Persona Studies 2019, vol. 5, no. 1
17
BRILLIANT DISGUISES: PERSONA,
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND THE MAGIC OF
RETROSPECTION IN BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN’S
LATE CAREER
RIC HAR D ELL IOTT
ABSTRACT
Popular musicians with long careers provide rich source material for the study of
persona, authenticity, endurance and the maintenance (and reinvention) of significant
bodies of work. The songs of successful artists create a soundtrack not only to their own
lives, but also to those of their audiences, and to the times in which they were created and
to which they bore witness. The work of singers who continue to perform after several
decades can be heard in terms of their ‘late voice’ (Elliott 2015a), a concept that has
potentially useful insights for the study of musical persona. This article exploits this
potential by considering how musical persona is de- and re-constructed in performance. I
base my articulation of the relationship between persona, life-writing and retrospective
narrativity on a close reading of two late texts by Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run, the
autobiography he published in 2016, and Springsteen on Broadway, the audiovisual record
of a show that ran from October 2017 to December 2018. In these texts, Springsteen uses
the metaphor of the ‘magic trick’ as a framing device to shuttle between the roles of
autobiographical myth-breaker and lyrical protagonist. He repeatedly highlights his songs
as fictions that bear little relation to his actual life, while also showing awareness that, as
often happens with popular song, he has been mapped onto his characters in ways that
prove vital for their sense of authenticity. Yet Springsteen appears to be aiming for a
different kind of authenticity with these late texts, by supplementing the persona developed
in his earlier career with an older, wiser, more playful narrator. I appropriate
Springsteen’s ‘magic trick’ metaphor to highlight the magic of retrospection and the
magical formation of the life narrative as an end-driven process.
KEY WORDS
Musical Persona; Autobiography; Narrative; Authenticity; Late Voice
INTRODUCTION
At the start of the two-minute spoken introduction to his Broadway show, as streamed on
Netflix from 16 December 2018, Bruce Springsteen provides a litany of “elements that will come
in handy” for anyone who finds themselves “face-to-face with eighty thousand screaming rock
’n’ roll fans … waiting for you to pull something out of your hat … something that, before the
faithful were gathered here today, was just a song-fuelled rumour” (Springsteen on Broadway
2018, henceforth SOB). It is a routine that enables the veteran musician—who was 68 at the
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time the show was filmed—to do at least two things straightaway. Firstly, he breaks the ice by
commenting on what is happening at that moment: an individual introducing himself to two
expectant audiences, one in the theatre and the other on the other side of a screen. Secondly, he
marks this event as different to those arena shows for which he has long been famous. The
theatre audience is removed from the arena concert by the intimacy of the event, which is taking
place—as it would for its 236-show run—at Manhattan’s Walter Kerr Theatre, a venue with a
capacity of less than 1000. The Netflix audience, meanwhile, is removed from the live
experience altogether, experiencing the show as captured by director Thom Zimny and
mediated through film production and the streaming platform. This difference between
Springsteen as stadium rock star and theatre monologist finds a parallel in a series of myth-
busting anecdotes that make up SOB and which previously found voice in Springsteen’s (2016a)
autobiography Born to Run (henceforth BTR).i The introduction to the Broadway show is based
on the two pages that make up the foreword to the autobiography, albeit re-ordered and
rephrased to work more directly as speech.ii
As any orator knows, what works as written prose needs adapting for direct speech if it
is to be affective and memorable for speaker and audience. However, the changes Springsteen
makes to his BTR script for SOB are less surprising than the continuities from one medium to
the other. Common to both is the framing mechanism of the magic trick, alluded to in SOB by the
line about pulling “something out of your hat” and more explicitly in what follows: “I’m here
tonight to provide proof of life to that ever elusive, never completely believable … ‘us’. That’s my
magic trick. And like all good magic tricks, it begins with a setup” (SOB 2018). The book’s
narrator is inaudible and invisible (though some home-sourced photographs are included at the
end of the book); the audiobook adds the author’s speaking voice; the Netflix special adds the
visual presence of the body; the Broadway show provides the aura of physical presence: all do
their magic tricks in ways particular to their medium but all are involved in the work of
dismantling, maintaining or rebuilding the “song-filled rumour”. This raises questions as to
whether Springsteen is creating a new persona or adding layers to existing personas, an
ambiguity that gives these late narratives a considerable part of their appeal and which will be
at the heart of this article.
Vital to the narrative of SOB is the inclusion of sixteen songs drawn from across
Springsteen’s performing career, each interspersed with or interrupted by a series of
monologues drawn from BTR. Springsteen uses the “magic trick” at the start and close of both
the book and the Broadway show. In the former, it appears in the foreword and again at the end
of the final chapter (Springsteen 2016a, p. 505), ahead of one final anecdote; in SOB, it is
mentioned at the outset and again in the monologue that precedes Dancing in the Dark, not
quite the last song of the show but close to the end. This device allows Springsteen to shuttle
between the roles of life-writer, myth-buster and lyrical protagonist, repeatedly highlighting his
songs as fictions that bear little relation to his actual life, while also acknowledging how he has
been mapped onto the characters of his songs in ways that prove vital for their sense of
authenticity. At the beginning of BTR and SOB he offers the first of many confessions: “I come
from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I. By
twenty, no race-car-driving rebel, I was a guitar player on the streets of Asbury Park and
already a member in good standing amongst those who ‘lie’ in service of the truth ... artists with
a small ‘a’” (Springsteen 2016a, p. xi). Yet, as we soon learn from these late projects, Springsteen
is far from giving up on authenticity, supplementing the persona developed in his recorded
work with an older, wiser narrator focussed on the late depiction of life, love and loss. He
repeatedly presents his life as the thing he set out to achieve, able to do so with the useful and
secure knowledge that he has achieved it and that he and everyone experiencing his narrative
knows it; this is all part of the facade, part of the “magic trick”.
