BY JIM CULLEN - Time Fifty years after their 1973 debut albums on Columbia Records, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel have had dozens of top 10 hits, sold hundreds of millions of records, and continue to fill arenas and stadiums. Their success is undisputed and their legacies secure. What doesn’t often receive attention is how, a half-century later, the suburban roots of both men still play a key role in shaping the contours of those legacies.
By the middle of the 20th century, New York City had developed a distinct musical culture that reflected its polyglot character. From earlier eras, the city had spawned minstrelsy, Broadway show tunes, and the Tin Pan Alley recordings, producing superstar performers like Irving Berlin and Tony Bennett. Gotham was also the nexus of the nation’s radio, record, and television industries.
And yet even as this was happening, traditional American popular music met a revolt from the hinterlands. The Mississippi Delta produced an array of young artists with unique musical approaches, from Robert Johnson to Elvis Presley; the hollers of Appalachia spawned Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn; the grimy industrial port of Liverpool generated the Beatles and the British invasion that followed in their wake. For young people at the time—among them Joel and Springsteen, both born in 1949—these fresh new talents were the defining figures of the age.
The two men saw themselves as heirs of a new tradition that included innovators like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Bob Dylan—all of whom hailed not from the urban northeast but from the nation’s interior.
The urban sprawl of metropolitan New York that made it a cultural driver of American society deeply influenced these artists and writers. Most of them were outer-borough or city-adjacent figures with ethnic origins that didn’t fit into the Black-white racial binary of the American South that was the cradle of so much American music. Many had Jewish or Italian roots, which, in mid-20th century United States, made them racially ambiguous. The Brill Building writers also routinely incorporated Latin elements and accents into their songs, elements sometimes treated with disdain by both elitist record company executives in the 1950s as well as those who prized “pristine” folk music on college campuses and coffeehouses in the early 1960s.
This sprawling New York landscape with its culturally diverse roots shaped Joel and Springsteen as the two teenagers—who had lived remarkably similar lives—forged careers in the late 1960s. Both men grew up on the metropolitan periphery: Joel in Hicksville, Long Island, and Springsteen in Freehold, N.J. They were born into worlds where potato farms were still common features of the local landscape, rapidly replaced by the new crop of cheaply produced mass housing. Commuter-based transportation put the city in reach but just beyond effortless access, making it both alluring and remote. But amid this growing affluence, both were also products of downward mobility, with Joel abandoned by his corporate executive father and Springsteen’s grandfather, a lawyer, going to prison. Both decided in high school that music would be their vocation, and both struggled to realize their ambitions in a milieu where college was an expectation that they rejected.
In 1973, Springsteen and Joel signed with Columbia Records and released their first albums for the label. Within months, the music industry labeled both commercial disappointments. In the next few years, they also both had serious conflicts with their managers that imperiled their careers. In the late 1970s, however, Joel and Springsteen achieved breakthroughs, and by the 1980s—the age of MTV—both were superstars.