Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (48 page)

It was in the
Darkness
period that you started your campaign of self-education and particularly studying American history
.

Well,
Born to Run
did have those big themes on it. I was interested in who I was and where I came from, the things I thought gave my music value and meaning, so I pursued that information. Also I was just naturally inquisitive. High school was just so boring and I never went to college so I missed out on a moment when I may have been—and I say “may have been” more susceptible to learning things. So in my mid-twenties I pursued a lot of things that I found inspired me. History inspired me. I guess I was aware of wanting to write about the place where I lived, the people I knew. You wanna get everything you can get out of it and you wanna give all that you can give. You wanna explore the self, you know.

The Grapes of Wrath
became very important to you—the John Ford film, the novel and Woody Guthrie’s Dustbowl songs. What got to you about the 1930s and 1940s?

A lot of the blessings and the curses were closer to the surface. Look at the movies. From the John Ford film of
Grapes of Wrath
I got that elegiac
view of history—warmth, fidelity, duty—the good soldier’s qualities. But film noir came out of those periods too and they were popular films. I think you see that again through the early ’70s, big films like
Taxi Driver
. People had interest in the undercurrents, the underbelly, an interest in peering behind the veil of what you’re shown every day. There was a sense that there was more than what you are seeing and what was being presented to you, and that was pervasive in the country at large, I think, not just in the progressive elements of society. I mean, the Vietnam War didn’t end with the hippies being against it or the progressives being against it, it ended when the truck drivers were against it. The ’30s and ’40s, the early ’70s again, those were times when things were in great relief. People were willing to look past society’s mask. That was compelling to me.

Looking past that mask, what did you see?

Just that people were … I do kind of touch on it in some of my early things—“Lost in the Flood” (from
Greetings from Asbury Park
, 1973). I was trying to get a feeling for what was actually going on, what were the forces that affected my parents’ lives. I suppose you would have to say it all goes back to your immediate personal experience. Those are the things that shape you. The whole thing of the wasted life, it was very powerful to me.

Did you go on to read political books like the Communist Manifesto?

No, I didn’t read that. But I went through a lot of what was out there it seemed, bits and pieces of a lot of different philosophers. But a book that had an enormous effect on me was
America
by Henry Steele Commager [and Allan Nevins], a very powerful history of the USA. It went back to that core set of democratic values that the country guided itself by sometimes and sometimes not. It was the first thing I read that made me feel part of a historic continuum—feel our daily participation and collusion in the chain of events. As if this was my historical moment. In the course of your lifetime how your country steers itself is under your stewardship. So what did you do? That was an interesting idea to me in terms of how to look at your life, your work and your place.

That was very tangible for the first time and it directed some of my
writing—along with you want to rock and have fun. You see the effects in
Darkness, The River
and
Nebraska
. It’s certainly in the song “Born in the U.S.A.”; that’s a Vietnam veteran who’s on fire because he’s colliding with the forces of history. But this guy has accepted that personal and historical weight—it’s angry, there’s a social element, there’s a lot less innocence.

With
Born in the U.S.A
. were you deliberately commenting on Reagan’s America—with him in the middle of his first term when you wrote it—or was it post-Vietnam issues that stirred you up, the problems the veterans were having 10 years on?

I was moved a lot by the veterans I’d met. I’d become close to some of them. Vietnam wasn’t written about almost at all until a decade after it stopped—earlier, all I remember is
The Deer Hunter
and a great Nick Nolte movie which hardly got shown called
Who’ll Stop the Rain
(both 1978). But in the early ’80s there was the birth of the Vietnam Veterans of America. My friend Bob Muller was heading it up and we did a benefit for them on the
River
tour (1981). I remember going to see
The Deer Hunter
with Ron Kovic, who wrote
Born on the Fourth of July
, and he was looking for things that reflected his experience. The song came out of all that. Bob Muller was the first guy I played it to. That was something.