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The retrospection allowed by lateness and successful ageing is key here. Popular
musicians with long careers provide rich source material for the study of persona, authenticity,
endurance and the maintenance (and reinvention) of significant bodies of work. Successful
artists’ songs create a soundtrack not only to their own lives, but also to those of their
audiences, and to the times in which they were created and to which they bore witness. The
work of singers who continue to perform after several decades can be heard in terms of their
“late voice” (Elliott 2013, 2015a, 2015b), a concept that refers to chronology, vocal conviction,
afterlife, retrospection, and the writing of age, experience, lateness and loss into song texts. In
this article, I explore those aspects of lateness most pertinent to considering the musical
persona, especially as it is de- and re-constructed in retrospective, autobiographical
performance. In doing so, I present the multiplicity identified above as crucial to Springsteen’s
persona. The process whereby he simultaneously deconstructs and maintains his various
personas provides a vital component to what I will call the ‘affective pact’ that he shares with
his audience. My main primary sources here are Springsteen’s autobiography and his Broadway
show, though I also make use of interviews the artist has given to journalists and to some of the
now voluminous critical writing devoted to him. In selecting from this body of work, I
emphasise a set of recent texts that cover Springsteen’s later career.iii
I proceed from two assumptions that are worth stating now. The first is general: that
audiences are aware of and invested in musicians’ personas. Indeed, they are more than
invested, in that they play a vital part in maintaining these personas (Auslander 2004, 2006)
and in using them to authenticate their (the audiences’) own personas. My second assumption is
particular to this case study: that Springsteen’s audience is knowledgeable about his history. It
could be argued that an audience with a less developed understanding might still wish to
engage with these works and there is evidence from online commentators on review sites that
people who profess not to like Springsteen’s music find his autobiography interesting precisely
because of its attempt at deconstructing his persona. However, the inclusion of so many myth-
busting comments by Springsteen in these texts, the repeated quotation of these by reviewers,
and the reactions by his Broadway audience to these comments, make a strong case for an artist
and an audience who share a body of knowledge and/or assumptions that are based on the
successful development of a set of musical personas over a sustained period of time. Combined,
the two assumptions shared above mean that, even when I am presenting Springsteen as a
“text” to be read, I see such reading as a productive act, recognising that Springsteen is
producing his persona(s) in collaboration with the reader-producers who are his audience. The
persona is both the thing that Springsteen is performing and an object of exchange and co-
constitution circulated among a network of actors (Latour 2005). If “personas are the material
forms of public selfhood” (Marshall, Moore & Barbour 2015, p. 290), then the circulation of
persona-objects is how these forms get materialised.
It is worth underlining that I am writing about a musician who has successfully
maintained a career over decades , which may challenge some existing accounts of fame and
celebrity applied to musicians’ careers. Pop music careers have, for example, been presented in
terms of “dissipation” (Marshall 2006, p. 217) or as a process in which an artist moves into fame
as “a career in itself” (Turner 2014, p. 8). As a challenge to this, it is useful to consider the
growing interest in long careers in which stars are seen as moving impressively into late style
(Gardner 2012; Jennings 2012; Elliott 2015a, 2015b, 2015c). Dissipation may still be a key
aspect of popular musicians’ careers but it is far from being the final word in the story as we
become more aware of the waxing, waning and second comings of pop careers across the life
courses of artists and their audiences. Similarly, while some musicians who perform into later
life may “freeze a popular persona” to re-present it on the “oldies concert circuits” (Auslander
2004, p. 9), others are notable for reinventing and reframing their careers. In BTR, Springsteen
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narrates the concern he felt over his “midnineties drift” (2016a, p. 398), but this is only one
episode of many more and he can look back from the retrospective space of autobiography to
see this as a precursor to “the second half of my work life”, which he dates to the composition of
1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad (Springsteen 2016a, p. 389).
Persona
Discussions about popular musicians’ personas, especially for musicians considered over
extended periods, are often guided by two dominant categories: the artist as shape-shifter
and/or the artist as consistent, layered self. The former category tends to focus on the radical
reconfigurations or “refractions” (Banauch 2015) evident in artists who have adopted several
distinct personas; typical candidates include Bob Dylan, David Bowie and Madonna (Scobie
1991; Banauch 2015; Fouz-Hernández & Jarman-Ivens 2004). The latter category tends to focus
on the gradual enriching of the persona over time, via layers of experience that build on a solid
core (Simmons 2013; Jennings 2012; Gardner 2012; Elliott 2013, 2015a, 2015c) and several
recent accounts of Springsteen follow this model (Carlin 2012, Colombati 2017, Hiatt 2019). It
would be a mistake, however, to think of these categories as exclusive binaries; the shape-
shifting aspect of a star might be the most consistent thing about them, while the seeming
consistency of the gradually layered self relies on the accumulation of multiple selves, some of
which might be as varied as the shifting light across a landscape. We should instead consider a
dynamic or dialectic tension between shape-shifting and layering, and indeed some of the
above-cited studies have done this for Dylan, Bowie and Madonna, along with other studies that
highlight consistency across the life course of these artists (Marshall 2007; Elliott 2015a;
McMullan 2019; Watson & Railton 2012). Joanna Demers (2017, p. 27) has even suggested that
“the defining trait of [Bowie’s] career was less his rapid and frequent stylistic metamorphoses
than the consistency of his underlying persona” (see also Auslander 2004, p. 7).
