Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen, (born September 23, 1949, Freehold, New
Jersey, U.S.), American singer, songwriter, and bandleader who
became the archetypal rock performer of the 1970s and ’80s.
Early Life And Singer-Songwriter Period
Springsteen grew up in Freehold, a mill town where his father
worked as a labourer. His rebellious and artistic side led him to the
nearby Jersey Shore, where his imagination was sparked by the
rock band scene and the boardwalk life, high and low. After an
apprenticeship in bar bands on the mid-Atlantic coast,
Springsteen turned himself into a solo singer-songwriter in 1972
and auditioned for talent scout John Hammond, Sr., who
immediately signed him to Columbia Records. His first two
albums, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the
Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, released in 1973, reflect folk
rock, soul, and rhythm-and-blues influences, especially those
of Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, and Stax/Volt Records. Springsteen’s
voice, a rough baritone that he used to shout on up-tempo
numbers and to more sensual effect on slower songs, was shown to
good effect there, but his sometimes spectacular guitar playing,
which ranged from dense power chord effects to straight
1950s rock and roll, had to be downplayed to fit the singer-
songwriter format.
From Born To Run To Born In The U.S.A.
With his third album, Born to Run (1975), Springsteen
transformed into a full-fledged rock and roller, heavily indebted
to Phil Spector and Roy Orbison. The album, a diurnal song cycle,
was a sensation even before it hit the shelves; indeed, the week of
the album’s release, Columbia’s public relations campaign landed
Springsteen on the covers of both Time and Newsweek. But it sold
only middling well, and three years passed before the follow-up—
the darker, tougher Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978)—
appeared.
Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen in concert, 1984.
Chris Walter/Retna Ltd.
With “Hungry Heart,” from The River (1980), Springsteen finally
scored an international hit single. By then, however, he was best
known for his stage shows, three- and four-hour extravaganzas
with his E Street Band that blended rock, folk, and soul with
dramatic intensity and exuberant humour. The band—a crew of
mixed stereotypes, from rock-and-roll bandit to
cool music professional—was more like a gang than a musical unit,
apparently held together by little other than faith in its leader.
Springsteen’s relationship and interplay onstage with African
American saxophonist Clarence Clemons was particularly iconic.
Springsteen’s refusal, after Born to Run, to cooperate with much
of the record company’s public relations and marketing
machinery, coupled with his painstaking recording process and
the draining live shows, helped earn his reputation as a performer
of principle as well as of power and popularity. Yet to that point
Springsteen was probably more important as a regional hero of
the Eastern Seaboard from Boston to Virginia, where his songs
and attitudes metaphorically summed up a certain rock-based
lifestyle, than as a figure of national or international importance.
Nebraska (1982), a stark set of acoustic songs, most in some way
concerned with death, was an unusual interlude. It was Born in
the U.S.A. (1984) and his subsequent 18-month world tour that
cinched Springsteen’s reputation as the preeminent writer-
performer of his rock-and-roll period. The album produced seven
hit singles, most notably the title track, a sympathetic portrayal
of Vietnam War veterans widely misinterpreted as a patriotic
anthem.
On His Own
Springsteen’s social perspective was distinctly working-class
throughout his career, a point emphasized both by his 1995
album, The Ghost of Tom Joad, which concerned itself with
America’s economically and spiritually destitute, and by his 1994
hit single (his first in eight years), the AIDS-related “Streets of
Philadelphia,” from the film Philadelphia, for which he won both
an Academy Award and a Grammy Award.
The other side of Springsteen’s work is reflected in the albums that
he produced in the period beginning with Tunnel of Love (1987)
and including Human Touch and Lucky Town (released
simultaneously in 1992). The songs on those albums are intensely
personal reflections on intimate relationships. In general, they
have not been as popular.
Bridging all that is the five-record set Bruce Springsteen and the E
Street Band Live 1975–1985 (1986), which captures as much of his
highly visual stage show of that period as can be rendered in a
solely audio form. (His work in music video has been judged to be
far less good, showing his tendency to be somewhat stilted on TV
despite his being a naturally gifted stage performer.)
The breakup of the E Street Band in 1989 and general trends
in pop music fashion curbed Springsteen’s popularity. In 1998 he
put together a box set, Tracks, consisting for the most part of
leftover material that had failed to make the cut on his albums
with the band. That grandiose gesture established him as prolix
beyond all but a couple of peers. Sales of Tracks were trivial
compared with those for Live.
Bruce Springsteen
QUICK FACTS
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BORN
September 23, 1949 (age 71)
Freehold, New Jersey
NOTABLE WORKS
“Springsteen on Broadway”
“Streets of Philadelphia”
AWARDS AND HONORS
Tony Awards (2018)
Presidential Medal Of Freedom (2016)
Grammy Award (2009)
Kennedy Center Honors (2009)
Grammy Award (2008)
Grammy Award (2007)
Grammy Award (2006)
Grammy Award (2005)
Grammy Award (2004)
Grammy Award (2003)
Back With The E Street Band And Into
The 21st Century
In 1999 Springsteen reunited the E Street Band. They appeared
with him when he alone was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame in early 1999, and they then spent a year touring with
him, resulting in a live album (Live in New York City [2001]) but
only a handful of new songs.
