Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen Read Free Book Online Page A

have an unending faith in people, are social creatureswho will merrily make conversation with a broom handle. My father was a misanthrope who shunned most of humankind. At the tavern, I’d often find him sitting solitarily at the end of the bar. He claimed to believe in a world that was filled with crooks out for a buck. “Nobody’s any good, and so what if they are.”
    My mother showered me with affection. The love I missed from my father she triedto double up on and, perhaps, find the love she missed from my dad. All I know is she always had my back. When I was hauled into the police station for a variety of minor infractions, she was always there to take me back home. She came to my countless baseball games, both when I stunk up the place and the one season lightning struck and I turned into a real fielding, hitting player, with my name inthe papers. She got me my first electric guitar, encouraged my music and fawned over my early creative writing. She was a parent, and that’s what I needed as my world was about to explode.

SEVEN
    THE BIG BANG (HAVE YOU HEARD THE NEWS . . .)
    In the beginning there was a great darkness upon the Earth. There was Christmas and your birthday but beyond that all was a black endless authoritarian void. There was nothing to look forward to, nothing to look back upon, no future, no history. It was all a kid could do to make it to summer vacation.
    Then, in a moment of light, blinding as auniverse birthing a billion new suns, there was hope, sex, rhythm, excitement, possibility, a new way of seeing, of feeling, of thinking, of looking at your body, of combing your hair, of wearing your clothes, of moving and of living. There was a joyous demand made, a challenge, a way out of this dead-to-life world, this small-town grave with all the people I dearly loved and feared buried in italongside of me.
    THE BARRICADES HAVE BEEN STORMED!! A FREEDOM SONG HAS BEEN SUNG!! THE BELLS OF LIBERTY HAVE RUNG!! A HERO HAS COME. THE OLD ORDER HAS BEEN OVERTHROWN! The teachers, the parents, the fools so sure they knew THE WAY—THE ONLY WAY—to build a life, to have an impact on things and to make a man or woman out of yourself, have been challenged. A HUMAN ATOM HAS JUST SPLIT THE WORLD INTWO!
    The small part of the world I inhabit has stumbled upon an irreversible moment. Somewhere in between the mundane variety acts on a routine Sunday night in the year of our Lord 1956 . . . THE REVOLUTION HAS BEEN TELEVISED!! Right underneath the nose of the guardians of all that “IS,” who, if they were aware of the powers they were about to unleash, would call out the national gestapo to SHUTTHIS SHIT DOWN!! . . . or . . . SIGN IT UP QUICK!! As a matter of fact, the arbiter of public taste in circa-1950s USA, “MC” ED SULLIVAN, was not initially going to let this Southern, sexually depraved hick sully the American consciousness and his stage. Once the genie had been let out of the bottle on national television . . . IT WOULD BE OVER! THE NATION WOULD FOLD! And we the great unwashed,the powerless, the marginalized, THE KIDS! . . . would want . . . MORE. More life, more love, more sex, more faith, more hope, more action, more truth, more power, more “get down in the gutter, spit on me, Jesus, teach my blind eyes to SEE” REAL-LIFE RELIGION!! Most of all, we would want more ROCK ’N’ ROLL!!
    The polite charade, the half-assed circus acts, the anemic singers, the bloodless (andoften highly enjoyable) shit that passed for entertainment would be revealed for what it was.
    In the end, ratings and money did the talking and Ed (actually, on Elvis’s first appearance, Charles Laughton, covering for Ed, who’d been waylaid by a car accident) did the walking, right out to the center of his stage to cough out, “Ladies and gentlemen . . . Elvis Presley.” Seventy millionAmericansthat night were exposed to this hip-shaking human earthquake. A fearful nation was protected from itself by the CBS