Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (26 page)
The riots broke out right after our second interview session. It was pretty frightening being in L.A. then
.
It really felt like the wall was coming down. On Thursday [the day after the riots began], we were down in Hollywood rehearsing, and people were scared. People were really scared. And then you were just, like, sad or angry.
At the end of the ’60s, there was a famous commission that Lyndon Johnson put together, and they said it would take a massive, sustained effort by the government and by the people to make life better in the inner cities. And all the things they started back then were dismantled in the last decade. And a lot of brutal signals were sent, which created a real climate for intolerance. And people picked up on it and ran with the ball. The rise of the right and of the radical right-wing groups is not accidental. David Duke—it’s embarrassing.
So we’ve been going backward. And we didn’t just come up short in our efforts to do anything about this, we came up bankrupt.
We’re selling our future away, and I don’t think anybody really believes that whoever is elected in the coming election is going to seriously address the issues in some meaningful fashion.
On the one hand there seems to be a tremendous sense of disillusionment in this country. Yet on the other hand, it seems like George Bush could be reelected
.
I think so, too—but not on my vote. People have been flirting with the outside candidates, but that’s all I think it is. When they go put their money down, though, it always winds up being with someone in the
mainstream. And the frustrating thing is, you know it’s not going to work.
Do any of the candidates appeal to you?
What Jerry Brown is saying is true—all that stuff is true. And I liked Jesse Jackson when he ran last time around. But I guess there hasn’t really been anyone who can bring these ideas to life, who can make people believe that there’s some other way.
America is a conservative country, it really is. I think that’s one thing the past ten years have shown. But I don’t know if people are really organized, and I don’t think there’s a figure out there who’s been able to embody the things that are eating away at the soul of the nation at large.
I mean, the political system has really broken down. We’ve abandoned a gigantic part of the population—we’ve just left them for dead. But we’re gonna have to pay the piper some day. But you worry about the life of your own children, and people live in such a state of dread that it affects the overall spiritual life of the nation as a whole. I mean, I live great, and plenty of people do, but it affects you internally in some fashion, and it just eats away at whatever sort of spirituality you pursue.
Do you see any cause for optimism?
Well, somebody’s going to have to address these issues. I don’t think they can go unaddressed forever. I believe that the people won’t stand for it, ultimately. Maybe we’re not at that point yet. But at some point, the cost of not addressing these things is just going to be too high.
A lot of people have pointed out that rappers have addressed a lot of these issues. What kind of music do you listen to?
I like Sir Mix-a-Lot. I like Queen Latifah; I like her a lot. I also like Social Distortion. I think
Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell
is a great record, a great rock & roll album. “Born to Lose” is great stuff. I like Faith No More. I like Live; I think that guy [Edward Kowalczyk] is a really good singer. I like a song on the Peter Case record, “Beyond the Blues.” Really good song.
How do you keep up with what’s happening musically?
Every three or four months I’ll just wander through Tower Records and buy, like, 50 things, and I get in my car and just pop things in and out. I’m a big curiosity buyer. Sometimes I get something just because of the cover. And then I also watch TV. On Sundays, I’ll flick on
120 Minutes
and just see who’s doing what.
Mike Appel, your former manager, has contributed to a new book [
Down Thunder Road: The Making of Bruce Springsteen
] that essentially claims that your current manager, Jon Landau, stole you out from under him
.
Well, that’s a shame, you know, because what happened was Mike and I had kind of reached a place where our relationship had kind of bumped up against its limitations. We were a dead-end street. And Jon came in, and he had a pretty sophisticated point of view, and he had an idea how to solve some very fundamental problems, like how to record and where to record.
But Mike kind of turned Jon into this monster, maybe as a way of not turning me into one. It’s a classic thing: Who wants to blame themselves for something that went wrong? Nobody does. It’s tough to say, “Maybe I fucked it up.” But the truth is, if it hadn’t been Jon, it would have been somebody else—or nobody else, but I would have gone my own way. Jon didn’t say, “Hey, let’s do what I want to do.” He said, “I’m here to help you do what you’re going to do.” And that’s what he’s done since the day we met.
Two other people who used to work with you, ex-roadies, sued a few years ago, charging that you hadn’t paid them overtime, among other things. What was your reaction to that?
It was disappointing. I worked with these two people for a long time, and I thought I’d really done the right thing. And when they left, it was handshakes and hugs all around, you know. And then about a year later,
bang!
I think that if you asked the majority of people who had worked with me how they felt about the experience, they’d say they’d been treated really well. But it only takes one disgruntled or unhappy person, and that’s what everyone wants to hear; the drum starts getting beat. But outside of all that—the bullshit aspect of it—if you spend a long time with someone and there’s a very fundamental misunderstanding, well, you feel bad about it.
You recently appeared on
Saturday Night Live
. It was the first time you ever performed on TV. How did you like it?
It felt very intense. You rehearse two or three times before you go on, but when we actually did it, it was like “Okay, you’ve got three new songs, you got to give it up.” It was different, but I really enjoyed it. I mean, I must not have been on TV for all this time for some reason, but now that I’ve done it, it’s like “Gee, why didn’t I do this before?” There must have been some reason. And I certainly think that I’m going to begin using television more in some fashion. I think it’s in the cards for me at this point, to find a way to reach people who might be interested in what I’m saying, what I’m singing about.
I believe in this music as much as anything I’ve ever written. I think it’s the real deal. I feel like I’m at the peak of my creative powers right now. I think that in my work I’m presenting a complexity of ideas that I’ve been struggling to get to in the past. And it took me ten years of hard work outside of the music to get to this place. Real hard work. But when I got here, I didn’t find bitterness and disillusionment. I found friendship and hope and faith in myself and a sense of purpose and passion. And it feels good. I feel like that great Sam and Dave song, “Born Again.” I feel like a new man.
