Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (49 page)

You’re thinking of the “war on terrorism”?

Well, although elements of that are real and true, it was basically co-opted. But to go back to the question of my identity when I’m on-stage: it’s not a face that’s dishonest, it’s a face that’s incomplete and a couple of things I did that
Storytellers
night were … What happens is when you have a lot of success your complexity tends to be whittled down into a very simple presentation, not necessarily by the artist or musician, it’s just the way that people want one-sentence explanations for everything and everybody; he’s the nice guy, he’s the nasty guy. And so, with my audience, one of the things I’ve tried to do is retain the complexity of human life or human experience. I want to see and be seen within those parameters. That’s where your freedom is and that’s where your true dialogue, a deeper dialogue with your fans, can take place. So I was taking … a kick at that.

Given the events of the late ’80s, did you feel that your fans’ opinion of your integrity had been blemished—that people were thinking less of you?

Well … I don’t have a problem with that [
laughs
]. That’s the way I would put it. Life is a messy business. Just as much for me as, I imagine, anybody else. My feeling at that moment was my … I was worried about my real life, not how my image was. Here I was trying to do things that were really hard for me to do; I was trying to connect with somebody [Scialfa] and get a family started and for somebody like me that was probably the hardest thing I ever had to do.

I had a grasp that those were the things that were going to matter to me as I moved forward. As to people’s perceptions of me, I didn’t have and I don’t have complete control over that and it goes up and down and in and out and that’s OK. By then I had 20 years of work behind me and I thought, “I’ll stand on that.” If people see you making a mess or stumbling around, well that’s life too. You don’t do everything right, you know. You make bad decisions or wrong decisions or misguided ones and as far as I know that’s how everybody’s living out there, so I didn’t have a problem with people seeing me do the same.

OK, but maybe that attitude didn’t work with the fans who feel the kind of reverence that made it hard for them to see you as that fallible human being
.

I’d say in general those things are always a good deal of your own making, you have to take some responsibility for it, and when I was younger I probably felt differently about it. But certainly as I got into my middle age, how people felt about me … wasn’t quite as important to me. I was trying to find integrity within my own experience, my own life and, uh, I’m always going to trust the art and be suspicious of the artist because he’s generally untrustworthy flimflam, a stumbling clown like everybody else. That aspect, the reverence I attracted, dispelling it is important because it hinders your communication and diminishes the complexity of the dialogue you’re trying to have with your fans.

There’s quite a transition from the early ’90s albums to
The Ghost of Tom Joad
.

Yeah, but people talk about the records from the early ’90s … I joke about it on stage, “I’m told this is my weakest record.” But if you go
back to the songs from
Lucky Town
and
Human Touch
, I play a lot of them on this tour. The production on
Human Touch
we didn’t quite get right, I think, but I look at those records,
Tunnel of Love, Human Touch
and
Lucky Town
, and it was me writing personally, looking at relationships and how they were playing. I was also interested in not being “the other guy” at that moment. I wasn’t writing like that for a time, I didn’t have those good songs in me, and the moment you’re trying to write something that conforms to a particular … [
trails off
]

But then I did move back in that other direction. “Streets of Philadelphia” probably started it. Then
Tom Joad
. I was living in California at the time and there was a lot of border reporting in the media. California had become very multicultural, a big Hispanic population. Go back to Freehold now, central New Jersey, 10 years later that’s happened there [the latest census shows his hometown’s 11,000 population is 28 percent Hispanic]. I did have a feeling it was what the country was going to look like and feel like in another decade or so and it gave me a new perspective.

I remember writing
Tom Joad
very quickly. I’d gotten into my mid-forties and when you’re younger you feel, “This is gonna stop, it’s gonna get fixed” [the social ills he was addressing] and then by the time you’re in your forties and fifties, oh, you’ve seen it cycle around a few times under a lot of different guises.

It’s cliché, but when you’re writing passionately it … What people are experiencing with
Born to Run
, what makes music different from the other arts is it conveys pure emotion.

