Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (11 page)
Because the idea of taking that quote and blowing that thing up like that, that’s a bunch of jive. The future ain’t any damned thing. Who was gonna swallow that? This is me. Who the hell wants to read stuff like that?
Just like suicide tactics. Crazy, crazy, crazy stuff to do. You wanna kill somebody off? It’s like I said earlier—you gotta fight out from underneath something all the time. Who CARES, anyway? A kid in his chair—he couldn’t give a damn what the future is or anything!
You know, he DON’T CARE about that kind of stuff, don’t even pay attention to, it’s just business like what it amounts to is, Jon Landau [one of the producers on the
Born to Run
LP] wrote a great article—with his heart—and on that level it was very, very encouraging to me.
At the time we weren’t doing so good, and it helped me out with the record company. But what they did with it was, like, a cheap publicity trick, and I resent it very much, that they used that quote.
I guess good intentions were intended but it was a D-R-A-G, the whole episode was a big drag for me, and still is. I mean, who wants to come out on stage and be the future every night? Not me.
You know, let somebody else, let the guy who thought up using it in the ad, come out and do it! You know? See how he likes it. It was like
another big, big mistake, right up there with the New Dylan thing. Same calibre.
Taking a wide view of the rock scene before you came into it with any strength with albums, do you think rock needed you, or someone, to revitalise the music scene?
I don’t think about it. I’ve lived on a pretty personal basis. It’s as simple as that, you know. I don’t know why anybody needs it. People always moan and moan—rock this, rock that, and everybody’s all saying: hey, that’s supposed to be cool.
To say everything stinks is supposed to be right. Well, it’s affected the musicians, I’m sure it has. I never felt that way. I always felt it was always very real. I know what it did to me, and it still does. I know when it happens to be right, and when I put it on a record, I go NUTS! You know, I love it.
It’s a reason to live, helps people out. Now a lot of the new music hasn’t done that. In fact, you know, it’s like … I don’t know why, I wish I knew why. It just hasn’t done that.
You mean heavy rock?
Yeah, I could do with hearing some good new stuff. The Move had a single out once which was great, great song, and there are good records that still come out, but a lot of them get lost in the shuffle. A lot of them don’t get a chance. That should have been a hit single, that song, on the radio, all over the country.
But it didn’t. And, you know, so many good musicians are just trying to make it happen, just trying to make it through to the next day.
Your manager has to approach things more professionally than you, with more business consciousness than perhaps you do—he has to take a financial view of things. How is your relationship with him in that respect? If he wants for you massive commercial success is there any situation here when you’ll say to him: “I’ll go no further than that because I don’t like it”?
Sure there is. I gotta watch out with that stuff. There’s not going to be an easy way out for anybody just hanging round here, you know. I think everybody realizes that and anybody who doesn’t realize it that’s working with us will soon realise it, you know. Because it’s not going to get easier. It’s gonna get harder, ’cos it gets harder on me.
Founded in 1969 and based in Detroit,
Creem
billed itself as “America’s Only Rock ’n Roll Magazine.” Edited by Lester Bangs, who became one of the premier rock critics of the 1970s, the magazine also featured the early writing of such notable critics as Dave Marsh, Greil Marcus, and Robert Duncan, who wrote this feature. Referring back to the recording of
Born to Run
, Springsteen says, “that was the most horrible period of my life.” Telling his “crooked mirror” story about the making of the album (see “The Lost Interviews”), Springsteen also tells Duncan, “I thought [
Born to Run
] was the worst piece of garbage I’d ever heard. I told Columbia I wouldn’t release it. I told ’em I’d just go down to the Bottom Line gig and do all the new songs and make it a live album.”
Understand. New Jersey has no baseball or football teams and half of it stinks. It used to be that if you were from Jersey and you came over to New York—by that I mean Manhattan, naturally; Queens certainly doesn’t count—you didn’t admit you were from Jersey. No, if there was one thing we New Yorkers could get together on it was Jersey: not a one
of us would’ve given a second thought to blowing the joint off the face of the universe like the infected pimple that it was …
Was
, I say. My God, how times change. I mean, I stopped going to the Academy of Music on 14th Street because the average patron there was a Jerseyite—you know, loud or nodded out or smelly or in any way obnoxious. But now, just like the guys down the hall from me who pretend that they’re
black
and jive and shuffle about the building all day, I—a New York chauvinist if ever there was one—wonder why my mother wasn’t considerate enough to have gone to Jersey to borne me. And when folks ask,
these
days, if I have any interest in impressing them, I say: “Me? Hey, I’m from
Jersey
, man!” Because—may Fiorello LaGuardia rest in peace—it’s finally and unmistakably
hip
to be from the “armpit of the nation,” that newly venerable State of New Jersey …
But, of course, I don’t try to fool these guys, these authentic specimens, and besides, they probably have ways of checking …
“I was born in Sheboygan,” I tell Bruce Springsteen, Miami Steve Van Zandt and company, who unanimously fall over in their seats laughing, having just discussed the drag scene that had gone down in Wisconsin—they think it was “some place like Sheboygan probably.” And they’re still laughing while this chick journalist who is accompanying the band and who lives in England “but originally came from Jersey”—I bet,
bitch!
