Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters

by Jeff Burger

  He pauses again. The music swells slightly, but otherwise there’s complete silence. The audience sits breathless, waiting to see: Can this Yankee rock and roller conjure too? Springsteen resumes in a harsh, rushed whisper. “All of a sudden, there’s this light in the sky above me and a great big voice booms out and says …” Beat. The music drops down. “‘Let it rock!’” And the band hits it, Springsteen singing, “I stood stone-like at midnight …” The audience is on its feet cheering. It works!

  After the show, a group of European journalists is ushered backstage for an informal press conference with Bruce. While the rest of the band members casually make their way to the post-concert party on the other side of town, Springsteen, who is as uplifting and inspiring a performer as there is, becomes almost vehement denying an English reporter’s suggestion that rock and roll is about nihilism. Two days later, I remind Bruce of the exchange. He makes a small boxlike gesture with his hands to try and contain this belief he feels is too big to contain.

  “Sometimes people ask,” he tells me, “who are your favorites? My favorites change. Sometimes it’s Elvis. Sometime it’s Buddy Holly. Different personalities. For me, the idea of rock and roll is sort of my favorite. The feeling. It’s a certain thing … Like rock and roll came to my house”—again, rock and roll becomes palpable, becomes flesh—“where there seemed to be no way out. It just seemed like a dead-end street, nothing I like to do, nothing I wanted to do except roll over and go to sleep or something. And it came into my house—snuck in, ya know, and opened up a whole world of possibilities. Rock and roll. The Beatles opened doors. Ideally, if any stuff I do could ever do that for somebody, that’s the best. Can’t do anything better than that. Rock and roll motivates. It’s the big, gigantic motivator, at least it was for me.

  “There’s a whole lot of things involved, but that’s what I think you gotta remain true to. That idea, that feeling. That’s the real spirit of the music. You have to give to the audience and try to click that little trigger, that little mechanism. It’s different things to different people. I got in a cab with a guy down South, and we’re riding around. Then he says, ‘Hey, you know what I like about your shows is I go see a concert [by someone else] and I’m fixed all day for the next day, and when I go to your shows I feel good for a week.’” Springsteen wheezes a laugh. “This is what it is. I thought that was a good review.”

  Another good review: During the show that night in New Orleans, a prim fortyish woman leans over the edge of the stage and hands Bruce a tiny object. At the end of the song, I see him lean back down to her, trying to return the gift, but she won’t budge. Finally, there is nothing he can do but pocket the gift and get on with the show. “It was a ring. And I looked at it, and it looked like a real thing, you know, with stones in it. So I tell her—I can’t keep this. And she tells me it was her grandmother’s engagement ring, and she wants me to have it! That’s gonna make me keep it? Maybe if she’d told me she’d just bought it at Woolworth’s for thirty-nine cents … but her grandmother’s engagement ring? Wow, what’s that?”

  That, I tell him, must be True Love. He leaves the ring with the hall manager with the instructions to return it to the lady should she come around looking, having had a change of heart. That is caring.

  Bruce heads back to the hotel after the press conference, and I’m over at the party at Acy’s Pool Hall & Restaurant on Sophie Wright Place. Situated in a poor black and white neighborhood outside the French Quarter, Acy’s is a windowless cement-floor dump where the only light is from the abrasive fluorescent lamps swinging over the six fully occupied pool tables. Something right out of the movie Fat City (there is in fact a city outside of New Orleans called Fat City).

  By the time I arrived, the crew and band had decimated the Dixie beer, leaving only Miller and Pabst Blue Ribbon, and Ernie K. Doe and his pickup band playing off in the corner have decimated the band and crew. Ernie K. Doe had his one and only hit record with “Mother-in-Law” in the early sixties, and until an intrepid advance scout from Springsteen’s party unearthed him, he had been living in relative obscurity, like so many other greats of his era, multivented in New Orleans. As I walk in, Ernie K. Doe, dapper in a beige multivented suit over a dark open-neck silk shirt, every hair carefully pomaded into place, has run out of words to the song. But he doesn’t want the folks to stop dancing and is repeating, “Well, all right,” endlessly over the solid locomotive beat.

