by Jeff Burger
CR: How was it for you to go back to the very beginning and listen? I mean, you have John Hammond, the legendary CBS executive, at the very beginning of this [Tracks collection], who saw you and heard you …
BS: Right. That was a big thrill.
CR: But how was it for you to go back and listen and hear songs that you [originally], for whatever reason said, “Not ready, not now, not this album”?
BS: It was enjoyable to do now because at the time you’re making those decisions, you’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself. Sometimes I’d have a particular theme or context going for a particular record, and you’re caught in a very specific moment in time and many of your decisions are coming out of that state of mind. I think if you go back ten or twenty years later and you’re free of that context, you can just hear the music. You’re not concerned about whether this fits in this particular record or what kind of song it is. The music is just what it is.
So it was nice to go back and enjoy the stuff just for what it was. And when I was able to do that and get outside of my own head about it, I realized, “Oh, that could have went on, and this could have went on and, boy, I should have put that song on.” And I tried to pick the things [for Tracks] that I felt were as good as the stuff we released. I went very carefully through the hundreds of songs that we had and things that felt like they could have come right off of those [earlier] records.
CR: Where are you musically now? I’ve heard that there is a country-and-western collection of songs.
BS: [Laughs.] I’ve been asked about this. I make a lot of different kinds of music all the time. I’ve made country music.
CR: Why haven’t you released it?
BS: That [country music] came about through the Tom Joad record. The Tom Joad material was so intense that in between cutting the story songs, I’d have a western swing thing. I had a little country combo with Garry Tallent and Danny Federici and a great steel player, Marty Rifkin from Los Angeles. And we’d move into things that just felt conducive to that instrumentation. But it never formed into a record.
And for Tracks, I specifically chose things that came from records that I’d released—that there’d be a context for, for my fans to go back. If you liked The River, there’s an album from [the sessions for] The River. If you liked Born in the U.S.A., there’s almost an entire album from [the sessions for] Born in the U.S.A. So I wanted the things in this collection to refer back to the records that I’d released and fill those records out and give people a broader idea of what I was doing in the studio and the kind of music we were making.
CR: So this is an insight into where your head was. Some say it’s a kind of alternative vision.
BS: Yeah, I’d say that it’s a bit of an alternative career in some fashion.
CR: Like this is the career you took and this [holds up Tracks] is the career that you might have taken. The road not taken, the road taken.
BS: On certain records, they intersect more and on certain ones they wouldn’t. You know, there’s party songs from [the] Darkness on the Edge of Town [sessions]. And there’s a lot of things from the second CD [on Tracks], which is the River collection, that could have come out on that record.
I tried to have a very hard focus on my [earlier] records. It was a part of the way that I protected myself at the time. I protected my identity and who I wanted to be and what I wanted to say. And so I made a lot of tough decisions and left off a lot of music that was actually very enjoyable that I’m glad I can get out now.
CR: Why isn’t “The Promise” in this set?
BS: [Laughs.] Yeah, I’ve been asked that. I went back and listened to it and we never really got a good recording of it, in my opinion. It’s been a favorite song of a lot of people. A lot of people mention that one to me and it was the sequel to “Thunder Road” in some fashion. It referred back to those characters. But we had a very plodding, heavy-handed version of it and I couldn’t quite live with it. So maybe another time.
CR: You know how much your fans are asking about this.
BS: Yeah, I’ve had a few [questions about] what happened to “The Fever” and—
CR: Well, that’s my second question: What happened to “The Fever”?
BS: Southside [Johnny and the Asbury Jukes] did a great version of it and it’s never been one of my favorites. So I said, “Well, I’ll put this on a B side or something.” It was sort of a sequencing decision. It kind of slowed down the way the music felt when it came up.
CR: Does that mean we’ll never see it?
BS: Well, it’s been seen [on bootlegs] [laughs]. But we have a nice version of it and it’s mixed and I’ll probably get it out.
CR: Where do you rank “The Wish”?
BS: That was a song about my mom. I wrote a lot about my dad, you know, and …
CR: This was the only song you wrote about your mom?
BS: Yeah. Yes it was … directly.
CR: This is the person most responsible—most responsible—for your career. A sixty-dollar electric guitar way back when …
BS: Yeah. I’m ashamed of myself [laughs]. So what does that mean about fathers and sons?
CR: Exactly. Why did you write all these songs about your father? Does that mean it [creativity] only comes out of pain and not out of joy?
BS: No…. It’s so complicated. I mean, I could get on the couch here and we could go on about it, but I think a son’s relationship with his father particularly but with both your parents—it’s your most closely observed relationship.
It’s the relationship you watch every single day. About how to tie your shoes, how to walk, how to address people, how to treat people. You’re learning all those things and you internalize them. As parents, you can forget how closely you’re being watched. You’re being watched so closely. And that stuff goes in and it lays deep and it’s there forever.
