“I couldn’t relate to him at all”: David Bowie’s disappointing meeting with Bruce Springsteen
Any great musician will want to find someone to connect with through their music. It’s hard enough trying to write something that captures any kind of emotion on a record, but once people start looking past the spectacle of it all and start following their heart, there’s hardly anyone who can touch them. Not everyone’s heart beats the same, though, and while David Bowie could wear various sonic costumes, not every one of them was going to resonate with some of his favourite artists.
When looking at how Bowie inhabited every one of his albums, though, it was always like going on another mini-adventure in the headphones. Despite his tongue-in-cheek humour on some of his tracks, ‘The Starman’ was always a firm believer in music having the power to go beyond the spectacle of everything. The costume was half the battle, but if the audience could get on board with someone playing the role of a musical alien, there’s a good chance that they could understand the concepts of loneliness and feeling not quite normal on albums like Ziggy Stardust.
Because that’s where all great rock and roll starts. Bowie may have been the first of his generation to unleash his inner musical personalities, but any great rock and roll is about endlessly searching for a greater force than a bunch of chords. Everyone knew they were listening to something unprecedented when Chuck Berry started playing, but while Bowie took the energy, someone like Bruce Springsteen was more interested in the lyricism.
Despite both being prime voices in rock and roll, ‘The Boss’ was far more cut-and-dry than what Bowie was known for. Both of them talked about the need for escape, but whereas Bowie could write fanciful tales for his characters and hide behind different personas, Springsteen was like a modern Ernest Hemingway with his lyrics, taking the basic images of backstreets and boardwalks on the streets of New Jersey and finding the romanticism in living out his rock and roll dreams.
It didn’t take long for people to start looking at Springsteen as something special, but it was clear it was far different from what Bowie was doing. If Bowie was looking to bring a touch of theatre into the mainstream, The E Street Band turned every one of their shows into a place of worship for all things rock and roll, with songs like ‘Badlands’ and ‘Thunder Road’ as their central hymns as they burned each venue to the ground.
Bowie may have had a great admiration for what ‘The Boss’ was doing, but he remembered being disappointed when they first met in the 1970s, saying, “I just couldn’t relate to him at all. It was a bad time for us to have met. I could see that he was thinking, ‘Who is this weird guy?’ And I was thinking, What do I say to normal people? There was a real impasse.”
But while Bowie could appreciate the kind of lyricism of a song like ‘Growin’ Up’, there many things lost in translation when they started talking together. As much as Springsteen may have appreciated any rock star willing to be different, it would be easy to think someone like Bowie would have been making a mockery of rock and roll by playing up his exaggerated hairdo and using guitars like props half the time.
Even if they were far from the best of friends at first, each of them were perfect teachers for what rock and roll was supposed to be. Many fans can try to model themselves after either Bowie or Springsteen, but the core message behind their music was to be able to let everything inside your own heart.
