Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (47 page)

As a songwriter and musician he moved on into the big world. The broad picture is that, while he never invented a genre nor even experimented much within the idiom, he did bring the whole history of rock ’n’ roll together with love and verve and imagination and a protean attention to detail. The music was kind of taken care of in the blood, and the soul was right there—anyone who heard what he did when a wordless howl or holler was called for knew what he had inside. But, chiefly, he pulled off his translation from excitable boy to rock ’n’ roller for the ages by becoming a great storyteller. In fact, that process of development did start on
Born to Run
with “Meeting Across the River,” the one slow track, murky with melancholy piano and lonesome trumpet. The stroke that
hinted at Springsteen’s narrative gift was that he chose to write the lyric as just one side of a conversation. “Hey Eddie, can you lend me a few bucks / And tonight can you get us a ride,” asks first-person unnamed. From those opening lines all his fears, failures and serial delusions of grandeur hang out there in the empty air, unanswered and exposed, until this poor dope who’s “planning” a stick-up without a car or a gun has finished his fantasy about impressing his wife—“I’m just gonna throw that money on the bed / She’ll see this time I wasn’t just talking.”

By the following album,
Darkness on the Edge of Town
(1978), he was committed to developing this craft. It included a crucial stepping-stone in “Racing in the Street.” Perhaps deliberately confronting the “cars-and-girls” line of criticism that dogged his early years, it started out with a car-obsessed hotrodder in barroom braggadocio mode: “I got a ’69 Chevy with a 396 / Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor.” After a bit of boasting about all the races he’s won, he suddenly finds himself thinking about his girl, her love, her ageing, her loneliness, the ways his neglect has worn her down until “She stares off alone into the night / With the eyes of one who hates for just being born.”

The stories operate in a political landscape—working-class people struggling to make ends meet, financially and morally—against a backdrop of religious language that rarely suggests true belief. And some of them absolutely rut with sex, from “I’m on Fire” (
Born in the U.S.A
., 1984), through “Highway 29” (
The Ghost of Tom Joad
) to “Reno” (
Devils & Dust
). Bruce really delivers, somewhere between Aretha’s version of “The Night Time Is the Right Time” and the kitchen table in James M. Cain’s
The Postman Always Rings Twice
.

Springsteen is a relentless thinker about what he does and, in recent years, writing carefully about the craft and the craftsman, he’s offered two very different approaches. The first, in
Songs
, his lyrics book, is seriously analytical: “When you get the music and the lyrics right, your voice disappears into the voices of those you’ve chosen to write about … But all the telling detail in the world doesn’t matter if the song lacks an emotional centre. That’s something you have to pull out of yourself from the commonality you feel with the man or woman you’re writing about.” So the egos of artist and listener are set aside and they meet in the fictional characters and their stories. But that was 1998. Now Springsteen has turned seriously satirical on the subject, having grown far more interested in uncertainties, especially his own identity and how that relates to his fans. Or doesn’t. When
Mojo
saw him recording
his
VH1 Storytellers
show back in April, he raised the topic in comic vein while discussing “Brilliant Disguise”—a song from
Tunnel of Love
(1987) in which our narrator, who sounds closer to an autobiographical Springsteen than usual, wonders who he is, who his wife is, and how far both of them are faking it.

Springsteen discoursed on how “We all have multiple selves” and began a yarn about how, a while back, he was spending the afternoon at a favourite strip club out on the highway—“that holier-than-thou bastard Bruce Springsteen” having left him to his “simple pleasures” for once. However, when he left, trouble lurked out in the parking lot: “A woman and a man spied me and said, ‘Bruce, you aren’t supposed to be here.’ I could see where they were going with this so I said, I’m not. I am simply an errant figment of one of Bruce’s many selves. I drift in the ether over the highways and byways of the Garden State, often touching down in image-incongruous but fun places. Bruce does not even know I am missing. He is at home right now doing good deeds.”

