Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (62 page)

And so your craft comes in, but you’re still listening. The main thing you’re doing if you have your clay in front of you, you’re seeing all the time. What is assisting you in moving forward? Your eyes: you’re seeing, you’re seeing. If you’re a musician, what is assisting you in moving forward with a song? Your ears. Every time you strum the chord, you’re listening. What is the song telling you? What is the character telling you about his fate? And if you listen hard enough, and if you yourself are a seeker—in other words, your motivation is that you are in search of whatever it is you might want to call it: truth, experience, reflection of the world as it is, you want to sing your blues away, you want to sing about your gal, your friends your town, your country, your day at the beach, whatever it feel like—these things come forth and begin to sort of give shape and refinement to your thoughts and emotions.

So it’s a magic act. Basically, you’re in the process of … nothing exists in this room when I walk in, and you literally pull something from thin air and give it physical properties, and by the end someone out in the world holds it in their hand. You’ve taken something, you’ve literally,
boom
, you know, zoom, there it is. Abracadabra. But it begins in the air. It begins as ideas and emotions, and it begins as something that has no physical property whatsoever.

So it’s a lot of
fun
to do, and I get great excitement, exhilaration, enjoyment out of it—and of course, occasionally it’s very, very frustrating. In the old days your percentage is about 95 percent failure to about 5 percent success. But hey, if part of your 5 percent success is “Born in the U.S.A.” or “Born to Run,” once those things are there, you forget about the 95. It’s like coming home from the dentist: you forget about the pain,
and you’re happy about how good your teeth look [
laughs
]. It’s the same thing. It’s like, once it’s played, all you’re thinking about is
wow, that was great
.

Do you just start with the music first? Or the words? Or is it a combination?

I don’t have any rules. The only record I started words-first was my first record, because I imagined myself as being some sort of poet at the time. I would sit there with a rhyming dictionary or just by myself and pour forth with whatever the images were in my head. Later on, almost immediately—and even on that record—the music is so evocative that you use it.

Like on this record,
Working on a Dream
, I had a very specific idea of what I wanted the music on the record to be like. I wanted a very big, orchestral kind of rock music.

Your inner world is a mine, and there are many, many different veins. And if you work one vein a lot, it may go dry.
The Ghost of Tom Joad
and
Devils & Dust
, okay, I don’t have any more of these songs in me right now. But then you may, if you turn around and your eyes are open so you can see, you may go
oh, what’s that over there?
Chip chip boom, a vein of a certain kind of music may come bursting forth and music will pour out of you. The minute you finish a record, sometimes.

This was something I didn’t allow myself to do in the early days. I only looked at one vein—the vein I was very concerned about defining myself with—and ignored everything else. And that’s what’s on
Tracks
; I ignored a lot of good music! But now I don’t do that. Now, I’m open to whatever feels like it’s going to come through my creative system at a given moment. So at the end of
Magic
: wow, “Girls in Their Summer Clothes,” that was fun. I like that big production style, I haven’t done that in a long, long time. That brings you to come up with another song. And then you go home that night and think, man, I’d really like to make something big, and rich, and romantic, but that carries with it the concerns of somebody at my age. Innocent and kind of knowing at the same time. And take that sound—the sound of which is basically the sound of innocence in those days of the Beach Boys and [Phil] Spector—and take that sound and combine it with my 60 years of experience on the planet Earth. And so you have
Working on a Dream
.

“Outlaw Pete”—people said I was ripping off a Kiss song, actually I
thought I was ripping off [Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson’s] “Heroes and Villains” [
laughs
]. There was a vein that just comes rushing out. And these days I’m able to listen to it, and work on it, and I’m able to get more music to my fans.

Is there one guitar you normally use to write with?

Nope. I pick up anything that is around. If I have something nice around—I have some just beautiful-
looking
guitars. A guitar is a fetish object. That’s why people love them, that’s why they’re used in fashion ads—they’re fetish objects. The design of the guitar is incredible. I mean, they’re shaped like women, number one; and they look like circus implements [
laughs
]. They may be sparkly, they may be metal flaked, but they’re beautiful things simply to look upon. So a guitar can be inspiring, just picking it up and feeling the wood and smelling it. The smell of a guitar is a wonderful thing: put your nose to the strings and smell the inside, the wood. It’s a very … dreaming sort of object. So I have a few nice ones in my room. But otherwise, I’ll just pick up anything that’s around, whatever happens to be available. And if you’re gonna write, you’re gonna write.

We also have a lot of your songwriting notebooks, and I noticed that you filled them up from cover to cover, and that there’ll be several drafts of one song
.

Sure. I did a lot of rewriting; I suppose I still do a reasonable amount. Probably less than I did at the time, because at the time I was trying to shape who I was and what I wanted to be about, and what I wanted to write about, and how I wanted the world to see me, and how I wanted to see myself. And also, the kind of writing I was interested in doing, which was using very classic rock ’n’ roll archetypes—cars, girls, Saturday night, the job, the end of the day, all things that had long been written about in popular music and blues music—you’re either going to turn them into something that are archetypes or clichés. And so, you start out usually with clichés. And I did a lot of shaving away to turn them into something more than that, to turn them into sort of classic images that I was able to use to express my own life experience.

So in the beginning, I knew enough to go,
if I get this wrong, it isn’t going to be any good
. And so on
Born to Run
, I took a lot of time trying to find that place, trying to find
me
in those images, me and my world, the world in 1974 post-Vietnam America.

And okay, if Brian Wilson was … “Racing in the Street” I always thought was like a sequel to “Don’t Worry Baby.” You put ten to 15 years on the guy in “Don’t Worry Baby,” and he’s the guy in “Racing in the Street.”

