Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (28 page)

By the time I had kids, I’d burned out on the idea of living internally, for my own excitement. I just had to give up that type of control. I think at some point you realize that you don’t need that as much as you thought you did. You feel more centered and safer with kids and marriage, which gives you a lot more emotional flexibility and allows you to go along with other people’s lives. For me it’s still a struggle sometimes. I think I’ve been a good dad, but it calls for an entirely different set of responses than those that I’ve used for the past 30 years.

Are you worried that your success will keep your kids from having the same kind of experiences you had as a child?

It will change their experience tremendously from what my experience as a child was. A friend of mine, Van Dyke Parks, who worked on one of my records, came in the studio one day, and we got into this discussion about how I was concerned about my children growing up differently than I did. And in retrospect I felt that a lot of things about the way that I grew up were good, because I struggled and had the opportunity to make something from not a whole lot. He said, “Well, you give your kids the best and the world takes care of the rest.” And I think that’s what every parent tries to do. And also not to put them in any circumstances where the distortions of the experience are too overwhelming, or too unusual, and then just protect them as best as possible.

Before you ever married, you wrote a number of songs about characters that had wives and kids
.

Yeah, I was probably testing it out.

Do you feel that you portrayed those relationships accurately before you had even experienced them?

Well, there were a lot of different types of portrayal. I guess the songs that come to mind when you talk about it would probably be “The River,” “I Wanna Marry You,” which is just a guy standing on the corner fantasizing, and “Stolen Car.” I stayed away from that subject for a long time. I didn’t write about relationships, probably because I didn’t know much about ’em and I wasn’t very good at ’em, and also it was a subject in pop music that had been written about so much and I wasn’t interested in writing just your classic sort of pop love songs. Later on when I did write about them, I tended to write about them with all the real complications that they involve. I tried to write a more realistic sort of love song, like “Brilliant Disguise” or any of the stuff from
Tunnel of Love
or
Lucky Town
record. I just wanted something that felt grounded in the kind of tension and compromise that these things really involve.

What kind of advice would you give the young Bruce Springsteen now?

I would tell him to approach his job like, on one hand, it’s the most serious thing in the world and, on the other hand, as if it’s only rock and roll. You have to keep both of those things in your head at the same time, simultaneously. I still believe you have the possibility of influencing people’s lives in some fashion, and at the same time it’s only entertainment and you want to get people up and dancing. I think I took it very seriously. I don’t regret doing so, but I think that I would have been a bit easier on myself as I went along and I would have been less self-punishing at different times if I’d remembered that it was only rock and roll. Being a little bit worried about it can be dangerous. It’s a minefield, it’s dangerous for your inner self and also for whatever your ideas and values are that you want to sing about.

You drift down your different self-destructive roads at different times and hopefully you have the type of bonds that pull you back out of the abyss and say, “Hey, wait a minute.” When I was 25, I was
in London and there were posters of me everywhere in this theater that were making me want to puke. I was disgusted at what I’d become, and then someone in the band would say, “Hey, do you believe we’re in London, England, and we’re going to play tonight and somebody’s going to pay us for it?” So I was lucky. I had good friends and a good support network that assisted me along the way. In retrospect, I look back on those times now and they were just funny, you know. But there was good cause for worry because I’d read the maps of the people that came before me and I was interested in being something different, and accomplishing something slightly different.

And what advice would the young Bruce Springsteen give you?

Louder guitars.

Columbia Radio Hour
, November 1995

Though reinvigorated by working again with the E Street Band, by the fall Springsteen was about to embark on what would become a year-and-a-half-long solo trek. Just prior to the start of the acoustic tour for
The Ghost of Tom Joad
, Springsteen spoke at length with broadcaster Bob Costas. Only a portion of the 90-minute interview aired. Delving into the inspirations behind his stark new record, Bruce was excited about returning to what he was when he started out playing Max’s Kansas City by himself. “In a funny way,” he tells Costas, “it’s a throwback to what that was. But it’s something I haven’t really done before; it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.”

