by Jeff Burger
BS: [Laughs.] You’re talking to the AARP cover boy! [Springsteen was the cover story in the September/October 2009 issue of AARP The Magazine. —Ed.] We’re counting on science to take us into the future.
BW: You have grown old together. I’m not going to name any names, but there are new hips, new knees …
BS: I guess one of the things I’m proudest of in this new package that we put out is we went to Asbury and we played the Darkness album from top to finish about a year ago. And I think if you hold it up to the tapes of the time, we play a lot better right now. The band is truly at its best.
I think if you do it right, instead of running from the years, you gather them in. And the songs gather them in and the evening gathers them in and something wonderful happens. Something really, really wonderful. And I think that’s our MO right now. We’re looking to give you those years, gather those years in, gather all the time we can. And it fills the music. If the music was sturdy, written well, it fills it in a way that brings extra vitality, extra meaning, extra purpose, extra life, extra import, even extra now-ness to what you’re putting out at night. So the time we’ve got ahead is something where it should get better.
It’s gotten better so far. The band played so good on the last tour. I always say to the young kids as they come in, “Look, your daddy has nothing on you and your big brother’s got nothing on you. If you see the E Street Band tonight, you’ve seen the best E Street Band there is and you can go home with that in your hat.”
BW: In the old days in the [Stone] Pony [in Asbury Park], you would take shouted requests from the crowd like any good bar band does. On this tour, you’ve said to the crowds, “Bring [your requests]. We are a big, well-oiled rock-and-roll band and I’m going to show you that we are agile and we will play anything you throw out there.” And you did. My God, you played songs you guys hadn’t played as a group.
BS: That was nice. We’d turn the show over to the crowd and the band calls on its collective memory from things over the past thirty-five years that we hadn’t played together—just things that we’d played individually in clubs or something. It was a nice part of the show and it let each audience put its stamp on their evening. And it tested our skills, our claim to [being the] greatest bar band in New Jersey, at least.
BW: So take one last victory lap. At the beginning of the documentary, you’re not scared [but] you’re under a lot of pressure for a young man. You don’t say it, but it’s a make-or-break album that decides what kind of artist you’ll be seen as. It won’t change your core, your character … but it turned out OK, didn’t it?
BS: Well, yeah, I mean, you were scared. I really didn’t know what my potential was. I was scared I wasn’t going to be good enough. I’d received quite a bit of attention at the time and more maybe than I ever thought I might have. And I think I was nervous about whether I would be good enough because we wanted very badly to be good.
As I say in the documentary, it was more than rich or famous or happy—we wanted to be great. And that’s what motivates us still on a nightly basis. It’s great that the big crowds are there. The money’s great—we’re not handing any of it back at this late date. But the thing that moves the band on any given night is that we just want to come out and be great. We want to be great for that audience and for ourselves. We’ve got something very real at stake, something we’ve built for a long time: the good name of our band, what we can do for our fans and ourselves. On any given evening when the lights go down, you have an opportunity to pull magic out of the air. And I look into the faces that I do it for every single night. I look straight at you and I see you looking straight back. So we always want to be at our best.
TV INTERVIEW
IAN “MOLLY” MELDRUM | November 20, 2010, Sunday Night, Seven Network (Australia)
Ian “Molly” Meldrum, who is arguably Australia’s best-known popular music critic, journalist, and entrepreneur, interviewed Springsteen in Sydney in 1985 and in Los Angeles in 1995. They talked again in 2010, this time at the singer’s home in New Jersey on the occasion of the release of the three-CD/three-DVD Darkness box set. —Ed.
Molly Meldrum: Well, here we are in New Jersey. A few weeks ago, I was in Toronto with you and the documentary [The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town] was shown at the Toronto Film Festival. Exciting time for you?
Bruce Springsteen: Yeah, it was. I never thought it was going to be shown outside of the box set. So getting in the film festival was a treat. I view all these things on the television, so seeing it up on the big screen with a roomful of fans was a good time.
MM: A lot of the documentary is this amazing footage in black and white from this aspiring cameraman who shot it all at any time you wanted to come into the studio.
BS: Stuff sat there for thirty years, similar to the Hammersmith Odeon film from Born to Run. What happened was, there was a kid who had a camera like we had the guitars. He was our age, a young guy, and he was interested in film and he just started bringing his camera around.
He’d come out and see us here or there. It was some early videotape camera and he rigged it so he didn’t need any lights. He just carried it around on his shoulder. I don’t remember it being very big so it wasn’t very noticeable. And he was somebody we knew so we didn’t pay much attention to him. And we weren’t planning on doing anything with it. We weren’t filming for any project. He was just around and we let him come in for a while. And he got a significant amount of the recording of Darkness.
He sat on it for a long time because he didn’t know if it was his or mine. And he was quite honorable about it. He didn’t do anything with it. He said, “Well, someday we’ll make a picture or we’ll do something.” And I ended up buying the stuff he had. And in it we found all this footage from the recording of Darkness on the Edge of Town, which makes up about half the picture and shows all these skinny little twenty-seven-year-old kids trying to come up with their masterpiece in the studio.
