by Jeff Burger
BS: Well, you know, a little bit of mine has—the whole thing of when I was fifteen I wanted to play the guitar, I wanted to have a band, I wanted to travel, I wanted to be good, as good as I could be at that job. I wanted to be good at doing something that was useful to other people and to myself. You know, I think that’s the biggest reward of the whole thing—you make a lot of dough, you know, and that’s great, that’s fun, but the feeling that you go out there at night, you play some role in people’s lives, whether it’s just a night out, a dance, a good time, or maybe you make someone think a little bit different about themselves, or about the way that they live, which is what rock-and-roll music did to me. The interaction with the community is the real reward—that’s where I get the most satisfaction, and just doin’ it well … I’m proud of the way that we play, the kind of band that I’ve got now. It’s been a long time putting it together, we’re all ten years down the road … and it’s something I got a lot of pride in right now. So when we walk out onstage, your pride is on the line, and, you know, you don’t wanna let yourself down. And you don’t want to let down the people who come and see you.
RS: There are dangers attached to success, though, aren’t there? I mean, all my heroes let me down eventually.
BS: Well, it’s a funny thing. One of the problems is that the audience and the performer have got to leave some room for each other to be human. Or else they don’t deserve each other in a funny kinda way…. I think the position that you get put in is unrealistic to begin with. Basically, you’re just somebody who plays the guitar, and you do that good, and that’s great, that’s nice. If you do your job well, and people like it, and admire you for it, or respect you for it, that’s a plus. But the rest of the time you’re scramblin’ around in the dark like everyone else is. The idealizing of performers or politicians doesn’t seem to make much sense—it’s based on an image, and an image is always, basically, limiting. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily false; it’s just not complete. I don’t know, does that answer your question? [Laughs.] ’Cause I trailed off there …
RS: It’s that inspiration that you felt when you saw Elvis …
BS: The thing is, the inspiration comes from the music. The performer, he’s the guy that’s doing the music, but he’s not the thing. The thing itself is in the music—that’s where the spirit of the thing is. The performer is kind of what the music is coming through, but I guess what I feel is that Elvis … they got disillusioned. Well, I don’t feel personally that Elvis let anybody down. I don’t think he owed anything to anybody. As it was, he did more for most people than they’ll ever have done for them in their lives. The trouble that he ran into, well, it’s hard to keep your head above the water. But sometimes, it’s not right for people to judge.
RS: What would you have said to him that time you climbed over the wall of Graceland, if he’d been in and answered the door?
BS: [Laughs.] I don’t know, I wasn’t thinkin’ about that. I saw the light in the window. I was with Steve, Little Steven, and this taxicab driver, who was telling me not to go ’cause there were big dogs over there who’d bite! But I saw the light, and I just had to go, so I climbed over the wall and ran all the way up the driveway—this was about 3 or 4 AM—and I got to the door [laughs] and the guards came out. I said, “Gee, I’m a musician, had my picture on the cover of Time!” He just looked at me like I was a lunatic and said, “Elvis isn’t here and you gotta go.”
RS: How does it feel coming up to thirty-five?
BS: I feel good, feel better than I’ve ever felt before. I’m kinda at peace with the whole thing. I don’t think about it that much. I thought about it … I think I turned thirty when I was twenty-seven [laughs] and thought a lot about it then. After a while, it got to be not so important as you might think. I dealt with it in songs a little bit, and that’s fun. It just doesn’t seem relevant to me.
RS: Tell me how you make records now. It’s obviously changed a lot since the agonies that surrounded Born to Run. I understand these days a lot of it’s live?
BS: Yeah, that’s the way we made the Born in the U.S.A. record. It takes a long time making the records—but what I take a long time doing is not the recording. It’s in the conceptualizing of the record, where I’ll write three or four songs, and the fifth one I’ll keep. I’ll do that for quite a while. Generally, we just go in and we’ll spend a night—“Born in the U.S.A.,” that’s live, that’s a second take. “Darlington County” is all live—only two takes of that song. None of those songs are over five or six takes and they’re all live vocals with the exception, I think, of “Dancing in the Dark.” We overdubbed that voice. But it’s basically the band plays good, and we can go in, and once you do more than five or six takes, it doesn’t get any better.
