Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (7 page)

We had a chance to go on big tours. And I always try things, so I tried it once. Went on that big Chicago tour, and it didn’t work out: it was bad, it was bad for me. After that I realized. I knew the way we should have done it even before then, but I figured with people saying, “Do it, do it,” I thought okay, I’ll try that. If it works, good. And when I say “if it works,” what I mean is if it works band-to-audience. I don’t mean if we sell a lot of records. But it is all connected: if it works band-to-audience, then you’ll sell a lot of records. See, that’s what people forget. I read this thing in the
Times
where this guy said something about bad management, that we didn’t go out and try for new audiences. Which was totally wrong. What he should have said is that we didn’t go out and try for new audiences
in the accepted way
that bands go out and try for new audiences. We didn’t get on a tour with the Who and play in front of 10 million thousand people or nothing. What we did was we went to a place where we were not known, and we played in a club for 20 or 30 people. And then two months later we came back and we played for 50 people. Two months later we came back again, to the same town, and we played for about 100 people. And two months later we came back and the place was full. Two or three months after that we came back and played a theater, and we just about sold out. And then two months later we’d come back and sell out one or two shows at the theater, and that’s the way we did it. In almost every town, every place we went. In all the major cities that’s the way we did it. I went to Boston five or six times before I ever sold out a club. We played to ten people. I went to Philadelphia five or six times before we ever sold out a club. It goes on and on. So we did try for new audiences, but we did it our way.

I thought of it last night, seeing these people being so enthusiastic, I was thinking of the times when a band could be huge without having made an album, just by the sheer potential of people making music on a stage
.

I’ve based the whole thing around this: if my band plays the best, if I do
the best I can, and if I legitimately should be doing this and I have the ability to do what I’m trying to do, well then everything else is going to follow suit and work out. That’s the only kind of thing I ever concentrated on. Only two things that were important. Number one, making sure the band is playing the best it could at all times. Number two, making sure the band is being presented correctly, so that it could
be able to
play the best that it could. You play a half hour opening for Black Oak Arkansas, it don’t matter if you’re kings of the world, you ain’t gonna be presented right to show how you can play. We’ve done that, I did a gig like that, and I learned right away. So we stopped, and we didn’t go second on any bills anymore. Most of the time we didn’t play with anyone else at all. We decided we were going to go into these towns on our own and play to whoever came. And we would, and we’d go to a school and maybe two or three hundred kids would show up, and the next time we went back the place was half full, and the next time it was sold out. Word-of-mouth. All the hype in the world is nothing compared to a kid telling another kid, “Man, you should’ve seen that!” Because a kid listens to his buddy. He don’t listen to the papers! He looks, and he reads, but he doesn’t believe. But if his buddy comes up and says these guys were great, he’ll check it out. He’ll go to the show. And that’s the thing we’ve worked on, what made us keep going, even back when things weren’t going so well, when we weren’t getting promoted by Columbia—who I don’t want to say nasty things against, since they’re being so great now—when all we did was just go out there and play and play and play. And the kids did it, man, the kids themselves. A kid told another kid, word-of-mouth, they’d call up radio stations. The papers may get a few critics down there, or a few kids, but in general the kids don’t go unless they know it’s going to be good. They can’t afford to spend the bucks for curiosity’s sake. It was the audience that did it, and that came back, and that’s the way we did it. And it was good, because it established a certain type of relationship between me and the band and the crowd. It was the kind of thing where there was no mass success, but there was this very intense thing. At concerts, the kids would go
crazy
, they would go nuts, you know? Because there was this intense exchange going on between us and the crowd. And now it seems—and I’ll believe it when I see it—but it seems like it’s going better [
laughs
]. I don’t put too much faith in anything, I don’t care what it looks like. It
seems
like it’s going better. And I know if I did it any other way I don’t think it would be, and I would not have the same relationship I do with the crowd, which is what the people are coming for.

So you did it on your own
.

