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WORKING ON THE BOSS’S DREAM
by Johnny Black
The first public airing of Working On A Dream, the title track from The Boss’s 24th album took place during Barack Obama’s massive rally in Cleveland just two days before the US Presidential election.
With that one brief performance Springsteen flagged up to millions of his core audience that a new album was imminent, firmly located himself on the winning side and aligned himself with the wave of liberal optimism sweeping his homeland.
Three weeks later, the track became available as a free 24 hour download at iTunes and at BruceSpringsteen.net. Why would Columbia give away a song for which demand was clearly going to be massive? “The logic is that there are still people out there, particularly young people, who might be curious about Bruce but haven’t yet bought anything, so this gives them the opportunity to hear him at no cost,” reasons Columbia (UK) Label Group MD Mike Smith. “The thing I most want to achieve with this album, is to have sixteen year olds engage with Bruce the same way that I did at their age.”
It’s too soon to be certain how effective the strategy was but early indications are encouraging. When another track, My Lucky Day, appeared on Amazon on November 28, it immediately became their No1 mp3 download.
“We’re not out to re-invent Bruce Springsteen,” points out Columbia Marketing Manager Ken Marshall, “just to re-establish how relevant he remains. Right now, we are looking at other digital avenues to get more of the music in front of people prior to release. We’ll pick tracks that will work for certain markets and turn new people onto Bruce. For example we had the video premiere of Working On A Dream on MySpace on December 1. Again, not a traditional Bruce marketing strategy but it was another good outlet to broaden it a bit.”
Digital avenues, however, are no longer being seen as exclusively the preserve of the young. “Older fans are now a lot more receptive to downloading,” confirms Marshall. “I don’t think they’re scared of it any more.”
Although Springsteen may be perceived as a bastion of the traditional rock establishment, it became clear that he wasn’t ready to go walking with dinosaurs when he inducted U2 into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame on March 14, 2005. In his speech, he mentioned having recently seen U2 in an iPod commercial. “The next morning, I call up Jon Landau … and I say, "Did you see that iPod thing?" and he says, "Yes … and I hear they didn't take any money." … I said, "Smart, wily Irish guys. Anybody can do an ad and take the money. But to do the ad and not take the money … that's smart. That's wily." I say, "Jon, I want you to call up Bill Gates or whoever is behind this thing and float this: a red, white and blue iPod signed by Bruce 'The Boss' Springsteen. Now remember, no matter how much money he offers, don't take it!"
The yarn was clearly humourous but it signalled to the business that Springsteen had seen the future of rock’n’roll marketing, and he wasn’t going to be left out. No-one questions his integrity as an artist but these kinds of insights suggest he’s also on top of his business game.
Promoter Harvey Goldsmith, who has worked with Springsteen since the mid-70s, points out that, “When I first met him, he was still doing small club shows in New York and his manager then, Mike Appel, took care of all the business. But it was Bruce who made all the decisions about where he was going, when he was going there and what he was going to do, and he has done ever since.”
The physical product arrives in shops on January 27. Says Ken Marshall, “It’ll be a digipak, with lovely artwork, a painting of Bruce, and there’ll also be a deluxe version including a DVD with about forty minutes of studio footage from the making of the album, plus performances of some of the tracks.”
Asked to sum up Working On A Dream, Smith says, “It’s a rich and uplifting record, with some of the greatest melodies he’s ever written. He was still addressing a lot of dark and serious issues on Magic, but this comes from a different place, at a time when America is taking stock and, hopefully, delivering itself into a new era.”
Rudy Osario, Head of Music at HMV, is keenly anticipating the album’s arrival. “We expect it to be the key music event of January 2009. Magic sold incredibly well for us throughout our Q4 2007 and was in my Top 5 albums of the year. I'm really excited that they have used the same producer, Brendan O'Brien.”
Like Columbia’s Mike Smith, Osario feels a lifelong personal connection to Springsteen. “I grew up just a train ride away from Asbury Park. I felt then that his lyrics spoke to me and I still do. When I moved to Britain in 1984 I remember walking through central London and being amazed to see a 30 foot high mural of Bruce above the HMV at 363 Oxford Street to promote Born in the USA.”
