The director who inspired Bruce Springsteen to greatness
Ever since Bruce Springsteen began releasing music in the 1970s, he has become a staple voice in American music, amassing millions of fans with his pioneering heartland rock. With his 1975 album Born to Run, Springsteen earned monumental chart success, peaking at number three in the United States.
The album remains one of his most beloved works, celebrated for its songs about escape and dreaming of a better life. Yet the album also paints a realistic picture of this struggle, highlighting the criminality and seediness that can often be found in dead-end towns. Springsteen has frequently explored such themes, using his music to explore both sides of the ‘American Dream’.
In fact, Springsteen once captured the terrors of crime-ridden cities in the song ‘It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City’ so well that David Bowie claimed the song “really scared the living ones out of me”. However, despite a lot of his lyrics coming from personal observation, Springsteen has also looked to the work of a certain director for inspiration.
One of the most prominent influences on his work is Martin Scorsese, who has crafted a career out of examining corruption and depravity, especially in places like New York. Springsteen told the Washington Post that a “lot of my writing is deeply influenced from the movies” before citing Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Mean Streets, alongside Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, as some examples of films that have stuck with him.
Springsteen explained: “Those were just pictures that came right at a certain moment when I was creating my own work. So there was something, the existential nature of a lot of them just rang true for me and it was something that I tried to make a part of my own musical persona and what I was creating.”
It’s easy to see how the crime-filled streets depicted in Scorsese’s movies like Taxi Driver, where Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle cruises around the city, disgusted by the sight of urban deterioration, influenced Springsteen.
He continued: “I saw Mean Streets and I immediately connected to some of the things that I was doing but there was just something in the dark intensity of those pictures that felt like they spoke to the times.”
Released in 1973, Scorsese once described Mean Streets as “a story of a modern saint, a saint in his own society, but his society happens to be gangsters”. By depicting violence and sin with stunning visuals, Springsteen was undoubtedly inspired by Scorsese’s ability to transform corruption into something poetic.
Interestingly, Springsteen might have inspired the iconic “you talkin’ to me?” line in Taxi Driver. Scorsese said to Variety: “I think it might be [true]! You never know. Because we never knew where that came from”. De Niro had watched Springsteen play a few days before the scene was recorded, and, at the time, the musician frequently said the phrase while on stage.
Regardless, Scorsese and Springsteen have great respect for each other, and we can thank movies like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver for continually inspiring The Boss.