—asks me with a singular ridiculing distaste, “Exactly how do you spell that … She-boy-gan?” Well, all I know is God wasn’t shittin’! The last shall be the first,
indeed!
And I begin to counterattack.
“Sure, I know,” Springsteen readily admits. “When I was 18 and playing in this place in California in this bar band these people would come up to us and say, ‘Hey, I really dig you guys! Where do ya come from?’ And I’d say, ‘New Jersey.’ And they’d just go ‘Yecch! Ecch!’ ” So he knows, huh. I suggest to Springsteen that he probably should get some sort of public service citation from the Governor (if this one’s not in jail yet) for finally making Jersey—I choose my next word carefully so as not to flatter my uppity tormentors—“tolerable.” But Bruce doesn’t detect my thinly veiled sarcasm, mulls the point over for a moment, stroking his grizzly chin, and says, “I ain’t got nothin’ from nobody in Jersey. I mean, when I’m home I walk up and down the boardwalk all day and not one person—well, sometimes one—stops and says, ‘Hi!’ or ‘Hey, I know you!’ ” Then the lights go on behind this Jersey punk’s eyes—which he averts from mine, shyly, because we’ve just recently
met—and he tells me whimsically, but only half-jokingly, “What I think I’m gonna do is get on all the clothes I’m wearing on the album, you know, and get it just right. And hold my guitar, out here, this way, just so … And maybe I’ll even get ol’ Clarence and lean on him just so … Do the whole cover thing … Maybe
then
people’ll notice.” And for the first time since the show several hours earlier Springsteen laughs in his wheezing kind of chortle-through-the-nose way and looks directly at me. The ice is broken.
As the waitress passes, my new buddy (can a guy from New York really call a guy from Jersey his “buddy”? I am drunk) and I decide that more beer is in order. While it is only Springsteen’s second of the evening, the record company man asks protectively of his Next Big Thing, “You sure you should have another, Bruce?” In mortal fear that I may lose a drinking partner, I insist that Springsteen try the famous local brand. Over the protestations of the company man, Springsteen instructs the waitress, “O.K., yeah. Give me one of them.” He points to my empty. “But I won’t know the difference,” he says to me. “I don’t really drink beer.” Doesn’t drink beer? I remark to myself suspiciously. And when he confirms the stories that he doesn’t take drugs either … well, frankly, it
bothers
me. Somehow, in terms of the tradition which he is carrying on, it makes Springsteen, the would-be new Rock ’n’ Roll Rebel King, somewhat inauthentic.
I must deal with this contradiction. Sitting across from him in this sleazy downtown Detroit jock bar, once owned by the ex-football star turned TV personality Alex Karras, this place that is absolutely a drinker’s hangout, I assess the Phenomenon’s offstage persona, seeking the flaws. The clothing immediately stands out. In place of the studded black leather jacket, which Springsteen expropriated from James Dean for stage use, is a much more stylish, tapered sport coat of reddish leather. In place of the sneakers, which the record company has established as some sort of trademark, is a pair of brand new shiny high-heeled boots. Aha! This street kid stuff is just so much showmanship as I had suspected! Beside me, Miami Steve, who has a much more recognizably Jersey accent as well, looks more the part than Springsteen (or “Da Boss,” as he calls him), having shed his onstage pimp costume to deck himself out entirely in black leather. Disillusionment is setting in. Then I listen to the conversation.
