Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters

by Jeff Burger

Bruce Springsteen: Well, a lot of people had come before with that. Some of the greatest blues music is some of the darkest music you’ve ever heard. Obviously, Dylan had come when I was fifteen and I listened to his music first. I always used to say when I heard Highway 61, I think I felt, as a teenager, that I was hearing the first true picture of how I felt and how my country felt. And that was exhilarating, because 1960s small-town America was very [David] Lynchian. Underneath, everything was rumbling, and particularly if you grew up in the mid- and late sixties. And I think what Dylan did was he took all that dark stuff that was rumbling underneath and pushed it to the surface with a lot of irony and humor but also tremendous courage to go places where people hadn’t gone previously.

  So when I heard that, I knew I liked that. And I was very ambitious, also. And Darkness on the Edge of Town came out of a huge body of work that had tons of very happy songs [laughs]. You know, bar-band music, soul music—it was all music that we recorded and made a very distinct decision to not use for a myriad of reasons.

  One was, I’d come off of three years being waylaid by a lawsuit I’d been in, and it was a record where I felt I had to really create an identity for myself. Also, what people forget sometimes is that Darkness was recorded right at the moment of the punk explosion. And while I was musically set on my path, thematically there was a lot of very tough and hard music coming out of England.

  Also, we were in what was known as the Carter recession at the time. And these records were recorded three or four years after the end of the Vietnam War. So there was that feeling that the country had changed dramatically, lost its innocence. And the other music that I’d written for Darkness, a lot of it was more … genre-based. It was great, and it was exciting to go back and put it together for the project, but it didn’t feel completely reflective of its times.

  EN: Asbury Park and Born to Run and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle—it’s not that these records don’t have flickers of that on them. Born to Run, I think, is full of struggle and full of longing, [and] aspiration to leave and to go to a wider world. Do you think that it took a measure of success for you to feel that you had courage enough to put out that kind of work?

  BS: No, because you’re usually motivated by fear [laughs] rather than bravery. Darkness came out of a place where I was afraid of losing myself. I’d had the first taste of success so you’ve realized it’s possible for your talent to be co-opted and for your identity to be moved and shifted in ways that you may not have been prepared for.

  I was the only person I’d ever met who’d had a record contract. None of the E Street Band, as far as I know, had been on an airplane until Columbia sent us to Los Angeles. We’d heard about them. We’d seen them pass over, but we hadn’t been on any, you know. So it was a smaller world, and we were provincial guys with no money. And so it was this whole little street life in Asbury Park and New York was a million miles away.

  It was a very different time. But the good part about it was you were very, very connected to place. And it was unique; the place where you lived and you grew up and the people you grew up with were very singular. The irony of any kind of success is, you’re a mutant in your neighborhood and it does make you unusual and it also leaves you with a good deal of survivor guilt.

  In other words, no one knows anyone else who has any money. And so they only know you [laughs]. And at the time, even though we were making a lot of records, we weren’t making very much money because we didn’t know how to make records and we spent it, either on making the records or I’d signed a lot of bad deals and it all went away.

  But still, you were a guy that was very, very unusual and so my desire was to not get disconnected from my [roots]. It was a way of honoring my parents’ experience and their history. A lot of the people that I cared about, they aren’t really being written about that much. And those were the topics I decided to take on for that particular record, not so much out of any social consciousness, but out of a way of survival of my own inner life and soul.

  EN: What’s interesting about that to me, though, is you’re talking about that intense connection to a locale, to a place and a culture of people in your area; but when you toured with the Darkness record, you referenced things like Terrence Malick’s film Badlands or Flannery O’Connor. You were starting to talk about the way that other things were affecting you. And I think I even saw, in an old interview, that you talked about how literally going out to some of those Western landscapes opened up your sense of the country.

