Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (8 page)

There’s two kinds of sets that the band plays, even to this day. At the Troubadour, I was involved with wrestling with the situation, which I
was probably not enjoying at the time. So this would cause this particular thing. It was the same with the first night at the Bottom Line, I was very involved with wrestling with what I was trying to do. I was realizing that it was not quite coming off. With the Troubadour set—once every so many gigs, sometimes you go out there and you’ve really got to fight with it to make a go of it; sometimes you go out and it just falls out like nothing. That’s when you tend to be looser. In comparison to the Troubadour, last night was like the “loose” set, where everybody’s feeling good.

At the Troubadour, it was like the artist struggling with his art; other times it’s the artist
performing
his art
.

Yeah, that’s it. That’s the difference. At the Troubadour it really was a struggle to come through.

I got this weird impression last night sometimes of watching
West Side Story
, and seeing George Chakiris there
.

That’s interesting, I never saw that.

You never saw that film?

No.

Oh, well, it was the same kind of … well, it’s the feel in your lyrics of the East Side of New York, down-and-out people. Because of the dancing, it’s a very stylized movie. But the music wasn’t really bad, and the movie has the same kind of effect that you try to do with your lines, and it works well on many occasions. Everything coming together, you know: a bridge, a line change, falling on the ground, freeze
.

We’re trying to do a whole mess of things at once. We’re trying to do a real structured thing, but keep it real loose at the same time. The structure is like the frame on a picture, where the picture is constantly moving. So some nights it depends on how you are that night, how you’re feeling and how creative you are at any given moment. So it can vary a lot, it can vary a little night to night, it can not vary, it can do anything. Because there are certain set things we use as a skeleton for the set, and we try to let whatever happens happen around that.

It’s interesting how you can bring across so much charisma using all the old themes in show business, like the Laurel and Hardy theme: Clarence, the big guy with the hat, and you’re the little guy, doing what you do
.

Yeah [
laughs
].

And it always works again. But you do it with rock music, which is quite new, to do it that perfectly: choreography, humor …

That’s because those things are all very real to begin with, the first time they were done. They’re like situations that happen, day to day. You see it on the street, those people are everywhere.

Did you at any one moment in the development of your career come to realize that you have charisma? You’re a very charismatic artist
.

Nah, I don’t think about that stuff.

Are you ever aware of that? I mean, it’s obvious, I think it’s hard to evade
.

I don’t know. Before I go on—I’m very tense all the time before I go on. I got put in a weird situation for a lot of years; I got put in the situation for three years—and I’ll probably do this the rest of my life—where you got to go out every night. Probably a situation that other artists don’t have: you got to go out and prove yourself. Because I got so bombarded with all that stuff in the beginning, all that hype, I was put in a situation where I had to go out and prove myself. Night after night. It’s hard to do. And the longer you have to do it, the harder it gets. And for a while I thought it was that hype that made me feel like that, but then a few days ago, three or four days ago, I realized that that’s never what it was at all, that it was always me. And I think that’s what it is. I don’t know if it’s fate or what it is, but I go out there every night feeling that way: “Tonight, I gotta prove myself.” It never was to anybody, it was always to myself. And it’s funny, I just realized that the other night. It’s a weird thing.

It might have to do with being brought up Roman Catholic. Where God will see you, everything you do—under your blankets—God will see you, and you will be punished. That brings a certain frame of mind that’s not really good. There are some Roman Catholics
,
including myself, who come to realize only later why they are so damn ambitious. They want to prove everything. I presume, or I guess I read somewhere, that you are from a middle class family, or lower middle class. And these people really want you to get somewhere. You said to someone that you phoned your mother saying you had a contract and she said, “Did you change your name?” I could really feel that, imagine my mother saying the same thing. All these years, through religion, through this lower middle class family, they push you and they bring about a huge guilt. And I think it’s from the guilt complex that you think you have to prove yourself. As you were nobody all your life. And it’s hard to come to realize that—and when—you are anybody. Maybe that’s what you really want
.

Yeah, it was really a mind-blower.

And maybe it’s not good to realize that!

