The artist Bruce Springsteen said challenged a generation: “They woke you up”
Rock and roll has never once been about easy listening music. Anyone can create a melody that sounds catchy on the radio and enjoy their 15 minutes of fame for all its worth, but the ones that stay are the ones that are willing to get their hands dirty and put out a song that’s almost too vulnerable or too rough for its own good. Because the best artists always have something to lose when making some of their best work, and Bruce Springsteen never forgot about the price someone pays to be a great artist.
When looking through everything ‘The Boss’ played on, there was no chance he would back down from a challenge. He had spent years trying to woodshed his songwriting, and even if some of his early songs could get a bit too rambly, Born to Run was when every single element of the E Street Band came together, from the booming drums of Max Weinberg to Clarence Clemons’s beautiful saxophone parts to Roy Bittan’s piano mesmerising you before the song ‘Thunder Road’ officially started.
But it was always the lyrics that kept people coming back. As much as Springsteen loved the idea of writing traditional rock and roll songs, he was always the same kid from Jersey with a dream, and a lot of his songs are standalone stories of the kind of people that he had known on those long nights listening to music. He knew that it was better to write about what he knew, and that meant that every word needed to mean something in the context of the song.
And whenever one of his albums came out, people would get a new version of what he had to offer. Although his sound didn’t always change drastically between his records, Springsteen’s greatest hits feel like looking at different chapters of his life, whether that’s the catharsis he gave Americans on The Rising, the hope he had on Wrecking Ball, or when he was reeling from his divorce on Tunnel of Love.
Even if he became a symbol for everything that America should be, Springsteen always knew not to even attempt to touch what Bob Dylan had done. Dylan was by far one of the most enigmatic artists of his time, but he also helped people get over all of their hangups when times were at their darkest, whether it was telling everyone it was time to raise their voices in the early 1960s or deliberately pivoting into rock and roll to piss everyone off on ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.
Many people could have been enraged when Dylan brought a band in behind him, but ‘The Boss’ felt he was throwing down the gauntlet for the next generation, saying, “People always said it was the lyrics, but really, it was so much about how the band sounded and the thinness of his voice, the way he used it. The very sound of those records challenged you in the same way the punk records did when they first came out. They woke you up before you even got involved.”
And Dylan never stopped challenging his audience, either. There were bound to be a few records that people couldn’t stomach, like his divisive gospel period or his turn towards making a warts-and-all album like Self-Portrait, but the important part of his career is that it has periods. It can be easy to get locked into one sound, but it’s nice to see him eventually get to a place where he could make something that sounded as good as Time Out of Mind.
So when Springsteen talks about Dylan being a prime influence on his sound, it’s much more about how he sounded than the lyrics. It’s one thing to have a great set of lines that can touch people’s hearts, but it won’t mean anything unless people are willing to put the punch into the tracks.
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