This guide examines the growth of Bruce Springsteen’s career, from the optimistic youth who wrote Born To Run to the respected heavyweight songwriter of today. Collaborations and side projects, and the work of band members away from E Street are also detailed and rated.

Bruce Springsteen is not a musical pioneer, but he is a great artist. He has survived youthful hype – he appeared simultaneously on the covers of Time (with the story ‘Rock’s New Sensation’) and Newsweek (‘Making of a Rock star’) when just twenty-six years old. At his first peak of popularity he endured a protracted legal battle against his then manager, the aggressive, but undeniably resourceful, Mike Appel. Albums such as Nebraska, Tunnel Of Love and The Ghost Of Tom Joad have seen Springsteen follow his muse rather than the obvious commercial path that his writing could easily have seen him mine, and yet time and again he has resurfaced at the very top, against expectation or industry trend. Ultimately, he has weathered the fickle changes in taste from generation to generation, still remains capable of selling millions of records, and is now a hugely respected old-timer who has confounded his critics by remaining decidedly down-toearth in nature and well-liked by those with whom he has worked. What his career has shown is that Bruce Springsteen has an uncanny ability to write narratives that cover any subject that connects to, or interests him.That he is able to do this with a clarity and directness, particularly after the adrenalin rushes of his first two records, distinguishes him from both contemporaries and those predecessors who so influenced him. Greil Marcus acknowledges “it’s just amazing how much he can do in just two or three lines… you know exactly where you are and you can follow the story”. It is Bruce’s dedication to a largely narrative and direct style of songwriting, as opposed to simple boymeets- girl or girl-leaves-boy or the abstract imagery of other artists, that separates him and gives his work a vivid, often widescreen cinematic feel.With this directness of storytelling and a recurring working-class man versus hard-nosed authority theme, it is not surprising to find that Bruce has drawn from the cinema world. An artist who collects phrases and lines for potential lyrics, Bruce has notched up a number of tracks that borrow film titles. ‘Thunder Road’ was previously a Robert Mitchum bootlegging/ gangland film and ‘Badlands’ shares the title of Terrence Malick’s movie account of the Starkweather murder spree, a story that Bruce would actually describe years later on the title track of his Nebraska album. The brooding and regretful ‘Point Blank’ and the paranoid Born In The U.S.A. outtake ‘Murder Incorporated’ also hark back to classic film noir, a world where typically a good man at heart is forced to struggle against corruption and injustice just to get by, emerging, if at all, with an ambiguous sense of survival.

 

Mild-mannered Peter Basham's long-held interest in Bruce Springsteen has in no way affected the way he behaves and none of his friends have ever even thought that in some lights he resembles the younger Springsteen of the Born To Run days...

 

Bruce Springsteen by Peter Basham
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