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To his millions of fans he is simply “The Boss”, but Bruce Springsteen’s promotion to the top job in American rock was not easy to come by. From a traumatic childhood spent digging in trash heaps for electronics, through many years of grinding as a bar-room band singer and critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful troubadour, Springsteen found success the hard way. Having secured global fame as a hard rocking chronicler of blue collar life and legendary live performer, he now uses his influence to promote important causes and help inspire others dealing with the issues that he has not just experienced himself, but also sung about throughout his superheroic career. 

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Born In The USA

Bruce was born in 1949 in Freehold, New Jersey into a complicated and close knit Irish-Italian family. In his autobiography, Born To Run, he describes how “in my family we had aunts who howled during family gatherings; cousins who left school in the sixth grade, went home and never left the house again; and men who pulled hair from their bodies and heads, leaving great gaping patches of baldness, all within our little half block.” The family were poor, although not as poor as many in their area. Bruce’s mother was a legal secretary and the main breadwinner in the family, while his father, Douglas, was a brooding alcoholic who struggled to hold down jobs and saw Bruce as “an intruder, a stranger, a competitor in our home and a fearful disappointment”. In contrast, his grandparents doted on the young boy, to a degree that Bruce would describe as just as detrimental as his father’s disdain, writing of how the “unwarranted freedom” on offer at their house turned him into “an unintentional rebel, an outcast weirdo misfit sissy boy. I [was] alienating, alienated and socially homeless”, while in school he endured “the bullying all aspiring rock stars must undergo and suffer in raw, humiliating silence”.

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One positive that emerged from Bruce’s close relationship with his grandparents was a love of music, fostered during the regular Thursday “trash night” where the family would drive around town searching for broken electronics to be taken to his grandfather’s shed. Bruce would watch as his grandfather would swap parts from one ruined circuit board to another, and they would then sell the repaired radios to the endless stream of migratory farm workers passing through town. Bruce was inspired by hearing Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley on the radio, and convinced his mother to buy him a guitar. He soon began writing songs inspired by the people around him. By the time Bruce was twenty his family had moved away from New Jersey, but he stayed behind to develop his career as a musician; as he had “four clean aces. I had youth, almost a decade of hard-core bar band experience, a good group of homegrown musicians who were attuned to my performance style and a story to tell”.   

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Born To Run

The process of convincing people to listen to that story was not easy. Bruce gathered many of the musicians who would later form his legendary E Street Band - including future The Sopranos star Steven van Zandt - and formed a band with the typically Springsteenesque name of Steel Mill. From the outset, Bruce was writing lyrically dense songs about blue collar life, and the promotional material for his early work described how he had “more words in some individual songs than other artists had in whole albums". The initial buzz about his live performances led to a major label deal with Colombia Records and a debut album in 1972, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., but the record was a commercial failure. Its lead-off single, Blinded By The Light, had been written by Bruce after Colombia’s boss had complained that an early mix of the album lacked an obvious single, but Bruce’s version didn’t sell. (Four years later it would be covered by Manfred Mann, topping the Billboard Charts). Although many reviewers praised the album, others felt it was derivative; the infamous 70s rock journalist Lester Bangs would later say "many of us dismissed it: he wrote like Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, sang like Van Morrison and Robbie Robertson, and led a band that sounded like Van Morrison's."

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A second album followed and suffered similar commercial disappointment, but the growing critical acclaim of Springsteen’s live shows and recorded work convinced Colombia to continue backing him, and they significantly increased the production budget for his third album. Their investment paid off spectacularly, as 1975’s Born To Run catapulted Springsteen and the E Street Band to worldwide fame, and began a decade of radio domination that peaked with 1984’s Born In The USA. The enormous record sales of the era - Born in the USA alone sold thirty million copies - were supplemented by similarly remarkable ticket sales for Springsteen’s legendary live shows, with the year long tour to promote Born In The USA taking over $80m in receipts from 3.9m tickets sold. Springsteen’s popularity also led to his music being co-opted by politicians, with many Republicans throughout the years adopting the chorus of Born In The USA as an anthem for rallies, despite the song’s verses being a scathing critique of America’s treatment of Vietnam war veterans. It has frequently been described as one of the most misunderstood songs in rock history.

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Streets of Philadelphia

In the years since Born In The USA Springsteen’s message has become harder to misinterpret. In 1988 he leant the enormous pulling power of his live shows to Amnesty International, headlining the Human Rights Now! tour in support of the charity with 19 sellout stadium shows spanning five continents. His recorded output also remained overtly political, with the most famous example being the Oscar-winning 1994 single Streets of Philadelphia, drawn from the soundtrack of the film Philadelphia, a harrowing story of a gay lawyer’s attempts to sue his former employers for discrimination. The film’s uncompromising look at the discrimination faced by AIDS sufferers was one of the first film to portray these subjects by a major Hollywood studio, and Springsteen’s heartfelt contribution to the soundtrack was not just a huge chart hit all around the world (despite its maudlin theme) but a major factor in the enormous box office success of the movie. Bruce has continued to be a vocal advocate for LGBT rights ever since, something which many believe has been especially important given his close association and popularity with blue collar audiences. 

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He has also leant his tremendous fame to many other vital causes, and is a particularly active advocate for the Light of Day Foundation, a Parkinson’s disease charity named after one of Bruce’s own songs. He’s also been open about his own mental health issues, describing how he suffered from a prolonged bout of depression when he entered his sixties, writing: “My depression is spewing like an oil spill all over the beautiful turquoise-green gulf of my carefully planned and controlled existence. Its black sludge is threatening to smother every last living part of me.” His willingness to write so eloquently about his own experiences - as well as the stories of the people around him - perfectly illustrate the reason why he’s an inspirational figure to so many fans who see him not just as a True Superhero, but also The Boss.

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