I’d made a record, or part of a record, last year, that I didn’t finish, and I worked on it quite a bit and I listened to it … maybe before last Christmastime or something, and I said, “Gee, you know, it’s not quite right.” And I worked with the band on the
Greatest Hits
record. There’s something about the band that always has sort of drawn me outside of myself to write more about the world outside, I suppose. I think I wrote “The Ghost of Tom Joad” originally as a rock song for the E
Street Band, thinking I might use it as one of the extra songs on the
Greatest Hits
record. And for one reason or another that didn’t happen, but it kind of set me in that direction a little bit. And I had this song “Straight Time,” which is on this record. And I had that for about a year or so, and I liked its basic feeling. And as I was working at that time—you follow where your voice is, you don’t particularly choose where your voice is at any given moment. At this particular time in my work life it seemed like my voice is where this record ended up. It was more of a folk voice. That seemed to be something that was just saying, “Hey, work over here.” I didn’t sit down and plan to particularly make this type of record or not. Parts of it presented itself to me, and then you sort of follow it along.

Tom Joad is of course, from John Steinbeck’s novel
The Grapes of Wrath
, but it’s clear that your inspiration for this comes more from the John Ford film. Not just for this track, but the whole album has a cinematic feel. I know you’re a fan of John Ford
.

Yeah, that picture I guess I saw in the late ’70s and it had a really deep effect on me. I think I’d read some John Steinbeck, probably earlier than that, in high school, and there was something about the film that sort of crystallized the story for me. And it always stayed with me after that; there was something in that picture that always resonated throughout almost all of my other work. It was just an image that popped out as I was sitting around on the couch messing around with the guitar.

Do you remember the first time that you watched Henry Fonda give that speech at the end?

Oh yeah, I cried. That was a very powerful speech for me. I think to some degree the things you write are a conversation with yourself … I think that’s probably what that song was to me, it was a conversation I was having with myself. Not about, “Oh, brother, where art thou?” or “Where is this in the world today?” It was just, “Where is it in me?” I think you gotta start with that question. If you can get people to ask that question, then the song’s done its job.

You’ve often come to the theme of a person in difficult circumstances trying to find some nobility, some dignity in those circumstances, maybe not in a dramatic way that everyone can see, but in
some small way that would have a redemptive power for that person. And in these cuts, I find a little bit of that, but also a lot of resignation on the part of these characters that maybe they’re just not even gonna find that little bit of dignity
.

Well, I guess I sort of see there’s a little bit of it out there. I don’t really start from any political point of view—no conscious one. I suppose everybody carries their politics innately and emotionally in their psychology in some fashion. But I think that’s what’s been happening. I think that the American idea of equal opportunity, obviously it hasn’t been realized. And I think what’s worse, every study that’s come out about the division of wealth in society over the past 10 or 15 years has shown that the middle class has been getting smaller and people have been getting farther and farther apart. I think that while it’s something that hasn’t led to, say, riots, it leads to diminished hopes, diminished expectations, diminished possibilities. And so that feeling … like I said I don’t sit down and start from any particular conscious point of view, but I think that feeling of the way things feel to me right now, that colors the stories and the characters’ lives on the record.

Like we said earlier, “The Ghost of Tom Joad” is based much more on the movie, or draws its inspiration much more from the movie than from the book. And you think about the movie and this whole family making its way out west in this little rickety car, and nothing about their circumstances is nurturing. Nothing should give them reason to be optimistic. And they’re trying to forge some sense of community among themselves and find something that’s real that can help them transcend these circumstances. And that theme shows up in a lot of your work through the years, doesn’t it?

