Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters

by Jeff Burger

  DM: Are you happier?

  BS: Yes, I actually am.

  DM: Even though the tone of the last two records isn’t as liberating, maybe, as some of the earlier stuff?

  BS: I don’t think happiness is necessarily … it’s a lot of different things. To me, the music is liberating, because my job, what I’m interested in doing, is doing something that’s like what life is like. Or what life feels like. I feel the last two records were very … they felt very real to me in an everyday sort of sense.

  To me, the type of things that people do which make their lives heroic are a lot of times very small, little things. Little things that happen in the kitchen, or between a husband and wife, or between them and their kids. It’s a great experience, but it’s not always big. That’s what kind of interests me. There’s plenty of room for those types of victories, and I think the records have that. “Glory Days,” “Darlington County”—you know, the sense of life is in the spirit. It’s not necessarily in the facts of the songs.

  It is that “We keep on going” thing. Like that little bit that they edited onto the end of the film Grapes of Wrath. To me, that’s what it’s like. That’s what my life is like, a lot of the times. The experience is a big experience, but the rest of the time, it’s just the same old thing. You’ve got your friends, you try to keep your friendships going, your relationships going. You try to accept as much responsibility as you can as you get older. You know, to me, that’s where the richness of the thing is. “Let freedom ring”—some-how that fits in. It’s an everyday thing. I guess that’s what I want to say.

  Our job is, we just blow into town, tell everybody to keep going, and we kinda blow on out.

  DM: What do you think of people’s tendency to put you on a pedestal? Last night you kind of addressed that when you said, “I hate being called the Boss, but sometimes I like it.”

  BS: That’s about the size of it [laughs]. It’s hard, you know, you don’t see yourself in that fashion most of the time. The celebrity thing in America, it’s the old story of getting elected to a club you may not want to be a member of. But you are anyway. You’re just another trivia question on Jeopardy or something. A lot of times it’s funny. People idolize you and they ridicule you. I guess they’re both just a part of it. That’s just the way that my life is. Certainly you can’t take either of those things too seriously. It’s just part of the job.

  DM: We were curious about the synthesizers playing a more prominent role on the new record. How did that interest develop?

  BS: I don’t actually remember. We used it on “Drive All Night” on The River. And then we went in, and I think it originally started when I wanted to get a merry-go-round organ sound, like a roller rink. To me, like “Glory Days” and “Working on the Highway,” it’s that roller-skating sound. That’s a happy sound. I always loved that sound. It’s kinda the Sir Douglas Quintet, “She’s About a Mover.”

  We did that, and then one night we did “Born in the U.S.A.” We just kinda did it off the cuff; I never taught it to the band. I went in and said, “Roy, get this riff.” And he just pulled out the sound, played the riff on the synthesizer. We played it two times, and our second take is on the record. That’s why the guys are really on the edge. You can hear Max. To me, he was right up there with the best of them on that song. There was no arrangement. I said, “When I stop, keep the drums going.” That thing in the end with all the drums, that just kinda happened. It was a great night in the studio.

  So we got into doing that and wanted to use a different sound on the piano and synthesizer. Like, on “Downbound Train,” it can sound pretty haunting. It gets this real austere sound, and I liked that. A little bit of coolness.

  DM: Are you going to be performing that song?

  BS: Oh, yeah, we didn’t really relearn it in rehearsal, but maybe we’ll play it tomorrow if we get a chance to rehearse it tomorrow afternoon. I like to do different things. Tonight was really a different show than we did the other night. You don’t know what’s gonna work. It’s just “Let’s try this.” And if you play in the same town, it’s nice to do different shows all the time, because that way a lot of people come twice, and they get to hear all the songs that they like.

  DM: Since you’ve always seemed to favor sort of a raw, spontaneous sound, how come it takes you so long to get those albums out?

  BS: Well, it’s a bizarre thing. If I knew that, I’d probably put ’em out faster. I just kinda wait till I feel there’s something going on there. The only bad thing about it is that I feel kinda like a friend that goes away and doesn’t write [laughs]. But it’s unbelievable how great the kids are. I’ll see a kid like a year afterward and he’ll say, “How ya’ doin’?”

