Bruce Springsteen Wrote This Song for Elvis, but Elvis Died Before He Ever Got the Demo

Bruce Springsteen, like so many other kids growing up in the late 1950s, wanted to be just like Elvis Presley when he grew up. A then-six-year-old Springsteen immediately asked his mother, Adele Springsteen, to buy him a guitar after watching the King of Rock and Roll on television.

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Decades later, when Springsteen had established his own musical career, he tried to collaborate with the icon who inspired him to pick up his instrument in the first place. Sadly, the Boss ended up being a day late and a dollar short.

Bruce Springsteen Idolized Elvis Growing Up

Elvis Presley was a driving force behind countless future rock stars picking up a guitar in the late 1950s, including the Beatles, who, in turn, would go on to inspire just as many musicians themselves. Bruce Springsteen was certainly no exception. After watching Elvis perform on the Ed Sullivan Show, the young New Jersey boy knew he had found his life’s calling.

“It wasn’t just the way Elvis looked,” Springsteen later said, per Clinton Heylin’s E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band. “It was the way he moved that made people crazy, p***ed off, driven to screaming ecstasy and profane revulsion. That was [the power of] television. I had to get a guitar the next day. I stood in front of the mirror with that guitar on, and I knew that that was what had been missing. But then I crawled back into the grave or something until I was thirteen.”

The “grave” in question was a myriad of other interests popular among boys his age: baseball, football, etc. Playing the guitar wasn’t as effortless as Elvis made it look and, like so many other children who pick up an instrument before they’re ready to play, Springsteen let his guitar gather dust until his teen years. The rest, of course, is rock ‘n’ roll history. Springsteen managed to dodge the Vietnam draft out of high school because of a previous concussion and his behavior at the induction. Seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show sparked his interest in music once more, and he began playing gigs around the Garden State. By 1972, he had formed the E Street Band.

The Boss Wrote A Song For The King

By the end of the 1970s, Bruce Springsteen was a rock star in his own right. With albums like Born to Run and Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., under his belt, Springsteen began writing songs for a new album, Darkness on the Edge of Town. Springsteen didn’t want to chase after hits. He wanted to write raw, authentic rock ‘n’ roll music, even if that meant he wouldn’t be the one cutting the actual record. One such song that came about during these Darkness sessions was a track called “Fire.”

Springsteen wrote “Fire” with Elvis Presley in mind, even sending the King of Rock and Roll a demo of it in the hopes that he would cut the record. Sadly, Elvis died before it arrived. “Then, I decided to give the song to Robert Gordon because his voice is a little like Elvis,’” Springsteen recalled. “When I hear him, I kinda get the impression that Elvis is singing it.”

In the end, the most successful version of “Fire” would come from the Pointer Sisters, who released their rendition of Springsteen’s song on their 1978 album Energy. The song peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, besting its songwriter’s top single “Born to Run” by 21 spots.

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