by Jeff Burger
WB: I got this box set called Goodbye, Babylon that’s old field recordings from churches from between 1902 and 1960. Regine and I listened to that a ton when we were making Neon Bible.
SK: That’s actually another thing you two have in common: a lot of Catholic imagery.
WB: I grew up in Houston, but not in a super-religious family. My mom’s side is Mormon, my dad’s is from New England—it’s-good-that-people-don’t-kill-each-other-but-we-don’t-really-believe-in-anything types. But the whole mega-church thing was really pervasive in Texas.
BS: I think what feels Christian about your music is that it’s apocalyptic and puts things in a very religious context, like Roy Orbison. Roy Orbison is the king of romantic apocalypse. What’s the song title? “It’s Over”? Doesn’t get more apocalyptic than that. I think if the end of days is present in your music, however it gets in there, you’re involved in a spiritual world.
WB: To me, that darkness is always present in some way or another. That’s what I love about Motown—no matter how happy a song is, there’s some element grounded in the actual world.
BS: “Ball of Confusion.” “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.” Put those things on. “Darkness on the Edge of Town” I wrote in 1978. I think it also has to be part of your psychological nature. I grew up Catholic, and I suppose I go back to that for so much imagery in my music over the years. I was always interested in the spiritual background; it’s just what fascinates me. Like, hey, where’s the place you lose your soul, and how do I get there without falling in? I was always drawn to that, and it’s shot through all my music, including this record. Even something like “Your Own Worst Enemy,” where I use this pop Pet Sounds production, is all about self-subversion.
WB: One of my favorite songs of yours is “State Trooper” [from 1982’s Nebraska]—we’ve covered it before, and it’s just a fucking dark song. Even just driving here today on the New Jersey Turnpike, there’s a sense of place, of something real, and that in itself has a spiritual component to it.
BS: Robert De Niro said once that what he likes about acting is that he gets to step into other people’s shoes without the real-life consequences. Art does allow you to do that, to go right up to the abyss and look in, hopefully without falling in.
SK: Isn’t falling in a particular hazard, given your line of work?
BS: On any given day. I feel like that’s what Arcade Fire was built to hold off, that falling in. There’s a furious aspect to the performance, and that’s why people come out—you’re recognizing the realities of people’s emotional lives and their difficulties, you’re presenting these problems and you’re bringing a survival kit. The bands that do that forge intense, intense relationships with their audience, and to me, that was always the core of the best rock and roll.
SK: But aren’t a lot of people cynical about that sort of quasi populism at this point? So many bands give lip service to the idea of forging this intense connection that it has become a cliché in its own right. It’s easy to mistake honesty for pandering, and vice versa.
WB: I don’t think rock has anything to do with populism. My grandpa led a big band, and if you look at Irving Berlin or that type of songwriting, it’s so much more sophisticated than rock, which offered physicality and an opportunity to express visceral, raw emotion. He hated rock—he even thought jazz combos were a cop-out musically—but I remember being at his house when I was sixteen, and you were on TV and he said, “I don’t like the music, but I get why people do.” Here’s this ninety-year-old dude, set in his ways, and he’s like, “You know what, I totally get it.” Your music becomes a bridge.
BS: To do it right, you have to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at once before you play: You’ve got to go, “OK, I’m going to go out in twenty minutes and do one of the most important things I can think of in the world,” and, “It’s only rock and roll; I hope we have a good show and people go home happy.” I always try to keep both of those things in my head and populist or not, my business is proving it to you. Our thing is to find that place where we’re communicating and holding people, preferably by the throat.
WB: Part of the reason I got you this Orwell book is there’s a line in it: “In a time of universal deception, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” And another: “It is the first duty of intelligent men to restate the obvious.”
SK: Yet people will catch a lot of shit for doing just that. Bruce, you were on 60 Minutes recently, commenting about how people are still being demonized for speaking out against the war, and even that got conservatives in a tizzy. Is there any hope that we can get to a place where real discourse between opposing viewpoints can happen?
BS: You have to behave as if there is. I think with the incredible access to media and with everyone able to get their ideas out, we’re going to hear from a lot more stupid people. That’s the soup we’re in, and that’s not going anywhere. You just have to keep pressing and remain committed to your ideas and the small part you can play. Bill O’Reilly’s gonna curse me? God bless him.
WB: I studied 1920s Russian literature in school—Yevgeny Zamyarin wrote We, the first dystopian novel about how fucked up everything was … and he was killed. I’ll take being nastily blogged about over running for my life or having to hide my novel in a fucking drawer for fifty years because evil people are running the country. That’s why it’s important to speak up.
SK: It seems like a lot of younger bands, Arcade Fire certainly included, are talking about Bruce Springsteen right now. After so many years, what is it about this particular moment that feels relevant?
BS: It’s hard to say—I think when a generation bumps up against the music of other generations, there’s a tendency to pull away. But when that space opens up, people look back for influence. Now, if you go back to when we had our last blasts of mega-popularity, 1985, who remembers that? If you’re twenty-five, you were two then. So whatever baggage came with that is in the past for most people, and you’re just left with the music.