He wound up with his psycho-philosophical QED, “So the self is a mysterious thing.” And as we will discover, with Bruce it is.

Backstage is sparsely populated: three or four crew, management and the local promoter pad about a brick and concrete corridor wide enough for army manoeuvres.

After a few minutes’ wait, at the appointed time, 6 p.m., Springsteen appears in the dressing-room doorway and waves
Mojo
in. He’s smiling, with a note of reserve you might almost call English.

The room is bare except for a scattering of his possessions on a large glass-topped table—more papers, a personal stereo (he’s not taken to the i-Pod yet), a paperback copy of his lyrics book,
Songs
. There’s a small electric table clock, Woolworths maybe, which faces away from him as he takes a seat. Nothing at all purports to make the place feel “like home.”

He sticks one leg straight out on the table and leans back in the black moquette and chrome chair. The seams at the crotch of his jeans are worn white and about to go. He speaks slowly, carefully, pausing often to gather the exact words he’s seeking. An odd aspect of his presence close up is that he looks average height, average build when standing, and broad to the point of massive when sitting down. Maybe it’s a trick of the blue plaid shirt which, someone says, was a gift from Tom Hanks.

It’s strange to think that such a solid looking man, at a middle-years artistic peak, should talk and sing so much about ambivalence and doubt. Back in 1987 he was wrestling with the divided soul behind his “Two Faces” One that does things I don’t understand / makes me feel like half a man.” Three years ago, on
The Rising
, he was imagining himself into the traumatised, blank soul of the Nothing Man: “Darlin’ with this kiss / Say you understand / I am the nothing man.” But maybe now his life and work have arrived at one of those realistic-but-positive spots he made over into romance for “All the Way Home” on
Devils & Dust
: “I know what it’s like to have failed, baby / With the whole world lookin’ on / … Now you got no reason to trust me / My confidence is a little rusty / But if you don’t like bein’ alone / Baby, I could walk you all the way home.”

He sits ready, gazing at
Mojo
with a small frown.

At
Storytellers
, a fan describing herself as “a person of colour” asked how you “managed to capture the minority experience.” You said, “I think it comes from that feeling of being invisible. For the first 16 or 17 years of my life I had that feeling of being not there.” Was that one of the foundations of
Born to Run
?

Oh, it’s one of the building blocks of all rock ’n’ roll music. Or blues or jazz. It’s at the core of songwriting and performance and … almost any creative expression. It all comes from a will and a desire to have some impact—to feel your connection to the world and other people and to experience it. To experience your own vitality and your own life force. Go back through any creative expression and you’re trying to pull something out of thin air and make it tangible and visible. That’s why you’re the magician.

But you also told that woman how painful and unpleasant your experience of invisibility was
.

Yeah, uh … [
hesitates
]

It reminded me of the story about you as an eight-year-old boy in Catholic school; you got your Latin wrong and the nun who taught you stood you in the wastebasket because “that’s what you were worth.”

[
Laughs hoarsely and heartily
.] I suppose that was about as symbolic as you could get. So, yeah, the idea of struggling against the wasted life
has always been behind my songwriting. And obviously class and race play an enormous part in that here in the United States.

If you saw the shock expressed when, during Hurricane Katrina, suddenly all these people who had been marginalised were on television and visible. And people’s shock … was shocking to me. Those people who had been marginalized—who you’re normally seeing on the nightly news in handcuffs being arrested, that’s basically all you ever see of them—suddenly there they are with their kids, their families, and the country reacted with a sad sort of shock, and that’s just part of the history of class and race and it’s a permanent connection to the heart and the birth of blues and jazz and R&B and rock ’n’ roll music.

That music is one of the tools by which the invisible, the people who were born on the margins, have made themselves visible. It’s crucial and critical to making that kind of music. And I wanted to make a big noise. You want to let people know that you’re here and you’re alive.

