Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters

by Jeff Burger

  “I’m forty-six. I want to walk onstage and bring the fullness of my experience to my audience. I believe that’s what the show delivers—just life, living, in the sense that I want to take all that, all that I can, and do my best to present it to you. In that sense, the stakes are high.”

  Springsteen is no stranger to high stakes—not since Time and Newsweek ran simultaneous covers in 1975 proclaiming him rock’s next great hope, and not since his megamillion-selling 1984 album Born in the U.S.A. turned him into a pop-culture icon. The past twelve months have been particularly strong for Springsteen, too, with multiple Grammy awards for his song “Streets of Philadelphia” and a reunion with his E Street Band for some new songs on a Greatest Hits album last February and a performance at the Concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in September.

  In fact, Springsteen was working on another band album when Tom Joad began to take shape; even the title song was originally a rocker. But then he began gravitating towards the spare, folk-like narratives that populate the album, chronicling the travails of ordinary Joes—along with some migrants and a criminal or two—grasping desperately for an American Dream made elusive by class schisms and corporate greed.

  “I had a few of those things,” he remembers, “and I said, ‘That’s the kind of record I think I want to make. I want to make a record where I don’t have to play by the rules, I don’t have any singles or none of that kind of stuff. I can make whatever kind of music I want to make.’

  “I hadn’t done that in a real long time. I guess I wanted to see if I could do it again.”

  It’s dark terrain, but Springsteen contends that it’s not without hope. “There’s something being revealed—about them, about you. That’s always exciting,” he says. “Even if the stuff is dark, even if there’s tragedy involved, it’s still exciting. The truth is always hopeful, it’s always inspiring, no matter what it is.”

  Tom Joad finds Springsteen in the midst of a particularly prolific period. He also contributed songs to the films The Crossing Guard and Dead Man Walking, and he wrote an introduction to a new edition of Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, a book that inspired a couple of the songs on Tom Joad.

  “You don’t really choose the voice you follow,” says Springsteen, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife, singer Patti Scialfa, and their three children. “You sort of follow the voice that’s in your head. You’re lucky if you find it, and once you’ve found it, you’re supposed to listen to it. That’s probably where you’re going to start to do your best work.”

  [In the following sidebar, Graff cited a Springsteen monologue that preceded the concert rendition of a song from the Tom Joad album. —Ed.]

  On the Tom Joad tour, Bruce Springsteen is asking for silence from the crowd, but he has a lot to say himself. In a weary voice, he delivered this message at a recent show in Philadelphia:

  “This is a song about how quick we are to sort of abandon our own. I was just about finished with songs for the Tom Joad record and I was staying up all night—I had a little insomnia—and I went downstairs and pulled a book off the shelf. It was a book called Journey to Nowhere [subtitled The Saga of the New Underclass], by a fella named Dale Maharidge and photos by a fella named Michael Williamson.

  “What they did was, they traveled across the country in the mideighties by train, hoppin’ boxcars all the way across into California and up into Oregon, and they were chronicling what they were seeing out there at the time, as we were all sittin’ home and hearing about ‘morning in America.’

  “I was hearing from a lot of folks that I was seeing, people who work at different food banks, and they report in the book that there were more people coming in who needed their services than ever before. They were people who previously held good jobs, who supported their families.

  “I finished the book in one night and I put it down and I remember thinkin’, well, I’m a guy, I know how to do one thing. And what would happen if you’ve done something for thirty years, something that’s built the buildings that we live in, built the bridges that we cross, people who have given their sons to die in wars for this country? Who end up thrown out like yesterday’s newspapers. So what would I say to my kids if I came home at night and I couldn’t feed them and if they were hurtin’? I couldn’t help them, I couldn’t make them safe, ensure their health. I don’t know. It strikes to such a central part of who you are. This is called ‘Youngstown.’”

  BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN TELLS THE STORY OF THE SECRET AMERICA

  DAVID CORN | March/April 1996, Mother Jones (US)

  Springsteen was still on the Tom Joad tour some weeks later when he rolled into Washington, DC, in the first week of December 1995 and met up with Mother Jones’s David Corn. With Corn, the conversation focused mostly on politics and on the message Springsteen was trying to deliver with his radically different crop of new material. —Ed.

  The music on Bruce Springsteen’s thirteenth album, The Ghost of Tom Joad, is sparse—mostly Springsteen’s voice and acoustic guitar, more folk than typical rock. The album explores the travails of immigrants, dislocated workers, and America’s economically dispossessed. Its title track invokes John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and protagonist Tom Joad, the displaced Okie who confronts social injustice and is transformed into a radical.

  On a solo tour that will keep him on the road through the summer, Springsteen punctuates his performances with commentary between the songs. “There is a part of our population whose lives and dreams are declared expendable as the price of doing business,” he says, introducing one number. At another point, he paraphrases Joad: “Maybe they got it wrong and we’re not all individual souls, and maybe our fate is not independent at all. Maybe we’re all just little pieces of one big soul.”

  Sipping Jack Daniel’s, the forty-six-year-old Springsteen talked with Mother Jones after a performance in Washington, DC.

  David Corn: At a recent benefit, you dedicated the song “The Ghost of Tom Joad” to the “Gingrich mob.”

  Bruce Springsteen: With that song, I had been watching what’s happening in the world and seeing thirty years of work undone. It seems disastrous to me—and everybody is compliant. I don’t think there is any such thing as an innocent man; there is a collective responsibility. That’s in the song’s line: “Where it’s headed everybody knows.” Everybody knows there are the people we write off, there are the people we try to hang onto, and there are the people we don’t fuck with [laughs]. And that very knowledge could come back and haunt this next election.

  Everybody knows that, hey, maybe I’m just on the line. And maybe I’m going to step over from being one of these people to one of those people.

  DC: Some of the themes you deal with, like immigration, have become hot-button political issues in the last year or two. Did you plan on addressing political issues on this album?

  BS: No. I never start with a political point of view. I believe that your politics are emotionally and psychologically determined by your early experiences. My family didn’t have a political house. We didn’t have a cultural house. There was a lot of struggle in my parents’ life. In Jersey, when I was nineteen, they traveled west to start a new life. They didn’t know anybody. They had three thousand dollars to make it across the country with my little sister. My mother worked the same job her whole life, every day, never sick, never stayed home, never cried. My dad had a very difficult life, a hard struggle all the time at work. I’ve always felt like I’m seeking his revenge.

  My memory is of my father trying to find work, what that does to you, and how that affects your image of your manhood, as a provider. The loss of that role is devastating. I write coming from that spot—the spot of disaffection, of loners, outsiders. But not outlaws. It’s about people trying to find their way in, but somebody won’t let them in. Or they can’t find their way in. And what are the actions that leads to?

  That pretty much obsesses me to this day—and probably will the rest of my life.

&n
bsp; I don’t like the soapbox stuff. I don’t believe you can tell people anything. You can show them things. For this particular record, all I knew was that I wanted to write some good stories…. I don’t set out to make a point, I set out to create understanding and compassion and present something that feels like the world. I set out to make sure something is revealed at the end of the song, some knowledge gained. That’s when I figure I’m doing my job.

  DC: You’ve said the original idea for the album was sort of an “American noir” theme but then you shifted, and some of the major characters and subjects became immigrants, itinerant workers, and down-and-out people. Why?

