Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (5 page)

Well next time you run up and cue me [
laughter
].

Bruce Springsteen is here and the phones are just jammed
.

In New Jersey the number is Bigelow 8.

Please pledge your money so that this struggling rock star can go on to Texas. Have you heard this one, this is a tune called [“If I Was the Priest”]
.

That’s not what it’s called.

What is it called?

It has no name. This song I wrote, we did it about four years ago, we did it in the Prince, we did this in the Student Prince, which is a bar we used to play down in Jersey. I wrote it about four years ago. Thought I’d burned every copy. Somebody got a hold of it.

What we are talking about is it is on the new Allan Clarke album, it’s only available in England
.

But there’s one part that’s great, when the harmonies come in he does these great Hollies harmonies.

They call it “If I Were the Priest”? You ever going to do that tune?

No, I wrote it four years ago and we used to play it in the bar. No, we’re not going to do that one.

But just the fact that this one popped up
.

The harmonies are great. I love the harmonies he put on that.

There must be a whole raft of old material that you wrote that we never heard
.

Yeah, most of it I burn. It’s things that aren’t really indicative of where I want to be or where I’m trying to go. I think the only stuff they send around now is the material on the two albums.

Have you had anybody else record any of these tunes? Did I hear about Bowie recording something?

Supposedly. I haven’t heard it yet. Supposedly he did “Saint in the City” and “Growin’ Up.” The Hollies did “Sandy.” I heard that the other day.

Where do you put your songwriting as opposed to your performing?

It’s all in one. It’s all connected. I don’t like to separate it. I don’t really
like to think of myself as a songwriter or just as a performer. Whatever. I don’t know. That’s a weird question, Ed.

I think it is part of it. Obviously your material reflects who you are. Your performing is really important to why people have come to appreciate you so much
.

What it does, in performance, things crystallize. To know what I am trying to do and what the band is you have to see it. It’s hard to have a complete understanding just off the record.

What about when somebody else does your tune?

It’s hard which is why not too many people have done any of the songs at all. Because they are like fairly personalized numbers and it is hard for people to get a reasonable approach to take towards it. There’s not a whole lot of approaches that can be had towards the songs.

But a lot of them stand up by themselves. It’s hard to think of them without thinking of you. But I’m sure if somebody else tried to do “Saint in the City” they could do it, because it is a good song
.

For some reason I always imagined Joe Cocker doing “Spirit in the Night.” When I wrote the song I had his kind of voice in mind which is something that I rarely do.

Give us a little bit of Cocker doing it, how would you imagine that?

I wouldn’t imagine it.

Going to play an old tune here. What is this tune, “The Fever”?

What is this? It’s an old demo tape that you got. I don’t know where. It’s something we did a couple years ago, a little after the first album. It was done as a demo for other artists. It was done in one take.

Who played on this?

Who played on it: Me. Danny, Clarence, “Mad Dog” Vini [Lopez], Garry.

And Mad Dog sings the backup
.

Mad Dog sings the backup.

I want to thank you for coming down, because I know you don’t like to talk too much about things
.

It’s nice down here. It’s been a town where the band has got a lot of incredible support from Philadelphia. Because we are still really scuffling to make it work. And it’s getting better and getting better. And Philadelphia was the first town that really responded.

You better make another record, because this one is getting worn out
.

The following interviews date to 1975, both pre- and post
-Born to Run
. Little is known about their provenance; unearthed by
Backstreets
magazine in the ’90s, they were professionally recorded, conducted by European journalists (likely for promotion, as Springsteen would cross the ocean for the first time that fall), and stored in a record company vault. They are remarkably personal and revealing—speaking with a Swedish interviewer, Springsteen takes great care in describing his background and his concerns for a foreign audience. Having just completed
Born to Run
, Springsteen confesses, “The tension making that record I could never describe. It was killing, almost, it was inhuman. I hated it. I couldn’t stand it. It was the worst, hardest, lousiest thing I ever had to do.” Excerpts from the interviews appeared originally in
Backstreets
magazines #57 and #58, Winter 1997 and Spring 1998.

