Bruce Springsteen: Let's hear it for the Boss, 9/11's own chronicler

He memorialised ordinary Americans long before 11 September. No wonder his new album has struck a chord with his still grieving compatriots

The stage remained in near-darkness as he began to sing, a voice seemingly from beyond the grave:

Can't see nothin' in front of me,
Can't see nothin' coming up behind,
I make my way through this darkness

It wasn't until the gospel-like chorus kicked in – "Come on up for the rising"– that a flood of light revealed the source of the sound in all his defiant glory.

The song was "The Rising", and it was how Bruce Springsteen opened his show in East Rutherford, New Jersey, last week, the first in a tour that is to take him from his own backyard in north-east America across a further 38 US cities and on to Europe.

"The Rising" is the title song from Springsteen's new album, his first all-new work for seven years, and his first to feature the full complement of the E Street Band – the backing group that helped to make him famous – for 18 years. Inspired by the events of 11 September, The Rising went straight to No 1 in both the US and British album charts last week, placing Springsteen – nearly 53 and with record sales of some 100 million going back to the early 1970s – in a category beyond that of mere ageing rock legend.

No artistic response to 11 September has been quite so direct as The Rising. "The sky was falling and streaked with blood/I heard you calling me, then you disappeared into dust", Springsteen sings in "Into the Fire". In "You're Missing", he sings of "Coffee cups on the counter, jackets on the chair/Papers on the doorstep, but you're not there".

An artist who takes on such a uniquely momentous subject as 11 September runs a big risk. In lesser hands, the exercise might come across as mawkish, worthy, trite, opportunistic, exploitative and self-aggrandising, to list just a few of the more obvious pitfalls attendant upon such a venture. The trouble is that even in Springsteen's hands, some of the results are not so far above those criticisms.

While reviewers' reactions to The Rising have been mixed, everyone has found at least a few songs to admire, and what cannot be denied is that if anybody could be said to have the "right" to turn 11 September into art, then it is Springsteen. He is the musician who has done more than any to chronicle the trials and tribulations of ordinary Americans over the past three decades, at the same time as finding the nobility in their souls.

Springsteen was memorialising his countrymen long before 11 September happened, and after it had, he says, it was as if he had been "kind of asked" to tell the story of it in song. In joining other stars who appeared in a tribute telethon broadcast in America the week after the attacks, Springsteen was responding to a sense of duty that is at the heart of much of his work. And as the emotion stirred in him by 11 September turned itself into new songs – "It was a very natural thing to write about," he says – so he found himself on the creative path that has ended with him once more a cherished figure in American rock 'n' roll. "I'm sure his motives were honorable," says Pat Gilbert, the editor of the music monthly, Mojo.

Bill Greider, formerly of Rolling Stone magazine, now of the left-of-centre weekly The Nation, is a leading commentator on American politics who has followed Springsteen's career closely. "My take on what happened post-11 September was that we had a moment that was real and powerful in which there was a universal feeling of pulling together," he says. "Then it changed into a sense of victimhood. I think with The Rising, Springsteen is going back to the original sensibility. He's offering a very humanistic understanding of what happened, as opposed to the self-righteousness of our leadership's geo-political view."

But with the anthemic "The Rising" now a fixture on American airwaves, the distinction that Greider draws might well be lost on Republicans looking for a soundtrack to their post-11 September world view. It wouldn't be the first time that Springsteen had found himself misappropriated.

As the son of a frequently unemployed factory hand of Irish-Dutch descent and an Italian mother whose work ethic made a big impact on him as a boy, Springsteen grew up in the 1950s and 1960s with both an avowed belief in the dignity of labour and a highly developed sense of the hardships endured by the American working class. He took up the guitar at the age of 13, and within a few years his talent for rock 'n' roll offered an alternative life.

After the promise of a first contract – never fulfilled – had enticed him to drop out of college, Springsteen took the band he had formed there to California, his parents' new home. He had a breakthrough with the 1972 deal he signed with Columbia Records, but his first big hit did not come until "Born to Run" three years later – a powerful expression of the yearning to escape an American Dream gone sour.

There followed the top 10 chart albums Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River, and Nebraska, before the 1984 song "Born in the USA" completed the rise to megastardom of the performer who had now acquired his own sobriquet, the Boss. Not that he could stop the Reagan administration adopting "Born in the USA" – a mordant comment on the fate of Vietnam vets and the work of an undoubted liberal conscience – as a nationalistic signature tune that it hoped would make the country forget about its economic woes.

Meanwhile, the denim-clad Springsteen, his body pumped to resemble the manual labourer he never had to be, retained the common touch in spite of communicating with his audience – almost exclusively white, and largely male – through vast stadium shows. In plangent narratives of lost lives, Springsteen always looked for the good in people, and songs such as "Hungry Heart" and "Dancing in the Dark" had some of the most memorable hooks in rock 'n' roll. There was a reflective phase in the 1990s, in which Springsteen won an Oscar for "Streets of Philadelphia", the song he wrote for the Aids film Philadelphia, and went in for a sparer, more acoustic style.

As the industry looks back 25 years to the death of Elvis Presley, it's possible to find comparisons in the two men's humble backgrounds, says the acclaimed Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick, and in the way that each stuck with his origins in terms of his public image. But the absence of a black influence in Springsteen's music means that he has never reached beyond a certain audience.

It was as yet another "new Bob Dylan" that Springsteen had arrived on the scene, but lacking Dylan's mystique, lyrical range and many of his concerns, he had to settle for imparting a simpler but, to his fans, no less powerful message. Nobody ever called Springsteen an enigma.

Having been divorced by his first wife, Springsteen is now married to Patti Scialfa, one of his backing singers, with whom he lives on 420 acres of New Jersey farmland, close to where he grew up, with their three children. The couple are in the business of promoting small family farms; their aim is to make their own 100 per cent organic.

A dedicated family man, Springsteen's roots are very important to him. Locals commute into Manhattan, and Springsteen knew a number of people who died on 11 September. To an extent his response to what happened was simply that of a neighbour. And for millions of Americans, Springsteen is just the kind of guy they'd like to have living next door.