Did coming from New Jersey play a part in the sense of being disregarded that fuelled
Born to Run
?

Maybe the thing that was different back then was I’d never met anybody who’d made an album. You were much further out of the mainstream, particularly before localism in pop music became accepted. I mean, one hour out of New York City and you were in the nether world. Nobody came to New Jersey looking for bands to sign. That didn’t happen and the sense of being further away from those things was very pronounced. I did shows in my late teens and early twenties when I was playing to thousands of kids, but nobody really knew about that. We were acting independently of the record business and the concert business; they were just local events. And we were guys who had never been on an airplane until the record company flew us to Los Angeles.

Today I hardly know a band without a CD. Any local band, I go to their show and they’re selling a CD. But that wasn’t the case in the ’60s and early ’70s. The machinery, the technology, to make records was not in your hands. So when I got a record contract I was the only person I had ever known who had been signed, that was the big change, and then we made a couple of records and they didn’t sell that well but still it was miraculous. And then
Born to Run
came along and [
breaks off, with a tilt of the head at everything that followed
].

In terms of your standing then, something unprecedented happened: you got the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
in the same week (October, 1975). But then you seemed to hate it when they came out. Why?

That was the big decision I made. A moment came along when I said, “Gee, I’m not going to do these interviews.” So I wouldn’t have been on those covers. But then I was like, “Why wouldn’t I do that?!” This is my … [
halts a rush of words to consider
]. I had tremendous apprehension and a good deal of ambivalence about success and fame—although it was for something that I had pursued very intensely. But it was: “I’m never gonna know unless I do this.” You know? You’re never gonna know what you’re worth or what your music is worth or what you had to say or what kind of a position you could play in the music community … er, unless you did it. So I said, “Well, this is my shot and I’m gonna take this.”

You were talking about rock ’n’ roll springing from political and social issues. How was your political consciousness when you recorded
Born to Run
?

It didn’t exist. That was the last thing in the world that I was …

Even though you grew up in the ’60s?

No, you’re right, I don’t mean it to that degree. In the ’60s, the United States felt more like South America or Central America when I went on the Amnesty tour there [1988, with Sting, Peter Gabriel, Tracy Chapman]. At the press conferences it was all very intense political questions and everybody was involved in these tumultuous events in Argentina and then we played right next to Chile where they’d just gotten Pinochet tottering and so everybody was imbued with political consciousness. In the States in the late ’60s, if you weren’t involved in protesting against the Vietnam War and what the government was doing and the way the culture was changing, people thought there was something wrong with you. So that was bred into you and I carried that along with me and at times it came forth and at other times it would recede, but in the early ’70s I wasn’t particularly aware of it. After the end of the Vietnam War people felt at loose ends and there was a lot of instability. Look at
Born to Run
and it would be one of my least political records, certainly on its surface. I was motivated by records that I loved, by the sound I wanted to make and the feeling that I wanted to bring
forth. A feeling of enormous exhilaration and aliveness. That was what I was pursuing. A cathartic, almost orgasmic experience.

But then, in 1978, you made
Darkness on the Edge of Town
and that “darkness” became a prevailing metaphor in your lyrics
.

Mmm. With
Born to Run
there was a certain degree of your-dream-came-true. You’d found an audience and you’ve had that impact. So it was just part of my nature for better and for worse to go, “Well, what does this mean? What is its personal meaning? What is its political meaning? What does this mean not just to me but to other people?” There’s the concern about the fame, which is interesting because it makes you very present and you have a lot of impact and you have force, but it also separates you and makes you very, uh, singular.

You’re now having an experience that not many other people you know are having. Its irony is that it carries its own type of loneliness. And a whole series of new questions. So I said, for me, really the rest of my work life will be to pursue those answers.
Born to Run
was a pivotal album in that, after that, my writing took a turn that it might not have in other circumstances.
Darkness on the Edge of Town
was an immediate and very natural response to, uh, “How do I stay connected to all these things?”