Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (39 page)

Isn’t that the point of this record? That people who are familiar with
Born in the U.S.A
. suddenly find there is this other interpretation?

Yes, well, if you like that record, there is another record here waiting for
you! If you like
The River
there is an album from
The River
, if you like
Born in the U.S.A
. there is almost an entire album from
Born in the U.S.A
. You like one song over another at the time, but occasionally your choices are very, very particular. Like I don’t know if this particular “Born in the U.S.A.” had been on
Nebraska
whether that would have changed the record.

Two songs seem to be very you; one is “The Wish,” which is clearly about your mother
.

Yes, that’s risky territory, ha ha. I was saying on the last tour, rock ’n’ rollers don’t take to singing about your mother. You can do country or even rap music and sing about your mother. There was a gospel group called the Mother Lovers. Elvis, of course, sang about his mother all the time but not directly, so it’s sort of a funny song. It’s probably why it didn’t get on!

The other autobiographical song is “Goin’ Cali”; is that you?

Yes, that’s me. I was going to go out and play with a band and needed music that was going to fuel that show, but in the meantime I wrote about half a record on the bass, where you had a note and you had your idea. I wrote about half or more of a record. The only one that made it to release was “57 Channels,” but on this thing there was “Over the Rise,” “When the Lights Go Out,” “Loose Change,” “Goin’ Cali,” “Gave It a Name,” even “My Lover Man,” all these very psychological portraits of people wrestling with relationships and their own isolation. “Goin’ Cali,” I suppose, was just an experimental thing I laid down in the studio one day: I don’t even remember recording it or how it came about but it traces, ironically, my journey at that time out West.

A classic American tradition—if you assume that America was founded on people who could not fit in where they were in the first place, so moved and kept moving …

Well, that isolation is a big part of the American character. Everyone wakes up on one of those mornings when you just feel like you want to walk away and start brand new. The West obviously always symbolised that possibility for a long time here in the States—it probably still symbolises the
illusion
of that possibility today. I reached a point where I wanted something different. I tried living in New York City for a while and I just was not a city boy, and I had a small place in California from the early ’80s on, and it was a place where I could go and I had my cars and my
motorcycles, and I enjoyed the geography of the state; you can be out of Los Angeles in 30 minutes and hit the edge of the desert and travel for 100 miles. There is still a lot of nothing out here and I loved it. You are dwarfed in it and it puts your daily concerns in immediate perspective.

You have pared down your imagery through your career. To begin with your images were florid and very wordy
.

After I’d made a few albums, those were the records that I felt uncomfortable with. But now I go back and I really like them, because they are records that I made before anybody was listening. I never heard myself singing these songs until they were recorded, didn’t have a tape player at home, so you were just doing it, having fun. So I look back and it was a very free moment in my writing. I just wrote what came out and the songs work on an abstract basis, but that’s what makes them fun. “Santa Ana” is just a series of images, but it works, there’s a story being told. But later I turned away from that kind of writing because I received Dylan comparisons. If you go back and listen it’s really not like Dylan at all, but at the time I was very sensitive about creating my own identity, and so I moved away from that kind of writing. It still comes up in “Born to Run” and “Jungleland” and a few other places but by the time you get to
Darkness
it’s just about gone.

What would the 22-year-old who went to see John Hammond think of you now?

I really don’t know. You hear your voice from that particular period of time, and you try to think back to what you were thinking, and who you were, and you probably tell yourself that you’re the same. In some essential way you are the same, but of course you’re the same person at a very different place in your life. The kid that walked in that particular night hadn’t begun to imagine a life with children, a wife, and responsibilities—I was trying to
avoid
responsibilities, that was why I became a musician.

So I find myself coming to terms with those ideas that I ran from for a very long time. That’s quite a change. As you get older you realise that where life’s satisfactions and new freedoms reside is in making specific choices, choosing the way that your life is going to go. Those choices seem confining when you’re young, because you want everything, you live in a fantasy of endless possibility. Then if you have some success there is enormous amount of real possibility that is handed to you, a
dangerous amount, and if you go too far down that particular road, you realise it isn’t what it appears to be. You can mistake endless choice for freedom, particularly when everybody wants to say yes to you all the time. There’s plenty of fun to be had, but if you don’t sort that out it’s a recipe for disaster.

The following morning dawns bright and clear, which means it’s an ideal day to go to the seaside. It has to be said that if you were brought up on a steady diet of Bruce Springsteen records, then to cruise today round the sea front where so much of his early work is set is a chastening experience. The relatively modest Asbury Park boardwalk is completely deserted, and almost every surrounding building seems to be in a state of major disrepair. Madam Marie’s fortune-telling booth is still there, but the only signs of the once-thriving club scene are a decidedly tatty looking Stone Pony (recently converted to dance venue Vinyl) and a dancing establishment of low repute called Club Seduction; once upon a time this was the Student Prince, where The Bruce Springsteen Band plied their trade. The Palace Amusements building, celebrated in Springsteen mythology on both
Born to Run
and
Tunnel of Love
, is a wasteland of flaking paint and collapsing brickwork, and the Circuit plays host to a bloke on a bicycle and a police car.

But let’s go into the town itself, and more particularly to the Saint, a long, narrow bar with a small stage that enjoys something of a reputation, having hosted both the Fun Lovin’ Criminals and the Bad Livers in recent times. It’s a warm and colourful place and clearly somewhere Bruce feels at home. He arrives in the same 1963 Cadillac Coupe De Ville featured on the
Tunnel of Love
sleeve, but now sporting a fetching coffee-coloured paint job (“because of Chuck Berry’s Nadine!”) and settles down to business. With a glass of Newcastle Brown to one side and 12-string acoustic in hand, the mood is lighter than at Thrill Hill but no less revealing.

