Even Springsteen Has Had Plastic Surgery
The media are acting as if the biggest revelation in David Remnick’s lengthy profile of Bruce Springsteen in The New Yorker is that the Boss has been in therapy for 30 years. But for me the stand-out sentence in the article was this description of the singer: “His hairline is receding, and, if one had to guess, he has, over the years, in the face of high-def scrutiny and the fight against time, enjoined the expensive attentions of cosmetic and dental practitioners.” Yeah, it seems as if even the Boss has had work done. Which tracks with Remnick’s description of the singer’s lavish lifestyle. He may sing about the down-and-outs, but he hardly lives like one himself. His wife, Patti Scialfa, explains: “If your art is intact, your art is intact. Who wrote ‘Anna Karenina’? Tolstoy? He was an aristocrat! Did that make his work any less true?” But “Anna Karenina” was mostly about upper-class Russians, honey, and while Tolstoy may have been lord of the manor, he hardly lived like a czar. As Springsteen does today.