This dialectical tension between shape-shifting and layering can be found in the
personas associated with Bruce Springsteen. While it is often noted that he has maintained a
consistent, if increasingly layered, self that dispenses with the aliases and pseudonyms of near-
contemporaries such as Dylan (see, Gross 2016, for example), Springsteen has also been
presented as an artist with “multiple selves” (Cologne-Brookes 2018, pp. 140–54). There have
even been comparisons with Bowie, such as when a Guardian review of SOB reports that “Bruce
Springsteen is as much a contrived character as Ziggy Stardust – a stadium-filling exaggeration
of Springsteen’s troubled factory-worker father – and that we should be wary of treating what
he says as gospel” (Petridis 2018). Writing about Bowie’s 1973 cover of Springsteen’s Growin’
Up, Chris O’Leary (2015, p. 310) suggests a recognition by Bowie of “a kindred spirit, a fellow
self-mythologist whose instincts were theatrical … Both were labelled magpies and imitators by
critics, both would age into curators and revivalists”. Springsteen himself has noted the
multiplicity of personas he inhabits, sharing this self-objectification with audiences at concerts
and in interviews. It is a quality he alludes to frequently in BTR and in interviews following the
publication of the book. Discussing the creation of his onstage persona with Terry Gross in
2016, he recognised it as a site of desire and identification:
People see you on stage and, yeah, I’d want to be that guy. I want to be that guy myself
very often, you know? I had plenty of days where I’d go, “Man, I wish I could be that
guy.” And there’s a big difference between what you see on stage and then my general
daily, my daily existence. (Gross 2016)
As Marshall and Barbour (2015, p. 2) note in the inaugural issue of Persona Studies, the notion of
the persona can be traced back to the Greek use of wooden masks on stage that allowed “actors
to play more than one role” while also creating the possibility for “a univocal identity” when
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different actors wore identical masks (for example, in the chorus). If we relate this dual
possibility to the dialectic of shape-shifting and layering, we may understand how an artist such
as Springsteen (or Bowie, Dylan or Madonna) could seem to be many different personas (by
changing the masks) or the same persona (by maintaining the same mask while the person
behind it changed). This accords with the idea of persona as “the relative and strategic posture
of different versions of the self” (Marshall & Barbour 2015, p. 4). In Springsteen’s case, these
have taken the form of nicknames and honorifics bestowed upon the artist over his career: the
Boss, the Bard of Asbury Park, the New Dylan (see Streight & Harde 2010 for these last two) and
the seeming non-persona of the name chanted by audiences in stadia across the world: Bruce.
Peter Ames Carlin provides a prologue to his 2012 biography, Bruce, in which he justifies his use
of the simple first name term as the one that audiences use to build rapport with the artist. At
the same time, he notes that “the Boss” started as an insider nickname and still holds that status
for those in Springsteen’s inner circle: “one of the privileges of being a Boss is controlling who
can and can’t call you that” (Carlin 2012, p. x). Carlin also notes the “Bruce-bestowed
nicknames” given to Springsteen’s bandmates and associates: “Southside [Johnny], Miami [Steve
Van Zandt], Albany Al, and so on” (Carlin 2012, p. x ).
Then there are the different roles that Springsteen has played in his fans’ lives.
Reflecting on the evidence amassed in studies of Springsteen fans, such as Daniel Cavicchi’s
Tramps Like Us (1998) and in online resources such as backstreets.com, Irwin Streight and
Roxanne Harde (2010, p. 7) write that the artist “is adored and venerated beyond rock star
status, as would be a spiritual master, a pop philosopher, a revolutionary, a head of state, or a
saint”. Gavin Cologne-Brookes (2018, p. 141) notes the effect of the success of Born in the U.S.A.
on the maintenance of Springsteen’s personas:
By 1984 Bruce Springsteen had become ‘Bruce Springsteen.’ In the public eye, he was a
postmodernist rock star with no actual heartbeat or voiding of the bowels: a cartoonish
figure, epitomized by the lip-synced ‘Dancing in the Dark’ video, the Action Man pose on
the album’s inside cover, and—for an example of mass-media by-products—the sepia-
tinted, garish cover of the bio-catalogue Bruce Springsteen: Blinded by the Light (1985),
where our hero, in superimposed, photo-brushed Technicolor, gazes askance a tequila
sunglow and resembles a 1950s B-movie pirate matinee idol.
Cologne-Brookes’ study recognises the changes that are wrought upon artists’ personas as they
encounter shifts in fame and fortune, as they continue to try and produce art in the face of this
and—as Springsteen told a reporter in 1998—to not let celebrity “blur and obscure the story
that [they’re] interested in telling” (cited in Cologne-Brookes 2018, p. 143). Two decades later,
Springsteen evidently felt the need to engage with this in new ways by making that blurring the
very story he was interested in telling. BTR and SOB attest to this need or desire and also help us
to consider the ongoing unfolding of Springsteen’s persona over time and how this relates to
authenticity. As Richard Peterson (1997) demonstrates regarding genre, the extent to which
authenticity can be thought of as a “renewable resource” is intimately connected to what is
considered credible at different historical moments. So too with individual careers and
authenticity across the life course: the authentic Springsteen of 2018 needs to be different to the
authentic Springsteen of the 1990s, which in turn was different to that of the 1970s and 1980s.
