Bruce Springsteen Information and Biography
In contrast to his old former band “Steel Mill” this band totally rocks in many different ways. It was going in the direction of rhythm and Blues (R&B) then any of his projects from before. It was a huge band with a good horn section and female backing vocals.
The Bruce Springsteen was finally formed in July 1971 and ran at the same time as the other musical project “DR Zoom and the sonic boom”. Bruce’s band started to play in many places that included, shows in clubs, and university’s around New Jersey.
Highlighted by a combination of gig’s in a local bar called “The Student Prince” a bar in Asbury Park were they played every Friday thru Sunday night in September, 1971. These gig’s were also one of the gig’s Southside Johnny came in to the band on harmonica. In November 1971 manager Carl “Tinker” West had met with Bruce to downsize the band due to financial reasons. So Bruce had to let the brass section go. So the band kept playing without them until they lost momentum and broke up in April 1972.
Bruce’s band could be seen as the first line-up of what would latter be the E-Street Band. So this experience was an important part for Bruce’s career.
By the time Springsteen had returned with his fourth album, Darkness at the Edge of Town (in June of 1978), however, the punk/new wave movement had outflanked him taken over, pushing him from the vanguard straight to the mainstream. Similar sounding heartland rockers for example Bob Seger had appeared, so that Springsteen sounded less like an innovator than a member of a well established genre.
Nevertheless, he has set about winning fans with an album that found the lost children of his early albums stuck in factory jobs, still longing for some escape. The album was a hit success, though it did not match the success of Born to Run. Springsteen returned with the double album The River (Early October 1980), which topped the charts (U.S and U.K) and featured his first Top Ten hit, "Hungry Heart."
Nobody was calling him a hype anymore he had lost some momentum, but Springsteen retreated from his expanding success, next recording the low-key album Nebraska , A virtual demo tape-on-vinyl.
But then it hit the Born in the U.S.A song. In 1984 and a two-year international tour began after that. The album threw off seven hit singles and sold over ten million copies worldwide, putting Springsteen in the pop heavens with Michael Jackson and Prince. After touring for more than a year, he released a five-LP/three-CD concert album that was also a great marketing success, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band/Live 1975-85, which topped the charts
After another huge marathon tour, Springsteen had given the E Street Band notice in November 1989, breaking up a well celebrated unit that had stayed together for over 15 years. In March 1992, he simultaneously released his solo record Human Touch and Lucky Town, and though the albums premiered near the top of the charts, he was less successful with fans than previous efforts. In the fall, Springsteen taped an MTV Unplugged segment (though he plugged in after one song), and the performance was released as an album in Europe in 1993 it sold but not to many copies since he did plug in and thus taking away the effect of playing a song unplugged.
Springsteen then continued to tour until the month of July 1993. In the fall, he wrote and recorded "Streets of Philadelphia" for the soundtrack to the film Philadelphia, which concerned a lawyer (Tom Hanks) dying of AIDS. The song became a Top Ten hit in 1994, winning the Academy Award for Best Song and cleaning up in the Grammy’s the following year(so did the movie). At the same time, Springsteen had readied his Greatest Hits album which was a great success in (February 1995), reassembling the E Street Band to record a few new tracks. The album was an immediate best-seller. Springsteen followed it with The Ghost of Tom Joad, another low-key, downcast, near-acoustic effort, and embarked upon a brief "solo" tour. The much-anticipated Tracks -- a four-disc collection of previously unreleased material -- followed in late 1998. Which was also a great success for Bruce.
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