MM: Saying you didn’t know who owned the footage, whether it was you or him, [recalls the time] after Born to Run when you had all the legal hassles for three years with Mike Appel and you couldn’t record. What was it all about back then?
BS: My attitude when I started was I would sign anything to make a record. And of course it comes back and gets you later. The lawsuit lasted for two or three years, I guess. And it was a big, big hassle. Like I say in the film, you’re fighting with a pal. I really like Mike. We’re friends to this day.
MM: Yeah, I know. He figures in the documentary.
BS: It was very rough at the time. But I actually believe that after Born to Run, we would have stopped for two of those years anyway.
MM: Really?
BS: Well, it took us a year to make the record. And I think it would have taken me a year to sort out what had just happened to me. Because if you look at the two times when we had sort of a catastrophic success, you know, it was Born to Run and Born in the U.S.A. And after both of those times, I really kind of stopped and reflected. Born in the U.S.A. was the functional end of my work with the E Street Band. We toured on Tunnel of Love a little bit, but that was actually a solo record. And so really after that I stopped the band for twelve years. And after Born to Run, we stopped for three years.
So I think after those periods of sort of destabilizing success, rather than rush into something and hope I can keep that going, my attitude was to stop and try to reflect on what had happened. Those were times when I said I needed to regain control of my narrative and make sure that I was making the kind of music I wanted to make. That the band was gonna be about what I wanted us to be about and that I was gonna go in the direction I wanted to go and that I wasn’t just overtaken by commercial forces or the dynamic of success.
MM: I followed you from the very start, saw you play here in New York City. Would it be fair to say that you were shy or didn’t like that you were becoming a rock star?
BS: Well, it’s one of the things you pursue, but I was
really interested in where the job I was doing intersected with my audience, the people I was playing for, the people I was writing about, my own story. Those were the things that interested me. There’ve been a lotta, lotta rock stars—always was, always will be. I don’t mind being that thing, but I don’t want to just be that.
If you look at the role of storytellers in communities going back to the beginning of time, they played a very functional role in assisting the community and making sense of its experience, of the world around them, charting parts of their lives, getting through parts of their lives. I was interested in the eternal role of storyteller and songwriter and how I was gonna perform that function best.
When you’re a little rock band and you’re in a little bar, you’re in the middle of your people, you know? You play your set, you come off, you have a drink, you go back, you play your set. And you’re in the middle of the town you’re living in, so you’re an incredibly integral part of your people at that time. And then I think as you become successful there is stress and tension on all that fabric. It stretches, stretches, and stretches. Stretching it is OK—but you don’t want it to tear and break. I was concerned that I’d tear the basic threadwork of what tied me to the deeper meaning of what I was doing. So I was careful.
MM: Do you write your lyrics first and then form the music around them?
BS: No, I try to find a character, a theme, that I’m interested in that is coming up out of my own psychological needs and point of view at the moment. And then what happens, if you do it right, you start from the inside out and you grow your way into what the music is going to be the-matically about.
MM: The press love putting everyone into a box or comparing them with someone else. You were compared in the early part of your career to Bob Dylan.
BS: That’s right. There was me and a whole bunch of guys and we all got signed at the same time: me, John Prine, Loudon Wainwright, Elliott Murphy. There was probably half a dozen of us at the time who had our dice rolling to be, quote, the new Bob Dylan. And the sad thing was, he was still a kid and they were already looking for somebody to be the new him. He was only about thirty and we were all twenty-three or twenty-four or twenty-five. Needless to say, there was never going to be a new Dylan. But we were all serious songwriters and, at the time, that kind of songwriting was at the top of the charts. I mean, James Taylor and these guys had Top 10 records.
MM: When you were growing up here in New Jersey, who did you love when you were six, seven, eight, nine, ten years old?
BS: I only heard Top 40 radio, so I found things I loved on Top 40.
MM: You liked Elvis?
BS: Of course. The extent of your exposure to music was just what was on in the kitchen in the morning. But there was an enormous world coming out of this little ten-inch speaker. People thought it was junk, but there was an enormous sense of life and experience coming out of it. And then, of course, on television, you first saw Elvis and the Beatles and the British invasion. Elvis sort of got you thinking, and the Beatles and the Stones got you acting.
MM: When I saw the documentary, I slightly went into shock because I never dreamed—
BS: —that we were that skinny!
MM: Is it strange to look back and see yourself at that age?
BS: Well, I look a lot like my sons, so it’s kind of interesting. My sons are twenty and sixteen. I think the funniest thing is in some of the scenes, you’re just a dead ringer for your kids, you know? And Steve and I had already been friends for ten years when you see us in this documentary. But you see how that relationship has really remained. It’s been incredibly stable for my whole life.