Tell us a little bit about Asbury Park, and E Street, because that’s one thing we don’t know anything about
.

I guess you must have coastal canals? Boardwalks, fast wheels driving
around? That’s what it is. It’s a small, sort of has-been resort town, where mostly older people go and people that ain’t got enough money to go burn gas and go farther south to a bigger resort town, they stop there. It’s okay, it’s nice, I liked it, I lived there for quite a while. E Street, that’s just a street … [it’s] where my piano player, who played with me on the first two albums, named Davey Sancious, that’s the street he lived on. We just took the name of the street for the name of the band.

What sort of music did you listen to when you grew up and started to play in small bands?

At the time I listened to whatever was on AM radio. There was no FM, of course. Is there FM in Sweden? There is? Well, at that time there was no FM radio, but the radio had some good music on it. In the early ’60s, when I started playing … Elvis was big then, the Ronettes, all the [Phil] Spector stuff, and the girl groups from New York, which is a big part of my background. The Ronettes, the Shirelles, the Crystals, the Chiffons, who put out a lot of great music at the time. And then the big English thing happened, the Beatles and all that stuff, and the Stones, Manfred Mann …

AM radio was fine right up until about 1967 when FM came in and started to play long cuts, and you could see the disappearance of the really good three-minute single. So the music that got me was what was on AM from 1959 to 1965. And then later on I got into the early ’50s. They had that big San Francisco thing which went down over here; I never got too involved in that. My roots were sort of formed by then: Roy Orbison, the great English singles bands, the girl groups from New York. Chuck Berry, of course—your classics.

You were quite young when you started. Where did you play?

Everywhere. High school dances, bars, weddings. I can remember staying up all night learning “Moon River” because the bride requested it—“Moon River!” [
laughs
] We didn’t play any of that stuff at the time, but we needed the bucks, right?

First thing I ever did was in a trailer camp, out in the country. It was the fall, with trailer camp people. Ain’t got no trailer camps in Sweden? Motor homes, like you pull them with your car. You know America, everybody’s moving all over all the damn time. Trailer camps … you pull ’em and you park ’em. And there’s a certain trailer camp type of
person, right? We played there, and it was us and this other country music band who had an accordion, a bass guitar, a guitar player, and a little girl who stood on a stool and sang into one of these big RCA/Victor microphones, like in them old Shirley Temple movies … And we came out and we did “Twist and Shout” and Ray Charles songs and Chuck Berry songs. And the people went nuts … and man, we played for like eight hours that day. I remember starting at noon and we played until like eight or nine, when we had to stop. That was one of the first gigs I ever did.

So I was doing everything. I played for the fireman’s ball, where they didn’t know what kind of band they were hiring, and we’d get there and just blow everybody’s mind. The fireman’s ball, played for the Boy Scouts once, did every kind of gig. High school dances, clubs, anything, we did it. Played in the mental institutions, for the patients—everything.

Where did you get your musicians? Was it all people that you knew growing up?

This guy Miami Steve is a guy that I knew since I was about 15. Steve had his own band, I had my own band. I just got him in the band a few months ago, but he’d been in all my bands except for this one. So it was good to get him back in. So I’ve known him a long time; Garry, I’ve known Garry for about five years now, I guess, and he’s been in other bands with me. Danny I’ve known for six or seven years. They’re all people I’ve known. Clarence I met about three or four years ago. Most of them local boys, except for Max and Roy. Roy’s from Long Island, and Max is from North Jersey—which is not considered local [
laughs
]. Local is your town, maybe ten miles out. North Jersey is a whole other scene from where I live—it’s industrial, more like New York.

With that very strong local feeling, you must be interested in the same things and have the same sort of associations and jokes and everything like that
.

