by Jeff Burger
And I said well, we’ve got to be doing this wrong, but I look back and we realize well, no, we weren’t doing it wrong, we were just doing it the only way we knew how.
EN: If you could step into that twenty-seven-year-old guy who’s pulling his hair out in the videos, what would you tell him?
BS: I don’t know. What I might tell him from this perspective wouldn’t necessarily be right for the moment he was living in at that time. I remember I was turning forty, I was going up in an elevator and I’d gotten to know the doorman really well and he was like sixty. And I said, “Hey, I’m gonna turn forty. Do you have any advice?” And he said, “Just don’t worry.” I worry too much. Don’t worry about all those things. And that was pretty good advice for living. I’m not sure it was such good advice for working.
I look back now and I wish it been easier, but there was something in the hardness of it, that young naked desire. Like I said, we wanted to be important. We came out of a little town and we wanted people to hear our voices and we set our sights big. There was no modesty involved. At twenty-seven, the life we were living, it was around the clock.
EN: So maybe you would just tell [your younger self], “Keep doing what you’re doing and apologize later.”
BS: Yeah, you gotta put your head down and go, and hope that your inner guidance is good. I’d work the band for three days on a piece of music and I would throw it out. I’d work the band for three days on another piece of music and I would throw it out. And then we did the same thing with the cover. We shot the cover three, four, five times and threw them all out. I decided, we were going to roll for all of it or miss, and it was a good experience.
I don’t make records the same way now, because I don’t have to, but I do try to make them with the same level of intensity and sense of a conversation that I want to continue. And I think Darkness was important because it was the beginning, in a funny way. The first three records were a little bit of a prequel. [Darkness] was the beginning of a long narrative that went through Nebraska and into The Rising and even into Magic. Just a long conversation that I’ve had with my fans that has been one of the most valuable experiences of my life. So that was a record that really started that conversation, and it’s been something I’ve enjoyed tremendously.
TV INTERVIEW
BRIAN WILLIAMS | October 7, 2010, NBC Network (US)
Less than a month after he had talked with Ed Norton and about six weeks before the release of the Darkness retrospective, Springsteen sat down in the music room of his Colts Neck, New Jersey home for an interview with NBC News anchor and longtime fan Brian Williams. The singer was in a jubilant mood and clearly quite ready to talk. Though he laughed easily and often throughout the interview, he used many of Williams’s questions as springboards for serious, sometimes poignant reflections on what he’d set out to accomplish and what music has meant to him. —Ed.
Brian Williams: First of all, you’re in Holmdel [New Jersey], years ago. Would it have killed you to call a buddy in Middletown? I was three miles away—at most—and sitting in my house, already a fan.
Bruce Springsteen: [laughs] I could have used the company, let me tell ya.
BW: Would it have killed you to just reach out to a brother and say, “We’re having trouble with some of these tracks, come on over, we need your wisdom”? Or was that just too much for you?
BS: [Laughs.] Like I said, I could have used the company because I was sitting there suffering by myself most nights. And I’d gotten into this sort of vampire-like sleeping schedule of going to bed around eight in the morning and then sleeping till four and then writing all night. This went on for at least an entire winter till I suffered from severe light deprivation and tried to switch it around a little. But it was a long, lonely vigil in 1977.
BW: Somebody said, “All he had to wear was that white T-shirt,” and I said, “That’s no T-shirt. Back then, those were called undershirts.” [Springsteen laughs.] Life looked rough in that house. It looked like a little bit of a prison camp. What are your memories of the place? Just shag carpeting and bad food and—
BS: Well, it was always bad food. But the place was actually a beautiful house and I lucked into it. It was on 165 acres and I paid like seven hundred dollars a month rent. I sort of lucked into this fabulous farm. I believe it’s all McMansions now. But it was this big, roomy sort of farmhouse, and it was big enough to set the band up entirely in the living room. You know, it was a frat house. It was just the guys and there was serviceable furniture and boxes of cold cereal all over the kitchen and macaroni and cheese for dinner. But it served its purpose. I guess I lived there for several years and wrote some pretty good songs there.
BW: Born to Run comes out, cover of Time magazine. Causes guys like me to say to people, “Yes, I’m from New Jersey.” Becomes a source of great pride. And what were the stakes as you sat down to record Darkness?
BS: Well, part of the stakes were that it also caused somebody at the IRS to say, “Who is this guy and why hasn’t he paid any taxes yet?” [Laughs.] So that was a problem. People finally found out that we existed. Because we had all been living off the grid in New Jersey for so many years. I’d simply never met anyone who’d paid taxes.
BW: You never flew in an airplane, any of you.
BS: I don’t believe anybody in the band was ever in an airplane until we had our first record deal. They flew us to Los Angeles and we were like kids on a magic carpet.
