Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (41 page)

I wasn’t ever really a singles artist. I’ve had hits at a particular time, for one reason or another, but there wasn’t anything different about those records and the ones that I’d released four years earlier; it was just a particular moment. So I never really thought like that. From when I first began and affected people. All of those guys had internalized that, and when they went out and did what they did, which could have appeared to be something that was the polar opposite of church music, it was not necessarily so.

At the start of the ’80s when I first saw you play, it struck me that the brilliance of your shows was the rollercoaster ride you gave the audience—it was like the best Saturday night you’re ever going to have, but then you’d pull it back with “This Land Is Your Land” or “Independence Day” and make it much more pensive and reflective
.

I thought that was what it could do … present ideas in a more literal fashion, but then you want people to just raise their hand at a particular moment. And when you threw all these things together on a given night, something happened, something happened … and it could be inspiring. I’ve been inspired, and I hope to inspire. When you went out on that stage at night, you yearned to inspire, and bring happiness and fun and enjoyment, and make people laugh—and think. To me that’s what I had always got out of music, and that was what I wanted to return.

For me the people whose music I cared about, still care about, all had that element, an element of spirituality. The pure humanity of Woody Guthrie’s writing, it just cuts through everything. It’s why Dylan drifted back towards gospel, and when you hear his “Every Grain of Sand,” it’s rooted in those things. They made those connections, and all of those connections were things that were part, in some fashion, of everyone’s life.

I think that’s what I was interested in doing—talking basic, daily experiences that I had, that everyone had: being involved with family, work, their friends; the way they fitted in, or did not fit in, the town that they grew up in; the way they saw themselves as a citizen … These were things I felt were a constant part of people’s lives. And I wanted to create music that would encompass all of those issues and be fun and entertaining and would rock you on top—inside and outside!

Watching you play on
The Ghost of Tom Joad
tour, I got the impression that that was what you really wanted to do; you’d proved you were “The Boss,” you’d got the gold records, you’d got the record sales, and it was almost as if the rock ’n’ roll stuff was now just like the day job
.

Not necessarily. I pretty much always did what I wanted to do. To do what I did on any given evening, I needed to have that commitment; so anytime I walked onstage, I had focused and committed myself to the job in hand. But I got a great deal of satisfaction out of that tour and that record. I hadn’t written about those things in a while, and I felt it connected up to my earlier music … there was a connection back to
Nebraska
, which I’d always felt was one of my best records. And when I finished the
Tom Joad
record, that’s how I felt. I played it and I said I don’t know how this is going to do, or what people are going to think about, but it’s one of my best records.

But I always loved playing with a rock band too, and I wouldn’t put one thing necessarily in front of the other. 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 … and it’s something I’ve done since I was very young. I always went back and forth, almost since I started. Before I ever made records, I wrote acoustic music and played it in some local coffee houses here. I always did both things …

I wanted access to the physicality, the energy, the grab-you-by-your-throat intensity you get when you put on a physical performance that you can do with a group. But the
Tom Joad
tour, that’s sort of where you can focus and refine your ideas and present some of the things you’re thinking about, very clearly, very precisely, and with a certain sort of depth and clarity that you couldn’t achieve in a big concert.

In 1982, you wrote in a note to Jon Landau: “The song is in very rough shape but is as good as I can get it at the moment. It might have potential.” That song was “Born in the U.S.A.,” which two years later hurled you from being a cult, blue-collar rocker into the biggest rock star on the planet. But although
Born in the U.S.A
. remains among the best-selling albums ever released, it’s not an album that you seem particularly fond of …

It was the record I made at the time, but I wouldn’t say it was the record that I wanted to make. I spent a lot of time on it, we cut a lot of music. There’s an extra album of that material on
Tracks
that I actually think might have made a more interesting record—“This Hard Land,” “Murder Incorporated,” “Frankie.” There were some really good songs that, for one reason or another, at the time just went by the wayside …

It was a record I always had some ambivalence about, perhaps in the end because of its success. But I look back and it was really my purest pop record, and it functioned like that. I think that when I went into the studio initially, I wanted to take what I’d done on
Nebraska
and electrify it in some fashion. And on occasion—“Born in the U.S.A.,” “My Hometown,” “Glory Days”—I wrote some songs I liked. But I’m not sure I wrote the entire record that I wanted to. Sometimes that happens.

Given the astonishing range of material on
Tracks
, a lot of your longtime fans are going to want to know why “The Promise” isn’t on there
.

Yeah, that was a song that people really liked. There were a few things over the years that fans had mentioned that they liked and I did make an effort to include them. But when I went back—and I did go back—we didn’t have a particularly good recorded version of that. It was very slow, and plodding. I just felt it was … heavy-handed. I was never completely satisfied with the way I’d written the song. I played it out a little bit when I wrote it—and we did cut it in the studio, for
Darkness
, I think, but it just never felt right to me. I thought at some point of attempting to re-cut it, but it just didn’t happen.

In concert during the late ’70s, you would bounce back onstage at the end of a draining three-hour show, and scream, “I’m just a prisoner of rock ’n’ roll,” then play another hour’s worth of material. I always believed that to be true, that you had never had a “proper” job …

[
Laughs indignantly
] Hey, I was a gardener. I tarred roofs. I was a house-painter. But it was pretty brief, when I was a teenager, and basically I used that work to buy my first guitar. I went to a Western Auto Store, I remember I was paid 50 cents an hour, and I saved up 18 bucks, and I went out and bought my first guitar. I studied it for about six months and then I said, “If I’m going to be able to make a living, or get a job playing, I need an electric guitar,” and that leads into “The Wish.”

