How 'Bob Springs' Became Springsteen

Fan Fiction About the Seeger Sessions Tour, 2006

You might have heard that Bruce Springsteen has released seven previously unreleased albums in a single package, “Tracks II: The Lost Albums” today. This is not about that. Instead, it is a piece of “fan fiction” I wrote and kept mostly to myself (probably for good reason) in 2006, after seeing Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band at Madison Square Garden. I got a ticket from my Billboard colleague Thom Duffy. I enjoyed that show, and the loose, funky band playing hopped-up old American folk standards blues standards from his one-off “Seeger Sessions” album. It’s also the last Bruce show to which I could afford a ticket: It was only about $100.

Working my way—and it is a bit of work—through my downloads of the seven albums in “Tracks II,” I realized that some are heirs, or ancestors, of the Seeger sessions. I thought I’d blow the dust off this one from my old, unread blog and present it today, since I haven’t made it through all of the Lost Seven. I don’t like listening to music like I’m cramming for an exam.

This is an alternative history of Bruce Springsteen and the history of rock music; it is almost entirely fictional and is intended as both a tribute and as satire. Any resemblance blah blah blah is intentional and often untrue. For example Bruce was not named and have a 1950s rockabilly career as “Bob Springs,” nor did Pete Seeger on electric guitar lead a popular 1970s rock band.

This summer, as we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the classic 1965 album, “We Shall Overcome: Bruce Springsteen & the Seeger Sessions Band,” it is worth taking a moment to consider the history behind this groundbreaking musical event. It is hoped that the following will convey the essential “truthiness” of the early days of rock and folk music. No horns or string instruments were hurt in writing this.

When Elvis Presley was drafted into the United States Army in 1958, the artist now known as Bruce Springsteen was a struggling rockabilly singer performing under the name Bobby Springs.

Recording for the Tupelo, Miss.-based Rebel Yell label, Springs was one of a number of Elvis-soundalikes trying to fill the King’s shoes in the late 1950s, including Conway Twitty, Ral Donner, and Conrad Birdie. When Presley’s dear mother Gladys passed away on Aug. 14, 1958, Springs’ recorded a heartfelt tribute, encouraging Elvis to be strong for his family and country. The song, “Elvis, Kill A Commie for Your Mommy,” was a minor regional hit in scattered parts of the South in the fall of 1958.

Springs would have remained little more than a footnote in the history of rock had fate not stepped in. In the early winter of 1959, Springs was part of a package tour in the upper midwest. In early rock’s most mourned tragedy, three rising stars—Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens—died in a plane crash the night of Feb. 3, 1959. The next night, the surviving tour members, who had taken a bus, performed a tribute concert at the next tour stop, Fargo, N.D., where a local teenager named Robert Velline, just shy of his 16th birthday, warmed the crowd with his close-enough-approximations of Holly’s style.

Backing Velline that night was the Big Bopper’s bass player, Robert Zimmerman, another teen from relatively nearby Hibbing, Minn.; and Bob Springs on guitar and vocals.

Bob Springs manager, Major Tom Parker, took on Velline as a client that night as well. Just as he had created the stage name Bob Springs (Springs’ given name was Bruce Springsteen), the Major dubbed Velline “Bobby Vee.” The manager would later become immortalized in David Bowie’s song, “Space Oddity,” with the refrain, “ground control to Major Tom.” These were supposedly the last words from the Fargo airport control tower acknowledging that the plane with Holly, Valens and the Big Bopper had disappeared from radar.

Vee, Springs and Zimmerman hit it off, and decided to continue to tour and record together as Bobby, Bob and Robert, though some pressings of their 45 rpm singles identify the group as Bob, Bob and Bob. And one song, a cover of Valens’ “La Bamba” that was a minor regional hit in a few counties of South Texas and Central California, was credited to Los Tres Robertos, or Los Bobos.

There’s no question that Bobby, Bob and Robert were ahead of their time. They were the first group to utilize three electric guitars, the first to intentionally use feedback and distortion for effect, the first to transcend the limitations of the three minute single. One early signature tune, a tribute to jazz musician Charlie Parker, was called “Free Bird.”

But their 1959 concept album, “Ore,” a set of songs by Zimmerman and Vee about the heavy metal unearthed in Upper Midwest’s Iron Range, was thought to be deranged, by their label, and never released. Furious and depressed, the band broke up.

Zimmerman went to Tennessee. He stopped at Sam Phillips’ Sun Studios and cut a track called “Memphis Blues Again” that, remarkably, got airplay on influential black stations like Memphis’ WDIA. When WDIA dj (and Sun artist) Rufus Thomas met Zimmerman for the first time, he was struck by the shy guitarist’s damp, limp handshake. “It was like shaking hands with a pickle—a dill hand,” Thomas joked. Zimmerman himself was amused. In need of a stage name, he considered Robert Dill Hand, then Bob Dilland, then, finally, settled on Bob Dylan.

