How Bruce Springsteen Protected Himself and Bandmates From a “Death Cult”
From the 27 Club to the tragically premature losses of rock stars like John Lennon and John Paul Jones, the musical world and death, unfortunately, can seem like they go hand in hand—but Bruce Springsteen has gone to great lengths to protect himself and his E Street bandmates from what he calls the “death cult.”
The Boss is certainly no stranger to booze and drugs (he had his come-up in the 1970s, after all), but he’s made a point to place firm boundaries around what he and his colleagues do. Based on their decades-long career, we’d say it’s working.
How Bruce Springsteen Protects Himself and His Bandmates
Bruce Springsteen sat down with The Telegraph just days after the shocking death of One Direction star Liam Payne. Even as an artist whose homebase is across the pond, Springsteen could readily identify with Payne’s trajectory from his meteoric rise to his struggles with substance abuse to his tragic end that came far too soon. It’s a path to and from stardom that Springsteen knows well and has taken great pains to avoid himself.
“I’ve had my own wrestling with different things,” he said. “The band has all wrestled with different things. Drugs were not uncommon in the E Street Band, you know. There was a boundary, however. I stayed out of your business, but if I was on stage and I saw that you were not your complete self, there was going to be a problem. So, I made a bit of a boundary around that stage, where people had to be relatively sober.”