  BS: Oh, yeah. Well, you’re choosing a geography. We all carry a landscape within us. And also Mr. Landau was a film critic when I met him. And I was just getting at a place in my life where … I mean, I hadn’t read. I hadn’t watched anything. It was all Top 40 records, we were all creatures of the radio and blues and soul and so it was an interesting moment, because once again, if you think about the late seventies, when that record came out, top films of the day were like Taxi Driver. Mean Streets had come out. We were in L.A. on the Born to Run tour [and] I met Marty Scorsese and Bobby De Niro and [Scorsese] set up a screening of Mean Streets for us in Los Angeles, and so these things were happening a little simultaneously. And popular pictures were very dark, bloody pictures that dealt with the inner, flip side of the American experience.

  And in a funny way, Darkness, which was [released in] 1978, slipped out of that cultural moment, and connects up to some of those film influences. Also, we traveled into the Southwest, me and Steve Van Zandt. We flew to Reno and we bought a two-thousand-dollar [car]—I think it was a Ford—and we drove it for one thousand or so miles through the Southwest and we took some photos. And I passed a place called the Rattle snake Speedway in Utah. That’s just such a great name. [Springsteen used it in the song “The Promised Land,” which appeared on the Darkness CD. —Ed.] And all those things started to seep into [me]. I was interested now in writing music that felt not just New Jersey- or boardwalk-based. I wanted to bring in the full landscape of the whole country.

  EN: There’s a certain romance that we all project onto artists that we love and who speak to us. We want to believe, somehow, that their work just burst out of them fully formed.

  BS: Oh, if it could be so! I’m sure you know that [laughs].

  EN: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the older I’ve gotten and the more of an opportunity that I’ve had to work on my own but also to learn more about how some of the work that really hit me hard actually got made, like this film [The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town], the more I’ve started to think that that’s really not the case, and that a lot of artists use their right brain, too, a lot. They put their nose in the wind. They look at the landscape of what’s going on around them, and they use their references and they construct and craft things very carefully.

  BS: I’ve come to feel that a lot of them just hide how literate they are, because it looks more arty and rock-starry. We were talking about Dylan just now, and I think Dylan always gave the impression of being the ultimate savant, you know. But the truth, as we’ve learned through Scorsese’s documentary, is that that guy was a craftsman. He was very, very conscious of what was going on around him. He was conscious of Woody Guthrie’s idiom and he just wouldn’t talk about it.

  EN: But that gets me around to you, because I look at these tapes in this film, on Darkness on the Edge of Town. And onstage and in your work, you cut this figure of kind of this hairy-headed hipster who was this poet and everything. But I think that you knew what you were up to.

  BS: Oh, please [laughs].

  EN: I know you feel it, but I’m wondering what you think about that, the mix of the intuitive, but then the right brain and the ambition to say something big.

  BS: It works a lot of different ways. Bob [Dylan] said he always liked the singers who you couldn’t tell what they were thinking. I don’t know if I know anyone, with perhaps the exception of the early inventors of rock music, who [didn’t study]. And even them. The gospel background in Jerry Lee Lewis�
��s piano playing is completely informed with church and honky-tonk. You have to study that stuff. And I don’t mean study in the sense of literal schooling, but you’re drawn to things that make you seek out what they’re about. And whether you’re drawn to gospel or to church music or to honky-tonk, it informs your character and it informs your talent.

  The difference is, I think, that initially in rock music, you were only going to be a musician for three years or so, and then you were going to be done. You forget the Beatles made all their records in about eight years. And also, the oldest rock musicians, say when Darkness came out, were thirty-two or thirty-four. Those were the old guys. Like people were looking for a new Bob Dylan when Bob himself was only about thirty years old. I mean, the old one was still a kid, you know? And so it was a very different moment.

  EN: Was there a moment or a period or a certain age in your life when you remember it transitioning from, “I’d like to write a good song” to “I am going to paint on a big canvas where I’m going to go epic”?

