Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (2 page)

The Springsteen family moved to California in 1969, but Bruce remained in New Jersey and relocated to Asbury Park, where he pursued a rock ’n’ roll career in bars and clubs. He developed his craft playing in bands such as the Castiles (1965–68) and then with Earth (1968), Child (1969), and Steel Mill (1970–71). After they disbanded, Bruce continued to perform with different combinations of friends. He played regularly at the clubs of Asbury Park, especially the Upstage from 1968 to 1971 as well as other venues such as the Student Prince and the Wonder Bar. In 1972, Bruce signed a management deal with Mike Appel and auditioned for John Hammond, who had signed Bob Dylan at Columbia Records.

Springsteen would have to shed the label of “new Dylan,” which stuck not only from having been signed by Hammond (who said Bruce was farther along than Dylan was at the same age), but also from writing frenzied, funhouse lyrics that sounded like no one else’s. Critics had been anointing musicians the next Dylan since 1966, when Dylan withdrew from the public eye, and Springsteen was the latest selection.
Signed, like Dylan, as a solo acoustic performer, he confounded expectations by showing up with a band for his first album. In summer 1973 he recorded his second album,
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
. The effort received rave reviews including a notice in the
New York Times
that said “Springsteen has delivered another stone, howling, joyous monster of a record … Can you imagine what his third album will be like?” the reviewer asked.

That third album proved to be a horror—to Springsteen himself, at least. He felt pressure from Columbia Records to produce a hit; he felt pressure about being labeled the future of rock ’n’ roll, an out-of-context line from a review by the critic Jon Landau (who would soon come to be Bruce’s producer); he felt pressure from within, an artist determined to create music that transcended what he had done before. After spending six months recording the song “Born to Run,” David Sancious (whose Jersey Shore address gave the band its name) and Ernest Carter left the group. A new keyboardist, Roy Bittan, and drummer, Max Weinberg, came onboard. Along with Clarence Clemons on saxophone, Danny Federici on organ, Steve Van Zandt on guitar, and Garry Tallent on bass, they would constitute the E Street Band.

He almost didn’t want the third album to be released. “The tension making that record I could never describe,” Bruce told one journalist in 1975. “It was killing, almost, it was inhuman. I hated it. I couldn’t stand it. It was the worst, hardest, lousiest thing I ever had to do.” But
Born to Run
made him a star. He appeared on the covers of both
Time
and
Newsweek
that fall, he played London for the first time, and he received stellar reviews. Writing in
Rolling Stone
, Greil Marcus called it “a magnificent album” and predicted “it should crack his career wide open.”

But just as soon as the horizon seemed limitless, the heavens collapsed. A protracted lawsuit against his manager, Mike Appel, to regain control of his music kept him from recording. It took nearly a year for the suit to be settled. Bruce returned to the studio with dozens of songs and, in 1978, released
Darkness on the Edge of Town
. Three years between albums is an eternity in the recording industry. The new album was stark and inspiring, both angry and hopeful. Bruce told Peter Knobler, “on
Born to Run
there was the hope of the free ride. On
Darkness
, there ain’t no free ride—you wanna ride, you gotta pay.” These polarities of light and darkness, hope and despair, salvation and damnation permeate Springsteen’s work and are a recurrent theme in the interviews.

Springsteen toured extensively behind
Darkness
, and some of that
tour’s performances are considered among the finest that he and the band have ever delivered. Once it ended, he was back in the studio, this time recording dozens of new songs. Bruce refused to compromise on the artistic process, and these interviews reveal a person who might give up a lot, but never control. “You make your record like it’s the last record you’ll ever make,” he told Dave DiMartino. What emerged was a double album,
The River
, which traversed a range of emotion, from ebullient rockers to poignant ballads. The album reached number one on the charts and gave Springsteen his first top-ten hit with the song “Hungry Heart.”

