(Credits: Far Out / Carl Lender)
Fri 12 December 2025 2:00, UK
Every single Bruce Springsteen song seemed to have a little piece of rock and roll history in it.
Whether you were listening to the hits or some of the more obscure deep cuts that you’d find midway through The River, there would be the occasional nod to Chuck Berry, a Little Richard shout here and there, or maybe even a subtle percussion that Bo Diddley made his own before rock even existed. But when it comes to ‘The Boss’s personal favourites, a lot of it came back to the guitar heroes that lit his world on fire.
Then again, anyone who grew up in Springsteen’s generation was going to be influenced by Berry without even knowing it. He may have had to learn a few of his licks secondhand from Keith Richards, but from The Beatles to the Stones to Led Zeppelin, everyone who has ever tried to make the guitar scream or reenact Marty McFly’s iconic performance in Back to the Future is bound to have a few Berry licks tucked away in their subconscious.
If you get past the initial sounds of rock and roll, a lot of what Springsteen was listening to came from a strange mix of folk and blues. Bob Dylan had already broken down the door for people to listen to folk artists with nothing but acoustic guitars in their hands, but for anyone remotely interested in playing rock and roll, they would have to be delving into a few Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson licks to get by in their early days.
Despite being one of the biggest draws of the New Jersey scene, though, what Springsteen was after was a certain twang in his guitar sound. It wasn’t necessarily country music by any stretch of the imagination, but when listening to the greatest rockabilly players from the time, the sound of country pickers was never that far away when listening to people like Scotty Moore and Carl Perkins.
The way that the strings hit against the pickups on those country-flavoured rock tunes helped make every single riff stick out that much more. It made every Springsteen song sound like the New Jersey equivalent of an old Western, but whereas George Harrison learned country picking off of Carl Perkins, hearing Duane Eddy get twang out of his guitar was what turned Springsteen’s head when he first started hearing him.
So when Eddy passed away in 2024, Springsteen was the first to say that he would have been nowhere without him, saying, “This is a belated note of gratitude and remembrance for the king of the twang guitar, Duane Eddy, who just recently passed away. Without Duane, there’s no [‘Born to Run’]. Play on in that big house of 1,000 guitars. We love you.” But Eddy was only half of that battle for Springsteen.
The entire goal of Born to Run was to take the twang of Eddy’s guitar, the voice of Roy Orbison, and the production value of Phil Spector and turn it into a rock and roll opera, and Springsteen was the one making it all happen. There was no clear lick that predicted how the guitar talked in the middle of ‘Thunder Road’, but the minute that Springsteen hit that guitar line, it felt like it had been there since the dawn of the genre.
So while Springsteen had the chance to make the best music that would make his idols proud, it was never about trying to outdo his heroes. He knew that he needed to sound authentic if he wanted to be believed, and Eddy’s guitar was the kind of lifeforce that he hung onto every single time he put together one of his tracks.
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