Bruce Springsteen’s love for Bob Dylan over the years

Dylan was a revolutionary. So was Elvis. To me, Dylan and Elvis-what they did was genius.

Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen at the sessions for We Are The World

The first time that I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother and we were listening to maybe WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind, from “Like a Rolling Stone.” My mother, she was no stiff with rock and roll. She liked the music. She sat there for a minute and she looked at me and she said, “That guy can’t sing.” But I knew she was wrong. I sat there, I didn’t say nothing but I knew that I was listening to the toughest voice that I had ever heard. It was lean and it sounded somehow simultaneously young and adult.

I ran out and I bought the single and ran home and I put on the 45, but they must have made a mistake in the factory because a Lenny Welch song came on. The label was wrong. So I ran back [to the store], got [the Dylan song], and I came back and played it. Then I went out and I got Highway 61. That was all I played for weeks, looking at the cover with Bob in that satin blue jacket and the Triumph motorcycle shirt.

When I was a kid, Bob’s voice somehow thrilled and scared me; it made me feel kind of irresponsibly innocent—it still does-when it reached down and touched what little worldliness a fifteen-year-old high school kid in New Jersey had in him at the time.

Dylan was a revolutionary. The way that Elvis freed your body Bob freed your mind. He showed us that just because the music was innately physical did not mean that it was anti-intellectual. He had the vision and the talent to expand a pop song until it could contain the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve, and he changed the face of rock and roll forever and ever.

Without Bob, the Beatles wouldn’t have made Sgt. Pepper, maybe the Beach Boys wouldn’t have made Pet Sounds, the Sex Pistols wouldn’t have made “God Save the Queen,” U2 wouldn’t have done “Pride (In the Name of Love).” Marvin Gaye wouldn’t have done “What’s Goin’ On,” and Grandmaster Flash might not have done “The Message” and the Count Five could not have done “Psychotic Reaction.” And there would have never been a group named the Electric Prunes.

To this day, where great rock music is being made, there is the shadow of Bob Dylan over and over again. Bob’s own modern work has gone unjustly underappreciated because it’s had to stand in that shadow. If there was a young guy out there, writing “Sweetheart Like You,” the Empire Burlesque album, writing “Every Grain of Sand,” they’d be calling him the new Bob Dylan.

One time I was watching a Rolling Stone special on TV and Bob came on and he was in a real cranky mood. He was kind of bitchin’ and moanin’ about how his fans don’t know him and nobody knows him and they come up to him on the street and treat him like a long-lost brother or something. And speaking as a fan, when I was fifteen and I heard “Like a Rolling Stone,” I heard a guy like I’ve never heard before or since, who had the guts to take on the whole world and made me feel like I had to, too.

Maybe some people misunderstood that voice as saying that somehow Bob was going to do the job for them, but as we grow older, we learn that there isn’t anybody out there who can do that job for anybody else. So I’m just here tonight to say thanks, to say that I wouldn’t be here without you, to say that there isn’t a soul in this room who does not owe you his thanks, and to steal a line from one of your songs—whether you like it or not ”You was the brother that I never had.”

In 1965 I was like fifteen and there were no kids fifteen who were into folk music. There had been a folk boom, but it was generally a college thing. There was really no way of knowing because AM radio was really an incredible must in those days. The one thing I dug about those albums was—I was never really into the folk or acoustic music thing-l dug the sound. Before I listened to what was happening in the song, you had the chorus and you had the band and it had incredible sound and that was what got me.

“The Times They Are A Changin’” was written at a moment in our country’s history when people’s yearning for a more open and just society exploded bob dylan had the courage to stand in that fire and he caught the sound of that explosion and this song remains as a beautiful call to arms the meaning of this song and the echo of that explosion live on in the struggle for social justice in America that continues so fiercely today.

Some of the greatest blues music is some of the darkest music you’ve ever heard. Dylan had come when I was fifteen and I listened to his music first. I was sixteen and I had Highway 61 Revisited on my little mono record player in my room at night, I’d listen to it a thousand times.

In 1968, I was into John Wesley Harding. I never listened to anything after John Wesley Harding. I listened to Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61, Blonde on Blonde. That’s it. I never had his early albums back then or his later albums.