  BS: Yeah. I felt like that before I made my first record, because I’d had a pretty successful local band. I mean, we sometimes played to a couple thousand people, with no record or anything. You’d charge a dollar and earn two thousand dollars and you split amongst five guys. How long you going to live on that at twenty years old? You live forever on three hundred dollars in your drawer, you know.

  And, so we were sort of successful in that sense. And when it came time to record, I knew that that wasn’t going to be enough. I said, Man, there’s other guys that play guitar well. There’s other guys that really front well. There’s other rocking bands out there. But the writing and the imagining of a world, that’s a particular thing, that’s a single fingerprint. All the filmmakers we love, all the writers we love, all the songwriters we love, they put their fingerprint on your imagination and in your heart and on your soul. That was something that I’d felt touched by. And I said, well, I want to do that.

  EN: Were you affected by the Beats? Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg? Did that penetrate to you?

  BS: No. If I was ever a bohemian, it was by circumstance. None of the guys came out of an actual bohemian lifestyle. That was not what was in Asbury Park. Asbury Park was your working-class musicians who came from those kinds of homes, who fell into a bohemian lifestyle because it was all they could afford at the moment. You were on the outs, but you didn’t have a self-awareness about it.

  And I didn’t really read Allen Ginsberg [until] after I saw people comparing my first record to some of this poetry. So I was a latecomer to the whole Beat thing. We were influenced by records.

  EN: Were you paying attention at that time to the political reality in the country? Like you started singing “This Land Is Your Land” around the time of those Darkness tours or maybe it was on The River, and having commentary about dispossessed people and stuff like that. When do you think you actually started drawing connections between the landscapes and the struggles of people that you were describing in songs and writing about and the effect of political leadership on those conditions? When did that start crystallizing for you?

  BS: I guess it was around that time, maybe a little later. I know [by] The River album, for sure. If you’re a teenager in the sixties, you fell down on one side or the other. Like my brother-in-law never had a sixties experience. He was a 1950s man. And his life was very patterned. His and my sister’s lives were patterned after my parents, and it was very hard and it was a lot of struggle, and they were married young and had children very young; and then there were the people who drank the Kool-Aid, you know.

  I have a poster of us playing for George McGovern. I was twenty-two. We did a benefit for him and so politics was just there during the Vietnam War. As far as the connection later, I guess I was interested in my parents’ lives. I was interested in a sense of place. I felt that my own identity was rooted in that sense of place and that there was a narrative there. And I was interested in having a narrative. I had a story and I wanted to tell it. And I knew it was caught up in my childhood and my parents’ lives and my own young life, but I had no real clue as to the broader picture. And I remember Mr. Landau and I, we had a lot of conversations at that time, where I was trying to sort out what I felt was true, like what were the larger forces that were at work on my parents’ lives.

  That’s when I went back into the Woody Guthrie [material] and some of the earlier political writers, and even my experiences. I was interested in working-class pop music, which at the time would be the Animals or something. The Animals had so many great hit records, but they were very rooted in blue-collar experience. And I was interested in trying to figure out who I was, because when you have some success, you have a variety of choices, and I think I looked at some of the maps some of the people who’d come before had drawn and I saw where they went off—where the world was flat to them and they fell off the edge. And I said well, I’d rather not have that happen.

  I decided that the key was maintaining a sense of myself, understanding that a part of my life had been mutated by some of my success and experiences, but also holding onto a sense of myself that came out of where I grew up and the people I grew up with and my parents’ history and my own history. There was a thrust of self-preservation more than anything else, more than a political conscience, more than a social consciousness. It was an act of self-preservation and then also anger and some revenge from seeing some wasted lives and my home life, and I just followed that. But, yeah, you start telling people who they should vote for for president …

  EN: I kind of think that maybe every generation thinks that when they become parents, they’re going to be the first cool parents, you know, that they’re …

  BS: No, that doesn’t work out. That’s not your place. People always say, “Your kids coming to see the show?” I say, “Why would any kids want to come and see thousands cheer their parents?”

