The artists Bruce Springsteen never wanted to be like: “I wasn’t gonna let that happen to me”
Bruce Springsteen is one of the few artists who had rock and roll in his veins before he picked up an instrument. He had his influences from other American songwriters like Peter Seeger and Woody Guthrie, but listening to his tales of escape, he always believed that the power of his music was enough to get him out of his nowhere town and onto something much bigger than he could have imagined. And while he couldn’t have become as big without the E Street Band behind him, he had enough self-awareness to know which bands he should avoid.
That’s not to say that ‘The Boss’ was ever a snob about music. At any of his shows these days, he’s more likely to throw in any obscure B-side or Top 40 hit that comes into his head, but when looking at where he started, a lot of his first tracks were rambling tales about the everyday people trying to make an honest living in America.
While that mentality is all well and good, that wasn’t the kind of music that had been lighting up the charts either. Even if Springsteen wanted to be the biggest artist in the world, his idols like Bob Dylan had started to fade from the public lexicon, and while he had done a phenomenal job picking up on where he left off, the rest of the world wanted something with a bit more spectacle.
‘The Boss’ may have fashioned himself as a Roy Orbison type, but in terms of rock and roll gods, Elvis Presley was the one that got people in seats around the world. Outside of being a consummate entertainer, ‘The King of Rock and Roll’ was known as such because he felt larger than life, always performing for the back row and making the kind of songs that felt almost too big for one man to handle.
By the time Springsteen hit his stride again in the 1980s, he had started to see the whole thing happen again once Michael Jackson had taken off. People already knew him as the cute kid behind The Jackson Five, but once Thriller came out, he felt like a Hollywood commodity more than a human being at times, especially when the paparazzi turned him into a glorified circus act whenever he performed.
Although anyone could have envied those massive paychecks and countless fans, Springsteen was the first to admit that he never wanted to be that kind of entertainer, saying, “The type of fame that Elvis had and that I think Michael Jackson has, the pressure of it, and the isolation that it seems to require, has gotta be really painful. I wasn’t gonna let that happen to me. I wasn’t gonna get to a place where I said, ‘I can’t go in here. I can’t go to this bar. I can’t go outside.’ For the most part, I do basically what I’ve always done. I’ll walk into a club, and people will just say hi, and that’s it.”
That holds true for a lot of Springsteen’s work as well. Not everything he has made has been meant to sell a million copies, and even if a lot of people resonated with songs like ‘Born in the USA’ and ‘Glory Days’ in the 1980s, seeing him make something decidedly uncommercial on albums like Nebraska and Tunnel of Love was a big reason why fans were interested in the man behind the songs rather than the flashing lights.
If you look at what Springsteen was all about, you will see that he relished being viewed as the everyman in each song he wrote. It might not have been easy to keep himself grounded all the time, but there needed to be a humble head on his shoulders if he was ever going to sing ‘Born to Run’ with some integrity.
