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Bruce Springsteen war bisher zwei Mal auf dem Time Magazin Cover:

05. August 2002:



Bruce Rising

An intimate look at how Springsteen turned
9/11 into a message of hope

By Josh Tyrangiel - Time Magazin 28.07.2002
PHOTOGRAPH FOR TIME BY GREGORY HEISLER
Posted Sunday, July 28, 2002; 2:31 p.m. EST

Bruce Springsteen has a songbook that reads like a union membership log. He has written about cops, fire fighters, soldiers, road builders, steelworkers, factory laborers and migrant workers. Springsteen himself has held exactly one real job. For a few weeks in 1968 when he was 18, he worked as a gardener. But his gift is not horticulture. His great gift—the one that makes him the best rock 'n' roll singer of his era—is empathy. Springsteen doesn't know what a 40-hour workweek feels like, but he knows how a 40-hour workweek makes you feel. "If you roll out of bed in the morning," he says, "even if you're the deepest pessimist or cynic, you just took a step into the next day. When I was growing up, we didn't have very much, but I saw by my mom's example that a step into the next day was very important. Hey, some good things might happen. You may even hold off some bad things that could happen."

On The Rising, his first album of new material in seven years, Springsteen is again writing about work, hope and American life as it is lived this very moment. The Rising is about Sept. 11, and it is the first significant piece of pop art to respond to the events of that day. Many of the songs are written from the perspectives of working people whose lives and fates intersected with those hijacked planes. The songs are sad, but the sadness is almost always matched with optimism, promises of redemption and calls to spiritual arms. There is more rising on The Rising than in a month of church.

The Rising also marks the return of the E Street Band. The band—seven hardworking Joes in their 50s and 60s, plus Springsteen's wife, backup singer and Jersey girl Patti Scialfa—has always been a proxy for the Springsteen audience. The E Streeters don't eat meat sandwiches out of metal lunch boxes, but it's easy to believe that they could. Their 15-year absence from Springsteen's recorded music opened a gulf between the Boss and his core fans, one that The Rising seems intent on closing.

When Springsteen cut the band loose in 1987, Bruce was a major American somebody who had made his name singing about nobodies. But money shines a lot brighter than empathy, and after Born in the U.S.A., Springsteen wasn't just rich; he was loaded, and everyone in America knew it. Rather than continue as the wealthy rock-poet of the American grunt and risk being labeled inauthentic, Springsteen set out for new territory. As he put it in Better Days, a 1992 song, "It's a sad funny ending to find yourself pretending/ A rich man in a poor man's shirt."

So, after a failed marriage to model-actress Julianne Phillips, Springsteen moved into a $14 million mansion in Beverly Hills, Calif. (the faithful jeered), wed Scialfa in 1991 (the faithful cheered) and sang about relationships, kids and his ennui (the faithful shrugged). Then in '95 he put out an album of folk songs, The Ghost of Tom Joad. It won a Grammy for best contemporary folk album, but it felt more like a Woody Guthrie tribute than a Springsteen record. The songs were stark and compelling, but the old optimism was gone. The characters of Tom Joad lived on the fringes of American life, and they died quickly and violently. "I just wasn't sure of my rock voice," says Springsteen. "I wasn't sure of what it sounded like or what it was going to be doing or what its purpose was at that moment. The band wasn't functioning together at the time, so I kind of went to where I thought I could be most useful."

One important fact about Springsteen: he thinks a lot about being Springsteen. After Tom Joad, he did some hard thinking—about himself, his family and the job of being Bruce—and decided to move back to New Jersey, where he now occupies a sprawling estate just a few minutes' drive from where he grew up. "Patti and I, we're both Irish-Italian," he says. "We have a lot of family here, and we wanted the kids"—they have three, ages 12, 10 and 8—"to have that experience of knowing people who do lots of different kinds of jobs. The guy who runs the dry-cleaning service or the guy who hunts and fishes and works on the farm." The homecoming also inspired Springsteen to climb tentatively back into rock 'n' roll. After an E Street reunion tour in 2000 (they played only a smattering of new songs), Springsteen started writing an album of rock tunes. Then the planes hit.

