Throughout his long and illustrious career, Bruce Springsteen has navigated peaks and troughs of critical and commercial success, but his self-belief has never faltered. Above all else, the Boss is beloved for his consummate artistry: not only can he hold a crowd in the palm of his hand with hip-swinging rock-outs, but his poignant lyricism can also tug at the heartstrings and leave a permanent mark.
At a young age, Springsteen fell under the spell of Elvis Presley and dreamt of equalling such a powerful stage presence. When The Beatles arrived in the US in 1964, his dream became more vivid and unavoidable. “I saw Elvis on TV, and when I first saw Elvis, I was nine, but I was a little young, tried to play the guitar, but it didn’t work out, I put it away,” Springsteen once told Rolling Stone. “The keeper was in 1964, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ on South Street with my mother driving.”
Continuing, Springsteen remembered his reaction to hearing The Beatles, taking care not to leave out the romantic details. “I immediately demanded that she let me out; I ran to the bowling alley, ran down a long neon-lit aisle, down the alley into the bowling alley,” he beamed. “Ran to the phone booth, got in the phone booth, and immediately called my girl and asked, ‘Have you heard this band called The Beatles?’ After that, it was nothing but rock ‘n’ roll and guitars.”
In a sense, this romantic memory could be seen as the foundation of Springsteen’s success. Not only does it recall the pivotal influence of the Fab Four, but he echoed the rock ‘n’ roll romanticism throughout his catalogue for many years to come.
In 1975, Springsteen broke out to global acclaim with Born to Run. He described the lead single as the song in which he invented himself. “I managed to write well about these classic rock ‘n’ roll archetypes: the car, the girl, the road, the guy, the running,” he explained in a 2022 interview with The Project. “This is all classic B-movie rock clichés I was able to use and reinvigorate in my own way, bring new life and bring current into 1975.”
Over time, Springsteen evolved his tried-and-tested formula to keep things fresh but was always at his most powerful when candidly reflecting on his personal life. After Born to Run, Springsteen maintained impressive form through the late 1970s, reaching another peak with The River.
Springsteen performed ‘The River’ live onstage for the first time in 1979 at Madison Square Garden at the ‘No Nuke’ concert series. Although the song wasn’t directly political, Springsteen recalled being particularly emotional debuting the very personal lyrics: “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true / Or is it something worse / That sends me down to the river / Though I know the river is dry”.
Addressing the poignancy of his No Nukes performance in a 2010 conversation with The Arts Desk, Springsteen noted that he doesn’t “come at things from a political point of view” because he never had a particularly “political household”.
“Politics was just something that went on, that was happening, and it seemed very different,” he added.
Despite lacking political connotations, ‘The River’ celebrated family and life at odds with global destruction. “That was a song that was very connected to my family,” Springsteen pursued. “It was really based on my sister and her experience, and my brother-in-law, so it was a song that felt very, very connected to my life, and our lives, and it was the first time I’d found that particular type of expression of it. I think she might have been there that night, too.”
Although Springsteen’s prior catalogue had contained deeply personal material, ‘The River’ came from a different angle. “if you go back to that particular song, that’s really the prototype of the stuff I’m writing now,” he pointed out. “That sense of geography and place and basic issues and types of characters.”
The Boss picked out the opening lines, “I come from down in the valley where mister when you’re young / They bring you up to do like your daddy done”, as being central to his ongoing creative motivation. “That’s what was set out for me, and for all of my friends and for everybody that I knew,” he said of a mundane future that never came. “So being somebody who through one thing or another managed to slip that particular fate, that particular idea has probably motivated almost all of my work since then.”
Listen to Bruce Springsteen’s thematic blueprint, ‘The River’, below.