Bridge and Tunnel Boys: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the Metropolitan Sound of the American Century

Historian Cullen (1980) tracks in this meticulous study how Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel ascended to fame as “embodiments of a... metropolitan culture that emerged and flourished in the late twentieth century.” Describing the period between the 1970s and 2000 as “the Indian Summer of the American Empire... a moment of mortal splendor,” Cullen contends that the era was captured “with unusual acuity and durability” by Springsteen and Joel, each the product of “communities of people living, working and moving within and between a cluster of urban and suburban, industrial and residential settings.” These metropolitan tableaus, Cullen continues, fostered a musical culture of “sauciness, variety, and a strong tendency for integration.” He traces the contours of his subjects’ careers, including how their record label, Columbia Records, pigeonholed Springsteen as “The New Dylan” and Joel as “The American Elton John,” initially thwarting their success, before each wrested back control and reached superstardom with 1975’s Born to Run and 1977’s The Stranger, respectively. Elsewhere, Cullen probes the overlapping if sometimes contrasting ways the musicians related to their origins: Joel “kept an eye” on his Long Island roots even as he often “looked upon his native ground with an ironic or cynical” gaze, while Springsteen “was unabashedly exuberant in celebrating the Jersey Shore in the face of its dilapidation.” Despite a tendency toward verbosity (phrases like “an efflorescence of cultural democracy” abound), this is an engrossing take on two music legends who documented the glory and melancholy of “ordinary American life.” (Oct.)