by Jeff Burger
That’s where your uncle’s essay “Notes for a Novel About the End of the World” was very helpful to me and my writing. Your uncle addresses the story behind those same comments: “The material is so depressing. The songs are so down.” He explains the moral and human purpose of writing by using that analogy of the canary that goes down into the mine with the miners: When the canary starts squawking and squawking and finally keels over, the miners figure it’s time to come up and think things over a little bit. That’s the writer—the twentieth-century writer is the canary for the larger society.
Maybe a lot of us use the idea of “celebrity” to maintain the notion that everything is all right, that there’s always someone making their million the next day. As a celebrity, you don’t worry about your bills, you have an enormous freedom to write and to do what you want. You can live with it well. But if your work is involved in trying to show where the country is hurting and where people are hurting, your own success is used to knock down or undercut the questions you ask of your audience. It’s tricky, because American society has a very strict idea of what success is and what failure is. We’re all “born in the U.S.A.” and some part of you carries that with you. But it’s ironic if celebrity is used to reassure lots of people, barely making it, that “Look, someone’s really making it, making it big, so everything is all right, just lose yourself and all your troubles in that big-time success!”
WP: Do you think you’re through making music videos?
BS: I don’t know. I probably am. There’s nobody waiting with bated breath out there for my next video right now. I’ve never been much of a video artist. I was “pre-video,” and I think I remain pre-video, though maybe I’m “post-video” now.
Music videos have had an enormous impact on the way that you receive visual images on television and in the theaters—and it sped up the entire way the music world worked, for better or for worse. When I started, you had a band, you toured two or three, four years, you did a thousand shows or five hundred shows, that’s how you built your audience, and then maybe you had a hit record. I feel sorry for some of these talented young bands that come up: They have a hit record, a video or two, and then it’s over. I think it might have made the music world more fickle. In some ways, it may be more expedient for some of the young acts, but I think it’s harder also, because you don’t have the time to build a longstanding relationship with your audience.
There was something about developing an audience slowly—you’d draw an audience that stood with you over a long period of time, and it got involved with the questions you were asking and the issues you were bringing up. It’s an audience who you shared a history with. I saw the work that I was doing as my life’s work. I thought I’d be playing music my whole life and writing my whole life, and I wanted to be a part of my audience’s ongoing life. The way you do that is the same way your audience lives its life—you do it by attempting to answer the questions that both you and they have asked, sometimes with new questions. You find where those questions lead you to—your actions in the world. You take it out of the aesthetic and you hopefully bring it into your practical, everyday life, the moral or ethical.
“Man on the Train” helped me think about these things in some fashion, where your uncle dissects the old Western movie heroes. We have our mythic hero, Gary Cooper, who is capable of pure action, where it’s either all or nothing, and he looks like he’s walking over that abyss of anxiety, and he won’t fail. Whereas the moviegoer, the person watching the movie, is not capable of that. There’s no real abyss under Gary Cooper, but there is one under the guy watching the film! Bringing people out over that abyss, helping them and myself to realize where we all “are,” helping my audience answer the questions that are there—that’s what I’m interested in doing with my own work.
That’s what I try to accomplish at night in a show. Presenting ideas, asking questions, trying to bring people closer to characters in the songs, closer to themselves—so that they take those ideas, those questions—fundamental moral questions about the way we live and the way we behave toward one another—and then move those questions from the aesthetic into the practical, into some sort of action, whether it’s action in the community or action in the way you treat your wife or your kid or speak to the guy who works with you. That is what can be done, and is done, through film and music and photography and painting. Those are real changes I think you can make in people’s lives, and that I’ve had made in my life through novels and films and records and people who meant something to me. Isn’t that what your uncle meant by “existentialist reflection”?
And there’s a lot of different ways that gets done. You don’t have to be doing work that’s directly social conscious. You could make an argument that one of the most socially conscious artists in the second half of this century was Elvis Presley, even if he probably didn’t start out with any set of political ideas that he wanted to accomplish. He said, “I’m all shook up and I want to shake you up,” and that’s what happened. He had an enormous impact on the way that people lived, how they responded to themselves, to their own physicality, to the integration of their own nature. I think that he was one of the people, in his own way, who led to the sixties and the Civil Rights movement. He began getting us “all shook up,” this poor white kid from Mississippi who connected with black folks through their music, which he made his own and then gave to others. So pop culture is a funny thing—you can affect people in a lot of different ways.
WP: Did you always try to affect the audience like that? When you first started out, when you were young?
BS: We were trying to excite people, we were trying to make people feel alive. The core of rock music was cathartic. There was some fundamental catharsis that occurred in “Louie, Louie.” That lives on, that pursuit. Its very nature was to get people “in touch” with themselves and with each other in some fashion. So initially you were just trying to excite people, and make them happy, alert them to themselves, and do the same for yourself. It’s a way of combating your own indifference, your own tendency to slip into alienation and isolation. That’s also in “Man on the Train”: We can’t be alienated together. If we’re all alienated together, we’re really not alienated.
