Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters

by Jeff Burger

  And so it was to the Roxy in Hollywood that the Springsteen entourage came October 16 to 19 to debunk the hype, perjury, and associated theories, and it was with a great deal of noise and small regard for the agreed subtleties that CBS applied itself to the task. It began with a 50 percent stake in the opening-night house and bought in from there until your average man on the street needed air and ground-troop support to get into the place.

  By way of consolation, a roster of Hollywood’s brightest showstoppers turned up to lend their support … a lineup that by week’s end included Jack Nicholson, George Harrison, Jackson Browne, Neil Diamond, Jackie De Shannon (backstage introduction), Carole King (backstage introduction), Joni Mitchell (left early), Cher and Greg (twice), Tom Waits (hitched from his own gig ninety miles away), Dick Carpenter (“John, a Marguerita!”), Wolfman Jack (?), and Warren Beatty.

  First night, there was the usual preperformance walking to and fro, the conspicuous nonchalance, Hollywood hugging, shouting across tables, and explanations as to the root cause and nature of the Springsteen phenomena. And by the time Bruce actually walked out onstage, everyone was so relieved at not having to exhibit epic boredom anymore that the house lit up with a screaming and a wailing that must have scared him half to death.

  He heads straight for stage center, which is dark, empty, and almost eerie save for the screaming going on, leans his head and body against the mike stand and, just to further irritate those Dylan comparisons, whips out a harmonica for the opening of “Thunder Road.”

  He’s got on a beaten-up leather jacket, a pair of tight blue Levis. He’s small, he’s skinny, and his harp playing’s every bit as dumb as Dylan’s.

  The screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves

  Like a vision she dances across the porch …

  A prelude to a number about a woeful girl waiting for her King Kong to come along and make sense out of her dreaming, with Springsteen as the guy who says, “What the hell, things might not be so perfect around here but let’s jump in the old wagon anyway and take a ride along Thunder Road.”

  Hey, I know it’s late we can make it if we run …

  There’s just a piano pumping away and Springsteen’s knotty, out-of-tune voice … and dead still. Head bowed. Brando, in The Men, as his girl’s telling him she’ll love him forever even though his legs don’t work anymore. Actually, it’s all pretty embarrassing. And with folk through the house going “whoop, yeah … you sure can make a guitar sing, Bruce,” you feel kind of ominously out of sync.

  Then the band comes out for “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” also from Born to Run, and the lights flash on and Springsteen starts whipping and winding up his body, attempting to lend the appearance of weight to what on record is a fairly inconsequential moment. Cluttered, dense lyrics. A melody and arrangement that are a patchwork of some of the more dubious R&R mannerisms of the early sixties.

  “Spirit in the Night” is one of his few genuinely stirring melodies, even though it leans too heavily on Van Morrison. An early song, from Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., a period when Springsteen was caught up with the flash of the exploding metaphor … gypsy angels, mission men, and a preponderance of internal rhyme and lines that get left hanging.

  Crazy Janey, Wild Billy, and a bunch more drive out to Greasy Lake “about a mile down on the dark side of Route 88” where Janey’s fingers wind up in the author’s “cake.” The love scene is played out in the dark with Springsteen lying prone across a line of tables that reach out to the stage. Girls rub his back as he sings “Me and Crazy Jane was making love in the dirt singing our birthday songs.” Then the band and the spots light up, Springsteen jogs back to the stage, and the house goes wild with delight (for Janey and her lover that night).

  For the opening of the old Manfred Mann number, “Pretty Flamingo,” Springsteen delivers a rambling explanation-as-to-the-origins monologue that’s half-heard, half-grunt, and a pretty fine enactment of dumb bar-house literacy. The kind of punchy drool that Dean gloried in. Everyone gets to feel mean in the presence of this kind of talk.

  More sordid still is the way he frames the opening to “E Street Shuffle.” Here he tells the largely factual account of how he met up with saxman Clemons, who’d been playing with a local Asbury Park R&B band when a girlfriend told him he’d best go down to the Student Prince and look in on this kid Springsteen.

