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Bruce has made some references to the hippie movement in interviews, speeches, and his autobiography. The general sense I got was that he felt rather distant from it for various reasons but still shaped by it to some extent. He called himself "half-hippie" at certain points, saying he felt split between the blue collar world and the hippie world.
He often emphasized that his influences were "pre-psychedelic": Late-50s and early-60s music (Roy Oribson, Elvis, Duane Eddy, Girl Groups). When he was making Born To Run, he emphasized these influences more.
Overall, I was curious about how he felt about the later 60s. Clearly he had a lot of musical development through The Castiles/Child/Earth/Steel Mill/etc/.
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I think he enjoyed the hippie ideal of free love, tuning in and dropping out, etc. I don’t think the music did much for him, as he went from pre-psychedelic to rock n roll to punk influencers fairly quickly in the 70s.
I think his anti-war stance that would really emerge after No Nukes and Born in the USA also demonstrates somewhat of a kinship with hippie ideals
Yeah, it's a bit of a nuanced journey: he considered himself "apolitical" through most of the 60s and 70s, but because the times were so tumultuous and ever changing, he was still sort of shaped by the era. You could interpret it in a "personal is political" way.
Land of Hope and Dreams: Springsteen Interview
So even though he didn't have a well-thought out political ideology or prescriptive ideas, he could empathize with the anguish of people losing their jobs, or young people being sent off to fight for a war they knew little about. Subtly pointing at larger oppressive forces.
At least, that's how I interpret it.
I think he’s liberal, but doesn’t like the other aspects of hippy culture. As someone who was a major rockstar of the 70s, he was never really a big drug user or a womanizer.
I agree Bruce was never a big drug user. But not certain he was not a womanizer in the 70s.
As a dead head I took note of this in his autobiography. He mentioned seeing The Grateful Dead at a local community college and he didn’t like the music. But he was very impressed by the sense of community among the band and fans so he wanted to have that for his band. I don’t recall specifically but I think he came around to appreciate the band. Side note when he stopped playing with E Street, Clarence would sometimes sit in with The Dead and he considered joining the band.
In turn, Jerry Garcia was initially skeptical of Bruce, calling it the "Bruce Springsteen splash" in an interview because he thought Bruce was a very local New Jersey phenomenon that critics were trying to push into national relevance.
It would certainly be interesting to compare and contrast the E Street Band and the Dead: Bruce is definitely a strict bandleader, while the Dead didn't have an official leader (though early Bruce jammed more). I think Bob Dylan and Tom Petty were reverent of the Grateful Dead, so there's definitely some connections and adjacent artists. Bruce also played with Solar Circus (a Grateful-Dead influenced Jersey band).
That last is a surprise. I remember the days when E Street jammed more. Great, great shows. The fact that Bruce and the band still do great shows is outstanding.
Ideologically it probably affected him more than musically. He merged the left wing ideals of the "hippie" movement (despite many hippies going on to become yuppies) with the blue collar life ideals at least the ones his parents held which were more left leaning. Which explains why many people became turned off of him post 9/11 as blue collar ideals became more rooted in blind faith conservative-ism and jingoism rather than community and unity.
Hoyever there is a huge psychedelic musical spirit on the Working On A Dream album that dosent get talked about.
I think he was fairly familiar with the culture you’re describing in the period immediately before his record deal. I feel like in his book he is a self-described long haired lead guitar player who was playing in fairly experimental and progressive bands. I think of the iteration of the Bruce Springsteen Band with a bunch of people onstage playing board games - even if it wasn’t specifically hippie-inspired, it still seems closer to it than what his persona developed into through the 70’s and into the 80’s. I appreciate the theatricality on display in Bruce’s early albums, up through Born to Run before he stripped things back stylistically for Darkness on the Edge of Town. I also think of the then-contemporary Van Morrison influence that Bruce demonstrates on Greetings and The Wild, The Innocent…. To me those two albums feel very of their era, as opposed to the “classic” influences he would more openly embrace as his career went along.
I could see that. There's sort of a division between the way Bruce sees himself, the way the pubic sees Bruce, and how his music development actually progressed.
Bruce tends to emphasize his pre-1964 influences the most. In Deliver Me From Nowhere, he claimed that he wasn't that influenced after 1964. And the broader music narrative tends to present Bruce as a revivalist who focuses on pre-Beatles music. Which as you observed, it's not entirely true.
He obviously has been emphasizing The Castiles a lot ("Last Man Standing", the story of George Theiss, their identity as his first "real band"). Whereas Steel Mill was one of his most famous pre-record contract bands, but he seems to view it with some distance. Maybe because he no longer does that kind of guitar playing or jamming. Never mind all the other iterations like Earth, Child (Steel Mill's predecessor), Dr. Zoom, Bruce Springsteen band, etc.
On a broader level: while I'm not well-versed in the hippie movement, I've thought about their influence since they're one of the biggest countercultural/alternative movements.
In the past, I naively thought that alternative/rebellious/countercultural movements had some solidarity with each other. But over the years, you see how certain alternative subcultures were very critical of hippies like the punks. David Bowie was also critical of the hippie movement (see the song "Cygnet Committee") and his foray into Glam Rock was sort of a response to it.
Bruce was a hippie. He dodged the draft and probably smoked weed at least a little, despite claiming he didn’t.
he didn't dodge the draft. he was 4F. big difference.
He admitted to dodging the draft by acting as if he was on lsd.
https://www.upi.com/Bruce-Springsteen-I-was-a-stone-cold-draft-dodger/2231493471519/
https://time.com/5606245/bruce-springsteen-military-veterans/
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/bruce-springsteen-wrote-born-in-usa-exclusive-book-excerpt-811634/
i know bruce used that word. but he wrote that many years after he got that 4F. "dodging" at that time meant either not showing up for your physical or leaving the country. like bruce, my boyfriend also got out of going, by losing enough weight to be classified as underweight. but he had to go back yearly to be re-weighed. the difference was that i knew people who left the country and one of them was thrown in jail when he tried to sneak back in for "dodging the draft". but springsteen was lucky to get that 4F. lots of guys i knew tried the same thing and didn't succeed. bruce had a relatively low number in the lottery and would have been drafted for sure in 1970 without it.
He's described himself as the world's biggest Rolling Stones fan. He loved the Allman Brothers. Of course he's a huge Chuck Berry/Orbison/Beatles too but I don't think his tastes are that different from other people and musicians of his era. He just one day or over time decided to start writing Dylan style poetry instead of Zeppelin guitar and the rest is history.
“Let’s take LSD and off some pigs, do do do…”
ALL THOSE YEARS
For the old timers out there.