Bruce Springsteen thinks musicians dying young is “a normal thing” because the industry puts “enormous pressures on young people”
Bruce Springsteen has opened up on the pressures of being a musician, and how substance abuse and dying young has become a “normal thing” because of it.
The Boss’ reflections on fame and life in the public eye arrive after the death of One Direction star Liam Payne, who died aged 31 last month after falling from a balcony in Buenos Aires. A number of medications were found in his hotel room following his death, and multiple media reports allege that he had drugs in his system.
READ MORE: “The day of the ‘rock star’ is in twilight”: Bruce Springsteen says he wouldn’t want to start a rock band nowadays
In a new interview with the Telegraph, alongside manager and producer Jon Landau and director Thom Zimny, Springsteen says of Payne’s tragic passing, “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,” he adds. “I mean, I’ve had my own wrestling with different things. The band has all wrestled with their own issues.”
Later in the interview, Springsteen shares that though drugs were not uncommon in the E Street band, he had an expectation that they would not interfere with how his members would perform on 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,” he says.
Landau goes on to reflect on the deaths of Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix in the 1970s: “The romance that can surround this kind of thing was not appealing at all,” he states. “And so we, as a group, we just never went down that road.”
Springsten adds, “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?”
In other Springsteen news, a new film titled Road Diary is available to stream now on Disney+ which documents the band’s journey to their 2023 concert tour.
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