Critic Neil Strauss catches Springsteen in the aftermath of the phenomenal success of his single “Streets of Philadelphia” and his first reunion with the E Street Band to record several new songs for a
Greatest Hits
album. In retrospect, that January ’95 studio session was a turning point for Springsteen’s career as the new century approached; here, Springsteen lays out a vision for the future that would prove accurate: “I don’t think I’d want to have to choose between the band and the solo stuff. I’d like to have both. One of the things I realized when I saw the guys was that we’re like each other’s arms and legs.”
You can tell a lot about a musician by how he or she arrives at an interview. Some come with a manager, others with a publicist. Some come with bodyguards, others with a retinue of hangers-on. Bruce Springsteen came to this interview alone. He drove himself from his home in Rumson, New Jersey, to the Sony Studios in Manhattan in his black Ford Explorer, and he arrived early. Sitting in solitude with his back to the door in a darkened conference room, a mass of flannel and denim
and glinting silver-cross earring, he didn’t need much prodding to be talked into heading to a nearby bar for drinks and atmosphere.
Springsteen entered the 1990s on shaky ground. He fired his longtime back-up group, the E Street Band, bought a $14 million spread in Beverly Hills, divorced his first wife, model Julianne Phillips, and married a member of his backing band, Patti Scialfa. Since then, his career has been the subject of hot debate. What is his relevance in the Nineties? Does his solo work hold up to his recordings with the E Street Band? Is he losing touch with his audience?
But in the past year, Springsteen ended the debate. He recorded his most successful solo song ever, “Streets of Philadelphia,” earning himself a shelf full of Grammys and an Academy Award, and re-formed the E Street Band to record new songs for his
Greatest Hits
album, which debuted at Number One on the charts. On Labor Day weekend, he will perform at the opening ceremony for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum in Cleveland, an institution he will no doubt be inducted into when he is eligible in two years.
In a rough cut of a documentary now being put together from 23 hours of film that were shot while the revived E Street Band was recording the new songs last winter, the reunion seemed like an easy one. Three days after Springsteen called the band, they were in the studio, stretching what was supposed to be a two-day process into one which took a full week. In one scene that doesn’t seem created for the camera, the band gives its saxophonist, Clarence Clemons, a cake on his birthday and he gushes, “This is the best present a person could have for his birthday, being among you guys.”
The documentary also shows the recording of “Secret Garden,” a song that Springsteen originally wrote for his upcoming solo album. Here, he demonstrates the E Street’s democratic approach when he hands out torn-up pieces of paper so that the band can anonymously vote for or against the inclusion of string arrangements. (The strings lost.)
Springsteen takes his interviews as seriously as he takes his music. During the two-hour discussion, he stared intently across the table, face still except for battling eyes, body solid and immobile except for constantly fidgeting hands, and set about answering each question as meaningfully as he could. Giving the waitress a 200 percent tip for his beer and a shot of tequila, he pulled up a chair at a table next to the jukebox in a dark corner of the bar and began talking.
What does it mean to you to have a “greatest hits” album?
It’s interesting because when I started out making music, I wasn’t fundamentally interested in having a big hit right away. I was into writing music that was going to thread its way into people’s lives. I was interested in becoming a part of people’s lives, and having some usefulness—that would be the best word. I would imagine that a lot of people that end up going into the arts or film or music were at some point told by somebody that they were useless. Everyone has felt that. So I know one of the main motivations for me was to try to be useful, and then, of course, there were all those other pop dreams of the Cadillac or the girls. All the stuff that comes with it was there, but sort of on the periphery. In some way I was trying to find a fundamental purpose for my own existence. And basically trying to enter people’s lives in that fashion and hopefully maintain that relationship over a lifetime, or at least as long as I felt I had something useful to say. That was why we took so long between records. We made a lot of music. There are albums and albums of stuff sitting in the can. But I just didn’t feel that they were that useful. That was the way I measured the records I put out.
Instead of doing a
Greatest Hits
album, did you ever consider just putting out what you thought were your most “useful” songs?
That would be so personal. It might be more interesting and maybe fun to write about, but the song selection for the
Greatest Hits
was pretty much Jon’s [Landau, Springsteen’s manager] idea. We didn’t try to get into a “best of,” because everybody’s got their own ideas. Basically it was the songs that came out as singles. The only exception is “Thunder Road,” but it seemed central. I like the classic idea of hits—it was sort of like
50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong
. That was what we were thinking when we put it out. The album was supposed to be fun, something that you could vacuum the rug to if you wanted to. I think part of the reason we put the record out was that I wanted to introduce my music to younger fans, who for 12 bucks could get a pretty good overview of what I’ve done for years. And for my older fans, I wanted to say, “This still means something to me now, you still mean something to me now.” It was just kind of a way of reaffirming the relationship I’ve built up with my audience over the past 25 years, which outside of my family is the most important relationship in my life.
Did you include the “Murder Incorporated” outtake for them?
A lot of fans have asked for outtakes, and I have so many sitting around. It might be fun at some point to throw together some sort of collection of stuff like my attempts at other genres—from the bubblegum sort of thing to more pop-oriented material to the British Invasion things. We used to go in the studio and say, “Tonight is Beatles night,” and we’d put things together that had all these influences either just for fun or because we thought they were going to work out at the time. In the end, I would generally opt for things that had my own voice in them the most. But a lot of the other stuff was fun, and at some point it might be a blast for some of the fans to hear.
Before you ever started releasing records, you were known more as a guitarist than a songwriter. Do you ever think about stepping out as a guitarist again?
