Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (42 page)

Seeing how much work went into the drafts of the songs outlined in
Songs
, and having enjoyed the essays you wrote for the book about the creation of the music, I wondered if you’d ever considered writing on a more sustained level, maybe short stories, a screenplay or a novel?

If I had any thoughts about it, just trying to come up with the things I wrote for the book cured me forever! It’s a very different process. Initially I thought: it’s a lyric book, so what are we going to put in it? Maybe I could write a little bit about some of the records, yeah, that’s a great idea. And I sat down to write and write and write, and then I went back a week later and said this just isn’t working. And so I spent a long time even for the brief comments that are in the book … Writing about what you’ve done proved to be pretty challenging for me.

It was different from doing an interview, where
you
also bear a good deal of the responsibility. All of a sudden you’re left with having a written voice on a page, and it’s different. I think I find the voices in my songs through a variety of different techniques. Part of it is what
sound am I making with my own voice? The written words on the page, the music I’m strumming, all becomes part of the voice that you’re seeking and the voice that you find for the characters you’re writing about. It’s a very different process and in no way did it lead me to think I was going to pursue a writing career—I’ll stick with songwriting, I think!

But as a songwriter in rock ’n’ roll, everyone assumes that when you write “I did” or “I am,” that really is you singing, rather than a character you’ve written
.

That’s something that is particular to music I think. I suppose if you’re a film actor who plays an enormous amount of action heroes or tough guys, then somebody might come up to you in a bar and take a swing at you, maybe [
laughs
]. But I think it’s less likely. I think part of it is that it is self-contained, in the sense that you are the writer, you are the performer, you are the singer—and if you’ve done your job very well, and brought forth a lot of real emotion, I think it calls for the listener to take a step back and realise that they’re listening to a creation of some sort, a work of imagination. That what you’re doing, part of your craft, is understanding—and you may be singing through the voice of another character to create that understanding.

I’ve written in many, many different voices—of which a listener will say well that’s obviously not literally your life. But I’ve experienced it from time to time, where someone will come up and very literally assume that you’ve written very specifically about yourself—or about
them
! That’s the scary ones.

Occasionally you will write something that’s more autobiographical than not, but really it just goes all across the board. And I think that to over-interpret it, to overpersonalise it, is generally a mistake. As a writer you’re paid to use your imagination, and your emotions, and your eyes, to create something that is real—in the sense that there’s real emotion. And I think that whatever you’re writing about, you have to find yourself in there in some fashion. That’s what makes the song work.

But because you come out on stage and sing in that voice and tell that story, it may make the lines a little greyer than with novelists or film directors—I don’t think anyone thinks Martin Scorsese is
in
the Mafia! So it is perceived a little differently in music.

How did a song like “Iceman” turn up on
Tracks
? It hasn’t even appeared on bootleg before
.

I didn’t even know it existed myself, until a guy named Bob Benjamin sent me a tape with three songs on it, and that was one of them. When I was making the record I did sort of feel around: what did people want to hear? What do they like? I had feedback from a lot of different places. Bob sent me that tape and I’m like, “Iceman,” what’s that? I put it on in my car and said, wow, that’s pretty good. So we had a look to see if we could dig up the 24-track, and sure enough we found it and it ended up on the record. And “Give the Girl a Kiss,” the party thing from
Darkness
, I didn’t know that existed either.

It seems ironic that the keenly awaited, long-overdue box set should come so soon after your appearance in court battling against the release of archive material. And it was a pretty weird sight seeing you in a suit …

A pretty weird sight! Yeah, it must have been, because the picture was printed in papers all over the place simply because I was wearing a tie! I mean it was news of some sort—some distorted sort! If I’d known I was going to get that sort of publicity, I’d have worn a tie years ago!

Entertainment Weekly
, February 28, 2003

The Rising
found Springsteen doing more publicity than he had in years—perhaps ever. “Current reality is that you can’t count on radio [to play your music] when you’re my age,” he tells Tucker, “that’s just the way it rolls. This was a record I felt very strongly about and I wanted it to be heard; I wanted people to know that it was out there.” In what may be the most sober interview ever published in
Entertainment Weekly
, Springsteen discusses the meanings of success and the political situation in America. “I’m always fighting against that feeling of helplessness,” he admits. “I can be overwhelmed by ambivalence, by the despair of the day. [But] that’s what people use music and film and art for; that’s a light on new possibilities.”

Driving to talk with Bruce Springsteen, one passes small businesses that might pop up in one of his songs: Two Men and a Truck: Movers Who Care, and the Cree Mee Freeze ice-cream stand. This is rural Monmouth County, NJ, where the Boss lives surrounded by vast cornfields cleared for the winter, and a short distance from his seminal Asbury Park. On a cold day in early February, the living room of his
converted farmhouse is warmed by a glowing fireplace; three guitar cases and a keyboard sit in the hallway. Springsteen, dressed in Johnny Cash black (quilted jacket, shirt, pants, boots), has just come from his home recording studio, where his wife, Patti Scialfa, is completing her second solo album—a decade after her first. ”Yeah, a bit of a gap between, but”—Springsteen pauses—”that’s the way we do things in this family!” he says, laughing.

Springsteen went seven years between his last two studio albums—1995’s spare
Ghost of Tom Joad
and last year’s 9/11-themed
The Rising
—and 18 years between collaborations with a fully constituted E Street Band. He seems at peace with that pace. After 30 years of hard work and harder playing, he’s got a realistically skeptical view: While grateful for
The Rising
’s Grammy nominations, he scorns a music industry that seems focused solely on quick, hit-single careers; his kinship with the bedrock beliefs of his fans has grown, but he thinks the Bush administration is headed in the dead-wrong direction; and out of this troublesome world he’s done his best to carve a haven for his family—wife and E Street Band member Scialfa, and their three children, Evan, 12, Jessica, 11, and Sam, 9. With all the accolades, and sales of just under 2 million copies,
The Rising
has revived his career while maturing the man. As became clear during our interview, Springsteen has worked strenuously to find a strategy for survival, and almost welcomes the notion that even if he has peaked as a mass-culture phenomenon, he can still passionately connect to an audience with shared values and concerns.

