipy interest to anyone who isn't already a Springsteen fan. Perhaps its greatest value in that respect is in demonstrating what many of us suspected to be Springsteen's nature: he is a pretty ordinary outsider who struggles with depression and loneliness, who sees an ugly real world and an ideal dream world, and tries to find a psychic compromise rooted in the real humanity and compassion he's seen in the everyday folk he never quite lost touch with, tries to point to a way out, while never taking any injustice lightly.
It's not the kind of book that'll make somebody who isn't interested in Bruce magically interested in his writing or his music, and it contains no surprises whatsoever, but it's a fine bio, a good summary of a guy whose role in our cultural world is far from done, whose simple but incredibly sincere and serious and honest message seems to find a new appreciation and audience every time it seems he might have become totally irrelevant and historical. That he matters, on such deep and personal levels, to as many people as he does forty years after his first album emerged surely is testament to his importance as an artist. That he continues to add new fans, to inspire present-day rockers' ethos, is testament to his being something more.