Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (51 page)

There’s a few of us out here
.

But yeah, the surrealism in the lyrics is just fabulous.

You know what I need? If somebody could get me—is Terry here? My bag, I actually have glasses in there. Shh! Edit that part out! [
Laughs
] Yeah, there’s a bag somewhere that’s got ’em.

Anyway, we end up with “Froggie Went a Courtin’,” which is surreal in another way
.

Yeah, and I read your essay about it—I want to hear all those verses! That was the only version I knew, and you said there was like a hundred … I want to see all the verses. We may add them as we go along.

May the tour last that long! [
Both laugh
] Well, you’ve got to do “Here’s to Cheshire, here’s to cheese” once, that’s one of Pete’s great little moments. Now, Pete Seeger did three different “Froggies.” I don’t know if you heard all three of them
.

I don’t think so, no.

So you heard one or two, but you didn’t—and now we’re moving toward the second and third sessions—you didn’t restrict yourself to the versions that Pete did. You went and did some—you had Terry Magovern, your assistant, and you guys sort of did some research, right? Picked and chose? In a proper folkloric manner?

No, not really. I’m trying to think if I might have tried to dig up some extra lyrics on some things, but for the most part … no, I didn’t hear a lot of other versions of that.

No? I thought we talked about that earlier. But the thing you did do, to really change several songs, is you changed keys
.

The changes I made, a lot of it was musical. I changed “O Mary,” which is generally done in a major key, I just heard it in a minor key for some reason. It made it darker, and it sort of brought out its apocalyptic side. There were a lot of things I did like that. I don’t really remember the musical changes I made now, but I was throwing in chords and just trying to fit things to how I heard them, resetting lyrics.

Okay, we’ve got a session in ’97, you don’t do another session until 2005. In between, what’s happening to this stuff?

It’s just sitting around, like a lot of my things do! [
Laughs
] And I’m off doing other things. After I did the session, I was really excited about it, and I got really excited about it over the next seven years, probably four or five times. But there was always something else coming up. I had it there, and I’d go back to it, say, “Let me hear that stuff we cut at the house….” Toby [Scott] would send me over the tape, and all I knew was that I enjoyed listening to it a lot. It was so listenable.

Especially because your last three records have been tragedies
.

Yeah … I mean I hadn’t thought of it in that way, but they were pretty dark…. and the main difference is just whether you’re writing, or just singing and playing. I find that when I’m writing, I’m on my way to try to find a setting for the lyrics. And if I’m writing for the [E Street] Band, I’m trying to find a setting for the lyrics that fits with a lot of what we do in the band. If I’m writing my narratives and short story kinds of songs I write, I think like that a little bit more, and the music tends to be—certainly in the narrative things, I use very basic and very simple [music], because the lyrics are so dense. So I think what you get with this particular music is, when all this music was written, the sense
of struggle is in it, but there’s also the strange brightness of the twisted American spirit that keeps pushing its way through.

Well, how “John Henry” becomes an uplifting song …

The music is just vital—it’s simply vital. That’s what pours out. And you hear it—you know, there’s the most beautiful music that comes out of Africa. The struggle songs are all—you know, the bubbling rhythms, bubbling rhythms, dance music, dance rhythms, things that are so transcendent. Bob Marley: incredible lyrics of struggle, and yet dance rhythms, and bright. That’s a powerful combination, when those things come together. And so, in a funny way on a lot of these songs, you get a similar kind of experience.

Even “Mrs. McGrath,” which is very downtempo, yet …

It’s got that big chorus. [
Plays and sings
]:
Too-ri-aa, fol-did-dle-di-aa
… It’s the sound of determination.

It’s interesting, because that’s the only song on the record that’s really, truly what you’d think of as a topical or protest song. It’s the only song that addresses an issue. Even “We Shall Overcome” and “Eyes on the Prize”—“Eyes on the Prize” says “the day I started to fight” and that’s a freedom song addition, but for the most part, this is a record that is in another world than that
.

