Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters

by Jeff Burger

  PW: The challenge comes when you get more popular, which is inevitable.

  BS: But there’s no way. I’m always disappointed in acts that go out and play those places. I don’t know how the band can go out and play like that. I don’t know how Joni Mitchell can do it. You can’t. You can’t effectively do it.

  PW: But then there’s the Who. They announce they’re playing Madison Square Garden and it sells out in an hour. So I’d guess they’d have to book a week, a whole week.

  BS: You gotta do that. And if you get that big, you gotta realize that some people who want to see you ain’t gonna see you. I’m not in that position and I don’t know if I’ll ever be in that position. All I know is that those big coliseums ain’t where it’s supposed to be. There’s always something else going on all over the room. You go to the back row, you can’t see the stage, talk about what’s on it. You see a blot of light. You better bring your binocs.

  PW: I guess people go for the event.

  BS: What happens is you go to those places and it turns into something else that it ain’t. It becomes an event. It’s hard to play. That’s where everybody is playing, though. I don’t know how they do it. I don’t know what people expect you to do in a place like that. Especially our band—it would be impossible to reach out there the way we try to do. Forget it!

  PW: Listen, I got the word from somebody in New York that you’re a real sex star now.

  BS: Who?

  PW: Well, a girl who works at the newspaper. She’s twenty-six. I guess twenty-six-year-old women haven’t found anything for years that they could get off on.

  BS: That’s interesting.

  PW: And like, pow, they went to your show at the Bottom Line and Schaffer and it’s natural because it’s all part of the thing. It was a big thrill for them.

  BS: Well, we do some pretty heavy things onstage sometimes. There’s lots of different currents, lots of different types of energy going on in each song, and that current is very strong. But that’s interesting.

  PW: I tried to get her to describe why. I made notes as she was talking over the phone. She said it’s like “he knows that you know that he knows what he’s doing.” She said certain circles are really aware of what a joke it is because it’s done really totally seriously. But she also says she’ll sit there and laugh her ass off.

  BS: There’s so many different conflicts and tensions going on in each tune. It can affect people in totally different ways. That’s what a lot of the act is based on—it’s setting up certain conflicts and tensions. We’re going for the moment and then, there’ll be no … release.

  PW: And you’ll say, “We’ll be back next time.”

  BS: Really. And that’s the way this life is. Next, next, next, next. No matter how heavy one thing hits you, no matter how intense any experience is, there’s always, like, next. And that’s the way some things we do are structured, for there never to be any resolve, for there never to be a way out, or an answer, or a way in, anything! It’s like a constant motion in a circle.

  PW: And the two-hour sets are a manifestation of that, needing room to build?

  BS: That’s a lot. Right now that’s the utmost amount we could ever do. It could work better than it’s been. It’s just a question of finding the right spot for everything, where things make more sense than other things, what’s just the right place. When we were playing the Bottom Line we’d do an hour and a half. And those were long. We’d do an oldie, we’d do “Saint in the City,” we’d do “Jungleland,” we’d do “Kitty’s Back,” we’d do “New York City,” we’d do “Rosalita” sometimes. We’d do like ten things. Now we’re doing like … one … two … we’re doing “Lost in the Flood,” we haven’t been doing that … we’re doing that new song “She’s the One” and a few other things. We’re going about two hours. I think the longest we did was Avery Fisher, which was about two-twenty.

  PW: Most acts will do that with an intermission.

  BS: An intermission might be a smart idea just because it will set up a reference point where people can collect their thoughts. At clubs, I never expect people to order alcohol because they’re too tired. I know I’m pooped; I figure they’re dead. There’s outlets for a lot of different things in our shows, a lot of different emotions. It runs the gamut, from violence to anything. It runs through a lot of different outlets. We try to make people as close to it as they want to get.

  PW: There are a couple of songs on the first album, “Growin’ Up” and “For You,” that are more personal.

