Gruff-voiced singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, also known as “the Boss,” is regarded as the very embodiment of blue-collar American rock. He gave the disaffected white underclass its voice, both with his 1975 single “Born to Run” and with his 1984 album Born in the U.S.A. Springsteen has appeared in a great many guises during a 25-year recording career. He has been a wild-eyed, leather-jacketed street punk, a socially conscious folk troubadour, a musclebound stadium rocker, and a sensitive commentator on the American experience.
Springsteen was born on September 23, 1949, in Freehold, New Jersey, about an hour’s drive from New York City. Inspired by Elvis PRESLEY, he picked up the guitar as a teenager and played in bands in and around nearby Asbury Park. There he met many of the musicians who would later back him in his E. Street Band. Legendary talent scout John Hammond, whose previous finds included Bob DYLAN and Aretha FRANKLIN, signed him to Columbia Records.
Springsteen’s early songs were rambling street poetry, and he was touted as a “new Dylan.” His concerts were revival-like affairs, in which he told long autobiographical tales while rocking deep into the night. In 1974 critic Jon Landau saw one of these shows in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and wrote the famous line: “I have seen rock’n’roll’s future—it’s called Bruce Springsteen.”
Landau co-produced Springsteen’s third album, Born to Run (1975), an epic collection that quickly sold a million copies. However, a lawsuit over the right to choose his producer kept Springsteen out of the studio until 1978, when he emerged (with Landau in tow) with the hard-rocking but bleak Darkness on the Edge of Town. That marked the beginning of a new phase, in which songs about cars and girls were replaced by songs about work, struggle, marriage, and death. The River (1980) mixed sad, poignant songs with sing-along rockers, and earned Springsteen his first pop hit single, “Hungry Heart.”
On the brink of superstardom, he released the surprising Nebraska (1982), an acoustic folk album made on a portable four-track recorder and featuring sympathetic portraits of murderers and other outcasts. Born in the U.S.A. (1984) maintained that downcast feel while returning to a full-band rock sound. The result was a quintessential pop album that was also a perfect distillation of the anger and bitterness seething beneath the surface of Reaganera America. The title song, about a bitter Vietnam War veteran, was one of seven singles from the album to reach the Top 10. Springsteen spent the next 18 months touring the world, spreading a gospel of populism, political engagement, and hard-rocking defiance.
Springsteen’s next studio album, Tunnel of Love (1987), was ballad-heavy and quite different from the big rock sound of Born in the U.S.A. Springsteen married actress Julianne Phillips in 1985, but they were divorced soon afterwards. He later married E. Street Band backing singer Patti Scialfa.
In 1993 Springsteen recorded a synthesizer-and-drum-machine ballad, “The Streets of Philadelphia,” for the movie Philadelphia, and won an Academy Award. Then came The Ghost of Tom foad (1996), his starkest album since Nebraska, full of modern-day sagas about economic hardship.
Matty Karas
SEE ALSO:
ROCK MUSIC; ROCK’N’ROLL.
FURTHER READING
Cavicchi, Daniel. Tramps Like Us:
Music and Meaning among Springsteen Fans
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998);
Cross, Charles R. Backstreets: Springsteen:
The Man and His Music
(New York: Crown, 1992);
Goodman, Fred. The Mansion on the Hill
(New York: Times Books, 1997);
Marsh, Dave. Born to Run
(New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1996).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Born in the U.S.A.; Born to Run;
Darkness on the Edge of Town; Nebraska;
The River; The Streets of Philadelphia; Tunnel of Love;
The Wild, the Innocent and the E. Street Shuffle.