Bruce Springsteen

• 1. Introduction

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  Bruce Springsteen threw the first acetate of his own album Born to Run into the swimming pool of his hotel in 1975. The record was being mastered while the band toured, and he was furious at what he heard. He briefly considered scrapping the whole project and re-recording it live, and he was stopped before he could. That mix of perfectionism and stubbornness has carried him through six decades of music.

  Springsteen has sold more than 140 million records worldwide, and he has released 21 studio albums. Yet as a boy in Freehold, New Jersey, he felt out of place in every school he attended. This documentary asks how that outsider found a voice for ordinary working people. It asks why one of his biggest songs was widely misunderstood. It also asks what he did when sudden fame arrived and brought a backlash with it.

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• 2. Freehold Beginnings

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  Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen was born at Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch, New Jersey, on the 23rd of September 1949. His mother, Adele, was a legal secretary from the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, and she was the family's main breadwinner. His father, Douglas, known as Dutch, was a World War II veteran who drove a bus. Dutch struggled with mental health problems that worsened as he grew older.

  Springsteen's Italian maternal grandfather came from Vico Equense and arrived through Ellis Island unable to read or write English. He still became a lawyer, and the young Springsteen thought him larger than life. On the paternal side, the family name comes from Groningen in the Netherlands, where it means "jump stone," a stepping stone laid across unpaved streets. Springsteen grew up Catholic in Freehold, with two younger sisters, Virginia and Pamela.

  At St. Rose of Lima Catholic School he clashed with the nuns and chafed at their rules. Even so, he said in 2012 that his Catholic upbringing, more than any political ideology, shaped his music. By the age of seven he wanted to be a musician, after watching Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 and 1957. His mother rented him a guitar from Mike Diehl's Music in Freehold for $6 a week. He quit the lessons after a few weeks because they failed to give him the instant gratification he wanted.

  In 1964 the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, and Springsteen bought his first guitar for $18.95 at the Western Auto appliance store. He soon played for audiences with a band called the Rogues, including at the Elks Lodge in Freehold. Later that year his mother took out a loan to buy him a $60 Kent guitar. He later honored that gift in his song "The Wish."

  In 1965 Tex and Marion Vinyard, who sponsored young bands in town, helped him become lead guitarist of the Castiles. That band recorded two original songs at a public studio in Brick Township and played Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village. Marion Vinyard said she believed the young Springsteen when he promised he would make it big.

  Freehold High School, a public school, fit him no better than the Catholic one had. A former teacher called him a "loner who wanted nothing more than to play his guitar." He graduated in 1967 but felt so alienated that he skipped the ceremony. A brief stint at Ocean County College ended when he dropped out.

  At 19 he failed his draft physical because of a concussion from a motorcycle accident two years earlier. That failure likely spared him from serving in the Vietnam War. In 1969 his parents and sister Pamela moved to San Mateo, California, while he and Virginia stayed in Freehold.

  From 1969 through early 1971 he played in Child, a band that became Steel Mill. Its lineup included Danny Federici, Vini Lopez and Vinnie Roslin, and later Steven Van Zandt and Robbin Thompson. The group played the Jersey Shore as well as Richmond, Nashville and California, and it gathered a cult following. In January 1970, critic Philip Elwood wrote in the San Francisco Examiner that he had "never been so overwhelmed by a totally unknown talent." Elwood also called Springsteen "a most impressive composer."

  Springsteen had also played in a power trio called Earth, which performed in New Jersey clubs and at a major show at the Hotel Diplomat in New York City. After Steel Mill he searched for a style that was truly his own. He tried Dr. Zoom & the Sonic Boom and the Sundance Blues Band in 1971, then the Bruce Springsteen Band from mid-1971 to mid-1972.

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• 3. The Road to Born to Run

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  "More words in some individual songs than other artists had in whole albums." That was how Columbia Records later described Springsteen's early lyrics in its publicity. His songwriting caught the attention of managers Mike Appel and Jim Cretecos. They brought him to John Hammond, a talent scout at Columbia, and Springsteen auditioned for Hammond in May 1972. Columbia signed him that year. Hammond had signed Bob Dylan to the same label a decade earlier.

  In October 1972 Springsteen put together a new band to record his debut, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. The group would not be called the E Street Band until September 1974. During this period he picked up the nickname "the Boss," because he collected the band's nightly pay and split it among his bandmates. The name also reportedly grew out of Monopoly games he played with other Jersey Shore musicians.