  BS: Well, we were doing “For You” for a while with the new band a few weeks ago, but there’s just no time. You gotta realize there’s just no time.

  PW: Also, I feel the new songs have been more towards archetypes and away from …

  BS: Yeah, to a degree. I think what happened is I’m using a slightly different language to express the same thing. The songs haven’t gotten any less personal—probably just more and more.

  PW: They’re not as first-personal. On those songs on the first record, you identified with the anger.

  BS: I find that if it gets too personal, people get too high. So you’ve got to use this second person. I tend to be more direct. I’m just getting down there, you know. I think it gets harder to do if you want to continue reaching out there, if you don’t want to fall back and play it safe.

  PW: I like “Jungleland” a lot.

  BS: That’s been coming along. There’s a verse that’s not really finished. It goes … there’s a chorus that goes … “The street’s alive with tough kid jets in nova light machines.”

  PW: Tough kids in nova light machines?

  BS: “Boys flash guitars like bayonets, and rip holes in their jeans. The hungry and the hunted explode into rock-and-roll bands that face off against each other in the street, down in jungleland.”

  Then the band plays. And what goes next … uh … I think the next part is the slow part. It goes “beneath the city, two hearts beat, soul engines warm and tender, in a bedroom locked, silent whispers soft refusal and then surrender. In the tunnel machine, the rat chases his dreams on a forever lasting night. Till the barefoot girl brings him to bed, shakes her head and with a sigh turns out the light.”

  PW: Tunnel machines?

  BS: Yeah. [Sings/talks:] “Outside the street’s on fire in a real death waltz, between what’s flesh and what’s fantasy. The poets down here don’t write nothing at all, they just sit back and let it be. In the quick of the night, they reach for their moment and try to make an honest stand. But they wind up wounded and not even dead. Tonight in jungleland.” Those are some of the words. There’s a new verse and some that’s not done, but that’s the slow part.

  PW: “In the quick of the night, they reach for their moment.”

  BS: Yeah, that’s it.

  PW: “Jungleland.” That makes a nice title. It’s a nice word.

  BS: Yeah, it resolves.

  PW: You could call the whole album that because it fits all your songs.

  BS: I thought of that. I’m thinking of titles for the next album. That was my initial thought. That’s one of them.

  PW: It fits. It makes sense.

  BS: Yeah, but I usually change them. I work a lot on the lyrics before we record a song. I get self-conscious about them. So I change them. It’s the same with a lot of the old songs. I notice them, so even on some of the old songs I add new bits. There’s a bit on “E Street” and that one on “New York City.” It’s done differently.

  PW: And I like the violin.

  BS: Yeah, it’s great.

  PW: Well, I better call a taxi.

  BS: Yeah, what time is it?

  PART II

  “LIGHT OF DAY”

  Born to Run, Darkness, and The River turn Springsteen into a household name.

  “I knew why I started and I knew when it was slipping away and I got scared by it.” —BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, 1978

  BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND THE WALL OF FAITH

  ANDREW TYLER | Nove
mber 15, 1975, New Musical Express (UK)

  In the May 1974 Jon Landau review that Jerry Gilbert cited in his piece for Zigzag, the critic famously proclaimed, “I saw rock and roll’s future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” Then in 1975, the future became the present with a powerful one-two punch: First, Springsteen and the E Street band drew rave reviews for a five-night stand (August 13–17) at New York’s Bottom Line, where the audience included a who’s who of influential critics and industry insiders. Then, on August 25, Columbia released Born to Run.

  The importance of this album cannot be overstated. The effusive music—which featured an updated version of producer Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound—benefited from Clarence Clemons’s wailing sax, potent guitar work, and Springsteen’s intense vocals.

