Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters

by Jeff Burger

  Many of Springsteen’s interviews find him willing to speak with great candor about his personal life. He has talked in some detail, for example, about his marriage, about being in therapy, about his parents, and about fame. And he can be as funny and poignant as he can be candid; in fact, sometimes he can be all three in the course of a few paragraphs. (Check out what he has to say about his parents—and then about the “money men”—in his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame acceptance speech on page 283.)

  Springsteen’s interviews and speeches appear here in chronological order, and you’ll note a lot of changes over the nearly forty years they cover: “Chicks” and “girls” became “women”; eight-tracks became CDs and then iPod playlists; success-related problems replaced poverty-related ones. Springsteen, meanwhile, became increasingly articulate and adept at the interview process. It’s not surprising that the authors of the earliest articles here opted to include only a smattering of direct quotes or that the later pieces are loaded with them.

  Moreover, his attitudes and opinions changed at least as much over time as his music. For example, he told Melody Maker in 1975, “I couldn’t bring up kids. I couldn’t handle it. I mean, it’s too heavy, it’s too much. I just don’t see why people get married. It’s so strange. I guess it’s a nice track, but not for me.”

  Needless to say, those views didn’t last. Nor did his early opinions about New Jersey, which he called a “dumpy joint” in an early interview and “a great place to live” three decades later. And consider his view on performance venues: The man who today schedules shows for places like the 82,500-seat MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, told critic Paul Williams in 1974 that “we won’t play anyplace over three thousand … and that’s even too big.”

  Springsteen has also changed some of his ideas about music—and even about discussing music. The same year he met with Williams, Spring steen told me that “I really don’t want to talk about [the music]. I really don’t want to touch on the songs at all, because I’ll screw them up. As soon as you start talking about it, you’re messing with the magic, you know?” But it wasn’t long before he was discussing his songs forthrightly and in minute detail. For instance, as he noted in Songs, a book of his lyrics:

  When I wrote “Nebraska,” my retelling of the Charles Stark-weather-Caril Fugate 1950s murder spree, I’d found the record’s center. The songs tapped into white gospel and early Appalachian music, as well as the blues. In small detail—the slow twirling of a baton, the twisting of a ring on a finger—they found their character. I often wrote from a child’s point of view: “Mansion on the Hill,” “Used Cars,” “My Father’s House” … these were all stories that came directly out of my experience with my family.

  Of course, Springsteen’s circumstances changed at least as much over the years as his views and his ability to express them. At the beginning of this volume, he is earning seventy-five dollars a week, struggling to emerge from the New Jersey bars and make a name for himself. By the end of the book, he has achieved almost unimaginable wealth and worldwide fame and has stood on stages with John Kerry and Barack Obama, having been asked by the candidates to campaign for them and to urge his fans to support their causes. It’s quite a journey. But what may be even more remarkable than the distance traveled is that Springsteen comes through all the changes with a sense of humility and gratitude, with his integrity intact, and with a clear grasp of the basic ideals with which he began.

  This collection features quite a few interviews with well-known media and leading critics, but I’ve also included some gems from small and international periodicals that even serious fans may not have unearthed. In addition, I’ve incorporated radio and TV interviews that have not previously appeared in print as well as some material that has not been issued in any format until now.

  You’d have to read pretty carefully to find variations between what follows and the original material, but there are differences. In the previously printed articles, I’ve standardized style, Americanized British spellings, and fixed some grammatical and other errors, especially outside of quotes. But I’ve tried to preserve the originals as much as possible and have resisted the urge to do the kind of editing I might do to a previously unpublished manuscript. I’ve done a bit more tweaking to the transcripts of audio and video recordings, to weed out redundancies and turn the spoken word into something that’s a little more comprehensible and readable in print.

  A note about the late 1980s: You’ll read Springsteen’s reflections on this period in various interviews in this book, but you’ll find relatively little material from this time. That’s because he was a lot more productive than talkative during these years. (A notable exception is the conversation with Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore that appeared in the magazine’s November 5, 1987, issue; it’s available in Bruce Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Files.)