"I was having breakfast, and then I was in front of the television. A little while later," says Springsteen, "I drove across the local bridge. The Trade Center sits right in the middle of it when you look toward New York." Having been spared any personal tragedy, Springsteen tells his where-were-you-when story sheepishly. His greatest hardship was having to explain the day to his kids. "I think it's become placed in their lives in the same way that the nuclear bomb was when I was a kid. It's the really dark, scary thing, and they're not sure where it can touch them. Can it touch them at school? Can it touch them in the house? What are its limits? Does it have limits? It's mysterious, you know."

Springsteen's home county, Monmouth, lost 158 people in the towers, more than any other in New Jersey. After Sept. 11, Springsteen discovered that where he could be most useful was his own backyard. "This was one of those moments," he says, "when the years that I've put in and the relationships that I've developed and nurtured with my audience—this was one of those times when people want to see you."

Springsteen opened the America: A Tribute to Heroes telethon with My City of Ruins, an unreleased song from a few years ago about Asbury Park, N.J., that proved eerily adaptable to 9/11. He also played a few local fund raisers, but mostly he grieved along with the rest of the nation. As he read the New York Times obituaries ("I found those to be very, very meaningful—incredibly powerful," he says), he couldn't help noticing how many times Thunder Road or Born in the U.S.A. was played at a memorial service or how many victims had a pile of old Springsteen concert-ticket stubs tucked away in their bedroom. Within days after the towers collapsed, Springsteen was writing songs.

"I have a room off my bedroom that I just go in," he says. "All my things are in there—books, CDs, guitars, boots, belts, anything I've collected along the way. It's quite a carnival." When he writes, Springsteen generally sits at the same table he has used for 20 years and, by inserting a few small narrative details, tries to create songs that will carry his listeners away. "The difference," he says, "was that on this record, you're writing about something that everyone saw and had some experience with, and obviously some people experienced it much more intimately."

To flesh out the intimacies of Sept. 11, Springsteen had to do some reporting. Stacey Farrelly's husband Joe was a fire fighter with Manhattan Engine Co. 4 and, as his obituaries noted, a lifelong Springsteen fan. Recalls his widow: "At the beginning of October, I was home alone and, uh, heavily medicated. I picked up the phone, and a voice said, 'May I please speak to Stacey? This is Bruce Springsteen.'" They talked for 40 minutes. "After I got off the phone with him, the world just felt a little smaller. I got through Joe's memorial and a good month and a half on that phone call."

Suzanne Berger's husband Jim was memorialized in the New York Times under the headline fan of the boss. She too got a call. "He said, 'I want to respect your privacy, but I just want you to know that I was very touched, and I want to know more about your husband,'" she recalls. "He wanted to hear Jim's story, so I told him."

Springsteen freezes when the subject of the phone calls comes up. He doesn't want publicity for ordinary kindness, and he doesn't want to be seen as exploiting people whose suffering is well known. But for Springsteen, the experience of hearing Berger talk about how her husband hustled dozens of people out of the south tower before it collapsed around him or of listening to Farrelly recall some of her husband's copious daily love notes was obviously critical to the creation of The Rising.

The success of Springsteen's reporting can be measured by the music. The Rising opens with Lonesome Day, one of the few songs told in Springsteen's own voice. "House is on fire, viper's in the grass," he sings. "A little revenge, and this too shall pass." Like most of The Rising, Lonesome Day gets you moving in spite of its topic. The fire-fighter songs, Into the Fire and the first single, The Rising, put the listener in the physical space of the crumbling towers, but they never get at the emotions behind the fire fighters' courage. The songs are rousing and redemptive—and a little shallow. But almost every other song on the album has an aha! moment when Springsteen touches his subject's secret heart. On Empty Sky, his protagonist looks at the space where the towers used to be and seethes, "I want a kiss from your lips/ I want an eye for an eye."

Loss is everywhere on The Rising, but the album's best track, You're Missing, penetrates the unique horror of having a loved one turned to ash. Lyrically the song is a catalog of absence: a coffee cup on the counter, a newspaper on a doorstep. But the song rises to greatness because Springsteen not only recognizes dramatic details but also knows what they mean. "Loss is about what you miss," he says. "You miss a person's physical being—their skin, their hair, the way they smell, the way they make you feel. You miss their body. When my father died, my children wanted to touch him, to touch his body. And the kids got something out of it. The people in this situation, you know, they aren't going to get that." That's why You're Missing is one song that does not end hopefully: "God's drifting in heaven, devil's in the mailbox/ Got dust on my shoes, nothing but teardrops."

