Bruce Springsteen Reveals Which Beatles Album Showed Him His Future
Bruce Springsteen is an influential rockstar himself, but there were many artists during his youth who helped show him that being a rockstar was a possibility. One of these artists was The Beatles, who Springsteen says showed him his future after seeing one of their album covers.
Bruce Springsteen remembers discovering the cover of ‘Meet The Beatles!”
Meet The Beatles! is the second studio album from The Beatles released in the United States. While the album isn’t considered the artistic high point of the band’s discography, it did contain some highlights, such as “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “I Saw Her Standing There.” However, Bruce Springsteen says he was more impressed by the cover of the album, which featured a photo of the heads of The Beatles on a black background.
“The Beatles were cool,” Springsteen said in his 2012 SXSW keynote address. “They were classical, formal, and created the idea of an independent unit where everything could come out of your garage. The Meet the Beatles album cover, those four headshots. I remember, I seen ’em at J. J. Newberry’s. It was the first thing I saw when you ran down to the five–and–ten cent store. There were no record stores. There weren’t enough records, I don’t think, in those days. There was a little set by the toys where they sold a few albums. And I remember running in and seeing that album cover with those four headshots.”
The album inspired Springsteen to pursue his future in music
Bruce Springsteen recalled that the cover for Meet The Beatles! inspired him to focus on a future in music. He said that The Beatles looked like normal kids he could have grown up with. They were cooler than the “Born to Run” singer at the moment because they were successful, but it proved that if they could do it, there was no reason why he couldn’t follow the same path.
“It was like the silent gods of Olympus,” Springsteen added. “Your future was just sort of staring you in the face. I remember thinking, ‘That’s too cool. I’m never gonna get there, man, never.’ And then in some fanzine I came across a picture of the Beatles in Hamburg. And they had on the leather jackets and the slick–backed pompadours, they had acned faces. I said, hey, ‘Wait a minute, those are the guys I grew up with, only they were Liverpool wharf rats.’ So minus their Nehru jackets and the haircuts – so these guys, they’re kids. They’re a lot cooler than me, but they’re still kids. There must be a way to get there from here.”
Springsteen was ‘struck twice’ by The Beatles
In a 2016 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Bruce Springsteen discussed how he was “struck twice” by The Beatles. After seeing the album cover, he was inspired to learn guitar. After giving up on it, he rediscovered his passion in music after seeing The Beatles on stage.
“At 7, I don’t know how much of a life I had to change, but whatever I had, it struck me right away, and I got my mother to run down to the store the next week, and we rented a guitar,” Springsteen shared. “I took a swing at playing for about a month, and I gave up. My hands were too small, and they didn’t know how to teach in those days. There wasn’t anybody teaching you ‘Twist and Shout’ or ‘Hound Dog.’ It was very methodical, so I got bored rather quickly and put it away until I was 14 when The Beatles stood on the stage, and it happened to me again. So, I got struck twice by lightning.”
