Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters

by Jeff Burger

  Good morning! Why are we up so fucking early? How important can this speech be if we’re giving it at noon? It can’t be that important. Every decent musician in town is asleep, or they will be before I’m done with this thing, I guarantee you. I’ve got a bit of a mess up here.

  When I was invited to do the keynote speech of this year’s conference I was a little hesitant, because the word “keynote” made me uncomfortable. It seemed to suggest that there was a key note to be struck that sums up whatever is going on out there in the streets.

  Five days of bands, hundreds of venues from morning till night, and no one really hardly agrees on anything in pop anymore. There is no key note, I don’t think. There is no unified theory of everything. You can ask Einstein. But you can pick any band, say KISS, and you can go, “Early theatre rock proponents, expressing the true raging hormones of youth” or “They suck!”

  You can go, Phish, “inheritors of the Grateful Dead’s mantle, brilliant center of the true alternative community” or … “they suck.” You can go, “Bruce Springsteen, natural-born poetic genius off the streets of Monmouth County, hardest-working New Jerseyian in show business, voice of the common man, future of rock and roll!” … or “He sucks. Get the fuck out of here!”

  You could pick any band, and create your own equation. It’s fun. There was even a recent book that focused on the Beatles and decided, you got it, they sucked. So really, instead of a keynote speech, I thought that perhaps this should be a key notes speech, or perhaps many keynote speakers. I exaggerate for effect, but only a little bit. So with that as my disclaimer, I move cautiously on.

  Still, it’s great to be in a town with ten thousand bands, or whatever. Anybody know the actual number? Come on, a lot of them, right? Back in late ’64 when I picked up a guitar, that would have seemed like some insane, teenage pipe dream, because, first of all, it would have been numerically impossible. There just weren’t that many guitars to go around in those days. They simply hadn’t made that many yet. We would all have to have been sharing.

  Guitar players were rare. Mostly, music-schooled bands were rare, and, until the Beatles hit, played primarily instrumental music. And there wasn’t that much music to play. When I picked up the guitar, there were only ten years of rock history to draw on. That would be, like, all of known pop being only the music that you know that’s occurred between 2002 and now.

  The most groups in one place I had ever seen as a teenager was twenty bands at the Keyport Matawan Roller Dome in a battle to the death. So many styles were overlapping at that point in time that you would have a doo-wop singing group with full pompadours and matching suits set up next to our band playing a garage version of Them’s “Mystic Eyes,” set up next to a full thirteen-piece soul show band. And still that’s nothing minutely compared to what’s going on on the streets of Austin right now.

  So, it’s incredible to be back. I’ve had a lot of fun here in Austin since the seventies and Jim Franklin and the Armadillo World Headquarters. It’s fascinating to see what’s become of the music that I’ve loved my whole life. Pop’s become a new language, cultural force, social movement. Actually, a series of new languages, cultural forces, and social movements that have inspired and enlivened the second half of the twentieth century, and the dawning years of this one. I mean, who would have thought that there would have been a sax-playing president or a soul-singing president, you know?

  When we started, thirty years old for a rock musician was unthinkable. Bill Haley kept his age a relative secret. So when Danny and the Juniors sang “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay,” they didn’t have a clue as to how terrifyingly, fucking right they were going to be. When I look out from my stage these days, I look into the eyes of three generations of people, and still popular music continues to provide its primary function as youth music, as a joyous argument-starter and as a subject for long booze-filled nights of debate with Steve Van Zandt, over who reigns ultimately supreme.

  There are so many subgenres and fashions, two-tone, acid rock, alternative dance, alternative metal, alternative rock, art punk, art rock, avantgarde metal, black metal, black and death metal, Christian metal, heavy metal, funk metal, bland metal, medieval metal, indie metal, melodic death metal, melodic black metal, metal core, hard core, electronic hard core, folk punk, folk rock, pop punk, Brit pop, grunge, sad core, surf music, psychedelic rock, punk rock, hip hop, rap rock, rap metal, Nintendo core. Huh?