  Greetings came out in January 1973 and made him a critical favorite. Because of his poetic lyrics, his folk-rock roots and his link to Hammond, critics compared him to Dylan. Crawdaddy editor Peter Knobler wrote in March 1973 that Springsteen sang with "a freshness and urgency I haven't heard since I was rocked by 'Like a Rolling Stone'." Knobler profiled him three times, in 1973-1975 and 1978.

  The second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, followed in November 1973, eleven months after the first. It earned acclaim but limited sales. It gave fans "the 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" and "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)," which he had played live 809 times as of June 2020. A music venue and bar called the Stone Pony opened on Ocean Avenue in Asbury Park in February 1974, and he played there regularly.

  At the Harvard Square Theater in 1974, critic Jon Landau watched Springsteen perform and wrote that he "saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen." The two had met in Boston a month earlier and quickly became close friends. In February 1975 Landau became co-producer of Born to Run.

  The sessions for Born to Run stretched over 14 months, and six of those months went to the title track alone. Springsteen treated it as a last-ditch attempt at a commercially viable record and chased a "Wall of Sound" production. He said he heard "sounds in his head" that he could not explain to the others in the studio. He also dealt with two producers who held opposing views. Appel sent an early mix of the title song to nearly a dozen radio stations, and anticipation built.

  During "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out," Steven Van Zandt invented horn parts on the spot. Springsteen and pianist Roy Bittan had failed to write usable ones before the horn players arrived. Van Zandt joined the E Street Band soon afterward. After the title track was finished, David Sancious and Ernest Carter left, and Bittan and Max Weinberg took over piano and drums. Mixing ran until the 20th of July 1975, just before a concert tour began.

  Born to Run was released in August 1975 and peaked at number 3 on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart. It eventually went seven times platinum in the US, and its two singles reached number 23 and number 83 on the Hot 100. Author Louis Masur tied its success to the fears of growing old held by a generation of late teenagers.

  In October 1975 Springsteen appeared on the covers of both Newsweek and Time in the same week, the first artist to do so. The coverage set off a media backlash, as critics wondered whether he was real or a product of record company promotion. Hurt by the attention, he personally tore down promotional posters in the lobby of the Hammersmith Odeon when the band reached London for its first concerts outside North America.

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• 4. Darkness and Nebraska

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  A legal battle with Mike Appel kept Springsteen out of the studio for nearly a year. During that time he kept the E Street Band together through extensive touring across the US and kept writing new songs. After a settlement in May 1977, nine months of sessions produced Darkness on the Edge of Town, released in June 1978. It stripped away the dense production of Born to Run for a rawer hard rock sound. Its lyrics follow ill-fortuned people who fight back against overwhelming odds.

  Darkness sold fewer copies than its predecessor, but it stayed on the Billboard chart for 167 weeks and sold three million copies in the US. Its singles "Prove It All Night," "Badlands" and "The Promised Land" performed modestly. The Darkness Tour was his largest yet, with shows lasting upwards of three hours. The staff of Ultimate Classic Rock said it solidified the band as "one of the most exciting live acts in rock 'n' roll."

  By the late 1970s other artists were scoring hits with his material. Manfred Mann's Earth Band took a heavily rearranged "Blinded by the Light" to number 1 in the US in early 1977. Patti Smith reached number 13 in 1978 with "Because the Night," a song he had not released, with lyrics revised by Smith. The Pointer Sisters hit number 2 in 1979 with his then-unreleased "Fire." Between 1976 and 1978 he gave Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes four songs, including "The Fever" and "Hearts of Stone." He wrote four more with Van Zandt, who produced the band's first three albums.

  In September 1979 Springsteen and the E Street Band joined the anti-nuclear power collective Musicians United for Safe Energy for two nights at Madison Square Garden. The resulting No Nukes live album and documentary film offered the first official recordings and footage of his fabled live act. They also marked his first tentative step into political involvement.

  The recording sessions for The River lasted 18 months. The 20-track double album tried to capture the energy of the E Street Band playing live, mixing party songs with introspective ballads. Released in October 1980, it topped the US Billboard chart. "Hungry Heart" reached number 5, his first top ten single as a performer, and "Fade Away" reached number 20.

  Springsteen recorded the songs for Nebraska as demos at his home in Colts Neck, New Jersey. He planned to redo them with the E Street Band, but poor test sessions changed his mind, and he released the demos as they were in September 1982. The stark, folk-inspired solo album chronicled the hardships of blue-collar workers and told bleak tales of criminals, cops and gang wars. It sold minimally compared with his three previous albums, yet it reached number 3 and surprised critics, who praised it as a brave artistic statement.

