Brian Fallon makes no secret of the fact that Bruce Springsteen is a core influence. Spend some time in his company talking music and the Boss will inevitably come up in conversation. They have performed together. They’ve hung out. They’re buddies.
The way Fallon speaks about him, it’s like they live over the fence from each other, or run into each other down Whole Foods when they’re out buying groceries. “I do, funnily enough. I see him all over the place!” laughs Fallon.
And he isn’t joking. Fallon was in Springsteen’s company not that long ago, shooting a documentary about the Telecaster. “It’s basically all these people talking about the Fender Telecaster and it’s me and Bruce,” says Fallon. “I’m interviewing Bruce about his Born To Run guitar. I got to hold it and play it. It was nuts. And that was a huge moment for me to get to see and touch [it], just holding that guitar, the Born To Run guitar!”
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Springsteen also had a guitar lesson for him. The Boss taught him how to play pinched harmonics.
“He actually gave me like a little tip, because there was this thing that he was doing that was like a little Roy Buchanan kind of squeal,” says Fallon. “I think the best place you can hear it is if you listen to Bell Bottom Blues from Eric Clapton, the first couple notes of the solo are like picked out with your thumb and then [hums pinch harmonic] and Bruce was showing me how to do that – and that was kind of cool.”
Talk about pinched harmonics these days and Eddie Van Halen, Zakk Wylde and Dimebag Darrell are the kinds of players who get mentioned in dispatches. But Roy Buchanan was doing them in the ‘50s, Clapton just over a decade later on Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs – and the example Fallon describes, where Clapton chokes his guitar out on them, is a very different thing to the super-sized squeal in rock and metal guitar.
Fallon says there is a lot we can learn from Springsteen the player. Yeah, we all give the Boss props for his songwriting, for performing. But his playing goes under the radar.
Fallon reminds us that Springsteen has ridiculously good chops.
“Oh, man, well, you got to watch this. If you go on YouTube, in 1975, they did the Live From Hammersmith Odeon album, then did Born To Run. Go to It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City,” he says. “Go watch that and how he plays guitar during that. And then he does at the end he does like a little trade-off thing, like a jam with Steven, and you’ll just see.
“Bruce, around Asbury Park in 1970, pre-Born To Run, like 1972/1973, he was known as the best guitar player in town, he was a serious gunslinger – and he still can really rip.”
Springsteen did not join the likes of Brandon Flowers and Phil Collen on Fallon’s new star-studded solo LP, Not Bad For New Jersey, but he was on The Gaslight Anthem’s 2023 comeback album, History Books, and there’s always next time.
He did however directly influence it.
The tempo and rhythm to the track Pearl, with the throb and pulse of that tremolo guitar, was an idea Fallon got from Aretha Franklin’s recording of The Dark End Of The Street, when she was accompanied on the track by two legendary Muscle Shoals players, Eddie Hinton and Jimmy Johnson (with Johnson sometimes credited on bass guitar it was surely Hinton who was responsible for the tremolo guitar part).
But the rhythm – where it is almost like a heartbeat – comes straight from golden era Springsteen.
“I like that pulse, even when it’s exaggerated, I really am enjoying that in any kind of music now, that kind of like heartbeat thing,” he says. “I think it’s really from Born In The USA, because that’s what Bruce said about, ‘I’m on fire!’. It’s like that’s the rhythm.
“The rhythm was supposed to be a pulse, like a heartbeat, so I think it was probably from that in my head. That’s where it came from.”
You can read our interview with Brian Fallon in full, coming soon to MusicRadar – and you can preorder Not Bad For New Jersey now, which is out via Nash York Records on September 11.