This is equally the case with representations. The sepia tinted photograph that Cologne-Brookes
highlights tells us as much about graphic design choices of the 1980s as it does about fame and
persona. In another vein, the emphasis on celebratory life-writing found in the canonical
literature on Springsteen (Marsh 1979 and 1987 being the most cited examples) seems to
require a critical counterpoint that provides a more nuanced account of the life course and
which considers the cultural milieu in which Springsteen’s late career unfolds. It is important
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that contemporary biographical narratives (such as those cited in this article) feel right for right
now. This notion of changing authenticity may not always be in line with the expectations of
fans, some of whom might prefer to live with the myths that the older Springsteen seems so
keen to dampen and who might prefer the Boss to get out on the road with the band for some
“proper” concerts. However, it seems as likely that a large proportion of Springsteen’s long-term
fan base will recognise the need for him to articulate his inhabitation of the personas of son,
parent, husband, friend, bandleader, and so on, not least if they are looking for him to reflect
some of their own experiences. What BTR and SOB provide, then, is not just the narration of
these aspects of Springsteen’s persona(s), but the addition of a new (or newly foregrounded)
persona, the wise, “late” storyteller operating retrospectively. What we also witness in
Springsteen’s presentation of wisdom-as-lateness and lateness-as-wisdom is the “heroic” taking
on of the role of self-narrator rather than the one who is narrated by others.iv This can be seen
as an appropriation of one’s “narratability”, a term that Adriana Cavarero (2000) uses to
recognise the latent layers of narrative in all of us, from the unconscious workings of our
memory to the conscious acts of remembering and self-narration. At the same time, in
Springsteen’s case, we should remember that we are dealing with someone who has
consistently taken on the role of hero-narrator. In addition, Springsteen has long acted as one
whose story will have been told or one whose destiny was always to star in a particular kind of
narrative, built on tropes of “pulling out of here to win”, “no surrender”, and a refusal to “give up
living” (lyrics from, respectively, Thunder Road, No Surrender and Racing in the Street).
(Auto)biography
Perhaps one of the defining traits of the popular music persona, in contrast to the personas of
other stars and celebrities, is the ingrained tendency in popular song to conflate the “I” of the
singer with the “I” of the lyric. The processes whereby the opinions, desires and intentions of
lyrical protagonists are confused with those of the composers and performers who bring them
to life is part of the authenticating work done by popular musicians and their fans (Frith 1996;
Auslander 2004). While it is certainly possible to speak of different voices at work in classical
song (see Cone 1974), there is arguably a stronger sense of the mediations at work in that
practice, just as there is with actors on stage or screen. The tendency to read lyrics as
autobiography in popular song leads to a species of interpretative debate amongst its critics and
fans that would seem out of place discussing other arts. It is a confusion that Springsteen relies
upon in BTR, and, to an even greater extent (because it is delivered in a more concentrated
form), in SOB. Among the most reported of the myths he sets out to bust in the book and the
show, are the following (quoted from SOB):
• “I’ve never worked five days a week until right now. [Pause]. 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 [dramatic pause] absolutely no
personal experience.”
• “I made it all up! That’s how good I am.”
• [on revealing that he lives ten minutes from his hometown:] “‘Born to Come Back’:
who’d have bought that shit?”
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These revelations also act as moments of humour in Springsteen’s narrative, something he had
earlier brought out strongly in the audiobook of BTR (Springsteen 2016b) and builds on with
dramatic pauses and shifts in vocal register in SOB. This is all part of the strengthening and
foregrounding of his narrator persona.
As Springsteen repeatedly distances himself, in the autobiography and Broadway show,
from the “I” of the songwriter and performer, a shift of authenticity occurs. We are now asked to
believe that the “I” of the autobiography is the truth-teller, the one who tells it as it really is. At
the same time, the references to the continuation of the magic trick and the occasional detours
into poetic, biblical and literary narrative styles offer clues that we are still under the spell of
some illusion. This illusion does not prevent Springsteen from making pronouncements that
come across like profound experiential insights or lasting truths. In this way, he seems to
exemplify an observation made by the pioneering theorist of autobiography, Philippe Lejeune:
“Telling the truth about the self, constituting the self as complete subject—it is a fantasy. In spite
of the fact that autobiography is impossible, this in no way prevents it from existing” (Lejeune
1989, pp. 131–2). This continuous illusion is perhaps something we already know from pop
artists, because the conflation of singer and lyrical protagonist is similarly an effective fantasy,
part of a set of “thought-fictions” we like to tell ourselves about music (Demers 2017).
By Lejeune’s early definition of autobiography—“Retrospective prose narrative written
by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in
particular the story of his personality” (Lejeune 1989, p. 4)—only BTR, of Springsteen’s late
memory projects, would count as true autobiography. Yet it is possible to recognise what
Lejeune calls “the autobiographical pact” in all the texts being considered here, as well as in
Springsteen’s longstanding practice of storytelling at his concerts. Lejeune’s initial description
of the pact, as set out in an influential article in 1973, is based on the observation that “[i]n
order for there to be autobiography (and personal literature in general), the author, the
narrator, and the protagonist must be identical” (Lejeune 1989, p. 5). v We might wonder how
the autobiographical pact might work for the self-confessed fraudster who narrates his story in
BTR and SOB. Is it worth, for example, making a distinction between a truth presented in the act
of narrating the self and a veridical truth to which it must bear some correspondence but not
always map onto directly? Lejeune does allow for some flexibility in autobiography that
distinguishes the practice from the demands of factuality in third-person biography. As Paul
John Eakin notes, the emphasis in the autobiographical pact given to enunciation (énonciation)
over utterance (énoncé) marks it out from the more veridical demands of biography: “Unlike
biography, where the resemblance of the protagonist to the verifiable facts of the life of the
historical model constitutes the decisive criterion for authenticating its structure of reference,
in autobiography such resemblance is of distinctly secondary importance” (in Lejeune 1989, p.
x). Furthermore, as noted already, popular song—the area in which Springsteen has plied his
trade—has its own kind of autobiographical pact, one which would not necessarily be
recognised by Lejeune (due to his insistence on prose as a condition for autobiography) but in
which, nevertheless, the frequent conflation between the “I” of the songwriter, singer, and
lyrical protagonist suggests its own promises, commitments and affective misreadings.
