Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (38 page)

It was a funny time, ’cos I’d gotten into Woody Guthrie for the first time. I’d come off
Darkness
and felt I’d really found the characters and the type of writing that I wanted to do. But one of my favourite records that summer was
The Raspberries Greatest Hits:
they were great little pop records, I loved the production, and when I went into the studio a lot of things we did were like that. Two-, three-, four-minute pop songs coming one right after another. So there was an extra album of those things that got left off, just because I wanted a record that balanced the two things that I was doing, that had a sense of continuity coming out [of]
Darkness
where you’d recognise the characters. And I wanted to infuse the record with the physicality and the excitement and the joy of the live show—Steve Van Zandt was part of the production team, and we finally learned how to capture the kind of dynamics, the explosiveness that we always felt on stage.

In some ways it was really our first successful use of the studio. We’d tune the snare way up: at the time, coming out of the ’70s all the drums were too down and deep. I like the way the snare sounds on “Hound Dog”: it’s high, you’re hearing the snare crack, you’re hearing it explode. When we recorded we found a wooden studio, put Max in the middle of the room, and I said, “When you hear it, I want you to see his arm coming up and coming down and
hitting
the drum.” We’d built the rest of the band around that sound and it was the first time that we really caught some of the rawness and excitement of the live show on record.

In the end I had turned in a single record that was finished, and it just wasn’t good enough, it wasn’t expansive enough—that was when we decided to go to the two records.

You’ve done that quite a lot, haven’t you? Finished records and then reworked them completely
.

Yeah well, it’s never over until it’s over. Everybody’s telling you you’re done and you take it home and it’s just not right. It’s happened many many times. It happened on
Darkness
—we had finished, I was back in
New York City, put the record on, “Promised Land” came up on the second side, it just wasn’t the right mix and then I stopped the record and went back to California. I only spent it doing this, so my life at the time was extremely focused, probably to the detriment of the records. But very often these things were created amid a mess and you don’t know what you’re doing until you’re done.

I had no intention of recording
Nebraska
in that fashion, whatsoever. It was—not a mistake—an
accident
, let’s say, and, anyhow, at the same time I recorded
Nebraska
I was recording
Born in the U.S.A
. in the studio in New York, so I had these two extremely different recording experiences going. I was in my house with a little tape player about three or four times the size of a book with a couple of mics and these songs that I’d written, I wasn’t sure where they came from, then I was going to the city and cutting this big studio album. I was going to put them out at the same time as a double record. I didn’t know what to do.

By the time we got to
The River
adulthood was imminent, if it hadn’t arrived already, so I knew I was gonna be following my characters over a long period of time. I thought it would be interesting and fun for my audience to have a certain sort of continuity, not explicit or literal or confined but just a loose continuity from record to record.

Is the Mary of “Thunder Road” the same one who crops up in
The River
and other places?

I couldn’t say. Sometimes a name just comes out, I suppose there’s all the interconnections that the songs make happen intentionally and unintentionally. A lot of the time you don’t know a lot of what you’re doing yourself.

In between recording
The River
and recording what became
Nebraska
, you went to Europe for quite a long time
.

Yeah, I’d gotten my nerve up and went back, ha ha.

How did that change your perspective? On America and the subjects you were writing about?

Well, at that particular point, America in the early ’80s, a sense of violence was in the air on a daily basis. It made me very sad: I was 30, having kids was on the horizon. Just the way things seemed, through television or different media, everything seemed much more aggressive and abusive. I experienced less of that in Europe—it seemed more civil, more sane.

The other thing was we really connected with the European audience. I’d been earlier in the mid-’70s and had a very disorienting experience and was simply frightened of coming back. The greatest thing that I did was to go back in the ’80s and to continue to go back. It has been the centre for an intense interest in the work that I’ve done.

Did that experience of going overseas give you a new perspective, writing about those characters in
Nebraska
? It did seem more explicitly political …

I didn’t think about the politics
of Nebraska
until I read in a review that it had a variety of political implications. At the time that was my most personal record—it reminded me of the way my childhood felt, the house that I grew up in. I was digging into that.

I don’t know how those stories evolved, they were things I’d gotten interested in. I’d read a book about Caril Fugate and that led me to the song “Nebraska.” I phoned the woman who reported on the story in the ’50s—she happened to be working at the same newspaper 25 years later, so I called and they put me through to her desk. There was something about that song that was the centre of the record, but I couldn’t really say specifically what it was, outside of the fact that I’d read something that moved me. Once again, you feel like you’re gonna tell that story and also tell something about yourself.

I think in my own life I had reached where it felt like I was teetering on this void. I felt a deep sense of isolation, and that led me to those characters and to those stories—people I remembered growing up, my father’s side of the family, a certain way they spoke, a certain way they approached life, and that resonated through that music. Along with all of a sudden trying to figure out, “Well hey, what if you don’t get back
in
?” I had a lot of sorting out to do around that time. When you get older, the price for not sorting through the issues that make up your emotional life rises. The same answers and the tricks and the lies that you told yourself at 22 feel a little less comfortable at 26, 28. The older you get the more the price goes up. I was at a place where I could start to really
feel
that price: I just felt too disconnected, I just wasn’t any good, right at the moment that record occurred. So that record had something to do with those things. There are things that make sense of life for people: their friends, the work they do, your community, your relationship with your partner. What if you lose those things, then what are you left with? The political aspect wasn’t something that was really
on my mind at the time, it was more just people struggling with those particular kinds of emotional or psychological issues.

Around the same time, Vietnam starts to creep into your work
.

