Jimmy Iovine has had one of the most illustrious careers in music.
It was 1978. “No one knew what the words Mercedes Benz meant to me,” Springsteen said. “But Jimmy knew.” It took getting Springsteen in his orange Mercedes and taking him on a drive to Coney Island, to convince him to give the unfinished composition “Because The Night” to a punk band called the Patti Smith Group.
“With Jimmy’s guidance, Patti turns ‘Because The Night’ into a huge Top Five hit record,” Springsteen said as the audience cheered. “Something that I could never have done, because I didn’t have the guts to turn it into a love song … Jimmy knows great songs and he knows who can sing them. He has one of the greatest guts for talent is one of the greatest sponges for learning I’ve ever met.”
Springsteen, who met Iovine as the “skinny Italian kid” changing the tape on the recording machine, spoke about watching his career unfold in spectacular ways as he trusted his artists, honored his relationships, and never “took off his fan shoes.”
JIMMY IOVINE HAS graduated from being the skinny Italian kid who changes the tape and hits the start and stop buttons on the recording machine to the skinny Italian kid at the console engineer on Born To Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town. I walk in the studio and Jon just says to me, ‘he told me he could do it.’ I asked him ‘what’s this kid doing at our mixing boards?’ But somehow, he did it, and on an engineer’s salary, he had parked outside the Record Plant, an orange Mercedes. Now, this was a moment when no one knew what the words Mercedes Benz meant to me. Jimmy knew. What else does Jimmy know? That afternoon, gets me in that honorable Mercedes Benz, and takes me on a little drive to Coney Island. On the way, he casually drops, “What’re going to do with that song, “Because The Night?”