Me and Mike [Appel]. People say, you know, bad management—and in the traditional sense it might have been. He didn’t put me on tour with the Who, because I wouldn’t go! He wouldn’t put me on this other tour, because I wouldn’t go there. So from a traditional view it might seem like bad management, but Mike knew the way I was about what I do, which is that I do it my way, a certain way. When I worked other jobs, I painted somebody’s house green when they wanted it green. But when I do this, I felt it was something I wanted to do my way, all the way. Or else I don’t do it. We’re not going to do gigs to go out and play 40 minutes, it’s a waste of time.

Do you have the impression that you took your record company on your bandwagon, rather than the other way around, as it usually is? They’d have to follow you now if you’ve created this momentum
.

Initially, there was big hype when I first came out, with Clive and stuff.

Is that story true, by the way, about you reading the Scaduto book on Dylan, and by that, going to John Hammond?

It wasn’t
by
that. I’d read the book, or I’d been reading the book, and I happened to be involved with Mike. I went in to Mike and Mike said we’ve got this appointment with John Hammond! So then we went up there. So yeah, it is … but it was just a freaky thing. There was a whole series of events at that time that were happening to me almost exactly how they happened to Dylan when he first started, and it was just coincidence. I met Hammond, then I went and played the Gaslight, and a lot of those little clubs, and it was by myself, I had no band. So anyway, Clive did a big hype, which probably as he looks back on it was a mistake. I mean the way it was done. I think I read somewhere he thinks it was a mistake himself—in his books he says it. Anyway, the big hype came out, and then for a long time I was thought of as like a Clive project that bombed. I sold 20,000 records or something. Even though the band was consistently getting good press, and Mike was always shoving it back to Columbia, when the record sales ain’t there, they can ignore it. So when the second album came out I had an argument with the A&R department. They didn’t think it was good, I thought it was good; they didn’t want to release it, I wanted to release it; eventually they did release the album, and it got pretty good reviews and did pretty well.

So meanwhile, all this time the albums are selling every week, but at
the record company at that time, well, there were a lot of inner conflicts between us and them. There were a lot of people there who were really pulling for us, but the people who had the big say at the time were not too involved with my project. I think Billy Joel was happening then, somebody was happening then. So, I don’t know if they figured we’d disappear and go away or what. But we kept going out there and kept playing. See, to bet against us was to make a bad bet, because the guys, we had nothing else to do! You were dealing with desperate faces—we
had
to go out there every night, we had to do that. And it was great, it was something we lived to do. This was our chance, and there was no turning around. I wasn’t going to stop and go back and fix TVs; there was nothing else I could do, so this was it for me. So they were dealing with something that would not stop. Could not stop. If you can stop, in this music-type thing, well then you
should
stop.

Finally, a year went by, and
Wild and Innocent
started to sell quite a few records, and then several major things happened. [Irwin Segelstein’s] kid—was the president of CBS records—came to see us at a show. Freaked out, went back and was bugging his old man: “What’s the matter with you?” and on and on. And the Jon Landau article came out at the same time. And all of a sudden the tide turned. It just went over the hump where it became too much to ignore anymore. They finally wised up to this. And things started to come around, and I started the new album, and it went on and on. In the end—and I’ve always worked on this principle—you go to somebody, and you’ve got a deal on their terms. You’re in their ballpark playing their game. I always found it’s better if you make them come to you. Then they’re in your neighborhood, playing your game. To a degree, you can call the shots. In our situation, we just played and played—those guys, they’re the most consistent band, they play good every night, I mean,
real
good every night. Even on a bad night, they’re still good [
laughs
].

It was a good night last night!