  One reason for the paucity of interviews from this period may be that he was adjusting to the almost unprecedented success of 1984’s Born in the U.S.A., which sold fifteen million copies in the United States and became one of the most successful albums in the history of rock; in the wake of its release, Springsteen probably needed a bit of privacy a lot more than he needed any additional publicity. Moreover, he was focused from 1985 to 1991 on his personal life: in just those six years, he married, divorced, remarried, and became a father.

  This book might never have materialized were it not for Chicago Review Press senior editor Yuval Taylor, who enthusiastically responded to my proposal and then patiently and thoroughly replied to all my queries. Thanks also to the rest of the staff at Chicago Review Press, especially project editor Kelly Wilson.

  I received invaluable, repeated assistance from the tireless and always dependable Eileen Chapman at Monmouth University, where the Springsteen Special Collection houses nearly fifteen thousand articles, books, and promotional items. Bob Crane of Friends of Bruce Springsteen also proved helpful and supportive, as did Mona Okada at the law firm of Grubman, Indursky & Shire.

  My thanks to all the contributors, and particularly to those who took the time to supplement their previously published material with fresh insights and reminiscences. I’m grateful to Frank Stefanko, whose wonderful photos appear in these pages. And thanks to Elliott Murphy, who has been making great music for as long as Springsteen has and who was kind enough to write the foreword to this book. I’m honored to be able to include his words here.

  Thanks also to journalist and lifelong friend Ken Terry and to master photographer and pal Bill Bernstein, both of whom provided encouragement along the way. I’m grateful to my colleagues at AIN Publications, particularly to Jennifer Leach English, whose friendship and kindness have helped to make the last few years of my working life so enjoyable.

  Thanks to my wonderful and always-supportive wife, Madeleine Beresford, who made valuable suggestions regarding the manuscript and helped me to free up the time I needed to put it together. Springsteen was right when he sang, “Two hearts are better than one.”

  Finally, thanks to Springsteen himself, for four decades of amazing records and transcendent concert performances.

  —JEFF BURGER

  Ridgewood, New Jersey, 2012

  PART I

  “FROM SMALL THINGS (BIG THINGS ONE DAY COME)”

  Springsteen struggles for success—and rent money.

  “This is it for me, you know. I got no choice. I have to write and play. If I became an electrician tomorrow, I’d still come home at night and write songs.” —BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, 1974

  BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN—LIVE!

  BRUCE POLLOCK | March 1973, Rock (US)

  Bruce Pollock was one of the very first journalists to interview Springsteen for a national magazine. Much later in this book, the singer speaks with the authority of a college professor when discussing his literary and political influences. But at the time of his conversation with Pollock, that degree of articulation was many years away. Now Springsteen was just twenty-three, his debut album ha
d been out for all of twenty-six days, and he said things like, “I’m not really a literary type of cat.” As he told Pollock, “I’m at a point where this is all very new to me.”

  But the Springsteen spark was already glowing, at least in concert performances. “I’d played the first side of the album,” Pollock recalled to me, “and although I liked it, I wasn’t totally astounded. Not even astounded enough to play the second side. Until I saw him live. And then when I got home and played the album it was a major revelation. This guy wasn’t just another word freak—he was the whole package, the Spectorian teenage symphony of dreams and agony incarnate, with a staunch R&B backbone and a huge side of self-deprecating humor.

  “Not since Dylan had I seen a guy who moved me so much,” Pollock continued. “Moved me to attend almost every concert in the area for probably seven years after that, many of them at Max’s Kansas City, where I’d sit at a table in the back with his manager, Mike Appel. When I asked him if Bruce would like to be included in the book on songwriting I was finishing up for Macmillan, In Their Own Words, he declined, stating that Bruce should have his own book. Unfortunately, fourteen other scribes beat me to writing that book. But I’m not sure he would have been his own best interpreter when it came to parsing his style and working habits. At that point, and for many years after, he was running on fumes and instinct, the way the best rock and roll always does.” —Ed.

