“He’s definitely ripped me off”: Van Morrison on his problem with Bruce Springsteen
It’s impossible not to take at least a little from your influences. Unless you’re recording from the inside of a rhumba, no music is made in a vacuum, and the biggest artists of all time will only tell you that they were playing what they heard in their record collections when they started. Although Van Morrison took his cues from the greats of jazz and combined it with rock and roll, he thought that Bruce Springsteen completely stole his schtick when he hit it big.
By the time Springsteen played the all-American take on the rock and roll star, Morrison had left that version of himself behind. They had been broken up for years, and considering his latest material was making albums with a swing like Moondance, it’s not exactly stretching to say that he didn’t have a Born to Run under his hat.
But Springsteen had more to his music than just straight-ahead heartland rock. Before he had managed to get the perfect sound for the E Street Band, many of his songs tended to be long and rambling like Morrison’s were on Astral Weeks, albeit with a much more powerful band than anything Morrison could have hoped for.
That didn’t stop Morrison from laying into the young songwriter, saying, “For years people have been saying to me–you know, have you heard this guy Springsteen?… [He]came on the video, and that was the first time I ever saw him, and he’s definitely ripped me off. There’s no doubt about that. Not only did Springsteen…I mean, he’s even ripped my movements off as well. My ’70s movements, you know what I mean?”.
Since this was during the age when Springsteen was actually making live footage, it’s not remotely the same as what Morrison was doing. Morrison was the kind of beatnik poet type who could scat sing anything he put his mind to, whereas Springsteen seemed to approach his craft like it was a workman’s job, never being satisfied until he got the most out of his band.
If anything, Morrison would have had better luck if he had called out Springsteen for ripping him off in the pre-Born to Run days. That jam-band style of songwriting definitely feels lifted from some of Morrison’s greatest albums, and the fact that Springsteen is also a soulful rocker who enjoys the sounds of horns on his projects probably doesn’t help matters.
Then again, if Morrison is pointing fingers at Springsteen, there’s a good case to be made that Bob Dylan should be pointing the finger at both of them. When both of them started coming to the forefront, they seemed to be taking pages from Dylan’s playbook, from Morrison’s storytelling voice to Springsteen writing a song the same way a frustrated novelist writes their characters.
Still, Springsteen managed to escape the shadow of Morrison by writing the template for modern American rock and roll. There are some poetic devices that he has in common with Morrison on albums like Nebraska, but this was a completely different storyteller. This man knew that he needed to bleed for his A-material, and even if he had some of Morrison’s moves to help him, no one else could have come up with a song like ‘Jungleland‘ if they tried.