  The way Springsteen tells it, he and his guitarist Miami Steve were shuffling through the cold and foggy night when through the smoke they see a big man coming at them. They hide in a doorway and fall to their knees as the big man approaches.

  They’re scared and they’re cold and they’re getting ready to run when Clarence holds out a hand. Springsteen reaches out to meet it. They touch. And sparks fly out on E Street.

  The magic of Springsteen is right here … at the climax of this particular yarn. On the word “sparks,” the stage flashes red, Springsteen leaps to a standstill and the band slams in with the kind of precision entrance that occurs only when there’s an operating consensus. From now on the show’s alive, more refined … a state of affairs that very nearly extends to the music itself.

  “Kitty’s Back,” “Jungleland,” and “Rosalita” have that foggy West Side tilt to them, and although neither is a miracle of construction, there’s enough ongoing momentum—and in the case of “Kitty’s Back,” a climactic instrumental segment—to eclipse the dubious areas.

  The band, in fact, is surprisingly adept at locating Springsteen’s half-concealed intentions. Excellent solos are forthcoming in both “Rosalita” and “Kitty’s Back” … especially from pianist Roy Bittan … and only organist Danny Federici, whose tendency is to grip the high end of the board a lot longer than is attractive, is suspect here.

  Just one encore tonight … a high-drama mood piece with accordion and sometimes-whispered lyrics.

  “Sandy” is about Bruce, or someone a lot like Bruce, readying himself to quit the boardwalk life, and it gives Springsteen the chance to open up on the reckless inhabitants of that whole scene. The clairvoyants, the bikers, waitresses, someone called Madame Marie, each of them shuffling back and forth from nothing to not much more.

  Lyrically it’s one of his most interesting pieces, since it’s one of the few moments he chooses to lay bare the disillusionment he patently feels for all the shucking from pin-table to roadside diner to trashcan, which in most of his later works he’s inadvertently glorifying.

  “‘Born to Run,’” he says, “was about New York. I was there for months. I had this girl with me and she’d just come in from Texas and she wanted to go home again and she was going nuts and we were in this room and it just went on and on. I would come home and she would say, ‘Are you done? Is it over? Are you finished?’ And I said, ‘No, it ain’t over, it ain’t over.’ I’d come home practically in tears.”

  “And I was sort of into that whole thing of being nowhere. But knowing that there is something someplace. It’s got to be like right there. It’s got to be tight somewhere.”

  Born to Run had already been eight months in the making when Jon Landau (previous experience, [producing] MC5’s Back in the U.S.A. plus two Livingston Taylor albums) moved in on the job. With Landau around, things continued to move at a deathly doze, although the further four and a half months taken to complete the package was, by contrast, an exhibition of fire and lightning.

  Landau attributes the delays to Springsteen’s fetish for detail: “He’d spend hours,” he says, “on one line. He’d say, ‘Hang on guys, I wanna check a line,’ and four hours later he’d be sitting there trying to make the most minute changes in one verse.”

  The pair had met in April ’74 in a Boston club called Charlie’s [Place, in the suburb of Cambridge], where the Springsteen band were playing. In the club window was a blowup of a review Landau had just written for the local Real Paper—an A-minus piece that dealt with Springsteen’s “many imperfections” as well as his considerable potential for world domination.

&
nbsp; It was a cold night, Landau remembers, and he found Springsteen in the back garden in a T-shirt, jumping up and down as he read the review.

  Springsteen told him he’d read better but the piece was OK, and then Landau introduced himself.

  The show he saw that night he describes as “astounding,” although no more than “a rough draft” of what takes place these days. The pair kept in touch, and a month later Landau went into print with that high-voltage review that Columbia subsequently spent fifty thousand dollars promoting … the “I have seen rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen” job.

  Not that CBS didn’t require an amount of cattle prodding before lining up behind the Springsteen-Landau combination. Factionalism within the company was rife … due partly to the flamboyance of Appel and the intractable nature of his client and also because Springsteen was a prodigy of “disgraced” chief executive Clive Davis.

  There were even reports of an alleged plot where the Springsteen myth would be hatched solely to irritate Bob Dylan, who’d recently left CBS for a two-record deal with David Geffen’s Asylum company.

