It wasn’t until 1975 that the bestknown line-up of the E Street Band came together, when Springsteen was already growing famous enough to attract Broadway show veterans like Weinberg and Bittan. Both these artists responded to an ad in The Village Voice, rather than simply gravitating towards the line-up from the local Shore club scene. Before the group could achieve true success, Springsteen had to secure a record deal. Ironically, this only transpired once Springsteen had all but abandoned the idea of getting his own band off the ground. Years of opening for every band that came through town, from Black Oak Arkansas and Brownsville Station to Sha Na Na and Black Sabbath, had left him weary and disillusioned. Springsteen commented years later, ‘When we first started playing I’d go to every show expecting nobody to come, and I’d go onstage expecting nobody to give me anything for free. And that’s the way you have to play. If you don’t play like that, pack your guitar up, throw it in the trashcan and go home… The night I stop thinking that way, that’s the night I won’t do it anymore.’ Bruce later told NME, that he fell out of love with the idea of being in a band and, ‘just started writing lyrics, which I had never done before. I would just get a good riff, and as long as it wasn’t too obtuse I’d sing it… Last winter [1972] I wrote like a mad man… Had no money, nowhere to go, nothing to do… It was cold and I wrote a lot… I got to feeling guilty if I didn’t.’ It was this batch of songs that would lead directly to his signing as a solo artist by Columbia Records, in New York, during May 1972. At first, the label’s A&R chief, John Hammond, saw him as a potential successor to Bob Dylan; who he had also signed to the label some ten years before. In retrospect, it’s easy to see why Hammond thought this way. Curly-haired and bearded, the twentythree-year-old Springsteen definitely had something of the wordy Bob Dylan about him, especially in Springsteen’s original songs like Blinded By the Light and It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City. When recalling playing the bars and clubs of his youth, Bruce told Zigzag Magazine, ‘you had to communicate on the most basic level… but when I talked to the record companies there was just me by myself with a guitar, and from that many false impressions were drawn.’ At the time, Dylan was a conspicuous influence on a generation of new young
Bruce Springsteen in concert during 1984.
songwriters, many of whom had already suffered from the comparison; talented word-and-tunesmiths like John Prine and Loudon Wainwright III, struggled under Dylan’s shadow throughout their early careers, the ‘new Dylan’ tag acting almost like a curse. Bruce, however, was not so easily subsumed. Nevertheless, the comparisons were perhaps even more obvious in early Springsteen songs, and Mike Appel, Bruce’s first manager has stated, ‘Bruce is very garrulous. When I first came across Bruce it was by accident. But when I heard him play I heard this voice saying to me – superstar. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never been that close to a superstar before.’ Adding, ‘Randy Newman is great but he’s not touched. Joni Mitchell
is great but she’s not touched. Bruce is touched… he’s a genius!’ It was Appel that had taken acetates of Springsteen’s earliest songs to Hammond – a legendary figure at Columbia who had also signed such pre-Dylan luminaries as Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Tommy Dorsey and Woody Herman, to name just a few. Hammond listened to the acetate while Mike and Bruce sat patiently in the corner. ‘Do you want to get your guitar out,’ Hammond eventually asked, at which point Bruce broke into a spontaneous version of It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City. ‘I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t believe it,’ Hammond later recalled. Intrigued by the rough recordings and charmed by the soft-spoken young Music Legends
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