Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen was born on September 23, 1949, in Long Branch, New Jersey, USA. His father, Douglas Frederick Springsteen, worked as a bus driver, and was of Irish and Dutch ancestry. His mother, Adele Ann (Zerilli),worked as a legal secretary, and was of Italian descent. He has an older sister, Virginia, and a younger sister Pamela Springsteen. Raised as a Catholic, Bruce was inspired to take up music at the age of seven after seeing Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show.
He bought his first guitar at the age of thirteen for eighteen dollars, and his mother took out a loan when he was sixteen to buy him a Kent guitar for sixty dollars. In 1965, he became the lead guitarist in the band "The Castiles," and later became the lead singer. The Castiles recorded two original songs at a public recording studio in Brick Township, New Jersey.
From 1969 to 1971, he performed with Steven Van Zandt, Danny Federici, and Vini "Mad Dog" Lopez in a band called "Child," which was later renamed "Steel Mill" when Robbin Thompson joined the band. In 1972, he signed a record deal with Columbia Records and released his debut album, "Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.," with his New Jersey-based colleagues, who would later be called "The E Street Band."
In 1973, he released his second album, "The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle," which received critical acclaim but had little commercial success. After more than a year of recording, his third album, "Born to Run," was released in 1975 and became a turning point in his career, with both critical and commercial success.
In 1977, he returned to the studio after a two-year legal battle with his former manager, Mike Appel, and produced the album "Darkness on the Edge of Town," released in 1978, which marked a turning point musically for his career. His next album, "The River," was released in 1980 and sold well, followed by "Nebraska," which received critical acclaim but had little commercial success.
In 1984, he released the album "Born in the U.S.A.," which sold fifteen million copies in the United States alone and had seven top ten singles, becoming one of the best-selling albums of all time. After the huge success of "Born in the U.S.A.," he released a more calm and sedate album in 1987, "Tunnel of Love," which included songs about love lost and the challenges of love, after the break-up with his first wife, Julianne Phillips.
The albums released in 1992, "Lucky Town" and "Human Touch," were also popular, with "Human Touch" hitting the number one spot in the UK. In 1994, he won an Academy Award for the song "Streets of Philadelphia," featured in the film Philadelphia. In 1995, he released the album "The Ghost of Tom Joad," which was mostly a solo guitar album and was inspired by "Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass," a book by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Dale Maharidge.
After being apart from the E Street Band for several years, they reunited with a successful tour that ended in Madison Square Garden in New York in 2000. In 2002, he released the first studio album with the full band in over eighteen years, "The Rising," which became a critical and commercial success. In 2005, he released his third folk album, "Devils & Dust," followed by "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions" in 2006 and "Magic" in 2007.
His 16th album, "Working on a Dream," was released on January 27, 2009. He married actress Julianne Phillips at the age of thirty-five, but the marriage ended in 1989 due to his affair with American singer-songwriter Patti Scialfa. He then married Patti Scialfa on June 8, 1991, and they have three children together: Evan James Springsteen, Jessica Rae Springsteen, and Sam Ryan Springsteen.
