BRUCE
SPRINGSTEEN
From Asbury Park to E Street
From humble beginnings in Freehold, New Jersey, to one of the
biggest names in rock history, Bruce ‘The Boss’ Springsteen has
captivated music fans for generations. In this article we take a look
at the legacy of one of America’s most enduring superstars, an icon
that is still riding high in the charts to this day.
Bruce Springsteen once said, ‘I want
it all.’ People these days often forget
that, baffled by an artist whose
musical output can switch, seemingly
effortlessly, from the gung-ho R&B
swing of classic rock albums like Born
to Run or his biggest-seller, Born In
the USA, to the heartrendingly stark
acoustic outpourings of albums like
Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad.
It’s a confusion that goes right back to
Springsteen’s earliest days as a recording
artist, when he was still seen as some sort
of folksy troubadour in the tradition of
Bob Dylan. However, for Springsteen
there has never been any difference
between the outgoing, crowd-pleaser that
we hear on hits like Hungry Heart and
the introspective loner of Secret Garden.
As far as he was concerned, music was
one of the few things in life that held no
barriers. As Springsteen explained in a
1992 interview with New York Newsday,
‘When I was young, I truly didn’t think
music had any limitations. I thought it
could give you everything you wanted in
l i fe.’
For Robert Hilburn of the LA Times,
Springsteen came to define ‘the struggle
in life between disillusionment and
dreams.’ Furthermore he suggested,
‘The important thing about Bruce isn’t
that he makes you believe in rock ’n’
roll or himself. He makes you believe in
yourself.’ While Dave Marsh of Rolling
Stone suggested that Springsteen’s
best music was nothing less than ‘a
refutation of the idea that rock was
anarchic rebellion. If anything his shows
were a masterwork of crowd control,
an adventure in pure cooperation, a
challenge to chaos.’
As usual, it was Springsteen that put it
best in his acceptance speech when Streetsof Philadelphia won an Oscar in 1994, for
Best Original Song In a Movie: ‘You do
your best work and you hope that it pulls
out the best in your audience and some
piece of it spills over into the real world
and into people’s everyday lives. And it
takes the edge off fear and allows us to
recognise each other through our veil of
differences. I always thought that was one
of the things popular art was supposed to
be about, along with the merchandising
and all the other stuff.’
Destined to become the blue-collar
rock hero whose best songs represented
the common experiences of everyday
American people, Bruce Springsteen
was born to working class Irish-Italian
parents in the modest New Jersey town
of Freehold, on 23 September 1949. His
Irish father, Douglas Springsteen, was
an-ex army recruit who later worked,
variously, in a plastics factory, as a bus