I always used to say when I heard Highway 61, I think I felt, as a teenager, that I was hearing the first true picture of how I felt and how my country felt. And that was exhilarating, because 1960s small-town America was very David Lynchian. Underneath, everything was rumbling, and particularly if you grew up in the mid and late sixties. And I think what Dylan did was he took all that dark stuff that was rumbling underneath and pushed it to the surface with a lot of irony and humor but also tremendous courage to go places where people hadn’t gone previously.

Bob Dylan is the father of my country. Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home were not only great records, but they were the first time I can remember being exposed to a truthful vision of the place I lived. The darkness and light were all there, the veil of illusion and deception ripped aside. He put his boot on the stultifying politeness and daily routine that covered corruption and decay.

The world he described was all on view, in my little town, and spread out. In the 1960s the first version of my country that struck me as truthful and unfiltered was the one I heard in songs by artists like Bob Dylan, the Kingsmen, James Brown and Curtis Mayfield. “Like a Rolling Stone” gave me the faith that a true, unaltered, uncompromised vision could be broadcast to millions, changing minds, enlivening spirits, bringing red blood to the anemic American pop landscape and delivering a warning, a challenge that could become an essential part of the American conversation. This was music that could both stir the heart of your fellow countrymen and awaken the mind of a shy, lost fifteen-year-old in a small New Jersey town. “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Louie Louie” let me know that someone, somewhere, was speaking in tongues and that absurd ecstasy had been snuck into the Constitution’s First Amendment and was an American birthright. I heard it on the radio.

I think he was really important in the sense of bringing into pop songwriting all kinds of serious subjects that hadn’t been a part of the pop world previously very often.

I was interested in going there and that’s him. When you look at anybody who’s doing that, whether it was Marvin Gaye with “What’s Going On” or even Public Enemy, you trace it back in some fashion to that moment when you think, “You can sing about this and get on the radio and people are going to connect to it and try to make sense of it.” So that was a big, big influence.

I’ve come to feel that a lot of rock stars just hide how literate they are, because it looks more arty and rock-starry. Talking about Dylan, and I think Dylan always gave the impression of being the ultimate savant, you know. But the truth, as we’ve learned through Scorsese’s documentary, is that that guy was a craftsman. He was very, very conscious of what was going on around him. He was conscious of Woody Guthrie’s idiom and he just wouldn’t talk about it.

Bob Dylan said he always liked the singers who you couldn’t tell what they were thinking. I don’t know if I know anyone, with perhaps the exception of the early inventors of rock music, who didn’t study. And even them. The gospel background in Jerry Lee Lewis’s piano playing is completely informed with church and honky-tonk. You have to study that stuff. And I don’t mean study in the sense of literal schooling, but you’re drawn to things that make you seek out what they’re about. And whether you’re drawn to gospel or to church music or to honky-tonk, it informs your character and it informs your talent.

My youngest son, he started out as a total classic rocker. Then he got into acoustic Dylan stuff. That was fascinating, he was very young when he got into it. He came in one night and I was watching Dylan at Newport, the DVD. What’s that Dad? That’s cool. I said, yeah, that is cool. I went out and I got him all the records.... and it was great, you see your child sort of connecting with something that has meant so much to you. Went to his door one night and I listened, he’s got “Chimes of Freedom” on, and he’s probably about 12 or 13, and I said what do you think? He said epic, Dad, it’s epic. I said, that’s right, that’s what it is, it’s epic. And it was one of those great, sort of, wow, ya know?

I think Dylan coming along, and the idea that maybe you can tackle some serious ideas with this music—and all of a sudden, the extended format, the album became the thing. The album always had a serious tone... when I was a kid, you saw an album, you knew it was going to be classical music or jazz. When I was a child, simply by their size, albums seemed very grown up.

I wasn’t ever really a singles artist. I’ve had hits at a particular time, for one reason or another, but there wasn’t anything different about those records and the ones that I’d released years earlier, it was just a particular moment. So I never really thought like that. From when I first began and affected people. All of those guys had internalized that, and when they went our and did what they did, which could have appeared to be something that was the polar opposite of church music, it was not necessarily so. For me the people whose music I cared about, still care about, all had that clement, an element of spirituality. The pure humanity of Woody Guthrie’s writing, it just cuts through everything. It’s why Dylan drifted back towards gospel, and when you hear his “Every Grain of Sand,” it’s rooted in those things. They made those connections, and all of those connections were things that were part, in some fashion, of everyone’s.

