Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (57 page)

But the songwriting that was on those first two records that came before I saw you perform for the first time … there was a scope to some of those songs that when I heard them … what I dug about them so much was I thought, well maybe this is a guy that likes the same records, lots of words, images tumbling out. And I thought, here’s the guy that spent some time listening to
Astral Weeks
and
Bringing It All Back Home
… and all those R&B records you talk about and that’s a great combination
.

It was kind of pragmatic because we played in bars as long as we could but really because we played original music and we weren’t your local Jersey Shore Top 40 band, it was very difficult for us to get
work. We worked, the way we did it, Steve and I … one night we canvassed the entire town from north to south … it was a Saturday night in the middle of the summer. And the idea was to find the emptiest dump in the whole town and try to get the guy who was running the joint to hire us. And we went bar, to bar, to bar, to bar … and Asbury was jumping those days, the circuit was filled with cars and college kids. And we finally found one, it was a place called the Student Prince … it was run by a bricklayer from Freehold and the place was empty. And Steve and I talked him into letting us play for one dollar at the door. And we started, and we played to 20 people or something … and next week, we played to 30 or 40 people. We worked our way into kind of a small group of local hipsters who would come down and see us. In the end, that kind of ran out. And I got to a place where I said I gotta make do with just the guitar and my voice at some point. And now, I was a good guitar player, accompanying myself alright … my voice was, my first band I was in wouldn’t let me sing at all. And so I said, the words better be good, the songs better be good. And that kind of set me off on the path of trying to be able to sit down with something and come up with something that was kind of electric just with the voice and the guitar.

And I’ve heard you revisit songs that you wrote in that era in recent times … and it isn’t with any sense of like, they’re a different language. I mean the songs I’m thinking of are things like “New York City Serenade” and “Incident on 57th Street.” They’re multi-parted and if I say operatic … I don’t mean like Puccini, I mean like
West Side Story
. They’re like a whole story going on and it’s a way you wrote for a while and then you only recently went back to it … songs like “For You” and “Growin’ Up” are really favorites … tumbling words really about real experiences. They serve all that but at some point you decide less is more enduring maybe, less words is more enduring
.

Initially, I think I wrote a lot of that music once I wanted it to be lyrically electric. I had to hit you with something. Then there was a lot of initially, the Dylan comparisons. So after that, I said well maybe I’ll try to sing more colloquially, the way that people speak, move back from some of the imagery … which really looking back on it, at that age you’re oversensitive to every sort of criticism.

And it was so early … I don’t know why people thought they needed a new Dylan. The old one was still really young at the time. And he’s still incredible! But it was just, I think he invented a language that didn’t exist in popular song before, so when you came along and you built on that language, you were just immediately connected to it. Part of it was flattering and part of it was well, I better figure something out. [After the] first two records, the third record I moved back off a lot of the wild imagery and stuff.

Well, there’s one song I’d really like to just ask you a moment about, because it is one that has a lot of fantastic images—but they’re completely appropriate because the location of the song is the circus. And you have images from it and you have the character Billy in the song and you’ve returned to him throughout your career, you’ve made references, passing references. Did you ever just want to ever run away to the circus and did that thought ever occur to you?

The circus came to Freehold. It was a Clyde Beatty–Cole Brothers Circus, they do it every summer. It’s an old-school travelling circus, they pitch the tent in your local fairgrounds … or they pitch the tent near a local racetrack in Freehold. And I used to go with my mother and I think when you’re a kid, the things you notice about the circus aren’t the things you’re meant to notice. But those are the things that are fascinating to you. You know what you’re watching, that right underneath it … you’d walk down the midway, but I was always interested in what’s going on down that side alley back by that trailer. And then late at night, if you happened to be stranded there at 11:30, midnight, after it had shut down, it was the province of local hoodlums at the time and it was really scary for a little boy.

