With mainstream rock having become flabby, there were stirrings of a new sound: punk music. Lou Reed (formerly of the Velvet Underground), the New York Dolls, the Stooges, MC5, and others were kicking a new jam. Just as Springsteen-mania was hitting, Patti Smith, a beat-style poet who hooked up with garage-rock musicians, was finishing her pioneering Horses album, full of dark and mystical lyrics. At the core of this rock rebirth was a sense of alienation and anarchy. The nihilistic message of much of this music: It’s all shit. In England, the Sex Pistols were being slammed as a sign of civilization’s end. Soon the Ramones would show up singing about sniffing glue and beating up brats. The arrival of The Clash would add a dose of politics to this countercultural sneer. It was all powerful stuff—especially for anyone disaffected and wondering where the hell the world was heading.
Springsteen offered something different: aspiration.
His songs captured what had been the traditional essence of rock: yearning for more. That more could be more fun, more love, more freedom, more community. What had Elvis symbolized? The ability to break free of convention. Springsteen’s songs focused on a fundamental American ideal: the pursuit of happiness. That was the main moral of the myths he created about teenage racers, street toughs, and guitar-wielding gangs. The protagonist of Born to Run was desperately seeking to escape the “death trap” of a “runaway American dream” to find “that place” where he and his love could “walk in the sun.” You didn’t have to be a motorhead who could rebuild a Chevy to identify with this compelling sentiment. In fact, as he has acknowledged, Springsteen wasn’t one either. That was just the realm where he located his poetry and storytelling. More fundamental, he was tapping into a universal desire of young people as America was experiencing an unsettling backlash to the 1960s.
He did this by embodying the spirit of early rock ‘n’ roll. During that Bottom Line performance, Springsteen played several covers, including “Then She Kissed Me” (a gender-flipped version of the Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me”), “Having a Party” (Sam Cooke), and “Quarter to Three” (Gary “U.S.” Bonds). Each had been a hit for a Black musical act. And just as significant, his long-term relationship with saxophonist Clarence Clemons, a towering Black man, rendered the E Street Band a multiracial endeavor, a not-so-common lineup in mainstream rock.
With such covers and original compositions that sought to capture the fire of his progenitors, Springsteen was honoring and building upon the past, not rejecting it—incorporating it into a modern retelling of American life. His mission was to show that music could be a positive and reaffirming spark in the lives of those who listened. As an ungainly and out-of-sorts teen reared in a home in which family love and dysfunction competed, rock had been his salvation. He believed it could be the same for others. Music was a way to cope with the disappointments, mysteries, and longings of life, as well as a source of exhilaration and delight.
