Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters

by Jeff Burger

  “You’ve got to be engaged with the stuff that life is made out of. What I’ve tried to do in this new music is that I’ve previously written a lot about certain things that were caught up in my past. I came out of a working class environment, played in working-class bars, and my history just drew me towards those topics naturally. I didn’t have any particular political worldview or any rhetoric that I was trying to get across in any way. It was just those were the things that felt urgent. I wrote a lot about that and I’m proud of that music. But I felt at the end of Born in the U.S.A. that I’d said all I wanted to say about those things. My battles were elsewhere.

  “There was a point where I felt that for me to confront the things that I was frightened of lay elsewhere on different battlefields. I pursued those things in my music and tried to sort them out in my life at the same time, in order to make some real connection beyond the connection that I make through my work. Onstage, I talk a lot about community, but it’s very difficult for me to connect up with anything. From my youth, I had a tendency to be isolated psychologically.

  “All my music is a journey towards some sort of connection with both people at large and then a person, whether it’s in your family or your girlfriend or your wife. That’s how you remain vital and don’t get lost in the furniture that comes with making a few bucks. That’s what I’ve pursued. For me, this music is about trying to get closer, trying to take down the walls that I had left up. Everybody does that. Everybody struggles towards feeling good enough about themselves to connect up with someone who can shine something good about themselves back onto them. And then to invest in it and not be afraid of that investment and not be afraid of its commitment or its responsibilities.

  “That’s what the guys on these records are struggling towards—making some peace with those things. Everybody does it. It’s happening on every block in some fashion or other. I felt there were a lot of things I’d not written about and I was feeling the results of not having dealt with those things in my own experience. And it was roll-up-your-sleeves time and get into this: women, friendship, real connection. The way that I grew up, men come unprepared, so you’ve got to prepare yourself if you’re going to make it.”

  Have you ever had therapy?

  “Oh sure. I did anything I could which would help me find my way through the thing. Like anything else, it’s just a tool that helps you center yourself. It’s tricky if you grew up the way I grew up. Everybody says, ‘You some kind of nut?’ That old thing. I guess it’s commonplace these days [to see a psychotherapist], but I don’t want to get into some celebrity bawl-fest.” And he giggles. “Oh, my trials, my tribulations!”

  There is the view that artists put so much into their work they don’t have enough left to live a rounded personal life …

  “I think that’s bullshit,” he immediately returns. “That’s the excuse that everybody uses. You do this. You don’t have to do anything else. You’re the guy that plays the guitar—you don’t have to sort out your relationship with people. I don’t believe that’s true, not if you want to live a realized life.”

  On June 8 last year, to the strains of various E Street alumni strumming a Scottish folk tune, Bruce Springsteen married Patti Scialfa in the garden of their Beverly Hills home. They now have two children and lead the congenial life of rich Californians, visiting his old home in New Jersey for just a couple of months a year. L.A. offers sun, early nights (“no later than eleven right now”), relative anonymity, and the chance “to live in the here and now.”

  “I lived in New Jersey for a very long time and I’d written about a lot of things which were very tied in to my past, a lot of ghosts you’re chasing. I felt like whatever they were, that was done for me. I’d taken that as far as I could and I was interested in making a break with whatever people’s perceptions of me were up to that point. In my own life, I was just interested in putting some distance between me and not New Jersey the state but whatever some part of that meant for me inside.

  “I came out. I had a really beautiful house and Patti and I got together and had the babies and it was just a good place. I had four or five years where I just basically went about my life. It was also a way of saying you just move on down the road. People always came west to re-find themselves or to re-create themselves in some fashion. This is the town of recreation, mostly in some distorted way, but the raw material is here; it’s just what you make it. I like the geography, I like the desert, and a half-hour from my house you’re in the San Gabriel Mountains where there’s a hundred miles and one store. It was just a good place to make a new start, and for Patti and I to find each other and find ourselves and have our babies.”

  The band was ensconced in this rehearsal hall the afternoon of April 30 when the L.A. riots began. “You can go five blocks that way and you’ll see burned-out buildings. That was the day when all the invisible walls that get put up—L.A. is actually a very segregated city—all the walls started falling. You can feel them starting to melt away. The inner cities are reaching a critical mass at this point. People have been abandoned, thrown away, tossed out. The way that people have dealt with it over the past ten years has just been denial. That’s not happening here, that’s happening over there. The answer has been, let’s get more police, let’s build bigger prisons.

  “I don’t even know whether people can look towards government to do the job at this point. In the States, people have lost their faith that government can tackle those problems. It’s hard to see whether people themselves have the will to sustain the type of effort that might give people a fighting chance in just the small respects of leading a decent life. I have a nice house, I live in a great part of town, I made a lot of money, and I think you feel frustrated. In the days after the riots, you had military helicopters buzzing thirty feet over your backyard every fifteen minutes. There was a big outpouring of, ‘What can we do?’ You try to figure out what can you do individually and then what can you press on your elected representatives to do and then is that really going to be enough? I have no idea.”

