![]() (Van Zandt, on tour with the Dovells, was mostly unavailable.) The album went unnoticed upon its initial release in January 1973 (although Manfred Mann's Earth Band would turn its lead-off track "Blinded by the Light" into a number one hit four years later, and the LP itself has since gone double platinum). In preparing his debut LP, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., Springsteen immediately rehired most of his backup band, Federici, Lopez, Sancious, Tallent, and Clemons. ![]() Hammond signed Springsteen to Columbia in 1972. It was as a solo performer that he acquired a manager, Mike Appel, who arranged an audition for legendary Columbia talent scout John Hammond. Due to lack of work, however, Springsteen broke up the band and began playing solo shows in New York City. Along with Federici, Lopez, and Van Zandt (who switched back to guitar), this group also included pianist David Sancious and bassist Garry Tallent, plus a horn section that didn't last long before being replaced by a single saxophonist, Clarence Clemons. Zoom & the Cosmic Boom, quickly superseded by the Bruce Springsteen Band. But they broke up in 1971, and Springsteen formed a big band, the short-lived Dr. (Later on, guitarist Steve Van Zandt joined on bass.) Steel Mill played in California in 1969, drawing a rave review in San Francisco and even a contract offer from a record label. Also in the hard rock vein was his next group, Child (soon renamed Steel Mill), which featured keyboard player Danny Federici and drummer Vini Lopez. From there, he briefly joined Earth, a hard rock band in the style of Cream. They got as far as playing in New York City, but broke up in 1967 around the time Springsteen graduated from high school and began frequenting clubs in Asbury Park, New Jersey. In 1965, he joined his first band, the Beatles-influenced Castiles. He became interested in music after seeing Elvis Presley perform on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 and got a guitar, but he didn't start playing seriously until 1963. He also stepped away from the band to pursue such adventurous projects as his autobiographical one-man show Springsteen on Broadway in 2017, the lush, cinematic 2019 album Western Stars, and Only the Strong Survive, a 2020 collection of soul covers.īruce Springsteen was born Septemin Freehold, New Jersey, the son of Douglas Springsteen, a bus driver, and Adele (Zirilli) Springsteen, a secretary. From that point on, Springsteen kept the E Street Band as his regular touring band and would often bring the group into the studio for such albums as 2007's Magic and 2020's Letter to You. He had some difficulty with the fallout of fame, stepping away from the E Street Band for nearly a decade as he wandered through a series of albums of varied quality, but at the turn of the millennium, he first reunited the band for a successful tour and then found an artistic rebirth with 2002's The Rising. What pushed Springsteen into the stratosphere was 1984's Born in the U.S.A., a record that turned into a 15-million-unit-selling phenomenon and made him a global superstar. Greeted by superlative reviews along with the rare distinction of his appearing on the covers of the news magazines Time and Newsweek within the same week, Born to Run put Springsteen on the map and over the next few years he worked hard, touring regularly with the E Street Band and releasing the acclaimed, successful records Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River. Here, Springsteen turned the working class into myth but that same sense of romance was evident in his rock & roll, surfacing spectacularly on his 1975 album Born to Run. The E Street Band allowed Springsteen to touch upon all of his beloved music - rock & roll, soul, jazz - yet he would still step outside the band to do an occasional solo project, often acoustic-oriented excursions into folk where he'd deliberately pick up the story-telling torch left behind by Woody Guthrie. He loved rock & roll, whether it was the initial blast from the '50s or the mini-symphonies from the days before the Beatles or the garage rockers that surfaced in the wake of the British Invasion, and all this could be heard within his wild, wooly collective E Street Band, a group who debuted on his second album, 1973's The Wild The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, and who would support him throughout most of his career. Unlike any other singer/songwriters saddled with the appellation of "the new Dylan" in the early '70s, Springsteen never hid how he was raised on '60s AM radio. Bruce Springsteen once said he intended to make an album with words like Bob Dylan that sounded like Phil Spector where he sang like Roy Orbison, a nifty summary of many, but not all, of his artistic ambitions and a key to his appeal.
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