It was magic and dread … and a little bit of illicit stuff going on. It’s the fabulous stuff of songs and of dreams, of childhood dreams and you turned it into this beautiful song, “Wild Billy’s Circus Story.”

We can’t possibly go through every stage of your career. People know so many things about you. And I mentioned seeing you on the occasion you came to London to play
Born to Run
. And the next time we met, I think you really would have been forgiven for not recognizing me, because it was in 1978 in Nashville and I had gone on a shopping expedition while I was there. And for reasons I
don’t know why I went to Bruce’s show dressed in a 10-gallon hat, red lizard skin boots and a Western shirt with horses on it
.

A full cowboy suit [
laughs
].

Yeah, I had everything but the holster and the pistol. The show was just a knockout because
Darkness on the Edge of Town
had just come out. And this is Nashville now, it’s 1978 and the word had not reached Nashville that your songs were not exclusively about cars and girls. So you opened with I think “Promised Land,” you did “Badlands,” remember … and I’d heard the record, but the way they sounded live was like the way they sound today, they just took off
.

It was funny, we were talking … if you were around at the time you might remember, when the record came out, it got a lot of nice reviews. But the fans weren’t … people didn’t take to it right away. I think because it had been three years since
Born to Run
. So that was a long time between records. And you had read all those “whatever happened to” articles in the newspaper and we finally got the record made and it was different. And one of the reasons it was different was because there was some young English songwriter at the time who said the songs in
Born to Run
were too romantic.

It wasn’t me I hope
.

I can’t remember his name right now …

It wasn’t me. Was it me?

I’ve been waiting 30 years for this moment, what do you think? Of course it was [
laughs
]!

I was clearly in a different relationship with the idea of romance then. But really, the serious point of telling the story about coming to see you was, one, it is an amazing record. The way you played the songs live they had … it was like something was really coming out. There was a change of tone in your writing and watching it—I mean you’ve got to remember I was a fan of yours before I got started. So I’m taking cues like you described—you take your cues from the best people. I’m watching you play. We’d made three records in a two and a half years, me and the Attractions …

Elvis’s first three records were hurricane. He made great ones since, all of ’em, but you had the perfect storm of first three records going.
Whoa
.
Songwriting is like, you’re watching everybody that is out there. You’re looking over your shoulder the whole time. It sort of never stops but those [albums] were like wow, they were scary.

Well thank you, that’s too kind. But of course, I’m watching you in the opposite direction disappearing into the distance, and I’m going … if Bruce, if they’re going to resist this change, how in the world am I going to do that?

I think at the time, it had been a long time in between records and we knew the record was a different kind of record. That was the idea … it had been written to be tougher. There was influence from the punk scene and your stuff and there was a lot of tough music that came out of England in those years. I loved those early Buzzcocks records, all the Clash records, the singles—because you couldn’t get the records you had to try to go and get the singles. And that stuff found its way into the subtext of
Darkness on the Edge of Town
along with sort of a cinematic-ness that was sort of growing up on all the Westerns … and so, the record ended up being a blend of those things in a funny way. There was an element of what you’d absorb from John Ford westerns, also you’d travelled yourself now. And we travelled through the west now and we’d seen some of it firsthand and we’d been out in it firsthand. Those things all kind of connected for me when I was writing in my room. And also wanting to be about something. I think that was important to me. I said well, the people that I liked sort of … they gathered their times in and found a way to contextualize it in a language to speak about the events of the day. That’s what I want to do if I can do it.

There’s a choice that you made after you had a degree of success to change your language. I mean, it’s not like a theoretical thing, you just did it. It was an instinctive thing obviously but if Wild Billy is some kind of carnival colors, these songs are in black and white
.

