The “rare” guitarist Bruce Springsteen called a true original
Nothing that Bruce Springsteen ever played necessarily needed to be the most complicated thing in the world.
Half of his greatest songs are all about using open chords half the time, and even though there are a few tunes that are a bit off the beaten track compared to the usual rock and roll chords, he made sure never to make his songs too out of reach for the rest of his fans. He wanted to stay true to his bar band roots whenever he put on a show, but he also understood the power of hitting on something bigger than just music when you have the right band around you.
Say what you will about him as a songwriter, but even ‘The Boss’ would agree that he wouldn’t have reached the heights he did without the E Street Band. Every single member helped push him up to the greatest heights anyone has ever seen, and even if not every one of his songs demanded that kind of huge arrangement, hearing Clarence Clemons’s saxophone live or watching Springsteen and Stevie Van Zandt work off each other was half of their charm.
But even if many people had heard songs that sounded like Springsteen before, that wasn’t by accident. His music is a damn love letter to the kind of music that made him one of the greatest in the world, and there isn’t a day that goes by that he doesn’t try to match the same kind of standards that he heard when he first fell in love with Phil Spector’s productions or a Roy Orbison vocal.
Once the 1980s was dawning, though, ‘The Boss’ tended to look a little bit different. Everyone had to adapt to MTV in their own way when the channel blew up, but even if all he needed to do was film himself performing wherever he wanted, U2 were already giving giants like him a run for his money. They meant every single word they sang, and it was impossible not to feel all of their passion, anger, and heartache whenever they kicked into one of their classic tunes.
Springsteen may have been looking for the tunes before anything else, but when records like ‘Pride’ came over the radio, every musician was asking the same thing: who the hell is playing that guitar? The Edge may have been one of the countless other musicians who wanted to create textures with their music, but even compared to the likes of Andy Summers and Jimi Hendrix, Springsteen felt that there was something that the U2 guitarist had that he had never seen before.
He wasn’t going to play anything too flashy compared to everyone else, but Springsteen felt that The Edge only needed a few guitar pedals to make him a legend, saying, “He is a rare and true guitar original and one of the subtlest guitar heroes of all time. But do not be fooled. Think Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry, Neil Young, Pete Townshend, guitarists that defined the sound of their band and their times. If you play like them, you sound like them. If you play those fourths drenched in echo, you’re going to sound like The Edge, my son. Go back to the drawing board and you won’t have much luck.”
And the best part is the fact that The Edge never stopped exploring the new effects that he could put into every one of their songs. Sometimes it could have been as simple as making an entirely acoustic rendition of a song, but after the genius work on The Joshua Tree, hearing the subtle textures on Achtung Baby songs like ‘Zoo Station’ was a breath of fresh air for a band that was already in dire need of a shakeup.
So when Springsteen started to hear what guitarists like Nils Lofgren and Tom Morello could do when they hopped onstage with the E Street Band, you could tell that he was listening to them just as much as he did with The Edge when he first heard him. Countless guitarists have tried to emulate their heroes, but it’s people like The Edge that continue to show that there are new things that can be done on the instrument if you’re looking hard enough.
