Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters

by Jeff Burger

  When “The Boss” performs, it takes him a while to come down after the show. As the fans file from the exits in their euphoric state, arguably having seen the best live rock act in the world, Bruce Springsteen cools down backstage and contemplates the night. “I usually get home and eat dinner about 2 AM, and then I often go for a walk around the city [in New Jersey]. When I get back I might listen to some music, and by the time I hit the sack it’s about 5 or 6 AM,” said Springsteen in a Channel Seven television special last week.

  Sydney Morning Herald: What do you hope your fans will take away from the shows?

  Bruce Springsteen: Well, basically, a good night out, and it’s a thing where maybe they can put aside their worries, dance a bit, sing along. I try to present a lot of different things. People can come along and perhaps hear something that’ll change their minds about a particular issue. In any case, whatever they want, I hope they find it in the show. Maybe they want to laugh, or cry, or a combination of those …

  SMH: How did you learn to connect with your audiences in the massive concert halls in which you now play?

  BS: When you get beyond the physical thing of actually setting up the sound, the lighting, and the stage, et cetera, it comes down to the mental act of being aware of your audience, just being conscious of who’s out there.

  SMH: Are there any problems now in playing the older material, in view of the legions of fans who only relate to the newer songs?

  BS: Yeah, that’s interesting. I still like the old stuff very much, and I do find that the fans enjoy those old songs like “Rosalita,” “Jungleland,” and “Born to Run.” That older stuff can contain the experience of the past ten years or so. I mean, the length in time between those and the new songs. And when it comes to the point in the show where I do them, I think that experience comes out and the fans can feel it. Those songs sort of breathe with the years and let the experiences in. And a lot of people have made those songs their own over the years. That means more to me because it means more to other people.

  SMH: What about your reluctance to do a live album?

  BS: I don’t know…. I think there’s not much point in doing another album of the same material unless you’re actually doing it with a definite aim, because that’s all a live album would be. I find it a little boring to rerecord unless I’m doing it to improve a song, and that’s what I could probably do with some of the material on Darkness on the Edge of Town. Some of that stuff I think was a little dry, like I underplayed and oversang. It would be interesting to get different versions of some of those songs, like “Badlands,” “Prove It All Night,” and “The Promised Land.”

  SMH: You’ve been notably reluctant to do videos …

  BS: Yes, I guess I think a lot of it is about being there, and that’s why we haven’t really got into the video thing. It allows too much distance, and that’s what we’re trying to break down. There was the “Dancing in the Dark” video recently, which is the first since we did that one for “Atlantic City” off the Nebraska album. That was OK because I didn’t need lip sync. The MTV thing has become very big and it has certainly been a launching pad for some artists. It’s also the big thing with kids, and it fills in the years up to a point where they can go to live concerts.

  Perhaps the best thing about Springsteen, surpassing even the quality of his music, is his patent humility, which is the abiding impression from the interview. He not only advocates the fine ideals of democracy but is himself the embodiment of them.

  BRUCE BIT

  On His “Job”

  “Dylan was a revolutionary. So was Elvis. I’m not that. I don’t see myself as having been that. I felt that what I would be able to do, maybe, was redefine what I did in more human terms than it had been defined before, and in more everyday terms. I always saw myself as a nuts-and-bolts kind of person. I felt what I was going to accomplish I would accomplish over a long period of time, not in an enormous burst of energy or genius. To keep an even perspective on it all, I looked at it like a job—something that you do every day and over a long period of time.”

  —interview with Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone, November 5, 1987

  BOB DYLAN ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME INDUCTION SPEECH

  BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN | January 20, 1988, New York

  His comments in Australia about not wanting to issue a live album notwithstanding, Springsteen released his first concert collection in November 1986. Called Live 1975–85, the recording was about as long as his typical show. On CD it filled three discs; on LP it spanned five. And the album’s reception was as massive as the music: It sold more than 13 million copies, making it almost as successful as Born in the U.S.A.