  As for the lyrics, “The characters on Born to Run were less eccentric and less local than [the ones] on Greetings and The Wild, the Innocent,” observed the singer in his 1998 book Songs. “They could have been anybody and everybody. When the screen door slams on ‘Thunder Road,’ you’re not necessarily on the Jersey Shore anymore. You could be anywhere in America. These were the beginnings of the characters whose lives I would trace in my work for the next two decades…. It was the album where I left behind my adolescent definitions of love and freedom. Born to Run was the dividing line.”

  While Springsteen waved good-bye to adolescent ideas on the album, its success allowed him to bid farewell to obscurity—and to poverty. The title cut became his first major hit, and the album produced a huge stack of laudatory reviews. As noted earlier, it also landed him on the covers of Time and Newsweek on the same day, October 27.

  Lest you think every critic was on his knees paying homage to Springsteen, however, witness this contrarian piece from Andrew Tyler. The British journalist, who met with the artist shortly before the Time and Newsweek blitz, proclaimed that the singer was “no more than a front man for another good rock and roll band” who “has neither the originality or the intentions … of a Dylan.” He concluded that, “in six months, Springsteen will be either musically wiped out, or more likely, another averagely regarded also-ran.”

  Already the backlash had begun. —Ed.

  Bruce Springsteen says he just writes down his impressions of stuff whereas here in Hollywood, California, there are people in from New York who believe otherwise. They tell you things like “Bruce is purity.” Bruce cuts through grime in half the time. Bruce is what America has been praying for, ever since Dylan fell off his motorbike and Brando got too fat to be in the motorcade anymore.

  And it gets harder to decide what’s best to believe because the people in from New York talk a lot louder than is natural and so do outsiders with a contrary understanding of the situation, coming on like a life depended on putting down the “I have seen mankind’s future and it’s a short, skinny guy in a brown leather jacket” theory.

  Bruce feels more than a little sick when he hears this kind of talk. His tendency, when it occurs, is to retire into a slow, agonized idiot-drawl, the relevance of which is not all that easily recognizable. But that’s to his credit. Dylan, after all, never once said, “Sure, I know the environment. The complexities of the human mind and things of that nature.” And neither did James Dean or Brando when he was thin. It was only when Brando started whanging off in those kind of directions that his credibility was suddenly and irrevocably reduced.

  No. The only way to make a legitimate claim to American folk-hero status is to reject the candidacy as preposterous. Then clam up and spit a mysterious spit. And that’s precisely what Bruce Springsteen from Freehold, New Jersey, is doing. Or you assume that’s what he’s doing.

  One thing’s for certain, though, and that’s the fundamental lack of modesty within the Springsteen camp on the subject of the attributes and infinite potential of their boy.

  Jon Landau, the celebrated American rock critic who quit worrying over an intestinal disorder to coproduce Springsteen’s Born to Run album, says that in the “rock area” Springsteen’s not only a “great artist” but also happens to be able to do “more things better than anyone else I’ve seen.” Also, he’s the “best performer in the history of rock and roll” with the possible exception of Elvis P., whom Landau nominates mainly for “sentimental” reasons.

  Mike Appel offers scant contrast when he makes claims to being manager of “the greatest artist in the world today, that’s all,” a sentiment he punctuates by attacking the palm of his left hand with his right fist.

  Appel is a curiosity even among rock-and-roll managers. John Hammond, the Columbia talent scout who signed Springsteen, describes him as “offensive as any man I’ve ever met,” a reference, no doubt, to Appel’s boundless and sometimes absurd urges for conflict. Mostly it’s the press that get to feel Appel’s pointed end, and this, it turns out, is no accident.

  “I like to do things with integrity,” he notes, “and since the media is not set up for integrity but for their own ends, my idea of how things should be done and their idea of how things should be done clash. So what happens is I’m the guy they focus all their hate on.”

  Appel and Landau’s extremities are matched by virtually everyone else within the Springsteen inner circle. Peter Philbin, Columbia’s New York–based international press officer, can talk up his client with a heat approaching delirium and at the recent Springsteen concerts at Hollywood’s Roxy was not so much the impassioned go-between as one more nut on a chair howling his brains inside out.