This was about the size of the Prince. The Prince held about 175 people and it was run by a bricklayer from Freehold, the town I grew up in. He’d bought the place and he was dying; there was nobody in there. And I couldn’t get a gig because I wasn’t playing the Top 40 material—it was a resort area, people came out on Fridays and Saturday
nights and they wanted to hear the songs that they knew. Steve [Van Zandt] and I went down one Friday night and walked in and the place was empty, about two people at the bar. We said we had a band and would he let us play. And he says what kind of music, and I said, “Well we just play our own music.” We said, “Look, this is not going to cost you anything, we’ll charge a dollar at the door; try it once and if you don’t like it, we’ll split.” So that’s what we did. On Saturday night I think 15 people showed up but it was 15 more than the previous Friday night, and so he gave us another couple of weeks. Pretty quickly we built a crowd to be almost 30, then 80, and in a month or two we were close to filling the place three nights a week. We just lived off it then—you needed very little money to get by, you were a kid just living hand-to-mouth and so it worked pretty easily.

The one thing that was unique about the town at the time was a club, the Upstage, that was open from eight to five in the morning—there wasn’t any booze or anything, and it was just kids. And because it was open two or three hours after the bars closed all the musicians, after they finished their regular gigs, would come down. In the late ’60s it was a tremendous meeting place for both local musicians and musicians who simply came into the area to work over the summer. I met Southside [Johnny] and Garry Tallent, Danny Federici. When I walked in the first night Vini Lopez was on drums, Danny was on organ and it was a revelation because we had good musicians and there were people playing some original music. It was a shock to me. I can remember walking in and I felt like I really discovered something. It’s how I began to play with many of the fellows that I played with for a long, long part of my career. It was very fundamental.

Why do they call you The Boss?

It all started with nicknames. Everybody had to have a nickname, there was no one in Asbury Park that did not have a nickname. My original nickname was The Doctor, because I had a band called Doctor Zoom & The Sonic Boom. In the local music scene there was a combination of original music and, I would hate to call it performance art because none of us had ever heard of the term, but there would be a Monopoly game going on on-stage, say, and other people engaged in disconnected activities that seemed to be part of the show. So that was what I was called originally. Southside was ’cos he was into the blues, I guess, Steven was originally Miami Steven, ’cos he went to Miami once and came back and
had on an Hawaiian shirt, and he would traipse around Asbury with a Hawaiian shirt and a Russian winter hat—no one had ever been to Miami at the time. So the names came from anywhere, there was Big Tiny, Little Tiny, there was White Tiny, Black Tiny, anyone who obviously wasn’t tiny got that nickname. My recollection was The Boss was a result of paying them at the end of the week … it was never meant for public dissemination. I personally would have preferred that it had remained private.

One of the good things about
Tracks
for me is to hear the funny songs, like “Part Man, Part Monkey,” that haven’t appeared before
.

The best part about doing the record was that all these things that I’d taken off because they were too entertaining, I got to put back on. A lot of the things we did very spontaneously, but a lot of them fell by the wayside.
Tracks
consists of an enormous amount of material that was just out on its own. The interesting thing about the early stuff from CD 2 is that I thought I hadn’t really written about men and women until
Tunnel of Love
. Then I found “Dollhouse,” plus a lot of other things that began to address those issues, even in the early ’80s.

I guess “Stolen Car” is really the start of a lot of that kind of thing
.

Well, it was the presentation of that particular guy, of somebody who was concerned with those ideas, for the first time: that if you don’t connect yourself to your family and to the world, you feel like you’re disappearing, fading away. I felt like that for a very, very long time. Growing up, I felt invisible. And that feeling is an enormous source of pain for people. To make your life felt, it doesn’t have to be in some big way; maybe it’s just with your family and with the job, the basic things you live for. So to have somebody who could feel himself slipping away from all that, and who didn’t know what to do about it, that idea was related to the heart of almost all of my music. The struggle to make some impact and to create meaning for yourself and for the people you come in touch with.

With “Stolen Car” that idea includes being able to have an intimate life, something that’s essential to filling out your life. He was the guy that started the rest of that idea—the things that I wrote with the bass, whether it’s the guy in “Goin’ Cali” or the guy in “Loose Change” that no matter what he touches it just becomes loose change in your pocket.
That’s something that everybody has to learn, to find their way through. And after that came
Tunnel of Love
.

So did music help you find that way through?

Oh sure, that was my central link, the minute I began to sing. The very first time I got up on stage, when I went down to the Elks Club and sang “Twist and Shout,” I felt different, very different.

You said that at the time of
Nebraska
and then just after everything went crazy with the
Born in the U.S.A
album you felt very isolated. Did that make a difference to what you were getting back?

Well it depends. Basically, all my heroes were people who had hit records. By that time I was 33, 34, I’d already been playing for 20 years and I was interested in just what could I do. I didn’t have any idea that that particular record would end up being popular as it was, but I knew when we cut that song that it was going to capture people’s imagination, probably in a way that possibly I hadn’t since
Born to Run
. You could just tell when you heard it in the studio that it was something. And then you just take the ride, you say, “Well, let me see what happens, and let me see where it goes.”

At the time I actually did enjoy it tremendously. If I look back on it now, this enormous amount of exposure is something anyone would probably feel uncomfortable with to a certain degree. But to get out there on the tightrope and walk across, that was a great opportunity. I would have regretted terribly if I felt like I had that opportunity and hadn’t made the most of it. It’s not something I would particularly want to relive in the way that I did at that time, it’s not something I would choose, but it was a laugh, it was at the right time for me—it was before I had my kids. I had a lot of experience and I was prepared for the things that happened.