by Jeff Burger
“I used to feel I always was in control,” says Springsteen, “but now I’m not so sure.”
RADIO INTERVIEW
DAVE HERMAN | July 9, 1978, king Biscuit Flower Hour, D.I.R. Radio Network (US)
A lot changed for Bruce Springsteen between the time Andrew Tyler interviewed him in 1975 and the lengthy conversation disc jockey Dave Herman conducted with him in San Diego nearly three years later.
The news wasn’t all good. A legal battle with first manager Mike Appel prevented Springsteen from recording for more than a year, beginning in 1976. But the suit was settled in May 1977 and by the time Bruce met with Herman, he had the evidence to prove that he was no one-hit wonder: he’d just released the Jon Landau-coproduced Darkness on the Edge of Town on June 2, 1978, and was promoting it with a massively successful nationwide tour.
Meanwhile, he had enjoyed so much success with Born to Run that complaints about not being able to pay the bills were just a memory. “Now, all of a sudden … there’s more money than we can spend,” said Springsteen. The new challenge was not how to make ends meet but how to avoid being swallowed whole by fame and fortune. —Ed.
Dave Herman: Bruce, there seems to be quite a change going on with you. I mean, for one, you’ve never given [many] interviews before. And now, suddenly, you’re quite agreeable to talking. What’s up?
Bruce Springsteen: I didn’t want an instant replay of my Born to Run release and so I initially said, “Well, I’m not gonna do any interviews right now. I’m gonna lay low and let the record come out.” And I just realized a lot of things have changed since 1975. Slowly, I guess after the past month or so, I took a different attitude towards promoting my record.
DH: That’s what it boils down to.
BS: [I had thought,] What? Promote my record? I can’t do that!
DH: Did you think it was kind of like selling your own stuff? Like promoting is almost like selling?
BS: Well, it is. That’s what you do. I’d chased very aggressively after what I was trying to get in the studio and I worked real, real hard on it. And I believe in it a lot. And for some reason, it just dawned on me that it was silly to [not promote it]. I mean, the records ain’t going to sprout legs and walk out of stores and jump onto people’s record players and say, “Listen to me.”
I worked a year on this thing and I put everything I had into it. Now I want to get as many people listening to it as possible. You don’t inherit an audience and they don’t run over and knock on your door and sit in your lap. I think you gotta go out and say, “Here’s what I think. I believe this,” and give people a chance to hear it and make up their minds. I was a little wary [at first]. I was afraid of the Born to Run thing.
This 1978 Haddonfield, New Jersey, shot is from the sessions that produced the cover image for Darkness on the Edge of Town.
FRANK STEFANKO
DH: By that you mean all the publicity and all the press and all the hype.
BS: I didn’t have it in perspective. I didn’t know what had frightened me about that and what had not. So I just bunched everything into something I called “the Born to Run experience.”
DH: Have you been able to separate what it was that frightened you about it?
BS: Yeah, since then. What frightened me about it was, I started to play to get as much say and control of my life as I could, and that’s what I felt slipping away and that’s what was scaring me. And I was real naïve about it at the time. We’d blown through three or four years of playing, we had albums out, the money came in, the money went out. I was doing what I’d always wanted to do with my life. I was traveling around and I felt really good. And then what happens is you become what is known as a “capital generator,” something that makes money.
DH: For lots of other people …
BS: Right. All of a sudden, it’s a different ballgame and a different ballpark, and you better get wise to it or else you’re gonna get stomped on.
DH: You become not only Bruce Springsteen the person but Bruce Springsteen the product.
BS: To ignore that fact is just stupid and it’s not real, and I spent a lot of time ignoring that. I was living out my rock-and-roll dream there. Once I got in that position of where all of a sudden there’s more money than we can spend, then come the distractions. “Hey, do you want this? Do you want that? Hey, you can have this. Do you want a car? Do you want a limo?” All the standard distractions—
DH: —that happen when you get to be rich and famous …
BS: That come down the line to take your mind off what is real and the things you started out for. But I always had it in my head. I always knew what I was doing there, because when I was losing it, I knew when it was slipping away. I knew why I started and I knew when it was slipping away and I got scared by it.