I usually don’t teach the band the songs until we’re in the studio, until we’re about to record. Then I show ’em the chords real quick, so that they can’t learn how to play it, ’cause the minute they start learnin’ to play it, they start figurin’ out parts and they get self-conscious. But the first two takes when they’re learnin’ it, they’re worried about just hangin’ on. So they’re playing right at the edge, and they’re playing very intuitively, which is in general how our best stuff happens right now.
RS: When do you conceptualize all this? Does it spring from one song, or does it gradually appear as you’re doing the songs?
BS: I don’t really know how it’s gonna come out until the end. I have an idea sometimes of a tone that I want, or a feeling, and I’ll go in that direction. That I usually come up with somehow, but never the way I think I’m gonna come up with it … I never made a record that’s come out the way I thought it was gonna come out. A record is like anything else: If it’s a real creation, it has a life of its own. You have to respect that fact, that there comes a point where it’s gonna go where it’s gonna go. To try and control it is to try and limit it. It’s like with a child. When a kid gets to a certain point, it’s his own life, and you gotta give him room.
RS: When you did the “Dancing in the Dark” video and the twelve-inch, was that you being pressured? Did you not want to seem like some reactionary old rock and roller?
BS: [Laughs.] No, I was interested in it. We did a video for Nebraska, an “Atlantic City” video, which I liked. I wasn’t in it. So people said, “Oh you gotta do one that you’re in!” So we tried one for “Dancing in the Dark.” But the thing I didn’t like about that was that it was that it was lip-synced, which is not what I’m interested in doing, ’cause I think the best thing that our band does is address the moment, and we go for some authentic emotion. That gets all sort of knocked out of whack when you’re singin’ to something that was recorded a long time ago …
The main thing with my songs right now is that I write them to be complete things, and they’re filled with a lot of geographical detail and a lot of detail about what people are wearing, where they live. You get a lot of detail in most of the songs, and the thing about a video is that you only really have a few choices about what you can do. You can either do a live thing, which is something that we’ve done before, like “Rosalita”—which is fine, because you record the moment—or you can illustrate the story, which generally comes out stupid. Because if you’re singin’ about a house, then you show a house, then you’re messing up. You’re robbing people of their imaginations. Everybody sees a different house. Like on “My Father’s House” from Nebraska, everybody would see a different house, a different field—they all have those things inside ’em which are their own.
Music is meant to be evocative; it is meant to evoke emotion. To individualize personal emotion in the listener. So either you illustrate the story, which limits it, or you relay another story in something that is already telling a story. Which doesn’t make sense, because if you did it right the first time, why are you going to do it again? That’s the video dilemma as I can see it, and those are the questions I’m trying to address when I look at that particular medium, which I
don’t have any answers for right now. I’m not interested in making an ad for my record. I am interested in video. It is very powerful. In this country, the video audience starts about six or seven years old and its most intense audience is between six and sixteen.
Little kids, seven or eight, come up to me ’cause they’ve seen the “Dancing in the Dark” video. And those people can’t go to shows. They’re too young. They have no visual access to rock-and-roll music. Those are the kids that are glued to MTV…. Every house I go in, the kids are glued to it. They know all the bands. So there is a completely different audience out there—I think it puts the responsibility of what you’re putting on the air to kids that young…. There’s a cartoonish thing that the videos employ. I was down at the beach, this little kid called Mike who was about eight came up to me and said, “You want me to show you my ‘Dancing in the Dark’ moves?” [Laughs.] So I said OK.
RS: When I was over here for the Meadowlands shows, I drove through Freehold [New Jersey, where Springsteen spent his childhood] and it looked such a dump, so incredibly boring. Was that the problem?
