Tabla de contenidos para Bruce Springsteen en Bruce Springsteen

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…

Neil Young also wrote a ballad for the film and received an Oscar nomination for it, and he was the first person Springsteen acknowledged when he accepted the Award. When asked about why he chose to ask Young and Springsteen, two of the straightest artists imaginable, to contribute to the soundtrack, Demme said, “I thought, ‘Let’s reassure people. Let’s get these guys who, if anything, are identified with a testosterone, machismo kind of thing.’…I thought: ‘What we need is the most up-to-the-minute, guitar-dominated American-rock anthem about injustice to start this movie off. Who can do that? Neil Young can do that. “So we edited the title sequence to ‘Southern Man’ to help him see how his music could power the images we were working with. He said, ‘I’ll try.’ Six…

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…

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 WRECKING BALL, 2012 Even as people were wondering if it would ever be possible to address the 9/11 attacks in art of any kind, Springsteen loomed as one figure who might be able to address it meaningfully. For one thing, he was a member of the New Jersey community that was ravaged by the attacks in New York. “Monmouth County,” he wrote in his autobiography Born to Run, “had lost 150 husbands, brothers, sons, wives, daughters. For weeks, long black limousines pulled up to churches, and candlelit vigils were held in the neighborhood park. In Rumson, a town full of Wall Street commuters, almost everyone knew someone who lost somebody.” Perhaps even more movingly, Springsteen was powerfully affected when his name repeatedly came up in The New York Times’…

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…

—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…

Born to Run excelled in both those regards. Springsteen wrote the book himself—a rarity for such projects—and proved fearless in telling his story. From the very first page, he establishes a matter-of-fact intimacy with the reader, a voice that is simultaneously conversational and beautifully, evocatively written. He provides valuable perspective on his extraordinary career, and his handling of his personal life is truly remarkable. His struggles with his father come as no surprise, but as he traces the full journey of that relationship—in particular, his father’s eventual diagnosis as a schizophrenic—the story becomes stunningly moving. Springsteen also addresses his own mental health struggles with extreme candor. It’s occasionally difficult to square the wildly uplifting character he inhabits on stage with the man whom he describes as debilitated by anxiety and…