Bruce Springsteen

His highly distinctive, word-drunk debut album, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., came out in 1973, and its poetic aspirations had inspired some critics and fans to christen him the “new Dylan”—an appellation that tended to bring as many problems as gifts to the artists who came to bear it. Clive Davis, then president of Columbia Records, Springsteen’s label, was so excited by what he heard on the album that he read the singer’s lyrics to a closed-circuit television meeting broadcast to Columbia executives across the nation. Springsteen was flattered, but he would later jokingly note that the sober recitation reminded him why songs have music as well as words. “The new Dylan,” Springsteen recalled that day, shaking his head. “Do you know how old the old Dylan was when I…

That would become one of the most iconic statements in the history of rock criticism, and for the next half century or so, it has proven true. It breathed life into Columbia’s support for Springsteen after the label had lost faith when both Greetings From Asbury Park and its late-1973 follow-up, The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, had failed to catch commercial fire. Landau’s bold prediction—remember, the vast majority of music fans had no idea who Bruce Springsteen even was—appeared everywhere. The spark of Brucemania had been lit. Like the “new Dylan” title, “the future of rock and roll” label created expectations that Springsteen initially would have a hard time fulfilling. The person whose career it most immediately affected, however, was Landau. Before too long, he would…

Particularly so, since Springsteen did not own an acoustic guitar at the time. Instead, he borrowed a broken-down one from a Jersey Shore buddy, which he carried slung around his neck on the bus ride from New Jersey and through the midtown streets of Manhattan. After he played “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” for Hammond, however, the A&R man was won over. Springsteen performed a couple more songs, and then Hammond watched him perform a brief, hastily arranged open mic set that evening in a Greenwich Village club, the Gaslight Au Go Go. Hammond set up a similar office audition for Springsteen with Columbia president Clive Davis a few weeks later, which landed Springsteen a contract with one of the most important record labels in the…

Energized, Springsteen prepared to enter the studio to create his follow-up album, and he was determined to have Landau produce the new album. This upset his manager Mike Appel, and lawsuits began to fly, leading to one of the most tumultuous times in Springsteen’s career. He was not permitted to enter the studio until the legal battles were resolved. To Springsteen, it seemed like his success was slipping away; he would not release an album for three years, an eternity at that time in the music industry. Since he couldn’t record, he wrote songs and toured at a breakneck pace, doing shows that are now legendary, both for their length and their ferocity. Covers of songs like Gary U.S. Bonds’ “Quarter to Three” and Mitch Ryder’s “Devil With a Blue…

Songs like “Crush on You,” “I’m a Rocker,” “Sherry Darling” and “Ramrod” capture the E Street Band in all its bar-band fury, while the title track, “Independence Day,” “Stolen Car” and “Wreck on the Highway” look into the complex, troubling issues he had begun to examine on Darkness. Finally, The River, its title itself an image of the ongoing flow of life, is an album about commitment, an issue Springsteen, now in his 30s, was beginning to contend with in his own life. His most meaningful life seemed to be lived in performance, which was one of the reasons it often seemed that he needed to be dragged off the stage. What was waiting for him when the music stopped? Drinking and drugs never held much allure for him, and…

—FROM TUNNEL OF LOVE, 1987 Though he did not say so at the time, he eventually came to view the live set as the conclusion of the first chapter of his career. Perhaps inevitably, he turned inward again on his next album, the brooding Tunnel of Love in 1987. Springsteen had married the actress Julianne Phillips in 1985, and while the album is far from strictly autobiographical, the issues that arose in his marriage clearly informed it. The title track is fascinating because it takes the carnival imagery that had been such a key element of his early writing about the Jersey Shore and adapted it to the wild emotional journey of falling in love. The descent into the tunnel of love, the identity questions that arise from seeing your…