SPRINGSTEEN, BRUCE

born Sept. 23, 1949, Freehold, N.J., U.S. Bruce Springsteen in concert, 1984. American singer, songwriter, and bandleader who became the archetypal rock performer of the 1970s and '80s. Springsteen grew up in Freehold, a mill town where his father was an impoverished labourer. His rebellious and artistic side led him to the nearby Jersey shore, where his imagination was sparked by a rock band scene and the boardwalk life, high and low. After an apprenticeship in bar bands on the mid-Atlantic coast, Springsteen turned himself into a solo singer-songwriter in 1972 and auditioned for talent scout John Hammond, Sr., who immediately signed him to Columbia Records. His first two albums, released in 1973, reflected folk-rock, soul, and rhythm-and-blues influences, especially those of Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, and Stax/Volt Records. Springsteen's voice, a rough baritone that he used to shout on up-tempo numbers and to more sensual effect on slower songs, was shown to good effect here, but his sometimes spectacular guitar playing, which ranged from dense power chord effects to straight 1950s rock and roll, had to be downplayed to fit the singer-songwriter format. With his third album, Born to Run (1975), Springsteen transformed into a full-fledged rock and roller, heavily indebted to Phil Spector and Roy Orbison. The album, a diurnal song cycle, was a sensation even before its release, when Columbia's public relations campaign landed Springsteen on the covers of both Time and Newsweek the week of its release. But it sold only middling well, and three years passed before the follow-up, the darker, tougher Darkness on the Edge of Town, appeared. With Hungry Heart, from The River (1980), Springsteen finally scored an international hit single. By then, however, he was best known for his stage shows, three- and four-hour extravaganzas with his E Street Band that blended rock, folk, and soul with dramatic intensity and exuberant humour. The band, a crew of mixed stereotypesfrom rock and roll bandit to cool music professionalwas more like a gang than a musical unit, seemingly held together by little other than faith in its leader. Springsteen and saxophonist Clarence Clemons, a huge black man, seemed sometimes to be playing out scenes from Huckleberry Finn, using the stage as their raft. Springsteen's refusal, after Born to Run, to cooperate with much of the record company's public relations and marketing machinery, coupled with his painstaking recording process and the draining live shows, helped earn his reputation as a performer of principle as well as of power and popularity. Yet to this point Springsteen was probably more important as a regional hero of the Eastern Seaboard from Boston to Virginia, where his songs and attitudes seemed to sum up a certain rock-based lifestyle, than as a figure of national or international importance. Nebraska (1982), a stark set of acoustic songs, most in some way concerned with death, was an unusual interlude, but it was Born in the U.S.A. (1984) and his subsequent 18-month world tour that cinched Springsteen's reputation as the preeminent writer-performer of his rock and roll period. The album produced seven hit singles, most notably the title track, a sympathetic portrayal of Vietnam War veterans widely misinterpreted as a patriotic anthem. Springsteen's social perspective has been distinctly working-class throughout his career, a point emphasized both by his 1995 album, The Ghost of Tom Joad, which concerned itself with America's economically and spiritually destitute, and by his 1994 hit single (his first in eight years), the AIDS-related Streets of Philadelphia, from the film Philadelphia, for which he won both an Academy Award and a Grammy Award. The other side of Springsteen's work is reflected in the albums that he produced in the period beginning with Tunnel of Love (1987) and including Human Touch and Lucky Town (released simultaneously in 1992). The songs on these albums are intensely personal reflections on intimate relationships. In general, they have not been as popular. Bridging all this is the five-record set, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Live 19751985 (1986), which captures as much of his highly visual stage show of that period as can be captured in a solely audio form. (His work in music video has been far less good; the naturally gifted stage performer has a tendency to be somewhat stilted on TV.) The breakup of the E Street Band in 1989 and general trends in pop music fashion have curbed Springsteen's popularity somewhat. In 1998 Springsteen put together a box set, Tracks, consisting for the most part of leftover material that had failed to make the cut on his original albums. It was a grandiose gesture that established him as prolix beyond all but a couple of peers, but sales of Tracks were trivial compared with those for Live. In 1998 he reunited the E Street Band for a reunion tour. Dave Marsh Additional reading The best-known Springsteen biography is Dave Marsh, Born to Run (1979, reissued 1996), and its companion volume, Glory Days (1987, reissued 1996). Bruce Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Files: The Ultimate Compendium of Interviews, Articles, Facts, and Opinions from the Files of Rolling Stone (1996), brings the story forward by a decade and provides a trove of journalism, interviews, and reviews. Robert Hilburn and Howard Klein, Springsteen (1985); and Patrick Humphries and Chris Hunt, Bruce Springsteen, Blinded by the Light (also published as Blinded by the Light, 1985), are useful fan appreciations. Two simultaneous cover profiles make amusing reading, if only for their contrasting approaches to celebrity journalism and for evidence of how much harm hype can and cannot do to an artist's career: the laudatory Jay Cocks et al., The Backstreet Phantom of Rock, Time (Oct. 27, 1975), pp. 4858; and the hostile Maureen Orth, Janet Huck, and Peter S. Greenberg, Making of a Rock Star, Newsweek (Oct. 27, 1975), pp. 5763. Representative Works: The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle (1973) Born to Run (1975) Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) The River (1980) Born in the U.S.A. (1984) Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Live 19751985 (1986) The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995)