“One of the greatest”: The artist Bruce Springsteen considered underground masters
No one gets into the music industry expecting to be the greatest underground artist in the world. Everyone is trying to reach the widest audience that they can, but sometimes, the world isn’t necessarily ready for the more experimental side of rock to suddenly take over the mainstream. Even though Bruce Springsteen had everything that the masses were looking for with his heartland rock tunes, he thought the art-rock giants Suicide were the true songwriting geniuses flying under the radar.
Looking at ‘The Boss’s track record for favourite songs, though, one of the biggest names in post-punk with a synthesiser as their main instrument wasn’t necessarily where he came from. He was born and raised on the larger-than-life rock songs made popular by everyone from Phil Spector to Chuck Berry, and as much as they loved their simplistic side, a crooner like Roy Orbison was never going to make a song as foreboding as ‘Dream Baby Dream’.
There was still some overlap to be found, though. Just like the punk revolution had broken down the barriers for pompous rock and roll, so too did Springsteen revel in the idea of just being an average kid from Jersey looking to make a name for himself. He was never trying to be one of the biggest rock stars in the world, but he knew that he could take his listeners on a journey every time they heard one of his tunes.
Although Alan Vega was doing the same thing in Suicide, those stories were a lot more graphic than anything Springsteen was trying to do. ‘Adam Raised a Cain’ may have been dark by heartland rock standards, but most of Suicide’s debut album seemed to be designed to either scare someone to death when they heard it or make a deliberate attempt to be as uncommercial as possible.
And even if you have a strong tolerance for dark music, ‘Frankie Teardrop’ is still one of the most uncomfortable listening experiences to come out of the late 1970s. There had been songs about murder before, but hearing those mechanical-sounding keyboard lines in between Vega telling a story about a man coming home and murdering his entire family is the closest that most of us will ever come to getting into that twisted mindset.
Springsteen was already known as a legend by the time Suicide started working, but he still considered them to be one of the best examples of what the underground had to offer, telling Rolling Stone, “They are underground masters, to me. Just one of the greatest. Alan Vega, one of the greatest. They should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in my opinion. They are just amazing. I loved them, and they had an influence on Nebraska in a roundabout way.”
And once you listen to Nebraska, you start to hear what Springsteen is getting at. The idea of the E Street Band making something like ‘Rocket USA’ is a bit of a stretch, but hearing ‘The Boss’ left to his own devices with an acoustic guitar playing haunting story-driven songs is ripped straight out of Vega’s playbook.
But for all of their differences, both Springsteen and Vega seem like two sides of the same coin in some respects. One was talking about the hope that can be found in the heart of America, and the other was working through what happens when the average working-class person finally snaps.
