Bruce Springsteen gives advice to young musicians at SXSW

By Daniel Terdiman/CNET

AUSTIN, Texas - (CBS News) Bruce Springsteen has some advice for all the young Turks hoping to make a name for themselves in music: Be tough, and cocky. But be humble, too.

Pictures: Bruce Springsteen
Pictures: SxSW in 2012

"Rumble, young musicians, rumble," The Boss urged a capacity crowd at his keynote speech at South by Southwest Thursday. "Open your ears, and open your hearts. Don't take yourself too seriously, but take yourself as seriously as death itself. Don't worry, but worry your ass off. Have iron-clad confidence, but doubt. It keeps you awake and alert. Believe you are the baddest ass in town. And you suck."

During his 50-minute speech to thousands of adoring musicians and music-lovers, Springsteen offered an impassioned history of his growth and influences as a rocker. Mostly, he spoke from the heart, but illustrating a few points, he pulled out his guitar and played.

Take his paean to The Animals, a Sixties band whose music he called "a revelation." Rocking a few lines from "We Gotta Get Out of this Place," Springsteen said the song was one of the first records with "full-blown class consciousness I've ever heard."

And, he added, "That's every song I've every written. That's all of it, I'm not kidding. 'Born to Run,' 'Born in the USA,' everything I've done in the last 40 years."

Springsteen, of course, has done more in his years as a rocker than any hundred musicians, but even his path to glory had a "genesis moment." And that call to action was seeing Elvis Presley shock the world--and shake up an industry dominated by black music--on the Ed Sullivan show in 1956. That evening, as a six-year-old, he realized "you did not have to be constrained by your upbringing or the way you looked."

Along the way, he layered on influence after influence--doo-wop ("the most sensual music ever"), Roy Orbison, The Beatles, the Sex Pistols ("so frightening, they shook the Earth"), Motown, Bob Dylan, James Brown, Country, and the workingman's Blues.

In the end, Springsteen urged up-and-comers, musicians looking to make their mark, to keep it simple. Just play music.

"The purity of human expression and experience is not confined to guitars, to tubes, to turntables, to microchips. There is no right way, no pure way, of doing. There is just doing," Springsteen said. "We live in a post authentic world, and today authenticity is a house of mirrors. It's all just what you're bringing when the lights go down. It's your teachers, your influences, and your personal history. At the end of the day, it's the power and purpose of your music that still matters.