Springsteen's liberal, humanist side comes out in the last two songs he wrote for The Rising. Worlds Apart is a new take on the classic story of lovers separated by a cultural divide, the lovers in this case being an American and a Middle Eastern Muslim. Springsteen sings, "We'll let love build a bridge, over mountains draped in stars/ I'll meet you on the ridge, between these worlds apart." Paradise opens from the perspective of a suicide bomber ("In the crowded marketplace, I drift from face to face") before transitioning to the mind of a woman who lost her husband in the Pentagon ("I brush your cheek with my fingertips/ I taste the void upon your lips)." The first verse was inspired by the newspapers, the second by a phone conversation Springsteen had with a Washington widow. The song ends with the realization that the afterlife is no solace to the living.

What's missing on The Rising is politics. Springsteen says he has never considered himself a political person, but after Ronald Reagan tried to hijack Born in the U.S.A. for his 1984 re-election campaign, the singer developed a spare but effective political voice that he generally raises on behalf of liberal causes and the occasional liberal candidate. In 1991 he played a fund raiser for the Christic Institute, a radical think tank that has repeatedly accused the U.S. government of illegal covert action in Latin America. On the subject of America's current foreign policy, he is with the mass of public opinion. "I think the invasion in Afghanistan was handled very, very smoothly," he says.

The absence of politics doesn't mean The Rising is controversy free. For some Springsteen fans, it arrives too quickly on the heels of tragedy to leave its motives unexamined. Charles Cross, who for 16 years published and edited the authoritative Springsteen fanzine, Backstreets, heard The Rising at a listening party for diehards. "They're really marketing it as a Sept. 11 album," he says. "I think we want art that can deal with it, but it's still such an uncomfortable thing, and it's still pretty fresh. Frankly, the commercial element of it really scares me."

Springsteen suspected the exploitation charge might be leveled, and he takes his time responding to it. "When you're putting yourself into shoes you haven't worn," he says, "you have to be very ... just very thoughtful, is the way that I'd put it. Just thoughtful. You call on your craft, and you go searching for it, and hopefully what makes people listen is that over the years you've been serious and honest. That's where your creative authority comes from. That's how people know you're not just taking a ride."

Listen to Farrelly on the subject: "Let me tell you, I have more CDs that people have sent me, just random people that wrote songs or whatever. I won't listen to them. But I trust that Bruce is sincere, that he really believes in what he wrote. I know the firemen are going to have a hard time with some of it, but then you sing along, and you just feel a little better. I trust him with all my heart. The only thing that bothered me is when he married Julianne."

Springsteen claims he is a big believer in the old saw "Trust the art, not the artist." But Springsteen devotees love the songs and the singer equally, and by playing his fans' experiences back to them over stadium speakers, Springsteen has been an active partner in a pop syllogism: he sings about people like me; he looks and dresses like me; therefore he must be a person like me! Perhaps what Springsteen means, as some of his friends suggest, is that he feels less worthy than the people he sings about. Perhaps that's why touring, communing with those who adore him (and whom he adores) is such a critical part of Springsteen's life.

In mid-July, Springsteen and the E Street Band were holed up in a small theater on the Fort Monmouth Army base, cramming for a 46-city tour that starts Aug. 7. During a break backstage, the band members were playing their consummate blue-collar roles. Guitarist "Little" Steven Van Zandt says he has to move out of his Eighth Avenue apartment in Manhattan after 20 years. "The place is fallin' apart." Drummer Max Weinberg suggests Steve check out a place in the legendary Upper West Side apartment building the Dakota; Van Zandt looks as if he has just been told to eat his pizza with a knife and fork. "Yeah, for $7 million? Very funny," he responds.

Meanwhile, at 52 Springsteen still looks as if he just strolled off the cover of Born in the U.S.A. As E Street Band member No. 9 in a black sleeveless undershirt and tan work pants, he moves across the stage like a camp counselor, all energy and encouragement as the group struggles to get the new songs down: "I know this stuff is hard. Don't worry; we'll get it, and it's gonna be fabulous! Now what we're gonna do this time ..." During a break, Springsteen bounds out into the house seats. He thinks the pace of the band's learning curve is fine. He is happy to be playing with his old friends. But he is also not satisfied. "If I have a good trait, it's probably relentlessness," he says. "I'm a hound dog on the prowl. I can't be shook!"