  Ironically, the year of this first live album was one in which Springsteen rarely performed. Aside from two shows in Asbury Park near the beginning of the year, his only gigs were two benefits—one in California in October and one in Paris in November. The following year also featured a relatively light schedule. He performed on January 21 at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where he inducted Roy Orbison and did only about two dozen other shows, mostly in small venues in Asbury Park and neighboring towns.

  But 1987 did bring the magnificent Tunnel of Love, which ostensibly chronicled the disintegration of the singer’s first marriage. Springsteen toured throughout 1988 in support of this album and also to raise money for Amnesty International.

  Moreover, he made another appearance at the Waldorf Astoria, this time to induct Bob Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Springsteen was not the “new Dylan,” but that didn’t mean he wasn’t heavily influenced by the man’s music. He made that quite clear in this speech. —Ed.

  The first time that I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother and we were listening to maybe WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind, from “Like a Rolling Stone.” My mother, she was no stiff with rock and roll. She liked the music. She sat there for a minute and she looked at me and she said, “That guy can’t sing.” But I knew she was wrong. I sat there, I didn’t say nothing but I knew that I was listening to the toughest voice that I had ever heard. It was lean and it sounded somehow simultaneously young and adult.

  I ran out and I bought the single and ran home and I put on the 45, but they must have made a mistake in the factory because a Lenny Welch song came on. The label was wrong. So I ran back [to the store], got [the Dylan song], and I came back and played it. Then I went out and I got Highway 61. That was all I played for weeks, looking at the cover with Bob in that satin blue jacket and the Triumph motorcycle shirt.

  When I was a kid, Bob’s voice somehow thrilled and scared me; it made me feel kind of irresponsibly innocent—it still does—when it reached down and touched what little worldliness a fifteen-year-old high school kid in New Jersey had in him at the time.

  Dylan was a revolutionary. The way that Elvis freed your body Bob freed your mind. He showed us that just because the music was innately physical did not mean that it was anti-intellectual. He had the vision and the talent to expand a pop song until it could contain the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve, and he changed the face of rock and roll forever and ever.

  Without Bob, the Beatles wouldn’t have made Sgt. Pepper, maybe the Beach Boys wouldn’t have made Pet Sounds, the Sex Pistols wouldn’t have made “God Save the Queen,” U2 wouldn’t have done “Pride (In the Name of Love).” Marvin Gaye wouldn’t have done “What’s Goin’ On,” and Grandmaster Flash might not have done “The Message” and the Count Five could not have done “Psychotic Reaction.” And there would have never been a group named the Electric Prunes.

  To this day, where great rock music is being made, there is the shadow of Bob Dylan over and over again. Bob’s own modern work has gone unjustly underappreciated because it’s had to stand in that shadow. If there was a young guy out there, writing “Swe
etheart Like You,” writing the Empire Burlesque album, writing “Every Grain of Sand,” they’d be calling him the new Bob Dylan.

  About three months ago, I was watching the Rolling Stone special on TV. Bob came on and he was in a real cranky mood. He was kind of bitchin’ and moanin’ about how his fans don’t know him and nobody knows him and they come up to him on the street and treat him like a long-lost brother or something. And speaking as a fan, when I was fifteen and I heard “Like a Rolling Stone,” I heard a guy like I’ve never heard before or since, who had the guts to take on the whole world and made me feel like I had to, too.

  Maybe some people misunderstood that voice as saying that somehow Bob was going to do the job for them, but as we grow older, we learn that there isn’t anybody out there who can do that job for anybody else. So I’m just here tonight to say thanks, to say that I wouldn’t be here without you, to say that there isn’t a soul in this room who does not owe you his thanks, and to steal a line from one of your songs—whether you like it or not—“You was the brother that I never had.” Congratulations.

  THE Q INTERVIEW: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

  DAVID HEPWORTH | August 1992, Q Magazine (UK)

  Springsteen and Julianne Phillips divorced in March 1989, less than four years after they’d married. That same year, he also “divorced” the E Street Band, opting to tour with a new group of unknowns.

