Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters

by Jeff Burger

  NH: Have you got to the stage where your kids are introducing you to things?

  BS: Yeah, my son likes a lot of guitar bands. He gave me something the other day, which was really good. He’ll burn a CD for me full of things that he has, so he’s a pretty good call if I want to check some of that stuff out…. The other two aren’t quite into that yet. My daughter’s twelve, thirteen, and she likes the Top 40. So I end up at the Z100 Christmas show, sitting in the audience with my daughter and her friends watching every Top 40 act … I’m all over the place.

  NH: How did that Suicide thing* come about?

  BS: I met Alan [Vega] in the late seventies. I was just a fan. I liked them. They were unique. They’re very dreamy, they have a dreamy quality, and they were also incredibly atmospheric and were going where others weren’t. I just enjoyed them a lot. I happened to hear that song recently. I came across a compilation that it was on and it’s very different at the end of the night. It’s just those few phrases repeated, very mantra-like.

  NH: It’s especially striking in a show that’s built almost exclusively on narrative.

  BS: Right, but it’s the fundamental idea behind all of the songs anyway† [laughs]. It’s just a different moment at the end of the night, where you go to some of the same places with virtually very few words. I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition. But this envelops the night. It’s interesting watching people’s faces. They look very different while that’s happening. It’s a look of some surprise, and that’s part of what I set the night up for—unconventional pieces at the top to surprise the audience and to also make them aware that it’s not going to be a regular night. It’s going to be a night of all different things and the ritualistic aspect of the night is dispelled. As long as it’s not something that I’ve done before.

  NH: How do you think of your relationship with your own material? Because when you were here with the band a couple of years ago, you were playing stuff from the first three albums and some of those you were doing solo as well. And yet last night I think there was one song from the first four albums.

  BS: Is that right? On certain nights I’ll play more. I think I played “For You” for a while … It depends. My only general rule was to steer away from things I played with the band over the past couple of tours. I was interested in reshaping the Rising material for live shows, so people could hear the bare bones of that. And the new material and [The Ghost of] Tom Joad and Nebraska get a nod, and I think “Tunnel of Love” comes up. I play “Racing in the Street.” I haven’t played much off Born to Run. It’s predicated on anything that doesn’t have a formulated response built in.

  NH: Does it feel like young man’s music to you now—the first three, four records?

  BS: I would say that it is, you know, because a lot of young people actually mention those records to me. I remember I was playing over here a while back and I was staring down and there was a kid, he couldn’t have been more than fourteen, fifteen. He was mouthing every word to us, Greetings from Asbury Park, literally word for word. And this kid—forget about it, his parents were the glimmer in somebody’s eye [laughs]. In some ways I suppose it is [a young person’s music], but also a good song takes years to find itself. When I go back and play “Thunder Road” or something, I can sing very comfortably from my vantage point because a lot of the music was about a loss of innocence. There’s innocence contained in you but there’s also innocence in the process of being lost [laughs].

  And that was the country at the time I wrote that music. I wrote that music immediately preceding the end of the Vietnam War, when that feeling swept the country. A part of me was interested in music which contained that innocence, the Spector stuff, a lot of the fifties and sixties rock and roll, but I myself wasn’t one of those people. I realized I wasn’t one of my heroes. I was something else and I had to take that into consideration. So when I wrote that music and incorporated a lot of the things I loved from those particular years, I was also aware that I had to set in place something that acknowledged what had happened to me and everybody else where I lived.

  NH: I presume that’s where the emotional connection with your music came for so many people at the time. Because all those people had grown up loving that music, but it wasn’t doing the job anymore.

  BS: I think we were a funny amalgam of things at that moment. There was so much familiarity in the music that for a lot of people it felt like home; it touched either your real memories or just your imaginary home, the place that you think of when you think of your hometown, or who you were, or who you might have been. And the music collected those things, so there was an element that made you feel comfortable. And yet at the same time we were in the process of moving someplace else, and that was acknowledged in my music also, and that’s why I think people felt deeply about it.