Once again, I think you’re choosing things that you think you can make “of the moment” and so you’re connected to this present world. I didn’t choose anything as a historical piece.

Well, you’re not approaching this as historical music, because nobody would put a brass band on “O Mary Don’t You Weep.” It’s been done 200 times; nobody ever did it that way
.

It was: how do I make this very, very present? How do I make these characters leap off the record and make them sit, or dance, or sing in your living room? Right now. That’s the key—you have to make it very, very present. I didn’t have a lot of interest in the music as a historian. That’s sort of somebody else’s job, you know?

Yeah, me! [
Both laugh
]

And so my main thing was, what’s gonna be exciting to play, and fun to sing and to hear people cut loose on, you know? That was my main
criteria. The stuff that passed the bar, that was the stuff we used. So that was my approach to the whole thing. Pete wrote me a letter about the history of a lot of the songs and talked to me on the phone about it once I told him what I was up to, and then you researched the stuff quite a bit, and that’s where most of my information about the music is from.

If you’d known more, you wouldn’t have done what you did. I don’t think you would have felt free to do what you did, if you’d gone and done that kind of research
.

Basically, like I say, I was just looking for what stories enthrall me right now, and what do I think I can bring to life right now and do something with—and what can I add my two cents on as an interpreter. Which is something that I’ve done only very rarely in the past, because I never saw myself primarily as an interpreter of other people’s music or of other songs.

But these aren’t other people’s songs, because they’re everybody’s songs. Most of them
.

Yeah, and I think the idea that these are songs, many of them, that have been roundly sung, and passed around, and handed down, I found some element of … there was a lack of self-consciousness. This is there to go to, and that was very freeing.

And at the same time now, if you look back on it (because I know you do that periodically when we make you), it does fit in with your other stuff. The themes …

Oh yeah. It all fits with the story that we’ve been telling for a long time, and it’s just another stop along the way, really. I think if you followed my music, bottom line, “Dan Tucker” could have come off
Greetings from Asbury Park
, you know? [
Laughs
]

And “My Oklahoma Home” could have come off any record from
Born in the U.S.A
. to
Devils & Dust
.

And now I have my glasses … [
Plays and sings first verse of “Old Dan Tucker.”
] So that’s like off of
Highway 61
, or …

Oh yeah! And sort of bleeding into your first two albums. “Mrs. McGrath” could have been on
The Wild, the Innocent & the E
Street Shuffle
pretty easily. The other thing is that part of that story you’ve been telling all this time is about a kind of participation that sometimes hasn’t been readily available, or it hasn’t been real obvious how people could participate. And on this one it’s really obvious—I mean, some of these are sing-alongs
.

Oh, I think probably most of them. Most of them are. Like I’ve said, it’s tavern music, it’s living room music, and the collectiveness of it is part of its essence.

In the documentary that comes with the album, one of the things you talk about [is] your cousin, Frank Jr., and his dad, your cousin Frank, how this is one of the places where your guitar playing first came in. You never told this story before, so I was dumbfounded
.

Frank—who is playing in this band, Frank Jr.—is my cousin, and his dad is a few years older than me. I remember when I was probably around … when I was 14 he must have been like 16 or 17, and you know how it is when there’s somebody a few years older in the family…. And Frankie played the accordion, in the classic sort of Ted Mack
Amateur Hour
style. I’d go over to his house all the time, and he’d bust out the big box, and he’d play the accordion. Well, one day I go over, these were family functions, and he’s playing the guitar. Had to be around ’64, I guess, and he had an acoustic guitar, and he was playing a lot of folk songs.

This was the height of the folk boom, ’63 and ’64, and
Hootenanny
was on television. And you’d go to the beach on Sunday, and one of the things that used to inspire me was there was about 20 guys that used to meet at the beach on Sunday, and they would sit in this big circle on a Sunday afternoon. And they would draw 100 people around them, playing “Twist and Shout,” and folk music, you know, “If I Had a Hammer.” And this would go on all afternoon at the beach—for hours, three or four hours, they’d all…. I said,
man
, if I could just get a guitar, I’d love to just find my place in the sand, and …

In the circle
.