When not near a guitar, Springsteen tends to be quiet, serious and very still. With a Fender in his hands, he's a horse that can't wait to run. He loves playing music for anyone, anywhere, anytime. "Ultimately," he says, "it's not anything near a selfless experience. It's very self-fulfilling and revitalizing. I'm up there trying to fire myself up. When the metal hits the pedal—bang!—I got a destination that I am moving toward, and I'm not gonna be satisfied till I get there. For me." Of course, Springsteen's pleasure is famously infectious. Springsteen feeds off the crowd, which feeds off him in an endless cycle of stadium euphoria.

When he is onstage, Springsteen says, he sometimes feels like a preacher, and on the last E Street Band tour, he did a mock monologue in a fire-and-brimstone voice about the power of music. "It was one of those things that was joking but serious at the same time," he says. Springsteen is a lapsed Catholic, but whether he is telling Scialfa that he wants her backup vocals to be "more gospel" or asking his listeners to "come on up for The Rising," he understands that spiritual revival is a necessity and that it has to be a communal experience. "I think that fits in with the concept of our band as a group of witnesses," he says. "That's one of our functions. We're here to testify to what we have seen." And to hear the testimony of others.

27. Oktober 1975:



Den Bericht aus dem Jahre 1975 möchte ich gerne lesen. Hat ihn jemand? Bitte melden...

Hier kann man nach Time Magazin Covers suchen.

Rock's New Sensation
The Backstreet Phantom of Rock

By Jay Cocks, et al
Time Magazine
October 27, 1975
_________________________________________________________

The rock-'n'-roll generation: everybody grows up by staying young

Bruce Springsteen is onto this. ln fact, he has written a song about it:

I pushed B-52 and bombed 'em with the blues
With my gear set stubborn on standing
I broke all the rules, strafed my old high school
Never once gave thought to landing.
I hid in the clouded warmth of the crowd,
But when they said "Come down" I threw up.
Ooh... growin' up.

He has been called the "last innocent in rock." which is at best partly true, but that is how he appears to audiences who are exhausted and on fire at the end of a concert. Springsteen is not a golden California boy or a glitter queen from Britain. Dressed usually in leather jacket and shredded undershirt, he is a glorified gutter rat from a dying New Jersey resort town who walks with an easy swagger that is part residual stage presence, part boardwalk braggadocio. He nurtures the look of a lowlife romantic even though he does not smoke, scarcely drinks and disdains every kind of drug.

In all other ways, however, he is the dead-on image of a rock musician: Street smart but sentimental, a little enigmatic, articulate mostly through his music. For 26 years Springsteen has known nothing but poverty and debt until, just in the past few weeks, the rock dream came true for him. ("Man, when I was nine I couldn't imagine anyone not wanting to be Elvis Presley.") But he is neither sentimental nor superficial. His music is primal, directly in touch with all the impulses of wild humor and glancing melancholy, street tragedy and punk anarchy that have made rock the distinctive voice of a generation.

Springsteen's songs are full of echoes -- of Sam Cooke and Elvis Presley, of Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly. You can also hear Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and the Band weaving among Springsteen's elaborate fantasias. The music is a synthesis, some Latin and soul, and some good jazz riffs too. The tunes are full of precipitate breaks and shifting harmonies, the lyrics often abstract, bizarre, wholly personal.

Springsteen makes demands. He figures that when he sings

Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we're young
'Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

Everybody is going to know where he's coming from and just where he's heading.

Springsteen first appeared in the mid-'60s for a handful of loyal fans from the scuzzy Jersey shore. Then two record albums of wired brilliance ("Greetings from Asbury Park. N.J." and "The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle") enlarged his audience to a cult. The albums had ecstatic reviews -- there was continuing and growing talk of "a new Dylan," -- but slim sales. Springsteen spent nearly two years working on his third album, "Born to Run," and Columbia Records has already invested $150,000 in ensuring that this time around, everyone gets the message.