  I just want to know what a Nintendo core is, myself. But rock noir, shock rock, skate punk, noise core, noise pop, noise rock, pagan rock, paisley underground, indie pop, indie rock, heartland rock, roots rock, samba rock, screamo-emo, shoegazing stoner rock, swamp pop, synth pop, rock against communism, garage rock, blues rock, death and roll, lo-fi, jangle pop, folk music. Just add “neo-” and “post-” to everything I said, and mention them all again. Yeah, and rock and roll.

  So, holy shit, this is all going on in this town right now. For a guy who realizes U2 is probably the last band he is going to know the names of all four members of, it’s overwhelming. Perhaps the most prophetic comment I’ve heard over the past quarter century about rock music was made by Lester Bangs upon Elvis’s death. In 1977, Lester Bangs said Elvis was probably the last thing we were all going to agree on—Public Enemy not counting.

  From here on in, you would have your heroes and I would have mine. The center of your world may be Iggy Pop, or Joni Mitchell, or maybe Dylan. Mine might be KISS, or Pearl Jam, but we would never see eye-to-eye again and be brought together by one music again. And his final quote in the article was, “So, instead of saying goodbye to Elvis, I’m gonna say goodbye to you.”

  While that’s been proven a thousand times over, still here we are in a town with thousands of bands, each with a style, and a philosophy, and a song of their own. And I think the best of them believe that they have the power to turn Lester’s prophecy inside out, and to beat his odds.

  So as the records that my music was initially released on give way to a cloud of ones and zeroes, and as I carry my entire record collection since I was thirteen in my breast pocket, I’d like to talk about the one thing that’s been consistent over the years, the genesis and power of creativity, the power of the songwriter, or let’s say, composer, or just creator. So whether you’re making dance music, Americana, rap music, electronica, it’s all about how you are putting what you do together. The elements you’re using don’t matter. Purity of human expression and experience is not confined to guitars, to tubes, to turntables, to microchips. There is no right way, no pure way, of doing it. There’s just doing it.

  We live in a post-authentic world. And today authenticity is a house of mirrors. It’s all just what you’re bringing when the lights go down. It’s your teachers, your influences, your personal history; and at the end of the day, it’s the power and purpose of your music that still matters.

  So I’m gonna talk a little bit today about how I’ve put what I’ve done together, in the hopes that someone slugging away in one of the clubs tonight may find some small piece of it valuable. And this being Woody Guthrie’s one hundredth birthday, and the centerpiece of this year’s South by Southwest Conference, I’m also gonna talk a little about my musical development, and where it intersected with Woody’s, and why.

  In the beginning, every musician has their genesis moment. For you, it might have been the Sex Pistols, or Madonna, or Public Enemy. It’s whatever initially inspires you to action. Mine was 1956, Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was the evening I realized a white man could make magic, that you did not have to be constrained by your upbringing, by the way you looked, or by the social context that oppressed you. You could call upon your own powers of imagination, and you could create a transformative self.

  A certain type of transformative self, that perhaps at any other moment in American history might have seemed difficult, if not impossible. And I always tell my kids that they were lucky to be born in the age of reproducible technology, otherwise they’d be t
raveling in the back of a wagon and I’d be wearing a jester’s hat. It’s all about timing. The advent of television and its dissemination of visual information changed the world in the fifties the way the Internet has over the past twenty years.

  Remember, it wasn’t just the way Elvis looked, it was the way he moved that made people crazy, pissed off, driven to screaming ecstasy and profane revulsion. That was television. When they made an attempt to censor him from the waist down, it was because of what you could see happening in his pants. Elvis was the first modern twentieth century man, the precursor of the Sexual Revolution, of the Civil Rights Revolution, drawn from the same Memphis as Martin Luther King, creating fundamental, outsider art that would be embraced by a mainstream popular culture.