  I think that it made some people comfortable, and there were stylistic things that caught people’s ears, that they were used to hearing … but that alone wouldn’t have made people feel very deeply. It was the other stuff. That’s why “Born to Run” resonates and “Thunder Road”; people took that music and they really made it theirs. I think I worked hard for that to happen. I am providing a service and it’s one that I like to think is needed. It’s at the core of trying to do it right, from year to year. It’s the motive when you go out there. You want that reaction: “Hey, I know that kid. That’s me!” Because I still remember that my needs were very great, and they were addressed by things that people at the time thought were trash, popular music and B-movies … But I found a real self in them that helped me make sense of the self that I grew up with—the person I actually was.

  BRUCE BIT

  On the Seeger Sessions

  “A lot of this music was written so long ago, but I felt I could make it feel essential right now. I’ve always got an eye toward the future and an eye to the past. That’s how you know where you’ve come from and where you want to go. If you look at our recent history, it seems there’s been so much disregard of past experience in the way the country has conducted itself.”

  —interview with Edna Gundersen, USA Today, June 6, 2006

  ___________

  *A few years ago, a friend gave me a DVD of early Springsteen performances, bootleg stuff taken from the Internet, and on it there’s shaky black-and-white film of Bruce performing solo at some folk club, probably in 1970–1971. And, of course, there’s a difference between performing solo as an unknown artist and performing solo when you’re one of the biggest acts in the world. Back then, it would have been very hard for Bruce to kid himself that anyone in the crowd had come to see him; they’d come to see the headline act, or they’d come for a drink. And if in those circumstances you can delay one person’s retreat to the bar, then you’re doing well. At the Royal Albert Hall, people had paid fifty to sixty pounds to watch Springsteen’s every move, for over two hours. That must focus the mind.

  *This sounds like a throwaway remark, but how many shows have you been to where the band pretend to be unaware that there’s a show going on? All that tuning up and talking to each other, while the audience waits for something to happen. Springsteen’s simple recognition of the fact that people pay for every onstage second separates him from almost every single other act I’ve seen.

  *Every now and then, No Nukes, the film of a big 1979 anti-nuclear concert in Madison Square Garden, turns up in the middle of the night on Sky Movies. Springsteen is one of the artists featured: he sings “The River,” “Thunder Road,” and then “Quarter to Three,” the old Gary “U.S.” Bonds hit that he used to play as an encore. In “Quarter to Three,” he does the whole hammy James Brown thing; he collapses on the stage, the band attempts to lead him off, he suddenly pulls away from them and does another couple of verses, stripped to the waist. It’s electrifying, and funny; but what’s remarkable, looking at it now, is that Springsteen’s uncomplicated showbiz gestures seem way more “authentic” than all the smiley, gleamingteeth sinc
erity that James Taylor, Carly Simon, and the rest of the performers are trying to project. What, after all, could be more sincere than a performer performing—and acknowledging that he’s performing?

  *Springsteen closed the Royal Albert Hall shows with an extraordinary cover of “Dream Baby Dream,” an old song by the scary punk-era experimental duo Suicide. He got some kind of echoed loop going out of his pump-organ and strolled around the stage singing the song’s disconnected phrases; there were no beats, of course, but it was as hypnotic and hymnal as Underworld’s “Born Slippy.”

  †“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,” said the critic Walter Pater. As it turns out, even musicians aspire towards the condition of music—something less wordy, less structured, more visceral.