The album has made it to No. 1, the title track is a hit single, and even the first two albums are snugly on the charts. Concerts have sold out hours after they were announced. Last Thursday Springsteen brought his distinctively big-city, rubbed-raw sensibility to a skeptical Los Angeles, not only a major market but the bastion of a wholly different rock style. It remained to be seen how Springsteen would go down in a scene whose characteristic pop music is softer, easier, pitched to life on the beaches and in the canyons, hardly in tune with his sort of dead-end carnival. Springsteen's four-day stand at a Sunset Strip theater called the Roxy was a massive dose of culture shock that booted everyone back to the roots, shook 'em up good and got 'em all on their feet dancing.

Even the most laid-back easy rocker would find it tough to resist his live performance. Small, tightly muscled, the voice a chopped-and-channeled rasp, Springsteen has the wild onstage energy of a pinball rebounding off invisible flippers, caroming down the alley past traps and penalties, dead center for extra points and the top score.

Expecting a monochromatic street punk, the L.A. crowd got a dervish leaping on the tables, all arms and flailing dance steps, and a rock poet as well. In over ten years of playing tanktown dates and rundown discos, Springsteen has mastered the true stage secret of the rock pro: he seems to be letting go totally and fearlessly, yet the performance remains perfectly orchestrated. With his E Street Band, especially Clarence Clemons' smartly lowdown saxophone, Springsteen can caper and promenade, boogie out into the audience, recite a rambling, funny monologue about girl watching back in Asbury Park or switch moods in the middle of songs.

He expects his musicians to follow him along. Many of the changes are totally spur of the moment, and the band is tight enough to take them in stride. "You hook on to Bruce on that stage and you go wherever he takes you," says Clarence Clemons. "It's like total surrender to him." A Springsteen set is raucous, poignant, brazen. It is clear that he gets off on the show as much as the audience, which is one reason why a typical gig lasts over two hours. The joy is infectious and self-fulfilling. "This music is forever for me," Springsteen says. "It's the stage thing, that rush moment that you live for. It never lasts, but that's what you live for."

He once cautioned in a song that you can "waste your summer prayin' in vain for a savior to rise from these streets," but right now Springsteen represents a regeneration, a renewal of rock. He has gone back to the sources, rediscovered the wild excitement that rock has lost over the past few years. Things had settled down in the '70s: with a few exceptions, like Paul Simon, Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt, there was an excess of showmanship, too much din substituting for true power, repetition -- as in this past summer's Rolling Stones tour -- for lack of any new directions. Springsteen has taken rock forward by taking it back, keeping it young. He uses and embellishes the myths of the '50s pop culture: his songs are populated by bad-ass loners, wiped-out heroes, bikers, hot-rodders, women of soulful mystery. Springsteen conjures up a whole half-world of shattered sunlight and fractured neon, where his characters re-enact little pageants of challenge and desperation.

The "Born to Run" album is so powerful, and Springsteen's presence so prevalent at the moment, that before the phenomenon has had a chance to settle, a reaction is already setting in. He is being typed as a '50s hood in the James Dean mold, defused for being a hype, put down as a product of the Columbia promo "fog machine," condemned for slicking up and recycling a few old rock-'n'-roll riffs. Even Springsteen remains healthily skeptical. "I don't understand what all the commotion is about," he told TIME Correspondent James Willwerth. "I feel like I'm on the outside of all this, even though I know I'm on the inside. It's like you want attention, but sometimes you can't relate to it."

Springsteen defies classification. This is one reason recognition was so long in coming. There is nothing simple to hold on to. He was discovered by Columbia Records Vice President of Talent Acquisition John Hammond, who also found Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman and Bob Dylan, among others. Hammond knew "at once that Bruce would last a generation" but thought of him first as a folk musician.

Casting Springsteen as a rebel in a motorcycle jacket is easy enough -- it makes a neat fit for the character he adopted in "Born to Run" -- but it ignores a whole other side of his importance and of his music.

Born to Run is a bridge between Springsteen the raffish rocker and the more ragged, introverted street poet of the first two albums. Although he maintains that he "hit the right spot" on "Born to Run," it is the second album, "The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle," that seems to go deepest. A sort of free-association autobiography, it comes closest to the wild fun-house refractions of Springsteen's imagination. In "Wild Billy's Circus Song," when he sings, "He's gonna miss his fall, oh God save the human cannonball," Springsteen could be anticipating and describing his own current, perhaps perilous trajectory. In case of danger, however, Springsteen will be rescued by the music itself, just as he has always been. "Music saved me," he says. "From the beginning, my guitar was something I could go to. If I hadn't found music, I don't know what I would have done."

