Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (50 page)
What do you mean by “grace”?
Grace to me, it’s just the events of the day. The living breath of our lives … Woody Allen once said he found himself happiest when he was standing in the kitchen in the morning buttering his toast. So you’re chauffeuring your kids somewhere and you think it’s a burden and something happens … it’s there.”
And the strip-club denizen, unholy Bruce, is he still around?
Unholy Bruce is alive and well,” he laughs. “Narcissistic, sexually obsessed, talks a good game then runs off in the other direction. Likes a good drink, let’s the good times roll. I’ll tell him you asked after him.”
In 2006, Springsteen released
We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
, an often raucous collection of folk songs originally popularized by Pete Seeger. Springsteen went back to the roots of American music and explored a number of traditional forms, from bluegrass to gospel to New Orleans second line—sometimes in the same song. He also toured with a full band that sometimes reached as many as twenty members. “I was just looking for what stories enthrall me right now, and what do I think I can bring to life,” he tells Marsh of this major departure from E Street. Conducted in Asbury Park as Bruce prepared for his new band’s live debut, this interview originally aired on Marsh’s Sirius Satellite Radio program,
Kick Out the Jams
.
On April 20, in the midst of preparations for that night’s Seeger Sessions Band debut on the Asbury Park boardwalk, Bruce Springsteen sat down for a long talk with his old friend Dave Marsh. Good thing for us, Marsh has a radio show. Airing a few days later on Marsh’s
Kick Out the Jams
program, on Sunday, April 23, the interview found Springsteen speaking expansively about the Seeger Sessions project, taking the listener through its
genesis session by session, as well as tracing his folk roots—and his aspirations—back to a circle of strummers on the beach
.
Just before bruce arrived on the mezzanine of the Paramount Theater for our interview, Thorn Zimny, who was going to film it, placed a guitar next to the little round table where the microphones were set up. “Maybe he’ll use it, maybe not,” he mused.
By the time I sat down across from him, Bruce already held and strummed the guitar, which he continued to do throughout the discussion. Since what we always talk about, when we talk, starts with music, it added immensely to what got said and how. When we got around to “Eyes on the Prize,” the radio version became a virtual seminar in how he constructs meaning. It’s what he does at the beginning of
Storytellers
with “Devils and Dust,” with the difference that the issue was not what the lyrics might mean but the way that performing a song determines meaning.
The Seeger Sessions
provides the best opportunity in many years for Bruce to talk about such things, because music is what it’s about, from the time he crashes into “Old Dan Tucker” to the last line, when he declares “If you want any more, you can sing it yourself,” an act of encouragement 180 degrees from the silence he’s commanded for his other “folk” projects. For someone like me, who values a truly original performance even more highly than an original song, that spirit places
Seeger Sessions
in the top rank of what he’s accomplished.
I’d first heard what was already being called “the Seeger project” in late December 2005 and immediately fell for its energy, the swinging drumming, the relaxed way in which he and the group delved into frenzy. Bruce and I had a couple of talks about it before the album came out, which sort of grew into the “liner notes” on his website. I remember telling him about Sis Cunningham, who wrote “My Oklahoma Home,” after he said he was sure that Woody Guthrie had written it. (I can imagine someone in another half-century insisting that Bruce did. I sort of came to the conclusion that it’s all true.)
That, the research for the notes, and seeing an early rehearsal (about a week before the public ones) constituted my preparation. Well, if you don’t count being immersed in some of these songs since I was a teenager. Bruce’s circle on the beach had very broad boundaries, and somewhere even further on the fringe, they made room for me, too.
Once we started, we had an hour (the raw tape is 64 minutes). We stayed focused on music, and all the other topics flowed from that. The guitar and the freer state of mind Bruce seems to have been in since the
Devils & Dust
tour took off into the deepest realms of his song catalogue made this the easiest interview of the many we’ve done since the first one, 32 years ago. I came away from it thinking that I knew something new about my old friend and where he came from. I learned a long time ago, that you can never figure out where he’s going next.