  On the night of January 31, 1973, we were present at a little bit of rock-and-roll history.

  The “we” I refer to are a few dozen of the New York City pop culture cognoscenti who were urged, cajoled, tipped, hipped, or otherwise hyped into joining the paying customers who saw Columbia recording artist Bruce Springsteen open up a five-day stint at Max’s Kansas City—one of the last remaining oases of good music in a city of deserted singles bars, beat-up coffeehouses, and broken-down concert halls.

  Already something of a word-of-mouth, trade press, and underground instant legend, Springsteen seems about to leap into the daylight of mass acceptance, household status, and Bandstand furor via the resounding clatter of praise issuing forth from some of your favorite magazines. The crowd at Max’s was prepared then—somewhat—for his set, armed and waiting to fling the hype back into his face like a custard pie.

  “It’s strange, it’s very strange. Let me tell you, Max’s was the first gig where people came to see the band. Before that, it was like we were playing at football games, you know … really terrible. People just didn’t relate. And I figured it would be that kind of scene. But then people started to get interested. In a way it’s good. I’ve met a lot of nice people who honestly like the music and are really excited about the band. But just the same, you get the other people who come on with attitudes toward us. I just get up and play every night—if somebody runs around saying it’s good or it’s bad, I don’t have a whole lot of control.”

  Clad in dungarees, baseball cap, and shirt, Springsteen—twenty-four [Twenty-three, actually. —Ed.]—ascended to the spotlight with acoustic guitar in hand, accompanied only by an accordion player. He dedicated his set to John Hammond Sr.—Columbia’s musical tastemaker supreme—who hasn’t been this high on a discovery since he flipped his superlatives at Folk City some eleven years or so ago over Bob Dylan. Dylan advanced from Folk City to the Gaslight, where Sam Hood put him to work. Eventually Bobby departed for the western skies of New Jersey. Bruce is from Asbury Park. Sam Hood now takes care of business at Max’s. And John Hammond Sr. came down early in the evening just to shake Springsteen’s hand.

  “The [New York] Times compared me to El Topo. They said, ‘If you like El Topo, you’ll like Bruce Springsteen.’ I think they compared me to Allen Ginsberg, Rod Stewart, and El Topo in the same article. There’s a cat with an original point of view. My songs have been compared to Ginsberg’s poem “Howl”—but I just write what comes out of me … because of some things I’ve seen. The kind of stuff I write might not be the kind of stuff I’d read. I’m not really a literary type of cat. A lot of people ask me what I read—what poets. I never read any, hardly. One time I tried to make a conscious effort because I was starting to get involved in it and I went down to the library and picked out a few books and I read ’em—I can’t even remember the books. Rather than pick up a book that has poems, I’d rather pick up anything else … any magazine … whatever is around. I was never a heavy, serious reader. I went through a year and a half of college, which I don’t remember a darn thing from. All I remember was getting hassled to no end. I’ve been playing music since I was about fourteen. I was really terrible at everything else.”

  After his opening number, a dirge called “Mary, Queen of Arkansas,” which is one of the nine songs on his debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, the pace picked up with a rocker about Indians and flapjacks made ’em fat and bishops and James Garner’s one-eyed bride. Following this was a piece on the big top, complete with flute and tuba (provided by the adept members of his band) chilling the air just enough to set the stage for some electricity.

  With the band joining him now in full blast, Springsteen put down his guitar for piano and began to show this crowd what he was really all about. Before he was through with “Spirit in the Night,” the halfway laid-back, still somewhat unconvinced and cynical New York audience came to life. He did a song about a bus ride (now playing electric guitar) before slamming into his epic opus, “Her Brains They Rattle and Her Bones They Shake,” and while this stomping, romping gut-rocker was going on the realization came upon you that the kid and his band were only warming up, getting loose. This was but the first set of three tonight, of five days here, of other days and weeks, present glory … future fame.

