Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (61 page)

But I’ll tell you, the amazing thing was: hey, we made that
Born to Run
. That was us scrubbing away in 914 Studio up in Rye, NY. And it still sounds pretty good today. It was nice when they did the 30th anniversary [reissue], I sort of got to re-experience it the way I should have when I was 24 or 25. And I was just like, whoa, yeah, this was really good!

What was it like when that album took off and you wound up on the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek
and all of that?

It was exciting … disturbing … sometimes enjoyable … horrifying … embarrassing … also, it was my dream come true.

It was so much more complicated than I thought it was going to be. I mean, when anybody imagines something wonderful, they only imagine the wonderful parts [
laughs
]. That’s why you’re imagining something wonderful! You only imagine the wonderful parts!

It’s like if you see that girl walking down the street and you say, “Oh my god, life would be ecstasy if she was just my girlfriend.” You’re only thinking of the wonderful parts, you’re not thinking … who knows. It’s
sort of like that. Success is like that girl: if only I had that, I wouldn’t have a worry in the world. And then you get it, or you get in a relationship, and then you realize that there are some things I’m not good at, and she’s telling me what she doesn’t like about me … And so all of a sudden you’re in the real world where it’s really happening, and it’s a complicated experience.

I don’t have any complaints, because I wouldn’t have had it any other way, no matter what it was like, because that was what I had my sights set on, and I was just gonna push on through until I figured out what to do. Because I wanted to play, I wanted an audience, I was cocky enough to think I was something special—along with, of course, thinking you’re a fraud and worthless, but that’s part of the artistic experience [
laughs
]. I had both sides. I had the other thing too: Hey, I’m the greatest. And I want my audience, I deserve your ears!

Steve had a lot of fun with it, because of course it wasn’t
him
on the cover. But it was the band, so he bought all the magazines and passed them out around the pool at the Sunset Marquis, and I ran upstairs to my room. There was a lot of tough stuff that went with it, and it’s all sort of been talked about over the years. But for a young kid … success is hard for any young person. I feel for the young people today when I see them out struggling, whether it’s Britney Spears or somebody; it takes an enormous leap of consciousness to handle yourself well under that kind of spotlight. And most kids don’t have the guidance or the facility to be able to do that at 22 or 23 years old.

I only asked one guy about it,
ever
. I happened to be in L.A. in 1975, which was right when we were exploding, and Jack Nicholson came to the show. Jack Nicholson from Neptune, New Jersey, next door to Asbury Park. He came to the show, we spent some time after the show, and he had just become quite successful himself. So I said, you know, “What was the deal, what did you think about it?”

And he said, “Well, I was older. I had been around quite a while, and I was older. And so when that happened, I was really ready for that to happen.”

I was pretty young. I was 24 years old, 25, and so you make your way through it. Luckily I had the band and good people around me. The people who you see end up failing are the people who just don’t have the people around them—or they simply don’t and won’t listen and learn. And there are a lot of folks like that out there, too.

The way the exhibit is set up, the first floor starts with the Castiles and goes up through
Born to Run
, and it’s basically chronological. On the second floor, it’s more thematic. There are four walls, so one wall is all of your guitars and on the other walls your song-writing stuff. Let’s talk about some of the guitars for a second. The Esquire: first off, thank you so much …

The Esquire was purchased for 180 dollars—maybe 185 dollars. It was my official just-signed-a-record-deal-you-get-a-guitar. I got it after I signed my record deal. Previous to that, you would not have 180 dollars at any single moment. So I think my earlier guitars—good guitars I got, a Les Paul and a few other things—I had Tex co-sign for me and I paid them off week-by-week, month-by-month. For quite a few years all I did was pay off guitars.