  THE FEELING’S MUTUAL

  Bruce Springsteen and Win Butler Talk About the Early Days, the Glory Days, and Even the End of Days

  STEVE KANDELL | December 2007, Spin (US)

  On April 25, 2006, Springsteen released the terrific We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, his only studio collection of non-original material, which featured songs popularized by folk-singer Pete Seeger and a band assembled for the purpose. Then on June 5, 2007, Springsteen returned to Seeger’s music for a concert album, releasing Live in Dublin (on CD, DVD, and Bluray), which featured the same band he’d employed on Seeger Sessions. It was his second consecutive departure from rock and from working with the E Street Band. But any fears that he was abandoning either disappeared after the October 2, 2007, release of Magic, a chart-topping album that he recorded with the band and that he has described as a response to the presidency of George W. Bush. Shortly after that CD appeared, he talked with then Spin editor Steve Kandell and a next-generation rocker and admirer, Arcade Fire’s Win Butler. —Ed.

  “Welcome, Canadians!” Even at sound check, Bruce Springsteen treats a New Jersey venue like his home, and Arcade Fire’s Win Butler and Regine Chassagne are honored guests. “Did you guys finish your tour?”

  Watching from the floor of the Continental Airlines Arena hours before Springsteen’s first official hometown show with the E Street Band in five years, house lights up, Butler shouts back that they wrapped up the American leg three days ago and will leave for Europe in two weeks. Springsteen nods, then leads his band through a version of “Backstreets” so sweeping it’s a shame only five people are here to witness it.

  Since his breakthrough 1975 album, Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen has been the future of rock and roll, a folkie, a misunderstood patriot, wildly popular, not particularly popular, a workhorse, a stay-at-home dad, a firebrand, a name brand. But moreover, he’s just been. His fifteenth studio album, Magic, which debuted at number one in October, is vintage Boss and just might contain one of the best songs he’s ever written (the lush “Girls in Their Summer Clothes”). Meanwhile, a new generation of bands—of which Arcade Fire are certainly at the forefront—reveres him as much for his varied body of work as for the fact that he just seems to have done things the right way. Never embarrassed himself, never embarrassed those who look up to him. And likewise, Springsteen—more wide-eyed geek than stately elder—has been energized by these younger artists; when he greets Butler and Chassagne after sound check, the first thing he mentions is the fan-made YouTube clip for their song “My Body Is a Cage,” set to scenes from Once Upon a Time in the West.

  Though they hail from different generations (Springsteen is fifty-eight; Butler is twenty-seven) and backgrounds (Springsteen: working-class New Jersey; Butler: well-heeled Houston suburb, prep school at Phillips Exeter) and project different personas (Springsteen fronts the world’s best-paid bar band; Butler and crew can come off as austere and vaguely Amish), there is a natural kinship. When Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible was released in March, much of the praise cited “Keep the Car Running,” “Intervention,” and “(Antichrist Television Blues)” as exercises in Boss-worship, and though Butler is quick to admit this is no coincidence, the strongest parallels are not strictly musical. Both men front large bands composed of friends and family, engineered to operate insulated from and autonomous of the vagaries of the industry. Of all the highly touted acts to debut in the past few years, Arcade Fire are perhaps the easiest to imagine still at it in thirty years—hair thinner, waists thicker, but still kinetic, even if Richard Reed Parry has to, as his E Street counterpart Clarence Clemons now does, take the occasional time-out on a stool, stage right.

  Shoulders hunched in a black hoodie, blond hair falling over his eyes, Butler not only doesn’t seem austere or Amish, he doesn’t even seem twenty-seven. Determined not to wear out their welcome—or wear themselves out—Arcade Fire are winding down after nine months of touring and will likely spend chunks of 2008 writing and recording at their studio, a converted church outside Montreal. “The real test is finding your own life within the bubble of shit,” Butler said at a Manhattan café before leaving for Jersey. “The hard work we did last record to set up that studio was so that the creative ebb and flow of the band could happen in a natural way.” (He and Chassagne will perform one more time this year on North American soil—they just don’t know it yet.)

  Butler met the Boss once before, at a Grammy after-party in 2005, but wasn’t sure whether Springsteen would remember. He does. In fact, it is his interest in speaking to Butler that brings us here today. I am not interviewing so much as eavesdropping.

