Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (35 page)

If I’m overgeneralizing just stop me. I’m not sure if I am or not, but in some fashion that’s my intent: to establish a commonality by revealing our inner common humanity—by telling good stories about a lot of different kinds of people. The songs on the last album connected me
up with my past, with what I’d written about in my past, and they also connected me up with what I felt was the future of my writing.

Do you think your last album, which wasn’t a pop or rock-and-roll record, had the same impact on the larger public that other records of yours had?

I’ve made records that I knew would find a smaller audience than others that I’ve made. I suppose the larger question is, How do you get that type of work to be heard—despite the noise of modern society and the media, two hundred television channels? Today, people are swamped with a lot of junk, so the outlets and the avenues for any halfway introspective work tend to be marginalized. The last record might have been heard occasionally on the radio, but not very much. It’s a paradox for an artist—if you go into your work with the idea of having some effect upon society, when, by the choice of the particular media, it’s marginalized from the beginning. I don’t know of any answer, except the hope that somehow you do get heard—and there are some publishing houses and television channels and music channels that are interested in presenting that kind of work.

I think you have to feel like there’s a lot of different ways to reach people, help them think about what’s really important in this one-and-only life we live. There’s pop culture—that’s the shotgun approach, where you throw it out and it gets interpreted in different ways and some people pick up on it. And then there’s a more intimate, focused approach like I tried on
Tom Joad
. I got a lot of correspondence about the last album from a lot of different people—writers, teachers, those who have an impact in shaping other people’s lives.

Do you think pop culture can still have a positive effect?

Well, it’s a funny thing. When punk rock music hit in the late 1970s, it wasn’t played on the radio, and nobody thought, Oh yeah, that’ll be popular in 1992 for two generations of kids. But the music dug in, and now it has a tremendous impact on the music and culture of the nineties. It was powerful, profound music, and it was going to find a way to make itself heard eventually. So I think there’s a lot of different ways of achieving the kind of impact that most writers and filmmakers, photographers, musicians want their work to have. It’s not always something that happens right away—the “Big Bang”!

With the exception of certain moments in the history of popular
culture, it’s difficult to tell what has an impact anymore, and particularly now when there’s so many alternatives. Now, we have the fifth
Batman
movie! I think about the part in the essay “The Man on the Train” where your uncle talks about alienation. He says the truly alienated man isn’t the guy who’s despairing and trying to find his place in the world. It’s the guy who just finished his twentieth Erle Stanley Gardner Perry Mason novel. That is the lonely man! That is the alienated man! So you could say, similarly, the guy who just saw the fifth
Batman
picture, he’s the alienated man. But as much as anyone, I still like to go out on a Saturday night and buy the popcorn and watch things explode, but when that becomes such a major part of the choices that you have, when you have sixteen cinemas and fourteen of them are playing almost exactly the same picture, you feel that something’s going wrong here. And if you live outside a major metropolitan area, maybe you’re lucky if there’s a theater in town that’s playing films that fall slightly outside of those choices.

There’s an illusion of choice that’s out there, but it’s an illusion, it’s not real choice. I think that’s true in the political arena and in pop culture, and I guess there’s a certain condescension and cynicism that goes along with it—the assumption that people aren’t ready for something new and different.

Do you think that the culture of celebrity is a cause of some of those problems? You seem to have escaped some of the problems that go along with being a celebrity
.

I don’t know, it’s the old story—a lot of it is how you play your role. My music was in some sense inclusive and pretty personal, maybe even friendly. I’ve enjoyed the trappings from time to time, but I think I like a certain type of freedom. Of course, I enjoy my work being recognized, and when you get up on stage in front of twenty thousand people and you shake your butt all around, you’re asking for some sort of trouble. I hope I’ve kept my balance. I enjoy my privacy.

I don’t think the fascination with celebrities will ever really go away. An intellectual would say that people in the Industrial Age left their farms and their towns, so they couldn’t gossip with their neighbors over the fence anymore—and all of a sudden there was a rise of a celebrity culture so we could have some people in common that we could talk about.

