The song that Bruce Springsteen called “every rock star’s dream”
There’s a lot of interest in the career of Bruce Springsteen right now. A biopic will do that sort of thing. But while it is easy to get wrapped in the Hollywood mystery of an artist who influenced a nation, the truth is, Bruce Springsteen has always been a down-home kind of guy.
Born in New Jersey and seemingly arriving into the world with a blue-collar already attached, Springsteen wrote songs and albums born out of the American heartland and the conditions that make up the world of a working-class man. Though he may now be a rock star, his beginnings were humble, and he spent the majority of his career looking up to the idols of the past, dreaming about his own moment in the spotlight.
He would use stars like Roy Orbison and Bob Dylan to help him navigate his own expression and, with those two and countless other musicians by his side, Springsteen would build a catalogue of tunes ready to rival just about anyone.
With a cache of some of the finest rock songs ever written, you don’t imagine that Bruce Springsteen does much dreaming these days, but in his pomp, that was the very notion that made his work so great. They say all writers will spend their whole career merely musing upon different variations of the same theme, and in one way or another, Springsteen’s discography has dealt with dreams.
Whether it’s the haunting death of the old American dream that renders Nebraska so stark, the faded hopes of ‘Glory Days’, or the youthful vigour of pursuing new horizons in ‘Born to Run’, aspirations beyond your stations are at the heart of his songs. This is perhaps the most American them of all. In fact, he’s a decidedly American star, worlds away in sentiment from the lowly contentment of Britpop.
When Bruce Springsteen talks of jumping in a Mustang and driving through the night until the engine gives out, you can really get behind the sincere romanticism of the story. The image of The Boss eating through the unspooling open road that spills out from New Jersey to the West in one huge rolling bulge of possibility to be plundered is as visceral and present in the song as the howling harmonica in the background.
However, the same story in northern England involves a lad getting behind the wheel of an economical family hatchback and driving two hours down the motorway, where he picks up an overpriced service station sausage sandwich, has second thoughts, and trundles on back home, having a pint and forgetting it all by the morning.
But this certainly didn’t alienate the boss, and he developed a soft spot for Britpop. “I met Bruce Springsteen about three or four years ago,” Noel Gallagher revealed to Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “We had the best four-hour chat about music ever. He was like, ‘You’re from Manchester, right?’ I was like, ‘Yeah’, and he was like, ‘How about that fucking Stone Roses album, whatever happened to those guys?’ I said, ‘Let me pour you a drink and tell you the whole sorry tale‘.”
It turns out that Springsteen had a particular soft spot for Ian Brown and the gang. As The Boss remarked on his home radio show: “All right, before Oasis there was The Stone Roses. Out of Manchester, they started it all. And here’s one that’s every rock star’s dream: ‘I Wanna Be Adored.’” He eulogised the song as one of his favourites, and it is easy to see why.
Much like Springsteen’s work, while the sentiment of ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ is ostensibly simple and obvious, there is a brooding weight to the song that reveals hidden depths. In some ways, the undertow of the track itself has now seen Brown himself caught up in his own portent about the potential pitfalls of fame. So, while the song is every rock star’s dream in terms of its swirling composition and brilliance, the reality of its tale can turn into a nightmare.
