Springsteen Recalls Dad’s Job Struggles

Bruce Springsteen's relationship with his late father, Doug, is the stuff made of rock legend. In Peter Ames Carlin's new biography, Bruce, he chronicles the elder Springsteen's chronic depression which went hand in hand at times with his inability to keep a steady job.

Springsteen spoke to Uncut and touched upon his early family dynamic while discussing the U.S. economy, explaining, "There's a difficulty in moving from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. There's a loss of the self-worth in that work. Unemployment is a really devastating thing. I know the damage it does to families. Growing up in that house there were things you couldn't say. It was a minefield. My mother was the breadwinner -- she was steadfast and relentless, and I took that from her."

While writing Bruce, Peter Ames Carlin spoke candidly with Springsteen about his own battles with depression and use of anti-depressants: "Well, he had spoken about therapy, I mean, he's talked about therapy on stage, he's talked about it in interviews before, so that wasn't exactly a secret. It's a bit of a private zone, but he's willing to talk about it to some degree. And we were talking about depression, and then there was a tragedy in his group of people, his group of friends out here, where a friend who had been depressed on and off for years, actually committed suicide, and he was. . . I happened to be with him the day that that happened or the day that he heard about it and he was so visibly shaken and disturbed by that and, y'know, it was like suddenly he became a different person."

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band will kick off their overseas dates on March 14th and 16th in Boondall, Australia.