Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters

by Jeff Burger

  “With Every Wish” he soberly describes as about “growing up and realizing what a life with consequences is all about. When you’re a kid, you have a dream and the way you imagine it is really a life without complications. When you get older, the trickiest thing is not to give in to cynicism, and you get to an age, particularly in 1992 in this country or in England, where you don’t have the time to spare. You have to understand the limitations of your own life and keep pushing through it. That’s what ‘With Every Wish’ is about, keeping on moving forward.”

  Talking in 1992, Springsteen is inclined to focus on what has happened to him personally since Born in the U.S.A. and its attendant, record-shattering world tour and how determined he is to prove that it’s possible for an artist to outrun the smothering maw of commercial expectation. Born in the U.S.A. was a sales peak he may never scale again, and artistically there seems every reason why he shouldn’t even try.

  Jon Landau underlines the point in one of those management/client testimonials that have unfortunately been debased by being claimed on behalf of too many hacks (see their manager’s insistence that Spinal Tap’s appeal was becoming “more selective”): “Growth from record to record is not part of Bruce’s game plan. We release records that we know in advance are likely to have different degrees of success. When we put out Tunnel of Love, we certainly didn’t think it was going to be as popular as Born in the U.S.A. We’re not in the business of taking X and forcing it into being Y. I’d encourage Bruce in his natural inclination to not get involved in the topping-yourself game. Bruce’s approach to his work and his whole life is very value-based. He approaches it with the full sensibility of the artist.”

  Los Angeles. On a hot Thursday in May, the artist drives his black Corvette down from his bourgeois house in the Hollywood Hills for another day’s rehearsal with his new band. Inside a massive hangar, two huge stages face each other. The first is being readied for shipping to Stockholm for the first night of the world tour. On the second is enough equipment for a medium-sized club act. On a dais at the rear of the stage, six microphones are erected for backing singers being auditioned this week.

  Stage right, in bowler hat and shorts, is the inscrutable figure of bass player Tommy Simms. Stage left we find guitarist Shane Fontayne, formerly of Muswell Hill, now domiciled in Los Angeles and looking like a cross between Slash and Danny Baker. At the drums is the slight, youthful figure of Zachary Alford. Sitting at a modest keyboard is the one survivor from the E Street Band, Roy Bittan. Pacing the wide-open spaces center stage, worrying at the chords of “Tougher than the Rest,” is their leader.

  Although the beard has been dispensed with, the motif is West Coast Romany. A flimsy print shirt is open to reveal a chest less mountainous than of yore. Three chains are intertwined around his neck. Three earrings cluster in the left lobe. Peeking from the cuffs of some uniquely blue jeans are the inevitable heavy, buckled motorcycle boots. With the help of a light tan acquired on a short holiday the previous week, he looks about five years younger than he has any right to. Bruce Springsteen is forty-two.

  His voice is suffering from the exertions of rehearsal, and so today’s rehearsal is largely instrumental. He tries “The Long Goodbye,” “Brilliant Disguise,” and “Gloria’s Eyes,” experimenting with different sequences and segues. At this stage, the first half of the show is worked out, and now he’s trying to piece together the drama of the second act. Taking a break and picking his way down the stairs with the rolling gait of a sailor reacquainting himself with dry land, he confesses that he hasn’t decided what the climax will be and therefore it’s not easy to see how to build to it.

  “There’s things that physically feel good one after another,” he observes. “It’s less intellectual and more just how it hits you as it comes up. I don’t think people go to concerts for a fundamentally intellectual experience. It’s more like, ‘Hey, how does it feel?’”

  Shane Fontayne, who has worked previously with Lone Justice and the Merchants of Venus, finds the rehearsal process fascinating: “He’s very focused in the way he wants it to sound. He doesn’t walk around saying play this or play that. He’ll be more allegorical in his description of the way he wants something to sound, say like fog rolling over the ground or something. He knows about restraint and how to get more power by holding something back.”

  The recruiting of this new group is the strongest indication of Springsteen’s determination to reenter the live arena on his own terms and to liberate himself from the need to do the kind of greatest-hits shows that have become standard for artists of his popularity. The new lineup is smaller. There will be no saxophone or layers of keyboards, and the emphasis will definitely be on post-Born in the U.S.A. material.

  “I was lucky in that I had the greatest band in the world,” he says of the severing of his relationship with the E Street Band. “Some of those guys I’ve known for twenty years. The way I look at it is I get paid to write a new song and I can’t keep rewriting the old stuff. I played with a single set of musicians for a long time, and I thought it was time to play with other people. Everybody sings their own spirit, their own personality. It’s like a fingerprint; no two musicians play the same or bring to the stage something similar. I think the fundamental values remain. I don’t have a plan. I’m just seeing what it is and playing into it. It’s going to be a very fun, hard-rocking band. What else it’s going to be … I’m just watching it develop.”

