Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (59 page)
Well, I was aware of them, but I never thought it’d make such good comedy, you know?
They were huge.
I never knew I’d grow to resemble them so much
.
But it was perfect because it was like the ultimate sobriquet and then this absurd thing. That’s kind of our business, and it worked so great.
I have to tell a story just for a moment, I’m going to make a total fool of myself doing this. You and Patti are the only people that have ever been able to persuade me onto horseback. It’s not an image that you want to carry in your mind late in the night, I know. I went out to visit Bruce and Patti at their place and they were kind enough to take me out. They took me out to the stable. You took me, thankfully, past the stable that contained Lightning and Thunder Bolt
.
Acid Trip. Widow Maker. Just don’t get on a horse with those names and you’ll be alright.
What was the name of the one you put me on, Slow Poke? Trotted me around the ring until it looked like I might be able to cling on with my knees
.
You did pretty good.
I’ve been singing Gene Autry songs since
.
And I had photographic evidence of that at one time. That was the only thing I lost.
You haven’t got it with you?
No.
You lost the picture. My secret is safe with you and your lovely wife
.
Very strange. You looked pretty good, though.
I’ve never once been back on a horse since. But it was a thrill to ride with you, I can say I rode with Bruce Springsteen. All of this really is a convoluted way of mentioning Patti and she is just the loveliest person and she’s a member of your band. She talks to my wife about children, she gives us advice. It’s a balance that’s difficult to achieve—working life, family life, musical life and she’s an incredible singer, songwriter. I mean, she’s made great records, I really would love to try to sing one of her songs. [
sings
]
It must have been a really extraordinary experience, quite apart from everything else … from a musician point of view, to be up on those steps on Inauguration Day [2009] and I think it was an experience that a lot of people shared, that a lot of witnesses to so many things, so many struggles were there. You sing for these reasons. I’m not trying to compress a lot of thoughts into one, but I was really struck that you were standing side by side with this man [Pete Seeger] who is now in his 90s
.
It’s incredible. 90 years old. I thought hey I was a teenager in the ’60s, you lived through the Civil Rights movement, you realize you go from the Voting Act to the first African-American president. In really, historically, a relatively compressed, short period of time. So, it was amazing to have lived to be there really. And also [there were] the ideas you have of the country you live in and you want your kids to grow up in.
Steve said to me—he was doing some research for one of his garage
shows, and he said, you know, I found the greatest thing ever said about rock ’n’ roll in this little ten-cent paperback. He said it was a quote from one of the go-go dancers on
Shindig
. Right? He said it’s about the greatest thing I ever heard. I said, what is it? Well, that rock ’n’ roll was always something coming. It creates an energy that pushes you toward the future. And it did do that. It’s a developmental force for some reason in that way. I always believed that Elvis sort of presaged a certain type of modern citizen that was a decade away. Gender lines dropped, racial lines dropped. He crossed all those boundaries. And there is some forward energy in it.
I think in everything you write, there’s two things. One, is I think to live fully and you can find it in music, you need—there’s the ever-present now that’s a part of grabbing life by the horns that you know people come to rock shows for. But there’s also a forward energy that it’s always for tomorrow, it’s always for tomorrow, it’s always for tomorrow. In a sense, I think you’re right. I think in a lot of songs that I’ve written, it’s the idea that it’s for now but it’s for tomorrow too because what I see isn’t here now. It doesn’t exist now. But I have some sort of faith that it can exist … whether it’s social justice, economic justice, you get out there and go well, it’s for tomorrow, it’s for tomorrow, it’s for tomorrow, while constantly trying to pull it into the present.
So I think that for me that day, it was a day when I said well maybe my songs are going to ring a little truer the next time I sing ’em … whether it’s “Promised Land” or something else. So it was big and I think a lot of people experienced that particular day like that. It was like, hard to believe.
It was beautiful to see … and obviously they try to do these things with the appropriate gestures and the right people were there, the right people were up there saying the right things
.