The three years from say when you’re 25 to 28, those are big years. They take up a lot bigger percentage of your life than now. So you change a lot. And also the position you’re in … I was both elated and embarrassed by my good fortune. It was like whoa … and I knew I had worked hard for all that stuff. And part of
Darkness
was me trying to sift through a lot of those issues and in the end my music was always about identity, identity, identity. Who am I? Where do I belong?
What’s the code I’m trying to live by? All of these things that are all about identity issues and so
Darkness on the Edge of Town
was sort of inspired by that search for … alright, I’ve been through, I had that first type of success but what does that make me, what does that make me now. And the only thing I knew to do was to stand very hard and connect with the things, the few things I was sure of … which was I suppose where I come from and all those things. It wasn’t a result of any social consciousness really, it was purely a matter of my own inner-psychological life and search for who do I want to be, who am I gonna be?

But contained in your relationship with the audience, because you’d become popular, and because the songs even when they’re about dark issues are played with such fervor … people, they kind of feel they’re your buddy. This they said about George Bush the lesser as well, you know, they said that people wanted to have a beer with him and that was part of his appeal. And that’s the weird conundrum as a writer, because sometimes when you’re writing songs and examining identity and even when you start writing character voices … you are not portraying you the good-hearted man. It could be a conflicted man, the conflict in it … and there’s a real balance to be struck between showman and artist in this moment
.

I think theater is drama. I think filmmakers, songwriters, artists, you’re drawn to conflict. It’s one of the things that people go to music for, and any kind of art for … it’s, okay, we’re all conflicted inside so how do you begin to contextualize some of that conflict, how do you begin to make sense out of it, how do you build something out of it? Instead of letting it destroy you, how do you make something out of it?

I know when I moved into
Darkness
I was interested in a few things … one was adulthood. I didn’t feel particularly young at 27 or 28 years old. And I had gotten into country music, I had begun to get into some Woody Guthrie and I wanted my songs, I wanted to write something that I could sing when I’m the ripe old age of 40, please. And that will feel real and connected to me. And I remember thinking about that very consciously at the time. So I wanted to move into adult issues.

And the second thing you’re doing is, you’re playing with a certain level of ferocity for your own survival. And for one reason I’ve always
believed the greatest rock ’n’ roll musicians are desperate men. You’ve got to have something bothering you all the time.

You can’t always be a nice guy in the songs is what it is
.

Why songs are good is, it’s like an art … one and one makes three. In music, if it makes two you failed, my friend. If you’re painting and all you’ve got is the paint and the canvas, you failed. If all you got is your notes, you failed. You’ve got to find that third thing that you don’t completely understand but is coming up from inside of you. And you can put it, you can set it any place, you can choose any type of character, but if you don’t reach down and touch that thing, then you’re just not going to have anything to say and it’s not going to feel like it has life and breath in it. You’re not gonna create something real and it’s not gonna feel authentic. I worked hard on those things.

Yes, indeed. Throughout those slower songs on what you’d do next—which is
The River
, the huge record—the narrative aspect in these songs, it puts me in mind of great character writers who you might have admired
.

You roll along and you sort of stumble on some part of your talent that you’re good at, that you didn’t know you were good at. I think I stumbled into that sort of writing through writing
The River
. It’s the sort of writing where it’s just “I,” you’re not outside the character, you’re basically the voice of the character’s internal life and you’re really, all the songs are what someone’s thinking. It’s like being able to overhear someone’s thoughts. And originally, I guess the first song I wrote was really “The River” where it had that [
sings lyrics
]…. And that came about from just … it was a song I actually wrote about my sister and brother-in-law. It was the late ’70s, New Jersey, there was a recession. My brother-in-law was a construction worker, building stopped, lost the job, struggled very hard. My sister, I have a sister a year younger than me, became a mother very, very young and struggled through a life similar to my parents. And so, for some reason and I don’t know, I remember sitting at my table one night and those opening lines came out. Then when the record came out, there was some folks who mentioned that particular song and that particular kind of point of view as a writer. Said oh gee, well the record’s really great when somebody comes in and they tell their story and they kind of leave. I think my
friend Greil Marcus wrote something about it and I said I like writing like that.