  Television and Elvis gave us full access to a new language, a new form of communication, a new way of being, a new way of looking, a new way of thinking—about sex, about race, about identity, about life. A new way of being an American, a human being, and a new way of hearing music. Once Elvis came across the airwaves, once he was heard and seen in action, you could not put the genie back in the bottle. After that moment, there was yesterday, and there was today, and there was a red-hot, rockabilly forging of a new tomorrow, before your very eyes.

  So, one week later, inspired by the passion in Elvis’s pants, my little six-year-old fingers wrapped themselves around a guitar neck for the first time, rented from Mike Deal’s Music in Freehold, New Jersey. They just wouldn’t fit. Failure with a capital F. So I just beat on it, and beat on it, and beat on it—in front of the mirror, of course. I still do that. Don’t you? Come on, you gotta check your moves. All right?

  But even before there was Elvis, my world had begun to be shaped by the little radio with the six-inch mono speaker that sat on top of our refrigerator. My mother loved music, and she raised us on pop-music radio. So between eight and eight thirty every morning, as I snowed sugar onto my Sugar Pops, the sounds of early pop and doo-wop whispered into my young and impressionable ears. Doo-wop, the most sensual music ever made, the sound of raw sex, of silk stockings rustling on backseat upholstery, the sound of the snaps of bras popping across the U.S.A., of wonderful lies being whispered into Tabu-perfumed ears, the sound of smeared lipstick, untucked shirts, running mascara, tears on your pillow, secrets whispered in the still of the night, the high-school bleachers, and the dark at the YMCA canteen. The soundtrack for your incredibly, wonderful limp-your-ass, blue-balled walk back home after the dance. Oh! And it hurt so good.

  In the late fifties and early sixties, doo-wop dripped from radios in the gas stations, factories, streets, and pool halls—the temples of life and mystery in my little hometown. And I would always be enraptured by its basic chord progression. Isn’t there supposed to be a guitar around here somewhere? Anybody got one? [Strums guitar and sings opening lines of the song “Backstreets”:] “One soft infested summer, me and Terry became friends …”

  It all comes from the same place. Well anyway, then into my thirteen-year-old ears came sixties pop. Roy Orbison. Besides Johnny Cash, he was the other Man in Black. He was the true master of the romantic apocalypse you dreaded and knew was coming after the first night you whispered, “I love you,” to your new girlfriend. You were going down. Roy was the coolest uncool loser you’d ever seen. With his Coke-bottle black glasses, his three-octave range, he seemed to take joy sticking his knife deep into the hot belly of your teenage insecurities.

  Simply the titles, “Crying,” “It’s Over,” “Running Scared.” That’s right, the paranoia, oh, the paranoia. He sang about the tragic unknowability of women. He was tortured by soft skin, angora sweaters, beauty, and death—just like you. But he also sang that he’d been risen to the heights of near unexpressable bliss by these same very things that tortured him. Oh, cruel irony.

  And for those few moments, he told you that the wreckage, and the ruin, and the heartbreak was all worth it. I got it, my young songwriters. Wisdom said to me: Life is tragedy, broken by moments of unworldly bliss that make that tragedy bearable. I was half right. That wasn’t life—that was pop music.

  But at twenty-four, who knew the difference? So I was on my way. Then Spector and the Wall of Sound. Phil’s entire body of work could be described by the title of one of his lesser-known productions, “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss).” Phil’s records felt like near chaos, violence covered in sugar and candy, sung by the girls who were sending Roy-o running straight for the antidepressants. If Roy was opera, Phil was symphonies, little three-minute orgasms, followed by oblivion.

  And Phil’s greatest lesson was sound. Sound is its own language. I mean, the first thing you would think of with Phil Spector is [mimics a drum beat]. That was all you needed. And then, the British Invasion. My first real guitar, I actually began to learn how to play, and this was different, shifted the lay of the land. Four guys, playing and singing, writing their own material. There was no longer gonna be a music producer apart from the singer, a singer who didn’t write, a writer who didn’t sing. It changed the way things were done. The Beatles were cool. They were classical, formal, and created the idea of an independent unit where everything could come out of your garage. The Meet the Beatles album cover, those four headshots. I remember, I seen ’em at J. J. Newberry’s. It was the first thing I saw when you ran down to the five-and-ten-cent store. There were no record stores. There weren’t enough records, I don’t think, in those days. There was a little set by the toys where they sold a few albums.