BS: It’s just a small town, a small, narrow-minded town, no different than probably any other provincial town. It was very conservative. There was a time in the late sixties when I couldn’t walk down the street ’cause of the way I looked. It was just very stagnating. There were some factories, some farms and stuff, that if you didn’t go to college you ended up in. There really wasn’t that much, you know, there wasn’t that much.
RS: It seems to me important for you to keep that bar-band mentality, the way the Beatles did in Hamburg, playing totally different sets every night.
BS: I really do that to keep it interesting for myself, y’know? The minute we play the set the same two nights in a row, or even a piece of the set the same … The whole thing that our band is about is lessening the distance as much as possible, the distance between the performer and the audience. Distance onstage is kinda your own worst enemy. At least it is for us. So I wanna stay very deep down in the material, to stay involved with it, and the best way to do that is to change it a lot, so things don’t get stale, so you don’t run the same routines night after night.
We have certain things we do, but the show changes quite a bit. Mainly, it keeps the band sharp, it’s more entertaining for the crowd, ’cause we do have a lot of fans who come two or three nights if you’re in a town that long, so they get to hear all the different songs they like. And we get to go through something different onstage at night, so it keeps it from getting boring, and it keeps you involved down there, in the music, which is where you have to be to get the emotion out of it that we want.
RS: That line from “No Surrender”—“We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school”—is so perfect. Was that written about you and Miami Steve [aka Little Steven]?
BS: Not really. It just kinda came out one night. I was sitting around my house. A song like that, or “Backstreets” or “Bobby Jean,” are just basic songs about friendship, which me and Steve—we’ve been best friends since we were like sixteen, so anytime I wrote one of those, I had to be drawing on our relationship I guess to a certain degree. They’re just songs about people passin’ through, the rites of passage together.
RS: Legend has it that there’s another album called Murder Incorporated raring to go. Is there anything to that?
BS: No. There’s a song called “Murder Incorporated.”
RS: Who do you rely upon to criticize your work, if anybody?
BS: Well, Jon [Landau, Springsteen’s manager], he does that quite a bit. He’ll say, “You’re doing this too much.” He’ll help me focus sometimes. If I have a song I’m stuck on, sometimes I’ll play him part of it. He’ll give me an idea. Jon, I guess, the band—you know, an arrangement idea—and I’m pretty harsh with the stuff myself. I have a feeling when I’m doing my best. I’m at a point where I have a good sense of when I’m doing my best. Which is why we take a long time doing the records, ’cause a lot of times, I don’t think I’m doing my best [laughs].
RS: Do you enjoy making records now?
BS: Oh, yeah. It’s a different job. It’s not the same job as performing. They’re really two different jobs entirely, with very little to do with each other, which is why you have people who make really good records and don’t perform well, and people who perform well and don’t make good records. I don’t think they’re really connected. I like it because it forces you to come up with good ideas, and expand the area that you’re working in. What happens to those people now? What happens to your characters? What happens to you? It’s reflective in that sense—at once it’s reflective and it’s also forward-looking. That’s a good thing. We’ll get off the road, which is a very physical experience, very tied in to the moment, not particularly reflective. Then you get off, and you do a record that is more of a … it’s not quite as immediate, you can expand a little bit, I guess.
RS: You’ve got a nice house now, a pool. Is there a danger of cutting yourself off?
BS: I feel that the night you look into your audience and you don’t see yourself, and the night the audience looks at you and they don’t see themselves, that’s when it’s all over, you know? I think to do it really well, and to do it right, you’ve got to be down in there in some fashion. I don’t feel it’s a thing about where you live, or if you’re rich or if you’re poor, or what your particular politics are. I feel that you have to have that emotional connection to the people that you’re singing to and about. I don’t feel that people “sold out.” I don’t think Elvis sold out when he lived in Graceland—people never sold out by buying something. It wasn’t over something they bought. It was something that they thought that changed…. My audience, I always hoped, would be all sorts of people, rich and poor, middle-class people. I don’t feel like I’m singing to any one group of people. I don’t want to put up those sorts of walls—that’s not really what our band is about.