Apart from reading, you explored America more literally by just driving around the country
.

Well I travelled a lot from the time I was 18 or 19. My parents were gone [factory worker Doug and legal secretary Adele moved from Freehold, New Jersey, to California in 1969] and they didn’t have any money to buy me a bus ticket much less an airplane ticket so I’d drive out to the West Coast maybe once a year to see them. We’d take these big country trips, three or four or five of us—and a dog—jammed into the cab of a truck and you’re driving three days straight without stopping. Just the stuff you did when you were a kid.

Come the ’80s, though, Springsteen really wasn’t a kid anymore. Pictures of America as seen through a car window were still important to him—that’s the point of view in “Wreck on the Highway” (
The River
, 1980), “Mansion on the Hill” (
Nebraska
) and “My Hometown” (
Born
in the U.S.A
.), as well as the cover picture of
Nebraska
(from the bottom in monochrome: dashboard, snow on a windscreen wiper, road and empty land, cloudy sky). But it wasn’t a matter of grabbing unfocused snapshots on the move. With diligently, deepened knowledge and wider awareness added to instinctive, passionate insight, he developed and extended the charmed life of success and public esteem begun by
Born to Run
.

This period reached a wildly disproportionate crescendo though, with
Born in the U.S.A
. The title track blitzkrieg kicked open the door to a whole new audience with the E Street Band playing more wide-screen than ever and Springsteen in character as the crazed Vietman Veteran “burning down the road / Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go.” But these agonies of ecstatic self-destructiveness were often misunderstood—in the 1984 US Presidential election, Ronald Reagan first tried to co-opt the song as a patriotic anthem (his advisors only heard the hook-line) and then his Democrat opponent Walter Mondale did the same. Springsteen forbade both sides to use the song, but the politicians weren’t the only ones whistling but not listening. With more pop-inflected singles “Dancing in the Dark” and “Cover Me” hurrying it along, the album sold out more than 15 million worldwide, which was about three times the core audience he’d previously reached.

In Springsteen, this experience of hyper-fame snagged many of the same nerves as the
Time
and
Newsweek
covers had back in 1975. As he noted in
Songs
, “A songwriter writes to be understood,” and he hadn’t been, or not by a large proportion of this new audience. What’s more, he called the album a “grab bag,” lacking the coherence he always strove for and which he had found in the plain and slow-selling
Nebraska
. Yet with its broad-push appeal and seemingly anthemic feel,
Born in the U.S.A
. brought Springsteen a host of fans who took him for a rock god and worshipped him, revered him, as a hero who could do no wrong.

Springsteen enjoyed the response on-stage, no doubt, but felt a fundamental unease that much of this huge audience was “transient” and, if courted further, could distort “what you do and who you are.” Seeking to reestablish control of his career—and to express himself both more subtly and more clearly—he recorded the subdued album
Tunnel of Love
. At its heart were the identity-challenging “Two Faces,” “Cautious Man,” “One Step Up” and the song that’s been so much on his mind again of late, “Brilliant Disguise.” He found his own (smaller)
audience again, all right, with many of those core fans still regarding it as his best ever.

But, by then, “control” was exactly what he didn’t have, not in any area of his life. The spell had broken.

The first flicker came in 1985, when he hit trouble with two former senior roadies. Mike Batlan (who’d recorded
Nebraska
on a 4-track Teac) and Doug Sutphin quit their jobs and sued their ex-boss for $6 million in punitive damages. When a judge threw that out, they lodged further suits against Springsteen for hundreds of thousands in alleged unpaid overtime and—trivial yet resonant—docking their wages for loss of his canoe in a storm. The Springsteen camp fought it all the way for six years, creating bad publicity all the while, through to an out-of-court settlement—which meant the publicly aired issues were never publicly resolved.

Then in 1988, his first marriage fell apart. Worse, the story broke messily in the tabloids on a European tour via paparazzi pictures of Springsteen keeping company with backing singer Patti Scialfa. Separation and divorce from Julianne Phillips, his wife of three years, followed in short order.