  EN: But you told me you try to keep up with what your kids are listening to and stay in touch with what matters to them, with the new zeitgeist that’s happening.

  BS: Well, they share their musical tastes, and I’ve heard a lot of great music through my kids.

  EN: You have?

  BS: Yeah. But it’s funny. We were lucky to come in on a lot of footage [for the Darkness documentary] that was taken from when we were twenty-seven. And so there’s a lot of footage of us at almost my son’s age, or a little bit older, and I’ve been informed by my kids that we simply look ridiculous. So you can’t win. You’re not going to win.

  EN: And yet your boys look an awfully lot like you at that age.

  BS: Yeah. Yeah.

  EN: I remember thinking, it made me love Neil Young even more, when he said when he heard Nirvana for the first time, he went out in his garage and played all night because it kicked his ass so bad. And I was curious, you’ve been doing it a long time. Do you still bump into work that kicks your ass and …

  BS: If you’re good, you’re always looking over your shoulder. I mean, it’s a part of the life. It’s the gun-slinging life. You know, it’s like, “Yes, you are very fast, my friend. But, there’s some kid in his garage tonight, right? And just about ten minutes from now …”

  So, there’s always a lot of inspiration out there to keep running. But to go back to the earlier question, I think the [Darkness] record was carved meticulously, thoughtfully, very consciously out of a big chunk of stone over a long time with a huge amount of ego and ambition and hunger.

  EN: Talk about your impulse to go back and look at the stuff when you were trying to shape that sculpture out of a big stone. You know, you cast off certain things. There’s songs I know from you, like “The Promise,” that were left off not because they weren’t deep—they were almost too deep for you. So how does it feel to you to shake the dust off those and let them be seen now?

  BS: [“The Promise”] I left out because it felt too self-referential and I was uncomfortable with it. Maybe it was too close to the story I was actually li
ving at the moment. I didn’t have enough distance from it and so … that probably was one that could have gotten on. But also, Darkness was an angry record and I took the ten toughest songs I had. I didn’t want to cut that feeling. I didn’t want something that had a broader, somewhat compassionate overview. That didn’t feel like the moment for that for me.

  EN: When you go back and look at it now, does any of it surprise you? Do you find yourself surprised by how good something is, or [think,] I don’t really like that one?

  BS: Yeah. I mean, now there is a large body of work, so every piece of it you’re less self-conscious about. At that time I only had three records out, so what you were going to put out was 25 percent of all your work.

  And that really changed the way you thought about things. Now it’s very different. We put a lot of music on this project we’ve been working on. And it’s just music you made at the time. And you want people to enjoy it and I still function a little bit like that with the current records I make. But you’re a lot less uptight and a lot less self-conscious, which is good. I think there’s an age to be that way, to be very, very controlling and extremely intense and focused and a good deal insane, also. I think that if you look at the people who we care about, they’re people who cared about something enough to get crazy with it.

  Martin Scorsese said the artist’s job is you’re trying to get the audience to care about your obsessions. And there is a time and there is a place to get and be that way. That’s why there’s a place for that intensity. But I was in search of a purposeful work life. I wanted to entertain, I wanted the pink Cadillac and I wanted the girls. But more than those things, I felt I wanted a purposeful work life.

  EN: If you could see a film like this one, about the making of the record of someone who was a giant for you, if someone said, you can get cameras on the inside of a record that meant a lot to you, who would you like to see?

  BS: Well, there’s a lot of stuff. Pet Sounds or Highway 61 would have been interesting. Well, you had Let It Be so you got a sense of how the Beatles worked in the studio. It’s interesting to see how other people approach their jobs, because everybody does it a little bit different and also because the way we did it was so hard, we often felt like we were doing it wrong, you know. It went on forever. We made records that [took] years [to finish]. I’d have musicians come in and [they’re] on their next record and man, I’m still hacking out what I’m doing.