The band that made the best American music, according to Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen was never one to apologise for wearing his influences on his sleeve.
Some of his greatest influences were bound to find their way into his songs sooner or later, and while he is the first one to say that no one could sing in quite the same way that Roy Orbison could when he first got up onstage, he was going to spend the rest of his life trying to find songs that hit with the same kind of energy that his idol’s did whenever he started working on Born to Run. But when looking at the rich history of American music, ‘The Boss’ felt some bands did things better than others.
Then again, there’s no traditional genre when it comes to American music. As much as people like to claim that country music is what unites everyone in the US, you have to remember that this is also the same country that gave the world everything from the blues to rock and roll to R&B. There’s a lot of great music to choose from, but Springsteen always had his eye on singers that had passion behind what they were singing.
You could hear the pain in Orbison’s voice whenever he was singing, but even when Springsteen first fell in love with The Rolling Stones, he could hear them being absolutely in love with every single song that they were playing. Even if they were only copying what they had heard in old Chuck Berry records, they were having the time of their lives trying to become the biggest band in the world.
That passion might be infectious, but a lot of it was born outside of rock and roll. Some of the biggest powerhouses in the world had always come from the world of soul music, and while Ray Charles set the benchmark for what R&B could sound like on his records, Sam and Dave were the ones making every one of their records sound like a mini opera contained within a single song like ‘Soul Man’.
Not all of their tunes needed to be the most complicated thing in the world, but as far as Springsteen was concerned, he was looking at one of the greatest singers of all time when he heard Sam Moore sing years after the fact in the 1970s, saying, “Sam Moore was an incredible bandleader. I used to go see Sam & Dave when they played the Satellite Lounge in Fort Dix, New Jersey, [and] the Fast Lane in Asbury Park. These are 200, 300-seat clubs, and this was in the late ’70s. They were still incredible. [It was] some of the greatest music in the United States at that very moment.”
But it’s not like Moore was doing the same kind of vocal leaps that Aretha Franklin would be doing on record. It all came from the way that he delivered every one of his songs, and when he talked about his heart being ripped out of his chest, you can feel that he is doing everything he can to get every single emotion out of his voice without full-on bursting into tears by the end of the song.
And while Springsteen was never going to match what he could do, you can hear the same kind of fire in his voice on a lot of The E Street Band’s best records. Darkness on the Edge of Town might have a reputation as being a lot more morose than Born to Run, but when you hear the kind of performance he delivers on ‘Adam Raised a Cain’, he was clearly trying to make the same kind of musical moments that he heard on all those Sam and Dave records he heard as a kid.
Every Springsteen fan didn’t necessarily have to listen to the best soul music in the world to like what he did, but you can definitely feel that same kind of energy in the way that he plays. ‘The Boss’ didn’t make music that was supposed to be too complicated, so what carried it was always going to be his lyrics and the raw energy he got out of himself and his bandmates whenever he hit the stage.
