Springsteen, Bruce

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

Born: Freehold, New Jersey, 23 September 1949

Genre: Rock

Best-selling album since 1990: The Rising (2002)

Hit songs since 1990: "Streets of Philadelphia," "Secret Garden," "The Rising"

With a career that spans more than four decades, Bruce Springsteen remains one of America's most popular—and populist—rock songwriters and performers. The popularity of his working-class sensibility is reflected in the tens of millions of albums he has sold. Springsteen has maintained a connection to fans by evoking the struggles and dreams of average Americans through music known for both lyrical depth and a hard-rock backbeat. While early critics hailed him as a successor to Bob Dylan, the folk-rock auteur of the 1960s, Springsteen made evident his direct debt to Woody Guthrie, the folk music radical of the 1930s, and to rock originators such as Roy Orbison and Chuck Berry. Backed by the expansive E Street Band—whose core personnel has, for the most part, remained the same since

his club days in the early 1970s—Springsteen is known for marathon live shows in which he translates the private experiences of his songs into stadium-sized euphoria.

Early Career

One of two children, Springsteen was born into a middle-class family. He skipped college after high school and moved to New York City. After discovering he was too late for the legendary folk scene in the city's Greenwich Village district, he returned to New Jersey and settled in Asbury Park. The dying coastal town became the mythic backdrop of his songs. Springsteen returned to Greenwich Village to play acoustic solo gigs, but mostly he played with several club bands in Asbury Park before forming the E Street Band. He was eventually signed to Columbia Records by John Hammond Sr., the industry veteran who also discovered legends such as the jazz singer Billie Holiday, the swing jazz bandleader Count Basie, and Bob Dylan.

Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle indeed bore traces of Dylan, including wildly hallucinatory lyrics and story songs featuring misfit characters on the fringe.

Breakthrough

Although they received favorable reviews, both sold poorly. Springsteen's breakthrough came with Born to Run in 1975. The album features the immortal "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out," along with seven other songs set within a sweeping sonic backdrop. Its production is similar to the "Wall of Sound" technique of the 1960s producer Phil Spector. Springsteen's epic-sounding album became a Top 10 hit, and Springsteen was praised for bringing back classic rock at a time when heavy metal and progressive art rock reigned.

Over the next few years Springsteen expanded his musical range, but only slightly. He recorded the lean and gritty rock album Darkness on the Edge of Town in 1978 and followed it up with the two-album set The River, which again presents Springsteen as a serious chronicler of working-class drama. But, if only to show off the E Street Band's ensemble sound, it features several bar band party jams.

In 1982 Springsteen countered his image as a rock band front man with Nebraska. Originally meant to be demos (they were recorded on a four-track cassette machine at his home), the rough recordings feature Spring-steen by himself, singing first-person narratives set in rural America. The ten songs were compared to the work of the short-story writer Raymond Carver for their gothic themes and attention to detail.

Commercial Peak

Springsteen's commercial peak came with the 1984 album Born in the U.S.A., which sold more than 20 million copies and led to a two-year-long stadium tour. Seven of its twelve songs were hit singles. The cover art features a picture of Springsteen's backside shot in front of an American flag; the title song recounts the agony of a Vietnam veteran who feels left behind by his country. The album's slick production and heavy synthesizers broadened Springsteen's pop appeal, but many long-time fans were dismayed: The music lacked the edge or tension found in Springsteen's previous recordings.

The title song and the album were interpreted by some as a pledge to a type of patriotic fervor represented by the "Morning in America" campaign, President Ronald Reagan's agenda to restore conservative values in the United States. Springsteen was asked by Reagan staff to endorse the president's 1984 reelection bid and to lend the song to the cause. When he refused, Reagan invoked Spring-steen in his speeches anyway; Springsteen publicly expressed doubts that Reagan had listened to Nebraska, the set of songs thought to represent the dark side of the country's economy by giving voice to those on the bottom rungs of the ladder.

Springsteen spent the early 1990s trying to come to terms with the larger-than-life image spawned during the 1980s. In 1991 he married his backup singer, Patty Scialfa, after divorcing his first wife, the actress Julianne Phillips. The breakup of his first marriage is thought to be the driving force bind his Tunnel of Love (1987), which dwells on the dark underpinnings of relationships.

Exploring New Directions

Entering the decade and a new marriage, Springsteen looked for ways to realign his life in other ways as well. Much to his fans' surprise, he moved from New Jersey to posh Beverly Hills. He also fired the E Street Band, explaining he wanted to experiment with other musicians. In 1992 he released two albums, Human Touch and Lucky Town, both recorded by himself and studio musicians, including Scialfa and the E Street pianist Roy Bittan. The heavily textured Human Touch continued in the style of somber introspection laced with synthesizers that he showcased on Tunnel of Love. Lucky Town was a hardy collection of generic rockers. Most critics and fans balked, and the two albums are widely considered the least successful of his career. Springsteen did tour to support both records, but he went on the road with an entirely new band. The result of that period was the European release of an MTVUnplugged appearance he taped while on the road.

