The moment Bob Marley supported Bruce Springsteen
Although his music is of a different style, it is easy to see how Bruce Springsteen could be compared to his 20th-century contemporary, Bob Marley. Both had the winning formula of popular appeal, entrancing stage presence and songwriting virtuosity. Despite these similarities, it’s difficult to imagine two acts of such different energy to share the stage, but on July 18th, 1973, the stars aligned.
Though Springsteen is now hailed as one of rock music’s most successful innovators, his rise to fame was less reminiscent of a rocket and perhaps more akin to an A380 towing a lorry. This snail crawl began in 1964 when a young Springsteen heard The Beatles for the first time.
“I saw Elvis on TV, and when I first saw Elvis, I was nine, but I was a little young, tried to play the guitar, but it didn’t work out, I put it away,” Springsteen once told Rolling Stone. “The keeper was in 1964, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ on South Street with my mother driving.”
“I immediately demanded that she let me out; I ran to the bowling alley, ran down a long neon-lit aisle, down the alley into the bowling alley,” he added. “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.”
After the relative success of his formative trio, Earth, in the late ’60s, Springsteen set his sights skyward. Through the early ’70s, he built an early incarnation of his E Street Band and took the show as far out as California while working on material for his first studio exploits. With a record deal signed with Columbia in 1972, things were looking up, but unforeseen woes lay on the horizon.
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., Springsteen’s debut album arrived on January 5th, 1973. Although the album is critically revered in retrospect, it was widely panned upon its release and reaped very little in the way of financial reward for the E Street Band. Undeterred, Springsteen led the group into the studio to piece together a follow-up.
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, the ill-fated follow-up, was recorded between May and September for a November release. While the album flopped, placing Springsteen in a precarious position, this period was host to a historical moment that wouldn’t have been considered so at the time.
In the middle of the summer, Springsteen and his E Street Band played a concert at Max’s Kansas City, a popular venue on Park Avenue South in New York City. The lesser-known Bob Marley and his band, The Wailers, were on hand to perform the support set that night, which would mark their first-ever concert in the city.
Below, you can hear recordings taken from both sets. Intriguingly, both acts would finally break through to popular acclaim in 1975. For Springsteen, it was the towering last-ditch effort, Born To Run, while Marley’s live version of ‘No Woman, No Cry’ became his first hit outside of Jamaica. In 1976, Marley consolidated his power with the album Rastaman Vibration, his first top-ten record in the US.
