“The biggest piece of shit”: Was Bruce Springsteen’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame performance sabotaged by a rock icon?
Being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is perhaps one of the greatest accolades any artist can receive in their life, acknowledging their longevity as a performer and the significance they’ve managed to hold over a lengthy period of time.
In order to be inducted, you have to have begun your career over 25 years ago, which means newer artists will have to wait their turn to see if they’ve done enough to be seen as significant enough. If being inducted is a major aspiration of yours as an artist, then it’s maybe best to put your head down and make sure you’re making a good impression on the world of music over a good stretch of time.
The first edition of the ceremony was held in 1986, where the first inductees included the likes of Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Little Richard – all of these are significant names in the history of rock and roll, and had all begun their careers in the 1950s and continued to stay relevant in the years afterwards, even if not all of them had managed to stay alive or active up until this point in time.
It took until 1999 for Bruce Springsteen to find his way into the Hall of Fame, with him only having become eligible in this year. Hardly anyone was going to argue with the idea that he was deserving of his place in rock history, and that he’d already immortalised himself through the slew of classic albums that he had been releasing since 1973.
This would have been a wonderful day for him when he finally received his eternal ticket into the Hall, and it certainly would have made up for the embarrassment he’d been forced to feel only four years prior when he was part of another performance for the institution.
At the opening of the Rock Hall’s official museum in 1995, Springsteen and the E Street Band took to the stage accompanied by one of the inaugural representatives, Chuck Berry. While this is the sort of performance that one would imagine might go down in history, it did, but for all the wrong reasons, with Berry deciding to completely sabotage the show with a chaotic rendition of ‘Rock and Roll Music’ that Springsteen and his band weren’t prepared for in the slightest.
From the outset, Berry decided to change key multiple times, meaning that the unrehearsed band were unable to keep up with him, despite being accomplished musicians themselves. This bemused the entire band, none more so than guitarist Nils Lofgren, who claimed that Berry was doing it deliberately. “I can’t imagine why else this happened,” he later claimed. “We’re all looking around at each other, the cast of characters and the backup band. These are pros, decades in. We are making these horrible sounds collectively in front of a stadium, sold out.”
The confusion didn’t relent there either, with Berry seemingly relishing his opportunity to fuck around with a yet-to-be-inducted group. “At the height of it, when no one has any idea how to fix this, Chuck looks at us all and starts looking at us, duck walking off the stage, away from us,” Lofgren continued. “He leaves the stage, leaves us all out there playing in six different keys with no band leader, gets in the car and drives away. ”
Sometimes ego and insanity really do get in the way of a good performance, but thank goodness Berry and Springsteen had already performed a number of other songs together prior to this disaster, with the concert’s opener, ‘Johnny B Goode’, seemingly being a lot tighter. Still, for many, the famous duck-walker hanging the band out to dry was further proof to some of what Brian Johnson of AC/DC opined when he declared, “He was the biggest piece of shit I ever met in my life. The rudest man I ever met.”