The substantive moral concern might be that we live in a country
where the only story might be who’s succeeding and who’s number one, and what are you doing with it. It sure does become a problem if a certain part of your life as a writer—your “celebrity,” or whatever you want to call it—can blur and obscure the story that you’re interested in telling. I’ve felt that and seen that at certain times. One of the most common questions I was asked on the last tour, even by very intelligent reviewers was “Why are you writing these songs? What are you complaining about? You’ve done great.” That’s where your uncle’s essay “Notes on a Novel about the End of the World” was very helpful to me and my writing. Your uncle addresses the story behind those same comments: “The material is so depressing. The songs are so down.” He explains the moral and human purpose of writing by using that analogy of the canary that goes down into the mine with the miners: when the canary starts squawking and squawking and finally keels over, the miners figure it’s time to come up and think things over a little bit. That’s the writer—the twentieth- century writer is the canary for the larger society.

Maybe a lot of us use the idea of “celebrity” to maintain the notion that everything is all right, that there’s always someone making their million the next day. As a celebrity, you don’t worry about your bills, you have an enormous freedom to write and to do what you want. You can live with it well. But if your work is involved in trying to show where the country is hurting and where people are hurting, your own success is used to knock down or undercut the questions you ask of your audience. It’s tricky, because American society has a very strict idea of what success is and what failure is. We’re all “born in the U.S.A.” and some part of you carries that with you. But it’s ironic if “celebrity” is used to reassure lots of people barely making it that “Look, someone’s really making it, making it big, so everything is all right, just lose yourself and all your troubles in that big-time success!”

Do you think you’re through making music videos?

I don’t know. I probably am. There’s nobody waiting with bated breath out there for my next video right now. I’ve never been much of a video artist. I was “prevideo,” and I think I remain “prevideo,” though maybe I’m “postvideo” now.

Music videos have had an enormous impact on the way that you receive visual images on television and in the theaters—and it sped up the entire way the music world worked, for better or for worse. When I
started, you had a band, you toured two or three, four years, you did a thousand shows or five hundred shows, that’s how you built your audience, and then maybe you had a hit record. I feel sorry for some of these talented young bands that come up: they have a hit record, a video or two, and then it’s over. I think it might have made the music world more fickle. In some ways, it may be more expedient for some of the young acts, but I think it’s harder also, because you don’t have the time to build a long-standing relationship with your audience.

There was something about developing an audience slowly—you’d draw an audience that stood with you over a long period of time, and it got involved with the questions you were asking and the issues you were bringing up. It’s an audience who you shared a history with. I saw the work that I was doing as my life’s work. I thought I’d be playing music my whole life and writing my whole life, and I wanted to be a part of my audience’s ongoing life. The way you do that is the same way your audience lives its life—you do it by attempting to answer the questions that both you and they have asked, sometimes with new questions. You find where those questions lead you to—your actions in the world. You take it out of the aesthetic and you hopefully bring it into your practical, everyday life, the moral or ethical.

“Man on the Train” helped me think about these things in some fashion, where your uncle dissects the old Western movie heroes. We have our mythic hero, Gary Cooper, who is capable of pure action, where it’s either all or nothing, and he looks like he’s walking over that abyss of anxiety, and he won’t fail. Whereas the moviegoer, the person watching the movie, is not capable of that. There’s no real abyss under Gary Cooper, but there is one under the guy watching the film! Bringing people out over that abyss, helping them and myself to realize where we all “are,” helping my audience answer the questions that are there—that’s what I’m interested in doing with my own work.