That must be a rock ’n’ roll first, a song written by a rock star to his mum!

Yeah! And after that, literally from fourteen-and-a-half on, I made money playing. I made money six months after I picked up the guitar; it wasn’t a lot, maybe five dollars on a particular night. But you forget, at 15 years old, ten or twenty bucks a week was an enormous amount of money for a kid to have in the mid-’60s. I was still living at home. So it was great: I made my own money, I didn’t need to go to my folks for money—they didn’t really have money they could give me. And relatively quickly, in the next two or three years, I developed into a “local attraction.”

From that point on, you shared a room with three or four other guys, there were times you slept on people’s floors. I lived in a surfboard factory. There wasn’t any rent, you could eat for three dollars a day, or less … If I made 20 or 30 bucks a week, I’d scoot by to the next weekend when I had a job. I focused completely on music. I guess I was single, and I was a kid, and I had living conditions that allowed me to do that.

If you went back and looked at them, you might think … a room with a couple of mattresses on the floor, a refrigerator in the corner, a TV on a little stand … and that’s how you lived! But that was pretty much how everyone I knew lived at the time—Vini Lopez [original E Street Band drummer] I think lived in the bathroom at the surfboard factory. We literally lived in an industrial park. It was tough, because the resin from the surfboards really knocked you out for a while. But it
allowed me to spend my time working on my music, so I really did do that from when I was very, very young.

Do you remember the first song you wrote when you really thought, “there’s something here”?

My first band, the Castiles, played some original music from the very beginning. We made a record that was never put out, just a demo that had a couple of original songs on it. I don’t remember the first one that I actually taught to the band, but it was probably right back at the beginning.

Your relationship with your father has been pretty well documented in your songs (“Independence Day,” “Factory,” “My Father’s House”) and I wondered exactly when your father first began to feel that perhaps you were finally beginning to amount to something?

Being on the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
was the big one. I always remember calling him up … it was a time when I didn’t see my folks much, from ’69 probably through to the 70s, because they moved out West when I was 19, and no one had ever been on an airplane. It was inconceivable to buy a plane ticket. So I had to drive out to California to see them, which I did a few times when the opportunity arose, but we were pretty distant. I did call and tell my mother that I had a record deal, and her first question was “What did you change your name to?”

I remember when I called and said to my pop, “I’m going to be on the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek
.” That must have sounded insane! I had made a few records, but they hadn’t done particularly well, and I remember my dad’s only comment was: “Well, better you than another picture of the President!” Obviously that was the moment they knew something was going on. They didn’t know exactly what it was … but they did know that, miraculously,
something
had occurred.

So you’re out driving around New Jersey, and you hear a Bruce Springsteen song on the radio. How does that feel?

Initially it was a great thrill. It still is, to hear your music on the radio—particularly new music. I was in a place the other day, somebody
had the radio station on, and I hear, “I Wanna Be with You,” and you sit, and you’re listening, even 25 years later, you’re going yeah, that
is
me. The radio still can feel like it’s a magical device. It’s something you can hear in your room, something that was incredibly personal to you, being disseminated over the airwaves—literally over the airwaves—it’s put out into the air, over thousands and thousands of miles. Some intimate thought you had on a particular night about something that was so deeply personal to you that you wrote a song about it—and all of a sudden, that song is on the radio. It’s still pretty incredible.

I haven’t gotten jaded about it. I can still remember the first time I heard “Spirit in the Night” [his second single] on the radio, in New York City. A car pulled up at a light, and the window was open, and I heard my record through the window. And I was shocked—it felt
so
great. But you’re frightened, because you’re listening and thinking, gee, did we make it right? Is it good? What does it sound like? And what does that complete stranger think? Does he even care what he’s hearing?

I saw Dylan in the summer. Sometimes he does a show and it’s not great, but this was, and I felt really privileged to be in the same room and hear him sing “Blowing in the Wind,” even though he’s sung it thousands of times before
.

I think when he’s singing it, he probably has a different connection to it than you do, and though the song has become iconic … I’m guessing, but for myself, sometimes you just go back to the original reasons and feelings and personal experience that made you write the song in the first place. And those things are all still, no matter how far you travelled or move on, they’re still a deep and integral part of you. So I think you can summon up the 22-year-old that sings “Growin’ Up,” or the 25-year-old singing “Born to Run” or the 30-year-old who sang “The River,” I think that person is always inside you, that part of you is always there to summon up and reconnect with that music.

I played behind Roy Orbison once, it could all just have been current music, the way he approached it … He sang everything literally exactly like it was on the record. Which I felt like was a gift he gave to his audience. In his hands, it didn’t feel rigid; in his hands, it didn’t feel nostalgic to me. There may have been a nostalgic element, but it wasn’t fundamentally nostalgic. And he presented it to you in a
way that felt incredibly fresh, and also tied in to your memories. You could tell when he stepped to the microphone, that he still had complete access to his emotions and to what those songs were about, and he didn’t short-change any of the music that he’d done, whether he’d sung it a thousand times before or not. He was able to step up and make it feel real to you on that particular evening, just in the beauty of his voice, and his own respect and profound connection to what he had created.

With the responsibilities of fatherhood, do you manage to get out much to see much live music these days?

I haven’t lately … This summer I saw John Fogerty’s show, but I really haven’t a lot lately. Your life changes, and all of a sudden it’s, “It
starts
at 10 o’clock?” So it has affected my getting out and seeing a lot of live music. Last summer I got out a bit, saw some local bands, and played a little bit myself … Over the last year or so, I saw Sheryl Crow, I saw Bob [Dylan] play. But I haven’t gotten out as much as I would have liked.