The Boss is Still Running
Vanity Faircalled him one of the few great rock icons alive today and you can’t really disagree. Bruce Springsteen is part of the bedrock of American rock and has earned the nickname "the Boss." He has earned numerous awards for his work, including 20 Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes, an Academy Award and a Tony Award. Springsteen was inducted into both the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. In the process, Springsteen has sold 135 million records.
It has been an extraordinary career, but if one thinks he life has been a typical example of rock royalty they would be misguided. Springsteen’s rise to fame has been long, hard and remarkably, well, ordinary.
Originally inspired by Elvis, he was forced to rent his first guitar due to living in poverty. A short while later he quit, claiming it was just too difficult. He was shy, ungainly and awkward while growing up in New jersey. But seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964 rekindled the fire for him. He learned more quickly this time and played in a series of different bands by the time he turned 20. While his peers concentrated on fame, girls and acquiring a seemingly endless supply of money, Springsteen spent his time pondering and learning the boring stuff – management, investment, choosing the best places to perform that would challenge him and make him better at his craft.
Other performers occasionally mocked him for retiring to his hotel room after concerts and eating fried chicken, fries and reading books when they themselves were out partying hard and living the good life.
Things paid off somewhat when he received a recording contract and produced two albums, both of which received a modicum of success. But then, in 1972, Born to Runwas released and overnight he became a global superstar, appearing on the cover on Timeand Newsweekin the same week.
Then the pressures really began. Industry insiders, promoters, other artists and the potential of even greater fame were tempting him to do what all the other great rock stars were doing. But, and this is where Bruce Springsteen is truly remarkable, he decided to remain true to his roots. He wrote more songs about those living down and out in New Jersey. As industry began shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs, Springsteen wrote about those lives and what they were enduring. Reading his autobiography, Born to Run,a few weeks ago, this one particular passage drove home for me just why he remains so special:
“Here was where I wanted to make my stand musically and search for my own questions and answers. I didn’t want out. I wanted in. I didn’t want to erase, escape, forget or reject. I wanted to understand. What were the social forces that held my parents’ lives in check? Why was it so hard?”
To this day, Bruce Springsteen lives 10 minutes from where he grew up, still attempting to comprehend how a nation as great as America could so easily turn its back on its own. His songs remain gritty, humanely poetic and prophetic in their own way. His attire on stage remains blue jeans and a wide variety of t-shirts.
At almost 70 years of age, the Boss is still running, still fighting the system and still sticking up for average hard-working families who watched their country abandon them. But his uniqueness will always be centred on the reality that in another dimension he didn’t run at all – he remained with those who got him where he is and refuses to pursue the lure of any kind of fame that would sever that link. It is this faithfulness that so drives his music and its message. It just the kind of loyalty every nation requires from its leaders and elites.
As Clive James would put it: “A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all”