  In April 2024, 20th Century Studios announced a biographical film called Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. It is based on a 2023 book by Warren Zanes about the making of Nebraska, and Jeremy Allen White will play Springsteen.

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• 5. Misreading an Anthem

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  Seven singles from Born in the U.S.A. reached the top ten after its release in 1984. The album sold 30 million copies worldwide and ranked as the 23rd-best-selling album ever as of 2024. Its title track was a bitter commentary on how Vietnam veterans were treated, and some of those veterans were Springsteen's friends.

  The verses were unambiguous when listened to closely. The anthemic music and the title, however, made it hard for many people, from politicians to ordinary listeners, to absorb them. Only the chorus stuck, and it could be read many ways. The song was widely misinterpreted as patriotic and became tangled in the 1984 presidential campaign.

  Conservative columnist George Will attended a Springsteen concert in 1984 and wrote a column praising his work ethic. He ended it with the line "There still is nothing quite like being born in the U.S.A." Six days after the column appeared, President Ronald Reagan spoke at a campaign rally in Hammonton, New Jersey. He praised "the message of hope in the songs of a man so many young Americans admire," and he named Springsteen.

  Two nights later, at a concert in Pittsburgh, Springsteen told the crowd that he wondered what the president's favorite album of his might be. "I don't think it was the Nebraska album. I don't think he's been listening to this one," he said. He then began playing "Johnny 99," a song with allusions to closing factories and criminals.

  "Dancing in the Dark" was the biggest of the seven hit singles and peaked at number 2 on the Billboard singles chart. Its video showed a young Courteney Cox dancing on stage with Springsteen, which helped start her acting career. He had written "Cover Me" for Donna Summer, but his record company persuaded him to keep it for the album. He wrote her another song, "Protection." Brian De Palma and John Sayles directed videos for the album.

  In 1985 Springsteen played on the "We Are the World" song and album. His live cover of Jimmy Cliff's "Trapped" from that project reached number 1 on the Billboard Top Rock Tracks chart. From the 15th of June to the 10th of August 1985, all seven of his albums appeared on the UK Albums Chart at once. No artist had ever charted an entire back catalogue simultaneously before.

  Live/1975-85, a five-record box set, arrived near the end of 1986 and became the first box set to debut at number 1 on the US album charts. It ultimately sold 13 million units in the US. Fans meanwhile started their own publications through the decade, among them Backstreets magazine.

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• 6. Wilderness Years and Return

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  Tunnel of Love, released in October 1987, was a sedate, contemplative reflection on love found, lost and squandered. It used the full sound of the E Street Band only selectively. It sold less than Born in the U.S.A. but still reached number 1 on the Billboard 200.

  In June 1988 atmospheric conditions at a Villa Park concert were so unusual that the show could be heard 20 miles away. On the 19th of July, a concert in East Germany drew 300,000 spectators. The Socialist Unity Party's youth wing had conceived it to placate young East Germans who were hungry for more freedom and for popular music from the West. Journalist Erik Kirschbaum, in his 2013 book Rocking the Wall, called it "the most important rock concert ever, anywhere." He argued that its success catalyzed opposition to the regime and helped contribute to the fall of the Berlin Wall the following year. Later in 1988 Springsteen headlined the worldwide Human Rights Now! tour for Amnesty International.

  In October 1989 he dissolved the E Street Band. By 1992 he had moved to Los Angeles and was working with session musicians, risking fan accusations of "going Hollywood." That year he released two albums at once, Human Touch and Lucky Town. An electric band appearance on the acoustic MTV Unplugged program was poorly received and cemented fan dissatisfaction.

  Springsteen won an Academy Award in 1994 for "Streets of Philadelphia," from the soundtrack to the film Philadelphia. Its video shows his actual vocal performance, recorded through a hidden microphone over a prerecorded instrumental track. He had developed that technique for the "Brilliant Disguise" video.

  In 1995 he briefly reorganized the E Street Band to record a few new songs for his first Greatest Hits album. The documentary Blood Brothers chronicled that session. He then released The Ghost of Tom Joad, a folk album inspired by John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and by Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass. That book was by Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael Williamson. Rolling Stone called the album his first overtly social statement since Born in the U.S.A.

  The solo acoustic Ghost of Tom Joad Tour played small venues around the world and reshaped many of his older songs. Springsteen bluntly reminded audiences to stay quiet and not clap during the performances. Afterward he moved his family from California back to New Jersey. In 1998 he released Tracks, a sprawling four-disc box set of outtakes. He later acknowledged that the 1990s were a "lost period" for him: "I didn't do a lot of work. Some people would say I didn't do my best work."

