Bruce Springsteen Biography

From LoveToKnow Music

A look at a Bruce Springsteen biography paints a picture of a man that many consider to be the troubadour of America. Springsteen, aka “The Boss” to his many fans, creates gritty scenes of American life through his songs, and his ability to depict his subjects with both realism and sensitivity has won him both critical claim and the adoration of the public. Though his music is thoroughly American, his fans span the globe, and he has sold more than 60 million albums worldwide.

Bruce Springsteen: Greatest Hits

Bruce Springsteen Biography – The Early Years

Upbringing isn’t always the most interesting part of a musician’s life, but for Springsteen, understanding his music comes down to understanding his New Jersey roots. Springsteen was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on September 23, 1948. The often hard luck, harsh economic realities of life in small towns in industrial New Jersey, coupled with the influences from his Catholic schooling and the strong ties to the Italian American and Irish American communities play out as subject material time and time again in Springsteen’s music.

After a brief stint at a New Jersey community college, Springsteen decided to turn his attention to music fulltime. His first gig was with a group called The Castiles, which he joined in 1965. Springsteen entered the group as a guitarist but soon began performing lead vocalist duties as well. The Castiles was a short lived project, but the band did give Springsteen a taste of touring and playing live.

In 1969, Springsteen began playing with fellow Jersey based musician Steve Van Zandt, among others, touring up and down the east coast, while also playing solo shows at smaller venues in New Jersey. As a buzz began to grow locally around Springsteen, he formed a series of different, short lived bands, including:

Dr Zoom and the Sonic Boom
Sundance Blues Band
The Bruce Springsteen Band

It was this last band that would prove to be the most important in his career.

Record Deals and The E Street Band

1972 brought a record deal with Columbia Records (Springsteen was signed by John Hammond, the man who also discovered Bob Dylan). The core members of The Bruce Springsteen Band were brought into the studio, along with a few additions – this group would be the one to make up Springsteen’s famous E Street Band (though they would not be called that for a few more years).

Over the next two years, Springsteen and the band recorded two albums:

Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ
The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle

These albums made Springsteen a critic’s darling but didn’t win him masses of music fans. Big changes, however, were just around the corner.

Born To Run

In 1975, Springsteen released the album that changed it all, Born to Run. It is interesting to note that this album did not include any chart topping singles, but the singles, especially the title track and Thunder Road, received tons of radio play. Also interesting to note is the amazing amount of press coverage Born to Run received. Springsteen appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek magazine – for a musician, one of these covers would have been an astonishing achievement, let alone both. However, critics seemed to feel all around that this album was one of those special ones, and indeed it remains in many music critics’ favorite albums lists to this day. Many of Springsteen’s best known songs came from Born to Run.

Legal disputes with an old manager meant that Born to Run was the last Springsteen album for a few years, but during that time, he toured extensively.

The Early 80s

At the start of the 1980s, Springsteen released two very different albums:

The River
Nebraska

The River overall was an upbeat, party record, and its single Hungry Heart helped Springsteen crack the Top Ten in the charts at last. Nebraska, on the other hand, is a sparse, acoustic record. The critics went nuts for Nebraska, which features dark tales of American life in the heartland (including one song about spree killer Charlie Starkweather), but for fans, it was a difficult transition. Nebraska sold poorly at the time, but in the long term, it has become one of Springsteen’s most popular albums, as new generations laud it as a low fi, poetic masterpiece.

Back to the Big Time – Born in the USA

Springsteen found his way back to the top in 1984, when he released the album Born in the USA. The album spawned seven top ten singles, including what is perhaps the most misunderstood song in the history of rock music, the title track. This album also features the perennial Springsteen favorite, Dancing in the Dark.

After Born in the USA, Springsteen never again achieved the mass appeal he garnered with that album, however, all of his subsequent work has sold steadily. He remains one of the most powerful and recognizable figures in music, and the Bruce Springsteen biography will not have a line drawn under it any time soon.