That’s it—I just wanted to find my place …

This is exactly the same thing we talked about when we talked about
Born to Run
.

Yeah, I wanted to find my place in that circle of guys. And you know, they were just kind of strummers and shouters, but hey, the girls in the
bikinis were there, standing all around. So I said [
laughs
], man, I just want to find my place, you know, I just want to learn a few chords and squeak in there on a Sunday afternoon, sit in the back and strum along.

And so, Frank had started to play the guitar. And I remember I went over one night, and I was enthralled. I had gotten a guitar, but I had not learned how to tune it or how to read any chord charts. Basically, I brought it home, it was all out of tune, and I was making up songs, just plunking away on what I had. I don’t know if I brought it with me or what, but he taught me how to tune the guitar, and then he had a folk songbook with the chord charts in it, and he said, “Look, see where these black dots are? That’s where you put your fingers. You put your fingers on those spots [
laughs
], and you’re on your way!”

I remember I went home that night—he gave me the book, I went home that night, and it was “Greensleeves” or something, and I saw it was E minor, because it only takes two fingers [
laughs
]. So I said, “I’ll start there!” And E minor was my first big success. And the interesting thing was, see, I started off in a minor key, and that led me down that road ever since.

So his son picked up a guitar quite a few years back and wrote some songs and has made some music, and so I said, gee, you know, I wonder what Frank is doing? So I said, let me call Frank, and I had Frank come in. Because the idea was, yeah, it’s sort of this family thing: everybody sits around and sings. And so I said, “Frank, come on up and play!” And so he came up, and he plays well, and he covers all my guitar parts when I’m simply hamming. It gives me a lot of hamming room, because someone else will actually be playing while I’m clowning.

That guy Steve used to do that
.

Yes! Yes [
laughs
]. So that was the actual, initial thing that got me down the road to learning actually how to play. [
Strums
]: E minor, A minor, those were the first two; they’re close to each other. And I never made it to that circle on the beach. I don’t know what happened.

I think the circle dispersed—and joined rock bands and played at night
.

That’s what happened! By ’65, when I was ready, it was over. I think I spent about the first six months—I did work on some folk things, and then immediately, you know: [
plays “Twist and Shout” intro
] I
immediately picked up “Twist and Shout.” “Twist and Shout” was the first thing I learned. And I tried to move along to some Beatles songs, and Stones songs and things.

So yeah, it’s nice having Frank up there with us.

And actually, the other person who’s sort of renewed with your crew here is Patti. Because you’ve got not only Soozie, who was on the
Rising
tour, but you’ve got Lisa Lowell, and they were sort of a busking trio on the streets of New York at one point
.

The interesting thing about the group is that it’s kind of half people who’ve played together for a really long time, informally, and half people that just kind of happened by the house one day [
laughs
].

And then people that I’ve met in sort of other unusual … like, once I put the horn section on, the only thing we overdubbed on a few tunes was the tuba. Because, man, I have a
brass band
going, and part of the sound of that particular brass sound, on some of these things I need the tuba.

It’s the humor, and the drama
.

It’s the humor—and so I met this fellow Art [Baron], from the City, and also I went up and saw the
Nebraska
[Project] …

That’s right, the [New York] Guitar Festival did a tribute to
Nebraska
.

And I went up and I met Marc [Anthony Thompson], the guitarist, who played “Johnny 99” that night. I’d seen him on television with Marc Ribot. [Thompson] records as Chocolate Genius and, by the way, has made two fabulous records—I think one is
Godmusic
and one is
Black Music
—you should rush out and get those, they’re really beautiful records. And so we kind of met there, and I forgot about it, but Art the tuba player said “Hey, you know, I know this guy Marc …” and I said “Oh yeah, we’ve met.” And he said he’d be interested in doing some singing, doing some background singing. I said “Well, great, come on down!” And he came down, and it was like, bang!, it was just perfect right away. And so the whole thing is just a happy accident, it was the nicest way for music to get made—completely unplanned.