That’s a lot of what music did for me—it provided me with a community, filled with people, and brothers and sisters who I didn’t know, but who I knew were out there. We had this enormous thing in common, this “thing” that initially felt like a secret. Music always provided that home for me, a home where my spirit could wander. It performed the function that all art and film and good human relations performed—it provided me with the kind of “home” always described by those philosophers your uncle loved.
There are very real communities that were built up around that notion—the very real community of your local club on Saturday night. The importance of bar bands all across America is that they nourish and inspire that community. So there are the very real communities of people and characters, whether it’s in Asbury Park or a million different towns across the land. And then there is the community that it was enabling you to imagine, but that you haven’t seen yet. You don’t even know it exists, but you feel that, because of what you heard or experience, it could exist.
That was a very powerful idea because it drew you outward in search of that community—a community of ideas and values. I think as you get older and develop a political point of view, it expands out into those worlds, the worlds of others, all over America, and you realize it’s just an extension of that thing that you felt in a bar on Saturday night in Asbury Park when it was 150 people in the room.
What do you try to provide people? What do parents try to provide their children? You’re supposed to be providing a hopeful presence, a decent presence, in your children’s lives and your neighbor’s lives. That’s what I would want my children to grow up with and then to provide when they become adults. It’s a big part of what you can do with song, and pictures and words. It’s real and
its results are physical and tangible. And if you follow its implications, it leads you both inward and outward. Some days we climb inside, and some days maybe we run out. A good day is a balance of those sorts of things. When rock music was working at its best, it was doing all of those things—looking inward and reaching out to others.
To get back to where we started, it can be difficult to build those kinds of connections, to build and sustain those kinds of communities, when you’re picked up and thrown away so quickly—that cult of celebrity. At your best, your most honest, your least glitzy, you shared a common history, and you attempted both to ask questions and answer them in concert with your audience. In concert. The word “concert”—people working together—that’s the idea. That’s what I’ve tried to do as I go along with my work. I’m thankful that I have a dedicated, faithful audience that’s followed along with me a good part of the way. It’s one of my life’s great blessings—having that companionship and being able to rely on that companionship. You know, “companionship” means breaking bread with your brothers and sisters, your fellow human beings—the most important thing in the world! It’s sustained my family and me and my band throughout my life.
WP: Do you think you’ve extended your audience to include some of the kinds of people that you’re writing about now: Mexican immigrants, homeless people? Do you feel that you’re doing something for those people with your music?
BS: There’s a difference between an emotional connection with them, like I think I do have, and a more physical, tangible impact. There was a point in the mideighties where I wanted to turn my music into some kind of activity and action, so that there was a practical impact on the communities that I passed through while I traveled around the country. On this last tour, I would meet a lot of the people who are out there on the front line—activists, legal advocates, social workers—and the people that they’re involved with. It varied from town to town, but we’d usually work with an organization that’s providing immediate care for people in distress, and then also we’d find an organization that’s trying to have some impact on local policy. It helped me get a sense of what was going on in those towns, and the circumstances that surround the people that I’m imagining in my songs, in the imagined community I create with my music.
I’m sure I’ve gotten a lot more out of my music than I’ve put in, but those meetings and conversations keep me connected so that I remember the actual people that I write about. But I wouldn’t call myself an activist. I’m more of a concerned citizen. I think I’d say that I’m up to my knees in it, but I’m not up to my ass!
I guess I’m—rock bottom—a concerned, even aroused observer, sort of like the main character of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Not that I’m invisible! But Ellison’s character doesn’t directly take on the world. He wants to see the world change, but he’s mainly a witness, a witness to a lot of blindness. I recently heard two teachers, one black and one white, talking about that novel, and it sure got to them; it’s what Ellison wanted it to be, it’s a great American story—and in a way we’re all part of it.
BRUCE BIT
On First Seeing His Debut Album
“This [Tracks box-set cover photo] was in the Main Point [nightclub] in Philadelphia in ’74…. The thing I remember the most is this was the room where I first saw my first actual record. Somebody brought down a copy of Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., and pulled it out of the sleeve. It was on that red Columbia label, and to me, it was like an impossibility, because I pulled Highway 61 [Revisited] out of that sleeve with the red label on it. Seeing my name on that red label was quite miraculous.”