Yeah, you have to deal with that too, all the time. You start to find out more about yourself, which changes what you do. But that’s what it’s all about. You can’t do one thing forever; there are things that change your work, I guess. It’s interesting because I started to read a lot about it, read reviews about the way different people see you onstage, and I started to wonder, yeah, why am I acting like that? And what is this thing that is driving me to be out there like that? Why do I do this every night? Why do I take myself to the exhaustion point, and if I don’t, why do I feel terrible about it? It was the whole thing with the three-hour sets: I had to take myself to a point where I couldn’t stand up, where I felt sick, where I absolutely knew that I couldn’t do anything else. I had to do this every night. I still do. I did it last night. And the fact that the audience is there and coming along with you is incidental [
laughs
]. It’s like a second thought. In the end I realized that they were an excuse for me to be out there, and in reality what I was really doing out there I could do to an empty hall. Almost. They provide a certain … you know. Of course I never did think I was out there for the audience, I always knew I was out there for me, but I really didn’t know the darker side of being out there for you. There’s a light side of it, and a dark side. You’re out there for you, you think to have fun, and play, but you’re also out there for
you
to prove yourself to yourself, to beat yourself down as far as you can go and see how much you can take. So there’s two sides to it every night. And it’s funny, I also realized that there’s a certain amount
of illusion at work onstage too, no matter how easy it looks, it’s always a certain amount of struggle, always a struggle going on underneath. Sometimes the struggle is closer to the surface and it’s more visible—like at the Troubadour or the first set at the Bottom Line—you can see it. You can see it on my face; I don’t think I smiled once during the first set at the Bottom Line, and I know I didn’t smile at all at the Troubadour, because it was too close—it was so close to the surface, it affects you physically.

That was the menacing part of it: it was like a death-rattle for yourself
.

So that’s the hardest, when it has captured you. That means I’m not in control, it is in control of me and I’m in the middle of this battle with this thing. Last night, it’s always there, but maybe I have an edge on it. And it goes up and down during the set. You can see it come out. Last night I had an edge on it, like I was on top of it, but it’s always there. What it is is the potential for failure is always there. That’s what’s exciting about it, especially when you get to the point where you’re a big winner [
laughs
].

It’s the same thing you said before, but now you’re approaching it from the other side, the same thing as trying to prove yourself, looked at from the other side
.

Big winners are big losers. It’s like that. When you’re at Las Vegas and you’re a big winner, and you’ve got all this money in front of you, then all it takes is
that
to be a big loser. So I’ve found now that I’m more tense before I go on. Last night for the first time since I don’t remember when, I was real tense. I was uptight, almost. I was scared, I think. I might not have been scared, but I was close to being scared. Which I haven’t been in years.

So you like that?

I like it and I don’t. The whole thing of winning is also an illusion. People yelling don’t mean you won. I’m the only guy who knows, I think, if I made it that night. This is totally from my viewpoint. Other people, like John Rockwell, for one, his favorite set at the Bottom Line was the first set. He’s one of those guys who just sat there and just enjoyed watching the incredible struggle onstage. He came up to me and said the second set was fantastic, it was like clockwork, it was more exciting,
it was tighter, it got everybody going more, but I liked the first set better. Because I was able to sit there and watch a guy struggling with his thing. He liked that. And I was! The first set I was fighting like a madman with that stuff. Other people, they’d rather get off and groove along with it. So it depends. It’s something that you would not want to see every night. There were other people who were disappointed, like Paul Nelson, who came down and was disappointed in the first set. He came back Sunday, and he said it in his article, the set Sunday night was like the perfect set: the band was in control, and that’s a beautiful sight in itself. When everything is working right with our band, it’s smooth. It’s like the finest machine you’ve ever seen. It’s something. And the other way, that’s the darker side. Which comes out more on the record than on anything else. That’s a very hard record to play live, the new record. Because the situation I was in at the time, on that record, that comes out more. For me it does anyway.

I can hear that in some lines, the tension
.

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.

Were there pressures outside yourself?