Given the importance of Springsteen’s live presence, will he be coming in to tour? “I wouldn’t be surprised,” says Goldsmith. “He really enjoys playing in Europe and he usually comes here with each new album, so I’m just waiting for the phone to ring.”
(This feature first appeared in Music Week, December 2008)
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN by Johnny Black
“I can't do it by myself,” said Bruce Springsteen last year. “I need my audience.”
Even among those megastars whose names are etched in platinum, only a handful ever achieve the enduring connection with their audience that comes so naturally to Springsteen. Despite decades at the top, The Boss isn’t so much a heritage act as a lifestyle act. He’s a performer that millions don’t merely buy but buy into, because his principles and his integrity represent the values they aspire to in their own lives.
It was, of course, not always this way.
Bruce Frederick Springsteen was born in Freehold, New Jersey, on September 23, 1949. At the age of seven he saw Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show and immediately convinced his parents to buy him a guitar. “The first record I ever bought,” he revealed later, “was Jailhouse Rock.”
As a teenager he was enthralled by the rock’n’roll of Chuck Berry, the voice of Roy Orbison, the production sound of Phil Spector, the wordsmithery of Bob Dylan and the raunchy r’n’b of The Rolling Stones. “The best thing that ever happened to me,” he once said, “was when I got thrown out of the first band I was in and I went home and put on It’s All Over Now by The Rolling Stones and I learned that guitar solo.”
He would go on to display an uncanny gift for blending all of those influences and more into a coherent style that was also identifiably his own.
Springsteen paid his dues in hard-working but largely unsung bands including Earth, Child and The Castiles, but it was as a member of Steel Mill that he first attracted significant attention. On January 13, 1970, Philip Elwood of the San Francisco Examiner caught Steel Mill’s gig at The Matrix, and described them as, “the first big thing that’s happened to Asbury Park since the good ship Morro Castle burned to the waterline off that Jersey beach in ’34.”
Just over a month later, the powerful promoter Bill Graham offered the band a recording contract but they turned it down, electing instead to keep playing live.
Bruce was fronting The Bruce Springsteen Band by July 1971, when he supported Humble Pie at Asbury Park’s Sunshine In. Humble Pie leader Peter Frampton was so impressed he offered Springsteen not just a nationwide support slot but an audition with AAndM Records. Once again, the offer was declined.
It was not until May 1972 that Springsteen said yes to a record company. On the second of that month, he attended what was scheduled as a fifteen-minute audition with legendary Columbia AAndR guru John Hammond – the man who had signed Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin. “I had just finished reading Dylan's biography,” Springsteen told Rolling Stone magazine a year later, “and now I find myself sitting in Hammond's office with my beat-up guitar and, like, the whole thing I've been reading about is about to happen to me.”
The fifteen-minute meeting lasted two hours and the next day, a totally bowled-over Hammond recorded Springsteen performing fourteen acoustic demos. The contract was signed a month later but Springsteen’s conquest of the world was still some way off.
Nevertheless, before he’d even released a record, he started making waves around New York City, USA. On September 4, singer-songwriter David Blue convinced Jackson Browne to let Springsteen do an unannounced guest slot before Browne took the stage at The Bitter End. Browne was flabbergasted by what followed. “He went out there for about an hour and proceeded to do the greatest songs I’d ever heard, with just his guitar and (my) piano. When he got off stage I said, ‘Man, where the hell have you been hiding?’”
The debut album, Greetings From Asbury Park, arrived in January 1973 and, although it didn’t set the world on fire, it included Blinded By The Light which, in 1976, would give him his first chart-topping single.
Meanwhile, Springsteen (with his backing group now named The E-Street Band) was continuing to convert the cognoscenti. Within a month of the album’s release, David Bowie caught his set at Max’s Kansas City in New York and subsequently admitted, “I became a major fan that night and picked up Asbury Park immediately.”
Rock critic Jon Landau was in the audience at the Harvard Square Theatre, Cambridge, Massachusetts, when Springsteen first played Born To Run live. Landau reviewed the show for The Real Paper, saying “I saw rock’n’roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.”
A friendship between Springsteen and Landau blossomed quickly, with Landau eventually taking over the artist’s management in a relationship that has lasted until today.
