Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (3 page)
Bruce’s interview performance before international journalists was a measure of how far he had come as a public figure. Speaking to so many
outlets at once, he deftly used the media pulpit to sell his work, deliver his message, and win over new fans while gesturing appreciatively to his older ones.
Springsteen’s talk matters profoundly; these interviews are essential to gaining insight into the person, the work, and the changing times. But we must take care not to mistake the musings of the artist for the art. (“Trust the art, be suspicious of the artist. He’s generally untrustworthy,” says Bruce.) Throughout these interviews, Springsteen provides substantial insight into his life and music at different moments. But he also reminds us that his job is not to speak but to shout. “I’m a lifetime musician,” he declared at age 43. “I’m going to be playing music forever. I don’t foresee a time when I would not be onstage somewhere, playing a guitar and playing it loud, with power and passion. I look forward to being 60 or 65 and doing that.” On September 22, 2012, Springsteen and the E Street Band performed a
Wrecking Ball
concert before a sold-out crowd at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. At midnight, he turned 63.
The Asbury Park Evening Press
, February 9, 1973
Springsteen’s first album,
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J
., was released January 5, 1973. A month later he spoke with his hometown paper. Twenty-three years old, Springsteen was already a veteran of the Jersey Shore club scene. Some of the key themes to his early career are already here: his anxiety over being part of a big company and not having control, his insistence on playing good music, the comparisons to Bob Dylan, and his desire to be “honest” about what he is doing. Barbara Schoenweis notes that his songs “have an urgency that is typical of his generation, and more so, of Bruce himself.”
Music put Asbury Park on the map about 30 years ago when Frank Sinatra asked “Is it Grenada I see or only Asbury Park?”
Well, it’s back on the map again in a more contemporary version with Bruce Springsteen’s new LP for Columbia Records,
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J
. The jacket is a blow-up of a popular color postcard found among the city’s famous boardwalk’s stands.
Bruce, who hails from Freehold and moved here when he was 18, has been singing and playing guitar in the area for nearly 10 of his 23 years, both on his own and with bands like Steel Mill. And now on his way to the top, he’ll be stopping at the Sunshine Inn tomorrow night to perform for his loyal and local fans. Then it’s off to California for six weeks where he’ll be on bills with groups like the Beach Boys, Paul Butterfield, and others. He recently finished a week’s gig at Max’s Kansas City, New York, which he says was an unusual experience because the crowd really came to listen to him and his band.
On one of his rare stays at his apartment in Bradley Beach, he visited The Press to talk about what it’s been like being pushed into the limelight in less than six weeks. Dressed in a tattered green leather jacket, jeans, a wrinkled shirt, and lace-up boots, he hardly looks like the picture of upcoming fame and fortune. He does not seem impressed, either, by the machinery that has put him where he is, only somewhat shaken up by it.
“There’s a lot of confusion,” he says, about how it’s been since his friend and local manager “Tinker” (Carl West) introduced him to Mike Appel and Jim Cretecos in New York and how from there he met John Hammond who got him on the Columbia label.
“He’s the same guy who introduced Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, and Bob Dylan,” says Bruce. “The man knows his business.”
“It’s weird working for a big company, though,” he mumbled in a characteristically sullen manner. “It was like pulling teeth to get me to sign. You’re not your own man anymore. But you can always get up and walk away from it all. What can they do, sue me for my shoes? I ain’t got nothin’ else.”
Of course, he admits, his attitude toward this whole new world changes each day with whether he’s eaten and slept well.
“Some days you think when you start making a record, people drive you nuts,” he says. “Somehow it all comes back to money. And then other days you meet some really great people and it seems all worth it and terrific.”
On the way to where he is now, Bruce spent his time playing back street clubs and bars in the area for pin money, and made himself a respected but controversial reputation, because he believed in being honest with his audience and doing only music he thought was good.
“I broke up a lot of bands in my day,” he admits with a wry grin, “because I’d get up there and start playing junk with them, and all of a sudden in the middle of it all, I’d just stop and say, ‘What is this jive?’ ”
“All you can ask of a person is that he’s honest about what he’s doing. I hope I’ll never change in that respect,” he continues. “The world does not need another four-piece rock ’n’ roll band, and the market needs less to be flooded with more junk.”
When you ask Bruce what his music is all about (he wrote and arranged and plays all nine songs on his album), he tells you to listen to the record. When you ask him about his background, he tells you that he doesn’t go in for a personality image, that it’s his music that should stand or fall on its own.
His music style is not unlike Bob Dylan’s in mood and sound, but it is also unique in the way he puts words and sounds together. His tunes are not melodic but they have a drive, an urgency that is typical of his generation, and more so, of Bruce himself. His lyrics go from poetic and highly intelligible to wanderings of a way-out mind or a bad trip.
Among the best songs on the album is “Lost in the Flood,” a piece which marries the hypocrisy of the Vietnam War to the hypocrisy of our everyday lives. Bruce has a knack for bringing things to light in vivid images, some of which are drawn from local landmarks and the landmarks of his past.
The ragamuffin gunner is returning home like a hungry runaway
.
He walks through the town all alone
He must be from the fort he hears the high school girls say
.
His countryside’s burnin’ with wolfman fairies dressed in drag for homicide
The hit and run, plead sanctuary ’neath a holy stone they hide
.
They’re breakin’ beams and crosses with a spastic’s reelin’ perfection
Nuns run bald through Vatican halls pregnant, pleadin’ immaculate conception
.
And everybody’s wrecked on Main Street from drinking unholy blood
.
And then there’s what Bruce does admit to as his “nothing” songs:
Madman drummers bummers and Indians in the summer with a teen-age diplomat. In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat. With a bolder on my shoulder, feelin’ kinda older I tripped the merry-go-round. With this very unpleasing sneezing and wheezing the calliope crashed to the ground
.
