The Boss went from E Street to Easy Street by staying true to his humble roots—and rolling up his sleeves and going to work.
By Lisette Voytko-Best, Forbes Staff
When Bruce Springsteen returned to his native New Jersey in 1981, he finally had some financial security. Having just finished his first commercially successful tour—supporting his fifth studio album, The River—he had significant money in his bank account. Still, the then-32-year-old Boss chose to furnish his rented Colts Neck ranch house with cast-off furniture scavenged from the streets.
“I was solvent, which would make me unique in my little neighborhood,” Springsteen recalled in Deliver Me From Nowhere, Warren Zanes’ 2023 book about his landmark follow-up album, 1982’s Nebraska. “So I was dealing with that, with all my very conflicted feelings about being so separate from the people that I’d grown up around and that I wrote about.”
Despite his discomfort with the trappings of wealth, the Garden State’s original guitar hero has amassed a substantial fortune over six decades—which Forbes conservatively estimates to be worth $1.1 billion—singing about his blue-collar roots. Even now, at 74, he’s out there touring and doing three-hour shows. (Representatives for Springsteen could not confirm Forbes’ estimate.) Always a workman’s workman, Bruce is still clocking in and rolling up his sleeves for fans around the world.
Springsteen’s legendary work ethic sprang from a desire to do better than his humble beginnings, although he would always remain loyal to his home state. From his first major label LP, 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, Springsteen’s brand of rock ‘n roll spun tales of manual labor, finding love, and getting out of the town that “rips the bones from your back.” He would know, having been born in a Jersey Shore town to working-class parents, and living with his paternal grandparents in what he described in his memoir as their “noticeably decrepit” home.
Getting out would take some time. Springsteen spent the 1960s playing in a variety of local bands, figuring out who he was as an artist, before eventually signing with Columbia Records. For his debut album, Springsteen was backed by musicians who became the now-legendary E Street Band: guitarist Stevie Van Zandt, drummer Max Weinberg, the late saxophonist Clarence Clemons, among others. They had all met playing local Jersey Shore clubs, and as a group, put The Stone Pony—aka “The House That Bruce Built”—on the map in the 1970s.
The secret to Springsteen’s success? “I was into crafting an identity that was very, very personal to me as a man,” he explains in Deliver Me From Nowhere. “I wanted to connect that identity with the very big picture of the country at large…So I needed people who were going to be willing to go in as deep as I needed and was willing to go myself.”
Once Springsteen had the band, he turned to Jon Landau, a former rock journalist, to be his manager and record producer. It was Landau who, after listening the Boss’ music for the first time in 1974, famously wrote in Boston’s Real Paper: “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” What Landau couldn’t have predicted at the time is that in 2020, Springsteen inducted him into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Over the course of his career, Springsteen has dominated the charts with 21 studio albums, seven live albums, and five EPs, selling over 140 million albums globally. He has also told his stories in a No. 1 New York Times bestselling memoir, and 236 sold-out Broadway performances—along the way he won 20 Grammys, an Oscar, two Golden Globes, a special Tony Award, and has earned a place in both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. The man who sang about finding the American Dream has also received the country’s highest awards, accepting the Kennedy Center Honors in 2009 and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.
Then in 2021, shortly after his second run of Springsteen on Broadway ended, he sold his music catalog to Sony, earning a lump sum of $500 million for his life’s work. At the time, Landau said the deal was deserved for the half-century Springsteen spent making music. “Everybody is getting what is in their interest,” Landau told Forbes in 2022.
And the glory days keep coming: In 2023, Springsteen’s world tour sold more than 1.6 million tickets, generating $380 million in revenue, per Pollstar. With concerts scheduled through mid-2025 and no apparent plans to slow down (The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White is set to portray Springsteen in a forthcoming biopic) the heart of heartland rock remains, in his words, a gun for hire.
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