Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters

by Jeff Burger

  America is not the best place to make a run at becoming a superstar. James Taylor started in England, as did Jimi Hendrix. Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison did not survive it. Dylan did, in a way, but where is he now? And now Bruce Springsteen, who’s been compared to Dylan, the Band, Van Morrison, Leon Russell, Rod Stewart, El Topo, and Allen Ginsberg, throws his chips in the game. And the wheel goes around.

  WAS BOB DYLAN THE PREVIOUS BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN?

  STEVE TURNER | October 6, 1973, New Musical Express (UK)

  “I think I was the first British journalist to see him,” said London-based Steve Turner, who talked with Springsteen in Philadelphia in June 1973 for an article that appeared about four months later.

  While Springsteen had already spent years performing in clubs in New York City and New Jersey, this was still quite early in the game. Bruce was just twenty-three at the time of the interview, and his debut album, the Dylan-influenced Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., had been out for only six months. Sales had been unimpressive and while many reviews overflowed with praise, others mixed plaudits with putdowns. In Rolling Stone, for example, Lester Bangs called Springsteen “a bold new talent” but also described the singer’s vocals as “a disgruntled mushmouth sorta like Robbie Robertson on Quaaludes with Dylan barfing down the back of his neck” and implied that while the lyrics seemed clever, many of them “don’t even pretend to” make sense.

  Turner wasn’t too impressed, either. Prior to his meeting with Springsteen, he told me, he was in New York, where he saw the recently released film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which starred Dylan and featured his music. “I was disappointed that Dylan wasn’t doing what I thought he should be doing,” Turner said. “There hadn’t been a really good album from him since 1967 and I thought we’d lost him. A friend of mine, Mike O’Mahoney, was handling international publicity for CBS and he tried to sell me on the idea of Bruce Springsteen, who was apparently the ‘new Bob Dylan.’

  “I didn’t want a new one, I wanted the old one, and I have to admit that the songs on Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., irritated me because they seemed to self-consciously emulate Dylan’s technique of rubbing nouns together (‘ragamuffin drummers,’ etc.). You didn’t get a new Dylan, I reasoned, by copying the old one.

  “It was Mike [O’Mahoney] who took me down to Philadelphia to see Springsteen in action at the Spectrum,” Turner continued. “My clearest memory is not of the concert—where he supported Chicago and was not a big hit with its fans—but of this unassuming boy in the dressing room wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and his manager, Mike Appel, who seemed to do all the talking.”

  Perhaps partly for that reason, Turner didn’t elicit many quotes from Springsteen. But there’s enough here to sense the strength of the artist’s early ambition, not to mention the way he affected some early backers, such as manager Appel and Columbia’s John Hammond, who had signed him to the label. —Ed.

  “Randy Newman is great but he’s not touched. Joni Mitchell is great but she’s not touched. Bruce is touched … he’s a genius!” Manager Mike Appel is talking in the dressing rooms of the Spectrum stadium in Philadelphia. His artist, Bruce Springsteen, has just finished a forty-minute opening set and Chicago is tuning up in the room next door.

  “When I first came across Bruce, it was by accident,” he says, “but when I heard him play I heard this voice saying to me, ‘superstar.’ I couldn’t believe it. I’d never been that close to a superstar before.”

  Not wanting to miss the chance of being Albert Grossman for the seventies, Appel took acetates of Springsteen straight to Columbia Records in New York. There he played them to John Hammond, the man who signed up Bob Dylan and Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday and Tommy Dorsey and Woody Herman.

  Also, they were played to then-president Clive Davis. According to Appel, they needed to hear only one track before signing him up. [Other interviews suggest that Hammond decided to sign Springsteen after seeing him perform, not after hearing the acetates. —Ed.]

  Springsteen’s a hungry, scrawny-looking guy. There’s definitely something very Dylany about his whole being, about his curly hair and his scrub beard … and, I must say it, about his songs. It’s a comparison a lot of people are going to draw because of the connections with Hammond, the looks, and the highly influenced style of writing.

