Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (20 page)
A few months into the
Born in the U.S.A
. tour, Springsteen spoke with Ireland’s
Hot Press
after a show in Hartford. Asked about the danger of success, he admits, “well it’s a funny thing. One of the problems is that the audience and the performer have got to leave some room for each other, to be human.” Humphries would co-write 1985’s
Springsteen: Blinded by the Light
, a significant compendium (now out of print) for collectors and fans; this interview displays Scott’s depth of knowledge, from the Vietnam draft to hopping the wall at Graceland to the outtake “Murder Incorporated.”
The bets were on: Following David Bowie’s foray into “Serious Moonlight” in 1983,
the
rock event of 1984 had to be the Jacksons’
Victory
tour. On the face of it, there was no competition. Michael Jackson had become the ’80s’ brightest star, with
Thriller
shattering all known records and this was the tour on which that new status would reap ultimate dividends. But when it came to it, the Jacksons’ “Victory” proved to be a hollow one—exorbitant ticket prices and extravagant fantasies do not compensate for musical paucity.
In stark contrast, it was a scrawny 35-year-old from New Jersey who gave rock ’n’ roll a roaring voice in 1984. Bruce Springsteen had done it before, of course; those who witnessed him on the 1980/81
River
tour came away converted by Springsteen’s zealous rock ’n’ roll revivalist shows. But even the diehard must have wondered if he could still pack a punch. Three years away is, after all, a long time in rock ’n’ roll.
The omens on his seventh album,
Born in the U.S.A
., were promising—Bruce Springsteen was back doing what he did best, rocking his heart out! Yet at the core of the new album, beneath the exuberance of such classic rockers as “Darlington County,” “No Surrender” and “Glory Days” was a note of caution, with Springsteen coming to terms with his love of rock ’n’ roll, and the fact that he’s reached his mid-30s. Surely those legendary four-hour shows were now a part of rock history? No one could keep up that intensity. But with fervor and reckless abandon, Springsteen proved such speculation premature. His 1984 tour opened in St. Paul, Minnesota, on June 29 with a marathon 4½-hour, 30-song show. Bruce Springsteen was back, Jack!
In conversation, the voice sounds husky, like too many cigarettes in too many roadside bars, like too many tequila chasers chasing something long forgotten. It couldn’t be further from the truth. Bruce Springsteen is the essence of the puritanical rock star.
In a world where “excess” is almost written into the contract, Springsteen is an unlikely rock hero. He doesn’t smoke, drinks beer only in moderation, and only seems to come alive in performance, or when carving out a new album in the studio. He’d be too good to be true, if it wasn’t for the immensely moving quality of his music.
Springsteen’s restraint is carried over into his recording. During his 12 years with CBS, he has only released seven official albums. (The dedication of his fans in obtaining bootlegs is legendary. Along with Dylan and Bowie, Springsteen is rock’s most widely bootlegged artist. It’s an ironic barometer, but one which testifies Springsteen’s stature in rock legend.) It is only really in performance that Springsteen indulges in excess—in the positive sense of screaming, soaring shows, which stretch into four-hour celebrations of life, youth, of maturity—and of rock ’n’ roll itself.
A Springsteen show is a virtual potted history of rock music, alongside his own classic rockers like “Born to Run” and “Rosalita,” he’ll slot in songs by Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jimmy Cliff, the Beatles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley—the sort of sounds
that allowed Bruce Frederick Springsteen to escape the confines of Freehold, New Jersey, except that now it’s
him
up on stage pouring his heart out in concert, Springsteen puts
everything
into the performance, nothing and no one is spared.
The afternoon before the show there’s none of the usual rock ’n’ roll excesses. Springsteen can be seen diligently pacing every aisle of the auditorium, ensuring that the sound quality is right for everyone, not just those with enough money to blow on seats right up front.
That fine attention to detail, that
caring
separates Springsteen from the legions of Spinal Tappers ploughing ’round the rock circuit with one eye on the clock and the other on the house percentage! It’s a quality that’s been in abundant evidence since Bruce Springsteen emerged in the early 1970s.