  The European leg of the world tour offers a rare opportunity for Springsteen fans to see him play indoors, the first such opportunity since 1981. (“I was talking to Edwin Starr about British fans last time I was there and he felt the same as I did, that those people are with you for the long haul.”) The likelihood is that the tour will move outdoors during the American stage in the late summer.

  “I tend to like to play inside. Even in a big place. I just feel it’s appropriate. I don’t know why. There should be some smoke and some sweat. I’ve had some beautiful nights outside with the moon coming up and people having a great time, but it’s a different kind of experience. A stadium is an event in itself. Sixty thousand people in one place is an event in itself. In an arena, you can still capture quite a bit of the concert feel. We just played the Bottom Line [in New York] and it allowed for a certain casualness. You could be a lot less planned. That I probably miss. The bigger the place gets, the more you concentrate on focusing on people, getting their attention in the first place, and carrying it where the show is going. That takes concentration and preparation. In a club, you have everybody’s attention and so you can change a string, tell a story, and they’ll watch.”

  This time around, he’s unlikely to do any cover versions (“I’ve got my own oldies now”), and the smart money is on a leaner kind of show with fewer crowd pleasers, a show that will find more favor with hard-core fans. Is he anticipating any negative reaction?

  “I’m pretty confident of what we’re gonna be doing. There’s always, ‘I wished you’d played this or that,’ or ‘I liked you better when you had a beard or when you were young.’ I’ve got twenty years behind me at this point and everybody’s got their favorite part, everybody’s got a different thing. I don’t think about it. All I think about is how to keep it alive for me, because if I can’t do that it’s not going to be any good to anybody else. How do I keep it real and keep it alive and keep it vital for m
e and my audience? I’m not interested in being a nostalgia act. We’ll probably play some of the old things, the stuff that feels like it’s relevant to what I’m doing now. I had all that in 1978 when I put out Darkness on the Edge of Town—people saying, ‘Hey, you lost it after Born to Run!’

  “I always wanted my shows to be a little bit like a circus, a touch of political rally, a little touch of a lot of different things. Really, in the end I want people to go away feeling more connected to each other and connected in their own lives and to the whole world around them, and to accomplish that you got to be connected. Any good show does that. If you went to see Jackie Wilson in the late sixties, he did that, and he did it with three songs.”

  We wind up and head back across the yard as the shadows lengthen. Touring, he says, is not just about promoting your record; it’s to do with going to meet your audience. “These are people you have a relationship with like you have a relationship with your wife, your family and friends,” he argues.

  “I look at myself and I feel like I’m a lifetime musician. I’ve had some unusual success, which surprised me, and I enjoyed it when it happened, dealt with it pretty well, played well on the Born in the U.S.A. tour, and if you came and saw the show, you got a pretty good picture of what it was like in this country in the eighties. I felt I did good with it, but then you know there’s always the ‘Louie Louie’ thing …”

  Ah yes, the “Louie Louie” thing.

  “Yes,” he says and leans towards me. “Nobody’s quite sure, what is that guy singing?”

  He laughs.

  BRUCE BIT

  On Buying a House

  “I bought this big house in [Rumson] New Jersey, which was really quite a thing for me to do. It was a place I used to run by all the time. It was a big house, and I said, ‘Hey, this is a rich man’s house.’ And I think the toughest thing was that it was in a town where I’d been spit on as a kid.”

  —interview with James Henke, Rolling Stone, August 6, 1992

  LIVE AGAIN, SPRINGSTEEN STILL HAS METTLE

  GARY GRAFF | August 9, 1992, Detroit Free Press (Detroit, Michigan)

  Journalist Gary Graff caught up with Springsteen about the same time Hepworth did, but on the opposite coast. They talked during a show intermission on the singer’s home turf, in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Springsteen’s handlers “obviously make Bruce more available when it’s needed,” Graff told me. “During the 1991–1992 tour, for instance, when ticket sales were weaker [ostensibly because of the split with the E Street Band], they did the unprecedented, having me talk to him during the intermission—and probably delaying the second part of the show.” As Graff noted in his article, however, Springsteen still had no trouble selling out shows in his home state. —Ed.

  Bruce Springsteen’s black acoustic guitar leans against the tightly upholstered, earth-toned couch.

  The post-intermission set list sits on a coffee table, red marker on yellow legal paper.

  The sweat has been toweled off, and his clothes have been changed to an all-black vest, shirt, slacks, and boot ensemble, with a large silver cross dangling from the open neck of the shirt.

  Outside the Brendan Byrne Arena here hangs a huge “Welcome Home Bruce” banner, and as he sits in his spacious dressing room in the arena’s bowels, New Jersey native Springsteen has every reason to feel welcome and at home at the site of his first American concerts in four years—and of his first shows without his longtime sidekicks in the E Street Band, which he dismissed in late 1989.

  More than two hundred thousand fans snatched up tickets for his eleven shows here. This is the seventh of that stint. And despite some good-natured booing when he mentions his new home in Beverly Hills—“Let’s get the hostility out now,” he cracked, “I can take it”—the shows have been rapturously received as Springsteen continues a tradition of three-hour-minimum rockfests combining the lyrical and thematic depth of Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie with the charisma and energy of vintage Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Rolling Stones shows.