That was how I was thinking about things, and so there was a good amount of rewriting. Those were the days I’d second-guess, third-guess, fourth-guess, fifth-guess and sixth-guess myself constantly, until I got exhausted and then finally decide on something and put it out.

It seems like there are a lot of drafts from the
Born in the U.S.A
. period, too
.

There were just a lot of drafts from a lot of the stuff.
Born in the U.S.A
., I wrote I don’t know how many songs for that record. Many, many, many. Look at the outtakes that are on
Tracks
, and that’s probably just a part of them. I did a lot of writing before I felt comfortable putting something out.

So one of the other sections of the exhibit focuses on your tours, and one of the things I like is the set of the hotel room keys from one of the early tours
.

Yeah, I wanted to remember where I’d been. And so what I started to do was just keep the keys. And I had a piece of rawhide or something, and as we traveled I’d just slip each key on that piece of rawhide. And in those days you either stayed in a Holiday Inn—that was when we hit it
big
. When we knew we were going to a Holiday Inn, we were like “Oh thank God, we will sleep well tonight!” But there were a lot of [others] … they gave you a key on a big piece of plastic that said the town, the city, the hotel. And I just started to keep them, just as a way of knowing, like, I’ve been here, I’ve been there, I’ve been everywhere [
laughs
].

It’s funny, Tim Schmit of the Eagles, one of the things he gave us—he did the same thing on one of the tours, and his are just thrown in like a gym bag or whatever. It’s in the L.A. section where we have stuff for the Eagles
.

It was a reminder that you were
somewhere
… That you’ve been someplace. It’s such a rootless existence, it’s so transitory, you’re moving around so much.

We have the keys to various cities like Youngstown and Freehold. How does it feel to be awarded those things?

I didn’t put a lot of stock in it [
laughs
]. It’s kind of nice, it’s okay, people come out to the show and come backstage and say, “Here’s the key to the city, my friend!” and you go, “Thank you, sir, thank you!”

I always just thought that it meant that any time when you truly fucked it up badly and screwed everything up in your life, that you could then come back to that city, and you have the
key
to that city. So you will then be able to eat, survive, and somehow be accepted at your lowest. I don’t think that’s what they actually mean, but that was my fantasy. My fantasy was once you got the key to the city, son, you always have a home; no matter how the world treats you or how terrible things may get, or how badly you may screw up your entire life, you can always come back to Freehold or Youngstown, Ohio, and someone will buy you a beer here. I’m not sure if that’s what it means, but that was always kind of my take on it.

We also have the Blistex Beautiful Lips award, too
.

That’s incredible [
laughs
].

In terms of people coming to the exhibit, is there anything you hope people take away from it?

Generally, because I’m really not its creator—I guess that’s you guys—my take on it is that you’re providing people who’ve been interested in your work a little extra information about where you come from. I was always interested in, like, gee, I’d like to see Elvis’s shoe rack [
laughs
]. “Is that Elvis’s shoe rack? Is that
really
Elvis’s shoe rack?” It’s like, “Man, I saw Elvis’s shoe rack!”

So, it’s fun to go see, like Elvis’s Cadillac. I went to the Country Hall of Fame and they had, I forget who has the Cadillac with all the silver dollars in it. They’re just funny totems of people’s lives, and it gives you a little more of a tactile sense … you know, I think the hardest thing to believe when you’re a rock fan is that these things are real. In other words, I will occasionally run into someone from some gorgeous part of the globe—Stockholm, Paris, Barcelona—who tell me they just came back from a wonderful vacation in Asbury Park, New Jersey [
laughs
]. And not only that, but while they were there they saw Freehold. And I always go, “Whoa, you’re telling me that you had two
weeks off and you spent it …” you know [
laughs
]. It’s funny in a sense, but I understand it also, because I’ve driven through Memphis. I’ve driven past Sun Studios. I just wanted to know it was there, that it was real. That all of that stuff
really
happened. That there was a moment and a place in time when some kid stood in that room, that tiny little room right there. That room has its physical properties—it’s only x by x wide, it’s got these four walls, it’s an actual place on earth—and something otherworldly occurred, something that touched me so fundamentally in my soul that it changed my life, and it came out of this actual place. And if it came out of this actual place, that means that where
I
am is real, too, and who knows what can come out of
my
town.

So I think that the
things
, if they have any value whatsoever beyond pure curiosity items, are tangible evidence that the things that meant a lot to you—the people, the group of musicians—have a town just like yours. And it’s still there. It’s still physically there, you can drive through it, you can put your feet on its streets. And there’s something about that, because I meet a lot of people who do make their pilgrimages for one reason or another to this place or another. So the
stuff
is important in that sense.

Like I said, I was never much of a collector. I have a few things from other artists that were gifts that mean a lot to me, but I don’t have much. But they are talismans. They’re talismans of the connection between the emotional world—the world of people’s dreams, hopes, fears, desires, ambitions—and the real physical world, the one that we live in and we drive through in a very mundane way on a daily basis. There’s something about that physical-ness of things that a) it’s fun to see, but b) it also brings it into the realm of the real for your fan.

If I see one of Elvis’s guitars, or one of Roy Orbison’s … “Wow. There it is.” That’s part of the magic trick, right? That’s the magician’s tools. And those things…. if somebody did a nice magic trick, those things are always fun to see and be around.

At a Paris press conference held at the Théatre Marigny, Springsteen spent an hour fielding numerous questions about the new record
Wrecking Ball
, the psychology of anger, the state of America, Clarence Clemons, his autobiography, his falsetto, and much more. “My work,” he reiterated, “has always been about judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.”

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for me to fulfill a lifetime dream, to share a stage with Bruce Springsteen. A few introductory questions about
Wrecking Ball
. I’m curious to know why you’ve changed your producer, after working with Brendan O’Brien for so many years, and I’d like to know more about the process of recording
.