So for Pete, 90 years … the administration before sort of forgot the past, screwing up the future, and the present was pretty ugly. So, for him, it was fun being part of his excitement on that particular day. It was a lovely privilege.
Your willingness to stand and be unambiguous in the face of very, very catastrophic circumstances is something that … I suppose you just get to a time in your life when you can’t be told you have
no right to say this. We do live in a democracy. You’re up on the stage. My view is yeah, we can all say what we want, we’re all talking at once, but right now this is the way I feel. But you can write your song and disagree with me. But when big things happened, you turned your talents to speaking
.
I just think that was part of growing up in the ’60s. I think when you grew up in the ’60s, you grew up with that being part of your daily existence. The idea that we were teenagers and doing concerts to send anti-war protestors down to Washington. And it was just part of growing up at that time, it became an integrated part of what you do, I don’t think for me anymore than anybody else. But it was also something I wanted as a part of my music. Once again it felt like it was a part of the basic story of identity that was a part of what I was trying to write. Because what’s it about? OK. Who am I? Where is my home? How am I going to live? Where and how do I want to raise my children? All of these things ultimately lead you outward and lead you into an area of whether it’s political activism or social activism of some sort … identity questions that ultimately lead you inward but they also lead you outward. And so, the fullness of the picture I wanted it to be part of my music and really that was the sole motivation. It was just a natural part of writing about the things I wanted to be about.
And over the course of your career and the course of this evening, you’ve illustrated more than I can ever thank you for, the way that you’ve developed the craft that allowed you to do this with eloquence
.
I think you’re always just trying to make sense of your own life and what’s happening around you. And it leads you down … I always feel your internal motivations are so much stronger than whatever else might motivate you to write a song like that. I always find I’m trying to figure something out. I’m just trying to figure something out. And if I figure it out a little bit for me, maybe I’ll figure it out for you. I can’t claim much more credit as far as what moves me to write this song or that song, in that I’m just trying to figure out how to make sense of sometimes the unsensible. Things that are very difficult to make sense of. With a lot of that music, you’re always—there’s something internal that’s pushing you forward and pushing you in those directions. Otherwise, I think that’s what makes them good songs.
Any time I’ve tried to write about something, this is important, it never just sounded real.
I always denied there was even a political song, there was just an emotional reaction to events or a trend in our society or our world that we all share in. This is the version of it that moves you into song
.
In conjunction with “From Asbury Park to the Promised Land: The Life and Music of Bruce Springsteen,” an exhibition at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Springsteen gave one of the most comprehensive interviews of his long career. Sitting down with the Rock Hall’s Jim Henke, previously a writer and editor at
Rolling Stone
, Springsteen enthusiastically went all the way back to the beginning, when he was 14 and joined the Castiles. As curator of the exhibit, Henke used the artifacts on display—from motel keys to guitars to
the
guitar—as jumping-off points to take Bruce through his entire professional history.
So, why now? Why did you decide to do the exhibit at this point in your life?
I thought you guys decided it [
laughs
]. I didn’t know I decided it, I thought it was decided!
Well, it seems like you’ve kept a lot of things from your career over the years: your songwriting notebooks, guitars, posters, all that
stuff. Is that a conscious thing? You just wanted to save a lot of this stuff?
No—the pack rat is Max, Max Weinberg. And I think Danny kept a few things. But I didn’t keep much. I was sort of superstitious about hoarding all that stuff, and I tended to let everything pass with the exception of only the things I needed to work. So I never collected guitars, anything. I only collected guitars that I played, you know? Until probably the early ’90s, when Patti and I got a real house and said, gee, it would be nice to have a guitar in this room, or that room … Until then, I was into the sort of idea that it was all about what I could carry into your town—literally. And so I didn’t collect. I saved my notebooks, because they had all my songs in them. And that was really it.