But for the Esquire—and Mike Appel might have been with me—we went down to Phil Petillo’s guitar shop in Belmar, New Jersey, on Highway 34, I believe. I went in, and I wanted a Telecaster, because I’d played a Telecaster previously when I was younger, I’d picked one up somewhere along the way. Jeff Beck was one of my great guitar heroes, and I think Pete Townshend played one in the Who also for a while. It was a guitar that was a good mixture for playing soul music, à la Steve Cropper and James Burton, and also good for rock music like Jeff Beck. So it was a versatile instrument, it was a light instrument. I wasn’t playing heavy rock ’n’ roll anymore, I was playing something that tilted closer to soul music, and so I wanted a guitar that could handle the funk and that feeling. And that guitar was hanging there, and I didn’t ask anything about it—I just bought it.

Later on I found out—I knew a couple guys who had it before me—it’s a bastard. It’s not one guitar. The reason the neck says
Esquire
is because it came from another guitar, and it was a Telecaster body. And a couple of guys who had it before me—maybe Billy Ryan had that guitar, he was a very good local guitar player, played with James Cotton for a while. He might have had that guitar for a while, and I know another guy, and they kinda futzed around with it, and it ended up being what it is.

It also ended up having a very distinctive sound, and it still is unique amongst all my guitars for the way it sounds. I played it at the Super Bowl. So I still play it occasionally on stage. I have my pickup set a little different now, so I don’t play as often as I did. But it is, for me … when I put it on, I don’t feel like I have a guitar on. It’s such an integral
part of me. It’s the only instrument that when I put it on, I can’t feel anything on me. It’s an extension of my body. Everything else, I’m putting a guitar on. That thing is just an extension of who I am. It literally was the receptor of all my hopes and dreams, the symbol of my ambitions and desires. I’ve held it aloft to the audience on thousands and thousands of nights, I suppose with the idea that it says something about the power of rock ’n’ roll and the power of us.

Are there any recordings that you think that guitar is an essential part of?

I would say “Kitty’s Back,” I played that lead on “Kitty’s Back” on it. All of the stuff from Hammersmith Odeon, the guitar sounded
so good
on that, at that show that we put out with the
Born to Run
[30th Anniversary] package. It’s just very distinctive—and I had a couple of great Fender amplifiers, old Bassmans that I used, also. It was just a very warm, very old-school sound, and yet I was able to get clean funk and country playing like James Burton out of it, along with Jeff Beck-style leads.

I was going to ask you about the amps—we have two Fender Bassmans that you sent us. And one has four Fender ten-inch speakers, and the other has four Jensen ten-inchers. Any stories behind those two amps? Were they used in the studio or touring?

I don’t remember—generally those Bassmans, what I used to do is wire them together and play them in stereo on either side of the drum kit. If somebody finds old photos of our stage setup, they may find two of those out there. As far as the speaker setups, you just blew them up and other ones were put in—whatever were considered to be the good speakers of the day, I suppose.

Another thing we have is the tape machine you used for
Nebraska
. Do you want to talk about those sessions?

They were pretty basic. What happened was, I got tired of spending every single penny I had making records. In 1980 when we went to go on the
River
tour, I was just broke. After almost 10 years in the music business, I had about 20 grand to my name. And this was after million-selling records and the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek
.

Now, I had gotten into a lot of trouble and made some bad deals and had to hire a lot of lawyers. And then nobody in the band had ever paid
any taxes, because nobody in
New Jersey
pays any taxes [
laughs
]. At least, not amongst our crowd. I didn’t know anyone who paid taxes—I didn’t know anyone who had an honest job, barely. And if they
did
have a job, they were taking the money under the table. This is how everyone lived here. As a matter of fact, some of the guys who first worked for me out of New Jersey were shocked when I said that we had to pay taxes. It was like, “Hey, you trying to scam me, man?” [
Laughs
] “You’re ripping me off!”

