Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (19 page)

The River
has a lot of those sorts of workers—the people in “Jackson Cage,” the guy in “The River” itself
.

I never knew anybody who was unhappy with their job and was happy with their life. It’s your sense of purpose. Now, some people can find it elsewhere. Some people can work a job and find it some place else.

Like the character in “Racing in the Street”?

Yeah. But I don’t know if that’s lasting. But people do, they find ways.

Or else …?

[
Long pause
] Or else they join the Ku Klux Klan or something. That’s where it can take you, you know. It can take you to a lot of strange places.

Introducing “Factory” on a different night, you spoke about your father having been real angry, and then, after awhile, not being angry anymore. “He was just silent.” Are
you
still angry?

I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know if I know myself that well. I think I know myself a lot but I’m not sure [
laughs
]. It’s impossible not to be [angry] when you see the state of things and look around. You have to be, somewhat.

Tonight, you were saying on stage that you found the election terrifying. That seems to go hand in hand with playing the M.U.S.E. benefits, and striking back at ticket scalpers in L.A. You wouldn’t have done those things two year ago, I don’t think. Are you finding social outlets for that anger now?

That’s true. It’s just a whole values thing. Take the ticket thing. It’s a hustle. And a hustle has become … respected. In a lot of quarters—on a street level, dope pushers—it’s a respectable thing, to hustle somebody. I mean, how many times in the Watergate thing did people say about Nixon, “Well, he just wasn’t smart enough to get away with it.” Like his only mistake was that he didn’t get away with it. And there’s a certain point where people have become cynical, where the hustle, that’s the American way. I think it’s just turned upside down in a real bad way. I think it should lose its respect.

Do you feel that way about nuclear energy?

It’s just the whole thing, it’s the
whole
thing. It’s terrible, it’s horrible. Somewhere along the way, the idea, which I think was initially to get
some fair transaction between people, went out the window. And what came in was, the most you can get [
laughs
]. The most you can get and the least you can give. That’s why cars are the way they are today. It’s just an erosion of all the things that were true and right about the original idea.

But that isn’t something that was on your mind much until the
Darkness
album?

Up to then, I didn’t think about too many things. In
Greetings from Asbury Park
, I did. And then I went off a little bit, and sort of roundabout came back to it.

I guess it just started after
Born to Run
somehow. I had all that time off, and I spent a lotta time home. We were off for three years, and home for a long time. It came out of a local kind of thing—what my old friends were doing, what my relatives were doing. How things were affecting them, and what their lives were like. And what my life was like.

Did you have a sense that no one else was telling that story?

I didn’t see it too much, except in the English stuff. Things were being addressed that way in that stuff.

You mean, for instance, the Clash?

Yeah, all that kind of stuff. I liked it, I always liked that stuff. But there wasn’t too much stuff in America happening. It just seemed to me that’s the story. But there was a crucial level of things missing, and it is today still. Maybe it’s just me getting older and seeing things more as they are.

On
Darkness
, the character’s response is to isolate himself from any community, and try to beat the system on his own. The various characters on
The River
are much more living in the mainstream of society
.

That guy at the end of
Darkness
has reached a point where you just have to strip yourself of everything, to get yourself together. For a minute, sometimes, you just have to get rid of everything, just to get yourself together inside, be able to push everything away. And I think that’s what happened at the end of the record.

And then there was the thing where the guy comes back.

And
The River
is what he sees?

Yeah, these are his feelings, it’s pretty much there, and in the shows, it’s there now, too, I guess. I hate to get too literal about it, because I can never explain it as well as when I wrote about it. I hate to limit it. I look back at
Darkness
or the other records, and there were other things going on that I never knew were going on.

Do you like
Born to Run
and
Darkness
better now?

Not particularly. On
Darkness
, I like the ideas, I’m not crazy about the performances. We play all those songs ten times better live. But I like the idea.
Born to Run
, I like the performances and the sound. Sometimes, it sounds funny.

Young and innocent?

Yeah, yeah. Same thing with
The Wild and the Innocent
. I have a hard time listening to any of those records. Certain things on each record I can listen to: “Racing in the Street,” “Backstreets,” “Prove It All Night,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” But not a lot, because either the performance doesn’t sound right to me, or the ideas sound like a long time ago.

Do you remember when you threw the birthday cake into the crowd, at the second M.U.S.E. concert?

[
Laughs
] Oh yeah. That was a wild night.

You’d just turned 30 that night, and didn’t seem to be overjoyed by it. But a couple weeks ago in Cleveland, I was kidding Danny about turning 30, and said, “Oh yeah, we’re 30 now, can’t do what we used to do.” You said, real quick, “That’s not true.” What happened in that year? Was that significant, turning 30?

I don’t remember. It just made me wanna do more things. I think, as a matter of fact, when we were in the studio, that was the thing that was big. I didn’t feel we were going too slow for what we were doing. But I felt that I wanted to be quicker just to have more time. I wanted to be touring, for one thing. I wanted to be touring
right now
.

But by the time you finish this tour, you’ll be crowding 32. Then, if you’re right and it’s just gonna take a year or so to make a record
,
you’ll be 33 or 34 by the time you get out again. Can you still have the stamina to do the kind of show you feel the need to do?

Who knows? I’m sure it’ll be a different type of show. It’s impossible to tell and a waste of time guessin’.

When I was in the studio and wanted to play, it wasn’t the way I felt in a physical kind of way, it was what I felt mentally. I was excited about the record and I wanted to play those songs live. I wanted to get out there and travel around the world with people who were my friends. And see every place and play just as hard as we could play, every place in the world. Just get into things, see things, see what happens.

Like in “Badlands”?

