Originally published in NME, 6 October 1973

An analysis of stardom as related to the psychological needs of the audience

“Randy Newman is great but he’s not touched. Joni Mitchell is great but she’s not touched. Bruce is touched… he’s a genius!” Manager Mike Appel is talking in the dressing rooms of the Spectrum stadium in Philadelphia. His artist, Bruce Springsteen, has just finished a 40-minute opening set and Chicago are tuning up in the room next door.

“When I first came across Bruce it was by accident,” he says, “but when I heard him play I heard this voice saying to me… Superstar. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never been that close to a superstar before.”

Not wanting to miss the chance of being Albert Grossman for the ’70s, Appel took acetates of Springsteen straight to Columbia Records in New York. There he played them to John Hammond… the man who signed up Bob Dylan… and Louis Armstrong… and Bessie Smith… and Billie Holiday… and Tommy Dorsey… and Woody Herman.

Also, they were played to then president Clive Davis. According to Appel, they only needed to hear one track before signing him up.

Springsteen’s a hungry, scrawny-looking guy. There’s definitely something very Dylan-y about his whole being, about his curly, licking hair and his scrub beard… and, I must say it, about his songs. It’s a comparison a lot of people are going to draw because of the connections with Hammond, the looks, and the highly influenced style of writing.

Too many people have been primed to walk in those boots, only to find they didn’t fit. After all, no one wants ‘another’ of anything we once had, because we still have the original in our collections.

The other fault with PBDs (Potential Bob Dylans) is that people choose them on looks and sound alone, thinking that’s what made BD into BD. It wasn’t. BD filled the psychological need of a generation. Where there isn’t a psychological need there’ll be no BD or, indeed, no PBD.

The Beatles, too, came at just the right time in history and filled an awaiting psychological vacuum. To think it was their music, or, worse still, their lyrics, that made them the phenomenon they were is to be totally naïve.

We were the phenomenon… our need for them was the phenomenon… and they passed the audition to play seven years in the starring role of Our Psychological Need.

Now, the 1,000,001 intricacies which make up a moment in history have changed. It may never happen again as it did between ’63 and ’70. To expect another Bob Dylan or another Beatles is like expecting a reunion 10 years after any event to be exactly the same as the event itself. No way. History itself would need to be reconstructed for such a thing to happen.

Nevertheless, BD or no BD, Springsteen is a good ‘un. His songs are crammed with words and multiple images. “He’s very garrulous,” agrees Appel. On stage, he’s powerful and confident… there’s a charisma there that doesn’t occur with many people.

His allegiance to Dylan is evident in the songs. They’re mostly stories of a crazy dream-like quality. Where Dylan had peddlers, jokers, and thieves, Springsteen brings us queens, acrobats, and servants. Where Ginsberg gave us hydrogen jukeboxes, and Dylan gave us magazine husband, Springsteen has ragamuffin gunners and wolfman fairies.

Compare his use of adjectives, too. Dylan used “mercury mouth,” “streetcar visions,” and “sheet metal memory”… Springsteen comes up with “Cheshire smiles” and “barroom eyes.” Another notable likeness is in their use of internal rhymes.

Some of Springsteen’s numbers almost come over as direct parody.

Just for the record, other PBDs of the last couple of years include Kris Kristofferson, John Prine, and Loudon Wainwright III. Both Kristofferson and Wainwright are the property of Columbia Records… who recently lost the services of Bob Dylan. Now, I don’t want to start drawing conclusions, but…

Bruce Springsteen is 23 years old and comes out of New Jersey. He first started playing music at age nine under the influence of Elvis. At 14, it really hit him. “It took over my whole life,” he remembers. “Everything from then on revolved around music. Everything.”