Listening to one of a number of Bruce Springsteen concerts
on my way south to Asbury Park over the weekend, I continued to ponder just how
he made the leap from wholesale imitation of other performers as he did during
the Steel Mill days to his emergence as a fresh and innovative voice with the
release of his first album with the e-street band.
Music reviewers and biographers have been kind to him in
saying that he was in this or that performance mood when writing songs, when in
some cases, Springsteen’s bands simply changed lyrics and aped other people’s
performance nearly note for note. Some performances were so close to the
originals, it amazes me that the bands he imitated didn’t take note. Despite his
early success with the public, Springsteen sounded like the bands that he was
influenced by, often adding his own lyrics to other people’s productions and
coming away with a reputation as a prolific song writer.
Bruce actually followed a well-established pattern traced
back to countless eventually great song writers before him, including Bob
Dylan, who spent a good portion of his early career aping Woody Guthrie.
It was clear that Bruce struggled to find a voice of his
own, and clearly saw the limitations of Steel Mill, using the incident at the
swim club as an excuse to seek a new direction, despite the overwhelming
musical prowess he and the other members displayed.
Graham’s offer to back the band during their trip to San
Francisco combined with Steel Mill’s popularity must
have put a real scare into Bruce and motivated him to look beyond Steel Mill.
While kinder biographers claimed Bruce risked losing the rights to his songs if
he went with Graham, in truth, these largely weren’t his songs to sell, and a
national spotlight at that time would have exposed that fact, even if the
audience was willing to ignore how familiar these tunes were.
The question for me was how did Bruce manage to transition
from a song writer that basically revamped other people’s tunes to become one
of the great song writers of our generation.
In fact, it appears, he never did. He simply got better at
disguising the root of his music.
This is not to say that all of Springsteen’s music came from
already existing songs, but rather that his tunes appear to take off of what he
heard, especially as a backup way of writing new songs when he could not come
up with a hook of his own. But he never did this so obviously as he did during
Dr. Zoom or even the Bruce Springsteen Band – such as with the Stone’s song
Happy, that the band played as original.
Part of the disguise had to do with production. Steel Mill
for all its incredible musical ability was way too raw, exposed by its straight
forward approach with little place to disguise the roots of music so when they
played a Cream-like song, it sounded like Cream or a number of other lesser
known bands Bruce was enamored with.
But remember, this is nothing new for rock and roll. Nearly
all emerging bands sound like their predecessors. Even some of the root bands
of the 1960s like The Beatles, the Stones, The Who or the Kinks, owed their
sound to Elvis, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison and others. And
until that ludicrous lawsuit filed against George Harrison over “My Sweet
Lord,” it was an accepted practice. Even later, some bands such as Abba
depended on other people’s songs for their own hits. It is hard to tell the
difference between “Waterloo ” and
its predecessor, “Build me up Buttercup.”
But one huge difference between Springsteen and all the
other was Bruce’s ability to imitate whatever he heard.
He is a musical chameleon. He becomes what he hears.
Even after he broke up Steel Mill, he continued to sound
like his root material, although his sound softened and became more defuse. Instead
of sounding like Cream, Santana, Allman Brothers as he did with Steel Mill, he
began to sound like Bob Dylan and especially Van Morrison – someone he clearly
modeled his new persona on. But it was clear from this point, Springsteen’s
lyrics were not yet as good as those of those he imitated.
Seeking out more complex production such as he discovered
with Joe Cocker and James Brown, Bruce was able to better disguise his root
material, and at the same time, took one giant step closer to finding his own
authentic voice. Of course, he still hadn’t brought together the right
combination of musicians either and the horn player for Dr. Zoom – a more or
less temporary band – lacked the soul he needed to equal the kind of musical
models he was drawing from. Clemons’s arrival on the scene gave the suburban
Bruce what he most lacked at that point, real and legitimate soul that rivaled
people like Van Morrison and James Brown, and did something that helped draw
attention away from Springsteen weak point: original tunes.
Again, this is not to say Springsteen lacked original tunes.
But he seems to have fallen back on old habits of adapting other tunes by older
or contemporary artist. So that some songs played during his late 1980s tour
hinted or even more openly showed the influence. One appears to be a tune
developed out of Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones, only without the hook.
“Ties that Bind” and at least one other song seemed derivative of Joe Jackson’s “Is she really going out with
him,” while “Raise the Cain” echoes Tom Petty’s “Refugee” (though it is hard to
tell which of these came first), and there are even some hints of “Eve of
Destruction,” in Springsteen’s “Badlands.”
To be fair, other bands also borrowed from Springsteen such
as Thin Lizzy in their big hit, “The boys are back in town.”
Despite all of the accolades Springsteen received early and
even later in his career for his song-writing, his music doesn’t seem
particularly original, and his real innovation came with production and his
eventual brilliance at writing lyrics.
Clearly influenced by Bob Dylan, Springsteen’s early efforts
were extremely weak, pale imitations of what Dylan did.
Dylan had a knack for hitting a nerve and somehow finding
depth in even the most simplistic surface lyrics. Springsteen didn’t achieve
this until he started writing songs about his own life and what went on around
him, as he became the herald for the unsung suburban generation, the way Dylan
had for the urban hipster.
Springsteen captured our angst in a way no one had before or
since, part of the reason we still cling to him even as the suburban existence
we lived comes to an end.
Like Woody Guthrie, Springsteen has captured and
immortalized a place and a way of life that is bound to fade, kept alive only
in his songs and poetry, which will allow us and future generations to look
back at what transpired – even those people whose lack the suburban experience.
His Asbury Park will remain alive
and vibrant long after the developers have plowed down the working class Asbury
Park and short-sighted politicians turn it into a
playground for the rich.
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