Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (37 page)

Yeah. All of a sudden I was doing some shows to support the first record, and you had 30 or 40 minutes to make an impression, which was something I knew how to do because I’d been doing it for a very long time. I began to try to incorporate the acoustic music and ideas with what I’d learned leading a band for 10 years or so. And that’s how the second record came to be. I said, “Well I want to hold onto these characters, this point of view and this writing style, but I want to include the physicality of rock music, or band music.”

The song “Thundercrack” was something that we wrote as the show-stopper. It ended three or four different times—you didn’t know where it was going to go. It was just a big, epic show-ender that was meant to leave the audience gasping a little bit for their breath—“Hey, who was that guy? That was pretty good …” That was “Rosalita” ’s predecessor; later on, “Rosalita” began to fill that spot in the show and held it for many, many years, probably the best song I ever wrote for that particular job. Before that, “Thundercrack” had the same function. It was meant to make you nuts, and that’s why I wanted to get that song on this record. It was one of the few songs that actually was finished when I went and found it. I listened to it, and it seemed like it was so long and the guitar didn’t sound right; I just said, “This is going to be too much work.” It was meant to be played live in front of an audience and when we plunked our way through it in the studio, at first it just didn’t feel right. But it was probably about 80 percent done—we had to shape it a little bit, but I wanted to get that on because if you were a really early, early fan, that was the song that was a big hallmark at shows at the time. But I found a version which was actually pretty good, called up Vini
Lopez and I said, “Vini, I have some singing for you to do” and Vini—he’s a caddy master at a golf course—he just comes by and I said, “Remember this song?” He came in and sang all his parts completely unprompted, like he remembered it exactly from 25 years ago. We put the same harmonies we used at that time and finished it up a little bit.

Do you think people will be surprised when they see all this unreleased material, this whole other Bruce Springsteen?

It depends how closely you followed what I’ve done. Many of the songs we played early in concert—we played “Santa Ana” all the time. When I went on the road, I took the point of view I developed on my first record and I began to just write with the band in mind, with the idea of mixing those two things. We cut them all and at the time they didn’t get on, probably because there was a limited amount of time you could put on a record, only about 36 or 40 minutes tops, and so things just didn’t get on because there wasn’t enough room, or you didn’t think you sang that one that well, or the band didn’t play that one that well, or you wanted to mess around with the writing some more.

“Zero & Blind Terry” was a big song we played live all the time and “Santa Ana,” “Seaside Bar Song,” “Thundercrack” were from that particular period. Max [Weinberg, E Street Band drummer] came by when we were mixing the stuff, and it was fun watching Max listening to Vini’s drumming. Vini was a very eccentric drummer. But when you went back and listened, he played really great. The band at that time, we were folk musicians. With the exception of Danny [Federici], who had taken accordion lessons, there wasn’t any real formal training. People played very personally and very eccentrically, and if you listen to those cuts from
The Wild, The Innocent
, the band playing is very unusual. It’s a little carnie band. You hear the influences which Danny had a lot to do with—the boardwalk, the accordion, the atmosphere from the lyric writing which came out of that particular environment. And then you hear people who have probably really never heard themselves play that much, and so they’re just playing how they play, not playing like this guy or that guy. Garry’s playing is all over the place on the bass, Vini’s all over the drums. We had come out of a band that had jammed a lot, so when I put the band together as an ensemble, they had this tendency to want to play and play and play. Vini’s style was quite beautiful and very responsive and just totally original. It only lasted for a very brief period. The next record was
Born to Run
and it was immediately less eccentric.

And took much longer to record?

Yeah. The first record took three weeks. My recollection was the second record and the music from that record that’s on
Tracks
took two months, three months tops. And that was not recording solidly. Previously we’d played what you played on stage or in a room for John Hammond. But
Born to Run
was the first time I went in to use the studio as a tool and not in an attempt to replicate the sound of when we played.

