Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (64 page)

We’re lucky in that we have people around: we have Eddie Manion, who had played with the Sessions Band, Southside Johnny, and our band previously; and Clarence’s brother had a son who, in 1988, came and saw his uncle play the saxophone. Clarence mentioned Jake to me quite a few years ago, and he was on the road with us a bit during the last tour, and he plays very well. He’s also been around the band and understands what our band is about. We were together with Clarence the week he passed away, and there’s a good musical and spiritual connection
to Jake. So I’m excited about it. I think it’s going to add to the new conversation about these things that we’re going to have with the audience when we come out on stage.

I heard that you’re going to have a complete horn section on tour—it takes a full horn section to replace Clarence
.

It does—it takes a
village
to replace the Big Man! It takes many men! [
laughs
] So, we’ll do the best we can.

Do you think it’s going to change something in your stage personality?

I don’t know. It will change everything a little bit—or a lot. The thrust of the music will still be what it is, but it’s a big loss. Any time you lose … you know, we lost Danny [Federici], and these are guys that you’ve been with for 35 or 40 years, and you just enjoyed them being there, you know? But you move on. Life doesn’t wait.

So Clarence has to be replaced, you replaced Max at a few concerts with his son …

Right. I’m working on replacing myself now, and I’m gonna stay home. I will be home, and somebody else can do it [
laughs
].

On the last tour, you paid tribute to Joe Strummer, and you showed some support for Gaslight Anthem, and it seems you’re still a huge, huge music fan. I was wondering, as you look back at your music fandom, what four or five bands would you start and end with?

My own music fandom? Oh gosh … I hate to speak them aloud [
laughs
]. Because in truth, there were so many. I’d say one of the greatest things about music fandom is if you have one other person who is as fanatic about it as you are. That would be Steve [Van Zandt] for me. Steve and I have shared an insane and intense love affair with rock ’n’ roll music since we were teenagers. If a guy changed the way he combed his hair, if they changed their outfits … pop is all about obsession with detail. It’s a world of symbolism, and you live and die by that sword, for better or worse. But it’s also a lot of fun, and fun to argue about and fun to debate about.

So one of the great things was my connection with Steve in that area, and also with Jon. Jon was another freak who just was—it was all about the music. That’s the most important thing. You’ve got to have a friend or a pal who is sort of alongside of you in your
insanity
and knows why
you can spend three hours debating these things. I remember Steve and I on the bus to New York City, battling who was supreme at the time, Led Zeppelin or the Jeff Beck Group. Old Elvis, young Elvis. It goes on forever. It still goes on to this day. So that’s a great blessing. I wish all of you a good rock ’n’ roll partner.

When you were younger, you could spend a full year agonizing about a drum sound in the studio. Now you release a record every two years
.

Now I just agonize. It’s not over anything special [
laughs
]. That’s the adult. When you’re an adult, you don’t have to worry about it as much …

Does that mean you’re not trying to write “the great American novel,” with every record as one chapter?

Mainly, you’re trying to make a good record. You’re trying to make a record that won’t waste people’s time. You’re trying to be an honest broker with your fans—if I’m asking them to listen to it, I’ve got to know that it’s everything I have, at least at that moment. That’s why I think my relationship with my audience remains so vital and so present.

You’re always out there shooting for the moon, but in different ways. That hasn’t really changed. Our intentions on this album were no more nor less than our intentions on
Born to Run
or
Nebraska
. My intention is to do what, say, Bob Dylan did for me, which is to sort of kick open the door to your mind and your body, and make you want to move and think and experience and get angry and fall in love and reach for something higher than yourself and grovel around in something lower than that, also [
laughs
]. That’s the job description. That’s what people are paying you the money for: they’re paying you the money for something that can’t be bought. That’s the trick. And that’s what you’re supposed to deliver. You’re being paid for something that can’t be bought; it can only be
manifested
and
shared
. That’s when you’re doing a good job.

Can I ask you about anger? About the anger you might feel, the anger there seems to be so much of in America in the last four to five years, that anger that surfaced in the Tea Party … Does that anger get to you? And what do you see as its source?

I think our politics come out of psychology, whether we like to think so or not. And psychology, of course, comes out of your formative years. So my experience growing up—between when I was born to when I was 18,
I grew up in a house where my mother was the primary breadwinner, and she worked very hard every day. My father struggled to find work, and I saw that it was deeply painful and created a crisis of masculinity, and that it was something that was irreparable at the end of the day.

Those conditions are present in the United States right now, where you have a service economy overtaking a manufacturing economy. You’ve got a lot of guys who worked in manufacturing whose jobs have disappeared, and who are not necessarily coming out of those manufacturing jobs with the skills to move into a service economy. It’s a very, very different world. And so you have quite a few homes where the man is no longer the primary breadwinner.

I think that the lack of work creates a loss of self. Work creates an enormous sense of self, as I saw in my mother. My mother was an inspiring, towering figure to me in the best possible way, and I picked up a lot of the way that I work from her. She was my working example: just steadfast, just relentless. But I also picked up a lot of the fallout. When your father doesn’t have those things, it results in a house that turns into quite a bit like a minefield. And it can be abusive in different ways—just tremendous emotional turmoil.

So, I kind of lost him, and I think a lot of the anger that surfaced in my music from day one comes out of that particular scene. And as I got older, I looked toward not just the psychological reasons in our house, but the social forces that played upon our home and made life more difficult. And that led me into a lot of the writing that I’ve done.

I’m motivated
circumstantially
by the events of the day: that’s unfair; that’s theft; that’s against what we believe in; that’s not what America is about. But the deepest motivation—and the reasons to ask those questions, ultimately—comes out of the house that I grew up in and the circumstances that were there, which is mirrored around the United States with the level of unemployment we have right now. It’s devastating. People have to work. The country should strive for full employment. It’s the single thing that brings a sense of self and self-esteem, and a sense of place, a sense of belonging.

