Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters

by Jeff Burger

  He promoted this album with some of his longest and most energized concerts to date; I’d previously been impressed by the energy he’d displayed during a three-hour 1978 gig at New York’s Madison Square Garden, but when I saw him in Tempe, Arizona, on November 5, 1980, he punched the air and launched into “Born to Run” shortly after 8 PM and didn’t put down his guitar until 1 AM. Even then, he appeared to have more energy left than most of the people in the audience, who looked thrilled but exhausted after nearly five hours of standing, clapping, screaming, and singing along.

  About a month before that Arizona concert—and a few days prior to the release of The River—Springsteen sat for an extensive interview with Creem editor Dave DiMartino. The conversation, which took place after a show at Detroit’s Cobo Hall on October 9, 1980, covered the new album, the singer’s past and future, and more. —Ed.

  All things good come to he who waits; he who hesitates is lost. For every stupid cliché, there’s another one out there equally stupid that means the opposite, a fact of life that nobody forgets as they grow older, and a fact that nobody out there should ever want to forget.

  And so it is with Bruce Springsteen, who either waited or hesitated, according to who you talk to, and whose long-awaited “comeback” means more to more people now than it ever did before. His comeback, of course, is The River, two discs of working-class angst and fury no doubt already memorized in college dormitories and better homes throughout the country. “The Boss” returns, the legions chant, and—this time, at least—they’re right. Because Bruce Springsteen has returned: He’s returned to doing what he likes best (playing) for those he likes best (his fans) with those he likes best (his band). And the fact that it’s taken him so long to do it is, well, too bad. Because it’s been worth it.

  You could write a book about Bruce Springsteen. Face it, somebody already has. Springsteen’s long and glorious career has been huffed about ad nauseam in Creem, Rolling Stone, Time and Newsweek, radio specials, No Nukes reviews, Heroes of Rock and Roll TV specials, and places even your grandmother would notice if she really looked. And the fact that he’s met such enthusiastic reception everywhere has probably become a bigger albatross around his neck than any quickie “rock and roll future” quote could ever be, mainly because—as far as being set up goes—he couldn’t be in worse shape. It’s common knowledge: Set ’em up and knock ’em down. The reason Bowie’s tune “‘Heroes’” has those quotation marks around its title says it all: There are no more heroes. Because nobody wants them.

  Yet here’s Bruce Springsteen, hero. Waiting to be knocked down. And he probably will be—critically speaking, it’s too much of a temptation not to knock Springsteen at this point, with hordes of “Broooocee!!”-chanting fans growing larger by the minute, a two-year wait between albums (this time without legal hassles), and a gnawing feeling that this James Deanish last-angry-man stance is beginning to reek of political conservatism and other things you’ll probably be reading about elsewhere. And of course all this is bullshit.

  “Bruce Springsteen” is a myth; Bruce Springsteen isn’t. “Bruce Springsteen” is responsible for the “rock classic” (it wasn’t) Born to Run; Bruce Springsteen put out a promising debut album, one flawed great one (The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle), and one all-out classic, Darkness on the Edge of Town. Ironically, Born to Run got the reception its predecessor deserved, though of all Springsteen’s output, it now sounds the most forced, not quite ringing true these few years later. Filled with West Side Story pathos (“Meeting Across the River,” the worst song of the bunch), the album already sounds dated in a way E Street Shuffle never will; only “Thunder Road” and “Born to Run” escape the trap, remaining classics on the level of, say, “Rosalita” or others on E Street.

  What made Darkness so great, ultimately, was the sheer durability of its sentiment. The emotions dealt with on that set—loss, pain, and despair—have always been the most durable, especially when they’re conveyed as well and as meaningfully as Springsteen surprisingly managed. It’s what separates, for instance, the Jackson Browne who wrote “Song for Adam” from the Jackson Browne who currently chirps about a “Disco Apocalypse,” or Van Morrison’s “Slim (Slow) Slider” from most everything he’s done since. Springsteen went into the studios with Born to Run’s cheering fans patting him on the back and came out telling them that he had stuff running ‘round his head that he just couldn’t live down. And they loved it. But they would’ve loved Born to Run Part Two even more.