  When, after a good five minutes, Ernie K. Doe has run out of “Well, all rights,” he brings the music down and introduces the band—but not by name. “Let’s have a hand for the man on the bass!” he shouts, and there’s a round of applause. “Let’s have a hand for the man on the drums!” and so on, until he gets to Clarence Clemons, who is sitting in discreetly with his sax.

  I wonder. For all Ernie K. Doe knows, Clarence is just another guy who sauntered in off the street. Like I say, music is at least second nature to New Orleans. I listen carefully to his introductions. Without missing a beat, with not the slightest emphasis, Ernie K. Doe calls out, “Let’s have a hand for the man on the tenor sax!” The locomotive beat continues. Ernie K. Doe falls silent (these party gigs get tired after a while), and then while the steady semidrunk dance floor continues to bop, Ernie K. Doe goes through the introductions (one more time!) for want of something better. “Let’s have another hand …” Clarence Clemons plays on discreetly, diligently, strictly “the man on the tenor sax” playing for the love of rock and roll.

  As much as you can take any of the Confederacy at face value (you can’t really), you can say that Jackson, Mississippi, looks like a simple, sleepy town, and that it is. After a day off in New Orleans, the Springsteen-E Street juggernaut is off to Jackson, a couple hundred miles up the Delta. The auditorium there is probably the newest and largest structure in town, and two different times, as I’m standing in front of it, cars full of kids pull up to ask where they can find it. I tell them and assume they do, because the hall in Jackson is full later.

  Bruce Springsteen says that playing new halls like this makes him nervous. He much prefers a place that’s been “broken into rock and roll.” I understand his point. The crowd here is relatively subdued, almost indifferent to the carpeting and new chandeliers. But belying his statement, the show is about as loose as Bruce and the band get.

  “Let’s get some lights on ya. I got a pimple on my face and you probably look better than I do,” Springsteen says to the crowd at one point in the show. By intermission, of course, caution has been cast to the wind and everyone’s clapping and bopping, and crowding the front of the stage as much as the older security guards will allow.

  One underfed blond boy is particularly excited. Oblivious to the exhortations of the guards, he is dancing wildly at the edge of the stage, eyes riveted on his favorite rock and roller. At one point, between songs, he tosses a Bruce Springsteen belt buckle onstage, a present. Bruce picks it up, admires it, thanks the boy, and without thinking asks jokingly, “So where’s the belt?” Need I say more? In a second, the fan has ripped off his belt and tosses it up, too. Next comes his shirt. The guards make their move. “I had my eyes closed to sing a verse,” says Bruce, “and the next time I looked, the kid’s shirt is on the stage. I’m looking around for his pants when I see the guard grab him.”

  There is a slight scuffle (slight compared with the heavy head-busting tactics of most of the sadisto New York security goons), and the boy disappears into the crowd. Bruce tramps the edge of the stage looking for the boy; implicit in his action is a warning to the guard to cool it. Then he runs back to Miami Steve, who relays the message to one of the road crew. “‘Find him. Find the kid,’ is what I said,” says Bruce. “’Cause I don’t want him going out.’

  “What happens is that a lot of the security in a lot of places don’t understand. Kids get real excited, but they’re not mean; they’re just excited. I always watch out. Like in San Diego, I had to jump down and get this kid out. One of the security guards had th
e kid by the head. I’d seen the kid at a couple of shows and I’d talked to him outside. This kid’s not looking for trouble. What happens is the kids have a reaction to security, which is if the security guard grabs ’em, they think they’re gonna get thrown out and they try to get away. People just don’t wanna get thrown out of the show.

  “Anyway, this kid in San Diego’s real excited. He runs up to the stage. They grab him and try to pull him back and he tries to get away. So I went down and I pulled the kid away and the security guards are trying not to let go ’cause they’re afraid he’s gonna do something. Finally, we sent him up onstage and let him sit on the side. You gotta watch. You gotta do that. I can’t watch kids getting knocked down in the front row because that’s me. That’s a part of me.”