Springsteen recognises this himself by explicitly comparing his song lyrics with his “real” life in
BTR and SOB and by making explicit mentions of the pact he is making with his audience that
are in keeping with the themes of many of his songs (The Promise, Promised Land, No
Surrender). In BTR, he admits, “I haven’t told you ‘all’ about myself … But in a project like this,
the writer has made one promise: to show the reader his mind. In these pages I’ve tried to do
that” (Springsteen 2016a, p. 501).
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When Terry Gross interviewed Springsteen on the release of BTR, she asked him about
the construction of his stage persona and whether he felt it “[drew] both from the angry and
uninhibited side … and the more inhibited, timid side” that he had shared in his
autobiographical reflections. Springsteen responded by saying:
I think it’s both there … if you just looked at the outside, it’s pretty alpha-male, which is a
little ironic, because that was personally never exactly really me. I think I created my
particular stage persona out of my dad’s life and perhaps I even built it to suit him to
some degree (Gross 2016).
He then alluded to a passage in the book in which he talks about taking on his father’s voice:
Those whose love we wanted but could not get, we emulate. It is dangerous but it makes
us feel closer, gives us an illusion of the intimacy we never had. It stakes our claim upon
that which was rightfully ours but denied. In my twenties, as my song and my story
began to take shape, I searched for the voice I would blend with mine to do the telling. It
is a moment when through creativity and will you can rework, repossess and rebirth the
conflicting voices of your childhood, to turn them into something alive, powerful and
seeking light. I’m a repairman. That’s part of my job. So I, who’d never done a week’s
worth of manual labor in my life (hail, hail rock ’n’ roll!), put on a factory worker’s
clothes, my father’s clothes, and went to work (Springsteen 2016a, p. 414).
This passage, which Springsteen presents in slightly modified form before his SOB performance
of My Father’s House, does a lot of work itself. Not only does it provide a more nuanced version
of the myth-busting that permeates BTR and SOB (I sing about things I have no experience of), it
also provides insights into the construction of persona through intimate connections and
disconnections. Returning to the notion of persona as the wooden mask through which the actor
speaks, is it too fanciful to think of Doug Springsteen as the blank and inert facade brought to
life by his son’s performance and, simultaneously, of the singer-actor’s need of the mask that
was his father’s indifference to make the transformation from introvert to extrovert? Given that
these are the kinds of connections the post-therapy Springsteen himself makes at various points
in the book, in his show and in a number of late interviews, it seems not. As he told Terry Gross,
“most people’s stage personas are created out of the flotsam and jetsam of their internal
geography and they’re trying to create something that solves a series of very complex problems
inside of them or in their history” (Gross 2016).
Another aspect to note here is Springsteen’s reference to Chuck Berry’s song School Days
and its iconic lyric “Hail, hail rock ’n’ roll”; it is a typical recognition by Springsteen of the
workings of identification in popular music. Elsewhere (Elliott 2008) I have discussed the
identification processes in Berry’s song in connection to Louis Althusser’s (1971) account of
ideology and interpellation and Alain Badiou’s (2005) theory of event. Rock ’n’ roll, I have
argued, creates subjects who are faithful to its event and who recognise themselves as
addressees of its hail. Springsteen’s narratives—from his early concert monologues to his recent
autobiographical projects—have long been dedicated to asserting (even preaching) this
recognition. Having recognised himself as a subject and glimpsed his possible destiny in the
event of rock ’n’ roll (Springsteen 2016a, pp. 38–53), he is aware of the ways in which his
audience witness something in the persona he presents to the world. There is much labour
involved in the taking on of this power but, when the transformation is successful, a career is
possible. Berry’s School Days recognises this in its promotion of rock ’n’ roll as an alternative to
school and “regular” work; Springsteen’s disavowal of manual labour, meanwhile, is belied by
his own reputation as a hardworking bandleader who “sweats it out” in ways unmatched by
many of his fellow performers.
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Springsteen makes further use of the intimacy of autobiography by devoting much of
SOB to the accounts provided in BTR of family and friends; we are treated to monologues about
his childhood, his parents, his pre-fame friends, his bandmates, and his wife and children. In the
shows recorded for the Netflix special, Springsteen’s wife Patti Scialfa joined him for two duets,
allowing for a more intimate display of their domestic situation than would be typical at a
Springsteen show. As Marshall and Barbour (2015, p. 6) observe, “the contemporary moment
produces new pushes towards both forms of revelation and forms of performativity that allow
the social to move into the territories of the previously private and intimate”. They are thinking
here of the use of social media, and it is certainly the case that for many musicians—especially
those of a younger generation than Springsteen—the blending of personal and public has
become ever more noticeable, with Twitter-using musicians writing what often amount to
continuous autobiographies. Even aside from social media, however, there is a sense of a new
kind of intimacy being deployed by Springsteen as he reflects on love and relationships with
Scialfa standing beside him. Following their rendition of Tougher than the Rest, Springsteen
speaks about relationships in terms of letting people see our real selves, “allowing others to see
behind our many masks”. This opening of the self to others through love and trust is put into
question again when the couple perform Brilliant Disguise, a song about the uncertainty of
getting behind the mask.vi We are also alerted here to the co-constitution of personas between
actors in a network or other relationship and of brilliant disguises as objects emerging from the
processes of identification when selves present themselves to each other.