Given what you’ve seen, what are your political beliefs now and, presuming you’re somewhere on the left doesn’t having great wealth present a conundrum?

I don’t know how to describe my political views in left/right terms. I started out following my instincts and it seemed the country was best when it stuck to that democratic thread of good ideas and good values. The past 20 years or so have been rough. A large number of people have been marginalised, generation after generation. So what I think is it’s a reasonable expectation to have full employment, health care and education for all, decent housing, er, day care for children from an early age, a reasonably transparent government … Big money in politics is dangerous and antidemocratic. Well, to me these are all conservative ideas.

Do you see it like that? Really?

Economic stability. Health. That’s not remotely radical. All these things are in Jesus’s teaching. All part of a humane life. But we have failed in almost all of these civil ideals. It all seems common sense to me. These points are not a political philosophy, but good things I wanted my music to advocate. I find that vision in Woody Guthrie … well, even in the Animals’ records, back before I heard Woody. Working-class music, that’s part of pop history—natural politics. I didn’t go to college, I’m not a socialist economist, but these are things the guy on the street can understand.

But what about the personal wealth issue?

I’m a child of Woody and Elvis. They may not be opposite ends of the spectrum. Elvis was an instrument of revolutionary change. Elvis drove a pink Cadillac and Woody wrote a song about a Cadillac, he was not dismissive of those pleasures. What you do with the conundrums, you try to deal with it as thoughtfully and responsibly as you can. I don’t know if there’s a clear answer. You live with the contradictions.

On
Born to Run
’s thirtieth anniversary, having worked so much on the re-release material, how do you see the album now?

I look back with a lot of amusement on the band at that particular moment, the audacity and insecurity that was all right above the surface. When I came back off the
Rising
tour [2002] I was excited about the band and I both reflected on the present and took a look in the rear-view mirror, kind of saying, “Where do I go now?” And I’ll tell you what, the finiteness of your experience is real once you’re in your late fifties. This [
he gestures at his life, pointing both hands hard at the ground
] is finite. There’s x amount of years left in what we’re doing. I don’t know how many. I hope there’s a lot. I feel like there’s plenty to do, plenty of songs to write, I feel about that the same as I did when I was 24 years old. But part of taking your place in the world is letting that clock tick. Letting that clock tick and being willing to listen to it tick and understand that your mortal self is present and walking alongside of you all the time now.

Nothing like intimations of mortality to draw an interview to a close … Springsteen’s due on stage in less than an hour. Standing up,
shaking hands, he says, “I hope I was helpful,” and offers more time on the phone. As
Mojo
leaves he’s unhurriedly poking about among the bits and bobs scattered across the table, muttering, “Right, let me see what I’m doing here …”

Until showtime he’s alone again in his dressing-room, apart from a visit from long-time, Zen-calm tour manager George Travis. Usually, team members say, in the last hour or so before a gig he spends some time handwriting a setlist for photocopying to the crew. This changes substantially show to show—here in Chicago a dozen different songs from the previous night when
Mojo
saw him in Minneapolis. Even when he’s on-stage it’s more a basis for negotiation than a promissory note.

List complete, he’ll sit and play guitar a bit, gathering himself in. No conspicuous signs of nerves except, just when he’s due on, he might suddenly decide to change his shirt. When he’s set and he starts his walk towards the stage that’s one time nobody ever talks to him. And from then on, he’s told them, he doesn’t see anyone, not a face, only feels a crowd and a place, he’s so deep inside himself.

Though that’s not how it looks and feels tonight out in the audience. It feels intimate as he ranges over his 35-year songbook and a testament’s worth of stories and characters, and gets right down into the guts of all the emotional/sensual details—pungent aromas of the
Devils & Dust
battlefield as the day heats up and “the smell began to rise” or of the Reno motel room where the prostitute’s offering “Two hundred dollars straight in, two-fifty up the ass.” The songs scale the big hall down to a room. The listeners are engrossed in these people, what happens to them, what it means, engrossed in themselves.

