The Soul Roots of Bruce Springsteen's American Dream

By Joel Dinerstein

Bruce Springsteen's reputation stands as the voice of white workingclass America, the heroic poet-everyman of the Rust Belt's white ethnic working class and its intelligentsia. Most scholars place him in the social realist musical tradition of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan which hearkens back to the fetishization of male workers that informs the Whitmanesque. Yet for nearly a decade (1973–82), Springsteen was best known as a dynamic live performer, a rock-and-roll showman who appropriated many of James Brown's performative gestures for marathon four-hour shows that were, in effect, his translation of Brown's stagecraft, the energy and dramatic gestures of the self-proclaimed "hardestworking man in show business." In 1974 Springsteen's E Street band owed far more to the model of an integrated soul-funk band like War or Sly and the Family Stone than to, say, the Rolling Stones: it had two African American members—jazz pianist David Sancious along with saxophonist Clarence Clemons—and the half-Hispanic drummer Vini "Mad Dog" Lopez. (Lopez was at first replaced by an African-American jazz drummer, Ernest "Boom" Carter, before current long-time drummer Max Weinberg became an E Street member in mid-1975.) The title cut of Springsteen's second album, "The E Street Shuffle" (1974), was a soul-funk tune he admittedly riffed off of a Curtis Mayfield–penned R&B hit for Major Lance called "Monkey Time" (1963), while in his spare time Springsteen wrote and produced soul-tinged songs for the other successful white Asbury Park R&B band, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes.