Bruce Springsteen has been no stranger to playing to millions of people. He has found a second home onstage next to his E Street Band, and even if not everything that he played was to everyone’s taste, there isn’t a soul who goes to his concerts who doesn’t think that he is 100% certain that rock and roll could change the world. But he knew nothing could top him sharing stages with his heroes over the years.
But Springsteen’s definition of what a great songwriter should be has changed over the years. It’s easy to look at his music and hear echoes of everyone from Leonard Cohen to Van Morrison to Bob Dylan, but there’s no doubt that he was a student of rock and roll before he even considered the written word. He wanted to make his guitar talk like he did in ‘Thunder Road’, which meant studying under everyone from The Beatles to The Rolling Stones to The Animals.
The British invasion was bound to make a splash on anyone in ‘The Boss’s neighbourhood around the time of his upbringing, but Springsten wanted to dig deeper. There were hints of the blues in what Keith Richards did, and there was a lot of melody behind John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s best songs, but he knew that it all came from listening to people like Chuck Berry in the 1950s.
And once Springsteen had enough clout, he knew that nothing could beat him opening for Berry, saying, “It was at the Maryland Fieldhouse or something in 1973, and if you see the bill, it has Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and in really tiny print it says ‘Bruce Springsteen’. It’s one of the bills I’m proudest of. I’m 23 years old and I’m on the same bill and the same night.” But, really, Berry and Lewis were always two sides of the same coin in many respects.
“It was at the Maryland Fieldhouse or something in 1973, and if you see the bill, it has Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and in really tiny print it says ‘Bruce Springsteen’. It’s one of the bills I’m proudest of.”
By all accounts, Berry is the person who invented rock and roll as we know it. Everyone has their own discussions about who truly pioneered everything, but even other candidates like Elvis Presley couldn’t hold a candle to what Berry did for the genre, whether that was the iconic duckwalk or the guitar licks that everyone from George Harrison to Angus Young to Keith Richards got under their fingers the first time they picked up a guitar.
Although what Berry was doing was outrageous for the time, Lewis’s activity behind a piano was practically psychotic when he first came out. There had already been a rumour that rock and roll was meant to be the devil’s music, but as soon as Lewis hit those first few lines in songs like ‘Great Balls of Fire’ or ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ On’, there was no chance anyone could stand still listening to him play.
And while Springsteen may not have had the same kind of chops that they did when starting out, he knew the importance of giving everything he had into his performance. While he could throw in the occasional cover tune of ‘Johnny B Goode’ whenever he played, he made sure that he gave the audience a show and made rock and roll feel larger than life whenever he tore into tunes like ‘Badlands’ or ‘Born to Run’.
Because if there’s one thing that rock and roll was meant to be, it’s transcendent. Not everyone can feel like they are on top of the world all the time, but the minute they start listening to people like Berry, Lewis, or Springsteen, they will feel like they can conquer anything that stands in their way.