Springsteen is speaking in what appears to be his natural voice, breathy, gritty with a black cadence. He and Miami are talking about
their old buddies on E Street (yes, there is such a place) and if those guys could see them now. As Bruce has been warming up with the beer which he so rarely indulges in, Steve has been warming up with these miniature bottles of rosé. Now they’re talking quite seriously about the boardwalk at Asbury Park and the pinball machines. Miami Steve has made the seemingly logical proposal to Bruce that if the pinball people can make an “Elton John–Pinball Wizard” table, why shouldn’t there be a “Bruce Springsteen–Born to Run” table as well. Bruce explains to him with a similar forthrightness and logic, “Ya see, these guys wanna make
bucks
… You gotta be
famous
.” (Little did the two kids quietly turning over their dream world, determining what is and what will be, realize that around the next corner lurked
Time
and
Newsweek
covers. Little did they dream of Springsteen’s unprecedented ascension to nationwide fame.) Then they started to tease their record company guys, New York City rats both, about a recent trip to Asbury Park. Bruce mockingly relates the incident wherein one of the guys joined him on Asbury Park’s infamous “Rock ’n’ Roll Ride.” “It goes around and round,” he explains. “And up and down, in and out”—he accelerates with the ride—“and this and that way and-all-over-the-place! Wow!” He laughs. The company guy owns up, “Yeah, I was screwed up for two whole days afterwards.” Tapered red leather sports coat? That’s just the way they dress up in Jersey for a Saturday night. Listening to Springsteen, it becomes readily apparent that he’s for real, that if he’s no longer one of them, at least he’s
from
them, those kids he writes about, and deeply rooted in the steamy, frenetic landscape of Asbury Park, New Jersey. And while the Next Big Punk/Street Poet/Rock ’n’ Roller hype may have put his current album at the top of the charts, it certainly isn’t disseminated by him and seems to have caused Springsteen enough pain with the pleasure.
We’re talking about the recording of
Born to Run
. Abruptly, Bruce shifts gears and stomps on the pedal. He leans across the table willfully to within inches of my face. Everyone else at the table is shut out. His eyes are ablaze. “That was the most horrible period of my life …
the most horrible period of my life
,” he states, shaking his head slowly back and forth and sweeping his hand unequivocally across everything. And when I ask him why, he grabs the Columbia press packet from in front of his publicist and holds it up beside his face. Across the top is Jon Landau’s famous quote, “I saw the rock ’n’ roll future and its name is Springsteen.” Bugging eyes rivet me. Then impulsively, frustratedly,
Springsteen bites the packet and rips it with his teeth, finally tearing it in half with his hands and throwing it to the floor. “THAT!” he barks savagely in answer to my question.
“Let me tell ya,” he continues more quietly, but no less intensely. “I had this
horrible
pressure in the studio and for the whole last part of the record I was living in this certain Inn in New York over west. [The place is, in fact, notorious and has been raided more than once for gambling and prostitution.] And the room there had this …” He sizes something up. “It had this crooked mirror. And every day, before I’d go over to the studio I’d straighten out this crooked mirror … And every day when I’d come home, that mirror was
crooked
again. Every time. That crooked mirror … it just couldn’t stay straight … So I’m in there with this crooked mirror and after about a week the room started to look like Nagasaki
anyway
…” He pauses suspended in his gesture that indicates the room and then launches in again. “… junk
all over
the place. And
then
one day this chick I was with one night in Texas calls up and says she’s in Jersey and she doesn’t have any place to stay and she’s
freakin’ out!
And so finally I say, ‘O.K. You can stay here.’ So every day I’d go into the studio and there was
that
and then I’d come home and there’d be this crooked mirror and … this crazy chick, you see.” And he has to laugh as each Chinese box of his story gives way to another absurd package.
But as Springsteen goes on, elaborating on how every day of recording was
supposed
to be the last, brief sessions stretching on into weeks, and how
everybody
was “getting crazy,” he gets serious again. “One night,” he tells me, towards the end of the record, “I was sittin’ there at the piano in the studio, tryin’ to get down the last cut, ‘She’s the One,’ and Landau’s in the booth and we’ve been at it for hours and hours. I just lean my head down on the piano. It just won’t come. And everybody’s tryin’ to tell me how to do it—they were all there to
help
me and they were really tryin’—and Landau’s sayin’ this and that and freakin’ out … and then, all of a sudden, everyone looks around and Landau has just disappeared, just walked off into the night—night, it was like
six a.m
.—couldn’t take it. He was smart to go home and get some sleep. The whole thing was like that. And when I got home around ten in the morning to the room with the crooked mirror, this chick she says to me—she says it every night when I come home—” and Springsteen’s voice softens, “ ‘Is it finished?’ and I say, ‘No.’ And I could’ve cried … I almost cried …” Springsteen goes further away for a moment.
“… Well, maybe I did cry a little …” And then snaps back. “… I almost cried.”