By this point, the alternative rock era was in full swing with new bands such as Nirvana, Alice in Chains, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Pearl Jam dominating the charts. For the first time in his career, Springsteen was a veteran artist unable to attract a new generation of fans. He transformed himself from a rock bandleader back into the singer/songwriter of Nebraska. In 1993 he released "The Streets of Philadelphia," a song written for the Tom Hanks film Philadelphia and sung from the perspective of a person suffering from AIDS. It resulted in an Oscar for best song and five Grammy awards.

The solitary spirit of the song was a natural bridge to his next album, The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995), a collection of personal and political narratives of the dispossessed named for a central character in The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck's novel of the Great Depression.

After a solo tour Springsteen sought to reconnect himself to his glory days. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999 and the same year reunited with the E Street Band for a triumphant tour that continued through 2000. Refusing to play only his greatest hits, Springsteen juggled the set list each night, adding in obscurities from his early albums, occasional covers, and a new song, "American Skin (41 Shots)." Written in response to the shooting death of a twenty-year-old West African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, by New York City police officers, the song sparked controversy as it challenged the image of Springsteen as a flag-waver for the status quo.

Around this time, Springsteen began to flood the market with products to capitalize on his newfound stature as a heritage artist. Along with a greatest hits CD in 1995, he released Songs, a coffee-table book of handwritten lyrics, Tracks, a four-CD boxed set of outtakes, and Live in New York City, a concert from his reunion tour.

By the time Springsteen stepped into the studio to record with the E Street Band for the first time since 1984, the terrorist attacks of September 11 had taken place. In 2002 Springsteen released the result of those sessions, The Rising. Although its accompanying media blitz informed the public it was written directly in response to September 11, the music was nuanced. The songs recapture the bar-band fraternity of the E Street Band. Unlike many jingoistic songs prevalent at the time, The Rising paused to examine subtle areas. The song "Worlds Apart" involves the hardship between lovers of different religious traditions, and "Paradise" opens with the perspective of a suicide bomber. The Rising won a 2003 Grammy as the year's best rock album.

Bruce Springsteen is a lyricist of depth, an introspective singer/songwriter, a renowned arena rock performer, and a complex political troubadour. It is his unflinching humanity that makes his music compelling.

Spot Light: The Ghost of Tom Joad

Bruce Springsteen's dilemma in the 1990s was to find a way to reinvigorate his songwriter sensibilities after playing the rock megastar. The two albums with which he entered the decade—Human Touch and Lucky Town —were criticized for not taking risks and sounding like a rehashing of his mid-career commercial successes such as The River. That's why, when The Ghost of Tom Joad hit stores in 1995, it threw a curve to fans conditioned to expect more of the same. The album was far from commercial. A bookend to Nebraska, it features twelve quiet character songs that place the listener inside the marginal worlds of illegal immigrants, Vietnam vets, migrant workers, and prisoners trying to go straight. With a title character plucked from The Grapes of Wrath —John Steinbeck's 1939 novel of the plight of migrant workers during the Great Depression—and a somber spirit that evoked the songs of early American folk songwriter Woody Guthrie, Springsteen evokes an earlier era of folk-music storytelling, drawing attention to life on the fringes and infusing it with dignity. The album allowed Springsteen to try a different performing tactic. He set off on a solo tour, playing small theaters across the country. Onstage in front of quiet rooms, he transformed some of his early rock hits into quiet folk ballads. That included the song "Born in the U.S.A.," which he softened and transformed into a nightmarish blues song. The Ghost of Tom Joad also helped Springsteen connect to a younger generation. In 2000, on their album Renegades, the political rap/rock band Rage Against the Machine recorded a cover of the title song, turning the song into an intense rock anthem.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (Columbia, 1973); The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle (Columbia, 1973); Born to Run (Columbia, 1975); Darkness on the Edge of Town (Columbia, 1978); The River (Columbia, 1980); Nebraska (Columbia, 1982); Born in the U.S.A. (Columbia, 1984); Live 1975–1985 (box set, Columbia, 1985); Tunnel of Love (Columbia, 1987); Chimes of Freedom (EP, Columbia, 1988); Lucky Town (Columbia, 1992); Human Touch (Columbia, 1992); Greatest Hits (Columbia, 1995); The Ghost of Tom Joad (Columbia, 1995); MTV Plugged (Columbia, 1997); Tracks (box set, Columbia, 1998); Live in New York City (Columbia, 2001); The Rising (Columbia, 2002).

WEBSITES:

www.brucespringsteen.net; www.backstreets.com.

mark guarino