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(Credits: Disney Plus)
There was no way Bruce Springsteen was going to grow up to be the greatest musician to ever walk the Earth.
He was certainly great at relating to his audience on a personal level, but it was much better for him to focus on his songwriting than worrying about nailing the perfect guitar lick or training himself to sound like Freddie Mercury whenever he sang. Because as far as he was concerned, the best musicians in the world are the ones that could take you out of reality within the span of a few minutes.
All of ‘The Boss’s greatest tunes reflect that, after all. An album like Born to Run is far from the most complicated album to play along to with a guitar, but from the first few piano notes of ‘Thunder Road’, you are transported directly to the New Jersey boardwalk, where Springsteen is waiting for all of us so he could tell his story about the kids that want to escape their no-name town to find something better.
But that kind of sound doesn’t come from ‘The Boss’ saying the right words to get people invested. He likes to paint a picture every single time he plays guitar, but when listening to the rest of the E Street Band, the story he’s telling would have been impossible without everyone else. A song like ‘Jungleland’ has everything it needs to be a classic song, but would it have held any water without Clarence Clemons’ saxophone solo in the middle of it?
That’s not to say that rock stars can’t create that kind of atmosphere on their own. There had already been groups like The Beatles that took people on a journey with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, but as far as Springsteen could tell, the biggest guitarists in the world were the ones that could tell a story with one solo that had more depth than almost anything he could have written.
And for ‘The Boss’, he had a few musicians in mind when talking about those kinds of musical heights, saying, “I can play the guitar very well, but I’m not the greatest guitar player in the world. What excites me about a lot of the artists I love? And I realized, well, they created their own personal world that I could enter into through their music and through their songwriting. There’s people that can do it instrumentally like Jimi Hendrix or Edge of U2 or Pete Townshend.”
You can hear a lot of each guitarist in the way that Springsteen plays, but what makes them unique is how different they all are. Hendrix will forever be the signature guitarist of the 1960s thanks to his understanding of the blues and soulful rock and roll, but Townshend was a completely different animal. Whereas Hendrix practically made love to his instrument every single time he played, Townshend looked like he was in a streetfight with his every single time he played.
Each of them showed up in the way that Springsteen struck his six-string every single night, but the Edge was always a one-off in the guitar world. He wasn’t claiming to be the best guitarist by any stretch, but when listening to U2’s classic records, there are sounds that he got out of his instrument that seem impossible, whether it’s that signature delay that opens up The Joshua Tree or the strange effects all over Achtung Baby songs like ‘Mysterious Ways’ or ‘Until The End of the World’.
And to this day, Springsteen is still on the lookout for the kind of guitarists who can do that, even working with people like Tom Morello to get the right sound for his record. It was always going to sound like ‘The Boss’, but there’s nothing wrong with taking a musical detour with an artist that can create an entire musical landscape with a handful of notes.
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