  Roy Bittan got the call in 1990 informing him that Springsteen was planning a future without the E Streeters. “For three months, I was watching the same ‘Boss Fires Band’ story on TV, which I don’t think was ever really the case. Then he called me and I played him a track I’d done, which was ‘Roll of the Dice,’ and he said, ‘Come on, let’s start working on this stuff.’”

  These were the early stages of recording the album that became Human Touch. A band of hardened studio pros was assembled, and many songs were recorded with a view to their being edited down to a coherent single album. No fewer than four producers, including Springsteen, are credited on the finished record.

  “On some records, we have what you might call a small board.” Springsteen grins when asked what they all do. “Charlie Plotkin is a go-between from the technology to the emotion. Roy Bittan works mainly tonally and texturally. Jon Landau is interesting in that despite being the most intellectual of the bunch he listens on the most gut level and simultaneously will look at the record and see what it’s saying.”

  After eighteen months, Human Touch was completed. But because Springsteen “didn’t feel that I’d gotten to everything I wanted to get to,” they put it away for three months in order to take a longer view. Landau returned to the East where “Bruce Federal Expressed me two songs he’d worked up himself. They were ‘Living Proof’ and ‘The Big Muddy’ in substantially the form you hear them on that album. When I heard them, I just called and said, ‘Whatever you’re doing, just keep doing it.’ By the time I came out to visit a few weeks later, he had virtually all the Lucky Town songs really in that sequence. I was astonished because it hit me as it hit Bruce that this was really a very distinct group of songs with a different voice and different sound.”

  Explaining the three-week brainstorm that produced Lucky Town, Springsteen says: “Things come when they come. I don’t have any one way of doing it. I started Human Touch because I felt like I just had to get back to work. So we just started working on a record. Sometimes you work just to get through the work you’re gonna do. All that work on Human Touch was me trying to get to the place where I could make Lucky Town in three weeks, through dredging through a lot of stuff and then bang, a lot comes flying out. I don’t know the outcome when I start. One might be real work and a lot of time put in and then the other you really do click into some other place and stay there for two or three weeks. It’s really spontaneous.”

  The commitment to narrative coherence has been a feature of Springsteen’s work since Born to Run. For record com
panies used to dealing with acts who are ready to release as soon as they’ve worked up three singles and wadding, it’s frustrating. Settling into an odd living room arrangement set up by a trailer in the corner of the soundstage and slurping noisily from a paper cup of tea, he responds to the suggestion that where Human Touch is about a man falling from grace, Lucky Town deals with redemption.

  “That’s how a good part of it felt to me. What people pay me money for is to be out on my point. I try to present what I stumbled around and groped my way into and I try to get some of that into my music in some fashion and that’s when I feel good about releasing the stuff and committed to going on the road and getting involved in that life. I feel this is something that’s not going to waste people’s time. They may like it or not like it; it may be what you think rock and roll is or not. But it’s very centered and real. So if you want to slice them up like that, there’s a lot of groping around on Human Touch and more on Lucky Town about finding your place and re-finding yourself, getting back in touch with your own humanity and the good things that you feel about yourself.

  “There’s less fear on that record. If you go back to ‘Cautious Man’ on Tunnel of Love, about the guy who has love and fear tattooed on his hands—that’s about the story for most people. There’s a world of love there and there’s a world of fear, too, and it’s standing right in front of you and very often that fear feels a lot realer and certainly more urgent than the feeling of love.

  “The night my son was born, I got close to a feeling of a real, pure, unconditional love with all the walls down. All of a sudden, what was happening was so immense that it just stomped all the fear away for a little while and I remember feeling overwhelmed. But I also understood why you’re so frightened. When that world of love comes rushing in, a world of fear comes in with it. To open yourself up to one thing, you’ve got to embrace the other thing as well. And then you embrace those things that you’re just around the corner from … oh, death, the whole nine yards. My music over the last five years has dealt with those almost primitive issues; it’s about somebody walking through that world of fear so that he can live in the world of love.”

  Springsteen has little small talk. His answers to questions are all long, often mazy, and frequently beyond the reach of punctuation, but they are always answers and do betray the signs of having had some considerable thought expended on them. It’s difficult to spot the daylight between his public image and his personality as manifested in a private meeting. There is something faintly monkish about the seriousness with which he takes his responsibilities.

  The Springsteen image was tarnished in some eyes by one much-publicized court case brought in the late eighties by former Springsteen crew members Mike Batlan and Doug Sutphin, in the course of which they alleged that their boss was a chiseling martinet who had fined them for damaging a canoe. These claims were even made the substance of a particularly gleeful cover story in one British music paper. In September of last year, the case was settled out of court but only after a burst of unpleasant publicity. His only comment now is: “I’ve been working a long time and I’ve only had a couple of lawsuits. It was tough because it was with people we’ve worked with over the years and without getting into a blow-by-blow account of the highs, the lows, the foibles and fumbles, I felt like I did the right thing in that particular case.”

  Unlike most rock stars, Springsteen has exceptionally good taste in the music of others and can always be relied upon for tips. Current recommendations include David Baerwald’s Bedtime Stories, L.A. hard-rock band Social Distortion, and Dylan’s “Blind Willie McTell,” “a masterpiece.”