I guess. See, my folks, in 1969, I was 19, my folks went west. They went to California to start a new life. It was my mom, my dad and my little sister, I think they had saved $3000. And I remember I stayed in New Jersey because I’d gotten very involved with the band, and I guess that’d become my family at that point in time, and it was also where I could make a living. I went out to California, I tried to make a living, and I couldn’t get a job. I couldn’t get a job where somebody’d pay me to play. And back home I had two or three clubs where I could come up with 100, 125, or a 150 bucks a week, which was enough to survive on. I was sleeping with six other guys in an apartment, and everybody’s chipping in a few bucks for rent. But my folks went in ’69, they
had three grand, they slept two nights in the car and one night in a motel, and that was what they did. They drove into California, they didn’t know anybody. I had a girlfriend who was one of the first sort of hippies in the area, she was the only person anyone knew who’d ever been to San Francisco [
laughs
], and she sent ’em to Sausalito, which was this sort of hipsters’ enclave at the time …

Was she sure to wear a pretty flower in her hair?

[
Laughs
] So my folks pull straight from New Jersey into Sausalito, where of course, they realize very quickly that they don’t belong there. And my mother claims they pulled into a gas station and asked the attendant, “Hey, where do people like us live?” [
laughs
] And somebody said, “Oh, you live on the peninsula.” That’s her story. So they started a whole new life out there. They did well, but they struggled pretty hard.

I went out there—there was a time when I’d never been on an airplane, until I made a record, nobody could afford an airplane ticket. To get to see them about once every year or so, me and a buddy of mine, we’d drive across the country, go three days straight, we’d save—whatever, a 100 bucks … and drive straight through. I went to California. I did some auditioning, but I realized really quickly that I wasn’t gonna be able to live out there … you know, there were just a lot of musicians, and while it was a much bigger music scene, I was a nobody. I realized very quickly that while someone might let you play, they’re not gonna pay you. So I stayed about two months, and I realized I was gonna have to be living off my folks, and I didn’t want to do that, so I went back to New Jersey. And I don’t know if that’s had something to do with part of what I’ve written about. Maybe it’s some of my own experience and some of just, that’s the American story. The American story is transience and the idea of “over the rise.” Less [so] now, I suppose, but I think it’s some ingrained part of not just the American spirit, but human spirit in general. My characters have always been on the move going someplace, searching for something—whether it’s a better life or running from something with the idea that somehow moving will make you better, it’ll heal you inside.

This may not be the exact quote, but you said something like this once: “I was 24 years old, I was sitting at home in New Jersey asking myself the question ‘Is love real?’ and if people have followed my characters through all the years, they can find a common
thread with them and they see that ‘Lucky Town’ is where those characters wind up.” That’s what it was at the time you made that statement. Is “The Ghost of Tom Joad” where those characters wind up or where their thoughts wind up now, or is it more a nod of recognition at a path that all of us could conceivably take if we make the wrong choices or if our circumstances aren’t so lucky?

I guess I don’t like to use the idea of “wind up.” I guess you don’t “wind up” till it’s over [
laughs
]. There’s a lot of different things, questions, I tried to work through in my work over the years. The idea of “is love real,” yeah, I think it is, but it’s hard to find. And it can be hard to find evidence of it.

I’d written [almost] all of this record, and I was in my library one night and pulled a book out called
Journey to Nowhere
, which was a book I’d bought years before and I hadn’t read. The text is by a fellow named Dale Maharidge, and there are some really great photos by a fellow named Michael Williamson. And basically what they did, they went out on the road and they rode the trains from, I think, St. Louis to Oregon, and documented a lot of what had been happening to a group of Americans in the latter half of the ’80s—the people that the trickle-down economy never trickled down to. It’s a book that makes very real, puts real faces on what it’s like if you slip through those cracks. I was very frightened, I remember I read it all in one night and I closed it—my God, you never know what tomorrow brings. It strikes some sort of fear: what if you couldn’t take care of your family, what if you had to leave them, what if you couldn’t be home with your sons and your daughters, what if you couldn’t pay for their health care, couldn’t provide them with the health care that they need? What if that was your kids? I know how deadly important my job is to me. What if I didn’t have that job? Or what if I couldn’t do that job after I did it for 20 years or 25 years?