Benson Boone Is Known for His Backflips. Nils Lofgren Did Them First

Last month, Nils Lofgren was watching the Grammy Awards when he came upon a familiar sight. After Benson Boone started his performance of “Beautiful Things” in the audience, Lofgren observed Boone jump atop a piano and execute a side backflip; he then launched into yet another flip midway through the song. “He sounded great,” Lofgren says, “but I wasn’t ready for that. I’m glad to see the tradition carrying on.”

In the hall of fame of rock & roll stage moves, a backflip is a category all its own. Who did it first, however, is open to debate, and even Lofgren jokes, “Hell, somebody back in ancient times was probably doing it with a lute.” But starting with his band Grin and up through his solo career and early tours with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Lofgren perfected the move more than 50 years before recent Rolling Stone cover star Boone. Carting around a three-foot-diameter trampoline, usually positioned at a 45-degree angle and placed on the side of the stage, Lofgren would regularly step onto the tramp, do a flip — while playing guitar — and, for the most part, stick the landing.

“I would run, jump up, hit the trampoline, flip backwards towards the audience, and land, and the band would crash back in,” he says. “I always thought you could marry athletics and rock.”

For Lofgren, the backflip grew out of stage survival. As he recalls, Grin were about to open for the J. Geils Band at a show in the early Seventies. Given the energy that the Geils Band (and especially frontman Peter Wolf) put out, Lofgren knew it would be daunting to precede them. “I couldn’t figure out what can I do to compete with this that’s authentic,” he recalls. “I wasn’t feeling like I could jump around stage yet.“

During his time on the gymnastics team at his high school in Bethesda, Maryland, Lofgren, who is five feet three, had already learned how to do a backflip. Pulling one off with a guitar could be the solution to his stage concerns. He contacted his old gym teacher — who’d also been an Olympics coach — to learn how to do the acrobatic move while holding onto his instrument. With the help of his coach and training belts, Lofgren practiced before the show. “You have to violently throw your arms up over your head and back,” he says. “You use a lot of upper body for the back flip, which goes away if you’re holding a guitar.”

That night, Lofgren decided to debut the flip — and, it turns out, wisely so. “Three-thousand drunk college kids,” he says. “They were booing us, yelling for J. Geils, yelling ‘We hate you!’ Bottles were crashing around the drum kit.”

For the last song, Lofgren went for the backflip, but without his guitar. It worked: As Grin were leaving the stage, the promoter — who’d warned them against playing more than 30 minutes as an opener — begged Grin to return for an encore; the kids were going berserk over his high-flying move. Grin went back out and, after the encore, Lofgren rewarded the crowd with another flip, this time breaking out the move he’d practiced with his guitar. “We got an encore from people who were throwing bottles at me and yelling at me to get off the stage,” he says. “Now they were deliriously happy. I thought, ‘Wow, welcome to show business.’”

For roughly the next 15 years, a guitar backflip became an almost nightly part of Lofgren’s stage act in whatever group he played in; he even included one in a video for his 1983 single “Across the Tracks.” “I was crazy back then,” he says, recalling the moment in the show when he felt obliged to catch air. “You’re standing there playing rock & roll, sipping a little drink between songs, having a ball and then all of a sudden, ‘Oh, shit.’ It was a little scary. But I was very young and thought, ‘Hey, man, just focus.’ Once in a while I’d land and fall back on my ass.”

After he joined the E Street Band in 1984, Lofgren recalls an early rehearsal where Springsteen brought up the signature move. “He said, ‘Nils, that flip thing — I don’t know if we should use it. What do you think?’ I said, ‘Well, you’re the bandleader — that’s your call.’ He said, ‘Well, if you do it 100 times, how many times are you going to fall?’ I said, ‘Well, 100 times — I’ll fall once, but I won’t get hurt. I’ll tip back over on my ass and backslide across the stage.’ And he said, ‘Okay, let’s put it in the show.’”

With that, Lofgren’s flip became a regular part of shows on the Born in the U.S.A. tour into 1985, which immediately distinguished Lofgren from the man he’d replaced, Steve Van Zandt. One night, he recalls, “I stumbled and put my hands down like, ‘Thank God — I got through that,’” he says. “I turned around and Bruce is shaking his head, laughing at me on the microphone, and says, ‘Not good enough. Do it again!’ I’m looking at him and thinking, ‘Bruce. It’s me. We’re not in the Cirque du fucking Soleil. What are you thinking?’ But when our bandleader says, ‘Do it again,’ I do it again and land on my knees and hands and barely made it around.”

Lofgren wasn’t done that night: “I’m starting to get bruised up and Bruce is ready to call it a day. But like an idiot, I leap up and in front of the whole crowd, I put my finger up, like, ‘No, you started this. I’m going to get it right.’  I go do it a third time, and I belly-flop. I graze the top of my head. I almost break my neck, and I literally land face down on my guitar on the stage. At that point I hear Bruce go, ‘Fuck it!’ and I stumbled up in shame and embarrassment. But I was grateful I didn’t break my neck.”

After that first E Street Band tour, and as he was approaching 40, Lofgren decided it was time to retire the stage flip. “It served me well for a long time,” he says. “And then after that, I finally decided, well, maybe I’m good enough now to just sing and play for people and be very animated on stage.”

Still, Lofgren couldn’t resist being physical, whether it was continuing to play basketball on concrete city courts or jumping off Ringo Starr’s drum riser when he was part of the first All Starr Band tours. Combined with his more than a decade of doing stage backflips — and the hard landings they entailed — Lofgren finally had to undergo hip replacement surgery in 2008. He still moves around onstage (as he’ll do with Springsteen on the E Street Band’s European shows this spring and summer) and he still has tales to tell (his video series Rockality). But his days of backflips are over. As he told RS in 2009, a year after his surgery, “I can’t pull out my old trampoline and do a backflip with my guitar on. I can’t jump off a drum riser without real risking becoming a cripple at this point. It’s not worth having myself cut open again in five years.”

Watching Benson Boone’s own moves, Lofgren says he’s impressed with his ability to do a roundoff, land backwards and, using that momentum, do a backflip on the ground. “It’s a classic round-off back-flip that every young gymnast, boy or girl, does,” he says approvingly. “His side flips off the piano are also very cool. It’s a different version of a barani, where you go forward, do a half-twist and land backwards. He’s obviously had gymnastic training.”  

As far as advice for Boone, Lofgren, 73, has a little bit to share from his own experience, which, he says, resulted in two metal hips and no rotator cuffs. “I don’t know if the guy has a drink once in a while. But be careful not to have too many drinks before you do gymnastics,” Lofgren says. “And it’s 10 or 20 years from now and he’s still doing all that stuff, just weigh in with a physical therapist and a coach if something’s not feeling right. Throughout history, a lot of musicians will not exercise. They’re famous for it. For me, it was a good run, but as you get older and beat up, it’s dangerous.”