Also in the hard rock vein was his next group, Child (soon renamed Steel Mill), which featured keyboard player Danny Federici and drummer Vini Lopez. From there, he briefly joined Earth, a hard rock band in the style of Cream. They got as far as playing in New York City, but broke up in 1967 around the time Springsteen graduated from high school and began frequenting clubs in Asbury Park, New Jersey. In 1965, he joined his first band, the Beatles-influenced Castiles.
He became interested in music after seeing Elvis Presley perform on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 and obtained a guitar, but he didn't start playing seriously until 1963. Of course, it may have been these very sidesteps that kept his image and his music fresh, especially since he always had the fallback of returning to what his fans thought he did best, barnstorming the country with a marathon rock & roll show using his longtime bandmates.īruce Springsteen was born September 23, 1949, in Freehold, New Jersey, the son of Douglas Springsteen, a bus driver, and Adele (Zirilli) Springsteen, a secretary.
Although there were a few speed bumps along the way in Springsteen's career, the wonder of his nearly unbroken string of critical and commercial success is that he achieved it while periodically challenging his listeners by going off in unexpected directions, following his muse even when that meant altering the sound of his music or the composition of his backup band, or making his lyrical message overtly political. In the decades following his emergence on the national scene in 1975, Bruce Springsteen proved to be that rarity among popular musicians, an artist who maintained his status as a frontline recording and performing star, consistently selling millions of albums and selling out arenas and stadiums around the world year after year, as well as retaining widespread critical approbation, with ecstatic reviews greeting those discs and shows.