Decades-long love affair: The band Bruce Springsteen called the “Gods of Olympus”
The artistic heft of Bruce Springsteen has rarely been matched. One of the greatest songwriters of his generation, able to turn grease-ridden ditties and small-town life into enormous anthems capable of shaking stadiums, ‘The Boss’ has rightly earned his spot in the pantheon of rock and roll’s best. But, he has rarely acknowledged his own legacy without paying tribute to those who came before him.
Speaking on his own SiriusXM show, From My Home To Yours, in 2023, Springsteen was happy to name the four rock bands who sit atop his ‘Mount Rushmore’ of acts: “It’s Beatles, Stones, Animals, that’s how my playlist goes, you know. But any Dave Clark 5 fans?” he said. It’s a seriously chunky line-up of impressive acts. But for Springsteen, the Fab Four will always reign supreme.
The love affair between Bruce Springsteen and The Beatles has been going on for decades. Like millions of other children growing up in the 1960s, when four lads from Liverpool, England, showed up on American television, everything changed for Springsteen. “‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ came on the radio in 1964 — that was going to change my life because I was going to successfully pick the guitar up and learn how to play,” the songwriter confessed.
The Boss remembered the song coming on his mother’s car radio: “I immediately demanded that she let me out, I ran to the bowling alley, ran down a long neon-lit aisle, down the bowling alley into the bowling alley. Ran to the phone booth, got in the phone booth and immediately called my girl and asked, ‘Have you heard this band called The Beatles?’ After that, it was nothing but rock ‘n’ roll and guitars.” The relationship would last for years, and in 2012, Springsteen completed his dream by joining Paul McCartney on stage for a whirlwind performance.
During that same year, Springsteen gave a keynote speech at the SXSW festival, whereby he labelled the group as sonic deities. “The Beatles were cool. They were classical, formal, and created the idea of an independent unit where everything could come out of your garage.” For an artist like Springsteen, a working-class songwriter with dirt under his fingernails, the idea of a band from a similarly simple background was more than inspiring. His ability to connect with their upbringing was paramount to his own success.
However, the group’s first record would lead him down a slightly different understanding of the group: “The Meet the Beatles album cover, those four headshots. I remember, I seen ’em at J. J. Newberry’s. It was the first thing I saw when you ran down to the five–and–ten-cent store. There were no record stores. There weren’t enough records, I don’t think, in those days. There was a little set by the toys where they sold a few albums. And I remember running in and seeing that album cover with those four headshots. It was like the silent gods of Olympus.”
While it might sound a tad hyperbolic, the quartet’s impact has been similarly explained by the likes of Tom Petty, Ozzy Osbourne and many more. For Springsteen, the band were a pathway to his destiny: “Your future was just sort of staring you in the face.”
But the band’s image on the album cover was perhaps “too cool” and left Springsteen lamenting, “I’m never gonna get there, man.” However, things changed when the young Springsteen “came across a picture of the Beatles in Hamburg. And they had on the leather jackets and the slick–backed pompadours, they had acned faces. I said, hey, ‘Wait a minute, those are the guys I grew up with, only they were Liverpool wharf rats.'”
This ability to connect with the seemingly unattainable brilliance of the band would inspire the singer to begin work in earnest. “They’re a lot cooler than me,” he mused “but they’re still kids. There must be a way to get there from here.”
From this moment, Springsteen would begin his journey to become the voice of America’s heartland. He would take the pop sensibility of the Beatles, merge it with the righteous political nouse of Bob Dylan and smother in the very salt of America’s earth to bring out his own unique vision of what rock and roll was. His ability to reach out and touch these pop “Gods” gave him the impetus to join them on Mount Olympus.