  By this time, the man himself must be regretting the resemblances because the surest way of killing a man these days is to liken him to the late Bob.

  Too many people have been primed to walk into those boots only to find they didn’t fit. After all, no one wants “another” of anything we once had, because we still have the original in our collections.

  The other fault with PBDs (Potential Bob Dylans) is that people choose them on looks and sound alone, thinking that’s what made BD into BD. It wasn’t. BD filled the psychological need of a generation. Where there isn’t a psychological need, there’ll be no BD or, indeed, no PBD.

  The Beatles too came at just the right time in history and filled an awaiting psychological vacuum. To think it was their music, or worse still their lyrics, that made them the phenomenon they were is to be totally naïve.

  We were the phenomenon … our need for them was the phenomenon … and they passed the audition to play seven years in the starring role of Our Psychological Need.

  Now the million and one intricacies that make up a moment in history have changed. It may never happen again as it did between ’63 and ’70. To expect another Bob Dylan or another Beatles is like expecting a reunion ten years after any event to be exactly the same as the event itself. No way. History itself would need to be reconstructed for such a thing to happen.

  Nevertheless, BD or no BD, Springsteen is a good ’un. His songs are crammed with words and multiple images. “He’s very garrulous,” agrees Appel. Onstage he’s powerful and confident. There’s a charisma there that doesn’t occur with many people.

  His allegiance to Dylan is evident in the songs. They’re mostly stories of a crazy dream-like quality. Where Dylan had peddlers, jokers, and thieves, Springsteen brings us queens, acrobats, and servants. Where Ginsberg gave us hydrogen jukeboxes and Dylan gave us magazine husbands, Springsteen has ragamuffin gunners and wolfman fairies.

  Compare his use of adjectives, too. Dylan used “mercury mouth,” “streetcar visions,” and “sheet-metal memory.” Springsteen comes up with “Cheshire smiles” and “barroom eyes.” Another notable likeness is in their use of internal rhymes.

  Some of Springsteen’s numbers almost come over as direct parody.

  Just for the record, other PBDs of the last couple of years include Kris Kristofferson, John Prine, and Loudon Wainwright III. Both Kristofferson and Wainwright are the property of Columbia Records … which recently lost the services of Bob Dylan. Now, I don’t want to start drawing conclusions but …

  Bruce Springsteen is twenty-three years old and comes out of New Jersey. He first started playing music at age nine under the influence of Elvis. At fourteen it really hit him. “It took over my whole life,” he remembers. “Everything from then on revolved around music. Everything.”

  Two years later, he was playing regularly at the Café Wha? in Greenwich Village. “I was always popular in my little area and I needed this gig badly.

  “I didn’t have anything else. I wanted to be as big as you could make it … Beatles, Rolling Stones.”

  For the next eight years, Springsteen played in bands. Steel Mill … Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom … and finally his very own ten-piece band, which he named after himself. After two years, the numbers began dwindling. Nine, seven, five, until it was Bruce Springsteen—solo artist.

  Then: “I just started writing lyrics, which I had never done before. I would just get a good riff, and as long as it wasn’t too obtuse I’d sing it.

  “So I started to go by myself and write these songs. Last winter, I wrote like a madman. Put it out. Had no money, nowhere to go, nothing to do. Didn’t know too many
people. It was cold and I wrote a lot … and I got to feeling guilty if I didn’t.”

  At this time, he met up with Appel, who in turn took him along to meet Columbia’s John Hammond. Appel is a fast talker and took it upon himself to sell Springsteen.

  Hammond listened and began to take a dislike to this salesman. In contrast, Springsteen just sat, very quiet, in the corner of the office.

  “Do you want to get your guitar out?” asked Hammond. Springsteen did. He began playing “Saint in the City.”

  “I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t believe it,” recalled Hammond.