I think you tend to write about things that you’re trying to sort out. You’re trying to write about things that you don’t understand and you want to understand. You’re working on something to help you understand what that was all about. Who were you and who was he? That’s a big part of what writing does. I think it comes out of that particular fire. So those are the things that you carry and that you are always trying to put in context and make sense of.
My mother was very consistent and we had a relationship that was easier to understand. It was nurturing and there was faith involved and support and a lot of giving love. That was something that I shied away from writing about. I think it’s easier to write about your dad in rock and roll than about your mother.
CR: Because it’s angry? Born out of rage?
BS: It’s angry. It’s about rebellion. It fits more in the kinds of emotions that rock and roll came up out of. There’s songs about mothers in gospel music. There was a gospel group called the Mother Lovers at one time, I think. Country musicians [sing about mothers]. Merle Haggard had “Mama Tried.”
“The Wish” was probably one of the most autobiographical songs I ever wrote. It was just very detailed, incident by incident. It was a very divining moment [I was writing about]: standing in front of the music store with someone who’s going to do everything she can to give you what you needed and desired that day. It was a great sacrifice on her part. It was sixty dollars that was finance-company money.
I finally got a song out about it. I gave it to her many years ago, but this is the first time it’s been out on record.
CR: What did she say when she heard it?
BS: She liked it.
CR: I bet she did.
BS: [She said,] “About time,” or something.
CR: Let me just stay with the family for a second because you said once that “the two most hated things in my household were me and my guitar.” Your mother gave you the guitar. At the end, though, you and your dad got together? And he helped you understand what it meant to be a father for a son, yes?
BS: Well, you don’t learn by just the good things that are taught. You learn by y
our bad experiences. We internalize everything and carry it with us. And the way we create our lives is by sorting through those things. That’s how we honor our parents and honor the people who’ve taught us is in divining our own road through the things that they handed down, both the good things and the bad. That’s how you find yourself and get to your place in the world. It’s all a lesson.
With my son, I try to be patient and not run and be there. But also you have to respect [your children’s] wishes. The serious wishes. If they have an interest, you have to indulge it. You don’t know what that moment might bring ten, fifteen years down the road.
I read a short story once that was talking about a boy who went with his uncle fishing every Saturday. He says, “To my uncle, it was just a fishing trip, but to me it was a permanent work of art that was constructed in my head and I’ll carry that with me throughout my life.” Why do we think of things thirty years later? Some small incident that we’ll be thinking of when we’re on our deathbed. Some small incident that had no apparent meaning on the day that it occurred. I think when you address your children you have to always be on the lookout for that moment in some sense.
CR: Do you know why you have such genius … skill—
BS: [Laughs.] Hey, I’m gonna hire you!
CR: —at songwriting? I mean, the capacity to write a song that digs deep and understands and resonates. You didn’t go to school to get that; you didn’t have anybody even teach you that. You just sat down and did it, right?
BS: Well, there are a lot of teachers. First of all, I didn’t think I had a great talent at it. I thought that I was somebody who was gonna have to really work harder than the next guy to formulate my own ideas and visions. And when I was a kid, I did work harder than everybody else. I was [practicing] eight hours in my room every night and when the dance was on, I was the guy standing with his arms folded in front of the guitar player all night long.
And then the rest [of how I learned], I think, involves a certain amount of psychology. What kind of a person are you? Are you a watcher? Do you jump in and are you active right away or do you stand back and observe? My nature was that I was standing back and I watched the way things interrelated and what was going on around me. I might have been too frightened to join in. I didn’t know how to join in, so observation was a part of my psychology.
I think that has a lot to do with people who then go on and take their own thoughts and formulate them in some fashion. It’s usually a result of a variety of dysfunctions that you’ve managed to channel into something positive and creative rather than destructive. And so it came out of that need to sort yourself out. It was easier for me to observe and, when you’re writing, that comes in handy. So I think part of it was natural and part of it I worked really hard at.
CR: This album, as I said, begins with John Hammond. You come to CBS and they ask you to play what? Four songs?
BS: Yeah, it was an afternoon and I came up from New Jersey on the bus and I didn’t know how many songs [I’d be playing]. It could be one song and out [laughs]. I wasn’t sure, you know.
CR: You didn’t know what to expect.
BS: Well, I had a lot of confidence. I was pretty cocky because I’d had a lot of success. Not big success but I had a band and we played to two or three thousand people locally.
CR: And you knew you were doing something that was right.
BS: Yeah, I heard, “Hey, you’re good.” And I heard the guys on the radio and I said, “Well, gee, I’m as good as some of these guys.” And so I went in with a certain confidence. But at the same time, at the bottom, you don’t know, you know. This [John Hammond] is one of the greatest music figures …
CR: This is the man who discovered Bob Dylan.
BS: Yeah, and so I didn’t know what the response might be. But I played a couple of songs and …
CR: What did he say to you?
