by Jeff Burger
JW: When you said you were a misfit, what did you mean?
BS: Basically, I was pretty ostracized by my hometown. Me and a few other guys were the town freaks—and there were many occasions when we were dodging getting beaten up ourselves. So, no, I didn’t feel a part of those homophobic ideas. Also, I started to play in clubs when I was sixteen or seventeen, and I was exposed to a lot of different lifestyles and a lot of different things. It was the sixties, and I was young, I was open-minded, and I wasn’t naturally intolerant. I think the main problem was that nobody had any real experience with gay culture, so your impression of it was incredibly narrow.
JW: So you actually met gay people?
BS: Yeah, I had gay friends. The first thing I realized was that everybody’s different, and it becomes obvious that all of the gay stereotypes are ridiculous [laughs]. I did pretty good with it.
JW: Because of your macho rock image, I didn’t know if you were going to tell me, “Oh, yeah, there were years when I didn’t want anybody to feel that I had any sympathy for that.”
BS: No, I always felt that amongst my core fans—because there was a level of popularity that I had in the mideighties that was sort of a bump on the scale—they fundamentally understood the values that are at work in my work. Certainly tolerance and acceptance were at the forefront of my music. If my work was about anything, it was about the search for identity, for personal recognition, for acceptance, for communion, and for a big country. I’ve always felt that’s why people come to my shows, because they feel that big country in their hearts.
JW: You mean a country big enough for everyone?
BS: Yes. Unfortunately, once you get a really big audience, then people come for a lot of different reasons. And they can misunderstand the songs.
JW: You even had to deal with President Reagan thinking “Born in the U.S.A.” was about his values.
BS: Yes, at that one point the country moved to the right, and there was a lot of nastiness, intolerance, and attitudes that gave rise to more intolerance. So I’m always in the process of trying to clarify who I am and what I do. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.
JW: On The Ghost of Tom Joad, you have a song, “Balboa Park,” and in it you say, “Where the men in their Mercedes / Come nightly to employ … / The services of the border boys.” Are you talking about drugs or sex or both?
BS: I’m talking about sex, hustling.
JW: What do you know about this subject?
BS: I read about it in a series of articles the Los Angeles Times did about border life. It fit into the rest of the subject matter in the album.
JW: It’s impossible for most people to imagine the kind of fame you have. Everyone in the world knows who you are. Does it make you feel alienated?
BS: The only thing I can say about having this type of success is that you can get yourself in trouble because basically the world is set open for you. People will say yes to anything you ask, so it’s basically down to you and what you want or need. Yes, you can get isolated with an enormous amount of fame or wealth. You can also get isolated with a six-pack of beer and a television set. I grew up in a community where plenty of people were isolated in that fashion.
JW: How do you keep your personal life connected to the real world?
BS: Over the years, I think you have to strive for some normalcy. Like you need to say, “Hey, I’m not going to lock myself up in my house tonight. I’m going to go to the movies or maybe down to a club or take my kids to Universal Studios.”
JW: What keeps you connected?
BS: You have to want to be included. I always saw myself as the kid who got the guitar and was going to hold it for a while and play it and pass it on to somebody else. I always saw a lot of myself in my audience.
JW: But that changed when you got so big.
BS: True, and by anybody’s measure I have an extravagant lifestyle. But I never felt that I’ve lost myself in it. I want to feel that essential spiritual connection that you make with your deep audience, your true audience.
JW: So that’s how you’ve kept balanced?
BS: Yeah. I just felt that what I was doing was rooted in a community—either real or imagined—and that my connection to that community was what made my writing and singing matter. I didn’t feel that those connections were casual connections. I felt they were essential connections. I was a serious young man, you know? I had serious ideas about rock music. Yeah, it was also a circus and fun and a dance party—all of those things—but still a serious thing. I believed that serious things could be done with it. It had a power; it had a voice. I still fucking believe that. I really do.
JW: And I assume that your being here today means that you want gays and lesbians to feel they’re a part of this community—this big country.
BS: Yeah, very much so. The ongoing clarification of the way I feel, or my ideas, where I stand on different issues: That’s my work now. That’s why this interview is a great opportunity for me. Hey—you write, and you want your music understood.
JW: When you fell in love with your wife Patti, there was a lot of negativity in the press because your marriage to Julianne Phillips was breaking up. Did your experience with this kind of intrusion into your private life give you any idea what it’s like for gays and lesbians, who constantly get criticized for who they love?
BS: It’s a strange society that assumes it has the right to tell people whom they should love and whom they shouldn’t. But the truth is, I basically ignored the entire thing as much as I could. I said, “Well, all I know is, this feels real, and maybe I have got a mess going here in some fashion, but that’s life.”
JW: But that’s everything: This feels real.
BS: That’s it. Trust yourself in the end. Those are the only lights that [you] can go by, and the world will catch up. But I think it would be much more difficult to be gay, particularly in the town that I grew up in. Divorce may have been difficult for me, but I don’t know what it would be like to have your heart in one place and have somebody say, “Hey, you can’t do that.” So all anybody can do is do their best. Like when President Clinton came into office, the first thing he tried to do was have gays in the military. I thought, “Wow! A leader.” I just felt that was leading.