  “The audiences have been real welcoming here,” Springsteen says, his voice raspy and hoarse from the show’s first half. “I’m just glad there’s an audience out there who wants to come and see us play.”

  Glad and perhaps relieved. Since the release last March of his latest albums, Human Touch and Lucky Town, Springsteen has been caught in a crossfire of skepticism and anticipation. A longtime workingman’s hero who became a full-fledged pop culture icon with 1984’s multimillion-selling Born in the U.S.A. album, Springsteen has been criticized for losing touch with his roots and with the ideals of faith and loyalty that are the bedrocks of his music.

  His detractors, far more numerous now than at any previous time in his twenty-year career, point to Springsteen’s move to California—where he lives in a $13 million estate with his second wife, former E Street singer Patti Scialfa, and their children Evan James, two, and eight-month-old Jessica Rae. Detractors also point to his sacking of the E Streeters as proof of this detachment.

  They say that’s why ticket sales are slow in cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, and Los Angeles, and why his new albums, Human Touch and Lucky Town, have faltered on the charts, relative to his previous outings, even though they’ve sold more than 3.5 million copies each. [“Relative” is the key word here. The albums rose to numbers two and three, respectively, on the US charts, and both received platinum certification. —Ed.]

  “I kind of expected it,” says guitarist Nils Lofgren, an E Streeter from 1984 to 1989, of the backlash. “It’s the old ‘let ’em get to the top and then crucify him’ thing. But I love Bruce unconditionally, and I’m behind him. I still think he’s one of the greatest singers and songwriters ever.”

  To be fair, the new albums’ commercial showing is respectable, far more consistent with the rest of Springsteen’s career than was Born in the U.S.A., which sold 21 million copies worldwide. But it’s prompted stories such as Entertainment Weekly’s “What Ever Happened to Bruce?” cover. And Springsteen himself seemed concerned, tossing jocular references to the albums’ chart showings into his show, commenting on the performers who were ahead of him (“Elton John! That guy’s older than me!”).

  “It’s just a goof,” says Springsteen, who dumped the rap about halfway through his Jersey stand. “By the time I finally hit the road, the reasons I’m out there are … so varied. There are so many other reasons I’m out there other than hoping the records do well.

  “Yeah, everybody likes to be at the top of the charts … but that has never been my fundamental reason for being on that stage at night and having to perform the way I’ve performed over the years. For me, it’s a bit of a sideshow.

  “People just forget that everything recycles itself, even all of the criticisms … After Born to Run [in 1975], I remember reading all of the ‘What happened to?’ articles, and it just kind of goes around and around and around … every time you do something different or go into a big change.”

  For Springsteen, the big changes on the current tour are a new group—retaining only keyboardist Roy Bittan from the E Street Band—and the new music. The songs from Human Touch and Lucky Town, which comprise about half of his stage show, explore the changes in his life during the past four years, ruminating on marriage, fatherhood, and the fragile nature of these relationships.

  It’s heady stuff on its own, but when paired in concert with his older songs—“57 Channels (and Nothing On)” folding into “Badlands,” for instance—it makes both more resonant. And when he shouts, “I wanna know if love is real” during “Born to Run,” the new songs have already answered the question—that it’s more real than Springsteen, and maybe some of his fans, ever imagined.

  “Because I’ve been picking the old stuff just on instinct, it just feels like it has some major currentness to it,” Springsteen says. “I think that I’ve always had a real sense of purpose about what I was doing onstage, and I think my current life with Patti and the kids has deepened my sense of purp
ose and given me more to communicate and more to present people. So in that sense, it adds more fuel to the fire…. It just broadens and deepens.”

  Judging from the seventh show of his Jersey stand, Springsteen is still capable of doing quite a bit for listeners, whether they’re looking for fun or for something that cuts a bit deeper. It’s also an affirmation that despite the doubts about the new band, the new Boss is still the old Boss and he can still rock the joint into a sweaty rock-and-roll ecstasy.

  First things first; the new band doesn’t quite make you forget the E Street Band—a tough standard since the new ensemble has been together only a few months. The differences are apparent during older numbers, such as “Badlands” and “Prove It All Night.” Drummer Zachary Alford’s laid-back, R&B-oriented style doesn’t provide the proper drive for those songs, and they also miss Clarence Clemons’s saxophone parts, which provided a dynamic counterpoint to Springsteen’s guitar solos (multi-instrumentalist Crystal Taliefero plays sax only on “Born to Run”).

  That said, it’s still a solid group that’s lent a few welcome touches to Springsteen’s music. The five backup singers, for instance, provide a subtle gospel tinge to “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and an acoustic version of “Spirit in the Night,” as well as greater vocal strength to the rest of the material.

  “People usually come to see us for more things than great singing, Springsteen says with a laugh. “The musicians are basically real, real accomplished…. I was looking for musicians who could spread out over soul, rock and roll, just a lot of different types of music. I picked people both on the basis of their musicianship and how they felt. I want to maintain the kind of emotional communication that I felt we had over the years with the E Street Band.”