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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Bruce Springsteen is more than a rock legend; he's a god.
Jul 17, 1999 | On Oct. 27, 1975, both Time and Newsweek put a scrawny kid named Bruce Springsteen on their covers. And that was back when they let editors make those decisions.
Those New York publishing-world decision makers were on to something. But Jon Landau was on to it first. In May 1974 the rock critic (who later became Springsteen's producer) wrote in a small Boston paper what could be the most famous sentence about a rock musician: "I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen." He wrote these words in a rambling essay about his search for the "real thing" in music.
He found it in Bruce and so have millions of others. Bruce fans are special. Like Bob Dylan's, they are interested in his mind. Like Elvis', they are interested in his sexuality and show-biz pizazz. Like Woody Guthrie's, they love his common-man compassion. And he sings a romantic story in a way that attracts not only gals who love his macho sensitivity, but guys who want it. But Bruce's fans go one step further. They think he's a god. They don't talk about it, most don't admit it, but for them he is a religion. And there's good reason for this. He, alone among rock performers, has not sold out. He is pure, heroic. He'd be uncomfortable talking about how his fans worship him -- just another reason for them to do so.
Bruce wasn't born in a manger; he was born in Freehold, N.J., on Sept. 23, 1949, son of a pool-playing job drifter/bus driver who gave him a hard time and a secretary/housewife who gave him unconditional love and his first guitar. He is Irish, Dutch and Italian, has two sisters and told Time in 1975, "I lived half of my first 13 years in a trance or something." When he was a teenager his parents moved to Northern California. Bruce stayed in Jersey, woke up from the trance, got a guitar and started making hard history.
The career can be divided into at least four parts. The first is Bruce the unknown, and that's the shortest. After playing hundreds of gigs in Jersey and Manhattan bars throughout his teens he hooked up with the aggressive Mike Appel as his manager. In 1972 Appel got Bruce in to see Columbia Records ur-A&R man John Hammond (who had been astute enough to sign people like Billie Holiday, Dylan and Benny Goodman). After hearing Bruce, Hammond said, "The kid absolutely knocked me out. I only hear somebody really good once every 10 years, and not only was Bruce the best, he was a lot better than Dylan when I first heard him." Within a week, Columbia had signed Bruce to a contract. His first record, "Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.," hit the streets in the summer of 1973. Bruce was 24.
The album didn't sell well, maybe because Bruce was promoted as the next Dylan and that was a turn-off to DJs -- and not true. But Bruce, undaunted and with lots of material he'd written while crashing at friends' after his parents went west, came out with album No. 2 in the fall of 1974: "The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle." Like "Greetings," it got good reviews but foundered without airplay.
But even without garnering huge sales the two albums gave the world what were to become anthems. From "Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J." came "Blinded by the Light," "Growin' Up," "Spirit in the Night" and "It's Hard to be a Saint in the City." And from "The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle" came "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)," Incident on 57th Street" and "Rosalita." To this day any one of those can bring down the house, and they were all produced in the first year of Bruce's professional career.
Meanwhile, Bruce was playing the clubs and gathering the following that is his alone. Once you see him perform, you're either a fan for life or you don't get it. Pretty soon, radio was forced to pay attention because those who got it kept calling in requests, forcing him into fame.
