Welcome to Bruce Springsteen Month (January 2009)

Bruce Springsteen- An Introduction

By Anthony Kuzminski

If you get bitten by the music bug, it will infect you and overtake your body in a way for which there is no cure. Every person who becomes one of these fanatics has somewhere between a handful and a dozen artists whom they will follow with religious conviction. Mine is no different. I physically own thousands upon thousands of discs, have upwards of 50,000 MP3’s on my hard drive, hundreds of concert DVD’s and have seen hundreds of concerts. However, despite these numbers, I find myself often returning to a dozen artists every week that prove to be more than just strangers passing in the night. One of these artists is Bruce Springsteen. To many, he is overrated as the mainstream media has worshipped at his altar ever since he was proclaimed “the future of rock n’ roll” thirty-five years ago. However, there is good reason why so much has been written about him. For many, including myself, Bruce Springsteen is one of the artists who helped keep rock n’ roll alive after it’s initial golden age (1956-1969); he validated rock n’ roll as an art form when many declared it dead. To others whom such accolades do not matter, Springsteen was an artist whose words and music helped shape their life. I had my first album by Springsteen within months of discovering music, but it proved to be a number of years before his music became religion to me.



Early in my freshman year in college, I was lost (literally and figuratively). I drowned myself in music seeking solace, but little was providing me with the ease or answers I was looking for. One day while I was seeking these answers, I dug out Darkness on the Edge of Town, which I had picked up the previous summer at a used record store. Over the next forty-five minutes, I felt as if this man knew me and understood me and my struggles. Within days of this happening, the used record store had copies of numerous Springsteen releases including Nebraska. One listen to that record became my watershed Springsteen moment. This was where I knew I needed this man’s music in my life. My struggles, my hopes, my fears and my dreams were summed up in this man’s albums and songs. Over the next five-years, I did a deep dive on Bruce Springsteen. I spent hours, days, weeks and months searching for every b-side, rare single and hard to find bootleg I could get my hands on. I specifically remember spending three-years searching for Great Dane’s Master-Plus version of Live From The Promised Land bootleg (San Francisco, December 1978 FM) until I finally found a used copy for $50. This was during the infancy of cd-burners, the Internet and even online sales so when I found it, I felt I unearthed the holy grail. We live in a world where despite how many books, guidance and teachings we continue to search for a bit of internal peace and Springsteen’s music made me feel like I was not alone.



Springsteen’s music was biblical to me during these years and I viewed him as the world’s greatest live performer and one of the premier artists of our time. Amazingly in the last few years, I’ve kept Bruce’s music at a distance. No particular reason, but when you listen to an artist every single day for a decade, you sometimes need a break. A few years back when having a conversation with Jeff Giles, writer for Bulls-Eye and the brilliant Popdose blog, I offered doing a discography guide for Springsteen, upon which he answered, “does he really need one”. Jeff wasn’t shooting me down so much as that his point was that there has been so much written about Springsteen in the mainstream press, that it is unlikely a further exploration into his work would be warranted, especially when there are so many other deserving artists whose work deserves a closer look. This is something he is completely correct about, but it is not going to stop me from trying. Over the next month this blog (in conjunction with antiMusic) will be doing a deep dive into the recorded thirty-five year history of Bruce Springsteen. I’ve been pulling out every album, giving it a fresh listen and will be revisiting every one of them culminating with the release of his latest record Working On A Dream and his Super Bowl performance at the end of the month. While Bruce Springsteen is one of the most important and vital artists to me, it doesn’t mean that his work is without blemishes and in certain cases, glorified. However, on the flipside, I find some of his most derided work to be astoundingly revealing and among his best. I am not trying to make a definitive listening guide to Bruce Springsteen, but will hopefully create a series of reviews and essays that will make you go back and dust off a forgotten song, listen to an underrated album with new ears and possibly even look at some masterpieces with a fresh perspective. There is a part of me that has Jeff Giles voice in the back of my head wondering why I’m even attempting this, but ultimately, it’s because I need to. Time, perspective and life experiences can shine a new light on art; some of it for the better and some for the worse. Albums that seemed foreign are no longer lost in translation while others that were deemed great upon their release may not age well. Reflection is a wondrous passage; Springsteen is an artist who has enlightened my life in ways I can never put into words. Throughout the adventure of life, we look for people to show us the way. No matter how great our parents may have been or how much money you attain in your life, we still seek something more. In moments where we reach a crisis of faith, we need something else. Different people find different prescriptions but for me, the tonic to my tragedy was often music. When I found myself at a critical bypass of life, Bruce Springsteen’s music appeared to me and my life will never be the same. Over the next month, I hope I can put some of his illustrious career into perspective and hopefully do it justice.

Anthony Kuzminski is a Chicago based writer and Special Features Editor for the antiMusic Network and his daily writings can be read at The Screen Door and can be contacted at thescreendoor AT gmail DOT com.