The 1956 song Bruce Springsteen will never get tired of: “Sounds great “
Half of what Bruce Springsteen does is always about finding the beauty in the little things.
He didn’t need to write complex stories every time he wrote a record, and even when he was working on some of the greatest songs of his career, he was much more content to make tunes that felt a lot more grounded in reality than the fanciful stuff he heard on the radio around that time. He was perfectly happy making music that was more straightforward than everything else, because some of his favourite songs didn’t need to beat around the bush to get where they needed to go.
And if ‘The Boss’ had something on his mind, he wasn’t going to be subtle about it with the rest of the E Street Band behind him. Some of the greatest players in New Jersey were drawn to what Springsteen was doing every single time he played, and half of his best work came from him trying his best to make the Earth shake every single time he launched into ‘Born to Run’ or ‘Thunder Road’.
The foundations of rock and roll were built on that kind of excitement, but what Springsteen did had to mean a lot more than your traditional rock and roll songs. He wanted to have the same kind of excitement as Little Richard filtered through the literary storytelling of Bob Dylan, and you can tell when he was tearing through some of the greatest songs of his career based on how he delivered them.
Nebraska did show us the more soft-spoken side of what Springsteen was all about, but he was just as concerned with making sure that he never lost touch with that core audience. The crowd that he cultivated were the kind that believed in rock and roll being greater than anything else on Earth, and that rang true to Springsteen every single time he heard Elvis Presley sing his songs when they came over the radio.
Springsteen didn’t need to worry about living up to what ‘The King’ had done, but he felt that there was a lot more than everyone saw when Presley gyrated his hips. ‘Hound Dog’ was already going to be a spectacle whenever he performed, but there were so many different facets to the way that Presley’s voice moved whenever he did justice to what Big Mama Thornton had started.
This was what lit Springsteen’s world on fire, and he was going to do everything he could to make something half as good as that, saying, “Elvis was considered a novelty act. He wasn’t deemed to have a lot of cultural significance initially at all… And it’s funny because I was so very young, but it still hit me like a thunderbolt. And still sounds great to this day.”
Most of his songs didn’t need to be as simplistic as what Presley was working with, but all of his records told a story that Presley had helped birth. The America that Springsteen wrote about was the kind that was left in shock and awe of what Presley did, and that beautiful kid from the American South was the person who gave Springsteen the courage to dream big and think that there was something better for him waiting on the other side of the New Jersey turnpike.
And while Springsteen has achieved more than he could have ever dreamed of when he was still a kid working on those first records, he wasn’t going to take it for granted, either. He knew that what mattered was that little kid who grew up listening to ‘Hound Dog’, and he was going to do everything he could to help make his dreams a reality.
