“Something I envied very much”: The band Bruce Springsteen was always jealous of
There aren’t many frontmen who can make a crowd move the same way that Bruce Springsteen can.
Although he is getting a lot of help from the rest of the E Street Band behind him, there’s a good chance that ‘The Boss’ could hold an entire audience in the palm of his hand even if he sat onstage with an acoustic guitar and started talking about what life was like for him growing up in New Jersey when he was still a budding musician. But even for all the ground that the band covered together, there were a few pieces of Springsteen’s sound that he felt people were doing a lot better than him.
But years before Born to Run, Springsteen already needed to outrun Bob Dylan’s shadow before he had any hits to his name. He was certainly a fan of Dylan’s when he was making some of his first records, but you can also hear pieces of the kid that would one day make ‘Jungleland’ hiding in there somewhere. There was a lot more poetry behind his words, but he was on the cusp of something no one had ever heard before.
It’s hard to call Springsteen an innovator in the rock and roll world in the truest sense, but there are more than a few times where he was making the kind of sounds that no one had heard before. He may have been shooting to equal what Phil Spector had been doing on his records, but a lot of what he was doing was pointing towards heartland rock years before anyone had a term for what that meant.
If you look at the artists that came out after Springsteen, though, a lot of them were talking about what life was like growing up in America. There probably wouldn’t have been room for someone like John Mellencamp were it not for Springsteen, but for a band that had such a massive sound, Tom Petty was far more unique when it came to putting the guitar forward on every one of his tunes.
There are more than a few great guitar licks in Springsteen’s catalogue, but Petty had the perfect blend of sounds whenever Jimmy Iovine started working with him. Even for someone who had worked with as many bands as engineer Shelly Yakus had, even he was knocked out when he heard how Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench worked off of Petty’s vocal, especially when they started to incorporate the subtle licks into the mix like the piano at the chorus of ‘Here Comes My Girl’.
And while there was a lot of heart behind both Springsteen’s and Petty’s music, ‘The Boss’ would have been lying if he said he wasn’t a little bit jealous of what his Florida counterpart had been doing, saying, “What was charming and exciting about the Heartbreakers was their formalism. It was kind of like the great bands of the sixties, like the Beatles. It was a guitar band, something I envied very much. Because when we tried to push the guitars [in the E Street Band], it never quite worked for us. But they were a real guitar band.”
But just because Springsteen couldn’t match Petty’s guitar chops didn’t make him a bad guitarist by any means. They clearly had different strengths, and whenever you listen to records like Born to Run or Darkness on the Edge of Town, the core part of their sound is hearing the rest of the E Street Band creating a massive wall of sound than relying on having that one great guitar lick that was going to tie everything together.
Then again, there’s a certain mojo that comes with someone that can level an entire crowd with only one guitar line. Even though ‘Born to Run’ has that perfect guitar line to lead into the verses, all Petty needed was that one chord at the opening of ‘American Girl’ or the opening figure of ‘Runnin’ Down a Dream’ to get people’s attention whenever he came out with a new record.