But it was a funny period of time because of the long stretch in between records—it was three years. But a lot was good about it. One, I was out of the way, which I liked. Even after the success we had with Born to Run, I never stayed in the center of things. We were down here [in central New Jersey] and down here in 1977 was a long ways away from New York City. And nobody bothered you. It was just you and the locals, and I pretty much went back to living the way that I’d lived before I made the records. That satisfied me at the time, and I believe it was good for the music I was writing.
BW: And you sat down to record Darkness, and you say in no uncertain terms to members of the band, “This will prove whether or not we’re worth it.”
BS: Well, I don’t want to make the fellows nervous, so I’m not saying it but I’m thinking it. We are in the show business, not the tell business, so it’s all about showing people what you can do. And at the time, we’d kind of been written off as record-company creations or one-hit wonders and it was quite a few years in between records. So it was a moment where I felt I had to deliver something substantial.
It had to be more than just a good record. I felt like it had to be definitive. We wanted to make a record that you would have to go through if you were interested in rock music and the stakes that were being played for in popular culture and rock music in 1977. You may not like it, you may like it … but it was a marker of some sort. So that was the kind of record I went in pursuing, which is why seventy songs later, we were still struggling to find it. We were trying to make a very specific and essential record, and that’s really what took a lot of the time.
BW: Talk about your process. Talk about control. You say … the quote is you were “oppressive and obsessive” during the recording of Darkness. What did you put your colleagues through?
BS: Well, I’m like that all the time. It’s sort of where your OCD comes in handy. You’re a dog with a bone and you’ll just gnaw on it until it’s right. So that was sort of helpful. But the level of intensity and the demand that it accompanies—thank God, everybody was young men at the time because it demanded your twenty-four-hour fealty. Because I had no life, I didn’t think you should have one either [laughs]. And so it was all music, music, music, music, music.
I still hold a lot of that to this day and thank God, we’ve learned how to make records better to where we can bring the same sort of intensity and get the job done with a little bit less craziness. But at the time it was important, and madness is not to be underrated. Madness in the appropriate place and at the service of an
aesthetic ideal can help you get to higher ground sometimes.
BW: As an adult, as a husband and father and farm owner and veteran of carpools, when you now look back on you in those pictures, those films, what was brimming and bursting inside you? What do you think?
BS: I think … man, I was really skinny! [Laughs.]
BW: Could use a haircut, could use a meal …
BS: I had a lot of hair. I had my Italian Afro and I was really skinny. Beyond that, I recognize myself. In a lot of ways, creatively I’m still the same creature. I pursue my work with the same intensity. I get the same joy out of it, if not more. And so the young man is very recognizable to me. I have a much broader life and broader experiences now, which is essential to prevent what would have been oncoming insanity in a short period of time. But it’s not unrecognizable.
It’s fun to see the guys at this particular moment when we were involved in this sort of obsessive act of self-definition and of trying to make a record that was great. We just wanted to make a record that was going to excite you and animate your life and be thought-provoking and make you dream of things and make you recognize yourself and recognize the world around you and want to be a part of it and want to be engaged and active. The thrill was in creating something that would do that, and that’s the same thrill that I have today. Those are the goals. I want to get as far in your soul as I can, and I want to shake you and wake you up as intensely as I can and wake myself up in the same process.
BW: Percentage of your fans who approach you in public to say, “Soundtrack of my life”?
BS: [Laughs.] You get a lot of that …
BW: Eighty percent? Ninety?
BS: If you’ve made music, you have somebody saying that. But that was the idea: you wanted to be an integral part of people’s dreams, one of the things that help them get through the day. So I’d say probably that’s the finest compliment people give you—that you’ve been part of my life. That was what we were shooting for and so you always like to hear that.
BW: I listened to the new Arcade Fire album and there’s many a tip of the hat to Bruce Springsteen and his music, and that’s one of easily a dozen pieces of work on the market right now where the artists have said outwardly or through their work, “This is because of … this is a tribute to … this is thanks to … Bruce Springsteen.” That must be its own category of thanks.
BS: Yeah, it’s nice. You always want to hand it on to the younger guys or whoever’s coming along. I was influenced by so many great musicians that meant such a great, great deal to me and who I can never really repay. Music is so intensely personal and strikes you on such an emotional level that it leaves you feeling like you owe a great debt to the people that moved you that deeply. And it’s a lovely thing to owe someone. And when I see the guys that did that for me—and I’ve had the opportunity of actually meeting a lot of the guys that did that for me—it’s a wonderful feeling.
So it’s nice to think that you did something and somebody heard it and picked up a guitar and now you go out and see him. And you’ll see a whole new generation of kids sort of in the thrall of what was so ecstatic and transcendent for me. And I get to see my kids experience it through their own heroes. You just want to hand it on. That’s always a treat.
BW: What about your country? Think of the world as it was in ’77. Carter was president, installing solar panels on the White House roof. Yesterday—after Reagan took them off—President Obama announced we’re gonna put solar panels on the White House roof. We’ve come full circle.