The late ’70s and early ’80s was the first time when literature and films began to be made about Vietnam. There was a subtext on a few earlier things, there was a movie called
Who’ll Stop the Rain
[titled
Dog Soldiers
in the UK] with Nick Nolte, but all of a sudden it began to become very directly addressed.

It began with a strange experience when I was driving across the country and I stopped in Arizona at a drug store and I bought a book called
Born on the Fourth of July
. I drove on to Los Angeles and was at this little motel sitting at the pool and a fella came up, started talking and introduced himself: Ron Kovic. I thought, I must have met this fella, his name sounds real familiar, and he said, “I wrote a book called
Born on the Fourth of July
.” I said, “Wow this is a real coincidence, I just read the book a couple of weeks ago.” So Ron took me down to Venice to the Vet Centre, and I met Bobby Muller, who was the President of the VVA at the time. One thing led to another and it just began to surface in some of my music. There was a song, “Pittsburgh,” which was actually written for
Born in the U.S.A
.

You hadn’t been to Vietnam yourself
.

No, I did the draft-dodger rag.

Did you feel guilty about not going?

No, but it was such a part of growing up at that time, it was in your home every single night. My drummer in the Castiles went—and he died. I remember a fella was the best front man in New Jersey at the time, Walter Cichone, and he joined the Marines and was posted missing in action, and on the street people were frightened and everybody was trying to figure out how to get out of the draft. Whether you were there or whether you were at home in the United States, it was a defining moment in American culture. It finds its way time and again into some of my songs. Whether you went or not, it was a big part of your life.

At the time I was 18 or 19, I didn’t come out of a political household, I was part of what you’d consider the counterculture, though probably I was the conservative part. I never had any real drug experience, you know. I lived in a little town, and there were lines drawn everywhere.

Is it hard for you to arrange your records so they tell a coherent story; we have 66 songs from hundreds, is it hard to pick them?

Tracks
didn’t take a lot of thinking. I went in, I found pieces of music that I liked that we hadn’t released. I didn’t feel I had to arrange them conceptually: I based my choices on what was pretty much finished and what I felt were the best things we had done that hadn’t come out. What you find to your surprise is that when you begin to sequence them, some internal logic takes over. It follows the arc of the music: in the beginning there is a young man, at the end there is a guy my age. It ends with what is basically a folk piece and begins with one, so there is a trip that’s taken and you could go in and interpret it pretty easily. It’s the alternate route to the road that I took on the records that I released. It tells a similar story but you are going down a different road where all the roadside markers are a little different and the sights are different.

This is really something the fans have wanted for years. What made you decide to put it out now?

A couple of years ago I had some spare time, and I said to my engineer, Toby [Scott], send me everything that you have recorded. It often takes so long between records, and I said, “Gee, if it’s going to be a year or longer in between records I have all this unreleased music that I know is very good and I should release some of it.” So it began just with that idea and we listened to about 250 songs, maybe more, I made quick notes in a notebook and put it away.

A year went by, more maybe, and I came off the
Tom Joad
tour and I began to write acoustically again and I wrote about half a record. Then I got stuck and said, “Well, I’m going to put this aside for a while.” Then I wrote half of an electric record, and hit the same place. So I thought, instead of waiting for another year to put something out I’ll put some of this music together. So once again I went back to the archives. Charlie Plotkin, who has produced many of our records, came in and we sat and listened together and we came up with about 100 things. We sequenced them pretty quickly. I said, “This is going to be great,” because the mix was pretty good. Then I played it for Jon Landau and he said, “Yes it’s great, but I think it needs to be mixed.” I said, “Mixed, oh my God, there are 100 mixes or 80 mixes, has
anybody
ever done 80 mixes?” We had, like, two months to go. I said, “It will just screw the whole thing, let’s just not bother.” But when a song that came up that had been mixed, like a B-side, it just sounded a lot better, had
more focus and impact so I went back and I listened some more and realised Jon was right, of course.

I called him and I said, “Well OK, how do you mix 80 songs?” Charlie came in and we had three studios going at once: we had a studio in the other room, a truck out in the yard, and we had Bob Clearmountain on the phone—there was a system where he can mix in California and it just plays out your stereo speakers just like you were sitting in the studio! That’s basically how the things got mixed. There was a fella named Ed Thacker who took the rough mixes, basically remained very true to that sound picture and enhanced it greatly. So when I came in, I was not hearing something unfamiliar. For the fans who’d heard these things, it’s just a very different presentation of the music, much more fully realised and powerful.

One of the pleasures is actually tracking the evolution of some of the material; “Santa Ana” has got a couple of lines that crop up in “She’s the One,” and “Living on the Edge of the World” is “Open All Night,” effectively
.

If you have a good line, you don’t like to throw it—you don’t write that many. If I came up with a line that I liked I always tried to use it because writing was hard and, for one reason or another, things would begin here and end up there. Bob Benjamin sent me a tape with about three songs on it, and “Iceman” was one of them. I had forgotten I had even written it and I had no idea what it was, and I went back and it was a pretty nice song. Finding some of the things you’d forgot you had done, that was fun.

Do you really forget?

Yes. There were some things that I forgot I’d done—“Give the Girl a Kiss,” which was a big sort of party tune, I had forgotten; “Iceman,” like “Born in the U.S.A.,” was just something that I didn’t get at the time that I did it. When I went back and listened I realised that the reason I left it off
Nebraska
was partly because we’d already cut the band version, and this one I felt hadn’t really nailed it. But it came off pretty well, when I came back and I listened to it.