BS: I think I played “Saint in the City.” I looked up. He said, “You gotta be on Columbia Records.” That was the first thing he said. So that eased the tension a lot for me, you know.
CR: [Laughs.] No dummy there, Mr. Hammond!
BS: He had just unbridled enthusiasm about all kinds of music. I’d go to his house and he’d play me jazz and he’d play me all different types of music. And he was just endlessly enthusiastic about anything he thought was exciting.
CR: At the beginning, didn’t they try to make you into a kind of new Dylan?
BS: I probably helped out with that a little bit.
CR: In what way?
BS: Well, Bob Dylan was a big, big influence at that point in my life. He’s still a great hero of mine. But I know what you’re saying. I think that at the time when I went in [to Columbia Records], there were those obvious connections in the music. I was writing a lot of lyrics and my voice was kind of husky and I had a lean look. And it happens with every artist. They try to make some connection. A record company very rarely says [to the public], “We’d like to present you with something you just have never heard of, you’ve never seen before.”
I remember my first photo shoot was in New York City and it was my first introduction to somebody trying to manage my life in some fashion—and if I wasn’t careful manage also my identity. That was something that I was very frightened of. That’s why I was walking down the boardwalk one day and I pulled a postcard out of the rack outside a little gift shop in Asbury Park and I brought it up to the record company and I said, “I want this to be the album cover.”
CR: This was Greetings from Asbury Park?
BS: Yeah. That was a postcard.
CR: And you said, “This is the cover.”
BS: Well, yeah, I said, “I’d like this to be the cover.”
CR: And they said?
BS: And they said OK. What I found with record companies in general is if you know what you want to do and you’re sure about what you want to do and who you are, very often, not always, there’s somebody who says, “That’s a great idea.” They’ll listen.
But I was shocked at how easy it was. I said, “Wow, this is gonna be my album cover.” It was important because I’m from New Jersey, first of all, and I felt that that had a lot to do with the music I was writing and also it was going to allow me to be myself. It was going to differentiate me from some of the other artists that were out there at the time. And that’s always a struggle in your early years—how to hold onto your identity and what you want to be about.
CR: What do you owe Dylan? What’s the connection between you and Dylan? How do you see it, other than the fact that you were songwriters who seem to do it more poetically than your contemporaries and that there was substance in what you wrote about and you both had that lean and hungry and dark—?
BS: Well, when I was sixteen and I had Highway 61 [Revisited] on my little mono record player in my room at night, I’d listen to it a thousand times. It’s one of those debts that you can never repay.
CR: But you feel the connection.
BS: Yeah. I just have a deep involvement with his music, like any other fan. I always have.
CR: More Dylan than anybody?
BS: Well, I liked a lot of different kinds of music. I think he was really important in the sense of bringing into pop songwriting all kinds of serious subjects that hadn’t been a part of the pop world previously very often. I was interested in going there and that’s him. When you look at anybody who’s doing that, whether it was Marvin Gaye with “What’s Going On” or even Public Enemy, you trace it back in some fashion to that moment when you think, “You can sing about this and get on the radio and people are going to connect to it and try to make sense of it.” So that was a big, big influence. The first was obviously Elvis and—
CR: What was Elvis to you?
BS: My mother had him on TV when I was nine years old and there was some shock of recognition even at that young age. Maybe just, “That looks like fun. And how do you do that?” But I drew a lot from anything I heard. I liked the one-hit wonders like the Swingin’
Medallions and Music Machine, bands that you heard once and never saw again, bands who came up with some record that was just essential.
CR: You told Ed Bradley [on CBS’s 60 Minutes] that story about going to see Elvis. You climbed up over the wall at Graceland and said, “I want to see Elvis.” And they said, “Who are you?” And you said, “I’m on the cover of Time and Newsweek. I’m Bruce Springsteen.” And they said, “Outta here.” Is that what happened?
BS: Yeah, I don’t think they believed me. That was the only time I ever pulled that one out [about being on the magazine covers]. I was always kind of embarrassed. But that night, I had to pull out everything I had that I thought was gonna get me up that front stoop.
CR: Have the songs gotten more political over time, do you think?
BS: I think my music, because of what I wrote about, always had political implications. I suppose that came up originally out of my experience growing up and my relationship with my father and trying to understand the concept of work and how work plays a central role in your life.
I had two very different examples. My mother’s relation to work was very joyous and provided the entire family with stability. And what she gained from it was an entire mode of behavior: You get up in the morning at a certain time, you get yourself ready to go to a job and you walk down the street and you’re there at a particular time in the day. And you interact with your coworkers and that’s a big part of your life and your place in the world.
You’re doing something that has a purpose. There’s a reason you’re there besides just feeding your family. You’re a part of the social fabric. You’re what’s holding the world together. You’re what’s holding your town together. You’re what’s holding your family together. And I always remember, she walked with tremendous pride and enormous strength and it gave such great, great comfort to a child.