  In Hammond’s opinion, Springsteen is far more developed now than Dylan was at the corresponding point in his career. He feels that Dylan had worked hard at creating a mystique even before he signed with Columbia but Springsteen is … just Springsteen.

  His first album for Columbia has been Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. Reviews have been ecstatic. It marks a strong contrast from the way John Prine was handled. In his case, it was the publicity handouts that had the ecstasy, in the hopes that they could set the press on fire.

  “In the tradition of Brando and Dean” was how they sold him.

  With Springsteen, Columbia is restraining itself and relying on understatement.

  Mike Appel believes totally in Springsteen. “I’ve sunk everything I’ve got into him,” he tells me. And if he doesn’t make it … ? Appel demonstrates by holding his nose and flapping around in an imaginary ocean.

  BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: SAY HELLO TO LAST YEAR’S GENIUS

  JEFF BURGER | March 14, 1974, Zoo World (US)

  By the time he talked with Turner, Springsteen had been maintaining a grueling concert schedule for several years. In 1973 alone, he gave well over two hundred shows (often two in one day). The pace accelerated further after the release that November of his landmark second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the EStreet Shuffle. It would be a stretch, however, to say that major success now seemed within reach.

  True, Springsteen had made progress, as he told disc jockey Ed Beauchamp in a talk that aired on Houston’s KLOL-FM on March 8, 1974. “On the first album,” he said, “I was living three flights up over this drugstore in downtown Asbury [Park, New Jersey]. I didn’t have a band, I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have any money. I was living on like a dollar a day. Some chick was helping me out. So the first album was all written in this room I had there, and that’s all I did because that’s all I had. That’s all there was to do, to live for. Now, it’s not like, ‘Can we get a salary and have a place to live?’ I don’t have to worry about rent as long as we play and have a band. See, I have releases now where before I didn’t have any releases.”

  On the other hand, Springsteen had witnessed lackluster crowd reactions when he’d performed for large audiences as a backup act to better-known artists and had consequently vowed to never again work in big arenas. (When he spoke with Beauchamp, he had just completed the first night of what would be a four-night, seven-show concert series at Houston’s three-hundred-seat Liberty Hall.) And though The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle garnered some highly laudatory reviews, the record wound up peaking at number fifty-nine on the Billboard charts—and not until the summer of 1975, a year and a half after its release, when Springsteen’s career finally kicked into high gear.

  I spoke with the singer two months before Beauchamp did, on January 15, 1974. At the time, he was working for about seventy-five dollars a week and could still walk down the street unrecognized. He spent much of our interview making good-natured but serious complaints about how little he was able to pay his band (whose members I referred to in my article as “five unknowns”). Then—when I mentioned that while I loved his second album but had yet to hear his first—he offered to mail me his copy because “I can’t afford a record player to play it on.” I wasn’t sure whether he was joking but told him to keep the LP, saying I was confident he’d be able to buy whatever he wanted before too long.

  I’ve been wrong about many things in my life, but I was right about this. Nineteen months after I talked with Springsteen, he released the last album Columbia had agreed to issue for him—his final swing of the bat at fame. He knocked the ball right out of the park with Born to Run, which famously landed him on the covers of simultaneously published issues of Time and Newsweek, went on to sell more than six million copies, and changed everything.

  Having heard his earlier music—and the determination in his voice when we talked in 1974—I wasn’t surprised. —Ed.

  Perhaps you know someone who, at a very early age, proclaimed his intention to become a doctor and, after vanishing into deep study for twenty years, emerged wearing a stethoscope. If so, you might be able to imagine the intensity of Bruce Springsteen’s lifelong obsession with music.

  “I always knew what I wanted to do and where I was going,” says the singer-songwriter from Asbury Park, New Jersey. “Anything other than music was always a dead end for me.”

  Now twenty-four, Bruce first picked up a guitar at age nine and has been playing, with only rare interruptions, ever since. The only “real” job he has ever had, as a gardener, ended quickly. He left behind an equally brief college career because “the times were weird, the students were weird, and the school was weird.” And because the army thought Bruce just as strange as he felt the college scene to be, he was exempted from two years in uniform.