  Appel himself goes more than halfway to conceding that such a plan might well have existed.

  “When you’re involved in big-time record company management,” he says, “there are power plays. There’s how do you bring a Bob Dylan into line, how do you bring his lawyer into line?

  “His lawyer comes in and asks for the world … asks for retroactive royalties on Bob Dylan’s albums. Asking outrageous sums of money. All kinds of deals. All kinds of big spending. And then when the negotiations fail, Clive Davis had left the record company and the whole world was looking at Columbia Records and everyone was taking potshots at them. They were very nervous. Very uptight at this particular time, trying to prove themselves. Naturally they might have said, you know, in the heat of the moment, ‘Screw Bob Dylan, we’re going to take Bruce Springsteen and use him and show that guy just where it’s at.’ However, that wasn’t to be the case because it took us a long time to get our album together and Blood on the Tracks and all that had come out ahead of us. And they did manage to get Bob back.”

  A suitably ironic climax to this particular episode was the request made through CBS by Time magazine for an interview with Bob Dylan on the subject of Bruce Springsteen. The request was rejected.

  Springsteen is bewildered rather than flattered by the machinations on his behalf … the hoops he has to go through for the front pages.

  “They made the mistake,” he says. “They came out with the big hype. I mean, how can they expect people to swallow something like that [CBS’s early ads comparing him with Dylan]? And it blows my mind how they can underestimate people so much. All the time, man, it’s like … trying to find some room, man. Gimme some damn room. Give me a break. I was trying to tell these guys at the record company, ‘Wait a second, you guys. Are you trying to kill me?’ It was like a suicide attempt on their part. It was like somebody didn’t want to make no money.

  “I was in this big shadow, man, right from the start … and I’m just getting over this Dylan thing: ‘Oh thank God that seems to be fading away.’ And I’m sitting home thinking, ‘Thank God people seem to be letting that lie,’ and—phwooooeee—‘I have seen …’ No, it can’t be.

  “So immediately I call up the company and I say, ‘Get that quote out.’ And it was like Landau’s article. And it was really a nice piece and it meant a lot to me, but it was like they took it all out of context and blew it up, and who’s gonna swallow that? Who’s gonna believe that? It’s going to piss people off, man. It pisses me off. When I read it, I want to strangle the guy who put that thing in there. It’s like you want to kill these guys for doin’ stuff like that.

  “They sneak it in on you. They sneak it in and they don’t tell you nutin’. It’s like ‘shotgun murderer chops off eight arms.’ It’s that kind of tactic, you know. It’s that kind of tactic and they pull it for themselves and they pull it for me too …

  “It’s a stupid thing. Ignore it, you know. Ignore the whole thing because it don’t make any sense. So like I’m always ten points down ’cause not only have you got to play but you got to blow this bullshit out of people’s minds first.”

  “It was so beautiful. I felt James Dean was back…. When I saw James Dean for the first time I fell on the floor. When I saw Bob Dylan for the first time I fell on the floor. When I saw Bruce Springsteen for the first time I fell on the floor.” —Jackie De Shannon over a cup of morning coffee.

  “All I do, I write down my impressions of stuff and what I see, you know. But if you’re looking for something to look to … if you’re into the band it’s like … I don’t know. I can’t really see myself like that.”

  Appel has a more adroit interpretation of the hype-versus-legitimacy dialectic and it goes like this: “I just say to myself, ‘Listen fellows [of the press], your vanities may have been up, your ego might have been up, but let’s stop the bullshit. The kid’s really good. He’s really different. If you’ve any kind of talent you’ll recognize him. If you don’t, you’ll be run over. It’s like a steamroller. We’ll win in the end. You’ve got no chance against us. You’ve got no chance because we’re right. We’re good.’”

  Appel used to write commercial jingles. He was also in the marine reserves, and if he comes on a little like Ed Sullivan meets Joseph Goebbels that’s roughly the way Springsteen sees it, too.

