Kennedy Center honors ‘The Boss’

Bruce Springsteen, a scruffy, awkward, self-described “cosmic kid,” bet his life that rock ‘n’ roll could deliver him from a dysfunctional Irish-Italian ocean-side existence — that one day, he would “walk like Brando right into the sun.”

His gamble proved spectacularly correct.

At 60 years old, the Kennedy Center Honoree has delivered a finishing kick to a decade-long resurgence that has seen a flurry of ambitious recordings and an indefatigable stretch of live performances.

A “victory lap,” as Mr. Springsteen himself put it.

Yet the career of Bruce Frederick Springsteen of Freehold, N.J., almost never took off — despite his auspicious discovery by the same legendary talent scout (John Hammond) who signed Bob Dylan to Columbia Records.

Emerging from the ebullient, R&B-laden Jersey Shore music scene of the late 1960s, the young Mr. Springsteen, in retrospect, sounded distinctly different from his iconic label mate Mr. Dylan, to whom he was often compared and by whom he most certainly was influenced.

The voice was more akin to Van Morrison’s, for one. Also, the febrile wordplay of his early lyrics harbored neither the populist political sensibility for which he later would become renowned nor the “finger-pointing” topicality of Dylan-era folk. He was billed as a solo artist, a singer-songwriter, but he surrounded himself with a disheveled group of musicians — eventually known as the E Street Band — with comic, gashouse-gang nicknames: “Phantom Dan,” “Miami Steve,” “Mad Dog.”

The musical arrangements found on Mr. Springsteen’s first pair of albums, “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.,” and “The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle,” both released in 1973, were eccentric, often sprawling, never simple even when they seemed so, and punctuated by the altogether un-Dylanesque saxophone lines of Clarence Clemons.

Despite positive notices, they were flops.

Mr. Springsteen, on the cusp of being dropped by Columbia and returning to boardwalk refuse, persisted.

Rock ‘n’ roll may have been the stuff of romance and escape, but for the working-class Mr. Springsteen and his band mates, it also was a job — a job performed in front of young people who were peers, not adoring fanatics.

Mr. Springsteen’s beginnings as a teenage working musician were as humble as can be imagined: drive-in theaters, hospital benefits, shopping centers. By his early 20s, he was touring incessantly, vectoring out from the Jersey Shore to New York City nightclubs and college campuses throughout the Northeast, especially Philadelphia.

“I had never heard of him,” recalls Karla Andre, a Philadelphia-area native who lives in Nashville, Tenn., and first saw Mr. Springsteen in April 1974 at her alma mater, Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa. “You don’t know a song or what to expect, and then you get a vibe. All of us walked away saying, ‘This is great.’”

Shows at West Chester College and Kutztown State College, both now universities, soon followed. “We became local followers,” Mrs. Andre says — a typical conversion experience for countless Springsteen fans.

“Our roots were pre-psychedelic,” Mr. Springsteen recently told the British magazine Q. “The bohemian approach of the Stones — which I love so much, and I am a huge fan of — didn’t make a lot of sense to the lives of the kids we started off playing to. What made sense was hardworkingsoul man, the aspirations of Motown — that if you found a way to find your place, you might be able to move up slightly. These were the things that got you through the night.”

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