I don’t live that much differently than I did. I still live in New Jersey, I still go down and play in the clubs, still see people that I always saw. In that sense it hasn’t changed that much. I got a nice house, I got a couple different cars, but for the most part, those things, if they’re not distractions … The main thing, the things that always meant the most to me was the performing and the playing, feeling that connection, feeling I was right down in there. To me, that’s the most important thing, maintaining that connection, and how people lose that I’m not exactly sure. Maybe it’s your values changing … I was never much of a cynic myself. We just come out, play as hard as we can, the best we can every night, all night.
After the show, after the interview, with one mighty bound, Springsteen was free. It was long gone midnight. The auditorium was empty. Hartford was quieter than a broken amplifier. The wind rattled the trees, giving the first hint of autumn. The chance of a meal at the motel was as unlikely as a Reagan insight. It meant a solitary walk through those mean streets (down which, of course, a man must walk alone). In the distance, the yellow light of the diner shone like a beacon. Lines from songs floated like fallen leaves. Dodging between the trees, a stocky figure hove into view; it was all so like a line from one of his songs (so this is what he does after a show!). “Hey, Roger, how ya doin?” “Fine, Bruce, how are you?” “Good. Good. Gonna eat?”
A sandwich shared, coffee drunk, like figures in an Edward Hopper painting, like soldiers on a winter’s night…. Somewhere over New England, dawn was breaking. Springsteen shivered. “Time to be movin’ on.” In the best outlaw tradition, he walked off into the night—alone. The fans had long gone, now wrapped in each other’s arms, soiled in memory. For once, they had all been together. The man responsible for creating that community, responsible for creating the vinyl memories they would share until the next time, walked off into the bitter predawn wind…. So what can a poor boy do, ’cept sing for a rock-and-roll band?
BRUCE BIT
On the Draft
“My father, he was in World War II, and he was the type that was always sayin’, ‘Wait till the Army gets you. Man, they’re gonna get that hair off of you. I can’t wait. They gonna make a man outta you.’ We were really goin’ at each other in those days. And I remember I was gone for three days, and when I came back, I went in the kitchen, and my folks were there, and they said, ‘Where you been?’ And I said, ‘Well, I had to go take my physical.’ And they said, ‘What happened?’ And I said, ‘Well, they didn’t take me.’ And my father sat there, and he didn’t look at me, he just looked straight ahead. And he said, ‘That’s good.’ It was, uh … I’ll never forget that. I’ll never forget that.”
—interview (fall 1984, Los Angeles and Oakland) with
Kurt Loder, Rolling Stone, December 6, 1984
BRUCE BIT
On the Guitar as His Lifeboat
“I first started to play because I wanted to … feel good about myself. And I found the guitar, and … it gave me my sense of purpose and a sense of pride in myself…. It was my lifeboat, my lifeline—my line back into people. It was my connection to the rest of the human race, you know? Before that, it was a strange existence. I was a big daydreamer when I was in grammar school. Kids used to tease me, call me ‘dreamer.’ It’s something that got worse as I got older, I think. Until I realized that I felt like I was dying …”
—interview (fall 1984, Los Angeles) with Kurt Loder,
Rolling Stone, February 28, 1985
THE “BOSS” HAS SPOKEN
January 5, 1986, Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, Australia)
Springsteen married actress Julianne Phillips in May 1985, after a relationship of about seven months. He released no new music that year, but he toured heavily, performing all over the United States and Europe as well as in Japan and Australia. He spoke little to the press, but he did grant a few interviews, mostly to international media. The brief conversation that appears below, which aired on television in Australia before running in the Sydney Morning Herald, likely took place during a concert series in Sydney in March 1985. The interviewer’s name is unknown. —Ed.