On September 21, 2001, Springsteen performed the national debut
of his song “My City of Ruins” on a television special. It was
written about Asbury Park but took on a different tone in the wake
of the September 11 attacks. That tone continued on The Rising,
his 2002 album with the E Street Band and new producer Brendan
O’Brien, which weighed the consequences of the attacks and their
aftermath. Beginning on the Rising tour, Springsteen became
an adamant critic of the U.S. government, especially regarding
the Iraq War. Those developments culminated in his participation
in the 2004 Vote for Change tour in support of Democratic
presidential candidate John Kerry. Springsteen toured with the
band, but he went solo on the plane with Kerry for the final week
of the campaign. Springsteen’s 2005 solo tour, following the
release of the Devils and Dust album and coinciding with a 30th
anniversary celebration of Born to Run, explored the full depth of
his song catalog—it was Tracks with a one-man band—and
continued his opposition to the Bush administration’s policies.
We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006) took a turn
unanticipated by even the closest Springsteen observers. He made
the recording over a period of 10 years with a folk-roots band and
a horn section. It featured traditional American folk songs (“Oh,
Mary, Don’t You Weep,” “Froggie Went A-Courtin’,” and “John
Henry”) as well as songs associated with its inspiration, Pete
Seeger (“My Oklahoma Home,” “How Can I Keep from Singing,”
and “Bring ’Em Home”). Springsteen’s tour of the United States
and Europe in 2006 featured a 20-piece band.
Magic (2007), another E Street Band album produced by O’Brien,
spoke sometimes metaphorically and sometimes explicitly in
opposition to the war and government intrusions on civil liberties.
Springsteen continued his commentary through a worldwide tour
with the E Street Band in 2007 and 2008. He ranks with that
small number of artists whose work grew rather than remained
static or regressed with the approach of the end of middle age.
That continued to be true even after the April 2008 death of the E
Street Band organist and accordionist Danny Federici
from melanoma. The band’s playing acquired a darker urgency of
tone. The later stages of the Magic tour featured arguably the
most assertive, inspired playing Springsteen and the group had
ever done. Their guiding principle, that the way to play was as if
every night might be the last, was no longer an abstraction.
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
Springsteen and the E Street Band, 2007.
PRNewsFoto/SIRIUS Satellite Radio/AP Images
Springsteen seemed freed by that recognition. Working on a
Dream, released in early 2009, concerned itself lyrically with
thoughts of love and life, how fleeting both are and what it takes to
stay the course. The music on the album was a much more-
sophisticated version of what Springsteen had done on his first
two albums, with a greater emphasis on harmony, especially vocal
harmonies characteristic of the later work of the Beach Boys.
Springsteen’s use of a broader musical palette than he had allowed
himself since becoming a star resulted in passages reminiscent of
sound track composer Ennio Morricone as well as of the elaborate
pop of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson and songwriter-arranger
Jimmy Webb. In the lyrics, Springsteen’s knack for particular
detail served him well. Strangely, on such a relatively elaborate
production, his ties to the E Street Band seemed stronger than
ever.
On February 1, 2009, Springsteen and the band were the featured
entertainment at halftime of Super Bowl XLIII. With an average
viewership of 98.7 million, the game was the most-watched
televised sports event in American history. Many fans and much of
the press criticized Springsteen for commercializing himself that
way, but in the aftermath it was generally agreed that he had
managed to condense the structure, message, humour, and
athleticism of his live show into the 12 minutes allotted. On the
largest popular culture platform available, Springsteen established
that some rock artists remain determined to sustain their vitality
and creative ambitions all the way to the end. Later in 2009 he
was honoured by the Kennedy Center, whose chairman, Stephen
A. Schwarzman, observed that “Springsteen has always had his
finger on the pulse of America.”
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Without “The Big Man”
In June 2011 Springsteen lost his most important collaborator:
Clemons died after suffering a stroke at age 69. It unmistakably
dealt a heavy blow to Springsteen, who referred to “The Big Man”
as “my sax man, my inspiration, my partner, my lifelong friend.”
Some speculated that the absence of Clemons meant the end of the
E Street Band or even of Springsteen’s musical career.
Springsteen’s eulogy for Clemons, delivered at the funeral and
then widely published about a week later, rejected that idea
explicitly: “Clarence doesn’t leave the E Street Band when he dies.
He leaves when we die.”