  And I remember running in and seeing that album cover with those four headshots. It was like the silent gods of Olympus. Your future was just sort of staring you in the face. I remember thinking, “That’s too cool. I’m never gonna get there, man, never.” And then in some fanzine I came across a picture of the Beatles in Hamburg. And they had on the leather jackets and the slick-backed pompadours, they had acned faces. I said, “Hey, wait a minute, those are the guys I grew up with, only they were Liverpool wharf rats.”

  So minus their Nehru jackets and the haircuts—so these guys, they’re kids. They’re a lot cooler than me, but they’re still kids. There must be a way to get there from here. Then for me, it was the Animals. For some, they were just another one of the really good beat groups that came out of the sixties. But to me, the Animals were a revelation. The first records with full-blown class consciousness that I had ever heard. “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” had that great bass riff, that [plays bass line of “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”] and that was just marking time. [Sings and strums “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.”]

  That’s every song I’ve ever written. Yeah. That’s all of them. I’m not kidding, either. That’s “Born to Run,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” everything I’ve done for the past forty years, including all the new ones. But that struck me so deep. It was the first time I felt I heard something come across the radio that mirrored my home life, my childhood. And the other thing that was great about the Animals was there were no good-looking members. There were none. They were considered to be one of the ugliest groups in all of rock and roll.

  And that was good. That was good for me, because I considered myself hideous at the time. And they weren’t nice. They didn’t curry favor. They were like aggression personified. It’s my life, I’ll do what I want. They were cruel. They were cruel, which was so freeing. It was so freeing. When you saw Eric Burdon, he was like your shrunken daddy with a wig on. He never had a kid’s face. He always had a little man’s face.

  And he couldn’t dance. And they put him in a suit, but it was like putting a gorilla in a suit. You could tell he was like, “Fuck that shit, man.” He didn’t want it. And then he had that voice that was, like, I don’t know, the Howlin’ Wolf, or something—coming out of some seventeen- or eighteen-year-old kid. I don’t know how it happened. I found their cruelty so freeing. What was that great verse in “It’s My Life”? “It’s a hard world to get a break in, all the good things have been taken.” And then, “Though dressed in th
ese rags I’ll wear sable someday, hear what I say / I’m gonna ride the serpent, No more time spent sweating rent.” Then that beautiful,

  It’s my life

  Show me I’m wrong, hurt me sometime

  Hurt me sometime

  But someday I’ll treat you real fine

  I love that.

  And then they had the name. The name was very different from the Beatles, or Herman’s Hermits, or Freddie and the Dreamers. The name was unforgiving and final and irrevocable. I mean, it was in your face. It was the most unapologetic group name until the Sex Pistols came along.

  “Badlands,” “Prove It All Night,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town” were filled with the Animals. Youngsters, watch this one. I’m gonna tell you how it’s done, right now. I took “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” … [Sings and strums beginning of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” then sings melody of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” while strumming chords of “Badlands.”]

  It’s the same fucking riff, man. Listen up, listen up, youngsters, this is how successful theft is accomplished. Darkness was also informed by the punk explosion at the time. I went out and I got all the records, all the early punk records, and I bought “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “God Save the Queen,” and the Sex Pistols were so frightening. They literally shook the earth. And a lot of groups managed shocking. But frightening, frightening was something else. There were very, very few rock groups that managed frightening. And that was a great quality, and it was part of their great beauty.

  They were brave, and they challenged you, and they made you brave, and a lot of that energy seeped its way into the subtext of Darkness. Darkness was written in 1977, and all of that music was out there, and if you had ears you could not ignore it. And I had peers that did. And they were mistaken. You could not ignore that challenge.