DAVID Sancious was standing off to the side of the stage, watching his boss perform solo, when he had an epiphany. “After our set was over, he would occasionally come back out and play a song called ‘For You’,” says the one-time keyboardist for the Bruce Springsteen Band. “On the record it’s got the whole band and everything. It’s very cool. But he’d do an acoustic piano version of it, while we’re just hanging out to the side of the stage.”
Along with the rest of the audience, Sancious was mesmerised. “I used to watch him and watch the crowd very closely. The way he held everyone’s attention with that song – I could just tell that this guy was going all the way. At some point everybody’s going to know about him. And that’s exactly what happened. It was such a magnetic, energised thing. Bruce became the master of connecting with his audience.”
The early 1970s were a period of great creative growth for Springsteen, who graduated from boardwalk hero to major-label touring act to, famously, the future of rock’n’roll. From the beginning he had supreme confidence in himself and his songs, but exactly what kind of artist did he wantleading his road-tested band through winding arrangements of word-dense compositions?
