Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (12 page)

The “crazy chick” is now his near-longtime girlfriend, Karen Darvin. And the record? “After it was finished? I
hated
it! I couldn’t stand to listen to it. I thought it 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.” Of course, Columbia prevailed upon him to release the record, and while it did rise to the top of the charts and while Bruce can now laugh and say of the album these several months later, “I like it,” he also assures firmly: “Never again!”

But you mustn’t believe him. First of all, he’s from Jersey. Second: just listen to the care that went into
Born to Run
and you try to figure out how he can retreat from that. Third: he has this limitless energy and is driven by a sincere desire to give an audience everything that they could have hoped for in a performance because “You cannot take that audience lightly.” Unless he gets thoroughly corrupted by corporate economic policy and/or his own publicity, this guy will never just put out “product”—live or in the studio—he’s too honest.

Miami Steve is making sure that the barmaid tells Alex Karras that “Miami says hello,” as we’re all swept out of the bar. One record company guy has gone ahead to get the car, and, as we emerge onto the street, he pulls up. Everybody is piling in when Springsteen announces, “Nahh, I don’t want to drive. I’m gonna walk back.” And he expands his chest to take in a lungful of the dubiously nutritional Detroit air. In drunken mimicry, I do the same … and damned if it don’t feel good! I tap on my chest and shout to Springsteen, “H2O! H2O!” And he responds at first with a sheepish grin, unsure of my comic intentions, but a little drunk himself, echoes “Right! H2O!” And despite the protests of the company chaperones, the Next Big Thing and I set off into the murky Motown night, oblivious to danger and also oblivious to the fact that I’m not at all sure of the direction of the hotel, though I’m a certifiably good guesser.

Springsteen has his harp out and is stepping jauntily in time to his own unaccompanied version of “Not Fade Away,” singing between his honks in a quiet sinuous wheeze. (If they ain’t drowned out, Jersey cats can get hopelessly corny.) A block into our perilous journey, Springsteen realizes that the company guys are following slowly behind us in the car. He motions them on. When they stay put, he steps up to the
car and good-naturedly tells them to “Get outta here!” We walk on. Another block. The car remains on our trail. Suddenly, Springsteen pivots and races head-on at the slow-moving car, bounding solidly onto the hood in his high-heeled boots, and then stomping and skidding his way onto the roof where in mock-frenzy attack he jumps up and down repeatedly. “Hey! You’re gonna wreck the goddamned rented car, Bruce!” some Nervous Nellie within shouts out. “Nahhh!” Springsteen countermands as he finishes his assault and leaps back to the pavement. The car scoots off.

I laugh. It’s the kind of wanton nonsense that I expect from Rock ’n’ Roll Kings. He chortles in his nose and withdraws back into the harp and “Not Fade Away.” But fade away he does. Back at the hotel (amazingly enough) he makes a gracious, if perfunctory, gesture to invite us all in, but when we get off the elevator at the sixth floor it’s clear that he’s heading towards his room—swaying, actually—and sleep and that everyone else should go elsewhere. Aww! Those Jersey punks could never take it! I think as I careen off to whatever I can find. But in a more rational moment, I realize that mere mortals must sleep.

syndicated radio interview on
King Biscuit Flower Hour
, July 9, 1978

Dave Herman was one of the earliest and most influential FM radio rock ’n’ roll disc jockeys, first at WMMR in Philadelphia (along with Ed Sciaky) and then WNEW in New York. In 1975, he resisted playing Springsteen because he was turned off by all the hype, but after seeing him live that August at the Bottom Line, he became an impassioned fan. Promoting his brand new
Darkness on the Edge of Town
, Bruce talks about his reaction to the
Born to Run
phenomenon, about his relationship with Jon Landau, about the members of the band, and the new album: “I like it, which is always a hard thing to do.”

A few weeks ago, we went to San Diego where the band was performing on their current tour, for a rare radio interview with Bruce Springsteen. Bruce had been somewhat of a recluse during the last three years and we were eager to find out what he had been up to
.

Bruce, there seems to be quite a change going on with you. I mean, for one, you’ve never given interviews before and now suddenly you’re quite agreeable to talking. What’s up?

I didn’t want an instant replay of my
Born to Run
release, and so I initially thought, well, I’m not going to do any interviews right now. I’m not going to, I’m going to lay low and let the record come out and stuff. And I just realized a lot of things had changed since ’75 I guess, since 1975 and slowly like you said over the last month or so, I took a different attitude towards, towards I guess promoting your record.

That’s what a boy’s band does, I guess
.

Which is something’ that like, it was something that like, what? Promote my record? I can’t do that.

Did you think it was kind of like selling your own stuff, like calling the promoting as almost like selling, maybe?

Yeah, well it is, that’s what you do. That’s what you do. I chased very aggressively after what I was trying to get in the studio, and I worked real, real hard on it and, and I believe in it a lot. And for some reason I guess it dawned on me that it was silly to, like, do that. I mean, the records aren’t going to like sprout legs and walk out stores and jump on the people’s record players and say “listen to me.”

There’s a lot of records out there
.

I said, here it is, I worked a year on this thing and I put everything I had into it. Now I want it to get out there, I want it to get heard. I want to get as many people listening to it as possible. An audience is something, you don’t inherit an audience, and they don’t run over to your door and knock on your door and sit in your lap. You got to, I think you got to go out and you got to say, here’s what I think, I believe this, and give people a chance to hear it and make up their minds. I was a little wary first of all, of … I was afraid of the
Born to Run
thing.

By that, you mean all the publicity and all the press and all the …

Yeah, what I mean is I didn’t have it in perspective. I didn’t know what had frightened me about that and what had not. And so I bunched everything into something that I just called, like, the
Born to Run
experience or whatever it was.

