Bruce Springsteen on how Bob Dylan was “everything that mattered”
The journey Bruce Springsteen took to become one of the biggest rock stars in the world wasn’t for the faint of heart.
Every single member of the E Street Band was pushed to their absolute limit when they started working on Born to Run, and they were bound to do everything in their power to make the kind of record that would last for generations to come. And while a lot of that came from ‘The Boss’ telling stories about the blue-collar people he saw every day, he felt that the biggest superstars that came before him put his emotions into words a lot better than he ever could.
But in rock and roll, people didn’t need to worry about the lyrics every single time they performed. All that really mattered was whether or not the song made you want to dance back in the day, but if you look at what Chuck Berry had been doing years before the British invasion started, he was already setting up little pictures in the listener’s mind every single time he told a story.
Sure, the song structure wasn’t all that different from what everyone was used to, but everything from ‘School Days’ to ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ was something that kids could relate to a lot better than songs about partying all night. They could see themselves as ‘Johnny B Goode’, and that sent Springsteen off on a journey to dig a little bit deeper into what the lyrics meant every single time he bought a new single.
The Beatles were still firmly in puppy love mode when they started writing their first song, but ‘The Boss’ cared about The Animals just as much as the Fab Four when hearing Eric Burdon sing. He didn’t suffer fools gladly, and there was an almost dangerous demeanour to ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ and ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’ that not even The Stones could have touched on if they had tried.
All of these bands were starting to leave an indelible mark on ‘The Boss’, but ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ was like throwing gasoline on the musical fire for him. Bob Dylan had already been a major force in music ever since he strapped on an acoustic guitar, but the minute that he went electric, that’s when the light came on for Springsteen. This was someone that was talking about the real problems facing the world and wasn’t willing to sugarcoat anything, and he knew that was what his calling was when he formed E Street Band.
Although Springsteen got tagged as the ‘new Dylan’ by a lot of press agents around that time, there was no way that he was going to be able to shake people up the way that his idol did, saying, “It was the first time I heard something that felt real to me. In the 1950s, everything felt false everywhere you turned, but there was no language for it at the time. You didn’t have the words, and Bob gave us those words. Dylan didn’t write about one thing. He wrote about everything that mattered at once in every song and he pulled it off.”
It might not have felt good to be on your own like Dylan talked about in that song, but Springsteen felt that it was better knowing that he had a friend on the other side of those speakers whenever he listened. And even when he started writing masterpieces of his own, he had the same mindset Dylan had of writing for the downtrodden and making sure every line had some sort of greater meaning that didn’t cater to dancing the night away.
Because as much as Springsteen’s music is about hope and optimism, that doesn’t come from someone unless they’ve experienced real pain in the world. Dylan and ‘The Boss’ had both gone through their share of struggles throughout their career, but they were never going to take a second of their time at that microphone for granted whenever they got the chance to speak their minds.
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