  Did someone say something about a fisher of men?

  Maybe the times are too complicated for miracles. Maybe, as Springsteen says, “The enemy’s complicated, much more subtle now.” Maybe it’s just hard to be a saint in America. Too much dirt. Too many faces.

  The underfed blond kid without his shirt has brought one more present to the backstage entrance after the show where he’s waited an hour and a half for Springsteen to make his customary appearance (I have detained Bruce with this interview). Springsteen picks the kid out of the small crowd around the door, asks him how he is, laughs, and then carefully autographs the boy’s proffered Frisbee. “Thanks!” the kid says feverishly. “Thanks for comin’!” says Springsteen.

  As Bruce turns his attention to other fans, the hungry boy looks at his back with intense hungry eyes, hesitates for a second, his jaw hanging open, his tongue secretly wrapping itself around a pronunciation he wants to get right. Then as the crowd flows between the boy and his idol, the boy decides to do it and then blurts at Bruce’s back. It’s a word he’s been working on for days, weeks, maybe months or years: It’s his last and dearest gift to this Yankee guy who means so much to him. “Shalom!” he shouts. That his final, extra special gift goes unheard in the hubbub doesn’t matter. The boy dashes off, happy to be saved again (at least for the week), happier that he has tried something for Bruce Springsteen.

  “Where you all from?”

  “New York City,” my companion and I respond.

  “I was producing shows at the Fox and then Alan came up and was producing shows at the Fox and Paramount, too. We were both doing shows, but you might say I created New York City!” The white man in the oldies shop goes on and on. We’re not allowed to leave.

  “And that Hank Williams story, that movie, ya know [Your Cheating Heart, 1956]. There he is lying in the back of the car all dead on booze and pills and where was he headed for? Canton, Ohio! Did you read that? Did you see that in the movie? There I am backstage, cussing him all up and down, saying that when I get my hands on that son of a bitch I’m gonna tear him limb from limb. I’m out 750 bucks! I was producin’ a Hank Williams show that night and I’m out 750 bucks—750 bucks I don’t have! Wouldn’t that’ve made a much better ending for that movie? Me standing backstage pulling out my hair and cussing him out ’cause I’m out 750 bucks! Did you ever hear about that?

  “Huey Smith, the same Huey ‘Piano’ Smith right here on this record. (He’s a preacher now. Don’t make no money. Nooo! Huey ‘Piano’ Smith mows lawns for two bucks an hour!) So Huey says to me he just wants to make enough money so he can sue that producer of his. I say, ‘You got it all wrong, Huey. That’s not the way to approach it.’ I say, ‘Huey, I got an idea. You and me are gonna put on a show with all the old New Orleans people and we’re gonna do it right over there in that Superdome! And then you know what? Huey? We are gonna laugh all the way to the bank!’”

  But he isn’t laughing. And as we edge out the door he’s talking again. Half a block away as we round the corner, I’m sure he’s talking still. Weeks later, I’m sure he’s still talking and almost weeping. I’m sure that somewhere in the murky city of New Orleans a white man is detaining rock-and-roll fans with his past. And somewhere out in the heartland, Bruce Springsteen is digging after him.

  BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE

  MIKE GREENBLATT | October 11, 1978, The Aquarian (New Jersey)

  By the fall of 1978, when Robert Duncan’s article appeared, Springsteen had been at the top of the rock-and-roll heap for more than three years, thanks to Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and a seemingly endless series of concerts—including a much-talked-about three-night gig at Passaic, New Jersey’s Capitol Theater. (The first of these shows was broadcast live on the radio and later surfaced on a popular bootleg.) A month before those performances, he made the first of many appearances on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

  These successes notwithstanding, Springsteen was still not so far removed from the old days that he couldn’t spend hours cruising around his New Jersey home bases with an alternative-weekly reporter—and no publicist in tow. That’s just what he did with Mike Greenblatt, who took a ride with Bruce in a borrowed ’78 Camaro and got a revealing taste of his audiocassette collection. —Ed.

