Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (17 page)

A year ago, taking a respite from recording to play two nights of the M.U.S.E. anti-nuke concerts, Bruce Springsteen pared his normal three hour show down to a more everyday 90 minutes. The result was pandemonium just this side of Beatle-mania. Following the biggest stars in American soft rock to the Madison Square Garden stage, Springsteen
and the E Street Band upstaged everyone, including the issue itself. The air in the hall that night was one of fanaticism and conversion, as though Springsteen were a rock ’n’ roll evangelist and the Garden his tabernacle.

It’s easy to imagine that Springsteen was just a pro rising to an occasion which included a camera crew and a recording truck, not to mention a backstage full of peers. What’s harder to explain, unless you’ve seen him onstage before a crowd that might not include so much as a weekly newspaper reviewer, is that the M.U.S.E. shows were just a fragment of what he usually does. “After those shows went over so great, I just figured that that’s what we’d be doing on this tour,” remembers E Street guitarist Steve Van Zandt. “Just 90 minutes, a couple of ballads, and we make people as crazy as you can, like the old days. We can do that. But not Bruce. What we ended up doing was just adding that 90 minutes to the show we always did.”

By late October, when the E Streeters hit L.A. for four shows at the 15,000 seat Sports Arena, they were playing four-and-one-half-hour shows, five nights a week. Going on at 8:30, they’d break at 10, and return a half hour later to play until 12:45—or 1:00 or 1:15. And they weren’t playing the ebb-and-flow show offered by most bands who play so long. We’re talking about four hours of ensemble rock and roll here, in which even the ballads are attacked more strenuously than most modal jams. Yet Jon Landau, his manager, said one night, “I think Bruce might actually play
longer
, except that the band just gets worn out.” True enough, drummer Max Weinberg often spends intermission taping bleeding fingers, and the others are spared such medicaments only because their instruments are less physically demanding.

Generally, Springsteen did 32 or 33 songs, including 17 or 18 from
The River
, a half dozen from
Darkness on the Edge of Town
, five from
Born to Run
, the perennial setcloser “Rosalita” from
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
, plus “Fire” and “Because the Night” from his seemingly bottomless supply of unrecorded hits. And, of course, the Mitch Ryder medley which was the highlight of the
No Nukes
LP.

But the show has that shape only on nights when Springsteen hasn’t declared a special occasion, which is a rare night in itself. On Halloween, the second night in L.A., he cooked up a version of “Haunted House,” the old Jumpin’ Gene Simmons hit, at soundcheck, and opened the set with it—after appearing from a coffin and being chased around the stage by ghoul-robed roadies during the guitar break.

On Saturday, Bruce added an acoustic guitar and accordion version of “The Price You Pay” and debuted “Fade Away,” the one song from
The River
he’d avoided. On Monday night, with Bob Dylan in the house for a
second
night (he’d come with Jim Keltner on Thursday, and been impressed), Springsteen put “The Price You Pay” back in and dedicated it to his “inspiration.” Plus a lengthy version of “Growin’ Up,” from his first album. On both nights, he ended with encores with Jackson Browne, dueting on “Sweet Little Sixteen.” On neither night did the inclusion of the additional songs mean the removal of any of the others.

“Yeah, but you really missed it in St. Paul,” said Van Zandt. “He turned around and called ‘Midnight Hour,’ and we all just about fainted. Funky [bassist Garry Tallent] didn’t even believe we were doing it until about the second chorus.” The band had not rehearsed the song, and it’s unlikely that the E Street Band’s present lineup had ever played it before in its five years together. But even the musicians thought that it sounded great.

The expansiveness and elasticity of Springsteen’s show is a conundrum, because arena rock is in all other hands the surest route to formula. One of the most miserable summers of my existence was spent watching 15 Rolling Stones shows in 1975. By the fifth, I was fighting to stay awake; by the tenth I’d stopped fighting, a circumstance I ascribed to the band’s senility until it occurred to me that no one was meant to look at more than one or maybe two of their damn fiestas.

