Watch footage from Bruce Springsteen’s first-ever concert
Bruce Springsteen sits comfortably among the titans in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as both a dynamic showman and an insightful wordsmith. With the Boss enjoying sell-out stadium tours with the E Street Band over the past 45 years, it’s hard to imagine his painstaking snail-like crawl to international stardom over the early 1970s.
Springsteen became interested in rock and roll music as a child after seeing Elvis Presley perform on television. It was love at first sight, but his clear-cut ambition emerged after catching wind of four rising talents from Liverpool in the mid-60s. “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.”
With a manifestation of chart-topping success and screaming fans crowding his dreams, Springsteen persuaded his mother to buy him a $60 guitar in 1964. With his gear in check, he began to sing and play the guitar with a few different groups in his childhood town of Freehold, New Jersey.
After making notable headway with his formative trio, Earth, in the late ‘60s, Springsteen set his ambitions higher still. Through the early ‘70s, Springsteen formed an early incarnation of his E Street Band and began taking the show as far out as California while working on material for his first studio exploits.
With a Columbia Record deal signed in ‘72, things were looking up, but tough times were in store for the following year. After the commercial disappointment of his debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., released in January ‘73, Springsteen had already begun pouring long-laboured material into his second shot, September’s The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. Sadly, Springsteen’s second studio album, like the first, proved to be a commercial failure despite a positive reaction from critics.
In light of the favourable critical reception of the first two albums, Columbia gave Springsteen a generous make-or-break recording budget ahead of his third album, which was understood to be his final chance to make it big. “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 conjure up was Born To Run, his masterpiece and a bullet train to global stardom.
Below, you can see footage taken from Bruce Springsteen’s first official concert as a signed artist. A 23-year-old Springsteen took to the stage as a supporting act at Max’s Kansas City, New York and sang ‘Henry Boy’, an early track that didn’t quite make the cut for his debut album.
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