Bruce Springsteen names one of the best performers he’s ever seen: “He is incredible”
It would almost be poetic if Bruce Springsteen ascended to the heavens from his stage when fate calls for him. He has always been a natural animal whenever he steps in front of a crowd, and no matter how many times he’s played ‘Born to Run’, he’s guaranteed to put the same amount of heart and emotion into every guitar hit as he did when he first troe through the tune in New Jersey with The E Street Band. ‘The Boss’ might know something about what constitutes a great live performance, but he knew that Prince could give him a run for his money during the Born in the USA tour.
By the time that Springsteen reached the 1980s, though, he was already a fixture of what American rock and roll was supposed to be. He may have written intimate character portraits in a lot of his songs, but the minute he took those same ideals into the arena, he suddenly had an army of fans behind him going along with everything that he felt inside, whether it was the yearning for escape on ‘Born to Run’ or the struggle to survive on ‘Badlands’.
But the past decade, since his breakthrough album, saw him take things in a different direction. Despite gaining recognition as one of the greatest to grace the stage, albums like Darkness on the Edge of Town were a lot colder, and Nebraska ended up representing the most intimate side of The Boss’s psyche.
Whereas Born in the USA was a casual swing back into optimism, no one could have competed with what Prince was doing. From the minute he started making waves out of Minneapolis, ‘The Purple One’ had turned himself into a musical dynamo every time he faced the crowd, playing every instrument that he could get his hands on and covering everything from funk to soul to jazz in his wake.
And unlike Springsteen, he didn’t technically need his backing group to do it. Springsteen would always have the E Street Band as his main muscle when he played live, but even if he were alone onstage, Prince was like a wild musical animal let loose, even dancing his ass off when he wasn’t annihilating the fretboard or behind the piano.
Despite being on the insane run of dates that produced ‘Dancing in the Dark’ and ‘Glory Days’, Springsteen knew his work was cut out for him every time he saw Prince, telling Rolling Stone, “He is incredible live. He is one of the best live performers I’ve ever seen in my whole life. His show was funny; it had a lot of humour in it. He had the bed that came up out of the stage – it was great, you know? I think him and Steve [Van Zandt], right now, are my favourite performers.”
Then again, Springsteen and Prince delivered the best work from completely different angles. Whereas ‘The Boss’ saw his music as a spiritual exercise half the time, Prince was just looking to blow the people away in the same way someone like Jimmy Page or Eddie Van Halen was doing before him.
In fact, when looking at his talent, ‘The Purple One’ seemed to combine the virtuosic abilities of Stevie Wonder with the larger-than-life atmosphere of Elvis Presley. Most artists are lucky enough to have either charisma or musical genius, but Prince had everything wrapped up in one.