—interview with Melinda Newman, Billboard, November 7, 1998
TV INTERVIEW
CHARLIE ROSE | November 20, 1998, The Charlie Rose Show, PBS Network (US)
Springsteen spent a full hour on PBS’s Charlie Rose Show in November 1998, and made good use of every minute. That month, the artist issued Songs, a coffee-table book that collected all of his previously recorded lyrics, along with his reminiscences about each album; and Tracks, a four-CD box set that included a ton of previously unreleased material spanning his entire career. The response to that music was deservedly similar to the one that had greeted the first volumes of Bob Dylan’s Bootlegseries—amazement that so many high-quality songs could have remained unheard for so many years.
Springsteen had plenty to say to Rose about Tracks, but he offered provocative comments on other subjects as well. For one thing, there was more talk of an E Street Band reunion, which was an increasingly hot rumor at the time and would become a reality only four months later. For another, Springsteen’s father, Douglas, had died on April 26, and he was clearly very much on the singer’s mind, as was his mother. If there’s an interview where Springsteen talks at greater length or with more candor about his parents, I haven’t seen it. —Ed.
Charlie Rose: He is a rock icon, a legend, and now a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. [His membership was announced prior to this interview, but the induction ceremony didn’t occur until March 15, 1999. —Ed.] He is Bruce Springsteen. For the past thirty years, he’s been writing extraordinary songs about ordinary people. “The River,” “Born to Run,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” and “Streets of Philadelphia,” just to name a few, a very few. He has won eight Grammies and an Oscar for his achievements. [In fact, he had won seven Grammies by the time of this conversation; by 2012, he had won twenty. —Ed.] Tracks is his new four-CD set that features fifty-six previously unreleased songs and is garnering some of the best reviews of his career. In addition to songwriting, he is known for his legendary, intense concert performances that have lasted as long as four hours and more. Welcome.
Bruce Springsteen: Thank you.
CR: There’s so much to talk about. All those years where you’ve entertained so many people—was that the ultimate joy, to be performing in front of a live audience? Or was it sitting at home at a table like this writing a song?
BS: Writing’s always the hardest work. It’s the blueprint of what you’re gonna do. It’s the essence of your idea that you’re gonna try to communicate to your audience. The show is taking that idea and performing it. And performing it well expands its boundaries and its power. You flesh it out and entertain people with it.
I enjoy the writing a lot. I mean, it’s always hard to write a good song. You always need to have a new idea. But that release that you feel after you’ve done the writing and you come out and you’re finally face to face and you’re speaking to somebody … that’s why you wrote that song.
CR: To connect?
BS: That’s why you picked up a guitar and got the band together and wrote that song. That’s the fulfillment of the whole process.
CR: You drove yourself through four hours, sometimes longer, to almost exhaustion—
BS: Uh, to exhaustion [laughs].
CR: That was how you would know, I could not go one more song? Is that it?
BS: On certain nights, I suppose. But I think the four-hour show, when we did it, was just an outgrowth of playing in bars. The long shows were something that didn’t happen much in a concert setting. But they happened every night in bars all across America.
CR: There were other guys doing four hours; they just weren’t playing for a stadium full of people.
BS: I think the length of the show came out of two things. Once I had a few records out, I wanted to play the songs that the fans wanted to hear, and I wanted to play all my new songs, too. Also, we’d gotten used to playing a minimum of three hours in a bar. And you didn’t feel like you’d done it in some fashion [if you played less] and I wanted it to be an extreme experience—an experience that wasn’t casual, that pushed at the limits. I wanted people to be brought to someplace and to come out of themselves.
CR: Would you test out songs at concerts, or did they have to be perfect before you would perform them in front of a live audience?
BS: “Born to Run” we played quite a bit in some slightly diffe
rent versions before I ever recorded it. In the earlier days, if I had something I was excited about, I’d come out and play it. If you had a great riff, you wanted to hear it that night. If I had most of the words, sometimes I’d give it a shot. If I had a new song I liked, I’d come out and I’d play it. I played “The River” before I recorded it.
CR: Fifty-six of these songs we’ve never heard before.
BS: That’s what they say [laughs].
CR: Ten of ’em we’ve heard before, some in different versions. Like “Born in the U.S.A.,” there’s a version here that’s raw.
BS: Right, it was the original version that I cut in my bedroom. We’ve got fifty-six that have not been released before and I think some of ’em are B sides and there are a few other things that I wanted to include. The original version of “Born in the U.S.A.” should have probably been on Nebraska.
CR: But you didn’t put it in.
BS: I didn’t think it was finished, and it was one of my first songs about Vietnam. I think I wanted to make sure I had it right. Listening back, it came out pretty good really, and if I was making that decision today I probably would have put it on.
CR: Put it in Nebraska?
BS: Yeah. But at the moment, I was careful with it. See, I was recording Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A., the rock record, simultaneously. So I had these two very different things going on. And one of the first things we did was cut the band version of “Born in the U.S.A.” When I heard that, I felt that that was really powerful and I knew that that was going to be the centerpiece of the music I was doing at that time and so I went with the band version.