Finally, in November 1989, he parted with the faithful, beloved E Street Band—albeit after personal explanations to each member (Clarence Clemons told
Mojo
years ago “I was shocked, hurt, angry all at once”) and offers of severance pay which, it was reported, may have totaled $2 million a man.

Although he married Scialfa and they started a family—they have three children now—the music went off the boil when, in 1992, after a long hiatus, he released two separate albums,
Human Touch
and
Lucky Town
, on the same day. They were reviewed at the time (and are generally remembered) as his least satisfying since his debut.

Moving onto your late-’80s emotional turmoils: your first marriage ending, the roadies case, breaking up the E Street Band. Time for some self-examination?

[Laughs, stands up and walks across the room to get some water, talking en route
.]

I’m always doing that! Soon as I get up in the morning. It’d be nice to get away from it, but it’s one of those things I’m stuck with. It’s been good for my music and my work, I think, and ultimately it’s been good
for my life but, uh, I’ve never been … I think on-stage is about as carefree as I get, that’s when things switch off and you’re just living, you know. Most of the rest of the time it was always my nature to analyse and so, uh, I can’t say there was any particular period when …

OK, specifically the strange case of the roadies, why did you pursue it for so long and make it such a big event?

It was very intense because it was a divorce case. In general, the things I’ve been, uh, involved with have been divorce cases. With Mike [Batlan] it was very similar where you have people you’ve known for a while and relationships go sour and in the end that’s what it is. That’s what that was.

Did the parting from the E Street Band come under the same heading?

That was just a moment when I didn’t quite know where to go next and it needed to stop for a while. We needed a moment of discontinuity. It sent people out into the world on their own—me too—and it ended up being really healthy. I think if you talk to most of the guys they would agree with that. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I didn’t know what I was going to do with the band, so I said, “Well, I’ll see what happens.”

Now, playing with them again over the last five years I know, well, I’m with these people till it’s over. That 10 years apart, it’s not that people change so much, but, as I said when I inducted U2 into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, one of the rules of rock ’n’ roll is, “Hey, asshole, the other guy’s more important than you think he is!” [
Snorts and laughs
.] It can take time away from people to get a view on that. But we’ve had long deep relationships and it’s gonna go until it’s done.

When you talked about “Brilliant Disguise” on
Storytellers
you said the song questions the difference between appearance and reality in everybody. Then you pointed at yourself and said, “So this is my public self” and somebody applauded …

Sure.

And, clapping sarcastically, you turned to that person and said, “What, you think I worked well on that lying, cheating public face …?”

[
Giggles startlingly, maybe half pleased he was so direct, half worried he went too far in giving a fan such a hard time
.] It’s just … the reason I talked
about “Brilliant Disguise” is it’s about identity. And your identity is so multi-faceted and diffuse it’s amazing that every part of you is in the same place at one time! That’s the way that I experience it. So part of what I was talking about was that there’s an act of presentation. That’s daily life. If there are two people in a room there’s a play of some sort going on. That’s human interaction. And me talking about it is a way of dispelling some of the myths that build up around you and which tend to box you in. I don’t like that. That song is asking, “Is it me or a brilliant disguise?” And the answer is it’s almost always both. You know, you’ve gotta put out an enormous amount of your real self for it to feel real. You can’t … it’s not something … for it to feel real, it has to be real. At least, that’s the way that I operate. But it doesn’t have to be all, it’s not all, you know?

Not the whole of you, you mean?

Exactly. It can sometimes be just a very specific slice that may be very deep but … We forget that every adult was brought up on fairy tales so it’s natural to go on and, politically for example, want to believe that your President is an honest, nice man. The inability to turn to an adult perspective once you get to the age where you have some political weight is a great tragedy, and this is a period of history when it seems the most obvious type of disguise is on display to the entire world and yet those are the people who are still in power.