Readying himself for his first in-depth interview since last August’s media blitz in support of
The Rising
, he plops into a rocking chair and vigorously musses his already-mussed hair. He’s eager to hear what Secretary of State Colin Powell has said earlier that morning to the U.N. about possible war with Iraq. Foreign travel, among much more pressing things, is on his mind. (A new album, in case you’re wondering, is not.) After the Feb. 28 airing of a CBS concert special taped recently in Barcelona, Springsteen will resume his “barnstorming tour”—the first leg of which took him and the E Street Band across America through the fall and early winter—with U.S. dates in March. Then, at least through June, he and the band head overseas, to everywhere from Australia and New Zealand to Germany. Rocker, reader, and peace-seeking road
warrior, Springsteen refuses to be pinned down. He holds within him all the surprises and contradictions of an artist not just born in the USA, but now set loose in the world.

By the time most readers see this,
The Rising
may have won a Grammy for Album of the Year and Song of the Year. Are you excited to have been nominated?

I don’t put a whole lot on it, ’cause I’ve been around a long time, and I made some pretty good records [that didn’t get] an Album nomination:
Darkness
[
on the Edge of Town
],
Born to Run, The River, Nebraska
…. But this is nice. It probably means a little more to me now than it would have back then, y’know?

Why?

Because maybe I would have said, “Wait a minute, maybe I’m doing something wrong.” That kind of acceptance might not have fit my idea back then about whether a rock & roll rebel, or whatever I thought I was, should be winning awards [
laughs
]. But [
The Rising
] is an important record to me. It’s the first record in such a long time with the band, and I wanted to make it really good, a record that could stand shoulder to shoulder with all our others. The whole idea with the band was to get back together but move very consciously forward…. [If you] saw the band on this tour, your older brother or dad couldn’t say, “Oh man, I saw them back when they were
really
good.” The band’s playing as good—as committed and intense—as at any time in its history, and making a record that carried on those values and ideals was very important. So the [Grammy] recognition is nice, it’s enjoyable.

Are you familiar with your Grammy competition?

Yeah, I’ve heard probably just about everybody. Norah Jones is terrific. Eminem, he’s good: intense—intense—and committed. He’s got a lot to say and says it. Vehemently.

You did a ton of publicity for
The Rising
, appearing on TV everywhere from the
Today
show to
David Letterman
.

Current reality is that you can’t count on radio [to play your music] when you’re my age; that’s just the way it rolls. This was a record I felt very strongly about and I wanted it to be heard; I wanted people to know that it was out there…. So we immediately said, there are some
things I would be comfortable doing. [But]
Letterman
threw me a little. They said, “Ya wanna come over and sit on the couch?” I said, “Ahhh, ya sit on the couch ya gotta be
funny
. That’s too much pressure.” But
he’s
funny, so you don’t have to be too funny yourself.

You really thought a Springsteen album with songs about the aftermath of September 11 wouldn’t sell or attract attention?

Hey, it’s a big tent out there [in pop culture]. I take my kids and we buy popcorn and see the big movies. The problem is that [the marketplace] pushes to the margins things that may not be immediately accessible…. It’s like, you’re either in the mall or the little tiny theater downtown…. The hegemony of a certain type of movie or a certain type of music at any given time isn’t a good thing.

That’s the way the game is played, I understand that. But you have to fight for your place—the audience is not brought to you or given to you, it’s something that you
fight
for. You can forget that, especially if you’ve had some success: Getting an audience is
hard
. Sustaining an audience is
hard
. It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose, and of action over a long period of time…. You have to be willing to roll the dice, you have to be willing to risk, to step up and enter your particular arena and stake your claim to a piece of it. That’s part of what
The Rising
meant to me.

You recently toured Europe and are going back there again soon. How do you think America is perceived now?

For the best part of a decade, we’ve had a bigger audience overseas than in the States. Two thirds of my audience has been there; they were very connected to the
Tom Joad
record, very connected to music that was explicitly American, [so] there must be a tremendous commonality felt about the values of those songs. People continue to be very taken with America, with its bigness and its history and its drama, its myths and its values.

There’s a lot of dissent about America [now], about this administration’s policies. But I think those things are specific, I don’t think they’re something as general as a blanket anti-Americanism. Bob Herbert said in a column in
The
[
New York
]
Times
a few weeks ago that [Europeans] respond to a country that uses its power wisely abroad and dispenses its benefits fairly at home. Those are the things that are very debatable right now—the direction we’re going in.

Do you think we’ll go to war with Iraq?

I think we [already] are; I think the administration is just set on it. A month ago I wasn’t so sure, but now I am. Those drums are being beaten really hard. I think the administration took September 11 and used it as a blank check. And like most Americans, I’m not sure the case has been made to put our sons and our daughters and innocent citizens at risk at this particular moment. But I don’t think that’s gonna matter, unfortunately…. The actual war against terrorism is extremely complicated. You try not to be cynical, but without the distraction of Iraq, [people would notice] that the economy is doing poorly, and the old-fashioned Republican tax cuts for the folks that are doin’ well will seriously curtail services for people who are struggling out there. I don’t think that’s the kind of country that Americans really want. All the cutbacks in the environmental restrictions—it’s just a game of shadows and mirrors at the moment.