It wasn’t until 1975 that the best-
known line-up of the E Street Band
came together, when Springsteen was
already growing famous enough to attract
Broadway show veterans like Weinberg
and Bittan. Both these artists responded
to an ad in The Village Voice, rather than
simply gravitating towards the line-up
from the local Shore club scene.
Before the group could achieve true
success, Springsteen had to secure
a record deal. Ironically, this only
transpired once Springsteen had all but
abandoned the idea of getting his own
band off the ground. Years of opening
for every band that came through
town, from Black Oak Arkansas and
Brownsville Station to Sha Na Na and
Black Sabbath, had left him weary and
disillusioned.
Springsteen commented years later,
‘When we first started playing I’d go to
every show expecting nobody to come,
and I’d go onstage expecting nobody to
give me anything for free. And that’s the
way you have to play. If you don’t play
like that, pack your guitar up, throw it in
the trashcan and go home... The night I
stop thinking that way, that’s the night I
won’t do it anymore.’
Bruce later told NME, that he fell out
of love with the idea of being in a band
and, ‘just started writing lyrics, which I
had never done before. I would just get
a good riff, and as long as it wasn’t too
obtuse I’d sing it... Last winter [1972] I
wrote like a mad man... Had no money,
nowhere to go, nothing to do... It was
cold and I wrote a lot... I got to feeling
guilty if I didn’t.’
It was this batch of songs that would
lead directly to his signing as a solo artist
by Columbia Records, in New York,
during May 1972. At first, the label’s
A&R chief, John Hammond, saw him
as a potential successor to Bob Dylan;
who he had also signed to the label some
ten years before. In retrospect, it’s easy
to see why Hammond thought this way.
Curly-haired and bearded, the twenty-
three-year-old Springsteen definitely had
something of the wordy Bob Dylan about
him, especially in Springsteen’s original
songs like Blinded By the Light and It’s
Hard to Be a Saint in the City.
When recalling playing the bars and
clubs of his youth, Bruce told Zigzag
Magazine, ‘you had to communicate on
the most basic level... but when I talked
to the record companies there was just
me by myself with a guitar, and from that
many false impressions were drawn.’
At the time, Dylan was a conspicuous
influence on a generation of new young
songwriters, many of whom had already
suffered from the comparison; talented
word-and-tunesmiths like John Prine and
Loudon Wainwright III, struggled under
Dylan’s shadow throughout their early
careers, the ‘new Dylan’ tag acting almost
like a curse. Bruce, however, was not so
easily subsumed.
Nevertheless, the comparisons were
perhaps even more obvious in early
Springsteen songs, and Mike Appel,
Bruce’s first manager has stated, ‘Bruce is
very garrulous. When I first came across
Bruce it was by accident. But when I
heard him play I heard this voice saying
to me – superstar. I couldn’t believe it.
I’d never been that close to a superstar
before.’ Adding, ‘Randy Newman is
great but he’s not touched. Joni Mitchellis great but she’s not touched. Bruce is
touched... he’s a genius!’
It was Appel that had taken acetates of
Springsteen’s earliest songs to Hammond- a legendary figure at Columbia who had
also signed such pre-Dylan luminaries
as Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Billie
Holiday, Tommy Dorsey and Woody
Herman, to name just a few. Hammond
listened to the acetate while Mike and
Bruce sat patiently in the corner. ‘Do you
want to get your guitar out,’ Hammond
eventually asked, at which point Bruce
broke into a spontaneous version of It’s
Hard to Be a Saint in the City. ‘I couldn’t
believe it. I just couldn’t believe it,’
Hammond later recalled.
Intrigued by the rough recordings
and charmed by the soft-spoken young
Bruce Springsteen in concert during 1984.