Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (14 page)

Is that scary when it happens? Or is it just part of the fun and the madness of it all?

Oh, it’s like, it’s not scary. It’s like, you can always feel the situation out when you’re on stage. People come down to shows, it’s an excited crowd, but it’s not mean.

They’re just real turned on. Happy
.

It’s just a blowout.

Which is what you wanted, just a big party, a big blowout …

It should be fun and it was great, that was a great show. That was one of the best shows we ever did.

As long as we’re talking about tour stories, you’ve got to tell me the one about the sign on the Sunset Strip. In Los Angeles they have gigantic billboards advertising records. There are 20, 30 of them right on Sunset Boulevard, on the strip. What was that like?

It was just real ugly looking.

Tell them what the sign was
.

It was just a sign, it was like an advertisement. They put up, like, those big advertisements, they paint your face real big and out of shape. Your nose is big enough, they made it 10 feet long and like it was just funny. It was just the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.

It was just a big picture of you?

Oh no, it was words and stuff, too. So I said, OK guys, we’re going to hit the sign. We’re going to get some paint and we’re going to hit the sign. I don’t know if we were a little drunk or what was going on, but we came back home and I said tonight’s the night. It was two or three in the morning and I said whoever wants to go and hit the sign come on, we’re going to go now. So we all—Clarence says he wants to go. It was me and him, Garry and some of the guys from the crew and the road manager,
we all went down there. We had bought all these cans of spray paint. And we went down there, and the building was wide open and it was vacant. It was real strange. And the elevator was working and everything.

You had to get way up to the top where the sign was, right?

Yeah, well, the sign was like six stories up and then up on a frame. Some of the guys went up the fire escape, they didn’t know the elevator was working and we went up and we walked up, we figured there was going to be a locked door or something. The elevator opened up, we went up a flight of stairs and there we were out on the roof and there it was. It was just big and bright. So we all went up there, we climbed up there. There was a ladder that climbed up to the sign. We just got out the paint and started to work on the thing. And then we wrote “Prove It All Night” and I wanted to get, I wanted to write E Street, the band’s name up there, so Clarence says, well, get on my shoulders. So I got on his shoulders and we’re like six stories up, five stories up and I’m saying, Clarence, you tired yet? He says no, I got you, Boss, I got you. Clarence—I’d do a letter—you tired yet? He’d say no, no, I got you, I got you … I looked back and it was nothing but the pavement. But it was fun to do.

How’d “The Boss” name get started?

I don’t know. I never—that started with people who worked for me.

I thought Clarence might’ve started it
.

Nah, it was not meant like The Boss, capital B. It was meant like the boss, where’s my dough this week? It was sort of like that and it was sort of friendly … I guess it was from the band it was sort of just a thing, just a term among friends. And it’s funny, because I never really liked it. I still—I never really liked it.

Well you may not like it, but you’re not going to lose it. It’s just a term of affection. Bruce, do you have like any kind of life that is totally divorced from music? Do you have anything when you’re not working or, I mean like you’re not recording, you’re not on the road … do you do anything that’s got nothing to do with rock ’n’ roll?

No, just … I don’t think I do. Trying to think.

Your friends are all in …

I’ve had girlfriends. In general, I’ve got one friend that’s not really involved in the music business and he owns a motorcycle shop in Westwood … Town and Country Cycle. And there’s a little plug there I guess, his name is Matty. And I guess he’s my only friend that doesn’t work for me, or is not involved in some other way. He’s been a real source of inspiration and friendship. Like, he’s interested in playing and I’m interested in his motorcycles and stuff.

So you really are a prisoner of rock ’n’ roll?

I don’t know if I am … I don’t know.

I get from you, again a thing I get often is you like really care a great deal about your fans and people who love your music. I mean, you really feel close to them
.

It’s a shame that seems to be such a big deal or something.

I agree, but it is. It’s unusual
.