  His relationship with at least one E Streeter, Patti Scialfa, continued, however: They had a son, Evan, in July 1990; married in June of the following year; and had a daughter, Jessica, six months later. A third child, Samuel, would arrive in 1994.

  Bruce gave a limited number of concerts in 1989, 1990, and 1991, but fans didn’t see another new album until 1992. That’s when, possibly in an effort to make up for the long silence, he released two records on the same day, March 31—Human Touch and Lucky Town. The discs include some poignant ballads (“If I Should Fall Behind,” “My Beautiful Reward”) and likable rockers (“Man’s Job,” “Roll of the Dice”), and both sold well. Still, they received lukewarm reviews—perhaps partly because critics missed the E Street Band—and few music journalists today would list either of them among Springsteen’s best.

  Also in 1992, the singer made his first television appearances. He performed three songs on Saturday Night Live in May and then did a full set on MTV Unplugged in September. (The show’s name notwithstanding, he insisted on giving a plugged-in performance.) The concert was later issued on CD and DVD.

  In between these appearances, Springsteen sat down with David Hepworth for a wideranging interview that appeared in England’s Q magazine.

  By now, the singer had been a household name for nearly two decades. But, as he told Hepworth, “Success makes life easier. It doesn’t make living easier.” Bruce talked with the journalist about fame, friendship, marriage, parenthood, therapy, and the personal ups and downs that had defined his recent years. It was perhaps his most introspective interview up to this point.

  Hepworth and his subject were clearly on the same wavelength, a fact that is perhaps underscored by an anecdote that the interviewer shared with me. The night before he spoke with Springsteen, he said, he and a friend attended a Bob Dylan concert. “He was playing at the Pantages [Theatre in Los Angeles] and we were assured that he was suddenly on a hot streak.

  “We paid a scalper and went and, of course, he was as muddy and impenetrable as ever. So impenetrable, in fact, that when he launched into one number, I turned to the guy next to me and said brightly, ‘All Along the Watchtower’! Then we realized it was ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.’

  “The morning after the interview,” Hepworth continued, “I was talking to Jon Landau at breakfast. ‘Bruce and I went to see Bob last night,’ Landau said. ‘Halfway through, Bruce turned to me and said “All Along the Watchtower”! Then we realized it was “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.”’“ -Ed.

  New York, May. Bruce Springsteen and Tom Hanks appear on a promotional slot for Saturday Night Live. Kneeling at their feet are Wayne and Garth of the all-conquering Wayne’s World, doing the shtick with which they greet all superstar guests, genuflecting while intoning “We’re not worthy, we’re not worthy.” After a few seconds of this routine, Wayne pauses and, looking up at Hanks, confides: “Tom, nor are you …”

  Bruce Springsteen used to find his status as American cultural hero discomfiting. These days, seven years on from the glory days of the Born in the U.S.A. tour, he’s more likely to laugh it off. On Lucky Town, one of the two albums he released in March, he even offers “Local Hero,” a song that has some fun with his own mythic status, describing the sensation of finding a kitsch portrait of himself in a shop “between the Doberman and Bruce Lee.”

  “The first verse of that song is completely true,” he confesses. “I was driving through a town I grew up in and I looked over and there was a five-and-ten-cent store with a black velvet painting of Bruce Lee, a picture of me on Born in the U.S.A., and a picture of a dog next to me! I said, ‘Wow, I gotta get a photo of that!’ It was on sale for $19.99.”

  But did he invest?

  “Actually, I did.” He shakes his head with some wonderment at the notion of a songwriter ending up as a plaster saint. “You get to a point where you’re like Santa Claus at the North Pole.” Bob Dylan’s never-ending tour has pulled into Hollywood. Springsteen and Jon Landau, his manager/producer/friend for the last seventeen years, join the crowds at the Pantages Theatre to watch the godfather of all the legends continue the process of “dismantling his myth.” An inquiry about whether he thinks it inevitable that he should go through the same process of deconstruction draws the usual considered response from Springsteen.