That’s what I try to accomplish at night in a show. Presenting ideas, asking questions, trying to bring people closer to characters in the songs, closer to themselves—so that they take those ideas, those questions—fundamental moral questions about the way we live and the way we behave toward one another—and then move those questions from the aesthetic into the practical, into some sort of action, whether it’s action in the community, or action in the way you treat your wife, or your kid, or speak to the guy who works with you. That is what can be done, and is done, through film and music and photography and painting.
Those are real changes I think you can make in people’s lives, and that I’ve had made in my life through novels and films and records and people who meant something to me. Isn’t that what your uncle meant by “existentialist reflection”?

And there’s a lot of different ways that gets done. You don’t have to be doing work that’s directly socially conscious. You could make an argument that one of the most socially conscious artists in the second half of this century was Elvis Presley, even if he probably didn’t start out with any set of political ideas that he wanted to accomplish. He said, “I’m all shook up and I want to shake you up,” and that’s what happened. He had an enormous impact on the way that people lived, how they responded to themselves, to their own physicality, to the integration of their own nature. I think that he was one of the people, in his own way, who led to the sixties and the Civil Rights movement. He began getting us “all shook up,” this poor white kid from Mississippi who connected with black folks through their music, which he made his own and then gave to others. So pop culture is a funny thing—you can affect people in a lot of different ways.

Did you always try to affect the audience like that? When you first started out when you were young?

We were trying to excite people, we were trying to make people feel alive. The core of rock music was cathartic. There was some fundamental catharsis that occurred in “Louie, Louie.” That lives on, that pursuit. Its very nature was to get people “in touch” with themselves and with each other in some fashion. So initially you were just trying to excite people, and make them happy, alert them to themselves, and do the same for yourself. It’s a way of combating your own indifference, your own tendency to slip into alienation and isolation. That’s also in “Man on the Train”: we can’t be alienated together. If we’re all alienated together, we’re really not alienated.

That’s a lot of what music did for me—it provided me with a community, filled with people, and brothers and sisters who I didn’t know, but who I knew were out there. We had this enormous thing in common, this “thing” that initially felt like a secret. Music always provided that home for me, a home where my spirit could wander. It performed the function that all art and film and good human relations performed—it provided me with the kind of “home” always described by those philosophers your uncle loved.

There are very real communities that were built up around that notion—the very real community of your local club on Saturday night. The importance of bar bands all across America is that they nourish and inspire that community. So there are the very real communities of people and characters, whether it’s in Asbury Park or a million different towns across the land. And then there is the community that it was enabling you to imagine, but that you haven’t seen yet. You don’t even know it exists, but you feel that, because of what you heard or experienced, it could exist.

That was a very powerful idea because it drew you outward in search of that community—a community of ideas and values. I think as you get older and develop a political point of view, it expands out into those worlds, the worlds of others, all over America, and you realize it’s just an extension of that thing that you felt in a bar on Saturday night in Asbury Park when it was a hundred and fifty people in the room.

What do you try to provide people? What do parents try to provide their children? You’re supposed to be providing a hopeful presence, a decent presence, in your children’s lives and your neighbors’ lives. That’s what I would want my children to grow up with and then to provide when they become adults. It’s a big part of what you can do with song, and pictures and words. It’s real and its results are physical and tangible. And if you follow its implications, it leads you both inward and outward. Some days we climb inside, and some days maybe we run out. A good day is a balance of those sort of things. When rock music was working at its best, it was doing all of those things—looking inward and reaching out to others.

To get back to where we started, it can be difficult to build those kinds of connections, to build and sustain those kinds of communities, when you’re picked up and thrown away so quickly—that cult of celebrity. At your best, your most honest, your least glitzy, you shared a common history, and you attempted both to ask questions and answer them in concert with your audience. In concert. The word “concert”—people working together—that’s the idea. That’s what I’ve tried to do as I go along with my work. I’m thankful that I have a dedicated, faithful audience that’s followed along with me a good part of the way. It’s one of my life’s great blessings—having that companionship and being able to rely on that companionship. You know, “companionship” means breaking bread with your brothers and sisters, your fellow human beings—the
most important thing in the world! It’s sustained my family and me and my band throughout my life.