There was a brash exuberance to his debut
Greetings from Asbury Park
in 1973. With verbose enthusiasm, Springsteen crammed everything into his debut like it was his last chance.
Born to Run
in 1975 was an album of epic panache, Springsteen elevating the street suss characters of his first two albums into heroes of the American Dream, arriving at their rock ’n’ roll goal in burned-out Chevys.
By
Darkness on the Edge of Town
in 1978, the dream had turned sour, and the album’s 10 songs dealt in the darkness of disillusionment and despair. There was a reconciliation of sorts on the double
River
of 1980, with hearty rockers like “Sherry Darling” and “Ramrod” nestling next to bleak ballads such as “The River” and “Independence Day.” But the stark, acoustic detour through
Nebraska
(1982) left no doubts about Springsteen’s resolute artistic integrity. He would not tailor his output to suit the demands of the marketplace. Uncompromisingly bleak,
Nebraska
was totally solo, a collection of folk tales dwelling on those crushed by the weight of Reagonomics, stylistically similar to earlier efforts by Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams and Robert Johnson.
With his seventh album,
Born in the U.S.A
. (1984), Springsteen managed to fuse the disparate elements of his career most successfully: the exuberance can be found on such cocky rockers as “Darlington County” and “Working on the Highway,” the somber introspection finds a place on “Downbound Train” and “My Hometown.” The 12-track album was arrived at after a two-year recording stint, which meant sifting through around 100 songs to arrive at the final dozen.
Born in the U.S.A
. was such a defiantly rock ’n’ roll album, the reviews were surprisingly favourable. But its success and that of the two singles—
“Dancing in the Dark” and “Cover Me”—saw the 35-year-old blue collar rocker back at the top. And with Springsteen back on the road, some sort of honesty and merit infuses the bloated and avaricious caricature rock music too often seems to have become. Springsteen was a month into his first American tour in three years when Roger Scott talked to him in Hartford, Connecticut. It was the first time that Springsteen had spoken to a member of the European press in over three years. The intervening years had produced
Nebraska
and
Born in the U.S.A
. had seen video become another spoke in the rock ’n’ roll wheel. Springsteen was pensive and attentive during the interview, attaching the same sort of care to conversation, as he does to recording.
What did you do after
The River
tour when you came off the road?
Clarence got married, a couple of weeks after we got off the road. So we went to his wedding, and I was the best man. We came back to New Jersey, and very shortly after that, I started to write the
Nebraska
songs. That was the fall and early winter, and I think I recorded those right around New Year, in a couple of days. And that was about it. Not much happened. We went into the studio a couple of times, and I attempted to record some of those songs with the band, but it just didn’t work out, didn’t sound as good, but we did end up recording about half of the
Born in the U.S.A
. album. Those two records were always kinda inter-mingled—I have some
Nebraska
-like demos of “Born in the U.S.A.” “Downbound Train” y’know? Then we decided that we were gonna put the
Nebraska
album out, the demos that I’d made at my house …
I know you’d read the Woody Guthrie’s biography [
Woody Guthrie: A Life
by Joe Klein] and were doing a couple of his songs on the
River
tour. Was that an influence?
No, it was just basically that was the way that they sounded best. The songs had a lot of detail so that, when the band started to wail away into it, the characters got lost. Like “Johnny 99”—I thought, “oh, that’d be great if we could do a rock version.” But when you did that, the song disappeared. A lot of its content was in its style, in the treatment of it. It needed that really kinda austere, echoey sound, just one guitar—one guy telling his story. That’s what made the record work, the sound of real conversation … like you were meeting different people, and they just told you what had happened to them, or what was happening to them. So you kinda walked for a little bit in somebody else’s shoes.
Where did all the desperate people on that record come from?
I dunno. That’s just what I was writing at the time, that’s what I was interested in writing about. I don’t know where songs come from really, myself. I just had a certain
tone
in mind, which I felt was the tone of what it was like when I was a kid growing up. And at the same time it felt like the tone of what the country was like at that time. That was kinda the heart that I was drawing from.
Leading on from
The River
, which was full of these sharply contrasting songs, these wild celebrations alongside these hopeless people
.
