Henry Selick, best known as the director of films “Coraline,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “James and the Giant Peach,” “Wendell & Wild,” was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey and grew up in nearby Rusmon. He is, as you will read in the following first-person account, a lifelong fan of Bruce Springsteen.
I just saw “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere,” Scott Cooper’s knockout new biopic based on Warren Zanes’ book. Jeremy Allen White brilliantly channels The Boss without mimicking him. Jeremy Strong plays his loyal best friend/manager, and Stephen Graham gives a gut-punch performance as Bruce’s old man.
The film drops us into the early ’80s. Springsteen’s coming off a massive E Street Band tour and disappearing into himself. Holed up in Jersey, inspired by Flannery O’Connor, Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” and “The Night of the Hunter,” he records “Nebraska” — that ghostly, lo-fi masterpiece. But there’s something else haunting him, fueling his creativity. One night, Bruce drives back to his childhood home, now abandoned, sits in his car, and and remembers growing up there with a distant, terrifying father and a mother who did her best to protect her young son.
Watching this scene, I flashed to my own Jersey memories and my belittling, macho father, my escape into music and art, and the joy a young local guitar hero named Bruce Springsteen brought me and my friends.
The Horse Stable That Rocked
I grew up in New Jersey — a kid obsessed with drawing and painting and music. I played clarinet, piano, and later the electric guitar my Beatles-crazed sister ditched. My buddy Steve Murphy, drummer and local music cognoscente, told me about a new club, Le Teendezvous, down Seven Bridges Road in Shrewsbury. Cover: two bucks. One if you joined the “club.” We were fourteen. Steve’s mom drove. Le Teendezvous was a converted horse stable — dim lights, wooden beams, and a smell that said livestock once lived here.
That night, a band called The Castiles hit the stage. Their lead guitarist — a wiry seventeen-year-old named Bruce Springsteen — already had an assistant to hit his echo pedal on cue. He wasn’t even the frontman, but the room revolved around him.
The Jersey Circuit
From ’65 to ’70, I must’ve seen Bruce thirty times. After The Castiles, he fronted a power trio called Earth, making a six-string bass strung with guitar strings scream like Clapton-meets-Hendrix-meets-Jeff Beck on their best night. (My own group, The Reviled, were so inspired we entered a Battle of the Bands where sixteen-year-old Steve Van Zandt and The Shadows smoked our sorry butts.) Bruce next formed Child, which became Steel Mill, who somehow ended up playing our senior prom.
Around then, he started showing up solo at a local coffeehouse, playing his own songs. In that small room, stripped of the amps and swagger, I sensed a deep, quiet sadness. He wasn’t just performing; he was exorcising.
‘Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere‘©Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
Tinker, Trouble, and the Headphones
When Bruce formed The E Street Band, I’d started college but was still gigging with my band Shark River. One summer, we met Carl “Tinker” West — a surfboard maker, mad scientist, and part-time philosopher who let us rehearse in his shop if we played original songs.
Turns out, Tinker had been Bruce’s first manager. Tinker was brilliant, unpredictable, and slightly unhinged. He had a top-notch sound system and a habit of pushing your buttons — literally. He called me “Headphone Henry” because I always wore headphones during our loudest sets. Before one show, he drilled holes in them “so I’d toughen up.” That summer ended with a choice: stay in the band or go back to school to study animation. I chose the latter.
Fast-forward a few years — I’m back in Jersey after directing “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” and I stop by Tinker’s purple-painted shop in the Highlands. He’d welded a ten-foot tall Jack Skellington and stuck it on his roof. Still the same lunatic.
The Alchemist
Bruce Springsteen always had the power to heal his audience with his art, turning his own painful childhood memories into powerful songs that crack open your chest and make you feel good about feeling bad.
When Bruce Springsteen gives a concert, he gives it absolutely everything he’s got, gifting a thousand fans with a cathartic release by show’s end. But this brilliant “rock and roll doctor” could not heal himself.
In “Deliver Me from Nowhere,” the demons that fuel his songwriting are creeping up on him and only his best friend, manager and producing partner, Jon Landau, gets it. His love for Bruce leads to a break down, a breakthrough, and a heartbreaking reconciliation for Bruce and his father.
Bruce fans, Jeremy Allen White fans, everyone who’s haunted by their own childhoods or just in need of a hell of a good movie, go see “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere.”
A 20th Century Studios release, “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” is in theaters now.