Narratives
Towards the end of his autobiography, Springsteen observes, “Writing about yourself is a funny
business. At the end of the day it’s just another story, the story you’ve chosen from the events of
your life” (2016a, 501). This is a reminder of a point made by many theorists of narrative with
regard to the retrospective selection of significant and insignificant events. Hayden White
(1980, p. 14), for example, writes that “every narrative, however seemingly ‘full,’ is constructed
on the basis of a set of events which might have been included but were left out”. What, then, are
the elements chosen for inclusion in Springsteen’s late memory projects? The answer will
depend, of course, on which of the projects we wish to consider. For the purposes of this article,
it is best to begin with the more compact project of SOB. That said, there are many narrative
points that we can map from SOB onto BTR, as well as a range of distinct narrative strategies
that we can attach to both projects and to other works produced by and about Springsteen. With
the mutual construction of persona in mind, we should also recognise the role of Springsteen’s
audience in this selection process. As Philip Auslander (2006, p. 115) observes,
Audiences try to make performers into who they need them to be, to fulfill a social
function. A successful working consensus means that such a relationship has been
achieved. If one thinks of audiences not just as consumers, but also as the co-creators of
the musicians’ personae, and as having a substantial investment in those personae and
the functions they serve, it is easy to understand why audiences often respond very
conservatively (in the literal sense) to musicians’ desire to retool their personae.
As fans we have to be willing to reignite our belief in the artist at each new narrative event; in
the case of BTR and SOB, this means buying into a persona who is telling us things we probably
already know (that Springsteen is not the central character of many of his songs) but in newly
affective ways. By this I do not mean that the mode of delivery has to be new (although here it
is), but rather that affect relies on newly (re)engaged emotional responses.
Firstly, we can observe that SOB opens with a classic storytelling scene. A man walks
onto a stage and attempts to spellbind his audience, to perform a magic trick, to pull something
Elliott
26
out of the hat. He needs to beguile, to win over, to tempt, but this is less a siren song and more a
rime of an Ancient Mariner, an invitation to share the negotiation of stormy seas and
occasionally traumatic events from the safe distance of the storyteller’s circle. It is not the
odyssey, but the telling of the odyssey. It begins, as Springsteen tells his audience, with a “setup”
and within a second of him telling us this, we hear the opening chords to one of his most
enduring songs: Growin’ Up. It is an apt choice, allowing Springsteen to start with an early song
that recounts an even earlier experience. Whether the experience related in the song is real,
imagined, aesthetic or a combination of all of these and more seems unimportant; what matters
is that the audience is on-board. Many will have heard this song used at previous concerts and
will know it as a song frequently prefaced or interrupted by monologues. So it proves to be here
as well: Springsteen stops singing after less than two minutes and, over the continued guitar
figure from Growin’ Up, starts his myth-busting routine. Having established “how good I am” (at
creating art from experiences he has not had), he offers to tell his listeners how “this great
miracle [came] to pass”. Slipping briefly into a new voice for the first of many biblical allusions,
he intones, “In the beginning, there was a great darkness upon the waters”, which his audience
might recognise not only from the Bible, but also from the opening to “The Big Bang”, the
seventh chapter of BTR, in which Springsteen relates the coming of Elvis as the major event of
his childhood. His main narrative begins, then, with the emergence of rock ’n’ roll, delivered
with the fire and certainty of a testifying preacher. This is rock ’n’ roll as personal and cultural
event, with Elvis cast as a revolutionary force, along similar lines to John Trudell’s poem Baby
Boom Ché (Trudell 1992, Elliott 2008).
A narrative about a narrative is like a map about a terrain: what scale do we choose? To
go through the odyssey of SOB (let alone BTR) in a blow-by-blow fashion would be absurd and
unnecessary. Let us instead note different ways in which we can draw the map. One way to
present the narrative would be as a stripped-down list of the main topics Springsteen covers in
SOB: self, Elvis, hometown, father, mother, the road, the land, lost friends, Clarence Clemons,
Patti Scialfa, family, democracy, social justice. The narrative could also be listed as a set of the
songs that these episodes introduce or interrupt: Growin’ Up, My Hometown, My Father’s House,
The Wish, Thunder Road, The Promised Land, Born in the U.S.A., Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,
Tougher Than the Rest, Brilliant Disguise, Long Time Comin’, The Ghost of Tom Joad, The Rising,
Dancing In the Dark, Land of Hope and Dreams, Born to Run.vii This telescoping of the narrative
allows us to parse quickly the flow of the Broadway show and to get a sense of its arc. It also
mounts a certain kind of victory over time. As White puts it, “narrative strains to produce the
effect of having filled in all the gaps, to put an image of continuity, coherency, and meaning in
place of the fantasies of emptiness, need, and frustrated desire that inhabit our nightmares
about the destructive power of time” (White 1980, p. 15).
