“The first record that I ever learned”: The 1963 Beatles song Bruce Springsteen owes his career to
Bruce Springsteen could only hope to be a diligent student when he first picked up a guitar.
Even though he didn’t hope to be the same kind of massive rock and roll singer that Elvis Presley was, he knew that something magical happened when he first played those ringing chords with that Fender Telecaster in his hands. And while ‘The Boss’ was more than happy with those few chords that he started out with, he will never forget the first song that set his world on fire.
But if you’re going through a lot of what Springsteen was listening to, you’d be shocked how much of it was learned secondhand. No one in their right mind would be disrespecting Chuck Berry or Little Richard by any stretch, but when you look at how Springsteen’s life played out, a lot of those signature licks he needed to learn secondhand by watching Keith Richards’s fingers on every Rolling Stones song.
The same applies to the first time that he heard Bob Dylan. He knew of Dylan for years as one of the greatest wordsmiths of his generation, but way after the days of ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ and ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ was the first tune that Springsteen said kicked down every single door that was left in his mind when he heard rock. He found his calling, but there’s no one else in his generation who wasn’t shaped by The Beatles at least a little bit.
The Fab Four were practically a musical wrecking ball when they first performed on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, and when Springsteen was listening to them play, he became enamoured with the song ‘Twist and Shout’. It was already a major hit for the Isley Brothers in the soul charts, but with that Mersey spin behind it and John Lennon’s searing vocals over top of everything, ‘The Boss’ fell in love and never looked back.
Everyone else had been smitten by ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, but when Lennon passed away, Springsteen always cited ‘Twist and Shout’ as the first song that he ever learned, saying, “It’s a hard night to come out and play tonight when so much has been lost. The first record that I ever learned [was the Beatles’] ‘Twist and Shout.’ If it wasn’t for John Lennon, we’d all be someplace very different tonight. It’s an unreasonable world that you get asked to live with a lot of things that are just unlivable. It’s a hard night to come out and play, but there’s just nothing else you can do.”
And judging by the kind of vocal performance Lennon gave, Springsteen got more than a little bit of an education when he first performed the tune. Despite Lennon being mortified listening back to his performance and saying that it was horrible, it opened the doors for people like Springsteen to walk through, especially with his gruffer voice sounding a lot more raspy than what most people were used to on the charts.
It’s not like Lennon couldn’t see Springsteen putting in the work, either. While the former Beatle never got to meet one of the kings of heartland rock, he could see that he was in the business for all the right reasons, even if he did admit that he needed to keep himself in check from time to time so he didn’t get too big of a head after notching up massive hits like ‘Hungry Heart’ on the hit parade.
For Springsteen, though, that kind of advice is all you could have asked for from someone like Lennon. He wasn’t going to take a single second of his music for granted, and the idea of a Beatle approving of his work made every single lesson forming those first chords worth it when he first learned to play ‘Twist and Shout’.
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