He just embodied the essence of it and he was in mortal combat with the thing. ' was as big as the whole country itself,' Springsteen later remembered, 'as big as the whole dream. Springsteen first fell in love with rock 'n' roll when he saw Elvis Presley perform on The Ed Sullivan Show. They shaped my politics, and they alerted me to what is at stake when you're born in the U.S.A.' I would have written just happy songs - and I tried it in the early '90s and it didn't work… Anyway, I put on his work clothes and I went to work. 'I've gotta thank him,' Springsteen said upon his induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999, 'because what would I conceivably have written about without him? I mean, you can imagine that if everything had gone great between us, we would have had disaster. Years later, however, Springsteen suggested that his fraught relationship with his father had been important for his art.

'One was me, and the other was my guitar.' 'When I was growing up, there were two things that were unpopular in my house,' the singer later recalled. Springsteen and his father had a difficult relationship.

Adele, Springsteen's mother, brought in steadier income as a secretary in a local insurance office. His father, Doug Springsteen, had trouble holding down a steady job and worked at different times as a bus driver, millworker and prison guard.

Early Lifeīorn on September 23, 1949, in Long Branch, New Jersey, Springsteen was raised in a working-class household in Freehold Borough. Also known for his left-leaning political causes, the artist was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2016. alone, Springsteen is one of the most successful musicians of all time. With dozens of awards under his belt, including 20 Grammys, and more than 65 million albums sold in the U.S. His breakout 1975 record, Born to Run, united arena rock with human-size tales of working-class America. Bruce Springsteen, also known as 'The Boss,' began his career by playing the bar circuit in New Jersey while assembling his famous E Street Band.

Bruce born to run