and stayed up all night trying to copy it. Springsteen spent every weekend at YMCA or high school dances. He did no dancing. He just stood off to the side studying the lead guitarist. Then he’d rush home alone to his room and play everything he’d seen. As Oswald Chambers once noted, “Drudgery is the touchstone of character.”
Springsteen joined more bands, and by the time he was twenty, he’d played in every conceivable small venue—YMCAs, pizza parlors, gas station openings, weddings, bar mitzvahs, firemen’s conventions, the Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital. He began, slowly, to get good. He knew no one in Asbury Park, New Jersey, but there was a bar there with a set of speakers. Musicians could just sign up for a half-hour slot, plug in, and play. Springsteen walked into the room, where no one knew him, and let loose. As he wrote in his memoir, Born to Run, “I watched people sit up, move closer, and begin to pay serious attention.” What followed, he recalled, was “thirty scorching minutes of guitar Armageddon, then I walked off.” A new gunslinger had come to town.
Springsteen gathered the best musicians he could find—others who had also closed off all the other options. They toured Jersey relentlessly. They went to Greenwich Village in New York, ninety minutes and a world away, and were hit by the hard truth that most of the bands there were better than they were. There are (at least) two kinds of failure. In the first kind you are good, but other people can’t grasp how good you are. Melville’s Moby-Dick sold only 2,300 copies in its first eighteen months and only 5,500 copies in its first fifty years. It was savaged by reviewers. Some artists have to create the taste by which they will be judged. In the second kind, you fail because you’re not as good as you thought you were, and other people see it.
We all want to imagine that our failures are of the first kind, but one suspects that something like 95 percent of failures are of the second kind. One of the character tests on the road to mastery involves recognizing that fact.
You can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but you can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom. Springsteen’s early struggles taught him to pay attention to the parts of the job that are not the fun parts, but are the stuff you have to take care of to make the thing work. He spent more and more time thinking about how to craft a band. He fired a manager. He fired a drummer who was occasionally brilliant but often inconsistent. He thought about management structures. The band would not be a democracy. He would run it.
We like to think that rock stars, of all people, work hard and party hard. But the master almost never lives in the same body as the swinger. Mastery takes too much discipline and usually involves some form of asceticism. Bruce Springsteen worked in bars throughout his early career, but he never had a drink. He sang about factories all his life, but he never actually set foot in a working factory. He sang song after song about cars, but as a young man he didn’t know how to drive. Rock and roll is about wildness and pleasure, but after his concerts Springsteen has a ritual. He’s in his hotel room alone—with fried chicken, french fries, a book, TV, and bed.
Art is, as Springsteen says, a bit of a con job. It’s about projecting an image of the rock star, even if you don’t really live it.
Some people achieve flow socially. They are out with a bunch of friends at dinner or at a party, or dancing with a gang, and self-consciousness fades away. But many artists have trouble disappearing naturally into their lives. They feel separate from others and want to be connected somehow. It’s precisely the lack of social and emotional flow that can propel creativity. As the poet Christian Wiman puts it, “An artist is conscious of always standing apart from life, and one of the results of this can be that you begin to feel most intensely what you have failed to feel: a certain emotional reserve in one’s life becomes a source of great power in one’s work.”
In 1972, at age twenty-two, Springsteen was finally discovered. His first two records were not commercially successful, so the fate of his career hung on the third. It turned out to