  We’ve been sitting on a bench facing the ocean near the Casino Arena in Asbury Park. It’s forty-five minutes past our appointed meeting time with Bruce Springsteen and we’re trying to light matches in the wind. It’s past one thirty now and we’re wondering whether he’s going to show up. Hell, it’s a beautiful sunny fall day, one of his few days off from a grueling whirlwind tour of the country. And it’s his birthday to boot. Maybe he just ain’t gonna show.

  But we’re determined. We’re prepared to wait for two more hours. Then, if he’s still not here, we’ll split. We’ve already tired of scrutinizing all the faces for something that will tell us it’s him in disguise. We forget our quest and go back to the matches.

  “Hi,” he says as he walks right up to us. “Sorry I’m late. I just got up.” He’s dressed in a bluish work shirt and jeans. He has his ever-present sunglasses on. We decide to break the ice over lunch.

  Settling into a booth at the Convention Hall Coffee Shop, I order a BLT, photographer Sorce a cheeseburger, and Bruce a hamburger, french fries, and Coke.

  “Yeah, we had a real rep,” Bruce starts to say. “We could draw two, maybe three thousand people on any given night. We played our own concerts here and also down South. It’s weird. Nobody would book us because we never did any Top 40. Never. We used to play all old soul stuff, Chuck Berry, just the things we liked. That’s why we couldn’t get booked. We made enough to eat, though.”

  The waitresses are starting to mill about the table, so Bruce puts his shades back on and hushes up his tone. “The other night was amazing,” he whispers. “I went to see Animal House and when I came out of the theater there was a whole bunch of people that started following me to the parking lot. I wound up signing autographs for over an hour.

  “Anyway, after a while, the kicks started to wear off and a lot of the time we didn’t make enough to eat. That’s why I signed with Mike [Appel]. Anything was better than what was happening at the time.”

  Little did the local rocker know that this early signing with Appel would result in the latter claiming rights to the early material Springsteen had written. The rest of the courtroom drama is famous. Perhaps generously, Bruce had nothing bad to say about his former manager.

  “He did a lot of good for me at that time,” he says, dipping one particularly long french fry into a mound of ketchup. “He introduced me to John Hammond [CBS bigwig responsible for signing Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, and others]. He helped me on that first album.” He pauses as if he were ruminating on something. “I haven’t seen him since that day.

  “Actually, I was pretty shielded from the whole thing,” he continues. “Mike put the onus on Jon [Landau], claiming he was the culprit.”

  “You mean he charged Landau with stealing you away from him?”

  “Yeah, sort of. I was never much good at the business end of things.”

  Asked about the famous line Landau wrote
for his Rolling Stone review [Greenblatt makes the same mistake here as others; the review appeared in Boston’s Real Paper. —Ed.] (“I saw rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen”), Bruce says, “That line is misrepresentative of the whole review. It’s funny. The review was nothing like that one line. It got taken out of context.” Another myth shattered.

  “I remember playing in a club where an earlier review that Jon wrote was splashed all over the outside wall. I was leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette, when Jon practically bumped into me. I had never met him. We hit it off right away.”

  When asked if he ever gave up during the long months of inactivity, Bruce still remains bright, completely devoid of bitterness. “I knew that it was just a matter of time. We were playing almost throughout that whole episode, even though we weren’t supposed to. I mean, what kind of law is it that is written specifically to stop a man from doing what he does to make his money?

  “The only real frustrating thing which did cause me grief was the fact that my songs weren’t my own. I didn’t own my own songs. That hurt.”

  But that just makes it all the more satisfying now. At Nassau Coliseum, thousands of kids screamed their guts out for him before he even played a song. They didn’t let up until he finished, drained and exhausted. At the Capitol Theatre, two nights before, he was surprised onstage by a giant birthday cake out of which a scantily clad girl bounced. He swears he didn’t know a thing about it (“I even told [concert promoter] John Scher ‘no cakes’”). At Madison Square Garden, eighteen thousand fans leaned on every note as if it were the last they would ever hear. A gala party was held for him in the plush Penn Plaza Club located deep inside the bowels of the Garden. Security was the tightest I’d ever witnessed.