WB: I think Nebraska and Born to Run were the first I bought, but there’s no chronological order in which I heard your music, and that’s a beautiful thing. Because I remember getting into the Clash and going back and reading NME [New Musical Express] articles about what sellouts they were for having acoustic guitar on a song or something, and it’s like, How can people think this way? But being able to bypass that and just hear the music is great.
BS: You’re no longer imprisoned by your times, and there’s an enormous amount of freedom in that, the most freedom we’ve ever had. I’m not competing with anyone—I don’t put a record out and think it has to go up against 50 Cent.
WB: Most artists I really respect, at some point, had some kind of commercial failure or something that allowed them to continue to really be an artist. The ones who go off the rails are the ones obsessed with some abstract idea of “staying on top.”
BS: I read that I was finished two or three different times over the past forty years. You put out a record or two that may not be people’s favorite, but in a way, that ebb and flow is healthy, because you don’t end up chained to the numbers. No one who’s been around hasn’t gone through that. Green Day—classic example. They had some popularity, so I’m sure they had to go through that whole “You sold out the punk crowd.” Then they didn’t have the popularity and had to go through “You failed.” I took some satisfaction in how they handled all that.
SK: But in today’s climate, is it even possible to have that ebb and flow? It doesn’t seem like there’s the same luxury to fail and learn and develop. Bands are hyped up and then immediately torn down.
BS: I don’t envy young musicians, because I think it is harder. In the seventies, there was less media. A guy from a radio station could come down to a club where you’re playing for thirty people, and if he liked you, you’d hear your record on the radio as you drove out of town. You were left to build your audience, piece by piece. One thing we learned was stage presence—how to lead a band and
how to play and how to be exciting to people who haven’t seen you before. I’m not sure how available that is these days.
WB: Did you mostly play regionally, or did you do cross-country tours in the early days?
BS: We did cross-country tours, but no one in the band had even been on a plane until we had a record deal—that’s how provincial and contained our thing was. One hour out of New York and you might as well have been in the Midwest.
SK: Now that Arcade Fire has had two well-received albums, do you get the sense, Win, that people have their knives out for you?
WB: Yeah, but you have to understand, people who are obsessively online are a pretty small demographic compared with the people who come to our shows. The flip side of all this is, the Velvet Underground would have never been unheard-of if they were around today. There’s a certain level of success that’s easier to attain now, because people can hear the music. The problem is that attention spans are a lot shorter.
BS: The bottom line is, the knives will come out all the time. So what? You’ll write your good songs, you’ll play your good shows, you’ll have a certain amount of success, and in between, you will be toasted. A knock on the dressing room door: someone’s waiting for Bruce. More to the point, twenty thousand people are waiting for Bruce.
Springsteen offers to have the E Street Band learn “Keep the Car Running” so Butler and Chassagne can join them onstage to perform it tomorrow night. Butler is flattered … but politely declines. He and Chassagne are flying back to Montreal, and after nearly a month on the road, a night in their own bed proves the more attractive prospect.
“Plus,” Butler says, “Bruce’s die-hard Jersey fans who’ve been seeing him for thirty years would’ve just been like, ‘Who the hell are those dudes?’”
Five days later, however, Butler and Chassagne make good on a rain check, joining the E Street Band in Ottawa for “State Trooper” and “Keep the Car Running.” Fans can be heard screaming “Holy shit!” in shaky camera-phone videos posted to YouTube, a sentiment echoed widely once news broke the next day. (Butler was hoping they could do the Clash’s “Straight to Hell.” “There’s so much commonality between Joe Strummer and Bruce, especially in that song, talking about someone’s experience in Vietnam,” Butler says later, back home in Montreal. “But there’s no way to learn that song in thirty minutes.”)
Though Arcade Fire have played with superfans David Byrne and David Bowie before, performing on Springsteen’s stage, with Springsteen’s band, for Springsteen’s crowd, was a new experience. Butler takes it all in stride. “It’s fun being a tourist in someone else’s world,” he says. “But we come from a very different place.”
NEW JERSEY HALL OF FAME INDUCTION ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN | May 4, 2008, Newark, New Jersey
Roots have always mattered to Bruce Springsteen, and his are in New Jersey. As he told Charlie Rose (see page 272), it was important that his first album have an Asbury Park postcard on the cover “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.”
It still does. As Australia’s Molly Meldrum pointed out in his 2010 interview with Springsteen (see page 372), the singer could live anywhere in the world at this point. But after a few years in L.A., he’s back in Jersey, only miles from the streets he walked as a kid.
In fact, he’s a member of the New Jersey Hall of Fame. Here’s what he had to say about the state when he was inducted into the Hall’s inaugural class along with Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Buzz Aldrin, Frank Sinatra, and ten other luminaries. —Ed.
When I first got the letter [saying] I was to be inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame, I was a little suspicious. New Jersey Hall of Fame? Does New York have a hall of fame? Does Connecticut have a hall of fame? I mean, maybe they don’t think they need one.
