Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (40 page)

I have never been to one of your shows, or listened to one of your LPs, without it connecting with something in me I didn’t know I felt
.

That’s the writer’s job. First of all, everybody has a memory—where do you remember, why do you remember, when you were 11 years old, and you were walking down a particular street on a certain day, there was a certain wind blowing through the trees, and the sound your feet made on the stones as you came up the drive. Everyone has memories like
that, that they carry with them for no explicable reason. And these things live within you. They are an essential part of who you are. It may be that something happened. Maybe nothing happened. But for some reason on that particular day you had some moment of experience that revealed to you what it meant to be alive. How important it is, what you can do with your life.

And your life can be brought back to you by the sound of your feet on gravel at a certain moment. That’s the writer’s job. The writer collects and creates those moments from out of his own experience and the world that he sees around him. Then you use your imagination and put those things together, and you present that experience to your audience, who then experience their own inner vitality, their own centre, their own questions about their own life, and their moral life. Whatever you’re writing about, there’s a connection made. That’s what you’re paid for—somebody says, “Hey, I’m not alone.”

You can do it on stage at night—it can be done just through an explosion of energy at a particular moment in a particular way that makes somebody want to stand up, move themselves, go home and do whatever they feel they need to do. You’re just trying to bring forth experience and get people in touch with all of those things in their world. That’s the real job, the job that keeps you writing. That’s what keeps you wanting to write that next song, because you can do that to people and because if I do it for you, I do it for me.

What are the parts of the job you enjoy?

It’s the greatest, greatest job in the world. It was great even before I made a record. I had fun and loved my life when I was 22 and 23, and when I was making my first record and sleeping in a sleeping bag four blocks from here on my buddy’s floor, I felt tremendously fortunate. I was sleeping late, I was doing what I wanted to do. You were, I guess, the local hero, the big guitarist-singer, even if it was just doing a little tune. It was a position of some prestige. It was great, it’s always been great—that’s the reason they don’t call it working, they call it
playing
. It’s a very, very fortunate existence and even when we were in the station-wagon and going 13 hours you could handle it; you felt like you weren’t stuck or caught, you were seeing places you’d never seen before. I drove across the country once in three days with a buddy of mine. I was 19 years old, and we drove this big old Chevy flat-back with the equipment in the back and I didn’t have my licence, hadn’t driven and
it came to dark and he says, “We have to make it in three days so it’s your turn.” He put the truck in first and got it rolling and we switched seats and then I grinded the gears for the rest of the night and we went straight from New Jersey to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur in California. We got a gig there to play New Year’s Eve; it was 1969, and it was a real adventure. I look back on it and the hard times just felt like good times too. It was just a real charmed existence, I loved every little bit of it.

Do you still get the same pleasures from it now?

Yeah I do. I think the fundamental thing remains the pleasure of simply picking up the guitar and having an opportunity to speak to people and be heard, writing a song that you haven’t written before. It’s still a tremendous source of inspiration for me. I connected myself to my world, to the world that was out there via music. You felt that impact whether it was 100 people or a big crowd. That feeling stays fundamentally the same—it doesn’t grow incrementally with the size of the crowd or the size of the place you’re playing because it’s about something you’re doing internally, to feel yourself, to feel your own existence and to feel the impact of that existence in your town, in your neighbourhood, in the world. I still feel that need; that’s my place, that’s where I fit in. I still try to do it as well as I can and hopefully better than I have done it previously. That’s what I want to do.

And that is nearly that. There’s a line in “The Wish,” perhaps the best song on
Tracks
, which goes, “It’s a funny old world, mama, where a little boy’s wishes come true.” Almost 25 years ago I bought
Born to Run
and it changed my life. After the interview, on our way to dinner, I find myself sitting with Bruce in the front seat of his Cadillac outside the house where he wrote “Backstreets,” “Thunder Road” and all the rest, and that line pops into my head. Over the years Springsteen’s music has inspired me more than any other, often seeming to parallel my own life and addressing my own concerns when I most needed it to. You can’t ask more from popular culture. As we drive home, Bruce and Patti’s car peels on a different route. For a second they’re silhouetted, leaning towards each other in a perfect image of love and happiness. And sparks fly on E Street.

Record Collector
, February 1999

Another important interview for parsing the immense, career-spanning
Tracks
box, from the reasons these songs weren’t released sooner to the reasons “The Promise” still didn’t make the cut. Asked about
Born in the U.S.A
. and its outtakes, Springsteen says, “There’s an extra album of that material on
Tracks
that I actually think might have made a more interesting record,” admitting that
Born in the U.S.A
. “was a record I always had some ambivalence about, perhaps because of its success.” Beyond
Tracks
talk, Humphries asks wide-ranging questions and elicits revealing responses. Springsteen discusses the dualism of a career that now had him doing solo acoustic shows in support of
The Ghost of Tom Joad
as well as reconvening the E Street Band. Here on the cusp of the 1999–2000 reunion tour, Bruce says, “I got great satisfaction out of
Tom Joad
, but it wasn’t something that I’d like to have been doing all along … The physical intensity of playing with the band, and the way you reach and touch an audience in that context, is thrilling.”

It’s been a long time since anyone called Bruce Springsteen “the new Bob Dylan.” Over the last twenty years, an equally grim fate has befallen
artists like Steve Earle, John Cougar Mellencamp and even Bryan Adams—“the new Bruce Springsteen.”

But which Bruce Springsteen are those pretenders supposed to be imitating—the bar-room rocker from New Jersey, or the troubled troubadour recreating the spirit of Woody Guthrie?

