My Hometown (Introduction, Pt. 1) [Springsteen on Broadway]

[Spoken]
Now everybody, everybody has a love-hate relationship with their hometown. It's just built into the equation of growing up. If you take me, I'm Mr. Born to Run. I'm Mr. Thunder Fucking Road. I was born to run, not to stay

My home, New Jersey - it's a death trap. It's a suicide rap. Listen to the lyrics, alright. I had to get out, I gotta hit the highway, I'm a roadrunner man, I got the white line fever in my veins, I am gonna bring my girl and I have had enough, of the shit that this place dishes out. I am gonna run, run, run, and I'm - well I'm never coming back

I currently live ten minutes from my hometown. But uh, born to come back, or uh - who would've bought that shit? Nobody

And in our front yard, only a few feet from our front porch stood the grandest tree in town. It was a towering beautiful copper beach tree, and on sunny days, I lived under its branches, its roots, where a fort for my soldiers and a corral for my horses, and I was the first on my block, to climb high into its upper reaches, leaving behind a world that, I didn't care for much already

And up near the top, I had the wind in my face and I had all the dreaming room that you could want. On slow summer nights, I'd sit beneath its arms with my pals like the cavalry at dusk, just listening, listening, for the evening bells of the ice cream man. My grandmother's voice calling me into bed

I lived on Randolph Street, but my sister Virginia, she was a year younger than me, my parents Adele and Douglas, my grandparents Fred and Alice, and my trusty dog Saddle. We lived spitting distance from the Catholic church, the priest's rectory, the nun's convent, the Saint Rose of Lima Grammar School, all of it, just a football's toss away, across the field of wild grass. I literally grew up surrounded by God

Surrounded by God, and my relatives, 'cause we had cousins and aunts and uncles and grandmas and grandpas and great grandmas and great grandpas, so all of us were jammed into five little houses on two adjoining streets, and when the church bells rang, the whole clan would hustle up the street to stand witness to every wedding and every funeral that arrived like a state occasion, in our little neighborhood