But then I ran through the list of names: Albert Einstein, Bruce Springsteen … my mother’s going to like that. She’s here tonight. It’s her birthday and it’s the only time she’s going to hear those two names mentioned in the same sentence, so I’m going to enjoy it.
When I was recording my first album, the record company spent a lot of money taking pictures of me in New York City. But … something didn’t feel quite right. So I was walking down the boardwalk one day, stopped at a souvenir stand and bought a postcard that said “Greetings from Asbury Park.” I remember thinking, “Yeah, that’s me.”
With the exception of a few half years in California, my family and I have raised our kids here. We have a big Italian-Irish family. I found my own Jersey girl right here in Asbury Park. I’ve always found it deeply resonant, holding the hands of my kids on the same streets where my mom held my hand, swimming in the same ocean and taking them to visit the same beaches I did as a child. It was also a place that really protected me. It’s been very nurturing. I could take my kids down to Freehold, throw them up on my shoulders, and walk along the street with thousands of other people on Kruise Night with everybody just going, “Hey Bruce …” That was something that meant a lot to me, the ability to just go about my life. I really appreciated that.
You get a little older and when one of those crisp fall days come along in September and October, my friends and I slip into the cool water of the Atlantic Ocean. We take note that there are a few less of us as each year passes. But the thing about being in one place your whole life is that they’re all still around you in the water. I look towards the shore and I see my two sons and my daughter pushing their way through the waves. And on the beach there’s a whole batch of new little kids running away from the crashing surf like time itself.
That’s what New Jersey is for me. It’s a repository of my time on Earth. My memory, the music I’ve made, my friendships, my life … it’s all buried here in a box somewhere in the sand down along the Central Jersey coast. I can’t imagine having it any other way.
So let me finish with a Garden State benediction. Rise up, my fellow New Jerseyans, for we are all members of a confused but noble race. We, of the state that will never get any respect. We who bear the coolness of the forever uncool. The chip on our shoulders of those with forever something to prove. And even with this wonderful Hall of Fame, we know that there’s another bad Jersey joke coming just around the corner.
But fear not. This is not our curse. It is our blessing. For this is what imbues us with our fighting spirit. That we may salute the world forever with the Jersey state bird, and that the fumes from our great northern industrial area to the ocean breezes of Cape May fill us with the raw hunger, the naked ambition, and the desire not just to do our best, but to stick it in your face.
Theory of relativity, anybody? How about some electric light with your day? Or maybe a spin to the moon and back? And that is why our fellow Americans in the other forty-nine states know, when the announcer says “and now in this corner, from New Jersey …” they better keep their hands up and their heads down, because when that bell rings, we’re coming out swinging.
God bless the Garden State.
BRUCE BIT
On the Audience
“The first thing that I do when I come out every night is to look at the faces in front of me, very individually. I may find a certain person and play to that single person all night. I’m playing to everyone, but I could see one or two people and decide, ‘You’re the reason that I’m out here right now, and that I’m going to push myself till it feels like my heart’s going to explode.’”
—interview with Elysa Gardner, USA Today, October 31, 2008
BARACK OBAMA CAMPAIGN RALLY SPEECH
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN | November 2, 2008, Cleveland, Ohio
Having stuck his foot in the waters of partisan politics in 2004, Springsteen was ready to try again four years later, when Barack Obama made his bid for the White House. He gave this impassioned speech on Sunday, November 2—just two days before Obama collected more votes than any previous presidential candidate and more than twice as many elec
toral votes as John McCain, his Republican opponent. —Ed.
I must say I am honored to be here with Senator Obama tonight. And once again I thank him for inviting me.
I’ve spent thirty-five years writing about America and its people. About what does it mean to be an American, what is our duty, our responsibility, what are our reasonable expectations when we live in a free society. I really never saw myself as partisan, but more as an advocate for a set of ideas: economic and social justice, America as a positive influence around the world, truth, transparency and integrity in government, the right of every American to have a job, a living wage, to be educated in a decent school, and to have a life filled with the dignity of work, promise, and the sanctity of home. These are the things that make a life. These are the things that build and define a society. And I think that these are the things that we think of at the deepest level when we think about our freedom.
But today those freedoms have been damaged and curtailed by eight years of a thoughtless, reckless, and morally adrift administration. So we’re at the crossroads today. And I spent most of my life as a musician measuring the distance in my music between the American dream and the American reality. And I look around today and for many Americans who are losing their jobs or their homes or are seeing their retirement funds disappear and don’t have health care, who have been abandoned in our inner cities, the distance between that dream and that reality has grown greater and more painful than ever.
And I believe that Senator Obama has taken the measure of that distance in his own life and in his own work. And I believe that he understands in his heart the cost of that distance in blood and in suffering in the lives of everyday Americans. And I believe as president, he’ll work to bring that promise back to life, and into the lives of so many of our fellow Americans who have justifiably lost faith in its meaning.