Springsteen Opened His Draft Notice at His Freehold House in 1968 — He Wrote Until the Sun Came Up

Springsteen Opened His Draft Notice at His Freehold House in 1968 — He Wrote Until the Sun Came Up 

The envelope was from the United States government. That was the first thing Clara Springsteen noticed when she collected the mail from the box at the end of the front walk. The return address, the specific weight of it, the way it sat in her hand with the particular authority of official correspondence that does not require you to open it to understand what it is going to say.

She brought it inside. She set it on the kitchen table. She did not open it. She did not call up the stairs to her son. She put the kettle on and stood at the stove with her back to the table and waited for the water to boil. It was October 1968. Bruce Springsteen was 19 years old. The war in Vietnam had been taking boys from Freehold, New Jersey for 3 years and the taking showed no sign of slowing.

 And the boys who went were coming back changed in ways that were visible to anyone who knew them before. And some of them were not coming back at all. Clara Springsteen knew this the way that every mother in every working-class neighborhood in New Jersey knew it in October 1968, not as a political fact, but as a physical presence, a weight that had settled into the ordinary texture of daily life and could not be lifted by changing the channel or not reading the paper.

When Bruce came downstairs, she turned from the stove. She looked at him. She looked at the envelope on the table. She did not say anything. He picked it up. He read the return address. He stood in the kitchen of the house on Institute Street in Freehold for a moment holding the envelope and then he opened it.

The notice informed him that he was to report for a pre-induction physical examination at the Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station in Newark. The date was approximately 3 weeks away. The letter was formal and procedural in the way of government correspondence. It told him what was required of him and when and where.

 And it did not ask for his response to any of these requirements because his response was not the relevant variable. He read it twice. Then he folded it along its original creases and put it in the pocket of his jeans. Clara was still at the stove. She did not turn around until he said her name. When she turned, he was looking at her with the expression of a 19-year-old boy who has just been handed a document that will determine the next several years of his life and possibly more and who is processing this fact in real time in front of his mother

without sufficient distance from the information to have organized it into something manageable. The expression was not fear exactly. It was the specific unguarded quality of someone who has not yet decided how they are going to carry what they have just been given. Clara Springsteen looked at her son for a long moment.

Then she said the only thing she could find to say, which was his name. She said it quietly. That was all. He nodded. He went back upstairs. That night, Douglas Springsteen came home from the factory where he worked the evening shift. He found the notice on the kitchen table where Bruce had left it. He read it standing up, still in his work clothes.

He put it back down. He sat at the table with a beer and did not speak for a while. Douglas Springsteen was a man who had grown up in Freehold understanding that certain things were asked of certain people and that the asking was not negotiable. He had not gone to Vietnam himself. He was 35 years old in 1968, too old for the current draft, a fact that contained its own specific weight.

He had watched boys from the neighborhood receive their notices. He had watched some of them go. He understood, in the way of a man who had spent his life in circumstances that did not offer much latitude, that the notice on the table was a fact, and that facts of this kind required responses rather than feelings.

He did not go upstairs to talk to his son that night. He sat at the kitchen table for a long time, and then he went to bed. Upstairs, Bruce Springsteen did not sleep. This is not unusual for a 19-year-old who has received a Vietnam draft notice. Not sleeping is the entirely reasonable response to information of that magnitude arriving at that age in that year.

What was unusual was what he did instead of sleeping. He had a guitar in the room, which he almost always had a guitar in that room, and sometime after midnight, he began to play. Not the songs he had been working on, not the material he was developing for the bar circuit around Asbury Park, where he had been performing for 2 years.

Something else. Something that did not have a name and did not have a structure yet, and was not aimed at any particular audience or any particular performance context. He played the way people play when they are working something through. Not practicing, not performing, not even composing in any organized sense, but using the instrument as an extension of the thinking process, letting the chords and the melody carry the thoughts that did not yet have words.

 He played until the light changed outside the window on Institute Street. He played through the specific hours of 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning, when Freehold was completely quiet, and the only sounds were the instrument and whatever was happening inside his head. He played until the birds started and the sky went from black to that particular gray-blue of early morning in October in New Jersey.