There are times in the new songs when you come close to calling for an uprising. Can you really foresee that kind of response in America?

Well, the thing that has happened that’s good in the States: there’s no doubt that the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States was powerful about changing the national conversation, which has been
stuck for decades primarily coming from the right. The Tea Party set it for quite a while, and if you saw the initial years of the Obama presidency, he was kind of working under the national tone that the Tea Party set.

The minute Occupy Wall Street occurred, suddenly people were talking about economic inequality.
No one
has gotten
anybody
in the States to talk about economic inequality for the past two decades. You had politicians who tried—John Edwards tried with his “two Americas”—but they couldn’t get any traction. The labor movement wasn’t successful bringing that up as a current issue. But people in the street do it, and it works. It works. And if you look now, suddenly you’ve got Newt Gingrich calling Mitt Romney a vulture capitalist [
laughs
]. I mean, that’s impossible! That would never have occurred in ten million years without Occupy Wall Street. Where they go from here? I don’t know, and they’ve got to be careful; it’s a very delicate dance, and you don’t want to alienate the people who you’re speaking to. You can go off the edges with it. But it was without a doubt very important in changing the tenor of the national conversation. If you go to the United States right now, there’s discussion about the 1 percent and the 99 percent; you have people talking about economic inequality, and what to do about that, for the first time in a very, very, very long time.

I’d like to talk about your version of American patriotism, which has always been inclusive and generalist: it doesn’t matter where you come from, you can get on the train. And then you look at America and the way that the Tea Party is polarizing one side, and there are people who don’t even believe that Obama is an American. Do you think that the political system is actually irreparably damaged? Can you actually have a “United” States?

I don’t know. I think this is the issue: we’ve destroyed the idea of an equal playing field. They’ve had some recent studies that say, depending on where you come from, no, you
can’t
get on the train. There was a study recently that said that people were locked into the strata under which they were born. If you were born at the top, your chances for progress were great, and if you were born struggling, more often than not that’s where you were going to remain. So that’s a big promise that’s been broken.

There’s a critical mass point where a society collapses. You can’t have
a civilization where the society is so factionalized—you just can’t have it. People have got to be connected; everyone’s welfare has got to be connected. So, that’s a huge, huge challenge. The unemployment level is dropping a little now, which is good, but it’s going to take a long time to even remotely get back to the employment level we were at just a few years ago. Is it irreparable? I don’t know the answer to your question.

I read somewhere that you were working on your autobiography. Is that true? And how’s it going?

I wrote a little bit, and then I stopped for a couple of years. I haven’t looked at it in quite a while. It’s one of those things … I wrote a little bit at one time, but then I see in the newspaper that everybody else is writing them, and so you don’t want to be just another goldfish in a bowl. It’s like: hey, Pete Townshend! He’s got one coming! Neil Young! He’s got one coming … ahhhh, fuck it, the hell with it [
laughs
].

What would you call it?

The … Handsomest Man in Show Business
[
laughs
]. No, I have no idea.
My Story! … I Believe!
I may call it that.
According to Me
[
laughs
].

I was just curious, how, throughout the years, throughout all your albums, how are you still keeping in touch with the public concern? I mean, practically, are you involved in your local community?

Well, there’s an idea that it would be hard to do, but I don’t think that it is; I think you can
make
it hard. We have organizations we’ve worked with for 25 or 30 years, in every city and also in my local area. But really, I think the answer to what you’re asking, and I get asked this a lot, is that you have to remain interested and awake. You have to remain alert. You have to be constantly listening—and interested in listening—to what’s going on every day. You have to remain interested in life and in the way the world’s moving. You have to be awake and listening—that would be the best way that I would put it. As a writer, the way that I write, it’s like you’re hungry for food. That’s the writing impulse. The writing impulse is the same as one for hunger or for sex—it’s like that. It’s not something that’s related to your commercial fortunes. I mean, I’d do it for free. I’m glad that they’re paying me, but it was something I did for free before they were paying me.

And so I’m constantly looking—the writer looks for something to
push up against. Tom Stoppard, the playwright, once said he was envious of Vaclav Havel because he had so much to push up against, and he wrote so beautifully about it. I’d prefer to stay out of prison if I can, but I knew what he was talking about. You need something pushing, pushing back at you, and you tend to do your best work when there’s something that you can really, really push up against. And there has been in the States over the past—certainly for me, over the past 30 years, but that’s come to a head over the past four years now. So this record, there was quite a bit to write about.

I want to ask a question about your singing. You have a wide range now—you can go from a very high falsetto to a strong and deep voice. Do you feel you’re still improving?

[
Sings falsetto
]: Yes, I do! I do, I do, I do … [
sings deep
]: I do. [
Laughs
] For some reason when I got around 40, I was able to sing high all of a sudden. I’m not sure why. I used to have a harder time when I was younger; I have a little bit of a falsetto now that I didn’t have. Look at Tony Bennett: Tony Bennett’s 85 and he’s still singing. He still sings great. So I think you need a little bit of luck, and then you have to have something you’re dying to sing about.

Do you feel more powerful as a musician than you would be if you were a politician?

A politician? No, I could never be a politician. I just don’t have the skills. Everything that I’ve studied was about learning how to do my job as a musician better, and also trying to understand the arc of my own life and my family’s life—an immigrant family that came to the United States. I thought that there was something common in that, that if I understood that about me, I might be able to illuminate something about your life. That’s all I do. I have no interest in any other job, really, and I have no other skills whatsoever. So I’m hoping to continue to remain “powerful” as a musician [
laughs
] as best as I can.