DH: What is it you wanted to do when you started?
BS: You know, it’s easy to wander. A lot of people wander through their lives. You’re bouncing off walls, you’re bouncing off people, you’re bouncing off different jobs. And you end up fifty-five and you never found something that you wanted to do.
DH: Sounds like “Racing in the Street.”
BS: And you’re down the tubes. And when I was thirteen or fourteen, I found something that was like a key to a little door, that said, “There’s more to it than this. There’s more to [life] than just living that way.”
DH: Is that when you decided you wanted to get into rock and roll—when you were thirteen, fourteen, and heard these records?
BS: I was nine when my mother was an Elvis Presley fan, and she had him on the TV and she used to listen to him on the radio every morning in my house. You know, you’d come down before you go to school. My mother would be cooking up the breakfast. She’s got the radio on top of the refrigerator tuned to an AM station ever since I could remember. So something connected then but I was a little young. I didn’t have the discipline to stick with it. But then when I was thirteen, when the English thing happened, the Beatles and the Animals and the Stones—
DH: Dave Clark—
BS: That really kicked it off for me. I said, “Well, that looks like something that’s good to get into.” The point once again was to have some say in the way you’re gonna live and the thing you’re gonna do, and for the first time in a long time during the Born to Run thing I felt that slippin’ away. You know, I felt the old gas pedal stuck to the floor in a runaway car.
DH: People were running you, and you weren’t running your own life.
BS: Yeah, and I was lucky enough to realize it and grind it to a halt. There was a moment where I assessed my strengths and my weaknesses. And I’m glad it happened. I ain’t got one regret about one second of the past three years because I learned a lot from it.
DH: So Darkness on the Edge of Town is a whole new beginning for you because you’ve got a whole new perspective on yourself and your life.
BS: It’s a continuation, actually. You can hear it in the record, I hope.
DH: What I’m getting from you is that even though Darkness is your fourth album, you feel emotionally attached to it and have a lot of yourself invested in it, more than even the first three—that it’s a real important step in your life, this record. I’m kind of picking that up from you. And it brings me around to talking about certain things about the making of Darkness on the Edge of Town and about some of the stuff on it. The first thing that I’m wondering about is how did you and Jon Landau get together? Jon coproduced the album with you—
BS: I met Jon in Boston at a place called Charlie’s Place. I think it was in Harvard Square. It’s not there anymore. I remember it was in the wintertime and I was standing outside in the freezing cold. And he’d written that review of The Wild, the Innocent and they had it in the window, I guess to get people to come in. And he walked up to me as I was reading it and said, “Ah, I wrote that. I’m Jon Landau.” I said, “How ya doin’?” And he came in and saw the show.
DH: And that’s the review that had the famous line that—
BS: No, no, that wasn’t the famous line—
DH: That’s not the famous “I saw the future” line?
BS: No, no.
DH: For the benefit of the people listening, the famous line that they used in ads is Jon Landau’s line, “I saw the future of rock and roll and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” Now tell them about the line.
BS: The funny thing about that line is most people never read the article that it came from. And if they had read the article, it was not saying exactly what it seemed to say when it was used in the ad. And I believe it was only run in one ad but it was picked up so fast. As soon as I saw it, I said, “Uh-oh, this looks like trouble to me.” It was good intentions. But it was like a kiss of death. The article still means a lot to me. He saw a show and was writing about it and I think what he was saying was that the music that we were playing was a compilation of a lot of things, not just past influences and present but also …
DH: Your own … ?
BS: Yeah, yeah. That was the intention of the line, but I guess somebody at the ad department said, “This is it!” and it went out.
DH: Advertising people are always looking for little catchphrases.