  “Still working on it.”

  “Aw, take your time. We want it to be right.”

  It’s amazing. The funny thing about the record is that we don’t do any more than five or six takes on a song. The actual recording time was probably no more than three or four weeks. But I do write a lot of songs.

  DM: What happens to the rest of them?

  BS: They end up on flip sides, like “Pink Cadillac.” Eventually I want to get more released. We’ll have another single coming out, and there’ll be one on the back of that. But eventually I’d like to just release them on a record, because they’re fun. Sometimes, why you choose one and not the other is the mood you’re in at the moment. I’ve been concerned about getting the best thing I can out there.

  I feel that the Nebraska record, when it came out, that part of its success was the result of establishing an eight-, ten-year relationship going with an audience. I was thrilled with how it was accepted and how well it did. There’s something going on there, so before I put a record out, I just try to make sure that it’s the best that I can do and I’m going where I want to go with it. ’Cause I’m going to come out and play for a year and play those songs every night. If they’re good, they’re gonna hold up.

  Plus [laughs], I’m sure I worry too much about it.

  DM: Is “The Promise” [a legendary outtake recorded during the Darkness on the Edge of Town sessions] ever going to come out, or is stuff like that just too dated for you?

  BS: When I die, that’ll come out [laughs]. Some of that would feel a little dated for me, but I do have an album of outtakes from The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle that feels just like that record. There may be a whole album’s worth of it, and that sounds really funny. I’m singing all the crazy words, and it’s like those songs.

  Sometime I’d like to get that out, but I don’t know when I’m gonna do all these things. They’re all things kinda waiting there that I’d like to do at some point. I would like to get more music out, and I’m certainly gonna plan on trying to do that.

  DM: Don’t you say that after every record?

  BS: I know. And I try, and I don’t do it [laughs].

  AMERICAN HEARTBEAT

  The Bruce Springsteen Interview

  ROGER SCOTT AND PATRICK HUMPHRIES | November 2, 1984, Hot Press (Dublin, Ireland)

  British radio personality Roger Scott talked with Springsteen a month after McLeese did, when the band played Hartford, Connecticut, at the beginning of September. “Roger—a lovely man, great DJ, and huge Bruce fan—got the interview for [London’s] Capital Radio,” rock journalist Patrick Humphries told me. “He liked the Springsteen book I’d done so I transcribed the tape and topped and tailed it.” —Ed.

  The bets were on: Following David Bowie’s foray into Serious Moonlight in 1983, the rock event of 1984 had to be the Jacksons’ Victory tour. On the face of it, there was no competition. Michael Jackson had become the eighties’ brightest star, with Thriller shattering all known records, and this was the tour on which that new status would reap ultimate dividends. But when it came to it, the Jacksons’ Victory proved to be a hollow one—exorbitant ticket prices and extravagant fantasies do not compensate for musical paucity.

  In stark contrast, it was a scrawny thirty-five-year
-old from New Jersey who gave rock and roll a roaring voice in 1984. Bruce Springsteen had done it before, of course; those who witnessed him on the 1980–1981 River tour came away converted by Springsteen’s zealous rock-and-roll revivalist shows. But even the diehard must have wondered whether he could still pack a punch. Three years away is, after all, a long time in rock and roll.

  The omens on his seventh album, Born in the U.S.A., were promising—Bruce Springsteen was back doing what he did best—rocking his heart out! Yet at the core of the new album, beneath the exuberance of such classic rockers as “Darlington County,” “No Surrender,” and “Glory Days,” was a note of caution, with Springsteen coming to terms with his love of rock and roll, and the fact that he’s reached his midthirties. Surely those legendary four-hour shows were now a part of rock history? No one could keep up that intensity. But with fervor and reckless abandon, Springsteen proved such speculation premature. His 1984 tour opened in St. Paul, Minnesota, on June 29 with a marathon four-and-a-half-hour, thirty-song show. Bruce Springsteen was back, Jack!

