The singer Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen called the greatest: “The purest rock and roll voice of all time”
There’s a good chance that Bruce Springsteen could have never made it with the E Street Band without someone like Paul McCartney coming first.
The British invasion hit him like a ton of bricks when he heard The Beatles for the first time, and when you listen to what Macca could do with his voice, he was ready to give the audience a good time every time he belted out one of their classic tunes. But both ‘The Boss’ and McCartney knew that the greatest rock and roll voice had already come along well before them.
What makes both of them unique, though, is how they use their voice whenever they sing. Springsteen never claimed to have the best voice in the world by any means, but his voice is the perfect sound that you want to hear on those songs. He wrote about what he knew about, and when listening to Born to Run, you’d completely understand why someone with that kind of blue-collar voice was singing from the perspective of a couple of kids trying to get out of their nowhere town and onto something better.
There’s a lot of heart behind his voice, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t shred his vocal cords when he wanted to. Bob Dylan had been proof that Springsteen didn’t need to sugarcoat anything, but even by Dylan’s standards, Springsteen was belting out the kind of tunes that required a lot more grit behind them, whether that was the chorus of ‘Backstreets’ or the high notes in ‘Adam Raised a Cain’.
Not many people were willing to push themselves that far in the pop sphere, but if Little Richard could do it, why the hell couldn’t ‘The Boss’? After all, Richard was the epitome of what a rock and roll singer was supposed to be, and when you listen to a lot of those early songs that he sang onstage, everything from ‘Long Tall Sally’ to ‘Keep A-Knockin’ was a master class in how to leave the audience absolutely delirious whenever you went onstage.
So when Richard was finally silenced when he passed away, Springsteen needed to remind everyone of the genius that had shuffled off this mortal coil, saying on his radio show, “That is the purest rock and roll voice of all time, and it belongs to the Georgia Peach, the king of rock and roll. He’s one of the founding fathers of rock and roll, and he’s a preeminent vocal genius. He is one of the few men who changed the face of world culture.”
And you didn’t really need to remind McCartney of what made Richard so great as well. Half of The Beatles’ greatest rockers in their early days was them trying to make something that Richard could be proud of, and Macca figured that no one could touch what the pianist did, saying, “From ‘Tutti Frutti’ to ‘Long Tall Sally’ to ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly’ to ‘Lucille’, Little Richard came screaming into my life when I was a teenager. I owe a lot of what I do to Little Richard and his style, and he knew it. He would say, ‘I taught Paul everything he knows.’ I had to admit he was right.”
That might be a little bold for Richard to say, but it’s not like he was wrong, either. A lot of McCartney’s greatest screams have come from him trying to sing like Little Richard, and were it not for Richard trying to work his way through some of his greatest songs, we probably wouldn’t have had a song like ‘Helter Skelter’, and in turn, the entire concept of heavy metal would have looked very different.
So while Springsteen and McCartney didn’t sound anything like Richard whenever they sang, they knew that every rock musician who wanted to thrill an audience was forever going to be compared to him. No one could scream like he could, and an entire generation of players has tried their best to get as close as they can to what he did back when rock and roll was first finding its feet.
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