Well, no, not really; everybody’s sort of different. Everybody’s been through different things, different ages, different experiences. But there’s a real strong vibe there, because everybody realizes we’ve got a really good thing going. And they’re all good guys, very easygoing nice guys,
and it’s a very smooth-running thing right now. So yeah, to a degree, everybody knows New Jersey—when you got your local boys with you, you’ve got a thing you just can’t buy. I wouldn’t trade these guys for nobody. First of all because they all are great musicians, and there’s that extra thing.

Like me and Steve do that rap in “E Street Shuffle,” and that’s what it was like. We sat at that table in that club at three in the morning, and we dreamed and dreamed the day would come when we could make some records. That was number one. I’ve known Steve since he was about 15, and since then it’s been the same thing—that’s all we ever talked about. All we ever wanted to do was make a record. And we’d say, what’s the matter with us? We’re as good as those guys, we’re as good as those guys, how come we ain’t got a record deal? What’s going on?

And it’s funny, because the other day we were riding somewhere, like coming down here, and everybody was so excited: there we were, playing on the [radio]. We used to trudge around in this old van, me and Steve riding up and down the East Coast, riding to Virginia and Atlanta, all these different towns, just scrubbing away, and that damn van was breaking down all the time … and now here we were on the air. And I said “Steve.” And he said “Yeah!” And I said, “This is it! Remember all those towns, we’d be riding in the van saying ‘when this happens, when this happens …’ ”—and I never stopped to think that
it was happening
. And him either. But it’s something that I’d never take for granted, not for a second. Like last night with that crowd in that hall, I’d never take that for granted. For every night like last night, there were a hundred other nights that we played in these little bars in Jersey, and there was nobody there.

What did your family and schoolteachers think about you in the early years, playing guitar in bars?

Oh, they hated it. My mother—you know, your mother’s your mother. And she tries to be cool with you and let you do your thing. My father, he hated it, couldn’t stand it, wanted me to stop. Always was down on it. Wanted me to be a lawyer, some kind of heavy thing—a doctor. Guaranteed income. But I was a stubborn and strong kid, did what I wanted to do and just figured I could do it. Eventually they moved away, and before they knew it, it was happening.

You’ve talk about influences; how influenced are you, as you see it yourself, by rhythm & blues and Latin American songs?

I would say that I’m the kind of guy that whatever goes in my ear I digest. But I’m not a big looker; I don’t go around looking for it. I’m not a big record collector, I’m not real familiar with the old R&B artists. But whatever I hear I digest very quickly, and it comes right back out the way I want it to. All the Stax stuff and Atlantic stuff, I’m very into that. Wilson Pickett, Sam Cooke, Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd, the MGs, Steve Cropper … yeah, the band has moments when it’s based a lot on those rhythm & blues bands, especially in the way I use the band. If you see Otis Redding in Monterey Pop, the way he uses his band; the way James Brown uses his band. Because most of your better bandleaders have all been your soul bandleaders.

Because the white guys always tend to be a little too sloppy, too lazy; they think it’s part of the act to be not together or something, I don’t know. The best bandleaders of the last ten, twenty years, from what I’ve listened to, have been your soul bandleaders. They whip them bands into shape. I tend to use my band that way. I’m doing different things, but in that tradition … Ain’t nobody does it better than them soul artists. Like Sam and Dave, James Brown. James Brown is an idol, man … he spits, and those guys do somersaults. It’s incredible.

You don’t write what you could call ordinary love songs; it’s more about life, and you could read the lyrics without listening to the music and you’d get some sort of picture about life
.

That’s what some people say. [When] I write the songs, I write them to stand up as
song
lyrics. You’re supposed to listen to the song and hear the lyrics. You’re not supposed to read the lyrics, because they’re
song
lyrics. They go to a song, you know? That’s the idea. I’m a songwriter, I’m not a poetry man. That’s what I concern myself with. They describe whatever I write into them: just what I know about, what I grew up with.