When a show at New York’s Bottom Line in August 1975 made the cover of the New York Times, Springsteen began his transition from being a cult hero acclaimed by his peers, to being a bona fide rock star. Springsteen himself has acknowledged it as “our coming-out party”, while the venue’s co-owner Stanley Snadowsky has recalled, “The raw power was unbelievable. He climbed on the building's poles, the piano, the tables. He was so exposed in such a reckless way, everyone felt it.”
When Springsteen’s third album, Born To Run, was released later that month, it was becoming clear that the big breakthrough was not far off. Just two months later, Springsteen scored a coup unprecedented in the annals of rock when his face appeared simultaneously on the covers of two of America’s most prestigious cultural flagship publications - Time and Newsweek. The transition was complete. He had arrived big time.
There were already indications, however, that the adulation he was now receiving didn’t sit comfortably on his shoulders. At one gig he altered the lyric of his show-stopper Rosalita to, "Tell your daddy I ain't no freak, Cause I got my picture on the cover of Time and Newsweek."
Harvey Goldsmith, who had been negotiating for years to get Springsteen to play in the UK, recalls, “At the time we finally started to put his first European gigs together, there was a media frenzy, which included those Newsweek and Time magazine covers, and he felt he was being over-hyped.”
The inevitable backlash came at his first UK concert in mid-November. He became so enraged by posters proclaiming, ‘Finally London is ready for Bruce Springsteen’ that he tore them from the walls. “I had such a psychic weight on my head – just dealing with myself every day – to get through,” he explained later.
The show that night at Hammersmith Odeon was, by his own admission, one of his rare failures and, as publisher Tony Bramwell recalls, “After the gig Bruce insisted on going back to my house, despite the fact that all these CBS people, from all over the world, were waiting to have dinner with him at the Portland Hotel. We all got drunk, except Bruce, who sat there drinking milk and watching a film about James Dean because he wanted to cool down after the temper of the awful Hammersmith gig.”
The rise and rise of Springsteen was now, however, unstoppable and he was about to secure his first No1 hit without singing a note. His debut single, Blinded By The Light, had been a chart flop when it was released in 1973 but a new version, by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, was about to bring it the attention it deserved.
Philadelphia radio deejay Ed Sharkey had hipped Manfred to Springsteen’s first album, and he decided to record Blinded By The Light as an album track. “I stole a bit of an idea from Supertramp’s Dreamer for the piano part,” admits Manfred now. “It was only after we’d completed it that I started to think it might be a single.”
With the track almost completed, Manfred rang Springsteen to ask him to sing the final line. “We were well past our biggest hits, kind of has-beens, so I was very nervous. Then, when I rang, it became obvious I’d woken him up. I said, ‘Is that Bruce?’ He sort of slurred, ‘Who is it, man?’ and I said, ‘Forget it, man. I’ll call again.’ But I didn’t have the front to call again.”
Manfred Mann’s Blinded By The Light reached No1 in Billboard on February 19, 1977, returning his band to international prominence and boosting Springsteen’s reputation as a songwriter still further. Two further covers, Because The Night (No13, 1978) by punk poetess Patti Smith and Fire (No2, 1979) by the dance-oriented Pointer Sisters, confirmed that The Boss was a songsmith whose material could work in many genres.
Springsteen himself, however, spent much of this period in a protracted legal battle with his first manager, Mike Appel. As a result he didn’t release another album until 1978’s Darkness On The Edge Of Town. Although more sombre and less lyrically dense than the earlier albums, Darkness established him as a socially and politically-aware writer who looked set to be around for a long time to come.
In March 1979, The Old Grey Whistle Test gave Springsteen his first UK tv exposure, by showing a dynamic performance of Rosalita filmed in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. Whistle Test producer Mike Appleton, however, recalls how an earlier attempt to get him on the show had floundered. “We had actually filmed him at Hammersmith Odeon when he came in for the first time in 1975 but, when I spoke to him immediately after the show, he thought it had been a failure. In fact, the audience loved it, but neither Springsteen or his manager realised that British audiences were just a bit more reserved than American ones. As a result, it took about ten years for me to convince them even to look at the footage so I could get their permission to broadcast it.”
Springsteen laid his political cards firmly on the table in September 79 by taking part in the No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Gardens, and secured his first No1 album with 1980’s two-disc set The River, an extended hymn to solid working class values.