  BS: Part of it is due to my living in California, where there is a lot of border reporting. And when I get the chance, I take motorcycle trips and go out to the desert, Southern California, Arizona. I’ll go a thousand miles, two thousand miles, where nobody recognizes you. You just meet people. That whole thing probably began with this Mexican guy I bumped into in this Four Corners desert town at the end of the summer. We were all sitting outside at a table, drinking beers. It came up that his brother had been a member of a Mexican motorcycle gang in the San Fernando Valley, and he told us the story of his brother’s death in a motorcycle accident. Something about that guy stayed with me for a year. Then I read an article on the drug trade in the Central Valley. All that led to the song “Sinaloa Cowboys” [about two brothers, Mexican immigrants, who mix metham-phetamines]. The border story is something that I hadn’t heard much of in the music that’s out there. It’s a big story. It’s the story of what this country is going to be: a big, multicultural place.

  DC: People think that the country—rightly or wrongly—has taken a turn to the right. You’re cutting against that. What brought you to this point?

  BS: I believe that the war on poverty is a more American idea than the war on the war on poverty. I believe that most people feel like that. And I believe that it ain’t over till it’s over. We’ve gotten to this sad spot, where we’re talking about how much should be cut from what we need. It would take a tremendous concentration of national will, on the order of a domestic Marshall Plan, to do the things that need to be done to achieve a real kind of social justice and equality. Whether people’s hearts and wills are into it, I don’t know. I tend to be pessimistic. I want to believe in hope.

  DC: There are a few moments of hope on the current album, but they’re very small.

  BS: I got to the end of the record, and there had been a lot of mayhem [in the songs]. I wanted to leave the door open, so I wrote “Across the Border.” That song is a beautiful dream. It’s the kind of dream you would have before you fall asleep, where you live in a world where beauty is still possible. And in that possibility of beauty there is hope.

  Then I had this idea of writing a song [“Galveston Bay”] about the Vietnamese and the Texas fishermen, about a guy who makes a particular decision not to add to the brutality and violence. [In the song, fisherman Billy Sutter goes to kill a rival, Le Bin Son, but instead returns to his sleeping wife.] He decides to let it pass on this night, to leave it alone, for whatever the reason. That’s a miracle that can happen, that does happen. People get to a certain brink, and they make a good choice, instead of a deadly choice.

  DC: Do you ever feel the urge to direct your audience toward a course of action?

  BS: Music doesn’t tell you where to go. It says, “Go find your own place.” That’s what it told me.

  I heard a political message in rock music. A liberation message. A message of freedom. I heard it in Elvis’s voice. That voice had its implications. You weren’t supposed to hear Elvis Presley. You weren’t supposed to hear Jerry Lee Lewis. You weren’t supposed to hear Robert Johnson. You weren’t supposed to hear Hank Williams. And they told the story of the secret America.

  DC: An album like this recorded by someone else would be a hard sell.

  BS: Yes, it would. It probably would go virtually unheard. I didn’t put out the record expecting it to be on the big Top 40 stations. It’s not going to be. This isn’t the music business, it’s the money business, and I don’t have any illusions about that.

  DC: What is the effect of the concentration trend within the media industry on the diversity of pop-culture voices?

  BS: You mean the hegemony of the homogenous? I have faith in a lot of the new, young, vital rock bands that came up through independent labels. They found core audiences before they hit a major label. If the industry executives think you will make them money, they will do what you ask [laughs]. It’s a bottom-line job for those guys.

  But kids who are supposed to be invisible and never be heard, who are kicked out of high school, who are losers—they make their way through, generation after generation. Nirvana, Dr. Dre, Pearl Jam. Hell, they weren’t supposed to become powerful, but they did. It’s a business that depends on the kid in his garage, and it always will.

  That’s the irony of the whole thing. [The executives] are sweating about some kid in the Midwest in his garage right now. Then it’s up to that kid to hold on. It’s a question of your toughness, your survivability, and how hard you hold onto what you originally wanted to do.

  DC: The White House wanted you to drop by today, but you chose not to go.

  BS: What ears this man has! [Laughs.] I don’t know what to say. In my opinion, the artist has to keep his distance.