So it was a bizarre thing, I believe some enterprising young man at the IRS must have looked at the
Time
and
Newsweek
covers and asked, “Who is this guy?” and when they looked into it: “I don’t know who he is, but I know one thing: he isn’t paying any taxes.” And so we got chased after for an enormous amount of back taxes, not one cent of which had ever been paid. So between 1974 and 1980, I paid lawyers, the tax man, tried to keep the band afloat (which I barely could), and spent money in the recording studio. The result being, in 1980, I had no money after playing for quite a while in the professional music business. And so when I came back from the
River
tour, it was the first time I had a little money in the bank, and I said, this time I’m not gonna go in and break myself again. Because the record company paid up to a certain point, but after that if you were scrubbing away in the studio learning your craft, it was on your dime, my friend. You
paid
. You just had to pay. And I was spending a lot of time learning what to do in the studio. An enormous amount: the
River
record went on for a year or two.

So I told my roadie, go out and get me some little tape player. I don’t care what you get, just get me a little tape player I can sing some songs into and throw another track on, and I can tell if I have anything before I waste time and money in the studio with the band. So he came back with a little four track Teac. Set it up in my bedroom, exactly five minutes from here, right up the road. And I sat down, and in about three days I sang all the songs from
Nebraska
. I had them written, and I think there were maybe two or three takes of each; I think there’s one take of “Highway Patrolman” or something, not much.

You actually could mix—you recorded to a cassette, four track to a cassette, and then you mixed it to another cassette. I mixed it through a Gibson Echoplex, which is the sound of the echo on that record—just a separate unit, an old ’60s guitar Gibson Echoplex unit—onto another boombox. So the final mix came off, like, the boombox you would take to the beach.

Now the problem is, all those boomboxes are not finely honed recording equipment [
laughs
]. They’re meant to suck in the sand and keep playing! Consequently, the speed of them are all different. In those days, your cassette was being played at a variety of speeds that the artists never intended. So I did the whole record, carried it around, went into the studio, blah blah blah, tried to get the band to play it, didn’t sound right; tried to play it again myself, recorded it all myself, didn’t sound right; tried to take the tracks that we did and remix them, didn’t sound right. The better it got, the worse it got. And I also realized the tape … the sound we were hearing back was slightly slowed down, because the tape had been going slightly fast.

So all of these strange accidents occurred and [combined with] this junky equipment at the time to unintentionally make this very low-fi, spooky … I mean, I knew the mood I was going after, but a lot of it was just an accident. I was just trying to hear some songs I had written.

Another section of the second floor is about your songwriting. One of the things we have is that table you sent us, where you said you’ve written most of your songs
.

I think I sent you the chair too? Yeah, I’ve written at that table since the ’70s. Many, many songs have come across that table, starting with maybe the
Darkness on the Edge of Town
record. I bought it with Anthony Rioli, who was a local antique dealer and general wild man. I had a little house, and I was looking for something to write on, and we found that somewhere. But I’ve kept it ever since, and I think I’ve written as late as … was there anything from
Magic
written on there? Certainly
The Rising
was written there.

In general, what is your songwriting process like?

It’s very relaxed. You just get an idea, and I sit down with a guitar, and it’s a meditative state. Songwriting is fundamentally a meditation. It’s the exercise of your craft, your intelligence. But it’s primarily meditative, in that it works best when you go into a light trance-like situation. Where you just sort of start to … you’re scraping the top of your subconscious, like with a knife. And the shavings, sometimes they turn into a song [
laughs
]. And then occasionally, the knife plummets deeply in.

It would be like having a shapeless piece of clay or something in front of you, and you just start running your fingers over it. You’re just sitting there with clay. You don’t have an idea of what that clay is going
to be yet, you just start running your fingers over the clay. And as you’re running your fingers over the clay, your emotions, who you are, the issues that are on your mind, the sounds you may want to hear, the shapes you may want to see, your relationship to the world itself begins to define itself in the images, music, and lyrics that are just kind of flowing out of you.

Then there’s a point where your studied craft comes into play. In other words: okay, you’ve plummeted a certain amount, you’ve got your basic story, you’ve plummeted into some of your unconscious and you’ve come up with something that feels like life. It feels like it has some breath and some blood in it. But now you’ve got to call on your craft to refine it, to write well, to make good choruses, or verses.