This Story From Bruce Springsteen’s Childhood Is Infuriating, and It’s Easy To See How It Affected His Music

Catholic schools have a certain reputation for, shall we say, strict disciplining. While not every religious school follows these practices, there is a reason why “nuns” and “rapping knuckles” go hand-in-hand in many people’s minds. And according to Bruce Springsteen in his memoir Born To Run, he had firsthand experience with this kind of treatment as a grammar school student.

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Springsteen’s summary of his elementary experiences was a pretty shocking highlight—or maybe lowlight—reel of the worst moments. By the time he was through with the eighth grade, he wrote, “I’d have my knuckles classically rapped, my tie pulled ‘til I choked; be struck in the head, shut into a dark closet, and stuffed into a trash can while being told this is where I belonged. All business as usual in Catholic school in the fifties.”

Blame it on my no-corporal-punishment, public school upbringing, but a nun stuffing a kid into a trash can being “business as usual” took me by surprise. What was less shocking, however, was understanding how Springsteen translated his Catholic school upbringing into his music.

How Bruce Springsteen’s Childhood Experiences With Catholicism Affected His Music

Generally speaking, Bruce Springsteen’s music is not religious. He has used religious imagery in his songwriting, and he admits that he’ll always feel intrinsically tied to his childhood faith. Moreover, Springsteen typically focuses on the darker, grittier sides of life—not the pristine holy spaces of the Catholic church. Nevertheless, one can easily draw a line between his arduous upbringing in Catholic grammar school and the music he wrote as an adult.

He laid the connection out more clearly in Born To Run, writing that his religion “was the world where I found the beginnings of my song. In Catholicism, there existed the poetry, danger, and darkness that were reflected by imagination and the inner self. I found a land of great and harsh beauty, of fantastic stories, of unimaginable punishment and infinite reward. It was a glorious and pathetic place I was either shaped for or fit right into. It has walked alongside me as a walking dream my whole life. So, as a young adult, I tried to make sense of it.”

“The way I see it,” he continued, “we ate the apple and Adam, Eve, the rebel Jesus in all his glory and Satan are all part of God’s plan to make men and women out of us, to give us the precious gifts of earth, dirt, sweat, blood, sex, sin, goodness, freedom, captivity, love, fear, life, and death.” And indeed, if Springsteen’s music were to center around anything, it would be these instinctual, double-edged facets of human existence.

As for the heartbreaking image of a kid in a garbage bin, it’s hard not to wonder if the nun who stuffed a young Springsteen into the trash recognized his face when he started his ascent to rock ‘n’ roll royalty.

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