  And you know the story after that. Two years later, here’s Bruce Springsteen in Detroit again, this time touring to promote The River, which, on this Thursday night, won’t even be in the stores until the following Monday. It’s very early into what promises to be the longest tour yet: almost a full year of being on the road, time enough for the unfamiliar songs the Detroit fans hear to become old favorites by the time Their Hero returns. Time enough for a lot of things to happen.

  And it wouldn’t be a Bruce Springsteen concert if it weren’t an endurance test. As usual, though, it’s Springsteen and his band who’ll have to endure—this time almost four hours, with a brief intermission for the band while the audience in Cobo Hall refuels on beer and more. Their Springsteen concert is an “event” in the way concerts by the Stones, the Who, and even Led Zeppelin are: instant sellouts, scalpers hawking tickets outside, and smug looks on those inside who’ll be telling friends tomorrow what they missed.

  Wisely, the band begins with “Thunder Road.” The audience stands, sings along, chants “Broooocee!” at the song’s end, and, of course, loves it all. Old favorites continue; Springsteen knows the audience needs reassurance before he wheels out the new stuff that no one in Detroit’s ever heard before. When he finally does, though, it makes no difference; still “Broooce!” The audience keeps screaming till four hours later, when the final score is “Quarter to Three” and Springsteen struts offstage, ready for tomorrow night’s encore in Chicago. Ten more months or so and it’ll finally be all over.

  Backstage, it’s the usual. Local CBS man Mark Westcott is playing traffic cop, directing the flow of concert hangers-on, industry people, and local radio celebs who’ve come back to “meet the Boss” and are wearing appropriate passes visibly on their person. And the fact that Springsteen is such a real-and-true Good Guy makes things even more problematic: He’d never dream of not facing his public, be it radio bigwigs or the little guys, cold and waiting outside at the stage door. Unspoken, but not unfelt, is the sentiment that if Bruce Springsteen ever dies it will be of terminal niceness, “He Was a Nice Guy” his perfect tombstone epitaph.

  When we finally reach the inner sanctum, Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau greets us. He smiles and says, “No more than a half hour, OK? Please?” making it obvious that, indeed, if Springsteen’s niceness weren’t enough, the guy also likes to talk, which in these days of Johns Lennon and Lydon [of the Sex Pistols] is no small concern. Inside the dressing room, CBS man Westcott is finishing up presenting the radio royalty to Springsteen, and the man who looked ten feet tall and heroic onstage now looks merely short, tired, and diplomatic. “Nice to meet you all,” he says, and he obviously means it.

  Eventually, Westcott and crew leave, and the E Street Band is brought in for a series of quick Creem photos. “No point in keepin’ these guys up,” Springsteen says, and it’s a quick reminder that the interview to come will appropriately take place at quarter to three in the morning. Some things, I guess, you just can’t escape.

  As the band cruises out, Springsteen shuffles over to a nearby couch, the room quickly empties, and the tape recorder is turned on. A final Springsteen higher-up enters the dressing room, asks “Hey Boss, you want a soda or somethin’?” and soon leaves.

  Thus I can’t help but ask immediately: “You mean they all call you ‘Boss’?” and Springsteen cracks up.

  “Well, the thing I have with this ‘Boss’ is funny because it came from people like that, who work around you. And the
n, somebody started to do it on the radio. I hate being called ‘Boss’ [laughs]. I just do. Always did from the beginning. I hate bosses. I hate being called the Boss. It just started from all the people around me, then by somebody on the radio and once that happens, everybody said, ‘Hey Boss,’ and I’d say, ‘No. Bruce. Bruce.’”

