Shifting gears a little: Bobbie Ann Mason, a writer I know you admire, just published a biography of someone else you admire, Elvis Presley. In the book, she theorizes that Presley, brought up poor and ill-educated, had a lifelong urge to please people, whether it was his father or Colonel Parker, and he ultimately just gave up. He said, ”Okay, I’ll go do this next crap movie and Vegas show.”
The key to survival in the line of work he …
invented
is the replenishment of ideas. You can’t really remain physically or mentally healthy without a leap of consciousness and a continuing, deeper investigation into who you are and what you’re doing. Those are the things that will make sense of the many silly and weird things [
laughs
] that
will
happen to you [when you’re a star]! [But] what keeps you from maintaining that replenishment of ideas is an insecurity about who you let in close to you. To have new ideas you usually need to have new people around, people willing to challenge your ideas in some fashion, or to simply assist you in broadening them. Which means you have to be open to the fact that your thinking isn’t everything, y’know?
The performers who suffer through their success have a difficult time making those connections, because they come from a different environment. The culture of ideas is usually over here [
gestures to his left
] and you’ve grown up over here [
gestures to his right
]. In between is this tremendous void that, when Elvis started, was rarely bridged. Bridging that void is your ace in the hole, but to do it you’ve gotta be aware of
the limitations of where you come from and be willing to say, “Well, I’ve gotta go out and seek new things.”
You seem to identify with Elvis in this way
.
For me, I was somebody who was a smart young guy who didn’t do very well in school. The basic system of education, I didn’t fit in; my intelligence was elsewhere. I found I could apply my intelligence when I started to play [music], but once you get to that point…. There was a moment during the [recording of]
The Wild & the Innocent
when the band was having a kind of breakdown—we couldn’t make the record, the sessions weren’t going well. I happened to bump into Jon Landau [then a rock critic for Boston’s
Real Paper
, and Springsteen’s manager since 1977] outside a club I was playing in Boston. I was reading his review, which was pasted up outside the club in a feeble attempt to lure some paying customers inside [
laughs
], and he said, “Whattya think?” I said, ”It’s pretty good,” not realizing he had written it, and we just struck up a conversation about our love of music. I thought, This is an interesting guy and I don’t know any guys like this. That was my take on him: “I don’t know any guys like this.”
So he came in, he had ideas about how the band should sound, about how the band should be arranged. We listened to records together and we said we like this drum sound, that guitar sound. And it became clear to me that what he was doing was
assisting me in doing what I wanted to do
. So the security for a young guy like me was suddenly there. I was like, “Hey, I’m steerin’ the boat, I got some help here.” And I felt comfortable. My own tolerance for outside help was limited for all the same reasons [as Presley’s]—I went to just a year of college and you’re self-conscious about those things, believe me. But my artistic survival at that moment depended on some fresh ideas.
So how did you spark some of those fresh ideas?
I began to look at movies differently and I began to read more intensely. It led me on my own journey through the world of ideas, which I feel has sustained the vitality of what we’ve done for 30 years: It is at the
essential core
of everything that happened next. I was lucky to come along when I’d seen the mistakes that my predecessors had made and I instinctively understood some of those mistakes before I was able to articulate them. [As a popular entertainer] you can culturally feel very,
very isolated. No matter how revolutionary an artist Elvis Presley was, the flip side of that is that you are singular, you are alone, and so you seek the comforts of home and of personalities that you utterly dominate. You effectively isolate yourself from the world that keeps you alive.
As you get older, the price you pay for not sorting through your [emotional] baggage increases. At 22, you can get away with a lotta slippin’ and slidin’, and you can get away with a good deal of that at 32, but by your early 40s, you’re skiddin’
all
over the place. The pressure on you increases and I think that leads you to release this pressure, whether it’s with drugs, or whatever it may be for you. Because you can’t figure it out, you anesthetize yourself against it to go on livin’. And some people get dug in so deep that if the person [who could help him] was standing right in front of him it wouldn’t matter. I’ve seen that plenty of times. It’s a real tragedy because [an artist] who gave so much couldn’t get it in return: the things that really matter, the things that would have brought him fulfillment and meaning and understanding of the beautiful and vital role that he played in so many people’s lives…. You need to make that leap of consciousness. It’s a self-protective mechanism that protects your gifts. Otherwise, you’ll get totally spent and trashed. It’s a job you can only do by yourself, assisted by—if you are very lucky—a trustworthy companion and some close friends. I’ve been very lucky that way. I drift, but not too far—so far [
laughs
]. There’s always tomorrow!
This was how you felt even at the height of your popularity?
Yeah, sure. We were doing good, makin’ a lotta dough, but when you’re in the spotlight, it makes you hyperaware of what you’re doing, and that can make you more self-conscious than you need be. I wrestled through all those things, and I found my own way of alleviating those pressures, partly by making an [experimental] record like
Nebraska
—that helped me feel very balanced….
At the heights of success you’re a little extra cautious because the level of exposure becomes wearisome. I truly don’t know how some big stars do it. I could make a commitment to it for a certain amount of time, but after that I just had to get my feet back into what felt like real life. I always come back to the same thing: It’s about work—the work, working, working. Write that next song and put that next record out; speak to my audience and continue to have that conversation that’s
been going on for so long. After a while you build up a large body of work that serves as a foundation. It’s not like when you get your first record out and you wonder, Am I gonna get a chance to put another record out? Are people gonna care six months from now?
