Born to Run: Biography

The moment he sees Elvis Presley explode onto the American music scene in 1956, Springsteen recognizes music’s power to do far more than entertain. In a world of polite homogeneity and taboo sexuality, Presley unleashes a firestorm of defiance and sexual innuendo. Much of the older generation, raised on big band music and the American songbook, see Presley as moral corruption incarnate, a sexually charged Pied Piper luring youth down a dark, perverse path. Concerned about Presley’s influence, the producers of The Ed Sullivan Show instruct their camera operators to shoot him only from the waist up. For Springsteen and a generation hungry for something adventurous, the strategy doesn’t work. The sneering confidence and sex appeal remain “in his eyes, his face, the face of a Saturday night jukebox Dionysus” (40). Elvis opens Pandora’s Box that night, and Springsteen glimpses a world larger and far more epic than New Jersey working-class life and strict Catholicism. The music gives him hope.

The mid-1960s British Invasion (The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who) shows him rock music’s expansive possibilities—the harmonies, the sonic diversity, the rebellion. Hard rock blues groups like Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience inspire his early bands.