  In conversation, the voice sounds husky, like too many cigarettes in too many roadside bars, like too many tequila chasers chasing something long forgotten. It couldn’t be further from the truth. Bruce Springsteen is the essence of the puritanical rock star.

  In a world where excess is almost written into the contract, Springsteen is an unlikely rock hero. He doesn’t smoke, drinks beer only in moderation, and seems to come alive only in performance or when carving out a new album in the studio. He’d be too good to be true, if it wasn’t for the immensely moving quality of his music.

  Springsteen’s restraint is carried over into his recording. During his twelve years with CBS, he has released only seven official albums. (The dedication of his fans in obtaining bootlegs is legendary. Along with Dylan and Bowie, Springsteen is rock’s most widely bootlegged artist. It’s an ironic barometer, but one that testifies to Springsteen’s stature in rock legend.) It is really only in performance that Springsteen indulges in excess—in the positive sense of screaming, soaring shows that stretch into four-hour celebrations of life, youth, of maturity—and of rock and roll itself.

  A Springsteen show is a virtual potted history of rock music: Alongside his own classic rockers like “Born to Run” and “Rosalita,” he’ll slot in songs by Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jimmy Cliff, the Beatles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley—the sort of sounds that allowed Bruce Frederick Springsteen to escape the confines of Freehold, New Jersey, except that now it’s him up onstage pouring his heart out. In concert, Springsteen puts everything into the performance; nothing and no one is spared.

  The afternoon before the show, there are none of the usual rock-and-roll excesses. Springsteen can be seen diligently pacing every side of the auditorium, ensuring that the sound quality is right for everyone, not just those with enough money to blow on seats right up front.

  That fine attention to detail, that caring, separates Springsteen from the legions of Spinal Tappers plowing ’round the rock circuit with one eye on the clock and the other on the house percentage. It’s a quality that’s been in abundant evidence since Bruce Springsteen emerged in the early 1970s.

  There was a brash exuberance to his debut, Greetings from Asbury Park, in 1973. With verbose enthusiasm, Springsteen crammed everything into his debut, as if it were his last chance. Born to Run in 1975 was an album of epic panache, Springsteen elevating the street suss characters of his first two albums into heroes of the American Dream, arriving at their rock-and-roll goal in burnt-out Chevys.

  By Darkness on the Edge of Town, in 1978, the dream had turned sour, and the album’s ten songs dealt in the darkness of disillusionment and despair. There was a reconciliation of sorts on the double River of 1980, with hearty rockers like “Sherry Darling” and “Ramrod” nestling next to bleak ballads such as “The River” and “Independence Day.” But the stark, acoustic detour through Nebraska (1982) left no doubts about Springsteen’s resolute artistic integrity. He would not tailor his output to suit the demands of the marketplace. Uncompromisingly bleak, Nebraska was totally solo, a collection of folk tales dwelling on those crushed by the weight of Reaganomics, stylistically similar to earlier efforts by Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, and Robert Johnson.

  With his seventh album, Born in the U.S.A. (1984), Springsteen managed to fuse the disparate elements of his career most successfully: The exuberance can be found on such cocky rockers as “Darlington County” and “Working on the Highway”; the somber introspection finds a place on “Downbound Train” and “My Hometown.” The twelve-track album was arrived at after a two-year recording stint, which meant sifting through around a hundred songs to arrive at the final dozen.

  Born in the U.S.A. was such a defiantly rock-and-roll album. The reviews were surprisingly favorable. But its success and that of the two singles—“Dancing in the Dark” and “Cover Me”—saw the thirty-five-year-old blue-collar rocker back at the top. And with Springsteen back on the road, some sort of honesty and merit infuses the bloated and avaricious caricature rock music too often seems to have become. Springsteen was a month into his first American tour in three years when Roger Scott talked to him in Hartford, Connecticut. It was the first time that Springsteen had spoken to a member of the European press in over three years. The intervening years had produced Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A., had seen video become another spoke in the rock-and-roll wheel. Springsteen was pensive and attentive during the interview, attaching the same sort of care to conversation as he does to recording.

