Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (31 page)

I lived in a house where I experienced out-of-controlness and I didn’t like it. I suppose I had fears that that was going to be me if I do A, B, C, D or E.

I was ’round very many people who did many drugs and I can’t particularly say I liked any of them when they were stoned or high, for the most part. Either they were being a pain in the ass or incomprehensible. That’s my experience—so it didn’t interest me.

Also, at a very young age, I became very focused on music and experienced a certain sort of ecstasy, actually, through playing. It was just something I loved doing.

But you did take oxygen blasts between sets during your stadium shows?

“I suppose so, if necessary,” he laughs.

Those were the days when he was the Boss. A near-superhuman creation, trailing anything up to a four-hour extravaganza of euphoria, shaggy-dog monologues, stories with a bittersweet twist, clowning, death ballads and hard-won heroics. The extended victory march by the man who wanted the heart and soul of the music to rage long into the night. Can he imagine doing it ever again?

“I don’t know. I can certainly imagine playing with the band again. I don’t know if I’d play for that particular length of time at this point. I mean, I certainly
could
, but I believe I might want to create a more focused show if I went out.

“But it’s very tricky because I had the same thought the last time I went out, probably the last five times, then all of a sudden you’re looking at the clock and three hours have gone by. So y’know, I’d have to get there and see.

“As far as the other stuff goes, it was really I had a lot of fuel. I always felt the E Street powering me. We had a lot of
desperate
fun; I think that’s what gave the fun, that the band presented an edge, y’know. There were always two sides to that particular band, there was a lot of dark material and yet there was this explosion of actual joy; real, real happiness—whether it was being alive or being with your friends or the audience on a given night. That was real but it was the devil-on-your-heels sort of fun—laughing and running, you know what I mean?”

Did things change when Patti Scialfa [long-time New Jersey musician and, since 1991, the second and—he’s sure—last Mrs. Springsteen] joined?

“When Patti joined, I wanted the band to be more representative of my audience—I said, ‘Hey, we need a woman in the band!’ I saw the band as representative of myself. We were all in our mid-30s and I said, ‘It’s time to deal with these ideas. The band as a lost boys club is a great institution—the level of general misogyny and hostility and the concept of it as always being a place where you can hide from those things.’ But I wanted to change that, I didn’t want to do it.”

What changed you?

Just getting older, you know, and realising, like the old days—you can run but you can’t hide. At some point, if you’re not trying to resolve these things then you are going to live a limited life. Maybe you’re high as a kite and it doesn’t matter to you, I dunno. But ultimately it is going to be a life of limited experience—at least that’s what it felt like to me.

Not only did I want to experience it all—love, closeness, whatever
you want to call it, or just inclusion. To create a band that felt inclusive—someone would look and say. “Hey, that’s me!” That’s what bands do. That’s why people come and why your power is sustained: because people recognize you, themselves, and the world they live in.

You didn’t really start writing about sex until the
Tunnel of Love
album. Why had you avoided it until then?

I hadn’t avoided sex, but I’d avoided writing about it. It was just confusing for the first 30 or 35 years of my life. Whatever you’re caught up in—you know, you’re traveling round with the guys, and women are sort of on the periphery. By the time I was in my mid-30s that wasn’t acceptable any more. I didn’t want to be some 50-year-old guy out there with the boys. It seemed like it was going to be boring. Boring and kinda tragic.”

On “Lucky Town” you sang,
“It’s a sad, funny ending when you find yourself pretending/A rich man in a poor man’s shirt.”
On
Tom Joad
the metaphor is more explicit: you’re a land-owning Californian millionaire, writing about welfare rejects, illegal immigrant drug-runners and child prostitutes—people as far removed from you on a socio-economic scale as is possible. Is that what writing is about? Making connections that aren’t supposed to be possible?

The point is, take the children that are in “Balboa Park,” those are your kids, that’s what I’m trying to say. It’s like, I’ve got mine, you’ve got yours and these are kids, too. As a writer, I’ve been drawn to those subjects, for personal reasons, I’m sure. I don’t have some big idea. I don’t feel like I have some enormous political message I’m trying to deliver. I think my work has come from the inside. I don’t start from the outside—“I have a statement I want to make, ladies and gentlemen!,” I don’t do that. I don’t like the soap-box thing, so I begin internally with things that matter to me personally and maybe were a part of my life in some fashion.

I lived in a house where there was a lot of struggle to find work, where the results of not being able to find your place in society manifested themselves with the resulting lack of self-worth, with anger, with violence.

And, as I grew up, I said, “Hey, that’s my song,” because, I don’t know, maybe that was my experience at a very important moment in my life. And those ideas, those questions, those issues were things I’ve written about my entire career. I still feel very motivated by them and I still probably do my best work when I’m working inside of those things, which must be because that’s where I’m connected. That’s just the lights I go by.

Did you do any research to amass the material and detail that features in
Tom Joad
?

Things happen from all over the place. I met a guy in Arizona who told me a story about his brother who rode in a teenage motorcycle gang in the San Fernando Valley, called the Vagos. I just happened to meet this guy by the side of the road in this little motel. I don’t know, it just stayed with me for a very long time and when I went to write it, I kept hearing his voice.

If you’re in Los Angeles, there’s an enormous amount of border news. Immigration and border life is a big part of the town. That’s part of what I’ve gotten from being in California every year, for half the year, for the last five years. It’s a very, very powerful place; a place where issues that are alive and confronting America are happening at this moment. It represents what the country is turning into; a place where you see the political machinations of how the issue of immigration is being used, and a lot of the bullshit that goes down with it. It’s just the place that, ready or not, America is going to become.

Your reputation has always been of someone who is incredibly prolific and gives away as many good songs as you keep for yourself. Have you ever had a period when you haven’t been able to write?