BS: Yeah, that’s their job.
DH: Anyway, he came up to you and said, “I wrote that article.”
BS: Yeah and I said, “How ya doin’?” and “Come in,” and we played and then I didn’t see him and he was sick for a while and he went in the hospital and we made Born to Run. Me and Mike Appel produced it and I sent him a tape when he was in the hospital. And I called him and he said, “Gee whiz, first time I heard it, it just sounded like a bunch of noise, but after I listened to it for a while, I could hear what was going on there.”
He came back to New York and we got together, and I was having problems creatively in the studio. I was just having a hard time making records. It was a long time in between The Wild, the Innocent and Born to Run. It was like two years. We were all a bunch of amateurs basically. Even [now] there’s not that much experience.
And we came up with some problems that we couldn’t solve and I talked to Jon and he had some answers, and I just saw him as being another key to me being able to go on and do what I wanted to do. And eventually he came in and coproduced Born to Run. He opened a lot of doors for me because he was different than me and he exposed me to things that I hadn’t been exposed to before.
DH: So you started hanging around a lot together, going to the movies—
BS: Oh yeah, sure. I spent a lot of time with him when we made the record … I guess for six, seven, eight months. Quite a bit of time. And he broke down a lot of barriers to some of the problems we were having.
DH: Can you be more specific?
BS: There were a million little things, like the right piano, the right studio …
DH: And arrangements and getting the sound you wanted?
BS: I knew what sound I wanted; I was having some difficulty getting it. You’re trying to make something that is a non-physical thing and trying to make it physical.
DH: You’ve got something in your head and you’re trying …
BS: Right. So I knew what I wanted; that’s how come I knew I wasn’t getting it. And he just said, “Well, we could use a better studio, we could use a better this, we could use different things.” He’d just have different perceptions of things, like, “Try this tone on the guitar.” Various small things that—when it all came together—was a big contribution to put the thing over the hill.
DH: Is that one of the reasons why it took so much time?
BS: Born to Run—it didn’t take that long, actually. Born to Run the album was recorded in about four months.
DH: I think the first release date on Darkness on the Edge of Town was somewhere around October ’77. Columbia wanted it out for Christmas or something like that and we finally got it about a year and a half later. [Herman probably meant to say the first release date was around October ’76; the actual release date was June 2, 1978. —Ed.]
BS: I had an idea and I was just going after it. You know, if you can go in and do it in two weeks, great. If it takes a year, if it takes six months, it’s your own shirt, you know, so you might as well do what you want to do.
DH: You feel real good about the way this one’s come out, I take it.
BS: Yeah, I like it. There’s a lot of things that I would do differently and I hear differently now, but I think it’s an honest record and that’s what I was trying to make.
DH: I think it’s a great record, for whatever that’s worth.
BS: Well … that’s good.
DH: But part of the reason it took so long, I’m told, and cost so much money is that you did a lot more songs than you needed for an album. There are ten songs on Darkness …
BS: There’s about thirty songs we did. Not finished but started. Some of ’em are finished and some of them found their way to other places. “Fire” Robert Gordon did, “Because the Night” Patti [Smith] did.
DH: What track was the hardest one to get down on the album?
BS: Let me think …
DH: How about “Badlands”?
BS: Maybe so. It was hard to sing. Because when I write, I usually write the music first and then I think, “Oh brother, now I’ve got to write words to go with this …” With “Badlands,” I had the word “badlands” and then I had chord changes and we’d go in the studio and lay the track down. And I’d go home and I’d play the tape and write the words, but I wouldn’t do it out loud, I’d write ’em in my head. So I’d go in the studio and I’d try to sing it, and I’d realize that it was hard to breathe and sing it all at once. So that was hard to sing. Some of the songs are physically harder to play than some of the other ones. “Born to Run” was like that, too.
