The one band Bruce Springsteen said “shifted the lay of the land” | CPT PPP Coverage

On the other side of the Atlantic, The Beatles were taking the sounds of Buddy Holly, Little Richard and Elvis Presley and turning them on their head. Working out of The Cavern Club in Liverpool, the Fab Four had practically got their live act down to a science by the time they got picked up to record their debut album, Please Please Me. 

Once the band started to see success off singles like ‘Love Me Do’, it was time for them to venture stateside. With fans losing their minds to their tracks, The Beatles’ appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show became the stuff of rock legend, with Springsteen listening intently from his living room.

Reflecting on the impact of The Beatles for the first time, Springsteen remembered how quickly his world was turned on its head, saying, “This was different, shifted the lay of the land. Four guys, playing and singing, writing their own material … Rock ‘n’ roll came to my house where there seemed to be no way out … and opened up a whole world of possibilities”.

The Beatles were far from the only new British acts coming to invade America. In the wake of their initial appearance on television, acts like The Rolling Stones and The Animals were emerging, bringing their brand of American-flavoured rock and roll to the world. Though Springsteen had the idea of starting a rock band, he found his calling after this performance.

Working with anyone he could in his native New Jersey, Springsteen used his songs to paint graphic pictures of working life. Since The Beatles were moving outside the conventional rules of rock and roll, Springsteen felt it was appropriate not to sing the traditional toothless love song, creating vivid pictures of people down on their luck but willing to go down swinging if it meant they had an honest shot at happiness.

While Springsteen would become ‘The Boss’ behind The E Street Band when working on albums like Born to Run, the mentality of making music with friends was never lost on him. As longtime guitarist Stevie Van Zandt told Rolling Stone, “What we were mostly responding to was the fact that it was a band, which was a completely new thing to my generation. Before The Beatles, there was no such thing as a rock and roll band”.