Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters

by Jeff Burger

  GM: An image?

  BS: Image? Sort of, I suppose. That’s part of it to some degree, but that’s like the top part—the frothy stuff.

  GM: Did you ever have a big gay following?

  BS: Not to my knowledge.

  GM: There was always something very camp about that grease-monkey-baseball-hat-in-the-back-pocket look during Born in the U.S.A.

  BS: It was probably my own fault. Who knows, I was probably working out my own insecurities, y’know? That particular image is probably the only time I look back over pictures of the band and it feels like a caricature to me.

  Everything before and after that is just people, but that particular moment I always go, “Jeez,” y’know? I couldn’t tell you what that was about.

  All I could tell you was, when I wrote “Streets of Philadelphia” and I had some contact with gay people, who the song had meant something to, I felt the image that I had at that time could have been misinterpreted, y’know? That is something that I regretted and still do regret, to some degree.

  But I think, at the same time, it must have been an easy image to latch onto. Maybe it had something to do with why it was powerful or what it represented. But it was very edgy to me and very close to—if it wasn’t already—oversimplification. It was certainly oversimplified if you just saw the image and didn’t go to the show and get a sense of where it was coming from and what it was about. It had implications that I didn’t tune into at the time and I don’t really feel are a fundamental part of my work.

  GM: Is there an element of surrealism playing at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and finding yourself standing beside the real, living, breathing heroes you once worshipped from a distance?

  BS: Yeah. One night I was standing between George Harrison and Mick Jagger and y’know, I sat in my room with their records. I learned to play my guitar from those records. I studied every riff and the way they played it and my initial bands were modeled on them. So there’s always a little bit of, “Hey, what am I doing here?” You realize there were millions and millions of kids at that time that had that particular fantasy or whatever you want to call it.

  But I’m sort of glad I have a place generationally, where I get to stand with those people onstage. It’s a tremendous source of pleasure being able to back up Chuck Berry, one of the great American writers, a great American writer. He captured an essential part of the country in a fashion that no one has done before or since.

  GM: Are you sad that his creative life as a writer lasted for such a short period?

  BS: That’s just the way it goes. I have no idea how people’s creative instincts work. I’m just glad for the work he’s done. It was very influential in my work in the sense that there was a lot of detail in the writing, fundamental images I carried into my own music.

  That’s the course of rock music. It’s very unusual to be twenty or twenty-five years down the line and still be doing vital work. I think the reason is, it takes an enormous leap of faith at the time of your success, a leap of consciousness, and the ability to suss out what is essential and what is bullshit is very important.

  Money comes in—great! We can let the good times roll. We can have fun with it. But if you start out and get caught up in the idea that these things are going to sustain you in some fashion when you get twenty years down the road, you’re gonna be in for a surprise.

  Right now, I don’t need records that are number one. I don’t need to sell records that are going to make millions. I need to do work that I feel is central, vital, that sets me in the present, where I don’t have to come out at night and depend upon my history or a song I wrote twenty years ago. What I’m interested in doing now is finding my place in the world as it stands. That, to me, is what is vital and sustains you and gives you the commitment and motivation to tour and stand behind your work. That’s all I know, twenty or twenty-five years down the line.

  GM: Is there a sense of fear attached to what you do?

  BS: Of course, that’s part of everything. I think if there is a fear, it’s a fear of slipping out of things. By that, I don’t mean the mainstream of the music business. This particular record, I knew when I put it out it wasn’t going to be on the radio very much and it wasn’t! Fundamentally, it wasn’t going to be part of what the mainstream music business is today, in the States anyway.

  GM: We’ve all seen Spinal Tap, with the idea of an audience becoming more selective.

  BS: [Laughs.] I guess there’s the sense that you are protective over your artistic life and creative impetus, your creative instinct, your creative vitality. That’s something I’ve known since I was tearing the posters down in 1975 [on his first visit to Britain, Springsteen went on the rampage, tearing down posters outside Hammersmith Odeon proclaiming him “the future of rock and roll”] and it’s something I still feel real strongly about today.

  GM: Are there moments when you’ve surprised or disappointed yourself?

  BS: You’re always doing that. You look back and say, “I did that well, I didn’t do that, I communicated well here but not there.” It’s just endless, y’know? That’s the idea. That’s why you’ve always got some place to go tomorrow, something to do now. That’s why this particular music is not a rock show, it’s not unplugged, it’s something else. I don’t even know if I should call it a folk show. In a funny way, the songs are based in rock music, but I suppose it’s based around the new record. It’s not a night where I come out and play hits or favorite songs you wanna hear. There’s no payoff at the end of the night with those things. It is what it is and that’s my intent.

  GM: Is your ongoing work a reaction and extension of the work you’ve done in the past?

  BS: Of course, because the artist’s job, in my opinion, is to try and answer the questions that your body of work throws up, or at least pose new questions. With this record, that’s what I’m trying to do.

  I felt for ten years I put a lot of those questions on hold because I was writing about other things. I was having some reaction to the Born in the U.S.A. experience, because I was finding my way through a new life, in some sense.