Once again, you would tend to say yes, but I’ve come to decide that, no. I know myself enough to where I know that in a way I didn’t care if it was late, I didn’t care if the record company didn’t like it or what. For me to say, yeah, it was the tensions put on me by the press, or by the record company … I would tend to say that’s what made the record so hard for me.

You had to prove yourself against yourself. There was no audience at all that could relieve you by being receptive and getting you back three times. You were the yardstick
.

And with myself I’m never satisfied. I push myself hard all the time. I really don’t know why. Like the thought of doing an intermission never, ever crossed my mind. Not until someone said that the Allman Brothers did one [
laughs
], not until today, or yesterday. It never crossed my mind. I
never
did an intermission in my life. I figured, what do you need an intermission for? If it’s going perfect, if the band is running like it should run, it should be just a long, long set. And I just thought
about it, I just thought about it this morning. What would happen if we did this? We could actually do more. If we did an intermission, we could play more songs! Do more! But I was never into this logical approach. The idea was that was the human way to do it. And I’m not into that [
laughs
]. I was into this other way. Anybody can do it that way, I don’t want to do it that way. Which in a way is self-defeating.

And the same thing went for the album. The album couldn’t be easy. It just could not be easy, and it wasn’t. It was the hardest thing. You don’t know. I was going to cry over it so many nights. Really, I actually did. The other day I was in this hotel in New York, the Holiday Inn, I was there for the whole summer, and this little room, not even the size of this room, was like the worst room in the world. That was the worst room they had. The mirror was crooked. It wouldn’t go straight for nothin’. The sucker was as crooked as could be, it just hung crooked. Couldn’t get it to hang right. It just blew my mind after a certain amount of time. The other day this drove me nuts. It was the album that mirror became—it was crooked, it just wouldn’t hang right! Karen was with me. She was going nuts. She went crazy several nights. I’d be in the studio eight hours, come home at five, and she was going crazy. Because she had come from Texas, didn’t know anybody, didn’t know any place to go, she just sat in the Holiday Inn all summer, in this one room, and she went nuts. So it went on and on, night after night. The album was beating me to death, then I had this relationship going on that was murder. It was the heaviest. I told her I could understand exactly how she felt; she was in this hotel room for hours and was seeing me only at night, early in the morning and at night. She didn’t know anybody else, so of course she’d get mad at me, even if she understood what was going on. So that got insane, the whole thing, it was really like freak-out time.

Then, even as we got towards the end, the end of the album lasted for like two or three weeks! It was going to be over for weeks—the next day it would be over, for weeks and weeks. I’d be gone for two days from the Holiday Inn, and I’d come back and all she’d say was, “Is it over?” [
laughs
]. I’d say no! No, it ain’t over. I’d go back out, and I’d be gone for another two days; I’d come back and I’d say this is it, got one more song we’re gonna mix, I’ll come back and everything’ll be fine. “Is it over?” and I’d have to say no, it is not over. And this went on and on.

Finally I spent three or four days at the studio, ’round the clock. The
last morning. I had a gig in Providence, Rhode Island, that night; that morning I was singing “She’s the One” at the same time I was mixing “Jungleland” in another studio downstairs; at the same time I was in another studio, rehearsing the band for the gig that night. That’s the truth. I almost died. There’s a picture of it, this girl Barbara [Pyle] took a picture of it, and it’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. You have to see the band. It should be on the cover of that album. Scariest thing ever. You ain’t never seen faces like that in your life. She may have it. Because if she has it, it’s something to see. You ain’t never seen more messed-up, beat-down—we were there for four days, and every single minute is in everybody’s face. The light comes through the window, it’s like ten in the morning, we’ve been up for days. We got a gig that night, we’re rehearsing, and what’s worse is, I can’t even sing! Because I’ve been singing, trying to sing all these songs, and I’ve got to sing that night. The picture just captures that moment. And then, we didn’t get it done, even that day. I went home, “Is it over?”—we’re leaving the hotel, we’re packed—“Is it over?” I said no, it isn’t over. I could’ve cried. I could’ve died when we didn’t get it done. We walked out of that studio and I wanted to kill somebody. And then you had to deal with that.