When we started to look around, we found pictures and posters and stuff that got basically put to the wayside—not with any collecting idea in mind, just, you know, stuff that you have [
laughs
].
So the exhibit starts with the Castiles, and then comes up to the present. You were 14 when you joined the Castiles?
Yeah, now the Castiles … that notebook was from a woman named Marion Vinyard. My mother didn’t make those notebooks, it was Tex Vinyard’s wife—and Tex Vinyard was, of course, a factory worker in Freehold and the manager of the Castiles. We rehearsed in his little shotgun-style house, which was right across the street from Caiazzo Music—where we slobbered over the window on a regular basis—and about 25 yards from the rug mill, where my dad and an enormous part of the town at one time worked, in a part of town called Texas.
So I was about 14. I was in a band; I got thrown out of my first band because they told me my guitar was too cheap—and it
was
pretty cheap, but it wasn’t that bad. So I literally got thrown out because my guitar wasn’t good enough.
What was that band called?
I think we were called the Rogues at the time. So it kinda pissed me off, and I went home that night and I remember I put on “It’s All Over Now” by the Rolling Stones, and I forced myself to learn the lead. I just sat there for hours until I learned that very rudimentary lead that [Keith Richards] plays on “It’s All Over Now.” It was the beginning of my lead guitar career.
A few months later, George Thiess—who was dating my sister, Virginia—knocked on my door, told me he had a band, wanted to know if I played lead guitar. I told him that I did (which I barely did), and he took me over to Tex’s house, and I met the other guys in the Castiles. There was a bass player, who we thought of as being elderly, who was probably in his late 20s at the time. He began to teach me some more rudimentary things on the guitar, and it was sort of the beginning of my guitar playing career and the Castiles, which for a teenage band lasted quite a while. I think we lasted ’65, ’66, and ’67, it was pretty longstanding. We played in Greenwich Village in the Café Wha?; for one of your first bands, we got around pretty good.
Back then, was that when you were playing the Kent Guitar?
The Kent guitar, yes. Mine disappeared, and about two or three years ago I was thumbing through a vintage guitar magazine, and lo and behold they had a small article on Kent guitars. And there was mine! It seemed to be one of the remaining two in the world. And I immediately said “Kevin [Buell, guitar tech], call this guy up right now and get me that guitar!” I think we paid about the same that I paid for it when I bought it, which was something like $60. And the funny thing was, when I got it again, it played really well. I was surprised at how well it played.
And then there was another fellow—Kevin could tell you exactly who, I think he worked for Boston at one time—and he was kind enough to send me another one. So for a while I had two. I had one in each of my sons’ rooms. It’s nice to have that piece back, because that was really the piece that turned me into a lead guitarist, that single-pickup Kent guitar.
What kind of guitar did you get after the Kent, do you remember?
After the Kent guitar, I went way, way upscale, and I had a blue solid body Epiphone. Ray Cichone—there were two Cichone brothers, they were in a band called the Motifs, they were incredibly influential. They were older than us, amazingly influential musicians in the area at the time. First of all, they were the first band that sang. You have to understand there was a
before
and
after
the Beatles. Before the Beatles and the British Invasion, no one sang. All local bands were instrumental and based on the Ventures, “Pipeline” … it was all instrumental music. When you went to the high school dance and the local band played, it was instrumental music all night long. Finally these guys came in, and they had this guy, Walter Cichone, and he was a wild-looking … he
was a real rock star. A real, true-to-life, local—and probably could have been bigger—rock star. He just had it all, man: he looked great, sang great, scared people, very sexual. And he had a taller brother, Ray, who worked in the shoe store [
laughs
] in Asbury Park, I think, in the Florsheim Shoe Store. Except he was
huge
. He was like 6′5″ or something, and he was a little gawky, and he kinda hunched over his guitar, which he held way up high on his chest. But he played incredibly. And he was kind enough to show me a lot—over the years he would show me anything I asked—and he would hand me down his guitars as he got better ones. I would pay him a little money.