The
River
tour took Springsteen to Europe, and there he gained a new perspective on the United States and started thinking deeply about the American experience. Bruce had always told stories onstage. However much he squirmed when talking to a single interviewer, he had little difficulty staring into a darkened sold-out arena and offering fantasies and confessions. Sometimes he told long, whimsical tales such as when he introduced “The E Street Shuffle” in 1975 or “Growin’ Up” in 1976. Sometimes, the stories took a more personal and serious tone. During the
River
tour, while introducing “Independence Day,” he often admitted, “I grew up in a house where it seems nobody ever talked to each other.” Bruce had to learn how to open up, and as he thought deeply about his upbringing he wondered “how things got to be the way they are today, how you end up a victim without even knowing it, and how people get old and just die after not having hardly a day’s satisfaction or peace of mind in their lives.”

Following the tour for
The River
, Springsteen started to see a psychiatrist. He found himself at home in Colts Neck writing a new group of songs. “I was interested in writing kind of smaller than I had been,” he said. Although he originally intended to record the new songs with the band, he ultimately released his stark, home demo:
Nebraska
wound up a solo, largely acoustic album about American isolation, an album influenced by distinctive “outsider” American voices from Hank Williams and Flannery O’Connor to the dark, electronic proto-punk band Suicide.
Rolling Stone
called it “a violent, acid-etched portrait of a wounded America that fuels its machinery by consuming its people’s dreams.”

Nebraska
also showed that Springsteen would follow his muse and not be governed by his rock star fame, by audience or record-label expectations. Ironically, while he was considering whether to record
Nebraska
material with his band, Bruce wound up laying down the first
side of
Born in the U.S.A
., an album that would take Bruce from mere stardom to a place in the rock firmament few ever achieve.
Born in the U.S.A
. would eventually sell more than twenty million copies, it would yield seven top-ten singles, and it would compel the artist to speak more publicly than before about the meaning of his work and his political views. There was no denying the massive popularity of the 1984 album and ’84–’85 tour, which found Bruce and his E Street Band essentially conquering the world, playing massive stadiums from Europe to Japan.

After the
Born in the U.S.A
. juggernaut, Bruce says he “went through a very confusing time, a depression really … I began to reassess everything I’d gone through … I just felt overwhelmed by the whole thing. I felt dehumanized,” he confided in 1992. Springsteen had faced deep changes. His oldest friend, Steve Van Zandt, left the band in 1984 (Nils Lofgren replaced him); he met the actress Julianne Phillips and married in May 1985 (they would separate three years later); he continued to seek help in therapy. Bruce released
Tunnel of Love
, a quiet album filled with reflective songs of love, loss, and loneliness, as much an antithesis to
Born in the U.S.A
. as
Nebraska
was to
The River
. In 1989, the E Street Band officially disbanded. Springsteen told James Henke, “I just kind of felt ‘Bruced’ out.”

He continued to follow his muse and in 1992 released two albums,
Human Touch
and
Lucky Town
, and toured with a new group of musicians (“I thought it was time to play with other people”). He also did something that, as a 25-year-old, he would not have imagined: in 1990 he became a father. Bruce soon married Patti Scialfa, a Jersey girl who joined the E Street Band on the
Born in the U.S.A
. tour. Two more children would follow. The responsibilities of family and friendship, of coming to terms with his identity as a son, husband, and father, as a bandleader and as the “Boss,” a nickname he always despised, are recurrent motifs in these interviews.

Entering the 1990s, Bruce was no longer the laconic punk of his twenties or the muscular superstar of his thirties. He was intent on dismantling his iconic stature and reclaiming his identity. “I thought I had to reintroduce myself as a songwriter,” he told
Rolling Stone
. He also needed at the time to free himself from New Jersey; so he settled in Los Angeles where he could escape from being “a figment of your own imagination.” Music was his life, it had saved him from his father’s fate, it gave him a reason to live, and it was the only form of communication that mattered to him. In “Thunder Road,” Bruce wrote that he had
learned how to make his guitar talk. Now he had also learned how to communicate without the instrument. “The two best days of my life,” he realized, “were the day I picked up the guitar and the day that I learned how to put it down.”

