An excellent profile of the Boss

David Remnick

Nearly half a century ago, when Elvis Presley was filming Harum Scarum and Help! was on the charts, a moody, father-haunted, yet uncannily charismatic Shore rat named Bruce Springsteen was building a small reputation around central Jersey as a guitar player in a band called the Castiles. The band was named for the lead singer’s favorite brand of soap. Its members were from Freehold, an industrial town half an hour inland from the boardwalk carnies and the sea. The Castiles performed at sweet sixteens and Elks-club dances, at drive-in movie theatres and ShopRite ribbon cuttings, at a mobile-home park in Farmingdale, at the Matawan-Keyport Rollerdrome. Once, they played for the patients at a psychiatric hospital, in Marlboro. A gentleman dressed in a suit came to the stage and, in an introductory speech that ran some twenty minutes, declared the Castiles "greater than the Beatles." At which point a doctor intervened and escorted him back to his room.

So begins a superb Springsteen profile appearing in the current New Yorker written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Remnick. It’s probably the next best thing to reading a full-scale Springsteen biography. You can find the entire piece here.