Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (30 page)

He’ll be remembered as the most unbounded performer in rock ’n’ roll history. His records took you inside a world of naked honesty and passionate conviction, and his marathon shows were founded on deep audience empathy. But surely there must have been something else—some tough-bastard instinct—to get him where he wanted to be, to make him The Boss?

Bruce Springsteen laughs—partly in amusement, partly in protest. “The Boss was an idiotic nickname. It’s the bane of my entire career. I’ve learned to live with it but I’ve hated it, y’know. Basically it was a casual thing. Somebody said it when the paychecks came out at the end of the month and then it ended up being this stupid thing—in my mind anyway. But, hey, so it goes.

“The thing is, I believed when I was young. I was a serious young man, I had serious ideas about rock music. I believed it was a serious thing, I believed it should also be fun—dancing, screwing, having a good time, but … but I also believed it was capable of conveying serious ideas and that the people who listened to it, whatever you want to call them, were looking for something.

“And maybe because it was the only culture I knew when I was 15, it succeeded as a tremendous source of inspiration for me for the entire part of my early life. It truly opened things up for me.

“I heard tremendous depth and sadness in the voice of the singer singing ‘Saturday Night at the Movies,’ and a sense of how the world truly was, not how it was being explained to me, but how it
truly
was and how it truly operated.

“So when it came to be my turn, I said, ‘I want to try and present that and, if I can, then I’ll feel like I’m doing more than taking up space, y’know?’ ”

He’s not taking up so much space these days, not here in his modest dressing room backstage at the Rudi-Sedlmayer Halle in Munich. Not onstage, surrounded by a selection of three or four acoustic guitars and a shelf of harmonica holders on his first solo tour. Springsteen’s sense of commitment to serious issues has never been tested so strongly nor proved so resolute as on this, his “Born to Stand and Sitdown” tour, aka “The Shut the F—Up and Listen” tour. A natural progression from
The Ghost of Tom Joad
—the starkest, most terrifying album of his career, released in November last year—Springsteen’s solo tour is currently heading across Europe after three months in America.

He’s been playing small venues, 2–4,000-seaters, many well off the normal circuit, re-establishing links with the local networks of food banks and agencies for the homeless, forged during his megastar years. But now the clamour is less frantic and the aims more focused. That’s how he wants it to be; a reflection of the world-weariness and sense of fatalism that informs
Tom Joad
.

In Detroit, Bruce talked onstage about a year-long local newspaper dispute and, although he made a donation to the strikers, was careful not to make moral judgments about those forced by circumstances to cross the picket lines. Then the day he played in Austin, Texas, a city-wide ordinance which effectively made it a criminal offence to be homeless came
into effect. In Atlanta, the city’s relief organisations told of the pressure that local business interests were putting on police and politicians to clean the vagrants off the streets in preparation for the summer’s Olympics.

And when he played in Youngstown, Ohio, the depression-hit, population-decimated steel town featured in the eponymous song that gives voice to all those deemed expendable by late 20th-century American capitalism, they say you could hear the very heartbeat of the place pulsing inside the hall when he sang their song.

Springsteen says there’s no substitute for going to the town where someone lives and playing to them. He says there’s nothing that can match actually being there. This is, after all, a performer who keeps in touch with his fans—and their mothers. Like the woman he met back in 1981 after going to a cinema in St. Louis.

“That particular evening was funny because I saw
Stardust Memories
, the Woody Allen film where he was knocking his fans. The kid sitting next to me said, ‘Hey, is that what you think?’ and I said ‘No.’ I was by myself, I was in St. Louis and it was 10 pm. He said, ‘Come on home and meet my mother and she’ll make you something to eat.’

“That to me was part of the fun of being me—people asked you to step into their lives out of nowhere. It was always fun, interesting and fascinating. I just saw this kid’s mother a couple of weeks ago in St. Louis. I still see her, she’s come to every show for 15 years. She comes backstage, gives you something to eat and a kiss. Her son’s a lawyer now.

