Bruce Springsteen recently suggested that premature passings that are mainly caused by substance abuse, have become a “normal thing” in the music industry. He reckoned that the reason for this is the pressure successful musicians experience.
Bruce Springsteen opens up on the matter
The E Street Band is celebrating its 52nd anniversary this year, and with The Boss still delivering memorable performances at 75, it’s clear that Springsteen and his band know a thing or two about sustaining a long-lasting career. Unfortunately, there are many well-known examples of musicians who showed great promise but never had the opportunity to reach that stage in their careers.
Speaking about the tragic passing of One Direction’s Liam Payne, who died at 31 last month in a hotel in Buenos Aires where a number of medications had been found, Springsteen told the Telegraph in a recent interview:
“That’s not an unusual thing in my business, it’s a normal thing. It’s a business that puts enormous pressures on young people.”
“Young people don’t have the inner facility or the inner self yet to be able to protect themselves from a lot of the things that come with success and fame. So they get lost in a lot of the difficult and often pain-inducing [things]… whether it’s drugs or alcohol to take some of that pressure off. I understand that very well. I mean, I’ve had my own wrestling with different things. The band has all wrestled with their own issues.”
The Boss stated that members of the E Street Band were no strangers to drugs. However, that he strove to keep them off the stage:
“It made a bit of a boundary around that stage, where people had to be relatively sober and at their best. And I always say, one of the things I was proudest of is that if one of my fellas passed on, they passed on of natural causes.”
During the same interview, Springsteen’s long-time friend, manager, and producer Jon Landau talked about how the “romance” of icons who passed away young such as Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix “was not appealing at all” to the Springsteen camp, so they “just never went down that road.” The Boss added about musicians like Kurt Cobain making money for record companies after they pass:
“It’s a grift, man. That’s a part of the story that suckers some young people in, you know, but it’s that old story. Dying young – good for the record company, but what’s in it for you?”