He was born poor in Freehold, N.J., a working-class town near the shore. His mother Adele ("Just like Superwoman, she did everything, everywhere, all the time") worked through his childhood as a secretary. His father, Douglas Springsteen (the name is Dutch), was "a sure-money man" at the pool tables who drifted from job to job, stalked by undetermined demons.

"My Daddy was a driver," Springsteen remembers. "He liked to get in the car and just drive. He got everybody else in the car too, and he made us drive. He made us all drive." These two-lane odysseys without destination only reinforced Springsteen's already flourishing sense of displacement. "I lived half of my first 13 years in a trance or something," he says now. "People thought I was weird because I always went around with this look on my face. I was thinking of things, but I was always on the outside, looking in."

The parents pulled up stakes and moved to California when Bruce was still in his teens. Bruce stayed behind, with some bad memories of hassles with nuns in parochial school, an $18 guitar and random dreams of a phantom father for company. By the time he was 18, he had some perspective on his father. "I figured out we were pretty much alike," Springsteen says, by which he means more than a shared cool skill at the pool table and a taste for long car rides. "My father never has much to say to me, but I know he thinks about a lot of things. I know he's driving himself almost crazy thinking about these things... and yet he sure ain't got much to say when we sit down to talk." The elder Springsteen currently drives a bus in San Mateo, a suburb south of San Francisco. Neither he nor his wife made it to Los Angeles for their son's big show.

Bruce bunked in with friends back in Jersey and tried to make it through public high school. He took off on weekend forays into Manhattan for his first strong taste of big-city street life and began making music. He started writing his own because he could not figure out how to tune his guitar to play anyone else's material accurately. "Music was my way of keeping people from looking through and around me. I wanted the heavies to know I was around."

In 1965, while he was still finishing high school, Springsteen began forming bands like the Castiles, which did gigs for short money in a Greenwich Village spot called the Cafe Wha?. He met up with Miami Steve Van Zandt, current lead guitarist of the E Street Band, around that time. "We were all playing anything we could to be part of the scene," Van Zandt recalls. "West Coast stuff, the English thing, R&B and blues. Bruce was writing five or ten songs a week. He would say, 'I'm gonna go home tonight and write a great song,' and he did. He was the Boss then, and he's the Boss now."

Still, the Boss was sufficiently uncertain of his musical future to quit school altogether. He enrolled in Ocean County College. showed up in what is still his standard costume -- Fruit of the Loom undershirt, tight jeans, sneakers and leather jacket -- and was soon invited round for a chat by one of the guidance staff. As Springsteen tells it. the counselor dropped the big question on him immediately.

"You've got trouble at home, right?"

"Look, things are great, I feel fine," Springsteen replied warily.

"Then why do you look like that?"

"What are you talking about?"

"There are some students who have... complained about you."

"Well, that's their problem, you know?" said Springsteen, ending the conversation and his formal education.

Instead, he took his music anywhere they would listen. His bands changed names (the Rogues, the Steel Mill, Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom) as frequently as personnel. "I've gone through a million crazy bands with crazy people who did crazy things." Springsteen remembers. They played not only clubs and private parties but firemen's balls, a state mental hospital and Sing Sing prison, a couple of trailer parks, a rollerdrome, the parking lot of a Shop-Rite and under the screen during intermission at a drive-in. A favorite spot for making music. and for hanging out, was Asbury Park.

"Those were wonderful days," says Springsteen's buddy, Southside Johnny Lyon. "We were all young and crazy." Bustling with music and the fever of young musicians, bands swapping songs and members, new jobs and old girls, Asbury Park sounds, if only in memory, like Liverpool before it brought forth the Beatles. Springsteen lived in a surfboard factory run by a displaced Californian named Carl Virgil ("Tinker") West III, who became, for a time, his manager.