His next move was bold indeed. Nebraska was a stark solo acoustic album, recorded at home on a lo-fi four track tape deck. Although critically-acclaimed, it didn’t sell well but, as Jon Landau told Q’s David Hepworth in 1992, “Growth from record to record is not part of Bruce's game plan. We release records that we know in advance are likely to have different degrees of success. We're not in the business of taking X and forcing it into being Y."
In terms of popularity, however, he bounced back in 1984 with Born In The USA, another No1, which notched up 15m sales in the USA alone and became the first compact disc manufactured in America for release. Although much of the album dealt with America’s political malaise, the title track – about the hardships faced by Vietnam veterans returning home - was misunderstood by President Reagan who declared that it showed Springsteen to be a great patriot. In response, just days later, Springsteen sang Johnny 99 (about a laid-off factory worker who kills a store clerk and gets jailed for 99 years) and announced that he didn't think Reagan had heard this one.
Springsteen’s reputation as a peerless live act was cemented with a massive 1985 tour which saw him play three July nights at Wembley Stadium. “Those shows, which included the 4th Of July, are still probably my favourite Springsteen shows,” says promoter Harvey Goldsmith. “He just has this knack of energising an audience, a sense of knowing how to build an audience up and just give it to ‘em. He feeds off the audience.”
Confirmation of Springsteen’s status as the premier live performer of the 80s came with the 1986 release of Live/1975–85, a five album boxed set of in-concert recordings which not only debuted at No1 in Billboard but also became the first five-record set to reach the US Top 10 and sell over a million copies.
Although the 90s would bring a temporary rift with the E Street Band and controversy over issues as disparate as his move to California, his use of session musicians and his electric band performance on MTV Unplugged, it also brought his first Academy Award, for the moving title song to the film Philadelphia, a second largely acoustic album, The Ghost Of Tom Joad, and, as the decade ended, a staggering 15-show run at Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey to kick off the American leg of the E-Street Band Reunion tour.
In the new millennium he has continued to ring the changes, working with the E-Street Band on 2002’s The Rising (his poignant reflection on the terrorist atrocities of 9/11); in acoustic mode on Devils And Dust (2005) and with a folk-rock band on The Seeger Sessions (2006).
“The Seeger Sessions was the first Springsteen album I worked on,” says Columbia (UK) Label Group MD Mike Smith. “Bruce was coming out of a period of great reflection in his music, a lot of quite dark records, and then suddenly here was this joyous celebration of life which was also a fierce protest, accompanied by this unbelievably uplifting music.”
Having been a fan since schooldays, Smith was anxious about whether his lifelong musical hero could live up to expectations in person. “We launched the album with a show in St. Luke’s Church and, afterwards I went to see him in his dressing room. He was there with his partner, Patty and also Emmylou Harris, and he turned out to be absolutely the man I’d hoped he would be. Very humble, gracious, charming - an absolutely solid, decent human being.”
Having first come to Springsteen when he saw the cover of Born To Run tucked under a friend’s arm, Smith was thrilled to learn that an E-Street Band album was in the pipeline. “I hadn’t dared to hope I’d get to work with the E-Street Band,” he recalls, “and it was one of the great albums of his career.” Magic (2007) put Springsteen back at No1 for the eighth time but ,even after 18 Grammies and 120m worldwide album sales, it’s still the live stage where Springsteen finds his most direct line to the faithful.
“It's an organic, living thing,” Springsteen told Rolling Stone recently. “There's something subtly different being said on a nightly basis. But you're attempting to define and have impact upon the world and the life you're living. I can't do it by myself. I need my audience. It'll be a lifelong journey by the time that I'm done.”
(This feature first appeared in Music Week, December 2008)
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Bruce Springsteen : Towards the end of recording Magic, excited by the return to pop production sounds, I continued writing. When my friend, producer Brendan O’Brien, heard the new songs, he said, ‘Let’s keep going.’ Over the course of the next year, that’s just what we did, recording with the E Street Band during the breaks on last year’s tour. I hope Working on a Dream has caught the energy of the band fresh off the road from some of the most exciting shows we’ve ever done. All the songs were written quickly, we usually used one of our first few takes, and we all had a blast making this one from beginning to end.