  Even within his band, there’s an awestruck, almost religious, regard for the man they call the Boss. Clarence Clemons, the thirty-three-year-old sax man, sees his meeting with Springsteen as being no less than divinely wrought.

  “Bruce is the greatest person I’ve ever met,” he says. “He’s the strongest person I’ve ever met. When I first met him it was like in the Bible where this guy met this guy and he says, ‘Lay down your thing and follow me,’ and that’s exactly the way I felt, man. But I didn’t. And I punish myself. And I guess God punished me ’cause I got in this car accident and I nearly got killed and shit. Anyway, he came back [from California where he’d been visiting his parents] and we got together and here we are.”

  No less extraordinary has been the contribution of Time and Newsweek to the ballooning Springsteen legend and the apparent ease with which Appel was able to manipulate these two indefatigable giants.

  Time had previously run a piece on Springsteen in its April 1974 issue. Then a number of weeks ago, Newsweek made approaches of its own and Time, catching wind of the freshening scent, came back for second helpings.

  (The renewed interest had probably been spurred on by Springsteen’s dates in August at New York’s Bottom Line club, out of which came the most excessive Bruce-Is-Easily-the-Greatest-Person-on-the-Planet coverage to date.) This time, Appel explains, the rules were substantially altered. The game now was, “You give me a cover. I give you an interview.”

  “And they have to dislike you for it,” he says. “They say, ‘We’re New Musical Express,’ ‘We’re Melody Maker,’ ‘We’re Newsweek,’ ‘We’re Time magazine,’ and ‘Who the hell are you to tell us it has to be a cover story?’ But I say to you, ‘I’m giving you the most coveted thing I can give you. I’m giving you an interview with Bruce Springsteen. There’s nothing more I can give you.’”

  The indefatigable two returned and the net result was that double-cover splash on October 27 (Appel’s birthday), the first for an entertainer since Liza Minelli’s Cabaret days.

  Both articles were strangely impartial considering the prominence they attached to their subject. Lots of biographical data input, a smattering of the dourest kind of rhapsodizing and—in Newsweek’s case—a few microscopic insinuations that Springsteen might, after all, be the gravest kind of record business hypola, which, by the laws of media cause and effect, would render themselves and Time the victims.

  A few years back, the pair of them would have hung majestically to one side until the Springsteen legend
knocked them down. Then they’d have performed the gesture of the Cover Story.

  These days, even Time and Newsweek are fearful of missing out on the very next American sensation, even if it means lining up at the wrong theatre before the box office opens.

  “It’s crazy,” says Springsteen. “It doesn’t make too much sense, and I don’t attach too much distinction to being on the cover. It’s a magazine. It goes all ’round the world but really … you know.”

  We’re in a vacant room in the Sunset Marquis, Hollywood. Springsteen’s eating a bowl of Rice Krispies. Already he’s got on his brown leather jacket and he looks as if he hasn’t slept in maybe four weeks.

  “It doesn’t have that much to do with what I’m doing,” he says. “I don’t think so. The main reason I went through with it … you see, one of the things I did want, I wanted ‘Born to Run’ to be a hit single. Not for the bucks but because I really believed in the song a whole lot and I just wanted to hear it on the radio, you know. On AM. Across the country. For me, that’s where a song should be.

  “And they said, ‘Well, if you get your picture on Time or sumpin’, program directors may think twice before they drop it or throw it out. So the only physical reason I was on that thing was for that reason specifically, you know. Otherwise, man, I’ll probably regret it, you know.”

  Rolling Stone played an altogether cooler game. Still up in the air and blowing off over their Patty Hearst exclusives, their preference was to regard Springsteen as another of those East Coast phenomena, the kind that blows in and out with the frequency of the Atlantic tide.

  And Playboy … Appel also tried to hustle a Playboy cover but was told that the Big Bunny would rather take it in the eye than set that kind of precedent.