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Elvis Presley‘s death affected fans worldwide, including some of the top performers in the music business. In 1977, Bruce Springsteen was riding a wave of popularity between Born To Run and the 1978 release Darkness on The Edge Of Town. However, news of Presley’s passing shook the megawatt performer. He claimed it was “hard to understand” when the King of Rock and roll died in August 1977.

Elvis Presley and Bruce Springsteen in side-by-side photographs.
Elvis Presley and Bruce Springsteen | Hulton Archive/Getty Images/Scott Kowalchyk/CBS

Bruce Springsteen said Elvis Presley’s music hit him ‘like a thunderbolt’

As a child growing up in Freehold, New Jersey, Springsteen attributed Elvis’ 1956 song ‘Hound Dog’ as a significant turning point in his musical career. According to Far Out Magazine, Springsteen said Presley’s music hit him like a thunderbolt.

“When I heard it, it just shot straight through my brain,” he recalled. “I suddenly realized that there was more to life than what I’d been living.

“I was then in pursuit of something, and there’d been a vision laid out before me. You were dealing with the pure thrust, the pure energy of the music itself. I was very young but it still hit me like a thunderbolt.”

Bruce Springsteen said a friend told him about Elvis Presley’s death

In an interview featured on Elvis AU, Springsteen recalled when he learned his childhood idol had died. The entertainer revealed it was hard to understand how this tragedy could have happened.

‘I remember later when a friend of mine called to tell me that he’d died. It was so hard to understand how somebody whose music came in and took away so many people’s loneliness and gave so many people a reason and a sense of the possibilities of living could have, in the end, died so tragically. And I guess when you’re alone, you ain’t nothin’ but alone,” Springsteen said.

Springsteen once jumped Graceland’s wall to meet his idol

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Springsteen discussed the night he tried to meet his childhood idol during a concert stop to tour his Born in the U.S.A. album. He said he and Steve Van Zandt decided to take a taxi to Presley’s house.

As shared in an audio clip on YouTube, he explained he went to Graceland in the middle of the night. Seeing the lights on, he believed Presley was home. Springsteen said, “I figured that Elvis has to be up readin’ or somethin’, so I told Steve, ‘Steve, man, I gotta go check it out.’ And I jumped over the wall, and I started runnin’ up the driveway,” Springsteen recounted.

“Filled with the enthusiasm of youth, I ran up the driveway. I got to the front door and was just about to knock when guards came out of the woods and asked me what I wanted,” he continued. “I asked, ‘Is Elvis home?’ They said, ‘No, no, Elvis isn’t home. He’s in Lake Tahoe’. So, I started to tell them that I was a guitar player and that I had a band, that we played in town that night, and that I made some records.

“And I even told [the guard] I had my picture on the covers of Time and Newsweek. I had to pull out all the stops to make an impression, you know? I don’t think he believed me, though, ’cause he just kinda stood there noddin’, and then he took me by the arm and put me back out on the street with Steve,” the singer concluded. Springsteen also discussed the memory in a separate YouTube video with Graham Norton.

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