That’s it. That’s the idea. I want to see what happens, what’s next. All I knew when I was in the studio, sometimes, was that I felt great that day. And I was wishing I was somewhere strange, playing. I guess that’s the thing I love doing the most. And it’s the thing that makes me feel most alert and alive.

You look awful before a show, and then those hours up there, which exhaust everyone else, refresh you
.

I always look terrible before the show. That’s when I feel worst. And after the show it’s like a million bucks. Simple as that. You feel a little tired but you
never
feel better. Nothing makes me feel as good as those hours between when you walk offstage, until I go to bed. That’s the hours that I live for. As feelings go, that’s ten on a scale of ten. I just feel like talking to people, going out back and meeting those kids, doing any damn thing. Most times I just come back and eat and lay down and feel good. Most people, I don’t think, get to feel that good, doing whatever they do.

You can’t get that in the studio?

Sometimes, but it’s different. You get wired for two or three days or a week or so and then sometimes, you feel real low. I never feel as low, playing, as I do in the studio.

You know, I just knew that’s what I wanted to do—go all over and play. See people and go all over the world. I want to see what all those people are like. I want to meet people from all different countries and stuff.

You’ve always liked to have a certain mobility, a certain freedom of movement. Can you still walk down the street?

Oh sure, sure. It depends on where you go. Usually … you can do anything you want to do. The idea that you can’t walk down the street is in people’s minds. You can walk down any street, any time. What you gonna be afraid of, someone coming up to you? In general, it’s not that different than it ever was, except you meet people you ordinarily might not meet—you meet some strangers and you talk to ’em for a little while.

The other night I went out, I went driving, we were in Denver. Got a car and went out, drove all around. Went to the movies by myself, walked in, got my popcorn. This guy comes up to me, real nice guy. He says, “Listen, you want to sit with me and my sister?” I said, “All right.” So we watch the movie [
laughs
]. It was great, too, because it was that Woody Allen movie [
Stardust Memories
], the guy’s slammin’ to his fans. And I’m sittin’ there and this poor kid says, “Jesus, I don’t know what to say to ya. Is this the way it is? Is this how you feel?” I said, “No, I don’t feel like that so much.” And he had the amazing courage to come up to me at the end of the movie, and ask if I’d go to his home and meet his mother and father. I said, “What time is it?” It was 11 o’clock, so I said, “Well OK.”

So I go home with him; he lives out in some suburb. So we get over to the house and here’s his mother and father, laying out on the couch, watching TV and reading the paper. He brings me in and says, “Hey I got Bruce Springsteen here.” And they don’t believe him. So he pulls me over, and he says, “This is Bruce Springsteen.” “Aw, g’wan,” they say. So he runs in his room and brings out an album and he holds it up to my face. And his mother says [
breathlessly
] “Ohh
yeah
!” She starts yelling “Yeah,” she starts screaming.

And for two hours I was in this kid’s house, talking with these people, they were really nice, they cooked me up all this food, watermelon, and the guy gave me a ride home a few hours later.

I felt so good that night. Because here are these strange people I didn’t know, they take you in their house, treat you fantastic and this kid was real nice, they were real nice. That is something that can happen to me that can’t happen to most people. And when it does happen, it’s fantastic. You get somebody’s whole life in three hours. You get their parents, you get their sister, you get their family life, in three hours. And I went back to that hotel and felt really good because I thought, “
Wow
[
almost
whispering
], what a thing to be able to do. What an experience to be able to have, to be able to step into some stranger’s life.”

And that’s what I thought about in the studio. I thought about going out and meeting people I don’t know. Going to France and Germany and Japan, and meeting Japanese people and French people and German people. Meeting them and seeing what they think, and being able to go over there with something. To go over there with a pocketful of ideas or to go over there with just something, to be able to take something over. And boom! To do it.

But you can’t do one without the other. I couldn’t do it if I hadn’t spent time in the studio, knowing what I saw and what I felt right now.

Because then you wouldn’t have that pocketful of ideas?

Then, if you don’t have that, stay home or something. If you have some ideas to exchange, that’s what it’s about. That’s at the heart of it. I just wouldn’t go out and tour unless I had that. There wouldn’t be a reason.

The reason is you have some idea you wanna say. You have an idea about things, an opinion, a feeling about the way things are or the way things could be. You wanna go out and tell people about it. You wanna tell people, well, if everybody did this or if people thought this, maybe it would be better.

When we play the long show, that’s because it gives the whole picture. And if you aren’t given the whole picture, you’re not gonna get the whole picture. We play the first part … that first part is about those things that you said it was about. That’s the foundation, without that the rest couldn’t happen. Wouldn’t be no second half without the first half; couldn’t be all them other things, without those things. Without that foundation of the hard things, and the struggling things, the work things. That’s the heart, that’s what it comes down to.

And then on top of that, there’s the living, the things that surround that. That’s why the show’s so long. “You wanna leave out ‘Stolen Car’?” No, that’s a little part of the puzzle. “You wanna leave this out?” No that’s a little part of the puzzle. And at the end, if you want, you can look back and see … just a point of view really. You see somebody’s idea, the way somebody sees things. And you know somebody.

People go to that show, they know me. They know a lotta me, as much as I know that part of myself. That’s why, when I meet ’em on the street, they know you already. And you can know them, too. Because of their response.

Even these days, it’s still not very far from the dressing room to the stage for you, is it?

I don’t know if it is. I don’t know if it should be. I don’t know for sure how different the thing is or how it’s perceived. Except a lot of the music is real idealistic, and I guess like anybody else, you don’t live up to it all the time. You just don’t. That’s the challenge. You got to walk it like you talk it. That’s the idea. That’s the line. I guess that’s pretty much what it’s about.