(Source : Official statement from Bruce Springsteen)
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by Johnny Black
The first public airing of Working On A Dream, the title track from The Boss’s 24th album took place during Barack Obama’s massive rally in Cleveland just two days before the US Presidential election.
With that one brief performance Springsteen flagged up to millions of his core audience that a new album was imminent, firmly located himself on the winning side and aligned himself with the wave of liberal optimism sweeping his homeland.
Three weeks later, the track became available as a free 24 hour download at iTunes and at BruceSpringsteen.net. Why would Columbia give away a song for which demand was clearly going to be massive? “The logic is that there are still people out there, particularly young people, who might be curious about Bruce but haven’t yet bought anything, so this gives them the opportunity to hear him at no cost,” reasons Columbia (UK) Label Group MD Mike Smith. “The thing I most want to achieve with this album, is to have sixteen year olds engage with Bruce the same way that I did at their age.”
It’s too soon to be certain how effective the strategy was but early indications are encouraging. When another track, My Lucky Day, appeared on Amazon on November 28, it immediately became their No1 mp3 download.
“We’re not out to re-invent Bruce Springsteen,” points out Columbia Marketing Manager Ken Marshall, “just to re-establish how relevant he remains. Right now, we are looking at other digital avenues to get more of the music in front of people prior to release. We’ll pick tracks that will work for certain markets and turn new people onto Bruce. For example we had the video premiere of Working On A Dream on MySpace on December 1. Again, not a traditional Bruce marketing strategy but it was another good outlet to broaden it a bit.”
Digital avenues, however, are no longer being seen as exclusively the preserve of the young. “Older fans are now a lot more receptive to downloading,” confirms Marshall. “I don’t think they’re scared of it any more.”
Although Springsteen may be perceived as a bastion of the traditional rock establishment, it became clear that he wasn’t ready to go walking with dinosaurs when he inducted U2 into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame on March 14, 2005. In his speech, he mentioned having recently seen U2 in an iPod commercial. “The next morning, I call up Jon Landau … and I say, "Did you see that iPod thing?" and he says, "Yes … and I hear they didn't take any money." … I said, "Smart, wily Irish guys. Anybody can do an ad and take the money. But to do the ad and not take the money … that's smart. That's wily." I say, "Jon, I want you to call up Bill Gates or whoever is behind this thing and float this: a red, white and blue iPod signed by Bruce 'The Boss' Springsteen. Now remember, no matter how much money he offers, don't take it!"
The yarn was clearly humourous but it signalled to the business that Springsteen had seen the future of rock’n’roll marketing, and he wasn’t going to be left out. No-one questions his integrity as an artist but these kinds of insights suggest he’s also on top of his business game.
Promoter Harvey Goldsmith, who has worked with Springsteen since the mid-70s, points out that, “When I first met him, he was still doing small club shows in New York and his manager then, Mike Appel, took care of all the business. But it was Bruce who made all the decisions about where he was going, when he was going there and what he was going to do, and he has done ever since.”
The physical product arrives in shops on January 27. Says Ken Marshall, “It’ll be a digipak, with lovely artwork, a painting of Bruce, and there’ll also be a deluxe version including a DVD with about forty minutes of studio footage from the making of the album, plus performances of some of the tracks.”
Asked to sum up Working On A Dream, Smith says, “It’s a rich and uplifting record, with some of the greatest melodies he’s ever written. He was still addressing a lot of dark and serious issues on Magic, but this comes from a different place, at a time when America is taking stock and, hopefully, delivering itself into a new era.”
Rudy Osario, Head of Music at HMV, is keenly anticipating the album’s arrival. “We expect it to be the key music event of January 2009. Magic sold incredibly well for us throughout our Q4 2007 and was in my Top 5 albums of the year. I'm really excited that they have used the same producer, Brendan O'Brien.”
Like Columbia’s Mike Smith, Osario feels a lifelong personal connection to Springsteen. “I grew up just a train ride away from Asbury Park. I felt then that his lyrics spoke to me and I still do. When I moved to Britain in 1984 I remember walking through central London and being amazed to see a 30 foot high mural of Bruce above the HMV at 363 Oxford Street to promote Born in the USA.”
