The best rock songwriter Bruce Springsteen ever heard: “The greatest”
There has been no other artist who seemed to have the religious devotion to rock and roll as Bruce Springsteen has.
He sees every single concert venue like his church in his own way, and when looking through all of his greatest albums, the reason why all of them work is because he genuinely believes that his favourite music had the potential to move mountains as long as he had the right idea. But he wouldn’t have been able to shine as brightly as he did without the right people turning on the lights for him when he was a child.
‘The Boss’ had to spend a lot of time as a musical apprentice before he was ready to change the world, but every single he bought almost taught him another lesson. Everyone his age could tell the world where they were the first time they heard The Beatles playing on the radio, but when looking through Springsteen’s best work, it was the storytellers that always struck a nerve with him more than the average rock and roll song.
The genre may have been about partying for the most part, but Bob Dylan was the one who was tearing the lid off of everything whenever he performed. His songs were practically short parables about how someone can live their life, and while he was in anger of sounding a little too preachy on some of his tunes, Springsteen was willing to listen to everything Dylan said. This was someone speaking for the entire American population, but it’s not like Mr Zimmerman was the only one of his kind out there.
Springsteen had done more than his fair share of research when he started falling in love with everyone from Pete Seeger to Hank Williams. Every one of those artists had their own life experiences immortalised in their songs, but it’s not like that method was reserved for folksy music. After all, one of the greatest rock and roll stars of all time was the perfect storyteller, and it didn’t take Springsteen to see that magic when he heard his first Chuck Berry song through The Rolling Stones.
It took him a while to latch onto everything, but what Berry was doing was everything that he had looked for in a songwriter. Nothing that Berry said was all that flashy or taught everyone about the moral direction of the world, but when you listened to ‘Johnny B Goode’ or ‘Maybellene’ back in the day, you were transported to the romantic side of Americana, where no one had a care in the world except for their fast cars and their other halves.
So when that voice was finally silenced, Springsteen understood that he had lost one of the greatest teachers that he could have asked for, saying, “Chuck Berry was rock’s greatest practitioner, guitarist, and the greatest pure rock ‘n’ roll writer who ever lived. This is a tremendous loss of a giant for the ages.” Those songs aren’t that complicated, but if you look at the pedigree Berry had, just think of all the people that wouldn’t be here if not for him laying the groundwork.
First of all, without him, all of those classic guitar licks would be gone. He was the original guitar hero in lots of ways, and if you take away the people that he influenced, the idea of a world where The Beatles and The Rolling Stones weren’t influenced by Berry is a much darker reality to think about. Hell, we wouldn’t even have the best moment in Back to the Future, which is probably the biggest loss of all.
So when Springsteen put respect on Berry’s name, it wasn’t because of him trying to show his rock and roll credentials. He was going to stand by what he believed in, and even though that mentality has been enough for people to get angry at him these days, he’s not going to apologise for supporting the kind of people that helped paint the picture of America that he grew up in.