In starting to square narrativity with persona, we might ask how the maintenance of
persona serves a similar purpose and to what extent Springsteen’s deconstruction of his
persona can be seen as a revisionist history, a new way of telling a seemingly familiar story –
because there is a lot of familiarity in the narratives of BTR and SOB. While Springsteen may not
have shared as much about himself in as sustained a fashion before, he has told some of these
stories, and performed and recorded these songs before. The recurring stories that Springsteen
has told at concerts throughout his career can themselves be concertinaed into micronarratives,
as Daniel Cavicchi (1998, pp. 28–9) does by conflating several versions of Springsteen’s early
pre-Growin’ Up monologues into one version. This monologue, which has long functioned for
Springsteen as a retrospectively attributed sense of forward planning, fate and vision in his
younger self, is variable but consistent enough in its main themes and details for Cavicchi to be
able to caricature it effectively (see, also, Rauch 1988).
Persona Studies 2019, vol. 5, no. 1
27
From a more critical perspective, a 1985 review by Biba Kopf of Springsteen at the
height of the fame that came with Born in the U.S.A., uses a similar micronarrative in its adoption
of suspicion regarding the artist’s myth-making. Accusing Springsteen and his audience of
wallowing in nostalgia while offering only melancholy in response to the problems of the
present, Kopf sees the purpose of the pre-song raps as ways of presenting the subsequent heroic
performances as the solution to any problem or as the proof that the gamble of youth paid off:
The rage … is shortlived. Here comes another “I remember...” to disperse it, more
nostalgia for cars, gals, guitars, waterholes, rivers, endless rock ’n’ roll summers. The
further the Summer of Youth recedes into Springsteen's memory, the more warmly he
reheats it, remoulding the component parts into the shape of rock ’n’ roll eternals,
asserting through [the] sheer energy of his stagecraft and his undeniably likeable nature
that there is only one way forward and it shimmies like this. That is, like it always has
done (Kopf 1985).
Running alongside this nostalgia is a desire to be older, wiser and more experienced: “he wants
to feel every wrinkle being etched into his forehead” (Kopf 1985). From the perspective of more
than three decades later, it could be argued Springsteen’s closing of his Broadway show with
Born to Run is a continuation of this same old trick. Even with all the insight that comes with
really being older, wiser and more experienced, is he still converting all the concerns he has
raised into a problem for which the only solution is a classic rock song?
Perhaps. But then this is theatre and theatre serves many functions and uses many
strategies. Kopf’s analysis of the 1985-model Springsteen ultimately offers no other solutions
itself, failing to explain what an alternative (but presumably still utopian?) act of “musicking”
might entail (Small 1998). It also presents a simplistic notion of nostalgia, one that more
nuanced accounts of the “condition” have sought to challenge (see Pickering & Keightley 2006).
My purpose in invoking Kopf, however, is not to argue with his analysis (which, after all, only
partakes of a version of the same myth-busting that Springsteen himself would later adopt), but
to use it as an example of how time, age, experience, memory and nostalgia work in
autobiographical narratives to construct the multiple selves of those narrating and those
witnessing the narration. Such witnesses bring their own narratives to the event and Kopf is
therefore right to highlight the relationship between Springsteen and his audience and to note
that it is built on the artist’s likability. Indeed, I would argue that this likability is precisely the
point, that it is key to the affective (and effective) work done by the Springsteen persona and
that it is the tie that binds the layers that have rippled through that persona over the years. It is
Springsteen’s likability as much as the narratives of the everyday that he has told that has meant
his fans have been able to identify with him and feel that, despite his incredible success, he is
still speaking for, with and of us. As fans, our own personas are authorised and legitimised by
the process of identification that takes place in the circulation of meanings between our
representative artists and us. We might think of this as the affective pact between Springsteen
and his audience.
This pact is attained and affirmed through differently mediated voices. In the book of
BTR, Springsteen writes about wanting to find a voice with which to speak. The reader can
savour the results and hear whichever voice they wish. In the audiobook version, listeners are
given the author’s spoken voice and a different kind of intimacy is created. It is a storytelling
voice that can accompany us while doing other things; it can be taken in shorter bursts or longer
bursts and replayed to allow favourite vocal moments to be enjoyed. There is a different
intimacy to the Broadway show, which varies again, depending on whether one experienced it
in the theatre or via audio-visual media. One of the notable aspects of Springsteen’s delivery in
Elliott
28
SOB is the way he uses the microphone, sometimes using it “naturally”, sometimes using its
amplification technology to make sound effects, sometimes moving away from it to speak to the
audience “directly” and making use of the intimacy of the venue. For those in the theatre, this
last technique could make it seem like they were closer to the “real Bruce”; for those
experiencing it through the recording, there is an uncanny cutting-out of the voice that does its
own kind of authenticity work, reminding us of our distance from events but simultaneously
underlining the “realness” of the show. The different connections made through these different
ways of accessing Springsteen’s late autobiographical work underline the affective pact and
provide a sense of getting to know the “real Bruce”, even as he is telling us that he is performing
a magic trick for us. This collaboration—his setting up of the artifice of the affective pact, our
submitting to it—is one of the reasons that some critical voices accuse Springsteen of fakery;
but it is also the very thing upon which his personas—shape-shifting and/or layered as they
are—are built.