Everybody had a band; not only Springsteen and Southside, but also Miami Steve, Vini ("Mad Dog") Lopez (who played drums on Bruce's first two albums) and Garry Tallent (now bass guitarist for the E Street Band). They all would appear at a dive called the Upstage Club for $15 a night, work from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m., then party together, play records and adjourn till the next afternoon, when they would meet on the boardwalk to check the action and talk music. For sport everyone played Monopoly, adding a few refinements that made the game more like the Jersey boardwalk they knew. There were two special cards: a Chief McCarthy card (named in honor of a local cop who rousted musicians indiscriminately) and a Riot card. The McCarthy card allowed the bearer to send any opponent to jail without reason; whoever drew the Riot card could fire-bomb any opponent's real estate.

Springsteen was a demon player and won frequently, according to Southside, because "he had no scruples." Nicknamed "the Gut Bomb King" because of his passion for junk food, he would show up for a Monopoly tourney with armfuls of Pepsis and Drake's cakes. Whenever anyone would get hungry and ask for a snack, Springsteen was ready with a deal: one Pepsi, one hotel.

Nobody was getting rich outside of Monopoly. In 1970 Asbury Park was the scene of a bad race riot. and the tourists stayed away. "The place went down to the ground. and we rode right down with it," says Miami Steve. There were jobs to be had in a few of the bars, playing easy-listening rock, but Springsteen and his pals disdained them because, as he says simply, "we hated the music. We had no idea how to hustle either. We weren't big door knockers. so we didn't go to New York or Philly." Adds Van Zandt, who lived on a dollar a day: "We were all reading in the papers how much fun rock 'n' roll was -- it seemed like another world. We didn't take drugs. We couldn't afford any bad habits."

A lot of the life Springsteen saw then and lived through found its way into his songs, but indirectly. Filtered through an imagination that discovered a crazy romanticism in the ragtag boardwalk life.

She worked that joint under the boardwalk,
She was always the girl you saw boppin' down the beach with the radio,
Kids say last night she was dressed like a star
in one of the cheap little seashore bars
and I saw her parked with her loverboy out on the Kokomo.

Tinker, the surfboard manufacturer and manager, called Mike Appel on Springsteen's behalf. Appel, whose major claim to fame until then was the co-authorship of a Partridge Family hit called "Doesn't Somebody Want to Be Wanted," was smart enough to see Springsteen's talent and brash enough to spirit him away from Tinker. Appel got Springsteen to work up a clutch of new songs by simply calling him frequently and asking him to come into New York. Springsteen would jump on the bus and have a new tune ready by the time he crossed the Hudson.

Appel also called John Hammond at Columbia. The call was Springsteen's idea, but the come-on was all Appel. He told Hammond he wanted him to listen to his new boy because Hammond had discovered Bob Dylan, and "we wanna see if that was just a fluke, or if you really have ears." Hammond reacted to Springsteen "with a force I'd felt maybe three times in my life." Less than 24 hours after the first meeting, contracts were signed.

Even before Springsteen's first album was released in 1973, Appel was already on the move. He offered the NBC producer of the Super Bowl the services of his client to sing The Star-Spangled Banner. Informed that Andy Williams had already been recruited, with Blood, Sweat & Tears to perform during half time, he cried, "They're losers and you're a loser too. Some day I'm going to give you a call and remind you of this. then I'm going to make another call and you'll be out of a job." Says Hammond: "Appel is as offensive as any man I've ever met, but he's utterly selfless in his devotion to Bruce."

Appel and Springsteen understood each other. They agreed that Bruce and the band should play second fiddle to nobody. After a quick but disastrous experience as an opening act for Chicago, Springsteen appeared only as a headline attraction. That meant fewer bookings. There was also little to be done about the narrowing future of Bruce's recording career. Regarded as a pet of banished Columbia Records President Clive Davis, Springsteen was ignored by the executives who took over from Davis. "The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle" was not so much distributed as dumped.

For two years Springsteen crisscrossed the country, enlarging his following with galvanic concerts. Early last year, playing a small bar called Charley's in Cambridge, Mass., he picked up an important new fan. Jon Landau. a Rolling Stone editor, had reviewed Bruce's second album favorably for a local paper, and Charley's put the notice in the window. Landau remembers arriving at the club and seeing Springsteen hugging himself in the cold and reading the review. A few weeks later, Landau wrote, "I saw the rock and roll future and its name is Springsteen."