Last night was a good night. It wasn’t a great night, but it felt real good. It’s that kind of band that comes out, man, and always during the night they’re doing something … So that’s what we did every night: played and played, over and over. So finally what happened was the company came to us and said, “Hey, let’s get together,” and when they finally did, that’s when it started to work out. And now, they’re all like bonzo over the whole thing. It’s like, “Whatever you want, whatever you want.” And
they’ve been doing an incredible job, like down here they did a fantastic job. Columbia is a company that, if they want to, it’s incredible what they can do. They can do anything. And this is the way it should be. We just wanted to team up and make it work out. In most acts’ case, it’s like: pull here, give, take; they’ve got to pull something out of the act, then the act’s got to pull something out of the company. And I think a lot of people didn’t understand my reasoning on some things.

They might not have understood that you were not scared of not making it. I think many bands give in to what a record company wants, or a manager, because they figure, well, if we fail, it’s not our fault. You have to be pretty strong, and that must be part of the reason for your success: you are obviously that strong. To think, “I can do it. And if I can’t do it, I have at least tried on my own terms, and that makes me happy enough.”

And there’s also a certain way you have to legitimately care about what you’re doing, intensely. I mean, it has to be one of your only forces, and you have to legitimately
not
care about really making it. I couldn’t have cared less. I had my band, I was out there, I was making more money than I’d ever made before, maybe 150 bucks a week; I had my own house, it was a step up in the world. I was happy, everybody was happy, and we cared intensely about what we were doing. And in a way, we did not care about breaking into the big mainstream. The only thing that matters is your music. And if that’s right, then things come around. But that’s got to be it, that’s got to be what you care about. You’ve got to have your priorities in order.

So they were dealing with a situation like that, like I was in no big sweat to make it. And they said, “Well, if you don’t do this, this ain’t gonna happen”; and I said, “I don’t care!” They were dealing with an attitude that they couldn’t deal with. That was the key to keeping my sanity and the band’s sanity. If we’re sweating about whether or not we were going to sell 300,000 records next time out, then we ain’t gonna. Anybody caring about that kind of stuff shouldn’t do it. It
shouldn’t
sell.

That’s hard to handle sometimes for people who are concerned with another aspect of the business. They think you are not in line with what they are doing. If you’re not a very prolific thinker, you don’t come up with the idea that an artist shouldn’t be concerned about what you think he should be concerned about.

When we were playing in bars it was the same way. We were playing in
the bars, and the band was playing great. Five or six years ago—there’s a videotape of our band at the Student Prince. Somebody found it the other day, a videotape of us at this club in Asbury Park, at the Student Prince. Me, Steve, Davey, Garry, Mad Dog, all of us doing our thing. And Max saw it the other day. I said, “Max, how’s that sound, don’t we sound really good?” [
laughs
]. The band was playing the same way back then, five years ago. Six years ago. We were going on in them bars with the same feeling as last night. Surroundings change, but that’s all superficial stuff. You go out there with what’s inside you; you close your eyes and you could be anywhere. So where you are doesn’t matter.

Did you change in the way you expose yourself onstage, from a small club to last night? I saw you last year at the Troubadour and I saw you last night, and in my opinion there are certain differences
.

Well, at the Troubadour, with the band you saw last year? That was not a good show from what I remember. Mostly because it takes you a set or two to settle into a club, I’ve found. Even at the Bottom Line that happened to us.

But when you can see someone’s eyes, when you can see every little movement, even muscle movement, that’s a different way of acting. You’re acting for 200 people or 3,000. I think I’ve seen a different way of acting. Last year you were, to me, more menacing, more mean. That didn’t happen last night. You were sometimes menacing, but not all of the time. I remember last year, girls started crying, and shouting in the middle of the song—they couldn’t handle it, they couldn’t wait until it was over to let it go. Applause is a way of relieving tension, it’s not only appreciation, it’s a relief of tension when there’s a good artist there that can build it up. People last year couldn’t wait for that—they had to start yelling and shouting. You came out with the sunglasses, moving mainly in one spot but with the tension of wanting to break out of it. Now you’re moving about, you’re going across the whole stage, but then you gave this impression that you could do it, but you were forced by some magic force to stay there, and you were wrestling with your body
.