In the eulogy Springsteen also stated, more clearly than he ever
had, what he had been trying to accomplish since the beginning of
the E Street Band:
In some funny way we became each other’s protectors; I think perhaps I protected “C”
from a world where it still wasn’t so easy to be big and black.… I think perhaps “C”
protected me from a world where it wasn’t always so easy to be an insecure, weird and
skinny white boy either. But, standing together we were badass.…We were united, we
were strong, we were righteous, we were unmovable, we were funny, we were corny as
hell and as serious as death itself. And we were coming to your town to shake you and to
wake you up. Together, we told an older, richer story about the possibilities of friendship
that transcended those I’d written in my songs and in my music. Clarence carried it in
his heart. It was a story where the Scooter and the Big Man not only busted the city in
half, but we kicked ass and remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our
friendship would not be such an anomaly.
Wrecking Ball, Springsteen’s 17th studio album, released in March
2012, represented a sharp turn in his social vision and attitude
toward the political moment. The album and the tour that
followed its release attempted to reshape the E Street project. On
the album, the majestic saxophone that bespoke Clemons
appeared on only one track, but there were abundant other horns,
including a mariachi set, as well as strings, Celtic pipes, fiddles,
synthesizers and samples, a gospel choir, and even a brief rap
interlude. Old songs—including “Land of Hope and Dreams” from
1999—clashed against tunes that felt newer than anything
Springsteen had created since “Streets of Philadelphia.” It was the
biggest soundscape Springsteen had ever created, and it took on
the biggest topics in the most direct language he had ever used.
Although various ideological messages were read into them,
Springsteen’s previous social statements really were not nearly so
much political as moral. He did his best not to take sides, which is
one reason his work with Democratic presidential candidates
Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008 surprised (and
alienated) so many of his politically conservative fans. Springsteen
generally eschewed naming names even in onstage commentary,
and his lyrics concerned an ethos—the horrors of war, poverty,
racism, and loss of self-respect—that had little to do with electoral
politics.
On Wrecking Ball he went further. The most extreme song, “Death
to My Hometown,” pictured bankers as “the vultures [who] picked
our bones” and recoiled in disgust that those same men “walk the
streets as free men now.” The album progressed to a vision
summarized by “Rocky Ground,” resilient gospel with a hip-hop
interlude, and “Land of Hope and Dreams,” a full-throated
expansion of a secular vision bounded by the folk-gospel railroad
imagery of “This Train Is Bound for Glory”—evoking both Guthrie
and Sister Rosetta Tharpe—and of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get
Ready.” The album does not end with such a simple invocation of
reconciliation, however. Instead, it finishes with “We Are Alive,” a
call for action, evoked by a dream about the souls of a victimized
19th-century striker, a child martyr of the civil rights movement,
and a contemporary Central American peasant expired in a
southwestern U.S. desert. That is not just a matter of declaring
that his train excludes no one, not even lost souls, whores, and
gamblers. Its declaration that “it’s only our bodies that betray us in
the end” offers a way of reading the song as a tribute to Federici
and Clemons. But the ghouls Springsteen conjures also declare:
Our souls and spirits rise to carry the fire and light the spark
To fight shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart.
It is hard to hear those lines as anything but advocacy, especially
in the wake of the album’s hostility to “fat cats” and the proximity
of its release to the Occupy movement.
Dave Marsh
Released in January 2014, Springsteen’s 18th studio album, High
Hopes, was partly a retrospective of material that had been
targeted for but unreleased on albums from the previous decade or
so and partly a collection of cover versions. It also included
reenergized interpretations of a pair of powerful familiar
Springsteen compositions, “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and
“American Skin (41 Shots).” The latter song—a complex
exploration of the death in 1999 of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed
Guinean immigrant who was shot repeatedly by New York
City police officers who thought he was going for a gun when he
reached for his wallet—took on new relevance in the wake of
the shooting death in 2012 of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African
American teenager, by neighbourhood watch volunteer George
Zimmerman in Florida. Much in evidence throughout the album
are the sensibility and distinctive guitar playing of
collaborator Tom Morello, formerly the driving force behind
the alternative rap-rock group Rage Against the Machine, who
subbed for guitarist Steve Van Zandt during Springsteen and the E
Street Band’s tour of Australia in 2013. Contributions recorded by
Federici and Clemons before their deaths can be heard on cuts that
originally were intended to appear on earlier albums such as The
Rising. They and eight others—Van Zandt, drummer Max
Weinberg, pianist Roy Bittan, bassist Garry Tallent, guitarist Nils
Lofgren, vocalist Patti Scialfa (Springsteen’s wife), and two former
E Street Band band members, pianist David Sancious and
drummer Vini Lopez—were selected in 2013 for induction into
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as members of the E Street Band.
In 2016 Springsteen released the critically acclaimed
memoir Born to Run. That year he also received the Presidential
Medal of Freedom. In 2017 Springsteen on Broadway premiered
and was an immediate hit with critics and theatregoers. In the
one-man show—with musical accompaniment by his wife on
several tunes—Springsteen performed various songs and told
stories, many of which were from his memoir. For the production,
Springsteen earned a special Tony Award in June 2018. Shortly
after the show’s run ended in December, a filmed performance
debuted on Netflix. That month an album based on the production
was released.