  Sidestepping these irrelevancies with pleasure, Bruce continued to concentrate on his music. After performing in more local bands than he can now remember by name, he worked for a time as an acoustic soloist. And by early last year, he had assembled his present band and had put together a solid repertoire of original material.

  It was then that Mike Appel (who, with Jim Cretecos, manages Bruce and now produces his albums) brought him to Columbia Records. Upon hearing a few songs, Columbia’s John Hammond Sr. promptly handed a two-record contract to Bruce and his band. Hammond, who had signed Bob Dylan ten years before, reportedly said that Bruce was a lot further along musically than Dylan had been at the same stage of his career.

  On the strength of this praise, Columbia poured big money into promotion, but the advertising push partly backfired. Rolling Stone, for example, did a piece called “It’s Sign Up a Genius Month” and dismissed Bruce’s first album (Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.) with a string of sarcastic superlatives.

  Most reviewers, however, were genuinely enthusiastic. “One of the truly great singer-songwriter-performing talents our country has produced,” wrote a Record World columnist. “You know the kid is good when you wake up and you’re singing his songs,” commented Crawdaddy! editor Peter Knobler. “Never have I been more impressed with a debuting singer,” raved a writer for the L.A. Free Press, and Al Bianculli, in these pages, said simply, “’73 is Bruce Springsteen’s year.” Bruce, it certainly seemed, was well on his way.

  But a year later, he explains that he has not yet exactly taken the country by storm. “I ain’t makin’ that much money,” he says. “I’ve got some great musicians in my band and I’m payin’ them terrible money. I pay myself the same, but it’s terrible for me, too. I mean, we’re barely makin’ a livin’, barely scrapin’ by.”

  Though Bruce’s newly released second album may sell better, Greetings attracted only about twenty-three thousand buyers, a respectable yet not spectacular achievement for a debut LP. The Columbia contract has been extended, but only for a third album. And while the critical praise keeps coming, Bruce wishes he could sell records as easily as he elicits a reviewer’s acclaim.

  The second album indicates, at the very least, that he deserves a much wider audience. Written and arranged by Bruce, its highly emotional songs fuse vivid lyricism to poignant melodies. Incorporating touches of jazz, soul, and Latin music, this is basically get-up-and-dance rock and roll. When the record ends, you may find yourself wishing Bruce and his group could jump out of your stereo and do an encore.

  The five unknowns who comprise the backup are
among the most flexible and versatile rock musicians performing today. Perhaps because they’ve been working with Bruce for a long time, they are able to inject the music with a dose of their own ideas without ever straying from his intentions or detracting from the overall cohesion.

  While it is difficult to single out any one band member over the others, Clarence Clemons’s sax playing has to be considered a high point. Daubing the broad strokes of Bruce’s moody portraits, he underlines the reflective side of the singer’s style. And, when the tempo accelerates, Clemons punctuates the change with a burst of energy.

  Bruce’s own immense talent is omnipresent. Like Rod Stewart, Van Morrison, and Dylan, he has a limited vocal range, but his imagination and expressive ability seem almost boundless. His melodies are influenced by the work of many other musicians, most notably Van Morrison; yet, like all true originals, this composer absorbs what his predecessors have done and uses the gleanings to create music that can only be called his own.

  Lyrically, Bruce accomplishes more in one tune than many artists do in an entire album. From each of his songs, which are structured like stories, one or more well-defined characters emerge. “Incident on 57th Street,” for example, is a close-up look at Spanish Johnny, a “romantic young boy” who wavers between involvement with a girl named Jane and the hard life on “Easy Street.”

  Playing a “cool Romeo” to Jane’s “late Juliet,” he sits up alone and watches her while she “sleeps in sheets damp with sweat.” When she opens her eyes, he is dressing to leave and voices are heard beckoning through the window: “Hey Spanish Johnny, you want to make a little easy money tonight?”