“I liked that. Part of what I liked about my job was that I could step out of my hotel, walk down the street and some nights you could just get lost and you’d meet somebody and they’d take you into their life and it was just sort of … I don’t know, a way of connecting with things.”

In Munich, as with every other show, there’s a polite announcement before the performance, reiterating what Springsteen has already told the local press—silence is an integral part of much of the music he’ll be playing, and audience co-operation is appreciated. Shortly into his set he puts it rather more bluntly: “Yes, folks, this is a community event, so if anybody near you is making too much noise why not all band together and politely tell them to SHUT THE F—UP!”

The rapt attention and reaction over two nights in Munich and Hamburg suggests that the qualities being appreciated aren’t just the lyrics, but the poetic inflections in Springsteen’s voice, the feel for his characters’ cadences and rhythms of speech; the way each breath, sigh, pant or moan is heard and made to count.

Years ago, Springsteen told an interviewer he was “a nuts-and-bolts sort of guy,” who wouldn’t make his mark in a mercurial flash of brilliance, but gradually over a long “20 to 25-year” haul. The
Tom Joad
tour, allowing him to expand the artistry of his voice and the eloquence of his guitar-playing as never before, bears the fruits of this approach. But that’s not to say the new shows are solely a dark ride. The ripe friskiness of a horny, middle-aged male who has become a father three times since his 40th birthday is well in evidence in introductions to “It’s the Little Things That Count” and “Sell It and They Will Come”—unrecorded songs about his own “squalid little sexual fantasies.”

A compelling blend of good-natured showman and dedicated artist, Springsteen is obviously aware of the value of contrast. So the jocular banter between songs just goes to highlight the depth of torment and heartbreak at the core of the show—be it a wicked Delta-blues reworking of “Born in the U.S.A.,” the lost-tether confession of “Highway 29,” the awesome unreleased
Joad
outtake, “Brothers Under the Bridge,” or the violated innocence of the kids in “Balboa Park.”

The impression of a man at ease with himself and his new, lowlier rank in the Celebrity Freak Show is apparent when we meet backstage, some 15 minutes after his final encore in Hamburg. Springsteen is short and stocky, polite and deferential. With his goatee beard and receding hair pulled back into what’s not so much a ponytail as a sparrow’s cock, he looks not unlike a guy who might change your oil or check your tyres in any western town.

Then, when he grins and his face creases, he reminds you of Robert De Niro—another hardworking Italian-American whose art has centred on struggles of the soul and obsessional behaviour.

In conversation, Springsteen is given to a lot of self-mocking chuckling, but just as likely he’ll slip into a long, slow, deliberating drawl, restarting and revising his meanings; a painstaking approach not dissimilar to the one that has produced the bulk of his recorded output.

He puts his “limited repertoire” of poses into operation for a short photo session, with the proviso that his socks aren’t showing.

“That’s the only rule I have about photos and I’m very strict about it,” he grins.

The photographer mentions Nick Cave and Springsteen interrupts: “Oh, he probably has great socks—he insists you show his socks, am I right?”

Photo session over, he serves up two glasses of Jack Daniel’s and ice.
Undoing the belt around his pleated pants he attempts—unsuccessfully—to open a bottle of Corona. Then he opens the door and pries off the bottle top using the lock-keep, but the beer froths up over his trousers and shirt.

“That’s the trouble with doing it this way,” he says, navigating a quick detour into the shower room.

Finally, lager-stained but ready, Springsteen sits down, resting his drinks on the coffee table beside a silver bill-fold, holding some Deutsch-marks, an expensive watch and a biker’s key ring. Ninety minutes later, Bruce—who admits that he used to drink but “only for effect”—still hasn’t touched either his brew or his Jack.

Have you been working up to a solo tour for a long time?

I’ve thought about it since
Nebraska
, but
Nebraska
sort of happened by accident. A planned kind of accident, but enough of an accident that I didn’t really think that was something I was going to tour with. I thought about it again when I did
Tunnel of Love
, but
Tunnel of Love
was in between a group record and a solo record, and I still couldn’t quite imagine going out onstage by myself at that point.

