Bruce Springsteen discusses the pop song that “contained the whole world”
A bonafide legend in the annals of rock history, Bruce Springsteen has earned a place among the elite with his captivating performances and remarkable songwriting prowess. For over four-and-a-half decades, the Boss has mesmerised audiences worldwide, consistently selling out arena tours with his dynamic ensemble, The E Street Band. Elvis Presley, The Beatles and Bob Dylan remain Springsteen’s most important career influences to this day.
Springsteen became interested in rock and roll music as a child after seeing Elvis Presley perform on television, but his clear-cut ambition took shape after hearing the Fab Four from Liverpool. “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”.
He added: “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. 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.”
If The Beatles encouraged Springsteen to grab a guitar and hit the stage, Bob Dylan provided much-needed inspiration at a pivotal moment in his early career. While Springsteen’s first two albums – Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, both released in 1973 – were critically favoured, they failed to ruffle feathers in the financial department.
Columbia decided to give Springsteen a generous make-or-break recording budget for his third album, which was understood to be a last-ditch effort at commercial reception. “So, I was going to have to give it everything I had,” Springsteen recalled of the tense period in an interview with BBC News in 2018. Thankfully, the third album that he managed to rustle up was Born To Run, his masterpiece and a surefire ticket to the top.
Continuing in his conversation with the BBC, Springsteen revealed that, while recording the seminal album, he was inspired by three musicians. This time, neither Elvis nor any of The Beatles received a shout-out. “I’d been listening to three records,” he said. “I’d been listening to Duane Eddy, the twangy guitar sound, Roy Orbison, the very unusually and unstructured songs, and, of course, [Bob] Dylan.”
“So, those are the three things that kind of found their way — and inspector records — so, those are the three things that really found their way into Born to Run because I was never really much of a revolutionary musician,” he continued, “But I was an alchemist. I put a lot of things together along with stuff I pulled up out of myself.”
“Bob Dylan is the father of my country,” Springsteen added on his hero in his autobiography, Born To Run. “Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home were not only great records, but they were the first time I can remember being exposed to a truthful vision of the place I lived”.
In 1988, Springsteen inducted Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and discussed the immense power of the Highway 61 Revisited cut ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, on both a personal and universal level.
“The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’,” Springsteen said. “And my mother, who was – she was no stiff with rock and roll, she liked the music, she listened – she sat there for a minute, she looked at me, and she said, ‘That guy can’t sing.’ But I knew she was wrong. I sat there, I didn’t say nothin’, but I knew that I was listening to the toughest voice that I had ever heard”.
“It was lean, and it sounded somehow simultaneously young and adult, and I ran out, and I bought the single. And I came home, I ran home, and I put it on my 45, and they must have made a mistake at the factory, because a Lenny Welch song came on. And the label was wrong, so I ran back, and I got it, and I played it, then I went out and I got Highway 61, and it was all I played for weeks.”
“I looked at the cover, with Bob, with that satin blue jacket and the Triumph Motorcycle shirt,” he continued. “And when I was a kid, Bob’s voice somehow – it thrilled and scared me. It made me feel kind of irresponsibly innocent. And it still does. But it reached down and touched what little worldliness I think a 15-year-old kid, in high school, in New Jersey had in him at the time”.
He concluded: “Dylan was – he was a revolutionary, man, the way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind. And he showed us that just because the music was innately physical, it did not mean that it was anti-intellect. He had the vision and the talent to expand a pop song until it contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound. He broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve, and he changed the face of rock and roll forever and ever.”
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