(Credits: Alamy)
Mon 9 March 2026 18:30, UK
Bruce Springsteen didn’t want to treat a single piece of rock and roll like a job.
It was his privilege to make music for anyone who would hear, and while he may have had a few more friends than he may have bargained for when he was first playing his gigs in New Jersey, he was more than willing to have as many people congregate to celebrate all things rock and roll wherever he could. He wanted to stand for what was right about music, and when he goes down in history, he had a few people that he wanted to be positioned next to, once people brought up his name.
Then again, there’s no getting around the fact that ‘The Boss’ is going to go down with the rest of the members of the E Street Band, whether he likes it or not. He may be proud of his independence, but even when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by himself in the late 1990s, Springsteen always said that there was a major part of his story that he could never have told on his own unless people like Stevie Van Zandt and Clarence Clemons were right there beside him.
While some might remember him as a scourge upon the Earth for being an American who dared to have an opinion that they didn’t agree with, that wasn’t what Springsteen’s music was about. At the end of the day, he was about searching for personal freedom and the American Dream that existed well beyond the nowhere towns of the world, and if that wasn’t enough for someone to get behind, that was frankly their problem.
When you look at all of the great artists that had come before him, it’s no secret that Springsteen wanted to follow the lead of what Bob Dylan had done in the early days. There was no one else who had a more individual voice than Dylan’s back in the day, and there are plenty of instances where ‘The Boss’ was more than capable of speaking up for change the same way that his idol, even if it meant the ridicule of people who didn’t know any better.
That’s a thankless job for a lot of people to take, but the voice of the people is a lot trickier than it seems. Everyone else could ask someone like him to sing and dance for them while they happily feign ignorance at what’s going on outside, but when looking at the true American icons, that’s not what they did. Everyone from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan to Johnny Cash to Pete Seeger was willing to stick their necks out on the line for what they believed in, and that was what Springsteen was always aiming for.
He wasn’t the most articulate person in the world when it came to technical jargon, but he felt that serving the role that Cash and Seeger did was what he was put on this Earth to do, saying, “They pay me a fortune for something I would have done for free. I can’t imagine [retiring]. I mean, look at Johnny Cash or Pete Seeger. I played with Pete Seeger in Washington. He was 91 or 92 and he came out and sang ‘This Land is Your Land’. So I look at those guys. I don’t think I’ll be doing three-hour shows, but there’s so many different kinds of music that I could play or do.”
And that time with the E Street Band is only a small glimpse into the depth that he has as a musician. Even with only an acoustic guitar in his hand, his performances on Broadway are just as engaging as he would be when working in a stadium, especially when he tells you about the memories that he had when writing all of those beautiful songs back when he didn’t have a prayer in Jersey.
Most artists wouldn’t have the drive to keep going when making some of their biggest hits, but the reason why ‘The Boss’ has kept going is because of the fact that he never saw it as a one-time hobby. He wanted to be a disciple of rock for the rest of his life, and he wasn’t about to watch his future walk away just because some people may not have liked pieces of what he was saying.