  “It’s like you can’t lay an attitude on people. It’s like bullshit. It’s like a jive thing. It’s a terrible thing. You can’t come on like you’re some big deal, you know. I ain’t into coming on like that because it’s a basic thing that’s going on. It’s a simple thing. It’s a band, you know. It’s a rock-and-roll band and you just sing and write songs.”

  Appel got to meet Springsteen through an early mutual accomplice called Tinker. Tinker started out building drag racers in California, moved to Nassau where he helped launch astronauts into space, and wound up manufacturing surfboards in New Jersey. Springsteen met him in a bar. He was eighteen years old and Tinker said he could get him a job as a guitar player with Janis Joplin’s band.

  “I ended up living with him in a surfboard factory for about a year and a half. It was dynamite up there.”

  The first time Springsteen stepped outside the Jersey state line was with Tinker. Everyone in the band saved up a hundred dollars and drove out to California in a station wagon and a Chevy truck. Springsteen flipped from coast to coast during the next four years before realizing the best band he could ever have was waiting for him in New Jersey.

  In 1970 or ’71—he doesn’t remember—Tinker took him to New York to meet with Appel, and just like in a B-movie plot Appel is knocked out by the curly-haired kid with the wooden guitar and within months has him eyeballing with the big record company talent scout.

  Springsteen at the time is reading Anthony Scaduto’s book on Dylan and is fired up over the scene where Dylan launches himself into John Hammond’s office, plays a couple of tunes, and gets signed in a big hurry. So Springsteen and Appel try their hand and it works a second time.

  And that brings us through two low-impact albums followed by a regeneration of Columbia’s corporate faith back to the Roxy in Hollywood, where by week’s end Springsteen is being exalted to a degree that puts you in mind of Appel’s steamroller doctrine. By now, even Walter Yetnikoff, president of the Columbia Records Group, is up on his chair, stirred, possibly, by the avalanche of dollars that is mounting in his imagination.

  The kids, too—and by now it’s the punter class—have taken on a demeanor that bears more than a passing resemblance to the early Beatle years, except these kids are older and so is Springsteen (twenty-six).

  But the years are no insulation against the Springsteen wall of faith as codified by Appel, Landau, and Philbin and expressed, if haltingly by now, by Brucesteen himself.

  Time and Newsweek believed, and the punters believe because anything can be believed that is supported
by the indomitable will of unyielding faith as manifest by the aforementioned.

  Springsteen could eat a camel whole, so long as he believed such a project wasn’t outside his range, so long as the camel believed and the camel trader believed … or a king’s-new-clothes situation where no one notices the king’s fat, naked legs until a kid says, “Hey, where’s his trousers?” and all that faith drains away in a second and a half.

  Given that sooner or later someone’s going to speak up, the deciding factor remains whether or not Springsteen actually has anything to cover his legs—that something being artistic substance—and I’ll offer the opinion that Springsteen is indeed naked. That he’s no more than a front man for another good rock-and-roll band, composer of R&B-slanted material that tips a little in advance of the mean average. The supposed profoundly cerebral inclinations are also misleading because Springsteen has neither the originality nor the intentions—political or otherwise—of a Dylan, which leaves him with a sack full of punk, loner mannerisms that he’s already tiring of … a situation that probably caused the making of Born to Run to be such a vexed and anxious twelve and a half months.

  Springsteen has a will and a strong dramatic style and the air of the all-American loner who the guys in the gang ask of “Where ya goin’, Brucie?” and Springsteen grunts and goes off to the pier or to meet his girl whom he loves with a loyal and refined urgency as opposed to, say, Jagger, who could wake up anyplace and not remember how. And he exudes that dumb animal wisdom that made Brando and Dean such attractive propositions, even though Springsteen tries to upset the image with literary pretentions.

  Appel, Landau, and Philbin think they have to protect and talk up their man—otherwise he dies—whereas Springsteen says he needs protecting from Landau, Appel, Philbin, and others of their mentality.

  So already the wall of faith is beginning to rupture, and in six months Springsteen will be either musically wiped out or, more likely, another averagely regarded also-ran shouldering the resentment of punters and business types who by now see themselves as being suckered and duped.