That approach is basically what Phil Spector did. When he put that kind of snare sound together in the studio, that was the only place it existed, unless you play in a big armoury or high school gymnasium on a Saturday night. I’d gotten into the idea of production and was interested in doing that myself in some fashion. And that took a long time because no-one really knew how to get the sounds. I liked to put everything on, but then I couldn’t understand why the guitar sounds so small. The guitar sounded small because there was 20 other things on there competing for space. For a really big guitar sound, you just have a guitar with not that many other things. It took about 10 years to figure this out.

So when we went in to cut
Born to Run
, writing it was very difficult, then recording it and getting a sound that approximated to what I wanted was very difficult. I was striving for something very specific that I didn’t know how to get. So I had to spend time finding it. There were two outtakes from
Born to Run:
“Linda Let Me Be the One” is on
Tracks
, and there was another one called “Walking in the Street” which I would have liked to have put on but I couldn’t find the master. We searched and searched. It might have been simply recorded over, because in those days, if something wasn’t going to make it, you’re going to need that tape so you recorded something else over the top.

The cut “Born to Run” took about six months. The rest took maybe another six. I went in and I had my eight songs; I knew these were the songs the record was going to comprise. I took each song and worked on it very, very intensely, lyrically and musically—that’s all we did was shape those eight pieces of music.

By the time we got to
Darkness
the stakes had changed. They had gotten a lot higher. All of a sudden I had an audience. I hadn’t really had one—just a little grassroots audience. The first record, I asked Mike, “How many did we sell?” “Well,” he says, “About 23,000.” He was disappointed, but I said, “We did? Wow!” It was a shock to me that there were 23,000 people I didn’t know who had gone out and bought the music that we’d made. I felt that was a great success, and the second record did
probably about the same. But then when the third record hit all of a sudden, we had a real audience that the record company took notice of. All of a sudden you’re being watched a lot more closely; all of a sudden your actions have implications. I began to think about who I was and where I came from. It was a disorienting moment but it’s also one of those moments when you either find yourself on your feet or you get lost and maybe don’t find your way back. I took a very close, hard look at who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do and what was important to me. And then I got involved in a lawsuit to get the rights back to my music and control of my creative life, which went on for a long time.

So this long period went, and then when I went in to make
Darkness
I had very specific ideas of the record I wanted to make. I’d bring the band in and say, “OK, tonight we do ‘Give the Girl a Kiss’ ” … or “So Young and in Love”—anything to break the tension in the studio. You’re still learning how you sound and how to use the studio. So a lot of different kinds of music occurred. I edited
Darkness
very, very tightly and specifically for that particular emotional tone and a very hard focus on what I wanted to write about. So, a lot of music I put to the side.

Basically the second half of the first CD of
Tracks
were all things that occurred during the
Darkness on the Edge of Town
. There were things that might have fit but we didn’t have the time, and other things that were just terrific but would have been very out of context on that particular record, like “Give the Girl a Kiss” or “So Young and in Love,” which were great bar party songs. I didn’t even know that “Give the Girl a Kiss” existed—wow, that’s pretty, that’s fun. And “So Young and in Love”—a full band, beautiful ensemble club playing, very exciting. Meant to blow your head off.

It seems to me that at about the same time your writing changed; up to
Darkness
you had characters that were going somewhere, trying to get out of this community, for whatever reason. To some degree it seems the rest of your career has been spent trying to get them back in
.

Those were the questions that came up for me at that particular time. Initially you’re in search of a certain freedom—you want some sense of control of the arc your life is gonna take. You grew up in a particular environment, you had a very particular place you were gonna fit into, so your initial thrust is to explode those limits for yourself. That was what music offered in general: you were the guy getting up at 11 or 12 and going to
bed at three, four or five in the morning and I liked that kind of life. Then when I found I had an audience, all of a sudden I had a lot of personal freedom, I thought, “What do I want to do with this?” I had seen enough people who had come before me to know that this point was where lots of people lost track of the essential things that made their music vital and made it move forward. I always say I picked up the guitar because I wanted to speak to you. And the irony is that moment, when you have an audience, is when you are separated and isolated. How you handle it from that point on has a lot to do with the course your music takes.

