by Jeff Burger
Now, last but not least … the mighty men and women of the E Street Band … who I have reeducated and rededicated, reanimated, resuscitated, and reinvigorated with the power, the magic, the mystery, the ministry of rock and roll. Vini Lopez, Boom Carter—early drummers of the band. David Sancious.
Nils Lofgren, the most overqualified second guitarist in show business. He plays ten times better than me and he still wanders over to hear my solos when I play. I guess he’s checking to see if I’m getting any better.
Danny Federici, the most instinctive and natural musician I ever met and the only member of the band who can reduce me to a shouting mess. I love you, Danny. Your organ and accordion playing brought the boardwalks of Central and South Jersey alive in my music. Thank you.
Garry Tallent. Southern man, my lovely friend, bass player, rock-and-roll aficionado, whose quiet dignity graced my band and my life. Thank you, Garry.
Roy Bittan. Roy’s playing formed the signature sound of some of my greatest records. He can play anything. He’s always there for me. His emotional generosity and his deep personal support mean a great, great deal to me. Thank you, Roy.
Max Weinberg—Mighty Max. Star of the Conan O’Brien show … Max found a place where Bernard Purdie, Buddy Rich, and Keith Moon intersected and he made it his own. I ask and he delivers for me night after night. Thank you, Max.
Stevie Van Zandt. For those of you who have seen The Sopranos and are worried that that’s what Steve is like … that’s what he’s like. He’s a lifetime rock-and-roll friendship. We did it all, you know. Great songwriter, producer, great guitarist. We haven’t played together in fifteen years, and if it’s up to me, that won’t ever happen again. I love you, Steve.
Patti Scialfa. She busted the boys’ club, big time … It went like this: “OK, fellas. There’s gonna be a woman in the band. We need someone to sing all the high parts. How complicated can it get?” Well, a nice paparazzi photo of me in my Jockey shorts on a balcony in Rome … ten of the best years of my life … Evan, Jessie, and Sam, three children genealogically linked to the E Street Band … tell the rest of the story. Everybody … wants to know how I feel about the band. Hell, I married one of ’em. Thank you, baby. You hit all the high notes. You’re tougher than the rest.
Now last but not least, Clarence Clemons. That’s right. You want to be like him but you can’t, you know. The night I met Clarence, he got up onstage [and] a sound came out of his horn that seemed to rattle the glasses behind the bar, and threatened to blow out the back wall. The door literally blew off the club in a storm that night, and I knew I’d found my sax player.
Something happened when we stood side by side. Some … energy, some unspoken story. For fifteen years, Clarence has been a source of myth and light and enormous strength for me onstage. He has filled my heart so many nights … and I love it when he wraps me in those arms at the end of the night. That night we first stood together, I looked over at C and it looked like his head reached into the clouds. And I felt like a mere mortal scurrying upon the earth, you know.
But he always lifted me up. Way, way, way up. Together we told a story of the possibilities of friendship, a story older than the ones that I was writing and a story I could never have told without him at my side. I want to thank you, Big Man, and I love you so much.
So, as Stevie Van Zandt says, “Rock and roll, it’s a band thing.” And that includes you, the audience. Thank you for giving me access and entrance into your lives, and I hope that I’ve been a good companion. But right now, my wife, my great friends, my great collaborators, my great band: Your presence tonight honors me, and I wouldn’t be standing up here tonight without you, and I can’t stand up here tonight without you. Please join me. Oh, Jonny [Landau], you too.
NEW GLORY DAYS
GARY GRAFF | April 1, 2001, Oakland Press (Pontiac, Michigan)
Charlie Rose didn’t have to wait long for the band reunion he’d asked for in November 1998. Four months later, Springsteen performed with the E Street Band following his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech. He also announced that the outfit had regrouped and would shortly begin a world tour in Barcelona, Spain.
“This tour is about rededication, rebirth,” Bruce told Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times. “The only way we wanted to do this was to make everything feel current … to put all the music into the present to make the emotion true to right now. It’s not about when a song was written or when it was released. Roy Orbison, until the day he died, sang every one of those songs like he wrote it yesterday.”
The concert series hit the United States by July, beginning with a fifteen-night New Jersey stand, and continued for another full year after that, ending with a ten-night gig at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Performances from the last two nights at the Garden subsequently surfaced on both CD and DVD as Live in New York City. Less than two weeks before the CD’s release, Springsteen talked with Gary Graff about what might be next on his agenda. —Ed.
During their reunion tour of 1999–2000, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band thrilled fans around the world with 132 exuberant, passionate rock-and-roll shows that almost all hit the three-hour mark.
And, Springsteen says, E Street is an avenue that still offers plenty of room for him to roam.
“I guess the nicest thing about it was we were able to reconstitute the band as an ongoing sort of creative unit,” says the fifty-one-year-old New Jersey rocker known as the Boss.
In fact, Springsteen confirms, the band recently returned to the studio for a weekend of recording that “cracked the process” of beginning to make a studio album, which would be the group’s first since 1984’s fifteen-million-selling blockbuster, Born in the U.S.A.