He plays the acoustic, electric guitars, and bass as well as the harmonica on his album. He’s a self-taught musician, who can read music “a little” and who started playing piano when his grandfather gave him one at age 14.
“It was one of the nicest things that ever happened to me,” he says.
Bruce is backed up by a group of local musicians who, at this point, have no trade name. They are Vincent Lopez on drums, Clarence Clemons on sax and background vocals, Garry Tallent, bass, David Sancious, piano and organ. Harold Wheeler and Richard Davis fill in on piano and bass in a couple of songs.
What’s different about Bruce’s songs that made him catch the ears of the music world?
“Well, it’s me,” he says.
And about the future?
“It’s a waste of time to think about it,” he comments. “I’d rather think about my music.”
Like many critics, Robert Hilburn discovered Springsteen early on and became an enthusiastic supporter. Music editor at the
Los Angeles Times
, Hilburn made sure that LA audiences heard about the shows at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and the Troubadour in July 1974 and were primed for a series of historic shows Bruce would perform at the Roxy in October 1975. With his first two albums out, Bruce admits “the writing is more difficult now.” He was working on what would be his make-or-break third album, and he was feeling the pressure. “You have to let out more of yourself all the time. You strip off the first layer, then the second, then the third. It gets harder because it’s more personal.”
“The writing is more difficult now,” said Bruce Springsteen, the hot new, much acclaimed American singer-songwriter, as he sat in his modest hotel room (he isn’t booking suites yet) after a Santa Monica Civic Auditorium [show] and tried to put his suddenly accelerating career into perspective.
“I got a lot of things out in that first album. I let out an incredible
amount of things at once—a million things in each song. They were written in half hour, 15 minute blasts. I don’t know where they came from. A few of them I worked on for a week or so, but most of them were just jets, a real energy situation.
“I had all that stuff stored up for years because there was no outlet in the bars I had been playing because no-one’s listening in a bar and if they are, you’ve got a low PA [system] and they can’t hear the words anyway. So, the first album was a big outlet.
“On the second album, I started slowly to find out who I am and where I want to be. It was like coming out of the shadow of various influences and trying to be me,” continued the 24-year-old who bears a startling facial resemblance to Bob Dylan on stage.
“You have to let out more of yourself all the time. You strip off the first layer, then the second, then the third. It gets harder because it’s more personal.”
Though Springsteen had received three standing ovations at the evening’s concert, he was still vaguely displeased with the show. Because he was the opening act (for Dr. John), he had been limited to 45 minutes. Too short, he felt.
“It was like we didn’t even play at all,” he muttered in his slightly shy, hesitant way. “It reminded me of the time we toured with Chicago. We got introduced, walked on stage, blinked and that was it. It’s hard to show an audience what the band is about in that little time.”
But Springsteen had salvaged some of the evening for himself through his choice of an encore number. For most of the show, he and his five-piece band had given the audience uptempo tunes—songs bristling with the fire, energy, passion and sensualness of the New York and New Jersey streets of his youth.
For the encore, however, he played the slow, disarming “New York Serenade,” a tune that detracted from rather than added to the strong energy level that had been building in the auditorium.
The applause was clearly less when he finished that song than it would have been if he had given the audience another boogie number. But Springsteen had known it would happen and, unlike many young performers eager for the strongest possible applause, he had done it anyway.
Springsteen is shooting for high stakes in rock and he knows there are no short cuts. By doing “New York Serenade,” he was telling the audience and reminding himself that the song is just as much of his music as the uptempo numbers.
It’s a combination the public ultimately is going to have to accept or reject so why not, he figured, lay it on the line now.
“I thought it was important to do that song,” he said. “It completed the set for me. It might get more response to do a boom-boom thing and really rock the joint, but when I walked down the steps afterward I felt complete. Otherwise, I feel messed up.
“It’s just being honest with the audience and with myself, I guess. You can’t conform to the formula of always giving the audience what it wants or you’re killing yourself and you’re killing the audience.
“Because they don’t really want it either. Just because they respond to something doesn’t mean they want it. I think it has come to the point where they respond automatically to things they think they should respond to. You’ve got to give them more than that.”
Springsteen, who began playing in rock bands around his native New Jersey while in his early teens, burst onto the national pop music scene in 1972 with an album (
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J
.) that reminded you of Dylan because of its machine-gun barrage of surrealistic lyrics, such as these from “Blinded By the Light.”
Some brimstone baritone anti-cyclone rolling stone preacher from the east
.
He says, “Dethrone the Dictaphone, hit it in its funny bone. That’s where they expect it the least.”
Because the album stressed lyrics more than music (Columbia had originally encouraged him to simply record the songs with a guitar backing, but he insisted on using a band), Springsteen was immediately thrown into the folk-flavoured, singer-songwriter category where some began hailing him—along with John Prine, Elliott Murphy, Jackson Browne and Loudon Wainwright III—as the new Dylan. His second album,
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
, made enormous strides towards giving Springsteen that separate identity.
Without sacrificing the surrealistic lyrics, both his themes—normally reflecting the innocence, wonder, frustrations, urgency of youth—were more disciplined and his musical backing bolder than in the first album.
In a song like “Sandy,” Springsteen brings together several of his themes, set against the natural illusion/fantasy setting of an amusement park:
Sandy, the fireworks are hailing over little Eden tonight
.
Forcing a light into all those stoney faces left stranded on this warm July
…
And the boys from the casino dance with their shirts open like Latin lovers on the shore
Chasin’ those silly New York virgins by the score
…
Did you hear the cops finally busted Madame Marie
For telling fortunes better than they do
…
