Every musician has their own specialities, and while Bruce Springsteen is rarely put in the same category as rock and roll’s defining guitar heroes, if you want someone to strum a few chords and regale you with working-class tales of his native New Jersey, there is no better man for the job.
Like virtually every young devotee of the rock and roll way, the guitar was the first love of ‘The Boss’. After soaking up the religious experience of witnessing The Beatles play The Ed Sullivan Show back in 1964, the young Springsteen visited his local Western Auto and bought his very first guitar – drastically altering the course of his existence for the low, low price of $18.95.
From then on, there was no stopping his all-encompassing devotion to music and songwriting, and within a decade, he had produced his own debut album.
Both on that 1973 effort and beyond, though, Springsteen never seemed overly interested in the self-aggrandising, solo-heavy style of guitar playing that was infecting the wider rock realm at that time. He certainly had the skill to be able to pull off an incredibly impressive and completely superfluous ten-minute hard rock style guitar solo but, for Springsteen, the songwriting has always come first.
Although Springsteen, along with the E Street Band’s legendary axeman Steve Van Zandt, have certainly imbued their joint discography with a wealth of iconic guitar riffs and masterful chord progressions, they have also steered clear from certain avenues of guitar-based expression. Namely, you aren’t ever likely to see Springsteen adopting the elusive skill of playing barre chords.
For those who have never laid their hands on a humble six-string, barre chords involve a player using their index finger to hit the same fret on multiple fingers, essentially acting as a temporary capo. Countless guitar heroes throughout rock and roll history have built their entire style around the barre chord, particularly in the fast-moving blitzkrieg world of punk rock, where stopping to alter the position of a capo every few seconds would really take the impact out of a song.
Springsteen, on the other hand, has never adopted a playing style that would particularly demand the use of a barre chord – blending the sounds of The Ramones with an album like Nebraska has never been at the top of his agenda, for better or worse.
“I’m not a big barre chord player,” he once told Howard Stern. “I mean, barre chords are hard to play and they’re hard to get around on,” quickly clarifying: “I can play ‘em, but I actually never play them. I’ve never played them in concert in 40 years, you know.”
It is fair to say that nobody is demanding for Springsteen to play barre chords, either. They certainly serve a purpose within the rock world, but given the fact that ‘The Boss’ has managed to amass one of the most beloved and enduring music careers in the cultural history of the United States without playing one barre chord, it seems unlikely that he’ll start now.
