Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock 'n' Roll

April 2, 2012
Since his early days playing in garages and clubs in New Jersey and New York, Springsteen nurtured a rock and roll heart, pouring out his passion into power ballads, driving anthems, and mesmerizing riffs about social issues. Like a good rocker, Dolan relies on three chords and a beat to propel a straightforward story of Springsteen’s life in rock ’n’ roll and the ways that Springsteen’s music has shaped and been shaped by the history of our times. In an appreciative study that at times verges on the academic, Dolan traces Springsteen’s journey through a song-by-song and album-by-album development. Springsteen’s journey down thunder road to his glory days started on Christmas 1964, when his mother bought him an electric guitar and an amp, and he began practicing harder than ever to capture the energy and driving sound of the Beatles. Although many of his songs were covertly autobiographical, what made Springsteen’s songs “personal” was not so much their specific autobiographical detail or insights as the vision that they communicated of the observed world. As Dolan astutely points out, Springsteen’s music has captured places and times from the defaulting of Manhattan in the 1970s to the culturally estranged home front of the Second Gulf War, and has tried to appeal to the broadest possible audience.