Boss, Bam take spin on glory road
Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama went out for a ride and almost never went back.
The pair of bosses started Monday’s episode of their “Renegades: Born in the USA” podcast while riding around in Springsteen’s vintage Corvette, where they looked back at their glory days and toyed with the idea of a cross-country road trip. During that 54-minute chat, Springsteen confessed a former bass player quit his band because he wanted to watch the moon landing on television.
“In 1969, I was a 19-year-old kid playing in a bar in Asbury Park the night that they landed on the moon,” Springsteen recalled. “And we were like, ‘“F—k the moon landing, man.”’
According to Springsteen, there were roughly 50 people in the venue where his band was playing on that historic July night and the crowd was evenly divided on whether they wanted to hear live music or watch Apollo 11 landing on television. Some fans called out for more tunes while others yelled out for Springsteen to “shut the f—k up!” he recalled. After a few stop-and-starts, one of Springsteen’s bandmates put an end to the drama.
“Finally, I had a bass player that was a bit of a techie and he said, ‘You guys are freaking rubes, man. I quit. I’m watching the moon landing,” Springsteen said.
“In the middle of the set?” Obama asked.
“In the middle of the set,” Springsteen confirmed.
More than 50 years later, the former president and his rock icon cohost — who signed his first recording contract in 1972— agreed the unidentified bass player made the right call.
“He walked off and that was the end of it, man,” Springsteen laughed. “I look back on it, you know, and we were all idiots at the time, but uh it was… it was funny.”
The podcast turned more somber when the topic changed to the war in Vietnam. For Obama, 59, that war was history by the time he was a teenager, but he recalls the misplaced criticism of U.S. troops returning home from service.