  Yes, he says, it’s tough when you’ve had as much impact as Dylan’s had. Then the rueful smile returns. “But as far as the whole myth thing goes, then hell, it ends up being dismantled for you anyway. It doesn’t matter whether you do it or not, somebody’s going to do it, you know? There’s usually some element of truth in it, and there’s usually a lot of bullshit in it that you’ve contrived in some fashion.

  “I don’t think any of that stuff really stands for very long anyway, and that’s as it should be. Whatever your recent image is, there are elements that are part of who you are and part of your personality, but a lot of it is just some sort of collective imagining that you may have contributed to in some fashion and in other ways you haven’t. It can end up being confining and so the best thing is to have all the holes poked in it.

  “And,” he cackles, “everybody’s always willing to help you out!”

  Born in the U.S.A. transformed Bruce Springsteen from a heavy cult act into one of the half-dozen leading international brands of the boom-boom eighties. Along with Madonna and Michael Jackson, he sold records in quantities that predecessors like the Beatles could never have dreamed of, made unprecedented sums of money, and enjoyed the attentions of sections of the media that had never previously been bothered with music.

  That kind of success carries with it the implicit assumption of year-on-year growth. Right now, a couple of months after the simultaneous release of Human Touch and Lucky Town, there’s a perception in the music business that they are commercial disappointments, certainly when compared with the widescreen populism of Born in the U.S.A. (Tunnel of Love was always too modest and understated to live up to the market’s idea of a proper Springsteen album.)

  The man at the center of the problem doesn’t see it as a problem but clearly recognizes the pressures. Reflecting on the downside of the commercial and PR bonanza that was the Born in the U.S.A. tour, he says, “You get in a situation where the myth of success in America is so powerful that that story overwhelms the story that you may think you’re telling. Success at that level is a tricky business because a lot of distortion creeps in and not being particularly a media manipulator, it was fascinating realizing that you really do comment on a lot of different levels. There’s the songs you’re writing and the things you’re tel
ling and then there’s what’s happening to you and that’s also another story. I found very often that your success story is a bigger story than whatever you’re trying to say onstage.

  “I used to think that the idea was I come out on my stage and I do my best to bring out the best in you, which brings out the best in me. But sometimes you do your best and you pull out people’s insanity or you pull out parts of your own insanity. It’s not completely predictable, and when you lock into it on a very big level, it’s a big wave that you ride and you try and stay on and think, ‘What was that about? What did I accomplish? Where do I feel I’ve failed?’ I thought about all that stuff after we came home and when I did Tunnel of Love, I think the idea was to reintroduce myself as a songwriter.”

  The 1986 live box set was intended to set the seal on an era that had begun ten years earlier with Born to Run. Talking at the time, he described the material written in between—Darkness, The River, Nebraska, Born in the U.S.A. —as a reaction against that anthem’s blazing romanticism. Then newly and publicly married, he presented the sequence of songs as the personal odyssey of a man intent on carrying the flame of youth into the life of a grownup, finally riding out of his hometown to the sound of Tom Waits’s “Jersey Girl,” his best girl by his side and his demons laid to rest.

  Then came Tunnel of Love, an extraordinary dispatch from the trenches of marital breakdown, and it was clear that domestic bliss wasn’t dulling his edge. Either that or it wasn’t all that blissful. The Springsteen of Human Touch and Lucky Town suddenly sounds like one of the world’s older men. Songs like “My Beautiful Reward” and “The Big Muddy” manifest a new toughness, suggesting that rock’s great existentialist has passed through a midlife crisis and lived to tell the tale. The references are classical—rivers, mountains, valleys, and bluebirds of happiness; the mud defiles and the rain doth cleanse. The nature imagery “came out of listening to country music—Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie … everybody has that landscape inside them, doesn’t matter if you live in the city, it’s a mythical landscape that everybody carries with them.”