Bruce Springsteen on Broadway: A Father's Day gift from the Boss

Chris Jordan | Asbury Park Press

Show Caption Hide Caption Video: Springsteen on Broadway Bruce Springsteen officially opens his run of "Springsteen on Broadway" at the Walter Kerr Theater with a private show.

Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, “Born to Run,” and subsequent Broadway music play, “Springsteen on Broadway,” is essentially the story of a father and his son.

The late Douglas Springsteen of Freehold, Bruce’s father, figures prominently in both the book and play. Early in Springsteen’s career, Douglas was depicted in the Boss’ on-stage stories as an antagonistic authority figure who didn’t like Springsteen’s “God damn guitar.”

“I was not my father’s favorite citizen,” Springsteen wrote in “Born to Run.” “As a boy, I figured it as just the way men were, distant, uncommunicative, busy within the currents of the grown-up world.”

“When my dad looked at me, he didn’t see what he needed to see.”

A long-haired rock n’ roller was not the accepted thing in the Springsteen house. Bruce Springsteen became a music superstar, featured on the covers of Time and Newsweek, and received in the White House. Bruce’s portrayals of his dad softened over the years to where Douglas became a reflection of Bruce, an image of what could have become of the Boss if he hadn’t picked up a guitar.

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Or, perhaps, an example of what a man should aspire to. Either way, it was complicated.

Bruce spoke of his father in the lead up to “Independence Day” during a run of concerts at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford on a hot August night in 2016.

There were 60,000 people in the stadium, but you could hear a pin drop.

“This was one of the first songs I ever wrote about my father,” Springsteen said. “I figured when I started songwriting, the way I could have a conversation with (my father) was through my music. So I made my records and I’d bring them over to the house and I knew that my mom was making him listen to them all, so I knew he was hearing them. Years went by, I’d write another song, and another song, and no response. About 40 years went by and my father was close to his death. Finally, I said Dad, what are your favorite songs?

“‘The ones about me.’ OK. So, you got to take your satisfactions where you can get them.”

Bruce wrote candidly about his final moments with his father in “Born to Run.”

“Before he passed, I stood over my father and studied his body. It was the body of his generation. It was not shined or shaped into a suit of armor. It was just the body of a man,” wrote Bruce. “As I looked at my dad on what would be his death bed, I saw the thinning black curly hair and the high forehead I see reflected back at me when I look in the mirror. There’s the blotchy roughhouse of a face, the bullneck, the still muscly shoulders and arms, and he the swale between his chest and beer belly, half covered by a wrinkled white sheet. Protruding from the bottom of that sheet are elephant stumps for calves and clubs for feet. The feet are red and yellow, scarred by psoriasis. Shaped in stone, they have no more miles in them. They are the feet of my foe, and my hero. They are crumbling now at their base. I scan up and see boxer shorts in twisted disarray, then puffed armored slits holding reddened brown eyes. I stand there for a long moment and I lift a weighted, scaly hand between my palms. I feel warm breath as my lips kiss a sandpaper cheek, and I whisper my good-bye.”

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The relationship, once hardened and deflective, had come full circle to tenderness and love.

“Those whose love we wanted but we couldn’t get, we emulate. It is dangerous but it makes us feel close,” says Springsteen during “My Father’s House” in “Springsteen on Broadway.” “So I put on factory worker’s clothes, I put on my dad’s clothes and I went to work doing the only work I knew.”

It’s ironic that Douglas Springsteen helped Bruce Springsteen tell his greatest story — the story of a boy and his father.

It’s told each night in “Springsteen on Broadway.”

Springsteen and his father managed to find a resolution to their relationship before Douglas Springsteen passed. Some of us, including the author of this story, never got that chance.

Today, if your father is still with us, give him a hug and say happy Fathers Day .

Chris Jordan: cjordan@app.com. Twitter: @chrisfhjordan