Free Walk like a Man by Robert J. Wiersema Page A

Car” were both mentioned. These are all valid contenders, but I stand by my point. And fuck, it’s my book, so . . .
    3 . Yes, years. The songs that made up Nebraska, released in 1982, were, in many ways, the first demos of the Born in the U.S.A. sessions—those tracks date from early January of 1982, a home-recording session that also included early versions of “Born in the U.S.A.,” “I’m Goin’ Down,” and “I’m On Fire.” It was only when the sessions with the band in early 1982 failed to transform the bulk of those demos into E Street Band songs that it was decided to release them in their original form. Which, given the bleak, gut-wrenching nature of Nebraska, should have really served as a hint of just how dark Born in the U.S.A. was, despite the cheery flag cover and synthesizers.
    4 . I have never felt closer to my mother than I did the day she, upon being invited to visit the principal’s office to discuss the issue, proceeded to lacerate the principal on my behalf. She’s the reason I wasn’t expelled, and why the film went on to represent the school in a province-wide competition.
    5 . When I was in grade seven, I asked one of the English teachers to read one of my spy novels—thirty or forty pages of badly printed looseleaf in a Duo-Tang. He was generous and careful in his response, especially when I asked him what he thought of the sex scenes. “Well,” he said, measuredly. “There’s a reason you don’t buy shoes from a snake.”
    6 . Of course, it is not that easy. One of my mother’s recurring questions in those years was, “Why can’t you write anything happy?” I suspect she still asks herself that, but she’s given up on asking me.
    7 . Over the Labor Day weekend in 1987, I entered the 3-Day Novel Contest, a marathon session that requires you to write a novel in, well, three days. The book I ended up with was a fractured collection of vignettes about couples making love in deserted boathouses, friends getting high and throwing rocks off of overpasses, parties down by the river’s edge, and young lovers saying goodbye, all set on the Sunday of the Labor Day weekend. I called it Soft Summer, drawn from the first line in Bruce Springsteen’s “Backstreets.”
    8 . Well, that was the stated reason. We all know the truth by now, don’t we?
    9 . She did say it, in fact: we met up with her the next day, and “clusterfuck” was one of the first words out of her mouth.

Jesus Was an Only Son
    Album: Devils & Dust
    Released: April 26, 2005
    Recorded: 1996–2004
    Version discussed: VH1 Storytellers, Recorded April 4, 2005
    Album/released: VH1 Storytellers DVD, Released September 6, 2005
    D ESPITE HIS POSITION atop the rock-and-roll pyramid, Springsteen has spent significant chunks of his career on the other, folkier side of the tracks.
    As he recounts in his introduction to “Long Time Comin’” on the bonus DVD that accompanied the initial release of his Devils & Dust album: “I was signed as a guy with an acoustic guitar when I was twenty-two . . . I always, even when I was in my late teens, had a band, and then on another night I would go down to the coffee shop with my twelve-string and I would sing a whole group of songs that wouldn’t work in a bar, or needed more attention, or were just . . . different.”
    With Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and The River, Springsteen largely embraced his rock side, distancing himself from the folk elements present in Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (on “The Angel” in particular), and in The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. The folkie oompah of “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” on the latter album is a jarring contrast to the rock-jazz elements of the other songs, but tunes like “Incident on 57th Street” and “New York City Serenade” reveal a