Given the importance of Springsteen’s live presence, will he be coming in to tour? “I wouldn’t be surprised,” says Goldsmith. “He really enjoys playing in Europe and he usually comes here with each new album, so I’m just waiting for the phone to ring.”
(This feature first appeared in Music Week, December 2008)
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN by Johnny Black
“I can't do it by myself,” said Bruce Springsteen last year. “I need my audience.”
Even among those megastars whose names are etched in platinum, only a handful ever achieve the enduring connection with their audience that comes so naturally to Springsteen. Despite decades at the top, The Boss isn’t so much a heritage act as a lifestyle act. He’s a performer that millions don’t merely buy but buy into, because his principles and his integrity represent the values they aspire to in their own lives.
It was, of course, not always this way.
Bruce Frederick Springsteen was born in Freehold, New Jersey, on September 23, 1949. At the age of seven he saw Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show and immediately convinced his parents to buy him a guitar. “The first record I ever bought,” he revealed later, “was Jailhouse Rock.”
As a teenager he was enthralled by the rock’n’roll of Chuck Berry, the voice of Roy Orbison, the production sound of Phil Spector, the wordsmithery of Bob Dylan and the raunchy r’n’b of The Rolling Stones. “The best thing that ever happened to me,” he once said, “was when I got thrown out of the first band I was in and I went home and put on It’s All Over Now by The Rolling Stones and I learned that guitar solo.”
He would go on to display an uncanny gift for blending all of those influences and more into a coherent style that was also identifiably his own.
Springsteen paid his dues in hard-working but largely unsung bands including Earth, Child and The Castiles, but it was as a member of Steel Mill that he first attracted significant attention. On January 13, 1970, Philip Elwood of the San Francisco Examiner caught Steel Mill’s gig at The Matrix, and described them as, “the first big thing that’s happened to Asbury Park since the good ship Morro Castle burned to the waterline off that Jersey beach in ’34.”
Just over a month later, the powerful promoter Bill Graham offered the band a recording contract but they turned it down, electing instead to keep playing live.
Bruce was fronting The Bruce Springsteen Band by July 1971, when he supported Humble Pie at Asbury Park’s Sunshine In. Humble Pie leader Peter Frampton was so impressed he offered Springsteen not just a nationwide support slot but an audition with AAndM Records. Once again, the offer was declined.
It was not until May 1972 that Springsteen said yes to a record company. On the second of that month, he attended what was scheduled as a fifteen-minute audition with legendary Columbia AAndR guru John Hammond – the man who had signed Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin. “I had just finished reading Dylan's biography,” Springsteen told Rolling Stone magazine a year later, “and now I find myself sitting in Hammond's office with my beat-up guitar and, like, the whole thing I've been reading about is about to happen to me.”
The fifteen-minute meeting lasted two hours and the next day, a totally bowled-over Hammond recorded Springsteen performing fourteen acoustic demos. The contract was signed a month later but Springsteen’s conquest of the world was still some way off.
Nevertheless, before he’d even released a record, he started making waves around New York City, USA. On September 4, singer-songwriter David Blue convinced Jackson Browne to let Springsteen do an unannounced guest slot before Browne took the stage at The Bitter End. Browne was flabbergasted by what followed. “He went out there for about an hour and proceeded to do the greatest songs I’d ever heard, with just his guitar and (my) piano. When he got off stage I said, ‘Man, where the hell have you been hiding?’”
The debut album, Greetings From Asbury Park, arrived in January 1973 and, although it didn’t set the world on fire, it included Blinded By The Light which, in 1976, would give him his first chart-topping single.
Meanwhile, Springsteen (with his backing group now named The E-Street Band) was continuing to convert the cognoscenti. Within a month of the album’s release, David Bowie caught his set at Max’s Kansas City in New York and subsequently admitted, “I became a major fan that night and picked up Asbury Park immediately.”
Rock critic Jon Landau was in the audience at the Harvard Square Theatre, Cambridge, Massachusetts, when Springsteen first played Born To Run live. Landau reviewed the show for The Real Paper, saying “I saw rock’n’roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.”
A friendship between Springsteen and Landau blossomed quickly, with Landau eventually taking over the artist’s management in a relationship that has lasted until today.