The real Springsteen is more than either of those caricatures might suggest, as Patrick Humphries discovered when he recently met the man they still call the Boss. The party animal is alive and well, though these days he has to be in by ten. The social commentator is also still at home, though he’s tired of the responsibility of speaking for anyone but himself.

More than anything else, Springsteen is a surprisingly reflective and thoughtful songwriter, as the upcoming publication of his lyric book
Songs
will prove. During a long, revealing interview, Patrick Humphries persuaded Bruce to explain what motivates him to make music—and how that music has changed over the last thirty years.

The first question long-term fans will want to ask you is why did
Tracks
take so long to arrive?

[
Springsteen roars with laughter. He does this a lot. He also … pauses a lot while answering questions
.]

I guess … I sort of released records very carefully and somewhat cautiously from the beginning, because I felt from my first contact with the record industry … The first thing that happened after I signed to Columbia, the first photo session I did was in New York City. They said, oh, you’re from New York. I said No, no, no; I’m from New Jersey. But there hadn’t been anyone who’d been from New Jersey since Frank Sinatra!

A lot of your music has a really strong sense of place and your name has been inextricably linked with New Jersey, right from your first album …

I was strolling along the boardwalk, and I pulled out that postcard that was on the cover of my first album [
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J
.] and I brought it in and said “I wanna use this for the cover.” Luckily I had an art director who thought it was great.

But I guess I felt that once you step into that arena, and enter at play with all those different forces that are in there, who you are can kind of get lost. And so I constructed myself, both through my records, and
the band I put together, in what I felt I came from, and who I felt I was. And when the time came to edit the music I was going to put on those records, I was very specific about what I wanted to say, and what I wanted each specific record to be about.

Particularly after
Born to Run
: I had the first success, I had been on the cover of some big national magazines, and there was this … “Were you invented by the record company?” I’d been playing for 10 years by then in every bar up and down the East Coast! So I said wait a second! But I understood it. I’d seen that happening. So when I went in to make
Darkness on the Edge of Town
, I edited that record very tightly. I had two years where I hadn’t recorded, and I knew that what I put out next I wanted to be centered around who I was, what I wanted my music to be about and what I wanted to say. What I was going to write about, I thought was different from what was out there at the time.

We made a lot of music at that time, in some fashion or other, I thought didn’t fit on the records. And then, I didn’t really release at random, I didn’t feel that I needed to have a record out every year. I always felt that I needed to put out the
right
record—I wanted to put out a record that hopefully would mean something, that would deepen my relationship with my audience, that would clarify who I was and what I wanted to do.

This was the way I released my albums. I looked at them in some fashion as all of a piece. I was writing about a particular cast of characters, following their lives. Consequently, a lot of things ended up not getting on records. And when I put this record [
Tracks
] together, one of the things I did notice was gee, you know, I put on CD 2 and there’s an entire album from
The River
; there’s almost an entire album from
Born in the U.S.A
.

So I said, I wonder what would have happened if I’d put this album out, just a year after
The River
and before
Born in the U.S.A
.? And what if I’d put this album out in the middle of the
Born in the U.S.A
. tour? … I don’t know if it would’ve made a difference or not … Or if it would just have been more music for people to enjoy?

With the benefit of hindsight, do you think now that perhaps you were too rigid about it, that you took it too seriously?

Looking back, I don’t know if I would make those decisions differently, because basically I created the only way I knew how, and I presented my music the only way I felt I could at the time. But it meant
that later on I found myself playing catch-up: so when we put out a live album it had to span 10 years of work because we’d never released ones as we went along! And now we’re putting this out—basically 25 years of work because this music didn’t get out at the time … I think now, when I look back, that there are certain records where that focus was essential to what the record became—
Darkness on the Edge of Town, Nebraska, The Ghost of Tom Joad
—and then there were other records where I could have had more flexibility, more leeway with what I put on.

I think that a lot of the things that come from
The River
sessions on
Tracks
could have switched places with any ten things that I did put on that record and would have performed the same function. And really, at that time, the reason
The River
became a double album was that I was seeking a relief from that rigidity.
Darkness
was the record I wanted to make, but I already had some of the outtakes that are on here—some of the bar band, party music—and I felt that these things were great, and they are an essential part of what I do, and yet because I release records relatively sparely I have a difficult time squeezing them in. It didn’t feel right to me. So when I went to
The River
the first thing I said was, I want to include some of this music—things that happen spontaneously, things that we use to fuel the show.

Listening to
Tracks
, what’s interesting is the extraordinary quality of the music that got left off. Did you never consider releasing things like “Rendezvous,” “I Wanna Be Where the Bands Are” or “Thundercrack” as singles, or as B-sides?

I think that when I put those things out I wasn’t really a singles artist. This was the early ’70s—unlike 10 years earlier or even six years earlier, when you waited for that Rolling Stones single to come out, and you went straight down and bought it. At that time everyone was thinking more on 45s. Albums were still unusual. It was really the Beatles, a few records in, who all of a sudden created the idea of the album as a singular piece of work that people were going to be drawn to, and then there were singles that would come off it.

Previous to that, the music scene was fundamentally singles. It was fuelled by singles cuts, and I think that here in the States it was the British
Invasion that changed that picture, and then I think Dylan coming along, and the idea that maybe you can tackle some serious ideas with this music—and all of a sudden, the extended format, the album became the thing. The album always had a serious tone … when I was a kid, you saw an album, you knew it was going to be classical music or jazz. When I was a child, simply by their size, albums seemed very grown up.