Thanks to a TV ad and a drink-driving charge, the Boss has been called a sell-out and a hypocrite. But he's never pretended to be perfect.
"When people talk about me like I'm perfect, I feel diminished," Springsteen said lately. Cars play a huge role in American life and link the vast expanses of this vast nation.
Springsteen's characters dream of fleeing down Thunder Road, they drive all night to stay ahead of their own troubled dreams, run on the streets to keep futility at bay, they break out in a stolen car, worry the Highway Patrolman and ponder death while watching a wreck on the highway.
When he signs up to be Born to Run, he doesn't slip into sweatpants and sneakers, but rather considers “highways with broken heroes / on a last-chance power drive”, “suicide machines”, “chrome wheels, fuel injection”.
Springsteen's reputation is so closely tied to automobiles that it is easy to imagine him writing songs with shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, covered in oil and grease, and wearing a large wrench instead of a guitar.
Regarding his 2019 album Western Stars, he said, "I still write about cars, the people in them anyway. Cars were a powerful metaphor for me. Forty years ago they represented freedom. Not so much today. A metaphor at best for movement. But are we moving forward? Most of the time we are just moving. "
"Once Bruce went to Graceland in the middle of the night. Seeing the lights on, he believed Presley was home. Springsteen said, “I figured that Elvis has to be up readin’ or somethin’, so I told Steve, ‘Steve, man, I gotta go check it out.’ And I jumped over the wall, and I started runnin’ up the driveway,” Springsteen recounted.
“Filled with the enthusiasm of youth, I ran up the driveway. I got to the front door and was just about to knock when guards came out of the woods and asked me what I wanted,” he continued. “I asked, ‘Is Elvis home?’ They said, ‘No, no, Elvis isn’t home. He’s in Lake Tahoe’. So, I started to tell them that I was a guitar player and that I had a band, that we played in town that night, and that I made some records.
“And I even told [the guard] I had my picture on the covers of Time and Newsweek. I had to pull out all the stops to make an impression, you know? I don’t think he believed me, though, ’cause he just kinda stood there noddin’, and then he took me by the arm and put me back out on the street with Steve."
The drunk driver incident happened in 2021 at Sandy Hook, a national park in New Jersey, the state where Springsteen was born and raised, and continues to call his home. It's practically a strip of wilderness and beaches on a peninsula overlooking Manhattan Island.
Where else is he going to drink? His home? The forest? The only correct answer is the stripped-down shell of an abandoned car in the middle of that field down by the railroad tracks.
New York actor and director Michael Rapaport (@michaelrapaport on Twitter) had his own typical views on the subject and posted a video rant on iamrapaport.com. “You arrested Bruce Springsteen in Jersey? If he's not driving 97 mph on the wrong side of the street in a tractor-trailer, let go of the f____ing boss. It's like arresting Jesus in Jerusalem. You have to arrest the cop who arrested Bruce Springsteen and instead of saying, "Oh, nobodydeserves preferential treatment," Bruce Springsteen put that bogus hole on the map. "