Well, if I was
that
prolific I’d have put out more records. I suppose there’s prolific in writing a lot of songs and there’s prolific in writing a lot of
good
songs! I’ve written plenty of songs, but to me a lot of them didn’t measure up because I wrote with purpose. My idea wasn’t to get the next ten songs and put out an album and get out on the road. I wrote with purpose in mind, so I edited very intensely the music I was writing. So when I felt there was a collection of songs that had a point of view, that was when I released a record. For the most part I didn’t release a record until I felt like it, because I didn’t think my fundamental goal was to have hit records. I had an idea, y’know, and following the thread of that idea, when I thought I had something that would be valuable to my fans, something enjoyable, something entertaining, something that wouldn’t waste their time when I put a record out. I could have put out a whole lot more casual records but, at the time, you’re honing an identity of some sort.

An image?

Image? Sort of, I suppose. That’s part of it to some degree, but that’s like the top part—the frothy stuff.

Did you ever have a big gay following?

Not to my knowledge.

There was always something very camp about that grease-monkey-baseball-hat-in-the-back-pocket look during
Born in the U.S.A
.…

It was probably my own fault. Who knows, I was probably working out my own insecurities, y’know? That particular image is probably the only time I look back over pictures of the band and it feels like a caricature to me.

Everything before and after that is just people, but that particular moment I always go, “Jeez,” y’know? I couldn’t tell you what that was about.

All I could tell you was, when I wrote “Streets of Philadelphia” and I had some contact with gay people, who the song had meant something to, I felt the image that I had at that time could have been misinterpreted, y’know? That is something that I regretted and still do regret, to some degree.

But I think, at the same time, it must have been an easy image to latch onto. Maybe it had something to do with why it was powerful or what it represented. But it was very edgy to me and very close to—if it wasn’t already—over-simplification. It was certainly over-simplified if you just saw the image and didn’t go to the show and get a sense of where it was coming from and what it was about. It had implications that I didn’t tune into at the time and I don’t really feel are a fundamental part of my work.

Is there an element of surrealism playing at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and finding yourself standing beside the real, living, breathing heroes you once worshipped from a distance?

Yeah, one night I was standing between George Harrison and Mick Jagger and y’know, I sat in my room with their records, I learned to play my guitar from those records. I studied every riff and the way they played it, and my initial bands were modeled on them. So there’s always a little bit of, “Hey, what am I doing here?” You realise there were millions and millions of kids at that time that had that particular fantasy or whatever you want to call it.

But I’m sort of glad I have a place generationally, where I get to stand with those people onstage. It’s a tremendous source of pleasure being able to back up Chuck Berry, one of the great American writers,
a
great
American writer. He captured an essential part of the country in a fashion that no one has done before or since.”

Are you sad that his creative life as a writer lasted for such a short period?

That’s just the way it goes. I have no idea how people’s creative instincts work. I’m just glad for the work he’s done. It was very influential in my work in the sense that there was a lot of detail in the writing, fundamental images I carried into my own music.

That’s the course of rock music. It’s very unusual to be 20 or 25 years down the line and still be doing vital work. I think the reason is, it takes an enormous leap of faith at the time of your success, a leap of consciousness, and the ability to suss out what is essential and what is bullshit is very important.

Money comes in—great! We can let the good times roll, we can have fun with it. But if you start out and get caught up in the idea that these things are going to sustain you in some fashion when you get 20 years down the road, you’re gonna be in for a surprise.

Right now, I don’t need records that are Number One. I don’t need to sell records that are going to make millions. I need to do work that I feel is central, vital, that sets me in the present, where I don’t have to come out at night and depend upon my history or a song I wrote 20 years ago. What I’m interested in doing now is finding my place in the world as it stands. That to me is what is vital and sustains you and gives you the commitment and motivation to tour and stand behind your work. That’s all I know, 20 or 25 years down the line.

Is there a sense of fear attached to what you do?

Of course, that’s part of everything. I think if there is a fear, it’s a fear of slipping out of things. By that I don’t mean the mainstream of the music business. This particular record, I knew when I put it out it wasn’t going to be on the radio very much, and it wasn’t! Fundamentally, it wasn’t going to be part of what the mainstream music business is today, in the States anyway.

We’ve all seen
Spinal Tap
, with the idea of an audience becoming more selective
.

[
Laughs
] I guess there’s the sense that you are protective over your artistic life and creative impetus, your creative instinct, your creative vitality.
That’s something I’ve known since I was tearing the posters down in 1975 [on his first visit to Britain, Springsteen went on the rampage, tearing down posters outside Hammersmith Odeon proclaiming him “the future of rock ’n’ roll”] and it’s something I still feel real strongly about today.

Are there moments when you’ve surprised or disappointed yourself?

You’re always doing that. You look back and say, “I did that well, I didn’t do that, I communicated well here but not there.” It’s just endless, y’know? That’s the idea, that’s why you’ve always got some place to go tomorrow, something to do now. That’s why this particular music is not a rock show, it’s not unplugged, it’s something else. I don’t even know if I should call it a folk show. In a funny way, the songs are based in rock music, but I suppose it’s based around the new record. It’s not a night where I come out and play hits or favorite songs you wanna hear. There’s no pay-off at the end of the night with those things. It is what it is and that’s my intent.

Is your ongoing work a reaction and extension of the work you’ve done in the past?

Of course, because the artist’s job, in my opinion, is to try and answer the questions that your body of work throws up, or at least pose new questions. With this record, that’s what I’m trying to do.

“I felt for ten years I put a lot of those questions on hold because I was writing about other things, I was having some reaction to the
Born in the U.S.A
. experience, because I was finding my way through a new life, in some sense.