Have you been able to separate from that, what it was that frightened you then?

Since then, what frightened me about it was I started to play, to get as
much, say, control of my life as I could, and that’s what I felt slipping away and that’s what scared me. And I was real naïve about it at the time. We’d blown through three or four years of playing, we had albums out. And the money came in, the money went out. And I was doing what I always wanted to do with my life, I was travelling around, and I I felt really good. And then what happens is, once you become what is known as a capital generator, something that makes money …

For lots of other people
.

Right, all of a sudden it’s a different ballgame and a different ballpark and you better get wise to it or else you’re going to get stomped on.

You mean that you become not only Bruce Springsteen the person, but Bruce Springsteen the product
.

Well, the whole thing, it’s like, to ignore that fact is just stupid and it’s just what it is: it’s not real. And I spent a lot of time ignoring that. For quite a while, not even intentional because it didn’t connect to me that way. It was like I was living out my rock ’n’ roll dream there.

Fantasy …

And it was something that once I had gotten that position of all a sudden, hey look, there’s more money than we can spend. What happens is, then come the distractions. Hey, do you want this, do you want that. Hey, you can have this. Do you want a car? Do you want a limousine? Whatever. All the standard distractions that …

Things that happen when you get to be rich and famous …

…
come down the line to take your mind off of, to distract you from what is real and from your initial motivations, the things you started out for. But I always had it in my head, I always knew that, I always knew what I was doing there. Because I knew that when I was losing, I knew that it was slipping away. Like, I knew why I started, and I knew it was slipping away, and I got scared by it.

Well I want to get something specific from you. What is it, what is it you wanted to do when you started?

It’s easy. A lot of people wander, wander through their lives. You’re bouncing off walls, you’re bouncing off people, you’re bouncing off different
jobs. And you end up 55 and you never found something that you wanted to do.

Sounds like “Racing in the Street.”

And you’re down the tubes. And when I was 13 or 14, I found something that was like a key to a little door that said there’s more to it than this. There’s like … there’s just more to this than living that way.

So is that when you decided you wanted to get into rock and roll, when you were 13, 14 and heard these records?

Well, originally I was nine and I saw my mother was an Elvis Presley fan and she had him on the TV and she used to listen to him on the radio, like every morning in my house. Come down before you go to school. My mother’s cooking up the breakfast, got the radio on top of the refrigerator, tuned to the AM station ever since I could remember. And there was something connected then but I was a little young to, I didn’t have the discipline to stick with it or something. And when I was 13, the English thing happened, the Beatles and the Animals and the Stones, that really kicked it off for me. I said, that looks like something that’s good to get into. And the point was once again to have some say in the way you’re going to live and the way you’re going to do the thing you’re going to do. And for the first time in a long time, it was during the
Born to Run
thing that I felt that slipping away. I felt the old gas pedal stuck to the floor, in a runaway car.

People were running you and you weren’t running your life
.

Yeah, and it was like I was lucky enough to realize it and grind it to a halt, and it was a moment where I guess I assessed my strengths and my weaknesses. And I’m glad it happened. I’m like, I don’t … I ain’t got one regret about, about one second of the past three years. Because I learned a lot from it.

So,
Darkness on the Edge of Town
is a whole new beginning for you. It’s a whole change, it’s just a whole new beginning because you’ve got a whole new perspective on yourself and your life
.

It’s a continuation, actually, and I think it’s in the record, stuff you can hear. You can hear it on the record, I hope. And it was just something where I just learned a lot of stuff the hard way.

Would it be right for me to say, because what I’m getting from you is that the album,
Darkness
, even though it’s your fourth album, that you feel emotionally attached to it and you have a lot of yourself invested in it, more than even the first three? That it’s a real important step in your life, this record. I’m kind of picking that up from you. And it brings me around to talking about certain things about the making of
Darkness on the Edge of Town
and some of the stuff on it. First thing that I’m wondering about is how did you and Jon Landau first get together? Jon co-produced the album with you
.

I met Jon in Boston at a place called Charlie’s Place. I think it was in Harvard Square, it’s not there anymore. He came down, I remember I was standing outside, I think it was in the wintertime, I was standing out there freezing cold. And he had written a review of
The Wild, the Innocent
now and they had it in the window I guess to get people to come in or something. And I watched it, I mean I read it. He walked up to me as I was reading it and said, I wrote that, this is Jon Landau. I said, how you doing? And he came in and saw the show.

That’s the review that had the famous line …

Nah, that’s not the famous line.

That’s not the famous, that’s not the “future” line?

No, no, which is the funny thing about that line, it’s like …

Let me say the line for the benefit of the people listening. The line we’re talking about, the famous line that they used in ads and stuff. Jon Landau’s line. “I saw the future of rock and roll and its name is Bruce Springsteen.”

It was like, the funny thing about that line … I don’t know, I guess most people didn’t read the article that it came from. And if they did, if they had read the article it was not saying exactly what it seemed to say when it was used in the ad. And I believe it was only run in one ad but it was picked up so fast, because as soon as I saw it I said, uh oh, this looks like trouble to me. It was good intentions intended, but it was like a kiss of death sort of. And the article, actually, which is the article he wrote at the time, that means a lot to me, is that he saw a show and was writing about it. And I think what he was actually saying was that the music that we were playing, me and the band, was a compilation of a lot of things, not just past influences and present but also …

Your own
.

Future. Yeah, I think that was the intention of the line but it was like, I guess somebody at the ad department was, like, this is it! And it went out.

Advertising people are always looking for little catch phrases
.