Back in October, every Bruce Springsteen or Arcade Fire fan saw the YouTube clip from October 14th at Scotiabank Place in Ottawa. It was pretty exciting to see Win Butler and Régine Chassagne join Springsteen and the E Street Band for an eerie onstage version of “State Trooper” off of Nebraska, and a lively version of their own “Keep the Car Running”, as part of the encore. The torch was being passed from the old guard to the new, yet again.

It was also exciting for Springsteen fans because it was the first time he had played “State Trooper” since the Born in the U.S.A. tour. But it wasn’t at all surprising the kids were up there to do it with him. A couple of tracks off the most recent Arcade Fire album, Neon Bible, sound a lot like Springsteen in his early ’80s heyday. “Keep the Car Running” has that same emotional ebb and flow (with pounding drums guiding it) as “Dancing in the Dark”, while “(Antichrist Television Blues)” features a driving, rhythmic guitar-picking style, very much like “State Trooper.” These songs from both artists share very pure, almost frantic expressions of emotion. “(Antichrist)” sounds like amped-up rockabilly, not unlike more than a few Springsteen tracks off Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. You can place it alongside cuts like “Working on the Highway”, “Johnny 99”, “State Trooper” (though played with a more subdued rockabilly sensibility), or “Open All Night”, and it sounds very similar.

Springsteen seems to own this sound. It’s a sound that comes from somewhere in rock ‘n’ roll’s past. It wasn’t that evident in Springsteen’s earlier period from the ’70s when a majority of his songs were more like musical productions with long stories. “Jungleland” or “Incident on 57th Street” sounds more like West Side Story than rockabilly. Springsteen has said throughout his career that Elvis and the Beatles were a big influence on him, but it wasn’t that clearly displayed in his ’70s catalog—at least not musically. His vocals relate to Elvis for their depth of emotion and vibrato, but this driving sound Springsteen was playing with at this specific period in the early ’80s had to have come from somewhere else.

Just by chance, I was digging through my music collection and listening to Buddy Holly’s Greatest Hits in mid-December. Suddenly, I heard the sound that Springsteen had inherited. I became convinced he lifted this chugging, rockabilly-type style from Holly. You can hear this same sound on tracks by Holly like “Peggy Sue”, “I’m Looking for Someone to Love”, “Words of Love”, and “Rave On.” All of them relate, sonically, to “Working on the Highway”, “State Trooper”, and all the rest for that matter.

I did some investigating and finally came across the Boss’s Rolling Stone interview from August 24th, 1978. Springsteen tells Dave Marsh in the article, “I play Buddy Holly every night before I go on, that keeps me honest.” Later, that night of the interview, he whipped out a cover of Holly’s “Rave On” (which he’d never played live before) for the show’s encore, and it was reported that the crowd went wild. This was the same year The Buddy Holly Story biopic had come out, and Gary Busey, who’d just played Holly in the movie, was in the audience. Springsteen started writing tracks for Nebraska four years later in early 1982, as noted in Rolling Stone on September 16th of that year, when the magazine was previewing the release of the album. Did the Buddy Holly sound stick with him for that long? It sounds like it did.

After hearing the Holly that day in December, I reached an epiphany. I connected Springsteen to him, and then also the Arcade Fire to Buddy Holly via Bruce Springsteen. “(Antichrist Television Blues)” is, in particular, a Holly-influenced track (its rhythmic quality is especially similar to “Peggy Sue”) and really, so is “Keep the Car Running” for its urgency and raw emotion—both Buddy Holly trademarks. But this style of song has been learned by Butler and Chassagne via experiencing and emulating Springsteen with their songs. They are just the latest branch in the family tree of rock to spring from the Holly line, whether they realize it or not. In the big wide world of rock music, Buddy Holly influenced just about everyone as one of rock’s founding fathers. But here, with Springsteen and then the Arcade Fire via the Boss, you hear Holly’s sound, once again, very clearly.

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