  “I try to think like a fan,” he says. “If I came to my music right now, what would I be looking for? I think people come to my music looking for certain specific things, and in my head I make some of my music for that fan, initially. These records had to go to a certain place. I had a lot of changes in my life and everything you do ends up in the papers, and so I was concerned with making music that was a connection.”

  At the end of the Born in the U.S.A. tour, Springsteen married Julianne Phillips. When the marriage fell apart two years later and he took up a relationship with singer Patti Scialfa, the media embarked on a feeding frenzy. Wild speculation about multimillion-dollar settlements, disagreements over whether or not to have children, and drinking binges introduced Springsteen to a level of scrutiny he had never had to encounter when he was a mere rock star.

  “People are interested in marriage everywhere, whether it’s me or Princess Di or whoever,” he allows. “I don’t focus on it that much. I love my job and I love the things that it’s brought me. If I had a choice, I’d do without that stuff, but it comes with the territory. It’s not really your life. What’s important is what’s happening, not what’s written about what’s happening. Who cares? It’s just not real. The reality of your own life overwhelms whatever bullshit somebody’s written about you in a newspaper for a couple of days.”

  The reality was an individual who found it difficult to function away from his professional life, as workaholic and driven as any advertising man: “In my business, you’re afforded the luxury of extended adolescence. I found I’d gotten very good at my job and because I was good at my job, for some reason I thought I was capable of a lot of other things, like relationships. If you’re not good at those things and you’re in your twenties, you don’t notice it because you’re too busy scuffling. But when you get a little older, you start to realize that there are all these other things that you’re really bad at, that you’ve been failing miserably at for a long time. You begin to investigate what those things were, which is basically your real life, your life away from your guitar, your music, your work, your life outside your work.

  “In that area over the past eight years, I’ve been investigating that and feeling I came up short in a lot of ways, and I’ve been trying to sort my way through feeling good, whether I’ve got the guitar on or it’s in its case, trying to get a little closer to walking it like you talk it. Which sometimes I’ve done OK and sometimes I haven’t done all that well. A lot of the music is about pursuing what defines my manhood to me: what are my commitments and how to try and stick by them in a world where we can’t ever really know anybody else or ever really know yourself.”

  Isn’t that one of the themes of Tunnel of Love—how people deceive themselves and how difficult it is to arrive at true love?

  “I reached a point where I thought I knew myself very well and I had a variety of things happen where I realized I actually didn’t. It was a very good eye-opener because it throws everything wide open; it’s not that you don’t know parts of yourself, but very few people can confront themselves very accurately. We all live with our illusions and our self-image, and there’s a good percentage of that that’s a pipe dream.

  “If you can cut that stuff away, which I’ve tried to do in my music, and realize that I do this well but I’m taking baby steps in this other part of my life, it gets you closer to feeling a certain fullness in your life that I always felt like I was missing. I always enjoyed my work, but when it came to functioning outside of that, I always had a hard time. So basically the music has been based around somebody in pursuit of whatever that thing is. Tunnel of Love was like that, and with Human Touch and Lucky Town, I feel like I’ve finally got my feet on the floor as far as some of these things go.”

  One of the strongest threads running through his work since the early days has been the relationship between parents and children. With these albums and the births of Evan and Jessica, he’s getting used to the view from the other side of the generation gap. Is it possible to imagine a future Springsteen album carrying a song that addresses a theme like “Independence Day” or “Used Cars” from the point of view of a middle-aged father? Can rock do those things? Should it?

  “Absolutely. I think at different times rock music has encompassed a lot of outside topics. People have said it’s not good at expressing political ideas, for
instance. I think it’s expressed political ideas very well. It hasn’t had the power to make political changes, but there are some great political rock songs. Certainly the Clash wrote some; Elvis Costello wrote ‘Tramp the Dirt Down’—that was a great song. It’s as good as the singer. I never placed any limits on it. I always wanted my shows to be fun, where you could come and dance. I wanted my records to be the kind you could vacuum the floor to if you want to or you could sit down and they could center you or help you make some kind of sense of the world you live in. There’s nothing particularly that I couldn’t see myself writing about, I suppose. I don’t know if I’m looking forward to it, but I guess I’ll see what happens.”

  Later, in a hot, featureless green room across the way from the soundstage, as a caretaker empties the bins, he blows on the surface of his cup of tea, stares into the middle distance, and describes the desolation at the heart of “I Wish I Were Blind.”

  “It’s about that sinking feeling,” he says, with the same hoarse, amazed whisper he uses to introduce songs onstage. “There’s a world of love, a world of beauty, a world of fear, and a world of loss and they are the same world and that person is wending his way through that maze and at that moment he’s very in touch with both of those things. That song gets that picture. Most of the stuff does. That’s where its universality lies. There’s a limited interest in your accoutrements, whatever they may be. Success makes life easier. It doesn’t make living easier. I’ve enjoyed it and I’ve had great fun with it, but there have been very tough times and it’s the lucky seat, you know?