On
Born in the U.S.A
. I kinda combined the two things. On
The River
I’d have a song like this and a song like that because I didn’t know how to combine it … By the time I’d got to the
Born in the U.S.A
. album, I kinda combined those two things, like “Darlington County,” even “Glory Days,” uh, “Dancing in the Dark.” I did a little bit on
The River
, like “Cadillac Ranch”—that was the way I was dealing with different types of material. I hadn’t figured out a way to synthesise it into one song, y’know. I knew it was all part of the same picture, which is why
The River
was a double album.
“Born in the U.S.A.”, I see as an indictment of America’s treatment of Vietnam Veterans, and you’ve played shows for Vietnam Vets. I wondered—looking back—if you feel at all guilty about dodging the draft when you see these guys?
No, no. At the time, I had no political standpoint whatsoever when I was 18, and neither did any of my friends, and the whole draft thing was a pure street thing—you don’t wanna go! And you didn’t want to go because you’d seen other people go and not come back! The first drummer in a band [of mine] called the Castiles, he enlisted, and he came back in his uniform, and it was all, “Here I go, goin’ to Vietnam”—laughin’ and jokin’ about it. And he went, and he was killed. There were a lot of guys from my neighborhood, guys in bands—one of the best lead singers went, and he was missing in action—so it got to be kinda a street thing. When I was 17 or 18, I didn’t even know where Vietnam was. We just knew we didn’t wanna go and
die
! It wasn’t until later in the ’70s there was this kind of awareness of the type of war it was, what it meant—the way it was felt to be a subversion of all the true American ideals. It twisted the country inside out.
I saw you at Meadowlands, and you did “Johnny Bye-Bye” on the anniversary of Elvis’ death [August 16, 1977] and you said—almost like it was to yourself—that it was maybe dangerous to have all your dreams come true. Is it—because yours have?
Well, you know, a little bit of mine has—the whole thing of when I was 15 I wanted to play the guitar, I wanted to have a band, I wanted to travel. I wanted to be good, as good as I could be at that job. I wanted to be good at doing something that was useful to other people, and to myself. You know, I think that’s the biggest reward of the whole thing—you make a lot of dough, you know, and that’s great, that’s fun, uh, but the feeling that you go out there at night, you play some role in people’s lives, whether it’s just a night out, a dance, a good time, or maybe you make someone think a little bit different about themselves, or about the way they live, which is what rock ’n’ roll music did for me. The interaction with the community is the real reward—that’s where I get the most satisfaction, and just doin’ it well … I’m proud of the way that we play, the kind of band that I’ve got now. It’s been a long time putting it together, we’re all 10 years down the road … and it’s something I got a lot of pride in right now. So when we walk out on stage, your pride is on the line, and, you know, you don’t wanna let yourself down. And you don’t want to let down the people who come and see you.
There are dangers attached to success, though, aren’t there? I mean all my heroes let me down eventually
.
Well it’s a funny thing. One of the problems is that the audience and the performer have got to leave some room for each other, to be human. Or else they don’t deserve each other, in a funny kinda way … I think the position that you get put in is unrealistic to begin with. Basically, you’re just somebody who plays the guitar, and you do that good, and that’s great, that’s nice. If you do your job well, and people like it, and admire you for it, or respect you for it, that’s a plus. But the rest of the time, you’re scramblin’ around in the dark like everyone else is. The idealising of performers or politicians doesn’t seem to make much sense—it’s based on an image, and an image is always, basically, limiting. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily false, it’s just not complete. I don’t know, does that answer your question [
laughs
] ’cos I trailed off there.
It’s that inspiration that you felt, when you saw Elvis …
The thing is, the inspiration comes from the music. The performer, he’s the guy that’s doing the music, but he’s not the thing. The thing itself is in the music—that’s where the spirit of the thing is. The performer is kind of what the music is coming through, but I guess what I feel is that Elvis … they got disillusioned. Well I don’t feel personally that Elvis let anybody down. I don’t think he owed anything to anybody. As it was, he did more for most people than they’ll ever have done for them in their lives. The trouble that he ran into, well, it’s hard to keep your head above the water. But sometimes it’s not right for people to judge.