I had a while to throw those ideas around because I couldn’t record for a couple of years. I was living on a farm in Holmdel, New Jersey. I went out and I played in the bars at night, and we toured a little when we could to try and keep everything going. And I thought a lot about what kind of record I was gonna wanna make when I had the chance to record again. That is probably why some of these songs got let off, because they were a lot of fun but there was a moment when I said, “I need to identify myself at this particular moment.” We’d had the success, then I disappeared for a couple of years. You pick up the papers and just read those “whatever-happened-to?” articles, that’s not fun, ha ha. So finally, when I got to record again, I needed to identify myself and exactly what I wanted to write about: where was I going, where was I going to sit in my audience’s life … It was the central moment when my writing took a fundamental turn—which has continued for the rest of my work.

Does that mean that to one degree or another you were actually writing about yourself the whole time?

You’re always writing about yourself: not literally or specifically, but there’s got to be some part of you in everything. No matter how you may choose a story or a set of characters that you may have had no experience with, the job is to connect and create understanding, to see yourself in them and have your audience do so too. You try to find that place where there’s a fundamental human commonality around very basic issues of work, faith, hope, family, desperation, exuberation, joy. The song always fails unless you can find yourself in those characters in some fashion and so, like I say, I haven’t written really literally about myself, maybe on some occasions, but it’s a metaphor for your emotional experience. You’re trying to capture a piece of the world as you see it—that’s what the job is.

In another sense, none of your songs are actually about what they seem to be about; “Be True” is not really about romance
.

Well, it’s partly about romance. Any piece of work can be looked at through a lot of different veils. Talking about that particular song I’d say, “Yeah it seems to be a romance song”—what’s this fellow doing, he’s trying to say Hey, don’t sell yourself cheap. It’s saying be true to yourself in some fashion. He’s talking to a woman he’s interested in but actually that’s a device to address, just how do you find yourself through the falseness of some of those things and not sell yourself short and try to get the most out of yourself? In that particular song I think there’s a lot of cultural metaphors whether it’s the films or whatever, but I suppose that’s what that song was about.

Are you conscious of that layering in your writing?

At the time, maybe I was, “The scrapbook’s filled with pictures of all your leading men, so baby don’t put my picture in there with them.” You’re saying, Don’t lock me into this particular box, I wanna reach you in a different way maybe, if I can find it within myself. It’s a love song and then it’s a dialogue on remaining true to the things that you think are important. Good songs work on many different levels; that’s what makes them good, that’s what makes them last. The other thing was I was trying to write something that was really catchy, a three-minute pop tune, that moved lyrically, that linked together in a certain way. And I was having fun using the film metaphor. To me it almost sounds like it was a hit single; it never was but it feels like one—it’s accessible, the singer is open, he’s revealing something about himself and he’s asking the person he’s addressing to do the same and trying to lay out terms for a relationship of some sort. And it all happens in about three minutes and Clarence plays the sax at the end and the glockenspiel plays that riff and it’s just light and sort of sweet.

“Roulette” was the very first song you recorded for what became
The River
. It would have been a very different album had you put “Roulette” on it
.

It was the first song we cut for that record and maybe later on I thought it was too specific, and the story I started to tell was more of a general one. I may have just gotten afraid—it went a little over the top, which is what’s good about it. In truth it should have probably gotten put on. It would have been one of the best things on the record and it was just
a mistake at the time—you get oversensitive when you’re going to release the things. That was a record where there was an enormous amount of material. There’s an entire album of tracks from
The River
: “Restless Nights,” “Roulette,” “Dollhouse,” “Where the Bands Are,” “Loose Ends,” “Living on the Edge of the World,” “Take ’Em as They Come,” “Be True,” “Ricky Wants a Man,” “I Wanna Be with You,” “Mary Lou,” all three-minute, four-minute pop songs.