There is a moment, early in Bruce Springsteen's acoustic Broadway show Springsteen on Broadway, now available on Netflix, when the Boss begins to describe a particular type of fun. Standing at the microphone on a bare stage at the Walter Kerr Theatre, playing the same riff over and over on his guitar, he talks to the audience in his classic off-the-cuff way.
“Fun, the real kind,” he says, that “joyful, life-affirming…soul-lifting bliss of a freer existence…and all you needed to do to get a taste of it was to risk being your true self.”
He's talking, of course, about rock 'n' roll. More specifically, he's describing the moment when, as a 7-year-old, he saw Elvis Presley perform on The Ed Sullivan Show—an experience Bruce credits with transforming him into an artist in his own right. Encountering Elvis's hip-quaking guitar playing for the first time, Springsteen says, made him feel like “suddenly a new world existed.” It marked the beginning of a lifelong love affair with rock—one that would deliver him from the alienation that had blanketed his life and into that “soul-lifting bliss of a freer existence.”
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