  Bono inducted Springsteen into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999, and Springsteen returned the favor in 2005. That same year the E Street Band reunited for a Reunion Tour that lasted over a year. It included a record 15 sold-out shows at Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey, and ten sold-out nights at Madison Square Garden. A new song, "American Skin (41 Shots)," about the police shooting of Amadou Diallo, proved controversial.

  The Rising arrived in 2002, produced by Brendan O'Brien. It was his first studio album with the full band in 18 years, and it reflected mostly on the September 11 attacks. It became his best-selling album of new material in 15 years. He played an unprecedented ten nights at Giants Stadium in New Jersey. At the 2003 Grammy Awards it won Best Rock Album, and its title track won Best Rock Song and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance.

  Devils & Dust arrived in April 2005 as a low-key, mostly acoustic album in the vein of Nebraska. Its title track concerns an ordinary soldier's feelings and fears during the Iraq War, and the album topped the charts in ten countries. In April 2006 he released We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, a big folk treatment of 15 songs popularized by Pete Seeger. He toured with an 18-strong ensemble known as the Seeger Sessions Band.

  Magic followed in October 2007 and debuted at number 1 in the US, Ireland and the UK. It carried a hidden track, "Terry's Song," a tribute to long-time assistant Terry Magovern, who died in July 2007. The Magic Tour would be the last for E Street member Danny Federici, who died in 2008.

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• 7. Presidents and Later Years

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  Springsteen announced his endorsement of Barack Obama's presidential campaign in April 2008 and gave solo acoustic performances for it throughout the year. At a rally on the 2nd of November, he debuted "Working on a Dream" in a duet with his wife, Patti Scialfa. After Obama's victory, "The Rising" was the first song played over the loudspeakers following the victory speech in Chicago's Grant Park. On the 18th of January 2009 Springsteen opened the Obama Inaugural Celebration before more than 400,000 people. He performed Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" with Pete Seeger.

  On the 11th of January 2009 he won the Golden Globe for Best Song for "The Wrestler." He gave the song to the film for free after receiving a heartfelt letter from lead actor Mickey Rourke. On the 1st of February 2009 he played the halftime show at Super Bowl XLIII, having declined on earlier occasions. At a rare press conference, his first in more than 25 years, he promised a "twelve-minute party." The set ran 12 minutes and 45 seconds with the E Street Band and the Miami Horns, and it swapped the baseball lyrics of "Glory Days" for football ones. "This has probably been the busiest month of my life," he said.

  Springsteen received the Kennedy Center Honors on the 6th of December 2009. Obama said his concerts were not just rock-and-roll concerts but "communions." Clarence Clemons, the E Street Band's saxophonist and a founding member, died on the 18th of June 2011 of complications from a stroke.

  Wrecking Ball, released in March 2012, became his tenth number 1 album in the US. On the 31st of July 2012 in Helsinki, Finland, he played his longest concert, lasting four hours and six minutes with 33 songs. The Wrecking Ball Tour had the highest attendance of any tour that year. Springsteen finished second only to Madonna as the top money maker of 2012, with $33.44 million.

  In September 2016 Simon & Schuster published his 500-page autobiography, Born to Run, which topped The New York Times bestsellers list. On the 22nd of November 2016, Obama presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Springsteen on Broadway began a run at the Walter Kerr Theatre in the fall of 2017. He read excerpts from the autobiography and shared spoken reminiscences between songs. The show was extended three times and ended on the 15th of December 2018. It earned him a Special Tony Award.

  On the 29th of May 2020 he appeared remotely at a no-audience Dropkick Murphys livestream at Fenway Park in Boston. The event drew over 9 million viewers and raised over $700,000 for charity. In October 2020 he released Letter to You, which reached number 2 in the US. It made him the first artist to release a top-five album in six consecutive decades. On the 16th of December 2021 he sold the masters of his entire catalog and the related music publishing rights to Sony Music for $500 million.

  On the 1st of February 2023 Springsteen and the E Street Band launched their first tour in six years. Treatment for peptic ulcer disease, along with COVID-19 cases in the band, forced the postponement of twenty-nine shows in total. The 2023-2025 tour grossed close to $730 million worldwide, more than doubling the band's previous record from the 2012-2013 Wrecking Ball Tour. It also made him one of just five artists ever to gross over $2.3 billion touring. During a show in Philadelphia on the 23rd of August 2024, he denounced rumors of a farewell tour.