That’s rock and roll for tourists. Springsteen plays for the natives. Although he would probably put it more idealistically, he’s really just never lost the consciousness of a bar band musician, who knows that a good part of the house may be seeing all three sets. And like a bar band veteran, he refuses to resort to gimmicks. Marc Brickman’s lighting is the best in rock, but it’s based on relatively simple theatrical gels and an authoritative sense of timing with follow spots; any funk band in the Midwest might have a more elaborate
concept
, but nobody with lasers achieves such an effective result. (Brickman has a computer along on this tour, but only, he told me, because “if you can figure out a way to program Bruce’s show, you can figure a way to make it work for anything.” Most nights, Brickman and soundman Bruce Jackson might as well throw their set lists away.)

But what reveals Springsteen bar band roots more than anything is his sense of intimacy with the crowds. One night during this tour,
someone told me, he actually announced from the stage, “If the guy I met at the airport yesterday is here, please come to the stage at the break. I’ve got something for you,” which is about as close to sock hop mentality as you could ask. At his show in Phoenix, during “Rosalita,” Bruce made one of his patented leaps to the speakers at the side of the stage. But this time he missed.

The crowd just kept on cheering, but back at the soundboard where Jackson and I were sitting, the tension was thick. Bruce might do anything, but this was weird; the band was holding the chord, and the chords of “Rosalita” are not meant to be held for five seconds, much less fifteen.

It’s a good long drop from the speakers, two feet high, to the floor, a good eight or nine feet away. All there was between Bruce and the hard concrete floor was the band’s monitor mixing board, but as he tumbled down, roadie Bob Werner reached out and broke the fall. (He sprained his wrist in the process.)

Neither the band nor the crowd could see any of this. The next thing any of us knew, the guitar appeared, tossed atop the speakers. Then a pair of hands and at last, Springsteen’s head, with his silly-faced-little-boy grin. He shook his head, pulled himself the rest of the way up, and strapped on his guitar, went back into action as if nothing had occurred.

This moment is presumably on film—there was a crew shooting a commercial that night—though from what angle I cannot say. But what the incident proclaims, more than anything, even Bruce’s sense of spontaneity, is his sense of event. The cardinal rule of his shows is that something
always
happens. It’s not only, as he says in the interview below, that he’s prepared for whatever happens. Somehow, he always makes sure that something does occur. I’ve seen at least 100 shows in the past six or seven years. The worst of them was fascinating, but maybe the most awesome have been the times when, after four or five nights of hell raising action, he manages to make it different again. This guy does not know the meaning of anticlimax.

But there’s the bright side. There are darker ones. In Los Angeles, where ticket scalping is legal, front row seats for this extravaganza were going for $180, $200, $250. And fans wrote Bruce to complain, not just that tickets were being scalped, but that the best ones were. It’s an old story, and most bands would let it slide, but Bruce took a stand.
Each night in L.A., he gave the crowd the name of the state legislator, and a radio station, who’d agreed to campaign to change the scalping law in California. This might qualify as a gesture—although the night after Landau got a pre-show phone call from a “ticket agent” suggesting that Bruce “do what he does, and I’ll do what I do, so why don’t he just lay off,” he made the announcement
three
times—but he’s also hired investigators to get to the bottom of the mess, with intentions of turning the information over to the proper authorities, if any hard evidence can be turned up.

And this reflects the spirit in which Springsteen played M.U.S.E. Although he was one of only two musicians at the benefit who did not make a political statement in the concert program (the other was Tom Petty), Springsteen upstaged the issue only accidentally. He felt that particular problem to his marrow; “Roulette,” the song he wrote right after Three Mile Island, is the scariest piece of music he’s ever done, for my money more frightening than even the last lines of “Stolen Car,” and unmistakably based on the event. (Not to mention Del Shannon’s paranoic “Stranger in Town.”) There is more to come.

The River
itself feels like a farewell to innocence. As Springsteen notes in the interview below, the innocent characters on this album are anachronisms. Their time is gone. That guy lying by the side of the road in “Wreck on the Highway” is not only the guy in “Cadillac Ranch” and “Ramrod,” he is also Spanish Johnny, the original man-child hero of
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
.