DH: I’ve got to talk to you about the band, find out how you met these guys and your relationship with them. Because the E Street Band is so much a part of Bruce Springsteen and the record and the show, and it’s such a great rock-and-roll band. We’ll talk about Danny first because I think Danny Federici is the oldest member of the band, right?
BS: Yeah.
DH: How’d you guys get together?
BS: I remember it was at a place called the Upstage in Asbury Park. He was in a band that was pretty hot at the time. I believe the name of the band was the Moment of Truth. Him and Vini [Lopez]—Mad Dog. Mad Dog came up to me. His head was shaved bald. He’d been in jail or something and he said, “Listen, I just got out of jail but I got this band and we need a guitar player. Do you want to play?” I said, “Sure.”
DH: What were you doing at the time?
BS: I was freelancing on the guitar. I’d quit school and I was just playing, and I was making money at this club called the Upstage. I’d make anywhere from five to twenty-five dollars a night just jamming.
DH: They wanted you to join their band, Danny and Mad Dog?
BS: Yeah. I remember Danny was in a leather jacket and had his hair slicked back. And it was me and Danny and Vini and this fellow called Little Vini, who was a smaller version of Vini, played the bass.
DH: Were you the singer in the band?
BS: Yeah, at that time I was singing and playing.
DH: And when did Garry [Tallent] show up?
BS: Garry … it was funny because the first night I walked into this club … like I was from twenty miles inland. I was from Freehold and this place was on the shore. Very strict town lines and county lines. Very different lifestyles every ten or twenty miles.
DH: I lived in Asbury Park for ten years so I know like if you’re from Neptune [a nearby town] that means you’re not from Asbury Park …
BS: Exactly. And I’d played north, more on the coast, like up around Red Bank and Sea Bright where there were the beach clubs and there were more jobs there for us. It was tough to break in there because if you’re from Freehold, Freehold was …
DH: Farmers …
BS: Yeah, it was like that. And Asbury was funny. That was the only be
ach greaser town that was not like a collegiate kind of beach town at all. It was like Newark by the sea. And I went up to this club and I started to play—first night. And this guy pulls a chair out, sits it right in the middle of the dance floor and sits down on it and starts giving me what I perceive as dirty looks. And it was Garry. And I didn’t talk to him for quite a while after that. I assumed for one reason or another we weren’t gonna get along. And eventually we got together. Garry didn’t start playing with me till around 1970 or ’71. Because Miami Steve [Van Zandt] played bass before then. It was a four-piece band: me, Danny, Mad Dog, and when this fellow Little Vini left, Steve played bass guitar.
DH: Wait a minute—I thought you got together with Miami Steve around ’75. I thought when you played the Bottom Line, you introduced him as a new member of the band.
BS: See, the thing is, all these people have gone in and out. DH: Like a revolving door.
BS: Steve was in my band but it was a ways before the record. I was at home writing songs. We toured down South and stuff. So at the time of Greetings from Asbury Park, there was no formal band.
DH: Is Miami Steve on Greetings from Asbury Park?
BS: He is. I shouldn’t tell you where. He might be mad at me. See, we had a band. Steve was the bass player. We split up and then Steve played with the Dovells and Dion and he worked construction for a couple of years. But he actually didn’t get into the E Street Band until after Born to Run was completed.
DH: How about Roy [Bittan]? When did you get together with Roy? The way he’s playing piano on this tour and the sound of that piano is really beautiful. It’s gorgeous.
BS: I put an ad in the Village Voice for a drummer and piano player and I auditioned sixty guys—thirty drummers and thirty piano players—up at Studio Instrument Rentals in New York. That’s how I found Roy and Max [Weinberg].
DH: Max told me he showed up with one little snare drum. He said guys came before him and they had big drum kits. He said he was playing on Broadway in the pit of Godspell and he had two or three little drums with him and other guys were showing up with these big drum kits. And you worked him out on his little drums and he said, “I never thought I’d get the job but finally Bruce said, ‘Listen, if you want the job you can have it. It pays seventy-five dollars a week.’”