Conclusion
There are many ways to narrate a rock ’n’ roll life and each holds the possibility of unveiling
new personas (see Stein & Butler 2015). There are the personas of the different selves that
artists, like other humans, go through over the course of a life; then there are the personas
adopted or applied by the creators of those different narratives. The author of a written memoir
adopts a different persona to the writer of a song; the compiler of lyrics takes on a different role
to the compiler of photographs. The interviewee, the photographic subject and the authoriser of
sanctioned material take on different roles again. As Thomas Swiss (2005, p. 292) notes in his
account of Marianne Faithfull’s autobiography, “[b]eing ‘imaginative’ musically is what we often
admire most about our favourite rock musicians, but of course being imaginative in [written]
language requires different skills and experiences”. By successfully adopting “literary” language
and “poetic” techniques, Faithfull can present herself as narrator and subject “as a composite of
‘personas’ rather than as a single, unified, authentic self” (Swiss 2005, p. 292). So too with
Springsteen, who presents various incarnations of himself as the subject of his story while also
offering his audience the new personas of literary prose stylist, audiobook narrator and
theatrical monologist. Sidonie Smith (1995, p. 18) writes that
Autobiographical narration begins with amnesia, and once begun, the fragmentary
nature of subjectivity intrudes. After all, the narrator is both the same and not the same
as the autobiographer, and the narrator is both the same and not the same as the subject
of narration. Moreover, there are many stories to be told and many different and
divergent storytelling occasions that call for and forth contextually-marked and
sometimes radically divergent narratives of identity.
As autobiographer, Bruce Springsteen offers to take his readers and listeners closer to his real
self than he ever has before and he offers to do so through the intimacies afforded by different
platforms: book, audiobook, Broadway show, streaming video and audio, soundtrack albums on
CD and vinyl. At the same time, he tells us that it is a new form of “setup” as he unveils his latest
brilliant disguises: the prose stylist, the verbal storyteller, the theatrical dramatist, the stage
actor (a different but related stage actor to the one he has been throughout his performing
career). He offers a glimpse of his everyday self and removes himself from the scene, replacing
the protagonist of the drama with the dramatist, or rather a newer kind of dramatist than we
have known him as previously. He tells his audience that he is just a regular person like us (a
tramp like us, perhaps), that he is a great deceiver and a master of transformation. Again, we
might say that the clues were always there, that he has long been authenticated as a literary
figure, a writer of the great American novel in the form of songs, albums and concerts (see
Persona Studies 2019, vol. 5, no. 1
29
Colombati 2017; Cologne-Brookes 2018; Hiatt 2019). If Springsteen’s role as literary figure is
made more explicit by his turn to prose in his memoir and the script for his Broadway show, it is
nevertheless relatively easy, from a retrospective position, to trace the many precursors of such
prose exercises in the stories Springsteen has practised and perfected over his performing
career. Likewise, as SOB and the audiobook of BTR make evident (and what is already latent in
the written text of BTR), musicians’ autobiographies are further performances, to be read or
heard as extra layers of the musical works with which they achieved fame (Stein & Butler 2015).
But if it has become easy for others to retrospectively trace Springsteen’s career as an
autobiographer, the artist’s own uses of hindsight are equally important to underline. In his late
work, Springsteen seems to want to have things at least two ways: to have been the young man
with the vision—as described in Growin’ Up—and to be the older man who narrates the young
man’s vision. The autobiographical narrative, created in the present, attempts to re-present the
thinking of the younger Springsteen at these various stages in his life. Narratives can be
successful even through the flattening and distorting media in which they are presented (Cobley
2014); if the representation of the younger Springsteen is made credible by the operation of the
signs exchanged between the older performer and his audience, credibility is assured.
Springsteen aims for this credibility with the sincere craft of his prose stylings and with his use
of them to address his audiences directly, whether through the page, the stage or the recording.
To take an example from the end of his Broadway performance:
I always thought I was a typical American… I studied and I played and I worked … I
wanted to know the whole American story. I wanted to know my story, your story; I felt
that I needed to understand as much of it as I could in order to understand myself. Who
was I? … I wanted to be able to tell this story to you. That was my young promise to
myself and this was my young promise to you … This is what I 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.
Springsteen follows this with more in a similar vein, making a case for his service to the
audience (“you”) and our importance to him, then shifting into one of his favourite registers, the
testifying rock ’n’ roll preacher. Then he performs Dancing in the Dark and we have a choice:
take it as magical resolution, or dwell on the suggestion that what is first thought of as magic
later comes to be explained as science, craft, labour and service. That process involves our
labour too, the work we put into authenticating artists and authorising their personas.
i For an account that presents the earlier Springsteen as already a monologist (in his songs as
much as in his concerts), see Rauch (1988). For another description of “magical myth-busting”
in SOB, see Petridis (2018).
ii This process of turning the text of BTR into the speech of SOB was doubtless aided by
Springsteen’s experience of recording BTR as an eighteen-hour-plus audiobook (Springsteen
2016b).
iii Scholarly reflections on BTR and SOB were only starting to emerge at the time of writing this
article; Edgerton (2019) provides an account that connects the late narratives and places them
into the broader span of Springsteen’s career.
iv On the narratability of the hero figure, see Cavarero (2000). For the role of the hero in
Springsteen’s work, see Gencarelli (1994).
END NOTES
Elliott
30
v For another, predominantly Anglophone, tradition that dealt with similar definitional and
conditional aspects of autobiography in parallel with—but not always in dialogue with—
Lejeune’s work, see Olney (1980) and Gunn (1982). For a useful work that brings these
traditions together, see Marcus (1994). For an account of the autobiographical pact in relation
to popular music biography, see O’Dair (2019).
vi In his book, Springsteen writes, “My wife is a private person, not known through whatever her
‘public persona’ may be, and not nearly as fond of the limelight as I” (Springsteen 2016a, p. 373).
vii This is the list of songs included in the Netflix film and on the separately released soundtrack
and, as such, represents a slightly exaggerated version of any one particular night of the show,
in which most but not all of these tracks were included; details in the variations of the setlist can
be found easily online.
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Richard Elliott
Abstract
Key Words
Introduction
Persona
(Auto)biography
Narratives
Conclusion
Works Cited