I have a lot of sympathy for some young musicians who are trying to crack it. We’ve gone back to the pre-FM [hit-driven days of] Top 40. It’s a very different environment for young, thoughtful musicians. If I was just coming up, I wouldn’t want to be stuck playing by the particular rules of the music business right now.
So you’re unimpressed by the opportunities to be found for young talent on
American Idol
?
Ah, the great, terrible Darwinian spectacle! I haven’t seen it, but it’s the theater of cruelty that has everybody fascinated at the moment.
Speaking of embarrassment, do you ever hear one of your old songs and wonder, Where the hell did that come from?
Yeah, and it’s a feeling of, I wouldn’t write that now but I’m glad I wrote it then! [
Laughs
] Those first two records [1973’s
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J
. and
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
] were very freeing because I didn’t have an audience and I wasn’t reacting to something I’d done previously. I just had this explosion of youthful creativity and exuberance. Those records were filled with exuberance and enormous energy…. I had heroes I was emulating, but I also had my own little world that I was trying to give life to. Those records always bring me back to the street life of my early 20s and the boardwalk.
Then came
Born to Run
.
Yeah, with that one I was shootin’ for the moon. I said, “I don’t wanna make a good record, I wanna make The Greatest Record Somebody’s Ever Heard.” I was filled with arrogance and thought, I can
do
that, y’know? It was fun, it was a great time, but if I had to measure it all up I don’t think I’ve ever been as satisfied as I am right now. The combination of this particular record coming at this particular time, and the band being present and everybody being alive and accounted for—only a few bands can say that. We go to Europe and the front of the stage is filled with 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds—they see [the E Street Band],
who stood there 30 years ago. And not only are my guys
still
there, they still
mean
it.
Born in the U.S.A
. was by far your most commercially successful record. I have a friend who, remembering the album’s cover, wanted to know what it was like to have had, for a time, the most famous ass in America
.
[
Laughs heartily and turns red
] That’s funny because Annie Leibovitz would tell you she shot hundreds of pictures. [But] I kept looking at that one picture and said, “Well, I dunno, there’s something about
this
.” It had a certain laconic iconography that I liked. And I remember Annie yelling, “Oh no! It’s out of focus!” It was just a kind of instinctive thing, what can I say?
Got a current cultural hero, someone whose work continues to evolve in a way you’d like yours to?
I tell ya, those three [recent] books by Philip Roth—
American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain
—just knocked me on my ass. To be [in his 60s] making work that strong and so full of revelations about love and emotional pain—man, that’s the way to live your artistic life: Sustain, sustain,
sustain
.
You once said that part of entertainment is to provide food for thought. For you, that seems to be very much about resisting complacency; the battle to not become cynical
.
A certain amount of skepticism is necessary to survive in today’s environment. You don’t want to be taking everything at face value. But for that [questioning] to be worth something it has to be connected to an element of energy and creative thought—that’s the thing that’s gonna have some impact…. So that’s my approach: Try to be wise about the way the world works. But at the same time, you need to find some way to turn those insights about what’s real and what’s true into some creative process, creative action. That’s what we try to pass on to our audience so [they] don’t feel powerless…. Tommy Morello, the guitarist from Rage Against the Machine, said in an interview that history is made in people’s kitchens, in living rooms, at night; it’s made by people talking and thinking things through. That, I think, is true: You should throw your two cents in as best you can.
So much information comes from the top down. What do you say to people who feel like they don’t have much say in what goes on in the world?
I’m always fighting against that feeling of helplessness. 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 its purpose. Its purpose is to pull you up out of that despair, to shine a light on new possibilities. And I think if you look at it pretty hard-eyed, it helps. That’s where the living is, that’s where life is. Regardless of what’s going on externally, those are the powers that you find within yourself to keep going and change things. To try to make some place for yourself in the world.
Backstreets
began in 1980 and over 30 years has become the premier international magazine and online resource devoted to Springsteen and related New Jersey artists. Phillips joined the staff in 1993 and became editor and publisher in 1998. But until 2004, 24 years burning down the road, Springsteen had never spoken directly with
Backstreets
. The interview itself captures Springsteen at the moment he was about to support publicly John Kerry’s run for president—a move that proved too controversial among a portion of his politically broad fanbase—and launch Vote for Change, a series of concerts intended to, in Bruce’s words, “mobilize the progressive voters … to change the direction of the government, to add our voices to the folks who are trying to make a change at the top.”
Bruce Springsteen has directly entered the political fray of this fall’s election, leading a coalition of artists through the so-called swing states to call for the election of John Kerry on November 2. One year after the
Rising
tour wrapped at Shea Stadium, Springsteen will be
bringing the E Street Band together for five arena dates in early October (with a potential sixth date in Miami pending as this issue goes to press).
Joining them for concerts in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, and Florida (with nary a show in Springsteen’s New Jersey stronghold) will be R.E.M., John Fogerty, and Bright Eyes, making this the first Springsteen tour with an opening act since John Wesley Harding opened the Berkeley shows of the
Tom Joad
solo-acoustic tour in 1995.
Along with additional artists such as Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band, Jurassic 5, and Bonnie Raitt, Springsteen has thrown his considerable artistic and commercial power behind this Vote for Change series of concerts—presented by MoveOn (
www.moveonpac.org
), benefitting America Coming Together—to rally support for change in the coming election. It’s a twist that, predictably, brought a few shouts, with conservative politicians, pundits, and more than a few Springsteen fans decrying his “sudden” political activism. Why has Citizen Bruce, after decades of expressing social commentary through his art, decided to speak out loud and clear?
We thought we’d ask him.