Five songs that changed Bruce Springsteen’s life
As The Boss of rock and roll, Bruce Springsteen perhaps falls short of the foundational majesty of The King, Elvis Presley, but his influence knows no bounds. While Presley is respected as the earliest and smoothest voice in rock and roll history, he didn’t write his own songs. Springsteen, on the other hand, is the full package, with electrifying showmanship, poignant balladry, and reflecting rock anthems.
Although Springsteen is more creatively prolific than The King, he likely wouldn’t have released a single album if it weren’t for Presley. As a child, one track by the knee-shaking crooner had him in a trance. Speaking to the BBC, Springsteen once revealed that his first musical infatuation was with ‘Hound Dog’. “When I heard it, it just shot straight through to my brain,” he mused.
At the time, Springsteen was just a child, but at that moment, he realised that there was more to life and a world beyond the bounds of New Jersey that he could conquer. “I realised, suddenly, that there was more to life than what I’d been living,” he added. “I was then in pursuit of something, and there’d been a vision laid out before me. You were dealing with the pure thrust, the pure energy of the music itself. I was so very young, but it still hit me like a thunderbolt.”
Through the late 1950s and early ’60s, it was all about Presley. Springsteen begged his parents for 45s and was no stranger to the family radio. In 1964, Springsteen encountered yet another thunderbolt while riding in the car with his mother. “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.”
At the time, Springsteen was 15 years old and had one of his first girlfriends. The song seemed to click with the romance of the time. “I immediately demanded that she let me out,” he said. “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.”
As the British invasion played out, The Rolling Stones became major players alongside The Beatles. Under the early leadership of Brian Jones, the band was faithful to the blues tradition with blues and R&B covers. Before the peaks of ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ and ‘Get Off of My Cloud’, the band won Springsteen over with a cover of The Valentnos’ ‘It’s All Over Now’.
The original version, also released in 1964, featured Bobby Womack, who wrote the song with his sister-in-law Shirley Womack. The Stones’ cover became the band’s first US number one. “‘It’s All Over Now’ held a special place for me because when I got thrown out of my first band, I went home that night and I was pissed off,” Springsteen recalled. “I said, ‘Alright, I’m going to be a lead guitar player,’ and for some reason, that solo felt like something I might be able to manage.”
Springsteen’s rise to stardom was slow and painful. His first two albums with the E Street Band failed to achieve commercial success, but when he finally prospered with Born To Run in 1975, he proved that tenacity can pay dividends. “I put the record on, and I sat there all night until I was able to scrape up some relatively decent version of Keith’s solo,” Springsteen continued, recalling one of his earlier struggles. “It was a very important record for me as it was the first solo I ever learned.”
In the late 1960s and ’70s, Springsteen was on his way to becoming a star, following in the footsteps of his early rock and roll idols. However, his inspiration tank was far from full at this stage. Notably, he fell in love with the Prince of Soul, Marvin Gaye, and the singer-songwriter excellence of Van Morrison.
Morrison had been in a rock ‘n’ roll band called Them, which Springsteen undoubtedly adored. Still, he first truly fell for the Irish singer when he released Astral Weeks in 1968. “It made me trust in beauty; it gave me a sense of the divine,” Springsteen reflected. “The divine just seems to run through the veins of that entire album. Of course, there was incredible singing and the playing of Richard Davis on the bass. It was trance music. It was repetitive. It was the same chord progression over and over again.”
Throughout his long and successful career, Springsteen has combined the best attributes of all his idols to frame a story of his own. His catalogue is impressively eclectic but remains constant, with lyrics reflecting his life within the cultural framework of the US.
Five songs that changed Bruce Springsteen’s life:
- Elvis Presley – ‘Hound Dog’
- The Beatles – ‘I Want To Hond Your Hand’
- The Rolling Stones – ‘It’s All Over Now’
- Van Morrison – ‘Madame George’
- Marvin Gaye – ‘What’s Going On’