  “I was into messing around with words when I was eighteen, nineteen … but I quit and did something else. I got into R&B. It wasn’t until now that I figured out a way to fuse the two. It didn’t come together easy for me then. I’ve been playing for ten years, which isn’t real long but it’s a little bit of a while. I was out there by myself for about five … that’s how I made my living … by playing hard and sometimes getting groups. I played down South a whole lot, Tennessee, Carolina … went out to California when I was about twenty with a band. We played the old Matrix … second billing to Boz Scaggs.

  “But it got to a point where things got tough. In 1966, ’67, ’68 … it was easier, kids wanted to go to concerts and it was very exciting. But times changed and it got increasingly more difficult to get by. It got to a point where we had no way to get the equipment around. We had no PA system and no manager and no nothing so I said, well maybe I’ll try it myself for a while. The only club I really played by myself was Max’s. Sam would give me some jobs. If he had an open space, he’d put me in there, you know, give me some money. It seems kind of funny now. In a way, I don’t know if I dig all this commotion, you know?”

  Part of the magic is the relationship between Springsteen and his group. More than organ, drums, bass, guitar, and sax, more than just a bunch of good musicians, they are a greaseball, dancehall jazz band five, who relate like they’ve been playing together for years, like they grew up together in the Jersey flats, shared the same vision forever, and are just now getting around to laying it on the unsuspecting public. They seem to be having a ball, too. Especially Clarence Clemons on the big fat black sax—he’s too funky—much!

  “There used to be a little club around town in Asbury, a joint called the Upstage—three floors of solid black light. I would go down there quite a bit. This was four or five years ago. That’s where I met Vini [Lopez, the drummer] and that’s where I also met the organ player, Danny [Federici]. I met the bass player there too. Well, me and Vini’s been playing together about four years. Me and Danny played together about three years, then we used another cat for a while … and now Danny’s come back again to this band … all of them are local cats from Asbury. And Clarence … last year sometime … wandered into this club where I was playing, a place called the Student Prince, and he said, ‘Hey,
man, can I sit in?’ He sat in and we got something going … and that’s the band.

  “Now we’ve got tubas, accordions—the accordion used to be Danny’s main axe. They’ve each at one time played some ridiculous little thing they can still vaguely play. All the guy’s gotta do is be able to hit a note, put that note in the right place … and it’s all right! We’re going to add bagpipes pretty soon … and a bugle.

  “I love to play and the band is the greatest. They’re great guys and they push. They work as hard as I do. It’s the kind of scene where we’re all in the same boat. If it happens, it happens for everybody.”

  Bruce Springsteen’s intensity and humor onstage is contagious. You can bet he won’t be playing second billings for long. After leaving Max’s he starts on the winding uphill route of roadside dives, college gyms, and noisy after-dinner clubs. Watch for him soon in your town. After a return to Asbury Park and a tour of the East Coast, the Springsteen Five will be like a basketball team playing fourteen games in twelve days, covering Denver, L.A., San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. They will need more Wheaties to keep up.

  “Lately you know what I do when I’m not playing—I sleep, period. I go home and go to sleep, get up, and play again. Run to Baltimore to play, run back. Believe it or not, at one time I used to be a real ‘solitaire’ freak, but I haven’t been lately. This week I’ve got three days off, which is a really big vacation.”

  If Springsteen’s crew of managers, press agents, publicists, grooms, and groupies can keep his head and his band together, can disregard the frantic hype that’s bound to trail him, can manage to avoid falling prey to the nitpicker vultures who like to snipe at any moving target, they might bring him home again to the metropolitan area a winner. But it will be no easy road.

  “All I want to do is write some good songs. It’s my trade, you know? It’s how I get my satisfaction. The main problem is not to lose sight of what is actually going on. All the ads and the hype … anyone with any sense just ignores them. It’s just one of the unpleasant things you have to do so you can make a record. I’ve never been a door-knocker. I don’t try to push myself on anybody. I think it’s the wrong way to do anything. I just don’t believe in it. I mean, if people want what you’ve got, that’s good. I’m at a point where this is all very new to me.”