JW: What did you feel when it all fell apart?
BS: Initially I felt surprised at the reaction. I was surprised that it was such a big deal. But that’s what the federal government is supposed to do: It is supposed to encourage tolerance. If you can’t get acceptance, tolerance will have to do. Acceptance will come later. That’s what the laws are for. So I was saddened by the fate of the whole thing and the beating that he took.
JW: Were you surprised when Melissa Etheridge was able to come out and still have success in rock and roll?
BS: It was tremendously groundbreaking. The rock world is a funny world, a world where simultaneously there is a tremendous amount of macho posturing and homophobia—a lot of it, in my experience—and yet it has as its basic rule the idea that you are supposed to be who you are. When I first heard about Melissa, I was very happy to see that that was where some of the seeds of what I had done had fallen. I said, “Wow, a lesbian rock singer who came up through the gay bars! I don’t believe it!” [Laughs.] I felt really good about it.
JW: I understand you and Patti and Melissa and her Julie have become friends.
BS: We have gotten to know each other since her VH1 special. Since then, we’ve got a nice relationship going.
JW: She told me she’s talked with you about the fight gays and lesbians are in to have the right to be legally married. Some people, especially heterosexuals, think it isn’t that important. I’ve had well-meaning people say, “But you know that loving is all that’s important. Getting married isn’t.”
BS: It does matter. It does matter. There was actually a long time when I was coming from the same place. “Hey, what’s the difference? You have got the person you care about.” I know that I went through a divorce, and it wa
s really difficult and painful and I was very frightened about getting married again. So part of me said, Hey, what does it matter? But it does matter. It’s very different than just living together. First of all, stepping up publicly—which is what you do; you get your license, you do all the social rituals—is a part of your place in society and in some way part of society’s acceptance of you.
JW: You and Patti decided you needed that?
BS: Yes, Patti and I both found that it did mean something. Coming out and saying whom you love, how you feel about them, in a public way was very, very important. Those are the threads of society; that’s how we all live together in some fashion. There is no reason I can see why gays and lesbians shouldn’t get married. It is important because those are the things that bring you in and make you feel a part of the social fabric. The idea that Melissa and Julie can’t be married—that seems ridiculous to me. Ridiculous!
JW: So you, a rock star, a symbol of counterculture earlier in your life, have come to defend the importance of traditions?
BS: Yeah, oh, yeah. It’s like, my kids are sort of little heathens at the moment [laughs]. They have no particular religious information. Ten years ago, I would have said, “Who cares? They’ll figure it out on their own.” But you are supposed to provide some direction for your children. So you look for institutions that can speak to you and that you can feel a part of and be a part of and that will allow you to feel included and be a part of the community.
JW: What about gays and lesbians having children?
BS: Being a good or bad parent is not something that hinges on your particular sexual preference. I think that people have some idea of what the ideal parent is. I don’t know any ideal parents. I have met single mothers who are doing an incredible job of raising their kids. I don’t feel sexual preference is a central issue.
JW: You have three children. What would you do if one of them came to you and said, “I think I’m gay”?
BS: Whatever their sexual preference might be when they grow up, I think accepting the idea that your child has his own life is the hardest thing to do. That life begins, and you can see it the minute they hit the boards. I think when I was growing up, that was difficult for my dad to accept—that I wasn’t like him, I was different. Or maybe I was like him, and he didn’t like that part of himself—more likely. I was gentle, and generally that was the kind of kid I was. I was a sensitive kid. I think most of the people who move into the arts are. But basically, for me, that lack of acceptance was devastating, really devastating.
JW: Your father didn’t accept you?
BS: Yeah, and it was certainly one of the most devastating experiences. I think your job as a parent is to try to nurture and guide. If one of my kids came and said that to me—hey, you want them to find happiness, you want them to find fulfillment. So they’re the ones who are going to have to decide what that is for them.
JW: Does it get harder and harder for you, in terms of being a father, as your children define themselves more and more?
BS: Yeah, because you are caught up with your children’s identities. You try not to be rigid, but you do find out the places where you are rigid. And you do get caught up in really some of the great clichés of parenting, whether it is wanting them to excel at some particular sport—I mean, really, just some of the dumbest things.
JW: It’s hard to separate?
BS: Yeah, it’s the separation.
JW: And then to have your child’s sexuality be different from your own, that would be difficult, right?
BS: I think that with a lot of these issues, you just don’t know until they truly enter your life in some really personal way. You have your lights that you are trying to steer by; everybody has those. But then you have all that stuff that’s been laid on you that you’re working your way through. Sure, I can sit back and say I know how I would want to react. I know what I would want to say and how I would want to feel. But unless those things enter my life in some personal fashion, I don’t know how I will act.
JW: I think that is very honest. Do you have any family members who are gay?
