The rock ‘n’ roll classic Bruce Springsteen called “every song I’ve ever written”
Any great rock and roll song has to do something more than get the dance floor moving. The greatest tunes by Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley may have only served to liven up a party back in the day, but the message behind many of their songs was to capture a sense of reckless abandon whenever they played. And while Bruce Springsteen has always been a student of both Presley and Berry, he knew that pissing off one’s parent was only one facet of what music was supposed to be about.
Because while it’s easy to hear ‘The Boss’ taking cues from Berry at every juncture, he knew there was some power in having a great melody. A song like ‘Maybellene’ managed to get people listening in seconds, so if someone made a record with some genuine pathos behind it, it would hit the audience like a sonic battering ram whenever they turned on the stereo.
The model for Springsteen’s singing was always Roy Orbison, but every single rocker from his generation remembers where they were when they first caught wind of the British invasion. The Beatles were the ones serving up the English brand of rock and roll on a silver platter on the Ed Sullivan Show, but Springsteen dove headfirst into every rock band that he could get his hands on.
While he eventually had to backtrack to Chuck Berry through Keith Richards, there was always something that attracted Springsteen to the darker side of rock and roll. John Lennon and Paul McCartney had written some fantastic songs that talked about romance, but for any teenage kid looking to make a guitar scream, it was all about how Mick Jagger sounded singing ‘Satisfaction’ or the primal sound of Dave Davies’s guitar pounding out the first few chords of ‘You Really Got Me’.
When talking about the greatest British bands of the 1960s, though, The Animals tend to get lost in the shuffle a little bit. Although Eric Burdon’s voice will forever be remembered for his take on ‘The House of The Rising Sun’, their music was a lot more moody than what their counterparts were doing, and as soon as Springsteen heard something like ‘We’ve Got To Get Out of This Place’, he knew that Burdon was practically telling his life story from a continent away.
“That’s every song I’ve ever written. Yeah. That’s all of them. I’m not kidding, either. That’s ‘Born to Run’, ‘Born in the USA’, everything I’ve done for the past 40 years, including all the new ones.”
Bruce Springsteen
Despite being the king of American heartland rock, Springsteen felt that The Animals’ hit was central to his catalogue, saying, “That’s every song I’ve ever written. Yeah. That’s all of them. I’m not kidding, either. That’s ‘Born to Run’, ‘Born in the USA’, everything I’ve done for the past 40 years, including all the new ones. But that struck me so deep. It was the first time I felt I heard something come across the radio that mirrored my home life, my childhood.”
And looking at the lyric sheet to The Animals’ classic, it’s not hard to see where ‘The Boss’ got many of his ideas. ‘We’ve Got Get Out of This Place’ is all about trying to run away from your dead-end town and try to make something of yourself, and whether you’re listening to ‘Thunder Road’ or ‘The Rising’, Springsteen is reminding himself as much as anyone that there’s always hope for something better as long as there’s someone by his side.
A lot of Springsteen’s songs might blend together after a while, but he managed to take The Animals to places that they never could on their own. Burdon was singing a surface-level idea of what escape could look like, and it was up to ‘The Boss’ and the rest of the E Street Band to fill in the gaps of what was really going on in people’s heads as they spent lonely nights driving down the New Jersey turnpike.