  GM: On the sleeve note to your Hits collection, you describe “Born to Run” as your shot at a twenty-five-year-old’s attempt to craft “the greatest record ever made.” How do you feel about it today?

  BS: Oh, I don’t know, I can’t listen to it objectively. It’s too caught up in my life. I don’t sit around listening to my work. I’d be insane if I did. I’d be crazy. I like it as a record but, right now, it’s hard for me to hear it because it’s caught up with so many other things.

  It’s a really good song. The way I would record it now would be a lot different, probably not as good, because I would be afraid of going over the top, and there’s a moment to go completely over the top and push the edge of things.

  GM: Your relationship with “Born in the U.S.A.” is like Dylan’s with “Like a Rolling Stone,” trying to grasp back the song’s real meaning rather than allowing it to become a faceless anthem. It wasn’t just Ronald Reagan [who tried to claim it as an effective endorsement of his jingoistic agenda] who misinterpreted the song.

  BS: The record of it I still feel is very good, and I wouldn’t change it or want it to be different. I wouldn’t want the version that I’m doing now to have come out at that time. At that particular moment, it was how I heard it and it happened in a couple of takes.

  You put your music out and it comes back to you in a variety of different ways through your audience. But a songwriter always has the opportunity to go out and reclarify or reclaim his work; it pushes you to be inventive. I think the version I have now … for me, at least, it’s the best version I’ve done of the song. I suppose it’s the truest, y’know. It’s got it all—everything it needs to be understood at the moment.

  GM: You write a lot about killers—people like the death-row inmate played by Sean Penn in Dead Man Walking [Springsteen’s title song for the Tim Robbins-directed movie has just been Oscar-nominated] and the s
layer in “Nebraska.” Have you ever met a real-life killer? Is it necessary to do your job right?

  BS: No, you’re not trying to recreate the experience. You’re trying to recreate the emotions and the things that went into the action being taken. Those are things that everyone understands. Those are things that everyone has within them. The action is the symptom. That’s what happened, but the things that caused that action to happen, that’s what everyone knows about—you know about it, I know about it. It’s inside of every human being.

  Those are the things you gotta mine, that’s the well that you gotta dip into and, if you’re doing that, you’re going to get something central and fundamental about those characters.

  GM: So it’s just coincidence that you currently look like the character Sean Penn plays in the movie?

  BS: I do? I didn’t realize that. Help! I’m going home … I don’t have as much hair as he does, for a start.

  BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: THE ADVOCATE INTERVIEW

  JUDY WIEDER | April 2, 1996, The Advocate (US)

  If I had to point a reader to the two or three conversations that best reveal the sort of person Springsteen is at his core, this next piece would be one of them. Judy Wieder, then editor-in-chief of the gay magazine The Advocate, conducted the interview, so it’s not surprising that homosexual rights are a key topic. Springsteen speaks powerfully about that subject but also about stardom, parenting, his own marriage, and the moral values that underlie all of his work.

  “Naturally, I had gone through many rings of fire with Bruce’s management/PR to finally land his first (and only?) interview with the gay press,” Wieder told me. “We had been trying since his Oscar-winning song for the film Philadelphia. So when I found myself in a West Hollywood hotel, waiting for him to join me at last, I was a little skeptical. Just what kind of rock circus would arrive, if anyone came at all?

  “Then the front door opened and Bruce walked in alone, telling me that he’d parked outside and hoped no one minded. Just like that—no entourage and no publicity agent to hover over us making sure he didn’t say too much or I didn’t ask something forbidden. Just Bruce and Judy. I almost fainted. Not from the ‘celebritiness’ of it all—although that was considerable. But from the sense of trust Bruce emanated once he’d made the decision to expose his feelings about gay and lesbian issues.

  “Probably the most significant contribution made by Bruce in the interview (aside from revealing his own struggle with how he’d really feel if one of his own children turned out to be gay) came when he discussed marriage for LGBTs. It is important to remember that this was 1996; I had the heads of our own gay organizations cautioning me not to push for marriage. ‘Civil unions are enough for now. People are not ready.’ It drove me nuts. But Bruce not only understood that it was an equal-rights issue, he pushed for gays and lesbians not to settle for less in this interview. His clarity and passion gave me extra backbone for my own ongoing fight over the years: ‘[Marriage] makes you a part of the social fabric. You get your license; you do all the social rituals…. [It’s] a part of your place in society and in some way part of society’s acceptance of you.’

  “No one has said it better in my view,” Wieder concluded. “The world is catching up to Bruce even now.” —Ed.

  “The bonus I got out of writing ‘Streets of Philadelphia’ was that all of a sudden I could go out and meet some gay man somewhere and he wouldn’t be afraid to talk to me and say, ‘Hey, that song really meant something to me.’ My image had always been very heterosexual, very straight. So it was a nice experience for me, a chance to clarify my own feelings about gay and lesbian and civil rights,” says rock’s most thoughtful megastar, Bruce Springsteen. Sitting in the dimly lit living room of a West Hollywood hotel suite, the man the world calls “the Boss” is talking about his 1994 Oscar and Grammy award-winning song from the film Philadelphia—a song detailing the feelings of a gay man facing the final turmoil of his struggle with AIDS.