The gray-blue of a day that has not yet decided what it is going to be. What he was playing across those hours was not a song yet. Songs require completion, a resolved structure, a beginning and a middle and an end, words that have found their final form. What he was playing was the material from which songs eventually emerge if you stay with them long enough.

The raw constituent elements of something that does not yet know what it is. Chord sequences, melodic fragments, words that appeared and disappeared, some of them keeping and some of them not, none of them yet in their right relationship to the music. But there were things in what he played that night in October 1968 that people who know his work well would eventually recognize.

Not directly, not as quotations or drafts of finished material, as antecedents, as the emotional and musical territory from which, over the next several years of writing and recording and discarding and returning, certain things would eventually emerge. The urgency was there. The specific quality of urgency that belongs to someone who understands that the clock is running and the question of what you are going to do with your life has been given a deadline that you did not choose and cannot negotiate.

The streets were there, not any particular street, but the idea of streets, the American geography of towns and highways, and the specific freedom and specific entrapment of having a car and knowing how to drive and not being certain where you are permitted to go. The running was there, not yet in the form it would eventually take, not yet as a fully realized metaphysical argument about escape and velocity and the life available to someone who refuses to accept the life that has been arranged for them.

But as a feeling. As something in the music that leaned forward rather than back, that moved towards something rather than settling into what was already there. Clara heard him from across the hall. She lay awake and listened and did not knock on the door. She had learned, across 19 years of motherhood, the difference between the sounds her son made that required her intervention and the sounds he made that required her to stay out of the way and let whatever was happening happen.

This was the latter. Whatever was happening on the other side of that door in the small hours of an October night was not hers to interrupt. It was his and the appropriate thing was to let it be his. She fell asleep sometime around 5:00. When she woke, she could hear him still. Three weeks later, Bruce Springsteen reported to the Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station in Newark, New Jersey for his pre-induction physical.

He was, by multiple accounts and by his own later description, not entirely the person the army was hoping to examine. The weeks between the notice and the physical had not been weeks of ordinary life. He had slept inconsistently. He had been performing every night he could get a booking, burning through the calendar between the notice and the examination with the specific intensity of someone who understands that the calendar may be about to change in ways he cannot control.

He had been playing not the bar circuit material, but the other thing, the night music, the thing he had started the night the envelope came. He has never described the physical examination in comprehensive detail. What he has described in fragments across years of interviews is its outcome. He was not accepted for induction.

The specific reasons have never been fully disclosed, which is consistent with the privacy that surrounds medical records and induction proceedings. What is known is that he came back from Newark and he was not going to Vietnam and that fact settled into the house on Institute Street without ceremony. Clara made dinner.

Douglas came home from the factory. They ate. The subject was not discussed at the table in any depth because it was the kind of thing that in that family, in that house, was understood rather than spoken and the understanding was sufficient. What happened next is the part of the story that belongs not to 1968 but to the years that followed, the years of playing and writing and recording and trying and failing and trying again that eventually produced the music that the world knows.

Those years contain the full account of what Bruce Springsteen made out of the raw material of his life in Freehold, the father, the factory, the car, the streets, the specific American weight of a working-class town in the second half of the 20th century, and the nights in October 1968 when he did not sleep and played until morning.

 Some of what he played that night is in there. Not directly, not quotably, not in a form that any musicologist could point to and say, “This specific passage became this specific song.” But in the way that all of a person’s experience is eventually in their work if they make enough of it and are honest enough about where it comes from.

The envelope from the United States government sat in the kitchen of the house on Institute Street for a while before it was thrown away. Clara does not remember exactly when she threw it away. She remembers that it was there and then it was not. The way that certain documents are present in a life for a time and then cease to be present, their function having been served.

 What it produced in that house on the night it arrived, the hours of playing, the morning light coming up over Institute Street, the boy who did not sleep and the mother who listened from across the hall and knew enough to stay out of the way. That was not something that could be thrown away. That was already inside the music.

 It has been there ever since. If this story reached you today, share it with someone who needs to hear that the worst nights can produce the most necessary things. And if you have ever been pushed by fear or dread into making something you would not have made any other way, tell us in the comments. We want to hear it.

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