The one song where Bruce Springsteen rejected his nickname: “Don’t ever call me Boss”
Bruce Springsteen, the voice of blue-collar America, is widely known to the world and his fans as ‘The Boss’, a nickname bequeathed to him by his E Street Band due to his role collecting their nightly fee and distributing it among his bandmates. If you were relying on giving you money, you’d likely refer to them as ‘The Boss’ too.
Despite the epithet’s proclivity, it’s one that hasn’t always sat easy with the bos … er, Mr Springsteen sir, certainly if a song from his second studio album, 1973’s The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle is anything to go by.
‘Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)’ is a loosely autobiographical tale of young love that is threatened by a disapproving parent. Springsteen would often tell journalists that he fell for a girl when he was 17 whose mother took against the gravel-voiced every man, even going to the lengths of calling the cops if she ever saw him, leading to the couple seeing each other in secret.
Written as a defiant show-stopper, one that regularly ended a main set before the encore between 1974 and 1984, the song became a live set staple, with 882 performances documented on the user-generated website setlist.fm. Springsteen himself said of the song that it is “a kiss-off to everybody who counted you out, put you down, or decided you weren’t good enough”.
Whilst the studio version doesn’t allude to his sobriquet, according to Songfacts, Springsteen has often changed the lyric “You don’t have to call me lieutenant, Rosie, and I don’t want to be your son” to “You can call me Lieutenant, Rosie, but don’t ever call me Boss” on certain live versions of the song.
Springsteen rejecting his nickname in a song usually provides a titter of laughter from his fans during the performance. The musician got his legendary nickname after acting as the band’s bursary: “In the early days when he and the E-Street Band played gigs in small venues, it was Bruce’s job to collect the money and pay the rest of the band,” says Andrew Delahunty, a noted Springsteen author. “This led them to start calling him The Boss, a nickname which has stuck.” The singer has been known as ‘The Boss’ ever since, except when he’s singing ‘Rosalita’.
First performed at Joe’s Palace in Boston on January 5th, 1974, Springsteen has also been known to change other lyrics in the song live. The Bruce Springsteen Wiki entry for the song suggests that the lyrics were sometimes changed to “Tell your papa I ain’t no freak, ’cause I got my picture on the cover of Time and Newsweek“, after appearing on Time and Newsweek in October 1975.
Despite the song’s near legendary status, it wasn’t ever released as a single in the United States and, due to middling album sales, only started to gain traction on FM radio when an advance copy of his breakout album Born to Run was circulated to rock stations. It is now firmly established in Springsteen’s discography as a classic track.
