Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (22 page)

In a year when both political parties are fighting to see which can most reclaim the American flag and its attendant values as its own, how odd to see a rock ’n’ roller predate them. Bruce Springsteen, as evidenced by
Born in the U.S.A
.’s introspective, even homey slice of American-life sagas has created a curious but very real rock audience that might unknowingly have more in common with Cotton Mather than with Judas Priest, with Woody Guthrie than with Prince. Springsteen’s shows, his music and his attitudes share with his audiences a sort of New Puritanism, a sense of a quasi-religious manifest destiny, and a fundamentalist acceptance of life and its troubles, along with the faith that true belief will bring a better way. When Springsteen ends his shows with a cry to “let freedom ring—that’s what we’re here for, even if we have to fight for it every day” there are no scoffers in his rock ’n’ roll flock, only true believers.

Springsteen has the power and the touch. In many ways, he resembles the television evangelists riding the crest of a rebirth of religious fervor in this country. Unlike Jerry Falwell, though, Springsteen’s message is that true salvation lies in a rock ’n’ roll way of life. Articulating that was not easy; it seems to be an intuitive way of knowledge. How unusual it is to hear 20,000 rock fans cheer a performer’s rap on why you should love your street and your hometown and your state and your country. Bruce talks more about family values than Reagan does. Yet none of this suggests jingoism so much as a pure yearning for a return to solid values. Of course any value is better than no value, as demagogues and hucksters have always known. Any shyster can flourish in a moral vacuum, and in the past rock ’n’ roll has never gotten gold medals for presenting either wholesome role models or messages to young people. So what is
this
all about?

Part of Bruce Springsteen’s current level of success must be attributed to his talent as an entertainer, and the absence of any real hard-edged competition. Even so, the oft-hesitant
New York Times
has flatly proclaimed Springsteen the “best rock performer ever.” And there is no denying the fanatical intensity he brings to a show, the evangelical zeal of the true believer. Springsteen is the hardest-working white man in show business. His appeal transcends traditional rock ’n’ roll parameters, though. He’s selling something unique among rock superstars: a self-evident faith. And in the performance, he manages to project a R&R greatest hits collage: a bit of Buddy Holly’s innocence, some of the
dark sensuality of Elvis, a bit of Bob Seger’s blue collar integrity, and the exuberance and abandon of a Mitch Ryder.

That charisma is as strong offstage. I caught up with Springsteen at shows in Detroit and New Jersey and found the backstage atmosphere unusual for rock. No hysteria of any sort, no cocker-spaniel bed-wetting exuberance. The feeling was rather like being in a busy ant colony at work. (The parallel to the Crusades shall go unmentioned.) People around Bruce don’t want reflected glamour so much as approval. The Springsteen work ethic is clearly palpable. MTV may offer its viewers a lost weekend with Van Halen—for Bruce, it’s the chance to be a roadie.

Bruce does not behave like a star either. When he met me in his dressing room in Detroit after a show, his manner was that of an accomplice, a confidant, a comrade. For someone who seldom grants interviews, he was forthright, to the point, and funny. When I told him that he finally had a big enough constituency to either run for the Senate or start his own church, he laughed it off: “Naw, Clarence is gonna do that.” That breezy Jersey Shore camaraderie does not disguise a manner that is so simple and direct that it’s almost misleading. This is a man who clearly has thought out his position in the scheme of things and has some things to say about it.

Aren’t you offering uplifting rock ’n’ roll? Isn’t there a moral lesson involved with all that you do?

