Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (56 page)

Sometimes it’s about buying groceries, you know …

But maybe … [
laughs
] maybe there’s this other thing going on. In the States they’re sort of shameless, the bounty in them is overflowing. So the sexual subtext in the supermarket; well, perhaps, it’s just twisted me.

It must be really hard to go shopping with you
.

I’m telling you, it’s there! So I came home, said: “Wow, the supermarket is fantastic, it’s my new favourite place. And I’m going to write a song about it!” If there’s a supermarket and all these things are there, well, there has to be a queen. And if you go there, of course there is. There’s millions of them, so it’s kind of a song about finding beauty where it’s ignored or where it’s passed by.

And does Patti still take you shopping?

Yeah, she does [
laughs
]. Says, “Hey—what’s this one about?”

I wouldn’t tell her if I were you … you’ve got to keep some mystery
.

It’s funny—all those great old records always seem to trail off into mystery. You always wonder, “What was the room like that these guys made that record in? Where they made those Sun records, what did it feel like?” They’re surrounded with so much mystery. These days a lot of the mystery has been drained from popular music, but it still comes forth.

He first became enthralled by that mystery in the small town of Freehold in Jersey’s Monmouth County where he grew up the son of a bus driver and a legal secretary. By all accounts blindsided by Elvis, and an awkward youth who could only make sense of his world through music, he chuckles when he mentions he’s recently been listening to tapes of his first band, the Castiles, and his face lights up at the memory:

All the music I loved as a child, people thought it was junk. People were unaware of the subtext in so many of those records but if you were a kid you were just completely tuned in, even though you didn’t always say—you wouldn’t dare say it was beautiful. You would just say, “I like it. No, Dad, I like this,” or it’s great, or it’s fun, or it’s exciting me. And those records, some of them sustained their beauty. If you listen to the great Beatle records, the earliest ones where the lyrics are incredibly simple. Why are they still beautiful? Well, they’re beautifully sung, beautifully played, and the mathematics in them is elegant. They retain their elegance. So you’re trying to write elegantly also. I was interested in that kind of a creative pull, and that’s not the stream that runs on top through your farm, it’s the stream where it disappears underground.

“Kingdom of Days” has the best line on the record—“I don’t see the summer as it wanes, just the subtle change of light upon your face.”

It’s a line about time and I’m old enough to worry about that a little bit. Not too much but a little bit [
laughs
]. And at certain moments time is obliterated in the presence of somebody you love; there seems to be a transcendence of time in love. Or I believe that there is. I carry a lot of people with me that aren’t here any more. And so love transcends time. The normal markers of the day, the month, the year, as you get older those very fearsome markers … in the presence of love—they lose some of their power.

That’s true …

But it also deals with the deterioration of your physical body. It drifts away, it’s just a part of your life. But beauty remains. It’s about two people and you visit that place in each other’s face. Not just the past
and today, but you visit the tomorrows in that person’s face now. And everybody knows what that holds.

And recently that’s the thing that you’ve had to deal with that you haven’t really had to deal with before, which is the death of people your age that have been close to you …

It’s in most great rock music, you know. Because the impact of so many great records, immediately tells you, “Oh, there’s something else, my friend!” The desperate presentness of so much great rock music, the life force in it, it’s a ranting against the other thing.

The mythology is always mixed. The skulls, crossbones, death’s head. It’s ever-present. I hear death in all those early Elvis records, in all those early, spooky blues records. And in records made by young kids—it’s in “Thunder Road.” A sense of time and the passage of time, the passage of innocence. It cuts through all popular music but in this record, it comes more to the surface.

Well, “The Last Carnival” is obviously for, if not about, Danny Federici …

It started out as a way of making sense of his passing. He was a part of that sound of the boardwalk the band grew up with and that’s something that’s going to be missing now.

Does writing something like that help you process it yourself?

Maybe. I don’t know. You know, uh … on one hand it’s just a song.

It’s never just a song, Bruce …

You know, he’s the first guy we ever lost. The thing I’ve been proudest about for a long time was that unlike many other bands, our band members, they lived. They lived and that was something that was a group effort; it was something that we did together. The surviving part. People did watch the other person. And it was a testament to the life force that I think was at the core of our music—that nobody gave up on you. And that lasted a long time. People got pulled out of a lot of holes. And I would include myself, in different ways over many, many different years.

If nothing else, time tells us that a lot of rock stars struggle with the ageing process. One of the tragedies of Presley’s life was that he was the first of
those stars and back then the job didn’t come with a road map. Thirty-six years after he released his first album, it’s obvious that Springsteen does have a map, one he drew himself and studied carefully. He has a clear vision of the future, saying: “All I’m trying to do now is get music to my audience that is relevant to the times we’re living in and to the times in their lives,” and in difficult times his thoughts are on what endures
.

That sense of survival—or maybe not—is also in the title song you wrote for the film
The Wrestler
, where your friend Mickey Rourke plays a man who’s washed up, whose career is ending. How do you write something like that?

It’s the old job of putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes, while you’ve got a foot in your own shoe. And that’s how it works. I’m grounding this song in something I’ve experienced myself, that I believe I can write about.

Everybody understands damage by the time they’re 12 years old. Most of what you write comes from that point in time, and before. Your life narrative, the inner geography that you are going to have to make your way through is quite firmly set pretty early on.

And that was a song about damage, about what it does to somebody with the inability to get in to normal life. The inability to stand the things that nurture you. Because much of our life is spent running. We’re running, we’re on the run; one of my specialties.

You can find your identity in the damage that’s been done to you. Very, very dangerous. You find your identity in your wounds, in your scars, in the places where you’ve been beat up and you turn them into a medal. We all wear the things we’ve survived with some honour, but the real honour is in also transcending them.

