The Bob Dylan album Bruce Springsteen listened to a thousand times
Bruce Springsteen has been a student of rock and roll ever since he was first introduced to the genre. Sure, he may have learned a lot of his first licks from Chuck Berry secondhand through people like Keith Richards, but once he got his bearings, ‘The Boss’ created the best kind of rock and roll there is, where he put his heart on his sleeve and hoped someone out there was feeling the same way. The music was only one facet of his writing, though, and it took Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited for Springsteen to discover his lyrical addiction.
Because when anyone listens to Springsteen’s music, it’s as much about the story as it is about the guitar licks. There are amazing moments in songs like ‘Born to Run’ or ‘Glory Days’, but the core heart behind both songs is about knowing these people within the span of a few minutes, like the protagonist looking to get him and his girlfriend Wendy out of their nowhere town or the sad sacks who could never outrun their own fates.
But at the very beginning of Springsteen’s career, he got to the point where he was sounding a bit too much like Dylan. He had a far more eclectic band than the folk-rock hero did with people like Clarence Clemons, but the long, rambling stories that turned up on his first records definitely had traces of Mr Zimmerman, especially when he started to stretch well beyond the traditional pop song formula.
At the same time, Springsteen was never trying to hide his affinity for Dylan, eventually telling Rolling Stone, “Bob was the guy that came in, pulled the veil away and said, ‘This is where and what I’m living really looks like to me’, and it feels like, ‘I know this person;’. My first connect was ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. Heard it first on Top 40. And the record itself was on constant play on my little box record player in my bedroom. I played it a thousand times – every night, just round and round and round. I lived in that record for a long time.”
If most people had just known Dylan as a folkie prior to the album, though, they’d probably have good reason to have it on constant rotation. Not only was this the musical maverick trying something new, but it was also him going against his strengths, trading in his acoustic guitar for an electric growl and making songs that critiqued the idea of rebellion in general, like ‘Like a Rolling Stone’.
Even when looking at the previous Dylan projects like Bringing It All Back Home, no one would have dared to think that he was capable of this. He had protest songs in his arsenal before, but the minute that he finished playing ‘Desolation Row’, the air around you suddenly felt different to breathe.
Springsteen was far from the only one looking to up their game, too, with everyone from The Beatles to a young Tom Petty listening to the album and trying to find some way to equal it later down the road. While Springsteen did eventually get songs that could stand alongside Dylan’s masterpieces, that wasn’t really the point.
The whole ethos behind Dylan’s work was to be the best version of one’s self in song, and when Springsteen hit Born to Run, he wasn’t a rock and roll copycat anymore. He had finally understood his strengths and found his calling in writing songs about the world he saw in his native New Jersey.
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