He was there at the very beginning — playing drums when Bruce Springsteen was still building something from scratch on the Jersey Shore. Now, more than five decades later, Vini Lopez is offering a public disagreement with the man he helped launch.
In a recent interview with the California Post, Lopez — Springsteen’s original E Street Band drummer and a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer — pushed back on the political direction his former bandleader has taken on his current concert tour. The message was brief, direct, and notably free of personal animosity.
“You gotta have respect for the president,” Lopez said.
The context for Lopez’s comments is hard to miss. Since Springsteen kicked off his Land of Hope and Dreams Tour in Minneapolis on March 31, the 76-year-old rock icon has turned portions of his concerts into pointed political speeches.
He has described the Trump administration as “corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless and treasonous.” He has mocked President Trump, 79, as a “president who can’t handle the truth” and a “wannabe king.” He told ICE to “get the f— out of Minneapolis.” He declared the tour would be “political and very topical about what’s going on in the country.”
The approach has drawn both passionate support and significant blowback — including criticism over the steep ticket prices attached to a tour framed around themes of democratic values and working-class struggle, and a Truth Social post from Trump himself calling Springsteen a “total loser” and urging his supporters to “boycott his overpriced concerts.”
Lopez is not joining that pile-on. But he is drawing a line.
“Mucho Respect”
Lopez was careful to frame his disagreement as a matter of principle rather than personal politics.
“Trump is the president of the United States — everyone should have respect for him,” Lopez told the California Post. “And if I was standing there talking to him, I would have mucho respect for the man.”
He added that in such a meeting, he “wouldn’t talk to him about anything that’s going on” politically — a reflection of his broader view that divisive political conversations rarely produce more than division.
Lopez knows what it is like to be in Trump’s presence. He recalled meeting the president — before Trump held political office — at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. He was aware of Trump’s conservative politics at the time and extended a handshake regardless.
“He was very nice to me,” Lopez said. “He was very inquisitive and introduced me to Melania.”
As Lopez was leaving that day, he recalled, Trump pulled him aside with a request he clearly found memorable.
“Tell Bruce I’m his biggest fan,” Trump said.
A Different Philosophy on Music and Politics
The contrast between Lopez’s approach and Springsteen’s could hardly be sharper — and Lopez makes it explicit.
Lopez currently performs with his own group, The Wonderful Winos. Whatever he or his bandmates think about politics, he said, it stays off the stage.
“My band, whatever we think, we don’t go there in our music,” he said simply.
He is not asking Springsteen to do the same — Lopez was clear that he supports his former bandleader’s right to speak. “I’m not against what Bruce is saying,” he told the California Post.
But Lopez, who described himself as not strongly ideological — while acknowledging he has voted Republican in races from local City Council to Congress — expressed weariness with the intensity of political polarization more broadly.
“Maybe when I was 20, I was a little more extreme, but I’m 77 now, so the extremities are gone,” he said. “It’s so divided, the political part. It’s a tough one on me.”
He closed with a note of cautious hope about the current moment: “I would love to see something good come out.”
A Long History, Still Intact
For all the philosophical distance between them on this particular issue, Lopez was emphatic that his relationship with Springsteen remains warm and genuinely intact.
Their history runs deep. In 1969, Lopez, Springsteen, Vinnie Roslin, and Danny Federici founded a band called Child — which later became Steel Mill — performing together until 1971. When Springsteen formed the E Street Band, Lopez was in the original lineup.
He played on Springsteen’s first two studio albums — “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” and “The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle” — before departing in 1974. He later told the California Post he was “too jazzy” for the direction Springsteen wanted to take.
The two have reunited multiple times since. In April 2014, Lopez was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the E Street Band and performed with the group at the ceremony. In September 2016, he made a guest appearance during Springsteen’s River Tour stop in Philadelphia.
He and Springsteen still speak occasionally — the calls, he noted with quiet sadness, often come when someone from their extended circle has passed away.
“That’s happening more and more,” he said.
Lopez said he and Springsteen are on “perfect” terms. He did not attend any of the current tour’s shows and does not plan to — but he remains someone his former bandleader will call when the moment calls for it.
“If he wants me to do something, he’ll call me,” Lopez said.
Vini Lopez is not picking a fight with Bruce Springsteen. He is not amplifying Trump’s criticism of the Boss, and he is not calling for the concerts to stop. What he is doing is offering a perspective from someone who has known Springsteen longer than almost anyone — and who sees the current political moment through a lens shaped by 77 years of lived experience rather than ideological conviction. His message is simple, almost old-fashioned: the president deserves respect, music and politics make uneasy partners, and the division tearing through American life is “a tough one” for all of us. Coming from a founding member of one of rock’s most storied bands, it lands a little differently than it would from anyone else.