When I’m on stage, I’m almost—I’m half in the audience and I’m half on stage. And it’s really more of a one-on-one level. Like I see the crowd as a crowd but I also see them as like a one-on-one. If I see somebody getting in any trouble down there, if the crowd’s getting too excited, you’ve got a responsibility, that’s all. It’s no big deal.

Earlier, in the beginning of the interview, you said that when you were nine and then 13 and 14 and you realized it was music that you wanted to do and that’s what you’re doing with your life, did you also at one point somewhere along the way figure and think about being, quote, a rock ’n’ roll star, unquote?

Uh, I guess if you think about it, it depends what that word, what it means to you. Being a “star” or something is too associated with, I think, the trap. For me, that word has always been associated with the trappings of the music business. And I really, I’d rather not see the day when I can’t be able to get down in the crowd or something. I hope that day don’t ever come. It means you can hire 10 people to kiss your butt 10 times a day maybe.

What it means, I think, let me give you some meaning. What it means is that you’re really adored or idolized. It means that just a lot of people, huge crowds of people, just get to love you for the, for the joy and the music and the entertainment and the pleasure that you bring them. Can you accept that definition of it?

What they like is the music and the shows. I guess I have a certain aversion to it as everybody does. Like most people, they have a reaction and mine has always been to reach out and then when I reach out then the next thing I want to do is I want to pull back. It was sort of like this with
Darkness
. I got to pull back, I got to pull in tight. I got to, I got to keep to myself. And then I said, what am I doing? I worked hard on this record. I want to reach out, I want to go after it, a bigger audience. And I think you go through periods of reaching out and pulling back and reaching out and pulling back. There’s always a conflict, there’s a basic conflict there. There’s a lot of paradoxes—I think that’s the right word, yeah—that you have to learn to live with, because they’re not going to go away. The main thing is to cut down on the distance as much as possible, which is something that I’ve been interested a lot in lately. It’s just to get as close as possible to the audience. It’s when the whole concept of … like, the people come and they’re at the show. Well, they’re not
at
the show, they’re in the show. I’m not only in the show, I’m
at
the show. It’s very … it’s a cooperative thing, I’m not explaining it very well.

I think I know what you mean, that it doesn’t all rest on one person, that it’s part of a whole event that happens. But you’re the catalyst. You’re the person that’s making it all happen in that theater, in that arena
.

Yeah, I’m trying to figure out a way to explain this because a couple of people have asked me this same question.

Maybe it’s best not to try to explain it?

It’s like I said. There’s a lot of contradictions and paradoxes that you have to sort out in certain ways. It’s like the more popular you become, the farther people have to sit away to see you. And then, but yet, then you’re reaching more people in a way. And it’s like these are things that they go against each other but they’re like they’re both real and what are you going to do? You got to …

And these are the problems that you’re going to have to solve for yourself more and more as time goes on
.

And you got to work it out somehow. And I see myself in a particular way. I think I was lucky to find something that meant as much to me as young as I was, and I just wish that luck on everybody.

I’ll tell you, the thing that you found that means so much to you just means a lot to more people than you can imagine. Thanks a lot, Bruce
.

Dave DiMartino spoke with Springsteen while on tour to promote
The River
, which wasn’t yet available in stores. They discuss the “paradox” of material on the new double album: “sometimes you write about things as they are,” Bruce explains, “and sometimes you write about them as they should be, as they could be … And that’s basically what I wanted to do. And you can’t say no to either thing.” DiMartino covers a great deal of territory, from the nickname “The Boss,” to Gary U.S. Bonds, to bootlegs. Springsteen talks about forgetting the words to “Born to Run” on opening night and says about performing live, “I don’t gauge the show by the audience reaction, I don’t gauge the show by the review in the paper the next day. I know when I get on the bus to go to the next town. I know if I can go to sleep easy that night.” An edited version of this interview appeared in
Creem
in January 1981; later in the ’80s,
Backstreets
ran the complete Q&A.