When, in “Long Time Comin’,” he sings for the weathered and back-sliding husband and father who watches his wife and children sleeping around a campfire and vows to “bury my old soul and dance on its grave” and that he’s “not gonna fuck it up this time,” people cheer and “Yeah!” Springsteen picks it up before the next song, musing about how that line should have been “I’m not gonna fuck it up this time if I can help it but given the range of my own behavior which is completely dysfunctional I wouldn’t expect too much” and swears he could have made it fit the music back in the days of “Blinded by the Light.”

He’s been a dab hand at these intensity-easing moments of yarning rumination since the Jersey Shore club days. “Ain’t Got You” he introduces with, “People often ask me, ‘What’s it like to be The Boss?’ I usually say something humble like, Those are the breaks … But honestly,
it’s very sexy. Sometimes I wish I was Bruce myself …” For “Jesus Was an Only Son”—apart from a familiar speculation on Christ as a would-be Galilee publican if only he didn’t have to go be the Saviour—it’s reminiscence about his Catholic childhood and the non-stop schedule of Irish and Italian family wedding which meant they had to collect up the rice they threw so they had some ready for the next one, and “I think we even threw it at funerals. We did throw shitloads of rice.” On the politics front, he plugs the Greater Chicago Food Depository who have a stall in the foyer and, introducing the
Devils & Dust
border tragedy “Matamoros Banks,” calls for “a humane immigration or guest-worker policy.”

It’s quite something, then, that after all the writing and rewriting and fucking it up anyway and starting again—and all his “interminable bullshit” of self-examination and puzzling over identity and disguise—Springsteen closes his set every night with “Dream Baby Dream” from Suicide’s self-titled 1980 album.

Springsteen sits at the pump organ, starts pushing out the broad sustained chords and singing, round and round, “Dream, baby, dream … / Come on dream on, dream, baby dream … / Keep the fire burning … / Open up your eyes …” He sings this for some minutes, then he stands up, the organ chords looped now and louder and more churchy, and sings on and on, heart and soul, dream on, open up your eyes, swaying down to the front of the stage, one man singing in the big hall, and it’s overwhelming, jaws drop, tears gather, everyone swimming in the same heavy sea, nobody knows what’s up, we’re just taken for everything we’ve got.

Earlier in the dressing-room, as the interview concluded
Mojo
had asked about “Dream Baby Dream.”

“I’ve liked Suicide for a long time,” he said. “I met the guys late in the ’70s in New York City when we were in the studio at the same time. You know, if Elvis came back from the dead I think he would sound like Alan Vega. He gets a lot of emotional purity. I came across ‘Dream Baby Dream’ again because Michael Stipe included it on a compilation and I thought maybe I could do it.

“It’s a mantra and it works because the night is filled with so much narrative and detail and then at the end there’s just those few phrases repeated and they are the essence of everything else I’m saying and doing in the course of the evening. The night opens and opens and then, at the end, when you think it can’t open any more it does and it’s
completely embracing. It’s yeah, I guess … I have, an eye for a lot of detail and this is a lesson in uh, “What is a song?” It’s so purely musical, that’s what’s beautiful about it, it’s so simple and so purely musical.”

A couple of weeks later, Springsteen calls as promised. He’s in cheery form, having finished filming the show in Boston. He clears up a few points from our last meeting before asking for a final question.

Well, we’ve done politics, work, money, sex, time, death and the divided self OK. Religion. You’ve described yourself as “a runaway Catholic” and said that, although you use religious imagery in your songs for its resonance, you don’t need to know The Truth. Does that mean you’ve definitely decided you don’t know?

Yeah, the spiritual life is going to be a life of mystery,” he says. “Why would you not be humble in the face of that mystery? Why would you assume that the answers can be handed down to you, A to Z, no room for doubt? That’s child-like, that desire for answers. Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don’t have answers. So I let the mystery settle into my music. I don’t deny anything, I don’t advocate anything, I just live with it. We live in a tragic world, but there’s grace all around you. That’s tangible. So you try to attend to the grace. That’s how I try to guide myself—and our house, the kids.”