The singer Bruce Springsteen called the “toughest voice” ever
What Bruce Springsteen has done for rock and roll really is a thankless job.
Not many people take the kind of time to appreciate the classics as he does, but the reason why he has always been so reverent to the greatest rock and roll stars of his youth is that he’s still learning about the kind of change that someone can make when they have the right three chords storming out of the speakers. All of his life was about trying to recapture that kind of magic, but there were a few singers who had a lot more punch behind them than he could ever muster with the E Street Band.
But how ‘The Boss’ isn’t about having the greatest voice on Earth. He wasn’t Freddie Mercury or anything when he got behind the microphone, but he was far more likely to push his voice to the absolute limit whenever the time called for it. It wasn’t always pretty listening to him shred through his larynx on songs like ‘Adam Raised a Cain’, but you can hear the history of people like Little Richard in the way that he threw his voice into overdrive to get the right emotion across every time he sang.
Then again, the voice of a great rock and roller didn’t always have to do with the tone or even the way that you pronounced every single word. It was about relating to the person on the other end of the speaker, and if everyone could believe you by the time that the song had faded, that was worth much more than having any operatic pipes. And for Springsteen, telling the story was half the battle when he started writing his masterpieces.
The characters in his songs felt like they had flesh and blood whenever the record started, and the lessons that they learned were the kind of things that we should all take to heart. Not everyone was going to be able to realise their dreams immediately, but even if they didn’t manage to have everything work out for them, ‘The Boss’ was going to make sure that they had a soundtrack that made them feel like they could take on the world.
Because that’s exactly what he felt whenever he turned on a Bob Dylan record back in the day. Dylan wasn’t looking to be one of the finest singers in the world, and while it took Springsteen a long time to come around to listening to him, it was like having an epiphany the first time he heard Dylan pick up an electric guitar and embrace rock and roll when he first made songs like ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.
Other bands had tried to be as verbose as Dylan was, but when Springsteen heard him for the first time, he figured that someone with that voice could take on just about anything in their path, saying, “My mother, who was – she was no stiff with rock and roll, she liked the music, she listened – she sat there for a minute, she looked at me, and she said, ‘That guy can’t sing.’ But I knew she was wrong. I sat there, I didn’t say nothin’, but I knew that I was listening to the toughest voice that I had ever heard.”
And that toughness was half the battle on many of Dylan’s classic records. There are plenty of moments when he took the veil down and let everyone see his vulnerable side, but the beauty of a lot of his records came from watching him look the powers that be dead in the eye and almost daring them to challenge him, especially when going up against the government on tunes like ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’.
Dylan was always a little bit cagey about the details of every one of his songs, but even if he never revealed what he was talking about, Springsteen knew it was intense as all hell. And every time the E Street Band perform live to this day, they are still giving it their all because they believe in the same kind of power that rock and roll could have on someone that Dylan believed in.
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