Always attuned to the promise and perils of the American dream, Springsteen, in the ’90s—in the aftermath of a six-week tour for Amnesty International in 1988 and the Los Angeles Riots of 1992—seemed even more keenly engaged in his work with the problems of social justice. “Streets of Philadelphia,” about the ravages of AIDS, won an Academy Award in 1994 for Best Song. A few years later he wrote “American Skin (41 Shots)” in response to the police shooting of an unarmed immigrant in New York City. In 1995 he reunited in the studio with E Street Band members to record several new songs for a
Greatest Hits
compilation. One of them, “This Hard Land,” revisited ground covered by the Woody Guthrie classic “This Land Is Your Land.”

That same year, Bruce released
The Ghost of Tom Joad
and launched an extensive solo tour behind it. John Ford’s classic film
The Grapes of Wrath
(more than the Steinbeck novel) had profoundly affected Springsteen, who admitted to having wept at the memorable final speech of Henry Fonda’s character, Tom Joad. The stripped-down solo album was Bruce’s attempt to examine “what the country feels like to me right now,” and the pared-down solo performances “makes what you are about and what you are doing real clear.” Bruce was always a folk artist and a rock artist, a soloist and a band leader, and through much of the ’90s it was the folk voice that reemerged in his writing and performing.

Working together in the studio with the E Street Band in 1995 sowed the seeds for a reunion. They hadn’t recorded together in nearly a decade. “One of the things I realized when I saw the guys,” he told Neil Strauss, “was that we’re like each others’ arms and legs.”

He also seemed ready to rediscover the pure joy of what he did best. “It’s the greatest, greatest job in the world,” he told Mark Hagen in 1999. “I still try to do it as well as I can and hopefully better than I have done it previously.” That year, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; he simultaneously re-formed the E Street Band—including, as in ’95, both Lofgren and Van Zandt—and began a reunion tour that celebrated “the power and the glory, the majesty, the mystery, the ministry of rock and roll!”

The events of September 11, 2001, propelled Bruce further into the public arena and perhaps to a deeper understanding of his place not
only as a rock star but also as a citizen. Not long after 9/11 and
The Rising
, his first album of new studio material with the E Street Band since 1984, Springsteen shed his reluctance to engage overtly in politics. In an editorial published in the
New York Times
in August 2004 he announced that he would be part of a broad constituency of musicians who would devote themselves to Vote for Change, to get people to register and work “to change the direction of the government and change the current administration come November.” The policies of the Bush administration felt like an assault on the working and middle classes, and Bruce felt the stakes had risen to a point where he could no longer stay out of politics: “I’ve tried to think long and hard about what it means to be an American,” and this was the time, he felt, to fight for “the country we carry in our hearts.” These interviews reveal Bruce’s development as a citizen working to understand the meaning of America and taking measures to help refashion it.

Since 2004, Springsteen has continued his activism and has campaigned for John Kerry and Barack Obama. He has encouraged fans from stage night after night to fight back against the erosion the American dream. In a series of albums (
Devils & Dust, Seeger Sessions, Magic, Working on a Dream
) he continued to write and perform folk and rock songs that inspire and entertain, that make the audience feel alive. “The greatest pop music,” Bruce has observed, is a “music of liberation.”

In February 2012, before a group of international journalists in Paris, Bruce spoke at length about music and politics. Now 62, Bruce was about to release a new album,
Wrecking Ball
, and embark on a world tour, but this time without Clarence Clemons, who had passed away in June 2011. A few years earlier, the band had lost Danny Federici. “Losing Clarence,” Springsteen said, “is like losing the rain, or air.” But while the ghosts of his bandmates can be heard in its grooves, Bruce was never one to look back: this new record was a driving and direct response to the state of our nation’s post-financial crisis

Wrecking Ball
was a call to arms; it sought to startle, inspire, incite, and enlist. It lifted listeners up and knocked them down. It was unlike anything Springsteen had done before, and yet it was familiar, part of his ongoing meditation on the meaning of America. It was an angry album, and, asked about it in Paris, Springsteen smiled and observed, “you can never go wrong pissed off in rock ’n’ roll.”