“I think the central thing for me right now is I’d really like to make a record with the band, because they bring out … it’s a different thought process when I think about writing for that group of musicians. I expand my scope, maybe, in some fashion. It’s something about what the band is after all these years that makes me think a little bit different.
“I’m excited about doing that again.”
Springsteen, who’s known as a painstaking perfectionist in the studio, knows better than to put a timetable on the process, however.
“Hopefully, it won’t be some drawn-out recording process like some of our other records have been. I don’t think it will be … but I’ve been wrong before,” he says with a laugh.
Until that point, however, he’s offering fans a couple of souvenirs from the reunion tour, which kicked off in April 1999, shortly after he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
On Tuesday, Live in New York City, a two-CD set recorded during the last two shows of the outing last June at Madison Square Garden, will be released. It’s the companion piece to an HBO concert special of the same title, which debuts Saturday and will later be released as a home video and DVD, probably with additional performances, Springsteen says.
Putting those projects together has given him a chance to review the accomplishments of the tour, which visited fifteen countries and played before more than 2.5 million people.
It was the E Street Band’s first road work since the 1988 Amnesty International Human Rights Now tour; a year later, Springsteen dismissed the band he’d put together in the early seventies in order to work in different formats, including a solo acoustic tour during the midnineties.
“I had some acoustic music, and I thought of making another record like that,” says Springsteen, who had reunited the E Street Band in 1995 to record some new songs for a Greatest Hits album. “But I also had that part of me that wanted to play with just a real, hard-rocking band that was very physical. I said, ‘Well, if I’m gonna do that again, I think I want to do it now.’”
He says he also wanted his three young children with wife and E Street singer Patti Scialfa to get a chance to see their dad work with his “best friends.” So what did the three Springsteen progeny—Evan, ten; Jessica Rae, nine; and Sa
m, seven—think of the high-energy rave-ups their father and his eight E Street bandmates put on each night?
“Basically, they think we’re big showoffs,” Springsteen says with a hearty laugh.
The challenge, however, was to make the E Street Band more than just a blast from the glorious past, during which he courted one of rock and roll’s most devoted followings with anthems such as “Born to Run,” “Thunder Road,” and “Born in the U.S.A.,” as well as epic-length shows whose repertoire changed markedly night after night.
“I think because of our history, it brings a lot of … responsibility,” Springsteen explains. “I think we got to a place where everybody realizes this is a very unique thing, this group of people playing together in this fashion, and that we created something together that was a big, big part of our own lives and a big part of our audiences’ lives. And we wanted to live up to that thing and continue to serve in the fashion that we served before with our audience.
“So you had to be very thoughtful about it. And I was very concerned; I didn’t want it to be static in any fashion. I didn’t want to just say, ‘Well, we have these songs and we’re gonna run through them.’ That was something that I didn’t want to happen.”
From the beginning of rehearsals in Asbury Park, New Jersey, during early 1999, the group struggled to make sure its shows would be what Springsteen calls “a very present experience.” Some songs, such as “Youngstown,” “The River,” and “If I Should Fall Behind,” were radically rearranged. The 1998 archival set Tracks was tapped for selections such as “My Love Will Not Let You Down.”
And there were brand-new songs too, starting with “Land of Hope and Dreams,” a musical summing up of frequent Springsteen themes about faith, hope, and community, and later adding other fresh compositions such as “Code of Silence,” “Another Thin Line,” and “Further on Up the Road.”
The most controversial of those, “American Skin (41 Shots),” appears—along with “Land of Hope and Dreams”—on the live album and HBO special; it was inspired by the death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Guinean immigrant who was shot by New York City police officers during a confrontation in February of 1999.
The socially conscious elegy was greeted with both praise and protests, along with some calls to boycott Springsteen.
“I think that it deals very directly with race, and that’s a subject that pushes a lot of buttons in America,” says Springsteen, who was nevertheless surprised by the immediate and harsh reaction to the song after the band debuted it last June 4 in Atlanta.
“There were so many people willing to comment so quickly about something they’d never heard; we’d only played the song once, in Atlanta, and there was no recorded version of it, and I don’t think some of the people who were commenting on it were running to Napster to hear it. So the song wound up being misrepresented by quite a few people.”
That didn’t stop Springsteen from performing “American Skin” in New York, however.
“I was just setting out to basically continue writing about things that I’d written about for a long period of time, which is ‘Who are we? What’s it mean to be an American? What’s going on in the country we live in?’” he explains.
“I was confident in the song itself … that it would stand on its own. It was asking some questions that are hanging very heavy in the air right now … [about] people of color in the United States who are viewed through a veil of criminality, who have been used to having their full citizenship, their full Americanship, denied. It’s one of the issues America is going to face in the next century.”
