Springsteen, Bruce

▪ American singer, songwriter, and bandleader

Introduction

born Sept. 23, 1949, Freehold, N.J., U.S.

      American singer, songwriter, and bandleader who became the archetypal rock performer of the 1970s and '80s.

      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 (Hammond, John), Sr., who immediately signed him to . His first two albums, released in 1973, reflect folk rock, soul (soul music), and rhythm-and-blues (rhythm and blues) influences, especially those of Van Morrison (Morrison, Van), Bob Dylan (Dylan, Bob), 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 here, 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.

      With his third album, Born to Run (1975), Springsteen transformed into a full-fledged rock and roller, heavily indebted to Phil Spector (Spector, Phil) and Roy Orbison (Orbison, Roy). 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. 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 and saxophonist Clarence Clemons, a huge black man, seemed sometimes to be playing out scenes from Huckleberry Finn, using the stage as their raft. 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 this 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. Springsteen's social perspective has been 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 these albums are intensely personal reflections on intimate relationships. In general, they have not been as popular.

      Bridging all this 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 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. This grandiose gesture established him as prolix beyond all but a couple of peers. Sales of Tracks were trivial compared with those for Live.

      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, 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 Sept. 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. These developments culminated in his participation in the 2004 Vote for Change tour in support of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry (Kerry, John). 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 (Seeger, Pete) ( "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 tour with the E Street Band in 2007 and 2008. He ranks with that small number whose work has grown rather than remained static or regressed as he approached the end of middle age.

Dave Marsh

Representative Works

● The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle (1973)

● Born to Run (1975)

● Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978)

● The River (1980)

● Born in the U.S.A. (1984)

● Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Live 1975–1985 (1986)

● The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995)

Additional Reading

The most indispensable Springsteen book is Bruce Springsteen, Songs, expanded ed. (also published as Bruce Springsteen Songs, 2003), which collects his lyrics from his first album through Devils and Dust with limited but important comments from the author. The standard Springsteen biography is Dave Marsh, Born to Run (1979, reissued 1996), and its companion volume, Glory Days (1987, reissued 1996), published together as Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts (2003), with a foreword and final chapter updating the tale. Dave Marsh, Bruce Springsteen On Tour: 1968–2005 (2006), a coffee-table book featuring photos from Springsteen's personal collection, takes on the story from another angle. The fan's (and the band's) perspective is exemplified by the stories and memorabilia collected in Bob Santelli, Greetings from E Street: The Story of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (2006). Frank Stefanko, Days of Hope and Dreams: An Intimate Portrait of Bruce Springsteen (2003), collects the author's photos of Springsteen from the late 1970s and early '80s, offering the most personal visual document of the artist.June Skinner Sawyers (ed.), Racing in the Street: The Bruce Springsteen Reader (2004), is a compilation of significant journalism and criticism, most of it focused on lyrics. Of academic studies, the most interesting is Robert Coles, Bruce Springsteen's America: The People Listening, A Poet Singing (2004), which offers interviews with Springsteen fans conducted by someone who knows the artist well. Two simultaneous cover profiles make amusing reading, if only for their contrasting approaches to celebrity journalism and for evidence of how much harm hype can and cannot do to an artist's career: the laudatory Jay Cocks et al., “The Backstreet Phantom of Rock,” Time (Oct. 27, 1975), pp. 48–58; and the hostile Maureen Orth, Janet Huck, and Peter S. Greenberg, “Making of a Rock Star,” Newsweek (Oct. 27, 1975), pp. 57–63.Dave Marsh

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