Yeah, I guess. The one thing that bothered me about the
Born to Run
record was that when it was initially criticized people thought it was a record about escape. To me, there was an aspect of that, but I always felt it was more about searching. After that, that’s what I tried with
Darkness on the Edge of Town
and
The River
and
Nebraska
. It was like: How real are these things in people’s everyday lives? How important are they? I don’t know exactly what I’d call it, but I know that most of my records after
Born to Run
were somehow a reaction to the
Born to Run
album. To my own experience of it, which was really wild, it was really a big moment in my life. Now, “Born to Run,” the song, means a lot more to me than it did then. I can sing it tonight and feel like it breathes in all those extra years. It’s been, like—I wrote it ten years ago now. But it still feels really real. Very real, for me. It’s one of the most emotional moments of the night. I can see all of those people and that song to them is like—that’s their song, man. It’s almost as much the
audience’s as it is mine. I like it when the lights are up because you can see so much from people’s faces. That’s what it’s about. But I like doing the old songs now, because I really feel they let the years in, they don’t feel limiting. Like, I hear part of
Nebraska
in “Born to Run” now.

Is
Born in the U.S.A
. primarily about, as it suggests, blue-collar patriotic values and rock ’n’ roll realism?

That was the direction I was going in. It was kind of hard to get there because I was just learning the importance of certain types of detail, which I began to get a handle on, I think, in
Darkness on the Edge of Town
. And “Stolen Car” and “Wreck on the Highway,” which was kind of country-music-influenced stuff. I wanted the record to feel like what life felt like. You know, not romantic and not some sort of big heroic thing. Like in “Glory Days,” it sounds like you’re just talking to somebody; that’s what I wanted to do. Wanted to make it feel like you meet somebody. The
Nebraska
stuff was like that: you meet somebody and you walk a little while in their shoes and see what their life is like. And then what does that mean to you? That’s kind of the direction my writing’s going in and in general it’s just the thing I end up finding most satisfying. Just saying what somebody had to say and not making a big deal out of it.

Do you feel that you have real, believable characters now that people your songs?

That’s the hardest thing to do, the very hardest. When I wrote the
Nebraska
stuff, there were songs that I really didn’t get, because I didn’t get the people. I had all the detail, but if you don’t have that underlying emotional connection that connects the details together, then you don’t have anything. There were songs that didn’t get onto
Nebraska
because they didn’t say anything in the end. They had no meaning. That’s the trickiest thing to do and that was my only test of songs: is this believable? Is this real? Do I know this person? I was real lucky because I wrote almost all the
Nebraska
songs in about two months. Which is really fast for me. I just locked in and it was really different for me. I stayed in my house. I just worked all the time. Sat at a table or with the guitar. It was exciting because I realized that this was different from stuff I’d done before and I didn’t know what it was. But with songs like “Highway Patrolman” and the “Nebraska” song itself, writing like that, I was real happy with it. It just felt real. I didn’t know I was gonna do that, but I knew I was going somewhere in that direction.

Are those songs a reaction to what is happening in America? To American values?

I don’t know. I think that what happened during the ’70s was that, first of all, the hustle became legitimized. First through Watergate. That was a real hurting thing, in that the cheater, the hustler, the dope pusher on the street—that was legitimization for him. It was: you can do it, just don’t get caught. Someone will ask, what did you do wrong? And you’ll say, I got caught. In a funny kind of way,
Born to Run
was a spiritual record in dealing with values. And then
Nebraska
was about the breakdown of all those values, of all those things. It was kind of about a spiritual crisis, in which man is left lost. It’s like he has nothing left to tie him into society anymore. He’s isolated from the government. Isolated from his job. Isolated from his family. And, in something like “Highway Patrolman,” isolated from his friends. That’s what the record is all about. That happens in this country, don’t you see, all the time. You see it on the news. And it seems to be a part of modern society. I don’t know what anybody can do about it. There is a lot of that happening. When you get to the point where nothing makes sense. Where you don’t feel connected to your family, where you don’t feel any real connection to your friends. You just feel that alone thing, that loneness. That’s the beginning of the end. It’s like you start existing outside of all those things. So
Born to Run
and
Nebraska
were kind of at opposite poles. I think
Born in the U.S.A
. kind of casts a suspicious eye on a lot of things. That’s the idea. These are not the same people anymore and it’s not the same situation. These are survivors and I guess that’s the bottom line. That’s what a lot of those characters are saying in “Glory Days” or “Darlington County” or “Working on the Highway.” It certainly is not as innocent anymore. But, like I said, it’s ten years down the line now.