The River
is, I think, Bruce Springsteen’s best album for this very reason. It sums up seven years of work, and it does not shy away from the errors of his career thus far, nor does it disown them. He remains a romantic and a bit of a juvenile, after all this, for who but a romantic juvenile could conceive of a purposeless car thief as a genuine figure of tragedy? But he is also capable now of tying together his hopes and fears—the most joyous of songs are awash with brutal undercurrents.

The River
wasn’t the record anyone would have predicted Bruce Springsteen would make. Epics aren’t anticipated (although they might be the subject of certain fervent hopes.) But if
The River
was unpredictable, the album that will follow it is almost unimaginable. And not only because the society that shaped Springsteen’s most beloved characters and the musical tradition he cherishes is now crumbling.

Among other things,
The River
is a Number One record. “Hungry Heart” looks likely to be his first Top Ten single. Things change when that happens, and we have not yet seen the rock and roller who is strong enough to withstand those changes. It would be naïve to expect Bruce Springsteen to be any different.

Yet Bruce Springsteen’s career is all about naïve faith. Who else could have survived The New Dylan, The Future of Rock and Roll, The Hype, The Boss? And emerged not only successful, but respected. It’s easy to play cynical rock journalist and suppose the worst—no one else has exactly cruised through success—but the fact is, Bruce Springsteen is the only human I have ever met who cannot sell out. He doesn’t have a price, because the things he wants are quite literally beyond price. You don’t have to believe me. Just wait and see. As Miami Steve says, “For the first time, I can really imagine rock and roll at 40.”

The interview below took place at the Fiesta Motel in Tempe, Arizona, on Nov. 6th, from about 3:30 AM until dawn. (The time frame is typical.) Bruce had just completed a show at Arizona State University, and in a strange way, what I’ll remember about that night isn’t talking with him or even the fall off the speakers but the lines he sang just after the fall, that climactic verse of “Rosalita”:

Tell your daddy this is his last chance

If he wants his daughter to have some fun

Because my brand new record, Rosie

Just came in at Number one

He won’t forget, either.

Here you are,
The River
is a Number One album, the single is a hit, you’re playing great shows in the biggest halls, and selling them out. In a sense, a lot of goals you must have had are now achieved. What goals are left?

Doing it is the goal. It’s not to play some big place, or for a record to be Number One. Doing it is the end—not the means. That’s the point. So the point is: What’s next? Some more of this.

But bigness—that is no end. That as an end, is meaningless, essentially. It’s good, ’cause you can reach a lotta people, and that’s the idea.
The idea was just to go out and to reach people. And after tonight, you go out and you reach more people, and then the night after that, you do that again.

One of the things that
The River
and also the show, its length and certain of the things you say between songs, are about is seeing more possibilities, more opportunities for things to do
.

Yeah. There’s an immense amount, and I’m just starting to get some idea about what I want to do. Because we’ve been in a situation, always, until recently, there’s been a lot of instability in everybody’s life. The band’s and mine. It dates back to the very beginning, from the bars on up to even after we were successful. Then there was the lawsuit.

And then there’s the way we work, which is: We’re
slow
. And in the studio, I’m slow. I take a long time. That means you spend a lotta money in the studio. Not only do you spend a lotta money, you don’t make any money, because you’re out of the stream of things. It’s like you can never get ahead, because as soon as you get ahead, you stop for two years and you go back to where you were.

Is that slowness as frustrating for you as it is for everybody else?

I’m lucky, because I’m in there, I’m seeing it every step of the way. I would assume that if you didn’t know what was going on, and you cared about it, it would be frustrating. With me, it was not frustrating.

You know, we started to work [on the album] and I had a certain idea at the beginning. And at the end, that was the idea that came out on the record. It took a very long time, all the coloring and stuff, there was a lot of decisions and songs to be written. Right up until the very last two weeks, when I rewrote the last two verses to “Point Blank.” “Drive All Night” was done just the week before that. Those songs didn’t exist, in the form that they’re on the record, until the last few weeks we were in the studio. So there’s stuff happening all the time. But we get into that little bit of a cycle, which hopefully we’ll be able to break—maybe, I don’t know.