Those are the artists that I admired a lot, before “Like a Rolling Stone” you couldn’t sing like that and get on the radio. They couldn’t get on the radio like that. I’ve also said the same thing before Nirvana came out with “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” You couldn’t sound like that and get on Top 40 radio. And I always believed that it was a valuable risk to take. It was a funny situation in that I think that I was essentially probably a child of Elvis Presley initially, but 1 grew up in the ‘60s and Dylan’s work and later Woody Guthrie’s also meant an enormous amount to me so I sorta got caught in between... those are some different roots in certain ways. The things that meant a lot to me when I was young were the things that came across on AM radio. I didn’t live in an environment where there was a lot of cultural education. We weren’t exposed to things that were outside of the mainstream, for the most part. The mainstream was what you had, and in your small town what came across the radio was... I found it very liberating, and I found it very meaningful.

Dylan was a revolutionary. So was Elvis. To me, Dylan and Elvis-what they did was genius. I never really saw, myself in that fashion. I’m sure there was a part of me that was afraid of having that kind of ambition or taking on those kinds of responsibilities. I’m not that. I don’t see myself as having been that. I felt that what I would be able to do, maybe, was redefine what I did in more human terms than it had been defined before, and in more everyday terms. I always saw myself as a nuts-and-bolts kind of person. I felt what I was going to accomplish I would accomplish over a long period of time, not in an enormous burst of energy or genius. To keep an even perspective on it all, I looked at it like a job-something that you do every day and over a long period of time.

There were two catalysts that got me thinking about reactivating the E Street Band. One late summer evening as I stepped out of Federici’s Pizza Parlor in Frechold, two young kids came up to me, introduced themselves and said they were big fans of the E Street Band but unfortunately were too young to have ever seen us live. They may have been in their early twenties. That meant at the last E Street Band show, perhaps they were ten years old. I started realizing there was a sea of young people out there who never saw the greatest thing I did: PLAY LIVE... with the E Street Band. Then, visiting my parents in San Francisco, I opened the newspaper to see Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell were performing at the San Jose Arena, an hour south of my folks’ house.

That’s quite a bill. I asked my mom if she was game, and we drove down and took our seats stage right as the house lights lowered. Joni came on and did a beautiful set, followed by Van, swinging and lifting the house. Van Morrison has always been one of my great, great heroes and an enormous source of inspiration for everything I’ve done. Van put the white soul into our early E Street records. Without Van, there is no “New York City Serenade” or jazz soul of “Kitty’s Back.” Then out came Dylan in great form. Playing with a band he’d been working with for quite a while, he’d tightened his music into roadhouse poetry. They felt like they’d be at home in an arena this size or in the little bar down the road a ways. The band grooved joyous blues that even got their front man dancing a little!

This music, his happiness, these artists, made me happy as I stood alongside my mom and we danced in our seats. Watching the crowd was funny and a little disorienting. I felt like I’d fallen asleep, a sixteen-year-old with Highway 61 Revisited spinning endlessly in the dark night of my bedroom, and woken up fifty years hence in a rock ‘n’ roll, Rip Van Winkle-like dream. We’d all gotten... OLD! The seats were filled with middle-aged, wrinkled, out-of-shape, balding, gray-bearded rock fans straight out of the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four.” We all looked kind of ... ridiculous! But something else was happening. Young hipsters and teenagers were scattered through the crowd. Little kids were there, brought by their parents to see and hear the great man. Some were bored, some sleeping and many dancing alongside Mom and Pop. People were filled with heart, good cheer and emotion. I thought about my gray hairs and the wrinkles on my face. I looked over at my mother, seventy-two, her face a loving map of all our pain and resilience.

She was beaming ear to car, her arm tucked in mine. The floor was a mass of smiles and swaying bodies, and as I watched, I thought, “I can do this. I can bring this, this happiness, these smiles.” I went home and called the E Street Band.

Sources:

• Springsteen on Springsteen : interviews, speeches and encounters

• Talk about a dream : the essential interviews of Bruce Springsteen

• Bruce Springsteen’s speech for the induction of Bob Dylan into The Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, 1988.

• Born To Run: Bruce Springsteen (autobiography)