The “noble” lesson Bruce Springsteen taught Johnny Marr
Johnny Marr has rubbed shoulders with the great and the good of the music industry for decades. Among those who Marr has come across on his journey is the “noble” Bruce Springsteen, who left a strong impression on the Mancunian guitarist and taught him a valuable lesson about delivering the best performances possible.
Marr discussed his joyous first encounter with Springsteen in his autobiography, Set The Boy Free, and also on Rob Brydon’s Spotify exclusive podcast, Brydon &. Welsh comedian Brydon is a super-fan of ‘The Boss’, and there’s nothing he prefers to talk about than Bruce Springsteen.
It only took minutes before Brydon diverted the conversation onto Bruce, and he was all ears when Marr revealed he’d met the singer-songwriter. “I’m just going to say it,” Marr says after Brydon’s stern line of questioning about his hero. “I’ve hung out with Bruce Springsteen a couple of times, and it was amazing.”
He explained: “I was in The Pretenders with Chrissie Hynde between 1988, ’89, and ’90. It was a short couple of year burst and an amazing time of my life. For a start, I was playing those great Pretenders songs, but also I suddenly found myself as the guitar-playing partner of an amazing person, Chrissie Hynde, with all her experience, and she’s just a really interesting person.”
Marr continued: “One of the things about Chrissie, particularly at that time and in America, she just knew everybody, and everybody wanted to know her. So, at my second gig, I was in the dressing room, and she said, ‘Johnny, come meet Jack Nicholson’. And, she introduced me to Bob Dylan.”
The former Smiths guitarist explains how they were on tour and had a night off in Los Angeles. They’d agreed to go out for dinner, and Hynde was bringing a friend along too but didn’t tell Marr who was meeting them for food.
Marr recalled: “I heard shouting outside and someone throwing stones out the window. She said to me, ‘That’s my friend, go and tell him I’ll be a minute’. So, I went over to the window, looked down, and it was Bruce Springsteen.” Hynde, Marr, his wife, Bruce, and his then-wife crammed into Springsteen’s Volkswagen Beetle before making their trip to a “fancy restaurant”.
One particular memory stands out to Marr from that special evening, “I vividly remember him talking very earnestly and saying, ‘When my favourite band used to come into town, and I used to go and buy a ticket, I’d put that ticket up on the refrigerator, and for a few weeks, every day I’d look at it like it was this treasure’, he says, ‘When I go on-stage now, I think of everybody with that ticket on their fridge, and every ticket that a person buys, that is a contract between me, and the person, and I want to honour that contract’. I just thought that was so noble and inspiring.”
Listen to the full podcast of Brydon’s conversation with Johnny Marr below.
