The moment Bruce Springsteen realised “a white man could make magic”
There are several pivotal moments that milestone the extraordinary career of Bruce Springsteen. Undoubtedly, forming his E Street Band in the late 1960s was a huge moment, and breakthrough success on one last roll of the dice with Born To Run in 1975 was certainly another. However, long before Springsteen started his own musical journey, several prominent luminaries lit the way.
In a sense, Springsteen is a nuanced amalgam of his three most crucial influences: Elvis Presley, The Beatles and Bob Dylan. Each of these artists went far beyond mere entertainment as far as the Boss was concerned. Many artists establish success as pop stars but fail to provide lyrical depth and pathos. Springsteen has never had an issue when it comes to combining creative integrity with mass appeal, much like Bob Dylan.
Springsteen first caught wind of Dylan in the mid-1960s, hearing the troubadour’s early folk-rock hit ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ while riding in the car with his mother. As Springsteen explained during his speech while inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, his mother criticised Dylan’s unconventional voice. However, the youngster knew he was listening to the “toughest voice” he’d ever heard.
In his biography, Springsteen continued to outline the debt he owed to Dylan for demonstrating how one man and his guitar can make ripples across the planet. Whether abstract or direct, lyrics can dig far beneath the skin and turn the tides. “Bob Dylan is the father of my country,” Springsteen wrote. “Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home were not only great records, but they were the first time I can remember being exposed to a truthful vision of the place I lived”.
A decade before Dylan and The Beatles taught Springsteen vital lessons in songwriting and tenacious musicianship, Presley captured his imagination and turned his heart towards music. Though the King didn’t write his own lyrics like The Beatles and Bob Dylan, he was an influence on both and, indeed, most artists that came after him. Central to Presley’s appeal was his foundational work in rock and roll, a silky singing voice and divine stage command.
In 2012, Springsteen, ever the eloquent orator, made a keynote speech for SXSW. “In the beginning, every musician has their genesis moment,” he said. The singer then recognised that the younger generations may idolise punk bands like Sex Pistols or pop stars like Madonna. “It’s whatever initially inspires you to action,” Springsteen added. “Mine was 1956, Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show. It was the evening I realised a white man could make magic, that you did not have to be constrained by your upbringing, by the way you looked, or by the social context that oppressed you. You could call upon your own powers of imagination, and you could create a transformative self.”
When Presley appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1957, Springsteen was just seven years old. Still, in that moment he foresaw the impact this star would have and understood how rock ‘n’ roll was a celebration of Black music, chiefly the blues. “Remember, it wasn’t just the way Elvis looked, it was the way he moved that made people crazy, pissed off, driven to screaming ecstasy, and profane revulsion. That was television. When they made an attempt to censor him from the waist down, it was because of what you could see happening in his pants,” he said.
Of course, Presley was always covered with loose trousers and never had any literal malfunctions in that region. Instead, Springsteen figuratively alluded to the King’s suggestive energy, which formed the foundation of the rock and roll spirit, thus initiating cultural upheaval. “Elvis was the first modern Twentieth Century man,” Springsteen added, “the precursor of the Sexual Revolution, of the Civil Rights Revolution, drawn from the same Memphis as Martin Luther King, creating fundamental, outsider art that would be embraced by a mainstream popular culture.”