We did rehearsals where it was just me and a sit-down band and—I hate to use the word—an
Unplugged
-style show. That didn’t feel right, if there’s a band on stage, people are going to want you to go, “One, two, three, four,” y’know? So we ended up putting a big tour together.

So when
Tom Joad
came about I thought, “This is the chance to do something I’ve been waiting to do for a while.” Also, I wanted an alternative to touring with a band and all that that involves. I’ve done it for a long time and I felt like, at best if I got out there with a band I’d only have something half new to say, because, if you’re there with a group of people, automatically you’re gonna want to hear, A, B and C.

Really, the bottom line is that, through the ’90s, the voice I’ve found, the voice that’s felt the most present and vital for me, had basically been a folk voice. It really hasn’t been my rock voice.

I was originally signed as a folk singer and so it’s a funny sort of thing. John Hammond [the late legendary CBS talent scout who signed Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Bruce] would be laughing right now, because he was always saying to me, “You should make an album with just a guitar.”

When Jonathan Demme [director of
Philadelphia
] asked for the song [“Streets of Philadelphia”] he focused me outward and then working with the band did the same thing because they are the living manifestation of the community I write about.

Musicians are funny. When you’re home, you’re never a real connected part of your own community, so you create one of your own. So I created the band and that was your family and that was the living manifestation of whatever community you imagine and sing about, and I think that’s what they were to my fans. I think that’s what they represented and that’s why the band has power and why it is important and has been important.

That sense of friendship, loyalty, everybody’s different but somehow together; that’s why the whole idea of the band has always been a central idea of rock music; that’s why bands keep coming. Whether it’s the brothers in Oasis or whoever, everybody’s fascinated because IT FEELS LIKE REAL LIFE. People trying to make it, to get together and do something together. That’s why bands are powerful.

Do you follow young bands?

Not that much, I hear things in passing. Occasionally I’ll go out and do a lot of curiosity-buying. Since the early ’80s, my musical influences … they’ve been ultimately more … I sort of fought back in a way. There was Hank Williams and some of the blues guys and folk guys, but films and writers and novels have probably been the primary influences on my work.

On the album sleeve and onstage monologues, you’re quite specific that it’s the John Ford film, rather than the Steinbeck book of
The Grapes of Wrath
that inspired
Tom Joad
.

That’s the way it happened, that’s what I saw first. Then I read the novel, which is incredible. I recently re-read it, and you have that beautiful last scene. The book ends on a singular act of human kindness or compassion—the entire book leads to that point. That had a lot of meaning for me at the moment I re-read it because I was searching for a way to go beyond broad platitudes or whatever you want to call them.

I was looking for a way to make whatever light there is in the world feel real now. So I found myself turning at the end of my record to one person making one decision. I think the things I use to bring some light into the show are those types of things, that’s why I play “Spare Parts” and “Galveston Bay.” To me, those things are possible, those are things that … any individual at your show can walk out of the building and can lead the next day with that idea or that possibility.

Did therapy affect your most recent writing?

Nah, that had more affect on my life and the choices that I had; it gave me more control in the way I could live my life. Early on, when I was younger, I could only live my life in one way, it was the only way I knew. I was locked into a very specific and pretty limited mode of behaviour. It was basically the road, I had no capability for a home life or an ability to develop anything more than a glancing relationship.

Did you feel something happening to you at the time?

No, you’re 25 and you don’t know anything that’s happening to you. All you know is that things are rushing by. At the time I felt like—this is the race.

As a rock ’n’ roll athlete, Springsteen may be unique—there’s never been any account of him having taken a drug, for instance.

“No, I never did.”

Yet your songs suggest someone well aware of self-destructive urges
.

I’ve had many self-destructive urges but they’ve never worked themselves out in the drug area. I’ve had a funny experience in that I didn’t do any drugs; I’ve never done any drugs. It’s not about having any moral point of view about drugs whatsoever—I know nothing about them. I didn’t do them for my own reasons, which were probably … I didn’t trust myself into putting myself that far out of control. I had a fear of my own internal life.