  HEY JOAD, DON’T MAKE IT SAD … (OH, GO ON THEN)

  GAVIN MARTIN | March 9, 1996, New Musical Express (UK)

  The Tom Joad tour moved on to Europe in February 1996 and reached Munich on the fifteenth of the month. That night, and in Hamburg two nights later, Gavin Martin watched the shows and talked at length with Springsteen, not just about the album and tour but about sex, marriage, fame, songwriting, and more. —Ed.

  He’ll be remembered as the most unbounded performer in rock-and-roll history. His records took you inside a world of naked honesty and passionate conviction, and his marathon shows were founded on deep audience empathy. But surely there must have been something else—some tough-bastard instinct—to get him where he wanted to be, to make him the Boss?

  Bruce Springsteen laughs—partly in amusement, partly in protest. “‘The Boss’ was an idiotic nickname. It’s the bane of my entire career. I’ve learned to live with it but I’ve hated it, y’know. Basically it was a casual thing. Somebody said it when the paychecks came out at the end of the month and then it ended up being this stupid thing—in my mind anyway. But, hey, so it goes.

  “The thing is, I believed when I was young … I was a serious young man, I had serious ideas about rock music. I believed it was a serious thing, I believed it should also be fun—dancing, screwing, having a good time, but … I also believed it was capable of conveying serious ideas and that the people who listened to it, whatever you want to call them, were looking for something.

  “And maybe because it was the only culture I knew when I was fifteen, it succeeded as a tremendous source of inspiration for me for the entire part of my early life. It truly opened things up for me.

  “I heard tremendous depth and sadness in the voice of the singer singing ‘Saturday Night at the Movies,’ and a sense of how the world truly was, not how it was being explained to me, but how it truly was and how it truly operated.

  “So when it came to be my turn, I said I want to try and present that and, if I can, then I’ll feel like I’m doing more than taking up space, y’know?”

  He’s not taking up so much space these days, not here in his modest dressing room backstage at the Rudi-Sedlmayer-Halle in Munich. Not onstage, surrounded by a selection of three or four acoustic guitars and a shelf of harmonica holders on his first solo tour. Springsteen’s sense of commitment to serious issues has never been tested so strongly nor proved so resolute as on this, his Born to Stand and Sit Down Tour, aka the Shut the F—Up and Listen Tour. A natural progression from The Ghost of Tom Joad—the starkest, most terrifying album of his career, released in November last year—Springst
een’s solo tour is currently heading across Europe after three months in America.

  He’s been playing small venues, two-thousand to four-thousand seaters, many well off the normal circuit, reestablishing links with the local networks of food banks and agencies for the homeless forged during his megastar years. But now the clamor is less frantic and the aims more focused. That’s how he wants it to be—a reflection of the world-weariness and sense of fatalism that inform Tom Joad.

  In Detroit, Bruce talked onstage about a yearlong local newspaper dispute and, although he made a donation to the strikers, was careful not to make moral judgments about those forced by circumstances to cross the picket lines. Then the day he played in Austin, Texas, a citywide ordinance that effectively made it a criminal offense to be homeless came into effect. In Atlanta, the city’s relief organizations told of the pressure that local business interests were putting on police and politicians to clean the vagrants off the streets in preparation for the summer’s Olympics.

  And when he played in Youngstown, Ohio, the depression-hit, population-decimated steel town featured in the eponymous song that gives voice to all those deemed expendable by late twentieth-century American capitalism, they say you could hear the very heartbeat of the place pulsing inside the hall when he sang their song.

  Springsteen says there’s no substitute for going to the town where someone lives and playing to them. He says there’s nothing that can match actually being there. This is, after all, a performer who keeps in touch with his fans—and their mothers. Like the woman he met back in 1981 after going to a cinema in St. Louis. [This is the same story Springsteen told Dave Marsh, which is also quoted in this book’s introduction. In that version, however, the encounter occurred in Denver. It must be hard to keep your cities straight when you’re in a different one every day. —Ed.]