“The working man’s stories”: the singer who shaped Bruce Springsteen
Music was about a lot more than a bunch of chords to Bruce Springsteen.
A simple rock and roll song didn’t need to have that much going on in its arrangement by any means, but if it hit someone at the right time and under the right circumstances, it could become their own anthem, their refuge, and their salvation all rolled into one three-minute package if they believed in it hard enough. And while ‘The Boss’ was more than happy to preach the good word of rock and roll, there were a lot more great songwriters out there than would teach him what the best songs needed to have.
When Springsteen first started out, though, he had to do everything he could to shake the spectre of Bob Dylan over all of his tunes. As much as people claimed that they heard the future of rock and roll when they heard the E Street Band play, it was a lot more about the way the music related back to what Dylan had done on those early records. But something started to feel different when Born to Run. These were stories that could happen all across America, and Springsteen was the one painting the picture.
The beginnings of heartland rock may have had its origins in Springsteen’s tunes, but there’s nothing that could replace the rush that he got from listening to the right rock and roll band. The Stones and The Beatles had given him the guidance to become one of the best artists that he could, and while Dylan showed him what he could do with his lyrics, he was still interested in hearing what bands like Suicide were coming out with when he started working on albums like Nebraska.
He never wanted to feel stagnant whenever he made a new record, and they always meant reaching for different influences or songwriters that twisted their words in just the right way. Some people were a lot more blunt than others, like Tom Petty, and others, like REM, were more cryptic, but Springsteen felt that there was no way to go wrong when someone was as honest as country music was.
Then again, country music tends to be a hurdle for most people to jump over when they’re becoming a well-rounded music fan. That twang might be a little bit off-putting for people who only know the genre from the Bo Burnham-style parody of it, but even when Springsteen dismissed the genre as music for old people back in the day, he admitted that he wasn’t listening hard enough when he first heard people like Hank Williams sing.
Because, really, they were singing about the same darkness that he was, but with a Southern twist to it, saying, “I remember playing Hank Williams’s greatest hits over and over again, trying to crack its code. Slowly my ears became accustomed to its beautiful simplicity and its darkness and Hank Williams went from archival to alive before my very eyes and I lived on that for a while. In country, I found the adult blues, the working man’s stories that I had been searching for.”
While it wasn’t going to be all that convincing for a kid born in Jersey to make the bait-and-switch to singing about living in the country, after years of playing heartland rock, ‘The Boss’ wasn’t half-bad at trying his hand at some of those songs when he delivered his version of ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ later on in his career. Some country and rock and roll purists may have been a little upset, but there’s a common thread that always seemed to unite rock and roll and country since the very beginning of the genre.
There’s no disputing where some bands fall on that musical spectrum, but there’s a good chance that any character in a Bruce Springsteen song could have easily found themselves on the lost highway that Williams had talked about all those years ago. It wasn’t happy music by any means, but somewhere in between those grooves, there was at least a small hope that things could get better.
