The song Bruce Springsteen played in tribute to John Lennon | CPT PPP Coverage

The lineage of Lennon’s musical influence is set in stone, with the hallmarks of his written and performative style still echoing through today’s music studios. So when The Beatles’ debut album was released in 1963, the world began to make sense through the lens of music for a young Bruce Springsteen.

Remembering the heady days as a music-loving teenager in 1960s America, Springsteen said, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand came on the radio in 1964—that was going to change my life because I was going to successfully pick the guitar up and learn how to play.”

After that, Springsteen said he “Ran to the phone booth, got in the phone booth and immediately called my girl and asked ‘Have you heard this band called The Beatles?’ After that, it was nothing but rock ‘n’ roll and guitars.”

Shortly thereafter, Springsteen’s career flourished as his unfiltered representation of the American experience struck a similar human chord among fans, and he began to forge a voice of his own. By the mid-to-late 1970s, he cemented himself as a global star with ‘Born to Run’ and ‘Badlands’.

By 1980, the year of Lennon’s death, his rise to stardom provoked an unsolicited warning from Lennon, who, in an interview with Rolling Stone, said: “And God help Bruce Springsteen when they decide he’s no longer God,” he said, before adding: “I haven’t seen him, but I’ve heard such good things about him. Right now, his fans are happy. He’s told them about being drunk and chasing girls and cars and everything, and that’s about the level they enjoy. But when he gets down to facing his own success and growing older and having to produce it again and again, they’ll turn on him, and I hope he survives it. All he has to do is look at me or at Mick.”

In a tragic twist of fate, it was that very year that Lennon died, on December 8th, the same night The Boss played the Spectrum in Philadelphia. In his two-night residency at the venue, Springsteen paid tribute to his musical hero by playing a rendition of ‘Twist and Shout’. Arguably, it is one of Lennon’s most iconic vocal performances and a song indicative of a time when The Beatles’ sound captured the hearts and minds of music-loving teenagers across the globe, no more so than Springsteen himself.

Reverting back to the opening question, it felt natural that Springsteen’s chosen song was one that took him back to his and Lennon’s shared innocence. Upon the release of ‘Twist and Shout’ in 1963, Lennon and The Beatles were merely fresh-faced kids, bursting onto the music scene with a sound that alchemised exuberance, innocence and humour in a way not yet seen before. In that same year, Springsteen was a year away from a defining moment in his life when he would hear ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ for the very first time.

Amid the chaos, politics and moral corruption that stares music mega stars in the face, Springsteen playing a track devoid of those trappings, allowing his fans to dance amidst the darkness of one of music’s most tragic evenings, was perhaps the most fitting tribute for Lennon.

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