At the appropriate hour of quarter to three in the morning, manager Jon Landau asks DiMartino, “No more than a half-hour, OK?” But the problem
is not DiMartino, but Bruce, who is in the mood to talk. The interview runs easily to an hour, despite the fact the band has a show in Chicago in less than 18 hours
.

With
The River
still not in stores, Bruce focuses not so much on the new songs themselves, but on the process of making the record, his own perception of how he works in creating an LP and his own expectations of himself. Bruce is humorous and at times complex in responding to provocative questions from DiMartino, who he is meeting for the first time
.

They [the crew] all call you the boss?

Well, the thing I have with this “Boss” is funny, because it came from people like that, who work around you. And then, somebody started to do it on the radio. I hate being called “Boss” [
laughs
]. I just do. Always did from the beginning. I hate bosses. I hate being called the boss. It just started from all the people around me, then by somebody on the radio and once that happens, everybody said “Hey Boss,” and I’d say, “No. Bruce. BRUCE.” I always hated that. I always hated being called “Boss.”

I have lots of relatives in Jersey, Seaside Heights and Point Pleasant. It’s a pretty interesting place for somebody to grow up
.

Yeah, it’s pretty strange. It’s real “away,” you know? It’s like an hour from New York, but it might as well be ten million miles, because when I was growing up, I think I wasn’t in New York once until I was sixteen, except maybe once when my parents took me to see the circus. And New York was just so far away! It’s funny, because when we first came out, everyone tagged us as being a New York band, which we never really were. We were down there from Jersey, which was very, very different. It’s like my sister. She went to New York last year, and said “Hey, I went to New York and we couldn’t find Fifth Avenue, so we went home” [
laughs
]. It was like you just didn’t go to New York. It was a million miles away. I remember, you didn’t talk about it, you didn’t think about it. It was all very, very local. That’s the way those little towns and stuff are, you just never get out.

I remember we’d go to Seaside Heights when we were 14 and 15 years old. It was a good place to pick up girls
.

Yeah. Asbury was where you’d go if you didn’t have the gas to get to Seaside Heights. That was a whole other thing.

Bob Seger told us he saw you in LA and you were going through the same problems finishing
The River
that he had with
Against the Wind
, that you were pulling your hair out. What made you decide you had the right songs? Last we heard, you pulled a tune off it
.

Well, from the beginning I had an idea of what I felt the record should be. And I don’t think, I’m not interested in going in the studio and [
pauses
], I don’t want to just take up space on the shelf, or worry that if you don’t have something out every six months, or even a year, that people are going to forget about you. I was never interested in approaching it that way. We never have from the beginning. I have a feeling about the best I can do at a particular time, and that’s what I wanted to do. I don’t come out until I feel that, and that’s what I’ve done. Because there’s so many records coming out, there’s so much stuff on the shelves, why put out something that you don’t feel is what it should be, or that you feel—and I don’t believe in tomorrows—that “Oh, I’ll put the other half out six months from now.” You don’t know what’s gonna be happening six months from now. You may be dead, you just don’t know. It’s like from the very beginning, I just never believed in doing things that way. You make your record like it’s the last record you’ll ever make. You go out and play at night. I don’t think if I don’t play good tonight, I’ll play good tomorrow. I don’t think that if I didn’t play good tonight, that, well, I played good last night. It’s like there’s no tomorrows and there’s no yesterdays. There’s only right now.

You gotta prove it all night, right?

Well that’s the thing with the kids. Like if a kid buys a ticket, he comes in, tonight is his night. Tonight is the night for you and him, you and him are not gonna have this night again. And if you don’t take it as seriously as he’s taking it, I mean, this is his dough, he worked for it all week, money’s tough now and there’s a certain thing … I just think you gotta lay it all on the line when you go out there and then I feel good afterwards. That’s the only way I feel right and it’s the same thing with the record.