BS: No [laughs]. I have a very eccentric family, but, no, nobody gay in my immediate family.
JW: In your whole career, have you ever had a man ask you out or make a pass at you?
BS: Once or twice when I was younger. Yes [laughs]—I mean, no, not exactly directly—[laughs] but you know how those things are.
JW: Being gay or lesbian is a unique minority in the sense that we can pretend we’re straight if we don’t want to encounter homophobic feelings, including our own. Unfortunately, we’ll never change the world that way. To that end, it’s important to identify ourselves so that people learn how many people really are gay. As always, there is a tremendous conflict going on in the gay community about pushing people to come out—especially celebrities, because of their wide visibility. Do you have any strong feelings about it?
BS: I have to come at it from the idea of personal privacy. To me, that is a decision that each individual should be free to make. I don’t know if someone should make as profoundly a personal decision as that for you. I’m not comfortable with that.
JW: But would you encourage them?
BS: Sure, you can say, “Hey, come on, step up to the plate” or “We need you” or “It’ll make a big difference,” and that would be absolutely true and valid. But in the end—hey, it’s not your life.
JW: Do you think they could get hurt professionally?
BS: If you’re in the entertainment business, it’s a world of illusion, a world of symbols. So I think you’re talking about somebody who may feel their livelihood is threatened. I think you’ve got to move the world in the right direction so that there is acceptance and tolerance, so that the laws protect everybody’s civil rights, gay, straight, whatever. But then you also have got to give people the room to make their own decisions.
JW: But on a very personal level, what would you tell somebody who asked you for advice about whether or not he or she should come out?
BS: First of all, I can only imagine that not being able to be yourself is a painful thing. It’s awful to have to wear a mask or hide yourself. So at the end of my conversation, I’d just say, “Hey, this is how the world is; these are the consequences, and these are your fundamental feelings.” Because a person’s sexuality is such an essential part of who he is, to not be able to express it the way that you feel it [sighs] has just got to be so very painful.
ROCK AND READ
Will Percy Interviews Bruce Springsteen
WILL PERCY | Spring 1998, DoubleTake (US)
Novelist Walker Percy wrote to Springsteen in February 1989 to say that “I’ve always been an admirer of yours for your musicianship, and for being one of the few sane guys in your field.” In the letter, he mentioned that “my favorite nephew, Will Percy, has an even higher opinion of you.”
Springsteen wasn’t very familiar with the novelist’s work and didn’t respond to his note. Percy died from cancer a little more than two years later. At some point, though, Springsteen read his 1961 classic, The Moviegoer, which led him to explore more of Percy’s work.
By the time the singer met nephew Will Percy after an Atlanta show in January 1996, he was regretting that he’d never answered the novelist’s letter. Will suggested he write to Walker Percy’s widow. Days later, Springsteen sent her a heartfelt note, saying that it was “one of my great regrets” that he hadn’t had a chance to correspond with her husband. “The loss and search for faith [that Percy had written about in The Moviegoer] have been at the core of my own work for most of my adult life,” he added. “I’d like to think that perhaps that is what Dr. Percy heard and was what moved him to write me.”
Then, in the fall of 1997, Will Percy and Springsteen met again, at the singer’s central New Jersey farm. Percy taped the conversation, which appeared the following spring in the now-defunct magazine DoubleTake. The magazine was founded by Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard professor and chil
d psychiatrist Robert Coles, who would go on to write Bruce Springsteen’s America. —Ed.
Will Percy: When did books start influencing your songwriting and music? I remember as early as 1978, when I saw you in concert, you mentioned Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July, and you dedicated a song to him.
Bruce Springsteen: I picked up that book in a drugstore in Arizona while I was driving across the country with a friend of mine. We stopped somewhere outside of Phoenix, and there was a copy of the paperback in the rack. So I bought the book and I read it between Phoenix and Los Angeles, where I stayed in this little motel. There was a guy in a wheelchair by the poolside every day, two or three days in a row, and I guess he recognized me, and he finally came up to me and said, “Hey, I’m Ron Kovic”—it was really very strange—and I said, “Oh, Ron Kovic, gee, that’s good.”
I thought I’d met him before somewhere. And he said, “No, I wrote a book called Born on the Fourth of July.” And I said, “You wouldn’t believe this. I just bought your book in a drugstore in Arizona and I just read it. It’s incredible.” Real, real powerful book. And we talked a little bit and he got me interested in doing something for the vets. He took me to a vet center in Venice [California], and I met a bunch of guys along with this guy Bobby Muller who was one of the guys who started VVA, Vietnam Veterans of America.
I go through periods where I read, and I get a lot out of what I read, and that reading has affected my work since the late seventies. Films and novels and books, more so than music, are what have really been driving me since then. Your uncle once wrote that “American novels are about everything,” and I was interested in writing about “everything” in some fashion in my music: how it felt to be alive now, a citizen of this country in this particular place and time and what that meant, and what your possibilities were if you were born and alive now, what you could do, what you were capable of doing. Those were ideas that interested me.