MM: I would never have believed, when I heard that album—and I absolutely love that album [the original Darkness on the Edge of Town]—that you had written so many songs for it. You almost get frustrated watching the documentary. You think, “For God’s sake, that song sounds great, Bruce.” And you go, “Nah …”
BS: Yeah, we threw a lot of pretty good things out. The band can only go on what’s in front of them when we’re in the studio. They’re judging what we’re doing by what they’re hearing at that moment—by what we recorded on that day. I’m judging what we’re doing by what I’m hearing but also by what I’m thinking and by what I’m kind of smelling in the air that might be waiting out there or waiting inside of me.
It’s frustrating that we made so much music that I was constantly rejecting. But I had good reasons, and in the end I think the choices I made were right. But at a very young age, I had a sense of purpose and of what I wanted the band to be about. I had a certain essential kind of record that was simply going to take me a while to get through. And a part of the process was I wrote a lot of music, you know, and then I culled it down to the toughest things I had and that’s what became Darkness on the Edge of Town.
MM: There’s one song you’re doing with Steve and it’s a great pop rock song.
BS: Those are Steve’s favorites. He likes all the three-minute songs.
MM: I mean, you threw that one away.
BS: Well, we threw “Sherry Darling” out—
MM: Which is great—
BS: —until the next record. We threw “Independence Day” out until The River. You know, there was a lot of things. There were good songs that just didn’t fit in.
MM: We get some of them here on this [Darkness box set], but how much more is unreleased?
BS: Well, there were six or eight on Tracks, there’s twenty-two on this, and I’m sure there’s things that are sitting around but I really don’t know how much more. I think we got the best of it by now. Or most of it, anyway.
MM: You’ve had the same manager for almost all your life; the E Street Band seems to me like your extended family; you’ve got this house with Patti and the kids. Family … what does it mean to you?
BS: You get to a certain point and it’s just a part of the fullness of life. You get to grow up again alongside your kids. And have a deep, deep friendship. You know, Patti and I, we go back to 1970 maybe. She was still in high school and I was looking for a singer and she called me on the phone one night in 1970 in the surfboard factory that we were living in and I said, “Well, we have to travel, so you should stay in school.” And then she auditioned for the band in 1974, right before the Born to Run tour. So we’ve had a long relationship. She was a part of the scene around here, and we have so much in common just with how we grew up and where we grew up and it’s just the deepest, you know. It’s a certain sort of friendship that you only have one of.
MM: You could live anywhere in the world. Without sounding offensive, it’s like Old MacDonald had a farm and here is this amazing farm with goats and—
BS: [Laughs.] Does that make me Old MacDonald?
MM: No, no, no, no, no. It doesn’t make you Old MacDonald.
BS: Well, there are goats out there. Yes there are! And some chickens also, but we just enjoy that. And ten minutes this way is Freehold; Asbury Park’s about twenty-five minutes that way; the house I recorded Nebraska in is about five minutes this way; the house that we’re filmed in rehearsing is about ten minutes over here. So we’re sort of in the middle of everything.
But we did live out of state for five or six years. We lived in Los Angeles. And I liked it a lot. I got a lot out of living in California. I wrote some songs about it. But we have a huge extended family here. We’ve got about a hundred people—Italian, Irish—and I had that when I was growing up and we wanted our kids to have that … cousins, uncles, aunts, people that fish, people that hunt, that do all kinds of jobs. So it was just a place where what we did became as normalized as possible and they got exposed to a lot of things and to lives that other people have.
MM: When your kids see the documentary and go, “Oh, look at Dad there …”
BS: No, they don’t even bother to watch it.
MM: Really?
BS: No, they come to the show once in a while, but who really wants to see thousands of people cheer their parents? I m
ean, nobody wants to see that. You may go to see thousands of people boo your parents. That would be fun to see. But kids don’t really want to see thousands of people cheering their mother and father—it’s your worst nightmare, you know. So I think you have to respect the divine right of kids to ignore their parents. That’s very important.
MM: What was it like coming out of a place like Jersey, playing in the smaller clubs and building the whole thing with the E Street Band, and then suddenly huge stadiums?
BS: Well, it wasn’t suddenly. It took about a decade. There isn’t a night when you go out onto a stage of any size and you don’t realize, “I’m a guy that plays a guitar for a living. I’m a lucky guy.” To go out and have an audience and see people who’ve taken your music to heart—that’s something you never get over.
MM: When “Dancing in the Dark” came out, we saw this amazing video. Did you like that video?
BS: We just wanted to have a video at the time. I would have been fine if there were never any videos, personally.
MM: Really?
BS: I mean, I’ve enjoyed making them over the years, but it was one of the things that I did because it was a way to get your music exposed. I wasn’t driven to be a video maker. I’d always say, “Well, it’s the song. You go out and play.” And also, it was an entire new skill you had to learn. And it was very, very expensive. You would spend as much on one video as you would on your entire record back in those days. It seems to be of less import these days with the Internet and all kinds of other things, but for about twenty years, it was a pretty essential piece of record making. And I ended up enjoying it and I’m glad they’re there now. I like to go back and see them and where you were at this age or that age. And the kids have seen them, so they get to laugh at them.
MM: Laugh?
BS: Of course.
MM: All right, now whether you like it or not, you are iconic, you are a legend, you are a star …