  We laugh again and sit back, and I regale the man who hates being called “the Boss” with a story Bob Seger told Creem earlier this year. We’d asked Seger what the major delay had been with getting the album to “feel right.” He’d told us he’d been watching Springsteen record The River. “You should see Springsteen,” he told us. “He’s goin’ through the same movie right now. He’s pullin’ his hair out …”

  “Yeah,” Springsteen says with a laugh. “Right. Well, from the beginning I had an idea of what I felt the record should be. And I’m not interested in going in the studio and …” He pauses, considering. “I don’t want to just take up space on the shelf, you know? Or worry that if you don’t have something out every six months, or even a year, that people are going to forget about you. I was never interested in approaching it that way. I’ve never been, from the beginning. I just have a feeling about the best I can do at a particular time, you know? And that’s what I wanted to do. And I don’t come out [with a record] until I feel that that’s what I’ve done. Because there’s so many records coming out, there’s so much stuff on the shelves. Why put something out that you don’t feel is what it should be?

  “And I don’t believe in tomorrows, that ‘Oh, I’ll put the other half out six months from now.’ You may be dead, you just don’t know. You make your records like it’s the last record you’ll ever make. You go out and play at night. I don’t think, “If I don’t play good tonight, at least I played good last night.” It’s like there’s no tomorrows or yesterdays. There’s only right now.”

  Heavy stuff, and more ammunition for critics who think Springsteen’s approaching death via terminal romanticism—but the truth is the man says it and means it, for which he certainly can’t be faulted. Sincerity doesn’t play often at Cobo Hall and all that.

  “Nobody’s expectations are higher than your own. You do what you can do and that’s the way it stands,” Springsteen says. “People have their expectations, and I try to live up to a certain thing I feel myself. And I know I have strict ideals about the way we do things, the way the band does things. So outside forces play a secondary role. You know, people’s expectations are gonna be what they’re gonna be—and in the end you’re gonna disappoint everybody anyway, ya know?”

  Creem writer Mark J. Norton mentions that he saw Springsteen a week earlier in Ann Arbor, the opening night of the tour. It was great, says he, that Springsteen actually forgot the opening lines of “Born to Run,” but the audience knew them and sang along until the stunned Springsteen suddenly caught on.

  It brings up an interesting point. By now, most of Springsteen’s audience is literally fanatical. They know the songs, the albums, the band, and what to expect of a typical marathon performance. I ask Springsteen whether sometimes he wishes that wasn’t the case, that he was up against an audience that had absolutely no idea what to expect from him.

  “I’ve opened for Black Oak Arkansas,” he says, shaking his head. “I’ve opened for Brownsville Station, and I’ve opened for Sha Na Na. I’m thirty-one—and I’ve been playing in bars since I was fifteen. I’ve faced a lot of audiences that don’t give a shit that you’re onstage. And if you’re calling percentages, we’ve had 2 to 5 percent total nights like tonight against maybe 95 percent in the ten or fifteen years we’ve been playing. Lemme tell you, that did not happen then and that does not happen now. And it keeps you from ever getting spoiled, because you know what it’s like when nobody gives a damn when you come out there. It keeps you in a certain place. It stays with you. There’s no free rides.

  “When we first started playing, I’d go to every show expecting nobody to come, and I’d go onstage expecting nobody to give me anything for free. And that’s the way you have to play. If you don’t play like that, pack your guitar up, throw it in the trashcan and go home, fix televisions or do some other line of work, ya know? Do something where that’s the way you feel about it. And the night I stop thinking that way, that’s the night I won’t do it anymore, ’cause that’s just the bottom line.

  “I don’t gauge the show by the audience reaction, I don’t gauge the show by the review in the paper the next day. I know when I get on the bus to go to the next town. I know if I can go to sleep easy that night. That’s the way we judge it and that’s the way we run it. And if we didn’t, it wouldn’t be happening in the first place.”

  We start talking about albums and moods, and I ask Springsteen the impossible—to tell me, in a few words, what The River is all about. It is, in a sense, an overwhelming disadvantage to talk to Springsteen prior to actually hearing the album: As good as the songs might have been that were earlier performed onstage, it’s hard to immediately grasp any overriding theme or concept. And yeah, there is an overriding theme or concept, as antiquated as that might sound, but The River, like Darkness before it, is based on the broadest concept possible—the human experience—which automatically makes it more interesting than four-fifths of the other records coming out today. Not that four-fifths of the other records coming out today aren’t based on human experience, but can they help it if they don’t sound like it?