The new material, Springsteen says, helped to make the tour “a big experience, very satisfying.” It also strengthened his resolve to continue with the band, even though it now has to coexist with the E Streeters’ other jobs—including drummer Max Weinberg’s position as musical director on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and guitarist Steven Van Zandt’s commitments to the HBO mafia series The Sopranos, in which he plays the hit man Silvio. Springsteen’s wife, Scialfa, also is working on her second solo album.
“The nice thing about where we are at this point is we’re pretty free to do whatever we want,” he says. “We can go out and play a little bit if we want to; we don’t have to have a record out. We have a lot of freedom to just make our music and enjoy the band and the fact that it’s there and is as vital as it is.
“That’s something I can’t express—the amount of enjoyment that gave me and the satisfaction to be able to play like we did was something that was really, really meaningful to me. It was a great time for all of us, so hopefully we’ll have some good new music for our audience. This is a job we have to continue to do.”
BRUCE BIT
On Death
“I wanted to live to be old, old as hell, y’know? I’m glad the Who can get onstage and still sing ‘My Generation’ now…. I understood the cult of death was always a very, very integral part of rock-and-roll myth, and possibly because there was the whole idea of the edge and the idea that music felt like life and death. It did feel like life and death, it still does feel like life and death to me…. It’s a part of a lot of my music, but I interpreted it differently and I think in an integrated fashion as a part of the work that I was doing, and fundamentally our story has always been, ‘Hey, look, all we have is this, let’s see what we can do with it.’”
—interview with Adam Sweeting, Uncut, September 2002
BRUCE BIT
On Cynicism
“A certain amount of skepticism is necessary to survive in today’s environment. You don’t want to be taking everything at face value. But for that [questioning] to be worth something it has to be connected to an element of energy and creative thought…. So that’s my approach: Try to be wise about the way the world works. But at the same time, you need to find some way to turn those insights about what’s real and what’s true into some creative process, creative action. That’s what we try to pass on to our audience so [they] don’t feel powerless.”
—interview with Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly, February 28, 2003
SPRINGSTEEN … THE BOSS IS BACK
Still Writing and Singing for the Common Man
VERNELL HAOKETT | March/April 2003, American Songwriter (US)
Springsteen told Gary Graff, “This is a job we have to continue to do,” and that’s just what he and his cohorts did. On July 30, 2002, the singer released The Rising, his twelfth studio album, and his first with the E Street Band in eighteen years (not counting the four new tracks on Greatest Hits). The record, which focused largely on the events of September 11, was an immediate success. It debuted at number one on the Billboard charts, garnered a five-star review from Rolling Stone (one of only two records to do so in 2002), and went on to win a Grammy for Best Rock Album in 2003. In March of that year, American Songwriter cofounder Vernell Hackett talked with Springsteen about the album. —Ed.
Bruce Springsteen and Merle Haggard have much in common as songwriters. Though writing in two different musical genres, both speak to and for the common man—those people who get up every day, go out and do their job, then come home to spend time with their husband, wife, children, girlfriend, boyfriend, and other loved ones.
The people who appreciate the songs written by these two men are the backbone of America—the working men and women—for they not only see their friends and neighbors in the songs, but they see themselves and in so doing can directly identify with what the men are writing about.
“I’ve always felt I write well about these things,” Springsteen agrees. “Those elements are where the blood and the grit of real life mix with people’s spiritual aspirations and their search for just, decent lives.”
In his latest album, The Rising, Springsteen speaks directly to this group of people in its songs, many of which he wrote after the 9/11 tragedy. While he wrote about the heroes who died because of that attack, he also wrote about the survivors of that day and how they now deal with a whole different set of
problems from the ones they had before the tragic event happened. And in the end he offers hope for those who survived to go forward with their lives and be the best that they can be despite the new set of circumstances they must deal with.
Springsteen says that he did not set out to write an album about 9/11, yet the events of the day and those that followed weighed heavily on his mind as he began to write for the album that would become The Rising. Like any good songwriter, Springsteen writes songs about what is heavy in his thoughts at the time.
The New Jersey–born singer-songwriter was invited to be a part of the September 21, 2001, telethon for the September 11 Fund, and he planned to sing a song he had started writing immediately after the attacks, “Into the Fire.” Because he didn’t feel the song was complete enough to sing in public, he chose instead to sing an older song, “My City of Ruins.”
“I had had ‘My City of Ruins’ for a couple of years,” Springsteen explains. “I was going to play it in Asbury Park [New Jersey] for a Christmas show. Asbury has been struggling for a very long time, and the town’s now on the verge of being redeveloped, so there was a moment when there was a lot of hope and excitement about it. When I played it on the 9/11 telethon, people made a connection with that event, but it was written quite a bit before. It felt appropriate to sing it that night, but it was not written about 9/11.
“It’s a gospel song. It’s like a lot of my things, like ‘The Promised Land,’ or I had a song on the live album called ‘Land of Hope and Dreams.’ … They’re all fundamentally gospel-rooted, or blues- and gospel-rooted. It seemed like that element was going to be a significant element of the record in some fashion.”