BS: But in our own poll, 56 percent of Americans don’t think their kids are gonna have it as good as they did. That’s a soul-crushing stat. Seventy percent of Americans are pessimistic about the future of the country. This is your America, too. And what do you think of what’s become of it?
It’s very difficult right now. The economy has shifted. We’ve gone from running this American business into running this American casino. And the economy has shifted in such a way that it’s benefiting a very small percentage of Americans at the top, squeezing the middle and ignoring the bottom. That’s got to be altered. There’s forty-three million people beneath the poverty line. There have been people who have been in a recession or depression for the past thirty years, since the post-industrialization of the United States. Their concerns have been fundamentally ignored.
President Obama is in a very tough seat. A president comes in, you have four or eight years to make your mark, to try to manage these huge forces that are constantly at play. These financial institutions, corporations, the military. They’re always “president.” They’re always in play, and I think that when the economy moved away from serving the everyday guy that’s out there working at his job, the small businessman, and turned into really a gambling house, it spelled doom. And it spelled doom for a lot of people’s hopes to get whatever small piece of the American dream they can get.
That’s got to be fundamentally altered. That’s got to turn around somehow. And it’s a very, very difficult climate to do that in. The level of noise and speech is an enormous intimidating force. It’s a very, very difficult environment for those changes to occur right now.
BW: Back to your music. The notebook plays a prominent part in the Darkness documentary. It just looks like things are spilling out of your head and that notebook is the napkin that catches them by the paragraph, by the page, by the idea. What is going on in your head? Have you figured that out?
BS: No. That’s why I still go to the psychiatrist once a week [laughs]. I guess that was the point. Life’s just a mystery and I think that you’re a detective, you know? And the music was me searching for clues. You’re looking for clues to your past, clues to how to live in the present, a clue for some plan of the future. It’s a lifelong process of detecting where your life is going. I was compelled to write music and make music in search of a set of answers that I realized are never gonna actually appear. But the work itself has delivered to me a certain level of reasonable sanity and purpose that helps me get through the day.
The notebook is just a lot of bad words, bad lyrics, bad ideas, purple prose, florid writing, and a lot of embarrassing material. All the things that got thrown out are in the notebooks. Sometimes there’s something good. The notebooks to me are part of the package. We recreated the Darkness notebook, which I felt two ways about. People see all the faults that you canned. But they are pretty good little documents of the moment I was living through and what I was trying to accomplish or what I was thinking about at the time. Generally I did pretty good. I picked the best stuff and most of the time I left out the things that were completely horrible but I suppose not always.
BW: How many parts romantic are you and how many parts realist? Behind you in this room is a glass box where you record your voice. There’s Max’s kit and there’s the great Hammond B3 organ and over yonder is the standup glockenspiel and we’re surrounded by tambourines that the Big Man has used and guitars that you’ve used [Springsteen has been laughing loudly throughout this listing]. This is the stuff of Springsteen music … and you’re laughing. Pull yourself together! How do you see these disparate pieces?
BS: They’re my tools. That’s basically it. I never collected guitars until I met [producer] Brendan O’Brien and he got me into picking up some different guitars. Previously, I played the one I had and then whatever other ones I might need as spares. But it’s my toolshed—that’s what you’re in. I’ll go over to an instrument and say, “Oh yeah, man, Danny played on that thing back in 1975.” So they get mixed with memory.
BW: Do you think you’ve kept the contract with Jersey?
BS: [Laughs.] I don’t know. Did I have one?
BW: You didn’t sign it?
BS: I didn’t sign anything.
BW: But you had the good sense to not be born in any other state. And you’ve become part of the firmament.
BS: I’m still here and I don’t know if I planned on that. We did move to California for four or five years and
that was pretty enjoyable, but in the end we had a big family back here and we had the kids. It just seemed like the right place to be. I still enjoy it here. I still like the beach. I like the bars. This is a great spot to live. And people here have been good to me. I pretty much get left to go my way. People don’t make too big a fuss most of the time. So we’ve had what my wife and I would say was a life that was reasonably close to normal and that’s what we were in search of—except for the days when I go around looking to be treated as king. But most of the time, it’s pretty straight up. So I don’t think we’re going anywhere anytime soon.
BW: When will we next see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band take some of these new songs out for a spin?
BS: I don’t know. Someone told me we toured eight out of the past ten years in some form or another, by myself or with the folk band I had or with the E Street Band, and I think we’ve been off since November so that’d be coming up on a year in a few months. And you need some downtime and the writing takes some time. I’m working on a few records and some other things. But we’ll be out there probably sooner than later. The band is a going concern now and it’s a wonderful thing to have in your life. I don’t see any time in the future when we wouldn’t be out there playing. We’ll have periods of downtime like we’ve always had in the past. But I’m looking forward to continuing my adventure with my friends and exhuming a few more of those mysteries and seeing where it takes us all.
BW: I don’t want to go all AARP on you, but you guys have grown old together.