  I rattle off a rapid-fire analysis of Springsteen’s LPs, telling him I thought both E Street Shuffle and Darkness were better records than Born to Run, if only for their consistency of mood. E Street seemed—and seems even today—happily nostalgic, for want of a better word, without sounding forced or smug. Darkness was as depressing as its name, and what made it even more interesting was that it followed Born to Run and the whole success-story thing. In retrospect, Darkness seems like the only sane reaction to the same story—and, thankfully, a very human one.

  Consistency of mood apparently means much to Springsteen also; he cites it as the main reason for The River’s interminable delay. “The main thing,” he explains, “was trying to focus on exactly what I wanted on the album—as opposed to off, you understand—and what I wanted to do with the characters. Like on Darkness, that stopped at a certain point. Well, what happens now?

  “When I did Darkness, I was very focused on one particular idea, one particular feeling that I wanted to do. So this time, one of the things that I felt was that on Darkness, I just didn’t make room for certain things, ya know? Because I couldn’t understand how you could feel so good and so bad at the same time. And it was very confusing for me. ‘Sherry Darling’ was gonna be on Darkness, ‘Independence Day’ was a song that was gonna be on Darkness, and the song that I wrote right after ‘Darkness’ was ‘Point Blank’—which takes that thing to its furthest.”

  If you want to start talking about “types” of Springsteen tunes, reasonably one can suggest there are two major kinds: happy, upbeat songs like “Rosalita” and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” joyful Life-Is-Great-Now ditties, and “sad,” downbeat songs like “Racing in the Street” or “Something in the Night,” moving Life-Ain’t-So-Great-Now ditties. The basic E Street Shuffle-Darkness dichotomy. And apparently Springsteen sees it the same way.

  “When I did The River, I tried to accept the fact that, you know, the world is a paradox, and that’s the way it is. And the only thing you can do with a paradox is live with it.

  “And I wanted to do that this time out. I wanted to live with particular conflicting emotions. Because I always, personally, in a funny kind of way, lean toward the Darkness kind of material—and when I didn’t put the album out in 1979 it was because I didn’t feel that was there. I felt it was something where I just got a bigger picture of what things are, of the way things work, and I tried to just learn to be able to live with that.”

  So I’m gonna listen to The River when I get it next Monday and I’m gonna feel that paradox you’re talking about?

&
nbsp; “I think so,” Springsteen says. “In the end, I think that’s the emotion. What I wanted was just the paradox of those things. There’s a lot of idealistic stuff on there, there’s a lot of stuff that, hey, you can listen to it and laugh at it or whatever. Some of it is very idealistic, and I wanted that all on there. At first, I wasn’t gonna put it all on there, ya know?

  “I saw it as romantic. It’s a romantic record—and to me ‘romantic’ is when you see the realities, and when you understand the realities, but you also see the possibilities. And sometimes you write about things as they are, and sometimes you write about ’em as they should be, as they could be, maybe. And that’s basically what I wanted to do, ya know? And you can’t say no to either thing. If you say no, you’re cheating yourself out of feelings that are important and should be a part of you.”

  We talk a little more about The River and the time it took to record it (“Believe it or not, I’m goin’ as fast as I can,” he says), and Springsteen says he didn’t think there were more than ten takes of any of the songs, most of them, in fact, being done under five. Again, he stresses that the larger portion of time was deciding which of the forty tracks—that’s right, forty—he recorded should be included on The River. Word was, in fact, that just as the final version of the album was going to be pressed, Springsteen yanked it back in time to pull “Held Up Without a Gun” off the album. Behavior which, if anything, seemed to indicate that true recording spon taneity—typified by the Go-in-and-Bang-’em-Out mentality—was a concept totally alien to Springsteen.