Some loyalists at Columbia persuaded the company to cough up $50,000 to publicize the quote. Columbia's sudden recommitment caught Springsteen in a creative crisis. He and Appel had spent nine months in the studio and produced only one cut, "Born to Run." The disparity between the wild reaction to his live performances and the more subdued, respectful reception of his records had to be cleared up. Landau soon signed on as co-producer of the new album and began to find out about some of the problems firsthand.

"Bruce works instinctively," Landau observes. "He is incredibly intense, and he concentrates deeply. Underneath his shyness is the strongest will I've ever encountered. If there's something he doesn't want to do, he won't." Springsteen would work most days from 3 p.m. to 6 a.m.. and sometimes as long as 24 hours, without stopping. Only occasionally did things go quickly. For a smoky midnight song, called Meeting Across the River, Springsteen just announced, "O.K., I hear a string bass, and I hear a trumpet." and, according to Landau, "that was it." Finally the album came together as real roadhouse rock, made proudly in that tradition. The sound is layered over with the kind of driving instrumental cushioning that characterized the sides Phil Spector produced in the late '50s and '60s. The lyrics burst with nighthawk poetry.

The screen door slams
Mary's dress waves
Like a vision she dances across the porch
As the radio plays Roy Orbison singing for the lonely
Hey that's me and I want you only
Don't turn me home again
I just can't face myself alone again.

If all this effort has suddenly paid off grandly, and madly, Springsteen remains obdurately unchanged. He continues to hassle with Appel over playing large halls, and just last month refused to show up for a Maryland concert Appel had booked into a 10,000-seat auditorium. The money is starting to flow in now: Springsteen takes home $350 a week, the same as Appel and the band members. There are years of debt and back road fees to repay. Besides, Springsteen is not greatly concerned about matters of finance. Says John Hammond: "In all my years in this business, he is the only person I've met who cares absolutely nothing about money."

Springsteen lives sometimes with his girl friend Karen Darvin, 20, a freckled, leggy model from Texas, in a small apartment on Manhattan's East Side. More frequently he is down on the Jersey shore, where he has just moved into more comfortable -- but not lavish -- quarters, and bought his first decent hi-fi rig. He remains adamantly indifferent to clothing and personal adornment, although he wears a small gold cross around his neck -- a vestigial remnant of Catholicism -- and, probably to challenge it, a small gold ring in his left ear, which gives him a little gypsy flash.

When he is not working, Springsteen takes life easy and does not worry about it. "I'm not a planning-type guy," he says. "You can't count on nothing in this life. I never have expectations when I get involved in things. That way, I never have disappointments." His songs, which he characterizes as being mostly about "survival, how to make it through the next day," are written in bursts. "I ain't one of those guys who feels guilty if he didn't write something today," he boasts. "That's all jive. If I didn't do nothing all day, I feel great." Under all circumstances, he spins fiction in his lyrics and is careful to avoid writing directly about daily experience. "You do that," he cautions, "and this is what happens. First you write about struggling along. Then you write about making it professionally. Then somebody's nice to you. You write about that. It's a beautiful day, you write about that. That's about 20 songs in all. Then you're out. You got nothing to write."

Some things, however, must change. Southside Johnny recalls that after "Born to Run" was released, "we had a party at one of the band members' houses. It was like old times. We drank and listened to old Sam and Dave albums. Then someone said my car had a flat tire. I went outside to check, and sitting in the street were all these people waiting to get a glimpse of Brucie, just sitting under the streetlights, not saying anything. I got nervous and went back inside."

These lamppost vigilantes, silent and deferential, were not teeny-boppers eager to squeal or fans looking for a fast autograph. As much as anything, they were all unofficial delegates of a generation acting on the truth of Springsteen's line from Thunder Road: "Show a little faith, there's magic in the night." Just at that doorstep, they found it. Growin' up.

Ich weiß, ich weiß - es ist ein wahnsinnig langer Artikel. Aber ich finde ihn wirklich klasse und auf jedenfall lesenswert und vor allem im Nachhinein ziemlich interessant!!!

Also, nehmt Euch ruhig die Zeit, druckt das Ding aus und setzt Euch in einer ruhigen Minute oder Stunde zu Hause in ein kuscheliges Eckchen und verschlingt diesen ja wohl schon fast historischen Artikel - es loht sich, versprochen!!!