The true story behind Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Glory Days’
“The first verse actually happened, the second verse mostly happened, the third verse, of course, is happening now,” said Bruce Springsteen when discussing the track ‘Glory Days’.
Picture the scene: It’s the summer of 1973. Joe DePugh is walking through New Jersey, making his way to the local bar Neptune, where he plans on having a few drinks. The sky is clear, and the bar sign can be spotted from blocks away as DePugh edges closer to the place he can call home for the next couple of hours. Leaving the bar as he arrives is a face he recognises, one from high school, but more recently from the TV and album covers. After double-checking that it is who he thinks it is, he reaches out and stops the passerby. “Bruce!” says DePugh.
While many at that point knew Bruce Springsteen for being the rock star responsible for the album Greetings from Asbury Park, DePugh knew him well before that. The two of them had played baseball together when they were younger, around the ages of 13 to 15. DePugh had stayed with the sport; meanwhile, Springsteen swapped out his bat for a guitar. The two naturally drifted as childhood friends so frequently do.
By 1973, they had both made strides in their careers. Bruce Springsteen was on his way to becoming one of the most prolific rock stars in the world; meanwhile, DePugh had tryouts to play for the Los Angeles Dodgers. So much time had already passed since school, and the two had so much to catch up on, that Bruce Springsteen abandoned the notion of leaving the bar, opting instead to head back inside and catch up.
What enveloped them was a full night of drinking and reminiscing. They stayed inside the pocket of nostalgia for hours as they spoke about school, the people they used to hang out with, and where a lot of those people are now. The entire evening was spent looking back on this period of time the two old friends shared together, a period of time that they would go on to call the “glory days”.
This conversation is what inspired Bruce Springsteen’s classic song ‘Glory Days’. He used the period of reflection that he and his friend had and drew from it in a bid to write a song which centred around nostalgia. A lot of different elements from the spontaneous night he spent with his old classmate went into a song that is now recognised by many worldwide as the perfect celebration of nostalgia.
Nobody knew that DePugh had played a role in indirectly writing the song, but Springsteen confirmed it at his 30th High School reunion in 1997. Unfortunately, DePugh couldn’t attend the reunion, so he only heard about his influences from friends who had been at the reunion. He didn’t meet up with Bruce Springsteen again until 2005, where the two of them spoke about the song and, of course, took another moment to reflect on what they now so fondly know as ‘Glory Days’.
Using this real-life experience to inspire his music is very on brand for Bruce Springsteen, who has always so willingly tried to make his music a reflection of the real world. ‘Glory Days’ perfectly did that, and the song taps into the listener’s past, despite arising from a specific conversation that Springsteen had.