Well, Bruce, first of all I would like to congratulate you on once again confounding everyone else’s expectations
.
[
Laughs
] Including my own, I think.
Well, I have never seen you excited in quite the way you are by this music right now
.
It’s fun—it’s just exciting stuff to play, and the band is exciting. It’s an exciting group of musicians, and also it’s very freeing in the sense that the nature of the music, and not having to write it, kind of opened me up to be just purely musical.
Kinda like the way you can brag on something if it isn’t yours?
[
Laughs
] So it opened the whole thing up to just this purely musical experience. A lot of the rhythms that were used—the only rule I had was if it was something I did with the guys, with the E Street Band … whatever this is, it has to be not that.
You’re talking about stuff that’s not on the record, but for your show
.
Yeah, for the show—straight down the line, really, from the record to the show, just the different rhythms. The main thing, my only sort of line, was that everything felt rhythmically different. And we were drawing directly from a different—there’s some crossover, but mainly from a lot of different influences.
Actually, the first note I have here is “beats.” And that they’re rowdy and participatory beats
.
Yeah, it’s interesting—there are bluegrass grooves, there’s country grooves, there’s gospel grooves, there’s a lot of New Orleans in it.
And swamps further back than New Orleans, too
.
Yeah … we have a version of “My Father’s Place” that’s very field chant. And it just goes a lot of places I haven’t really gone before.
It’s your most syncopated recording ever
.
Yeah, and that really came from the different rhythms [of] the music that I chose, but then also came from the musicians themselves. There’s a spot in “Pay Me My Money Down” when you can hear the band—there was a series of steps that we took that happened very naturally. When I first went in, it was obviously just to find a song for Pete’s record [Appleseed Recordings’ 1998 tribute,
Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger
]. And so I listened to a lot of his music and picked out a bunch of things that I thought I could sing and would sound right interpreting.
This was way back in ’97
.
This was in ’97. I think the first thing we played was “Jesse James.” [
Plays and sings
]: Jesse James was a lad / That killed many a man / He robbed the Glendale train … So that [sound is] already something—I don’t play that with the E Street Band. That’s a very different feeling. So it started there. And these guys, who I had met at my farm, through Soozie Tyrell, came down from the city; they were playing sort of a zydeco and Cajun feeling, it just clicked. I think, literally, the take on the record is the second thing we ever played together—the second take. So just right from the beginning, just
bang
, it was it fired up right from the start. So it started there, just with a little bluegrass [feel], and then … I’m trying to think what else we cut that day, the initial day that we recorded. You might know better than me …
I actually don’t
.
No? Okay, the things we cut from the first session were “Jesse James,” “My Oklahoma Home” …
“Oklahoma Home,” which is the least-recorded song, one of the newest songs …
That’s interesting, I didn’t know that.
There are only two other versions recorded: Sis Cunningham, who wrote it, and Pete
.
That shocks me. I didn’t know that at all.
It hadn’t been recorded in 40 years!
Strange. Because it’s such a fabulous story, and the guy tells such a tragic story with so much wit, and strength, and humor, and the verses are just—
Well, when they get to that Smokey Robinson internal rhyme, with “mister” and “kissed her” …
[
Laughs
] [
Plays and sings
]: Got picked up by a twister …. And I guess what caught me was the chorus, it’s got that great [
sings
]: blowed away (blowed away!), she’s blowed away (blowed away!), I said yeah, that’ll be fun to sing! So we cut that the first day, and that turned into almost a—we sort of combined a little of the bluegrass rhythm with some Texas swing. So all of a sudden, we started out with that beat, and then some Texas swing kind of slipped in.