  On the 27th of June 2025 he released Tracks II: The Lost Albums, seven full-length albums of unreleased material dating from 1983 to 2018. The collection holds 83 songs, 74 of them previously unreleased. In a June 2025 interview with Rolling Stone, he said there will never be a farewell tour and that he hopes to still be onstage in his nineties. About the E Street Band he said, "that future is finite."

  In January 2026 he released the protest song "Streets of Minneapolis," written in response to the fatal shootings of protesters Renée Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents. The song quickly rose on the iTunes Top Songs chart. The Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour opened on the 31st of March 2026 at the Target Center in Minneapolis, with Tom Morello as a special guest.

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• 8. Private Life and Legacy

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  Patti Scialfa was performing at the Stone Pony alongside Bobby Bandiera in the early 1980s when Springsteen introduced himself after her set. Early in 1984 he asked her to join the E Street Band for the Born in the U.S.A. Tour. He instead married actress Julianne Phillips shortly after midnight on the 13th of May 1985, at Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church in Lake Oswego, Oregon. The two had an 11-year age difference, and his touring strained the marriage. Many songs on Tunnel of Love describe his unhappiness. Phillips filed for divorce on the 30th of August 1988, and it was finalized on the 1st of March 1989.

  The press criticized the haste with which he and Scialfa became a couple. In a 1995 interview with The Advocate he said, "It's a strange society that assumes it has the right to tell people whom they should love and whom they shouldn't." Years later he said of Phillips, "I handled it badly, and I still feel badly about it." Scialfa gave birth to the couple's first child, a son, on the 25th of July 1990. They married on the 8th of June 1991 at their Los Angeles home in a private ceremony. Their daughter Jessica Rae was born on the 30th of December 1991, and another son followed on the 5th of January 1994.

  The family owns and lives on a horse farm in Colts Neck Township and has a home in Rumson. Evan graduated from Boston College and writes and performs his own songs. Jessica graduated from Duke University, is a nationally ranked champion equestrian and made her show-jumping debut with Team USA in August 2014. Sam is a firefighter in Jersey City. On the 17th of July 2022, Springsteen and Scialfa became grandparents.

  Springsteen has avoided hard drugs his entire life. Van Zandt said in 2012 that he was the only person he knew who never did drugs. Springsteen began addressing his depression in his 30s after years of denial. He moved to a mostly vegetarian diet, running up to six miles on a treadmill and lifting weights three times a week. A 2019 Consequence article marking his 70th birthday said he still follows that routine.

  In a 2017 interview with Tom Hanks, Springsteen admitted he evaded taxes early in his career, since the government had paid no attention to them before his 1975 Time cover. Paying them back took most of his income for years, and by his 30th birthday he had only $20,000. Forbes conservatively estimated his net worth at $1.1 billion in 2024. In his 2016 autobiography he wrote, "I have a personal relationship with Jesus," and he also admitted that once you are a Catholic you are always a Catholic. Away from music, he is a model railroader who collects and runs HO scale trains.

  At 22 Springsteen paid $185 to a luthier in Belmar, New Jersey, for the guitar that became his primary instrument. It was a heavily modified Fender Telecaster that he calls a "mutt." A previous owner had fitted a neck from a mid-1950s Esquire and routed the swamp ash body to hold four pickups wired into separate jacks. The routing left it light, which suited his long performances. He used it in almost every concert for thirty years before retiring it in the 2000s, though it returned for the Super Bowl XLIII halftime show. It appears on the covers of Born to Run, Live 1975-85, Human Touch, Greatest Hits and Wrecking Ball. Insurance estimates place its value between one and five million dollars.

  Springsteen is considered a pioneer of heartland rock, a genre that pairs mainstream rock with working-class themes. Rolling Stone ranked him 23rd on its 2010 list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time," calling him "the embodiment of rock and roll." Writer Ann Powers called him "the quintessential album-era rock star," arguing that he used the album form to build an enduring persona across a whole career. His awards include 20 Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes, an Academy Award and a Special Tony Award. He entered the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1999 and received the National Medal of Arts in 2023.

  In April 2023 the governor of New Jersey proclaimed September 23 "Bruce Springsteen Day." A Bruce Springsteen Special Collection holds academic papers on his work, and he joked in 2001 that it had "more stuff than every place except my mother's basement!" His next announced appearance is the Power to the People festival on the 3rd of October 2026 at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, where he will join Tom Morello's band.

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