I miss a lot of people ...but it’s just part of life and we carry on
HE HAS a face that could have been carved out of stone... so craggy it belongs on a rock’n’roll Mount Rushmore alongside Chuck Berry, Elvis and Little Richard.
Bruce Springsteen has established himself as rock’s most dynamic stage performer and America’s leading contemporary folk poet.
Born, as the song says, in the USA – Long Branch, New Jersey, to be precise – his songs have always celebrated the lives and aspirations of blue-collar Americans.
Bruce sings about cars, friendship, work, love, escape and the spirit of his people.
His 1978 album Darkness On The Edge Of Town channelled John Steinbeck’s great Depression novel The Grapes Of Wrath.
His 2002 album The Rising was his fierce response to the atrocity of 9/11, a requiem for the lost and a heartfelt tribute to the resilience and heroism of New York’s firefighters and rescue workers. Springsteen’s background was humble. His father was an army veteran and bus driver; his mother Adele, the main breadwinner, was a legal secretary. His 1998 song The Wish paid tribute to her, opening with a verse about her buying him his first guitar.
Young Bruce attended local Catholic school Saint Rose of Lima in Freehold, NJ.
With an estimated worth of £500million, The Boss is still most comfortable in jeans and a plaid shirt. An everyman for everyone.
His legendary E Street Band includes
Little Stevie, aka “Miami Steve” Van Zandt, who found another level of fame playing mob consigliere Silvio Dante, owner of the Bada Bing club, in The Sopranos.
Bruce split from his first wife, actress Julianne Phillips, in 1988 after three years.
He married E Street Band guitarist and singer, Patti Scialfa, an old pal, in 1991.
The couple, who have three grown-up children, live on a 400-acre horse farm in New Jersey, a place he had biked past for decades. “I’d look down its beautiful lane and often thought…someday.”
In recent years, Bruce has branched out. He had a four-year residency in New York with the Emmy-winning Springsteen On Broadway between 2017 and 2021. And he made his directing debut with his 2019 feature-length film, Western Stars, splicing old performance footage with interviews. He called it “a meditation” on his life.
Age is very much on his mind, especially as those close to him pass away – his father in 2011, and band members organist Danny Federici and the great Clarence Clemons.
“I miss a lot of people,” he said recently. “It’s just a part of life, but it registers on you and finds its way into your work, as it should do. And we carry on.”