A little Bob Wills—because you’ve got the horn section in there …
Bob Wills, right. And the bizarre thing, I don’t know why I did it, was why I had the horns come at all! I got a letter from Pete, and Pete said, “Wow, horns on ‘Jesse James’! Who would have thunk?” [
Laughs
] And I knew what he was talking about, because I don’t know why I had the horn section come. And really, for the first session it was only Richie “La Bamba” [Rosenberg] and Eddie Manion, so we had just a trombone and a saxophone, because I think Mark [Pender] was doing something. But I must have heard something, some of the ’20s influence coming from somewhere, because I had the guys come down. I had no idea what to tell them to play, so I didn’t tell them to play anything. I put them in the hall, and I said, “just sort of play along,” y’know? [
Laughs
] And I think it was at the end of “Jesse James,” where Richie starts to move into that Dixieland solo on the trombone. It’s player’s music, also: it’s music where there’s a lot of soloing.
A different kind of soloing than you’d get in a rock band
.
Yeah—literally, it’s jamming, you know? [
Laughs
] So there’s a lot of soloing, and at some point I said, “Well, the fiddle played, the accordion played … all right, Richie!” And Richie went into that Dixieland feeling, and so that entered into the picture. I think that same day we covered “Stand at Every Door,” which we had a nice version of but didn’t end up on the record. We also cut “Pretty Boy Floyd” and “We Shall Overcome.”
And the one track that comes out, of course, is “We Shall Overcome.” You would not have guessed that all those people were there, because that really just feels like you and Patti [Scialfa]. I don’t know who else is on it
.
That was just a step up from people sitting in their living rooms singing. When we approached the background vocals, we approached it like that. There was very little rehearsing of the voices, and Patti’s worked incredibly hard—there’s a lot of singing in the show, just an enormous amount of singing, and she really arranged and put all the singers and the chorus together that we have. But at the initial session, I wanted to keep it very, very much like parlor singing, very loose and unstructured. So basically we got parts very quick, and we rushed through everything, and that was the sound that I liked. We played the track, and then everybody came in and sang it. Patti’s voice is very prominent, as it is on a lot of the things on the record—“Shenandoah,” she’s got that beautiful “high country” sound.
And as people get to the bonus side, on “How Can I Keep from Singing”—which actually, to tell you the truth, I was thinking gee, maybe this belonged on a Patti solo record! Because she owns that
.
Yeah, and she just did a beautiful job. So it was exciting, because when you can get a lot of people singing together, that choral sound of human voices is always something. It always ends up very personal, very human. There’s all kinds of choral music … there was a lot of different kinds of singing on there: “Shenandoah,” and “We Shall Overcome” and then obviously the stuff that veers closer towards gospel singing, like “Jacob’s Ladder.” But that came third session—we’re still on the first session! The first session, we’re running through those, and … We need a songlist. Can somebody dig up a list of songs from the album?
There’s an album here …
You got an album? Let’s look at it, because it’ll jog my memory. All right: “Old Dan Tucker,” first session.
So the first thing you’re hearing on the album is something from the first session
.
The first thing we did was “Jesse James”; “Old Dan Tucker” was one of the first things.
Well let’s talk about that for a minute, because those two songs—“Jesse James” is a song that people associate with Woody Guthrie, because he rewrote it. And “Old Dan Tucker” is actually written by Bob Dylan a hundred years before Bob Dylan was born, right? [
Laughs
]
That’s really strange…. the surrealism and the lyrics are so modern.
“Washed his face in a frying pan,” “died of a toothache in his heel …”
[
Starts to play
] The surrealism. The only thing we could use is if anybody has the lyrics, which I assume are in this …
Yeah, they probably are, but we’d need a magnifying glass
.
I don’t know, my eyes still might be—might be, and I say might …
Might be good enough for the task? I have bifocal contact lenses, so I get away with it sometimes
.
I’ll tell you in a minute. [
Long pause
] I can’t read ’em [
both laugh
]. My apologies to my fans with fading eyesight [
laughs
].