When a show at New York’s Bottom Line in August 1975 made the cover of the New York Times, Springsteen began his transition from being a cult hero acclaimed by his peers, to being a bona fide rock star. Springsteen himself has acknowledged it as “our coming-out party”, while the venue’s co-owner Stanley Snadowsky has recalled, “The raw power was unbelievable. He climbed on the building's poles, the piano, the tables. He was so exposed in such a reckless way, everyone felt it.”
When Springsteen’s third album, Born To Run, was released later that month, it was becoming clear that the big breakthrough was not far off. Just two months later, Springsteen scored a coup unprecedented in the annals of rock when his face appeared simultaneously on the covers of two of America’s most prestigious cultural flagship publications - Time and Newsweek. The transition was complete. He had arrived big time.
There were already indications, however, that the adulation he was now receiving didn’t sit comfortably on his shoulders. At one gig he altered the lyric of his show-stopper Rosalita to, "Tell your daddy I ain't no freak, Cause I got my picture on the cover of Time and Newsweek."
Harvey Goldsmith, who had been negotiating for years to get Springsteen to play in the UK, recalls, “At the time we finally started to put his first European gigs together, there was a media frenzy, which included those Newsweek and Time magazine covers, and he felt he was being over-hyped.”
The inevitable backlash came at his first UK concert in mid-November. He became so enraged by posters proclaiming, ‘Finally London is ready for Bruce Springsteen’ that he tore them from the walls. “I had such a psychic weight on my head – just dealing with myself every day – to get through,” he explained later.
The show that night at Hammersmith Odeon was, by his own admission, one of his rare failures and, as publisher Tony Bramwell recalls, “After the gig Bruce insisted on going back to my house, despite the fact that all these CBS people, from all over the world, were waiting to have dinner with him at the Portland Hotel. We all got drunk, except Bruce, who sat there drinking milk and watching a film about James Dean because he wanted to cool down after the temper of the awful Hammersmith gig.”
The rise and rise of Springsteen was now, however, unstoppable and he was about to secure his first No1 hit without singing a note. His debut single, Blinded By The Light, had been a chart flop when it was released in 1973 but a new version, by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, was about to bring it the attention it deserved.
Philadelphia radio deejay Ed Sharkey had hipped Manfred to Springsteen’s first album, and he decided to record Blinded By The Light as an album track. “I stole a bit of an idea from Supertramp’s Dreamer for the piano part,” admits Manfred now. “It was only after we’d completed it that I started to think it might be a single.”
With the track almost completed, Manfred rang Springsteen to ask him to sing the final line. “We were well past our biggest hits, kind of has-beens, so I was very nervous. Then, when I rang, it became obvious I’d woken him up. I said, ‘Is that Bruce?’ He sort of slurred, ‘Who is it, man?’ and I said, ‘Forget it, man. I’ll call again.’ But I didn’t have the front to call again.”
Manfred Mann’s Blinded By The Light reached No1 in Billboard on February 19, 1977, returning his band to international prominence and boosting Springsteen’s reputation as a songwriter still further. Two further covers, Because The Night (No13, 1978) by punk poetess Patti Smith and Fire (No2, 1979) by the dance-oriented Pointer Sisters, confirmed that The Boss was a songsmith whose material could work in many genres.
Springsteen himself, however, spent much of this period in a protracted legal battle with his first manager, Mike Appel. As a result he didn’t release another album until 1978’s Darkness On The Edge Of Town. Although more sombre and less lyrically dense than the earlier albums, Darkness established him as a socially and politically-aware writer who looked set to be around for a long time to come.
In March 1979, The Old Grey Whistle Test gave Springsteen his first UK tv exposure, by showing a dynamic performance of Rosalita filmed in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. Whistle Test producer Mike Appleton, however, recalls how an earlier attempt to get him on the show had floundered. “We had actually filmed him at Hammersmith Odeon when he came in for the first time in 1975 but, when I spoke to him immediately after the show, he thought it had been a failure. In fact, the audience loved it, but neither Springsteen or his manager realised that British audiences were just a bit more reserved than American ones. As a result, it took about ten years for me to convince them even to look at the footage so I could get their permission to broadcast it.”
Springsteen laid his political cards firmly on the table in September 79 by taking part in the No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Gardens, and secured his first No1 album with 1980’s two-disc set The River, an extended hymn to solid working class values.