So you and your characters are facing adulthood?

That’s kind of where I’m at right now. I wanted to make the characters grow up. You got to. Everybody has to. It was something I wanted to do right after
Born to Run
. I was thinking about it then. I said, Well, how old am I? I’m this old, so I wanna address that in some fashion. Address it as it is and I didn’t see that that was done a whole lot [in rock lyrics]. To me it seemed like, hey, it’s just life, you know. It’s nothin’ but life. Let’s get it in there. I wrote “Racing in the Street” kind of about that. See I love all those Beach Boys songs. I love “Don’t Worry, Baby.”
If I hear that thing in the right mood, forget it. I go over the edge, you know? But I said: How does it feel for you right now? So I wrote “Racing in the Street” and that felt good. As I get older I write about me, I guess, and what I see happening around me and my family. So that’s
Born in the U.S.A. Born to Run
was the beginning of that and it’s funny because I always felt that was my birthday album. All of a sudden,
bang!
Something happened, something crystallized and you don’t even know what. And now what are you gonna do? That’s the big question. You have an audience; you have a relationship with that audience; it’s just as real as any relationship with that audience; it’s just as real as any relationship you have with your friends. It’s funny. I wrote “Born to Run” in 1974 and now it’s 1984 and you can kind of see that something happened along the way. That’s a good feeling.

How do your rock values apply to your audience? What can you tell them of what you’ve learned?

I think it’s different for every performer. I don’t think it’s any one thing anymore. You really can’t tell people what to hold onto—you can only tell your story. Whether it’s to tell it to just one person or to a bunch of people. There’s nothing more satisfying to me than coming in and playing really hard … and watching people—watching their faces. And then going home and feeling real tired at the end of the day but knowing that something happened. So, I don’t know about the question of what rock ’n’ roll means to anyone. I think every individual has got to answer that question for themselves at this point. I don’t think there ever was anyone with an answer. It’s like the difference between Jerry Lee and Elvis. At the time, they were both great. It’s just that you’ve got to take it for what it is and see if you can make something out of it. Some people, they don’t even hear it. It just goes over their heads or something. So I don’t think you can really generalize.

So, is your music just about girls and cars?

That’s what everybody is saying. I always like those reviews. It’s funny, because I remember that when I was about 24 and I said, “I don’t want to write about girls and cars anymore.” Then I realized, “Hey! That’s what Chuck Berry wrote about!” So, it wasn’t my idea. It was a genre thing. Like detective movies. I used to compare it to spaghetti westerns.

Or morality plays, maybe?

Yeah. It’s probably less like that now than it was at one time. But I was always very interested in keeping a continuity in the whole thing. Part of it for me was the John Ford westerns, where I studied how he did it, how he carried it off. And then I got into this writer, William Price Fox, who wrote
Dixiana Moon
and a lot of short stories. He’s just great with detail. In “Open All Night” I remember he had some short story that inspired me. I forgot what it was. But I was just interested in maintaining a real line through the thing. If you look just beneath the immediate surface, it’s usually right there. So I like the girls and cars idea.

But you consciously write images
.

Oh yeah, I always loved the movies. And, after all, music is evocative. That’s the beauty of it. Which is also the danger of video. The tools can be great there and obviously it can be used real well. But it can also be used badly because it’s an inanimate thing in and of itself. The thing about a good song is it evocative power. What does it evoke in the listener?

A song like “Mansion on the Hill”—it’s different to everybody. It’s in people’s lives, in that sense. That’s what I always want my songs to do: to kind of just pan out and be very cinematic. The
Nebraska
record had that cinematic quality, where you get in there and you get the feel of life. Just some of the grit and some of the beauty. I was thinking in a way of
To Kill a Mockingbird
, because in that movie there was a child’s eye view. And
Night of the Hunter
also had that—I’m not sure if surrealistic is the right view. But that was poetic when the little girl was running through the woods. I was thinking of scenes like that.