Vee, of course, became a pop star, with Holly-inflected hits like “Rubber Ball” and tinkly ballads like “Take Good Care of My Baby.”

But what of Springs? Aimless for a few months, he joined the Army. While Elvis had had a soft, highly publicized posting in West Germany, Springs was part of a top secret “Black Ops” team in Southeast Asia; they were among the first U.S. “technical advisors” to the South Vietnamese military.

Upon his return, he made a few attempts at reviving his rock career. Visiting a buddy who was an ex-Navy Seal in Norfolk, Va., Springs got up to sing in a club where hometown hero Gary “U.S.” Bonds was performing. Riding high with “A Quarter to Three” and “Seven Day Weekend,” Bonds tried to help Springs launch a rock’n’roll career. But derivative tracks like “Half Past Four” and “Eight Days A Week” never penetrated the charts in the U.S., though the latter especially became a cult favorite in the U.K.
Springs was feeling not just dissatisfaction with his career, but dismay at what he had seen in Vietnam. He began singing and writing songs about his experiences there.

Deciding to break with what he felt was the “phoniness” of his past, he reclaimed his name, Bruce Springsteen. Accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and a harmonica held on a brace, Springsteen’s debut album for Columbia Records, “Greetings from Pnom Penh, Cambodia,” made him a darling of the Greenwich Village folk music circuit.
Soon, every folk singer from Gerde’s Folk City and the Bitter End in New York to the Ash Grove and the Troubadour in Los Angeles was singing Springsteen’s poetic, topical songs, like “Sown’ in the Wind” (“the seeds of freedom are so-wn’ in the wind”); “Think Twice, It’s Not All Right”; and the title song of his third Columbia album, which had the stirring line, “Those masters of war, baby they were born to kill...”

Springsteen was quickly adopted as a protege by the great political folk singer Pete Seeger. In 1963, they sang “We Shall Overcome” at the historic March on Washington, led by Dr. Martin Luther King. (It was one of the few times Springsteen ever sang in public with his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Joan Baez.) In 1964, Seeger and Springsteen performed together at the Newport (R.I.) Folk Festival to universal acclaim.

Yet Springsteen’s evolving musical curiosity would strain his relationship with Seeger. The following year at Newport was the debut of Bruce Springsteen and the
Seeger Sessions Band, an 18 piece lineup with fiddles, banjos and horns. Fistfights broke out among the usually peaceful throng: Some found the broad arrangements of the folk songs an adventurous, exciting tribute, while others thought the use of a horn section on folk songs to be sacrilege. Seeger himself was mortified: “It sounds like Benny Goodman,” he was heard to mutter backstage. Springsteen and Seeger didn’t speak for many years, although the venerable folk singer would ultimately make his accord with rock’n’roll in the 1970s, with a string of hits by Pete Seeger and the Silver Bullet Band.

And in that summer of 1965, as Bruce had written a few years earlier, “The Tide Was A Changin’.” Former folk singers like Barry McGuire of the New Christy Minstrels had antiwar, pro-Civil Rights songs like “Eve of Destruction” on the charts; L.A.-based folkies Jim McGuinn and David Crosby and their band, the Byrds, hit the top of the charts with an electrified version of Springsteen’s “Mr. Tangerine Man.”

In the early 1960s, Bob Dylan had moved to Nashville at the behest of his friend, Johnny Cash, writing songs such as “Desolation Music Row” that totally mystified traditionalists. But in the summer of 1965, he ended his isolation with an unexpected series of hard rocking hits: Wearing a white jumpsuit, colorful scarves, a black toupee and doing karate moves onstage, Dylan became not just the most charismatic stage performer of his era, but achieved what was once only a pipedream in his 6-minute-long hit single, “(I’m Gonna be a Big Star, Baby) Like the Rolling Stones.”

All these great records, not to mention hits by the Beatles, the Animals, the Beach Boys, the Supremes and other Motown stars, had to compete for No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. For in 1965 into 1966, top 40 supremacy belonged to Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band, with five consecutive No. 1 singles from the album: “John Henry,” “Erie Canal,” “Pay Me My Money Down,” “Keep Your Eye On the Prize” and “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep.”

As you’re reading this, the 60th anniversary edition of “The Seeger Sessions” is no doubt rising on the album charts, while the single “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep” stands at No. 2, just behind the female rappers known as the Yeastie Boys “Let’s Impeach the President” at the top of the top 40.

Rumors of a Bob, Bob and Bob reunion have surged through cyberspace, although some listeners to Latin radio swear that the reggaeton hit, “Presidente Puerco” is in fact performed by Los Tres Robertos.

Asked for comment, Springsteen simply said: “Don’t look back.”

Founding subscriber honor roll: Jamie Nicholson, Peter Himmelman, the Pitt-Stoller Family