  Roger Scott: What did you do after the River tour when you came off the road?

  Bruce Springsteen: Clarence got married a couple of weeks after we got off the road. So we went to his wedding, and I was the best man. We came back to New Jersey, and very shortly after that, I started to write the Nebraska songs. That was the fall and early winter, and I think I recorded those right around New Year’s, in a couple of days. And that was about it. Not much happened. We went into the studio a couple of times, and I attempted to record some of those songs with the band, but it just didn’t work out, didn’t sound as good, but we did end up recording about half of the Born in the U.S.A. album. Those two records were always kinda intermingled—I have some Nebraska-like demos of “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Downbound Train,” y’know? Then we decided that we were gonna put the Nebraska album out, the demos that I’d made at my house.

  RS: I know you’d read this Woody Guthrie biography [Woody Guthrie: A Life by Joe Klein] and were doing a couple of his songs on the River tour. Was that an influence?

  BS: No, it was just basically that was the way that they sounded best. The songs had a lot of detail so that, when the band started to wail away into it, the characters got lost. Like “Johnny 99”—I thought “Oh, that’d be great if we could do a rock version.” But when you did that, the song disappeared. A lot of its content was in its style, in the treatment of it. It needed that really kinda austere, echoey sound, just one guitar—one guy telling his story. That’s what made the record work, the sound of real conversation … like you were meeting different people, and they just told you what had happened to them, or what was happening to them. So you kinda walked for a little bit in somebody else’s shoes.

  RS: Where did all the desperate people on that record come from?

  BS: I dunno. That’s just what I was writing at the time; that’s what I was interested in writing about. I don’t know where songs come from really, myself. I just had a certain tone in mind, which I felt was the tone of what it was like when I was a kid growing up. And at the same time it felt like the tone of what the country was like at that time. That was kinda the heart that I was drawing from.

  RS: Leading on from The River, which was full of these sharply contrasting songs, these wild celebrations alongside these hopeless people.

  BS: On Born in the U.S.A., I kinda combined the two things. On The River, I’d have a song like this and a song like that because
I didn’t know how to combine it … By the time I’d got to the Born in the U.S.A. album I kinda combined those two things. Like “Darlington County,” even “Glory Days,” “Dancing in the Dark.” I did a little bit on The River like “Cadillac Ranch”—that was the way I was dealing with different types of material. I hadn’t figured out a way to synthesize it into one song, y’know. I knew it was all part of the same picture, which is why The River was a double album.

  RS: “Born in the U.S.A.” I see as an indictment of America’s treatment of Vietnam veterans, and you’ve played shows for Vietnam vets. I wondered—looking back—if you feel at all guilty about dodging the draft when you see those guys?

  BS: No, no. At the time, I had no political standpoint whatsoever when I was eighteen, and neither did any of my friends, and the whole draft thing was a pure street thing—you don’t wanna go! And you didn’t want to go because you’d seen other people go and not come back! The first drummer in a band [of mine] called the Castiles, he enlisted, and he came back in his uniform and it was all “Here I go, goin’ to Vietnam”—laughin’ and jokin’ about it. And he went, and he got killed. There were a lot of guys from my neighborhood, guys in bands—one of the best lead singers went, and he was missing in action—so it got to be kinda a street thing.

  When I was seventeen or eighteen, I didn’t even know where Vietnam was. We just knew we didn’t wanna go and die! It wasn’t until later in the seventies there was this kind of awareness of the type of war it was, what it meant—the way it was felt to be a subversion of all the true American ideals. It twisted the country inside out.

  RS: I saw you at Meadowlands [in New Jersey], and you did “Johnny Bye-Bye” on the anniversary of Elvis’s death [August 16, 1977]. And you said, almost like it was to yourself—that it was maybe dangerous to have all your dreams come true. Is it—because yours have?