  Now, with his second Oscar-nominated song, “Dead Man Walking,” and his stark new acoustic album, The Ghost of Tom Joad, the forty-six-year-old Springsteen seems relieved to have returned once again to the deliberately noncommercial core of his best social-commentary song-writing skills. Like “Streets of Philadelphia” and 1982’s daring Nebraska— recorded on his home tape recorder—Springsteen’s latest album and tour strip his muscular stadium rock down to a dark one-man stage show. No E Street Band, no mania-driven masses waving lighters from the balconies and shrieking “Bru-u-u-ce!” Just Springsteen, alone onstage, singing out from the shadows of all that’s gone wrong between people in the world today.

  For many skeptics, the idea of a hard-core rocker from the mean streets of New Jersey growing up, growing rich, and aligning himself with those who have not is pretty far-fetched. Yet that’s essentially the Springsteen way. Although he has sold millions of albums, filled thousands of concert arenas, and won mantelsful of Grammy and American Music awards, over the years he’s still managed to lend his support directly or indirectly to people and causes as diverse as Amnesty International, feeding the starving in Africa (“We Are the World”), the plight of immigrants, AIDS awareness, and the struggles of gays and lesbians.

  “After Bruce supported me by appearing on my VH1 special last year, we became friends,” says out lesbian rocker Melissa Etheridge. “I think the experience of having his song in Philadelphia led him to meet a lot of gay people and learn a lot about our lives. My girlfriend, Julie, is always with me when we go to his house, and he always treats us as a couple. I’ve often talked to him about my frustration over not being able to get legally married, and he’s always supportive and sympathetic.”

  Springsteen’s own struggles with finding love and settling down have been well documented in both his songs and the press. After his Herculean eleven-year rise to superstardom—which began with Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. in 1973 and culminated in 1984 with Born in the U.S.A.— he married model-actress Julianne Phillips. The marriage ended in the tabloids four years later when Springsteen fell in love with his backup singer, Patti Scialfa. They were married in 1991 and have three children.

  Judy Wieder: You think you’ll win another Oscar for your song “Dead Man Walking”?

  Bruce Springsteen: [Laughs.] Oh, I don’t know. When those Disney pictures are out there [Pocahontas], you don’t stand a chance. “Dead Man Walking” is another song that’s pretty offbeat, so I am not really expecting one. [Though nominated for an Oscar, the song did not win. —Ed.]

  JW: Still, offbeat subject matter served you well in “Streets of Philadelphia.” You say you’re pleased that gays and lesbians began approaching you after that song?

  BS: Oh, yeah! I had people come up to me in the streets or in restaurants and say, “I have a friend” or “I have a lover” or “I have a partner” or “I have a son.”

  JW: Why do you think Jonathan Demme—the director—asked you to write a song for Philadelphia?

  BS: Demme told me that Philadelphia was a movie he was making “for the malls.” I’m sure that was one of the reasons why he called me. I think he wanted to take a subject that people didn’t feel safe with and were frightened by and put it together with people that they did feel safe with like Tom Hanks or me or Neil Young. I always felt that was my job.

  JW: How could you make people feel safe?

  BS: When I first started in rock, I had a big guy’s audience for my early records. I had a very straight image, particularly through the mideighties.

  JW: But why could you reach them?

  BS: I knew where the fear came from. I was brought up in a small town, and I basically received nothing but negative images about homosexuality—very bad. Anybody who was different in any fashion was castigated and ostracized, if not physically threatened.

  JW: Did you have some personal inspiration for the song?

  BS: I had a very close friend who had a sarcoma cancer and died right around that time. For me, it was a very devastating experienc
e, being close to illness of that magnitude. I had never experienced what it calls on or asks of the people around the person who is so ill. Part of that experience ended up in the song.

  JW: You caught a particular isolation that many gay AIDS patients experience. When there are walls between people and there is a lack of acceptance, you can reach for that particular kind of communion: “Receive me, brother” is the lyric in the last verse.

  BS: That’s all anybody’s asking for—basically some sort of acceptance and to not be left alone. There was a certain spiritual stillness that I wanted to try to capture. Then I just tried to send in a human voice, as human a voice as I possibly could. I wanted you to be in somebody’s head, hearing their thought—somebody who was on the cusp of death but still experiencing the feeling of being very alive.

  JW: Were you surprised the song was a hit?

  BS: I would never have thought in a million years it was going to get radio airplay. But people were looking for things to assist them in making sense of the AIDS crisis, in making human connections. I think that is what film and art and music do; they can work as a map of sorts for your feelings.

  JW: Because you come from the streets of New Jersey, was there a personal journey for you in accepting and learning about homosexuality? Did it ever frighten you?

  BS: I don’t know if “frighten” would be the right word. I was pretty much a misfit in my own town, so I didn’t buy a lot of those negative attitudes. Sure, you are affected and influenced by them. But I think that your entire life is a process of sorting out some of those early messages that you got. I guess the main thing was that the gay image back then was the fifties image, the town queen or something, and that was all anyone really knew about homosexuality. Everybody’s attitudes were quite brutal. It was that real ugly part of the American character.