Everybody has experience with those things, but if you live in them, it’s a very dangerous life, and it’s going to be a very hard and unsatisfying one. And that’s a daily choice. In my own life I’ve built a lot, but … I don’t kid myself.

Do you still feel like that 12-year-old?

Of course. There is no part of yourself that you leave behind; it can’t be done. You can’t remove any part of yourself, you can only manage the different parts of yourself. There’s a car, it’s filled with people. The 12-year-old kid’s in the back. So’s the 22-year-old. So is the
40-year-old. So is the 50-year-old guy that’s done pretty well, so’s the 40-year-old guy that likes to screw up. So’s the 30-year-old guy that wants to get his hands on his wheel and put the pedal to the metal, and drive you into a tree.

That’s never going to change. Nobody’s leaving. Nobody’s getting thrown out by the roadside. The doors are shut, locked and sealed, until you go into your box. But who’s driving makes a really big difference about where the car is going. And if the wrong guy’s at the wheel, it’s crash time. You want the latest model of yourself at the wheel, the part of you that’s sussed some of this out and can drive you someplace where you want to go.

The artists people are interested in have something eating at them. Those are the guys they’re interested in. Elvis. What was eating at that guy? Why did he have to sing like that and move like that? Jerry Lee Lewis, what was eating at him, what was eating at Hank Williams? Johnny Lydon. Something was.

So the idea is: how do you manage that thing that’s eating at you, without letting it eat you? ’Cause that’s what it wants to do. The thing that’s eating at you, wants to eat you. And so your life is … how do you keep that from happening? That’s a pretty interesting story too, and that’s what a lot of my records are about, maybe all of them. So now, you know—my records and the music and everything are me attempting to keep from being eaten [
laughs
]. As best as I can.

Spectacle
, September 25, 2009, and January 27, 2010

Spectacle
was a UK/Canadian television show hosted by Elvis Costello that ran for two seasons between 2008 and 2010 and appeared on the Sundance channel in the United States. Costello and his guests engaged in extended conversation and musical performances; Bruce’s two-part appearance, filmed in one night and edited down from a four-hour event, ended the second season. What makes the interview special—aside from the fact that it is a rare Q & A before a live audience at the historic Apollo theater in Harlem—is that Bruce sits down to discuss his career with a friend and peer. With an easy rapport, Springsteen and Costello discuss musical influences and relationships. “The greatest rock ’n’ roll musicians are desperate men,” Bruce states. “You’ve got to have something bothering you all the time.” Despite his success, it is clear that Springsteen continues to be driven because he has not lost that sense of desperation.

In my introduction I attempted to bring you out on the stage here in a manner that befits the Apollo Theater …

[
Laughs
] You did.

When I heard your records … I had never been to America so I had no idea of what the place that you were singing about was like. There must have been some advantage to it being somewhere kind of obscure even to a lot of American people
.

I think people forget, there were still a lot of very local scenes and if you grew up an hour south of New York like we did along the Jersey Shore … I mean most of the people in my town had never been to New York City. And there was no one who came along the Jersey Shore to find talent or songwriters or bands. It just didn’t happen then … this was the late ’60s and early ’70s. You were left in a bit of your wilderness, you know, but it also created a very specific group of influences and a very specific sound. And primarily of course, Asbury Park was kind of low-rent Fort Lauderdale at the time in the ’50s and ’60s … and so what it was, it was bars, cars, girls, it was the things I ended up writing about, you know. But, I lived locally most of my life … part of the reason is it was sort of the most quiet local life I could find and we’re still there, we’ve stayed there. I looked at my heroes, a lot of my heroes, the people that came before me seemed to lose something when they lost a little sense of, I hate to say the roots because you can go any place and take it with you anywhere you go, it’s not necessarily being in a physical place so that may help somewhat. But it’s just that sense of your own history, what your initial motivations were, what the point was. What was, in the beginning … I think … and so I was very, very paranoid … I think the benefit we had coming up when we did was you were paranoid about stardom and that was a good thing. It didn’t mean you didn’t necessarily pursue it with everything you had, but you kept a very, very watchful eye to protect your music, your band, your internal life and I thought it was a very healthy paranoia because it was the nature of the business to suck those things out of you. That’s just the rules.

I was in London when you came to play your first show in London around the time of
Born to Run
and they were saying the future
,
it’s the future of rock and roll. And I’m thinking, there’s so much in this, people might not get how rich it is
.

I think the problem is when that first hits you, you sort of half-agree … you go, hmmm, future of rock and roll, I kind of like the way that sounds. But then you go, but it also sounds like a shitload of trouble man [
laughs
]. But you know, it goes the way it goes.

But also, I don’t think London had seen a show that was informed by the things you were talking about first … the bar thing and everything from R&B. They had you on record but they didn’t know what you did live, so when Bruce came out it was like we were seeing the Stax/Volt Revue from 1965. It was very informed. The songs were these rich songs but the way you presented ’em it was not, there was nobody doing that
.

The music, it was romantic, because I grew up on the great romanticism of the Drifters and Spector records and Benny King and that whole generation of beautiful romance that was in those songs. And then we were brought up because we played in bars night after night, you know, you had to have something that caught people immediately and it was, the idea was soul bands, soul bands, soul bands. That was a huge part of the Jersey Shore and so that was a very natural thing to absorb. And also, it was the music that I admired because I used to go out and see Sam and Dave … and man, they put on a show and all of those devices, the use of dynamics, the use of the way long songs that built, and built, and built, and built … really came out of a lot of those soul reviews. And we remain a sort of bar band so …