  Standing sentry on a metal folding chair outside Springsteen’s dressing room is a giant stuffed panda, a tribute to Terry Magovern, Springsteen’s longtime aide de camp, who died this summer. The panda grants us safe passage, and as we sink into the black leather sofas, Butler offers a gift of three books: George Orwell’s manifesto Why I Write; Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road, and Tracy Kidder’s inspirational Mountains Beyond Mountains. Springsteen leafs through the pages, grateful and beaming. On a wardrobe rack against the far wall hang black vests, black shirts, and black jeans. “Think I’ll go with the black tonight,” he says.

  Steve Kandell: You both encountered a lot of hype very early in your careers. How do you handle that sort of attention when you barely even know what you’re doing yet?

  Win Butler: Having my wife [Chassagne] on the road and having the whole band around to share the experience made the noise a little less pervasive. We’re in our own world, putting songs out to people, and all that was coming from the outside world. It was almost like watching a movie.

  Bruce Springsteen: That’s true. When I was twenty-four or twenty-five, I ended up on the cover of Time and Newsweek, which I found both thrilling and embarrassing simultaneously. Everybody had different responses—I remember [guitarist] Steve [Van Zandt] buying copies and handing them out by the pool at the Sunset Marquis. He was like, “This is the greatest, we’ve hit it!” And I was more like, “I’m going to go up to my room for a little while.” I think if I had been by myself, it would have been a lot tougher. Having the band there—knowing that ten years have gone by before this moment, knowing that tonight we’re gonna go out and do the same thing we did in Asbury Park for 150 people—provided an element of sanity. It’s the bargain you ask for, but at the same time, it’s nice to have your friends around you.

  SK: Not only do you have your friends around you, both onstage and on the business side, but your wives are in your bands. And Win’s brother Will is in Arcade Fire. Does that extended family construct make things easier or just raise the potential for tension?

  WB: For us, the closest the band has ever come to not working was when we first made a leap and started to need people on the road to function. The first couple guitar techs were total lifers; we didn’t know any of these people, and we’re spending all this time with them on a bus, and it was like, “Who the fuck are we? This doesn’t have anything to do with why we play music.” Over the last few years, we’ve made it so a lot of the people we work with have personal relationships with us; we can really be in our own skin. That’s why we have so many women with us on th
e road—otherwise, it just turns into this weird, horrible dude party.

  BS: We started out as a boys’ club, and that lasted until 1984, when Patti [Scialfa, Springsteen’s new wife] joined. She always teases me, because she says on the first night she played with us, she came into my dressing room wearing a frilly blouse and asked, “How’s this?” And I said, “Why don’t you just pick something out of there?” and pointed to my suitcase on the floor filled with T-shirts. So we made the transition, but it was a slow one. We were trying to move away from the dude party. When we started out, we played to a lot of audiences full of young guys, which I always said was the result of a homoerotic undercurrent, obviously. But as time passed, they brought the girls.

  SK: Well, you used to kiss Clarence onstage a lot. No homoerotic undercurrent there.

  WB: Not enough artists build it up the right way. You start with the guys, then get their girlfriends to come. That’s how you get the loyalty.

  BS: I want people to look onstage and see themselves. That idea of the band as a representative community—all the bands I like have some element of that. It’s thrilling when you see that communication. Pop records are fun—[Rihanna’s] “Umbrella” I can enjoy tremendously—but what I’m drawn to are bands where there’s an active collective imagination going on between them and their audience. That’s what I love about Arcade Fire—the first time I saw you guys, I thought, “There’s a whole town going on up there, a whole village onstage.” There’s an imagined world you’ve made visual in front of your fans’ eyes, and it’s a really lovely thing.

  SK: What other younger bands strike you that way? And how does what you’re listening to inform your own music?

  BS: I have three teenagers, plus I’m a curiosity buyer. My oldest son listens to a lot of political punk, like Against Me! And I’ve gotten into bands that have a bigger pop sound, like Apples in Stereo and Band of Horses—it’s very dark, romantic music. As for how it informs what I do, everything that goes in, comes out.