His next move was bold indeed. Nebraska was a stark solo acoustic album, recorded at home on a lo-fi four track tape deck. Although critically-acclaimed, it didn’t sell well but, as Jon Landau told Q’s David Hepworth in 1992, “Growth from record to record is not part of Bruce's game plan. We release records that we know in advance are likely to have different degrees of success. We're not in the business of taking X and forcing it into being Y."
In terms of popularity, however, he bounced back in 1984 with Born In The USA, another No1, which notched up 15m sales in the USA alone and became the first compact disc manufactured in America for release. Although much of the album dealt with America’s political malaise, the title track – about the hardships faced by Vietnam veterans returning home - was misunderstood by President Reagan who declared that it showed Springsteen to be a great patriot. In response, just days later, Springsteen sang Johnny 99 (about a laid-off factory worker who kills a store clerk and gets jailed for 99 years) and announced that he didn't think Reagan had heard this one.
Springsteen’s reputation as a peerless live act was cemented with a massive 1985 tour which saw him play three July nights at Wembley Stadium. “Those shows, which included the 4th Of July, are still probably my favourite Springsteen shows,” says promoter Harvey Goldsmith. “He just has this knack of energising an audience, a sense of knowing how to build an audience up and just give it to ‘em. He feeds off the audience.”
Confirmation of Springsteen’s status as the premier live performer of the 80s came with the 1986 release of Live/1975–85, a five album boxed set of in-concert recordings which not only debuted at No1 in Billboard but also became the first five-record set to reach the US Top 10 and sell over a million copies.
Although the 90s would bring a temporary rift with the E Street Band and controversy over issues as disparate as his move to California, his use of session musicians and his electric band performance on MTV Unplugged, it also brought his first Academy Award, for the moving title song to the film Philadelphia, a second largely acoustic album, The Ghost Of Tom Joad, and, as the decade ended, a staggering 15-show run at Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey to kick off the American leg of the E-Street Band Reunion tour.
In the new millennium he has continued to ring the changes, working with the E-Street Band on 2002’s The Rising (his poignant reflection on the terrorist atrocities of 9/11); in acoustic mode on Devils And Dust (2005) and with a folk-rock band on The Seeger Sessions (2006).
“The Seeger Sessions was the first Springsteen album I worked on,” says Columbia (UK) Label Group MD Mike Smith. “Bruce was coming out of a period of great reflection in his music, a lot of quite dark records, and then suddenly here was this joyous celebration of life which was also a fierce protest, accompanied by this unbelievably uplifting music.”
Having been a fan since schooldays, Smith was anxious about whether his lifelong musical hero could live up to expectations in person. “We launched the album with a show in St. Luke’s Church and, afterwards I went to see him in his dressing room. He was there with his partner, Patty and also Emmylou Harris, and he turned out to be absolutely the man I’d hoped he would be. Very humble, gracious, charming - an absolutely solid, decent human being.”
Having first come to Springsteen when he saw the cover of Born To Run tucked under a friend’s arm, Smith was thrilled to learn that an E-Street Band album was in the pipeline. “I hadn’t dared to hope I’d get to work with the E-Street Band,” he recalls, “and it was one of the great albums of his career.” Magic (2007) put Springsteen back at No1 for the eighth time but ,even after 18 Grammies and 120m worldwide album sales, it’s still the live stage where Springsteen finds his most direct line to the faithful.
“It's an organic, living thing,” Springsteen told Rolling Stone recently. “There's something subtly different being said on a nightly basis. But you're attempting to define and have impact upon the world and the life you're living. I can't do it by myself. I need my audience. It'll be a lifelong journey by the time that I'm done.”
(This feature first appeared in Music Week, December 2008)
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Bruce Springsteen : Towards the end of recording Magic, excited by the return to pop production sounds, I continued writing. When my friend, producer Brendan O’Brien, heard the new songs, he said, ‘Let’s keep going.’ Over the course of the next year, that’s just what we did, recording with the E Street Band during the breaks on last year’s tour. I hope Working on a Dream has caught the energy of the band fresh off the road from some of the most exciting shows we’ve ever done. All the songs were written quickly, we usually used one of our first few takes, and we all had a blast making this one from beginning to end.
(Source : Official statement from Bruce Springsteen)