What have you been listening to the past couple of years?
I listen to all kinds of things, you know? Take your choice. [
He reaches into a bag and pulls out a whole heap of home-made CDs
.] I’ve made all this music for walking … A lot of this is a little acoustic-oriented but I hear everything. I hear all the Britpop stuff, the Stone Roses and Oasis, and I go on to Suede and Pulp. I’m generally interested in almost everything.
For the benefit of the tape I’m looking at CDs which feature Dylan and Sleater-Kinney and the Beach Boys and Jimmy Cliff and Sam Cooke and Bobby Bland and Joe Strummer; pretty much the whole history of recorded music
.
I left a lot of my more rock things off, because this is my walking music. But I listen to old music; some Louis Armstrong stuff recently. And then I’ll listen to, I don’t know, Four Tet or something. I do a lot of curiosity buying; I buy it if I like the album cover, I buy it if I like the name of the band, anything that sparks my imagination. I still like to go to record stores, I like to just wander around and I’ll buy whatever catches my attention … Maybe I’ll read a good review of something or even an interesting review. But then I go through long periods where I don’t listen to things, usually when I’m working. In between the records and in between the writing I suck up books and music and movies and anything I can find.
And is that part of the process of writing for you?
I don’t think it has to be. I tend to be a subscriber to the idea that you have everything you need by the time you’re 12 years old to do interesting writing for most of the rest of your life—certainly by the time you’re 18. But I do find it helps me with form, in that something may just inspire me, may give me an idea as to the form I’m going to create
something in, or maybe the setting. Ten or 12 years ago, nature writing struck my imagination and it’s seeped into my work a little bit here and there ever since. It’s all kinds of things. I heard this live version of “Too Much Monkey Business” by Chuck Berry and it sounds so close to punk music. So when you go to record with your band, you have all those sounds, you’ve created a bank. I like to stay as awake and as alert as I can. And I enjoy it too, I have a lot of interest in it … I like not being sealed off from what’s going on culturally.
Have you got to the stage where your kids are introducing you to things?
Yeah, my son likes a lot of guitar bands. He gave me something the other day which was really good. He’ll burn a CD for me full of things that he has, so he’s a pretty good call if I want to check some of that stuff out … The other two aren’t quite into that yet. My daughter’s 12, 13, and she likes the Top 40. So I end up at the Z100 Christmas show, sitting in the audience with my daughter and her friends watching every Top 40 act … I’m all over the place.
How did that Suicide thing come about?
4
I met Alan [Vega] in the late ’70s. I was just a fan. I liked them, they were unique. They’re very dreamy, they have a dreamy quality, and they were also incredibly atmospheric and were going where others weren’t. I just enjoyed them a lot. I happened to hear that song recently, I came across a compilation that it was on and it’s very different at the end of the night. It’s just those few phrases repeated, very mantra-like.
It’s especially striking in a show that’s built almost exclusively on narrative
.
Right, but it’s the fundamental idea behind all of the songs anyway [
laughs
].
5
It’s just a different moment at the end of the night, where you go to some of the same places with virtually very few words. I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition. But this envelops the night. It’s interesting watching people’s faces. They look very different while that’s happening. It’s a look of some surprise, and that’s part of what I set the night up for—unconventional pieces at the top to surprise the audience and to also make them aware that it’s not going to be a regular night. It’s going to be a night of all different
things and the ritualistic aspect of the night is dispelled. As long as it’s not something that I’ve done before …
How do you think of your relationship with your own material? Because when you were here with the band a couple of years ago, you were playing stuff from the first three albums and some of those you were doing solo as well. And yet last night I think there was one song from the first four albums …
Is that right? On certain nights I’ll play more. I think I played “For You” for a while … It depends. My only general rule was to steer away from things I played with the band over the past couple of tours. I was interested in re-shaping the
Rising
material for live shows, so people could hear the bare bones of that. And the new material and [
The Ghost of
]
Tom Joad
and
Nebraska
gets a nod, and I think “Tunnel of Love” comes up. I play “Racing in the Street” … I haven’t played much off
Born to Run
. It’s predicated on anything that doesn’t have a formulated response built in.
Does it feel like young man’s music to you now, the first three, four records?
I would say that it is, you know, because a lot of young people actually mention those records to me. I remember I was playing over here a while back and I was staring down and there was a kid, he couldn’t have been more than 14, 15, he was mouthing every word to us,
Greetings from Asbury Park
, literally word for word and this kid—forget about it, his parents were the glimmer in somebody’s eye [
laughs
]. In some ways I suppose it is, but also a good song takes years to find itself. When I go back and play “Thunder Road” or something, I can sing very comfortably from my vantage point because a lot of the music was about a loss of innocence, there’s innocence contained in you but there’s also innocence in the process of being lost [
laughs
]. And that was the country at the time I wrote that music. I wrote that music immediately preceding the end of the Vietnam War, when that feeling swept the country. A part of me was interested in music which contained that innocence, the Spector stuff, a lot of the Fifties and Sixties rock ’n’ roll, but I myself wasn’t one of those people. I realized I wasn’t one of my heroes, I was something else and I had to take that into consideration. So when I wrote that music and incorporated a lot of the things I loved
from those particular years, I was also aware that I had to set in place something that acknowledged what had happened to me and everybody else where I lived.
I presume that’s where the emotional connection with your music came for so many people at the time. Because all those people had grown up loving that music, but it wasn’t doing the job any more
.
I think we were a funny amalgam of things at that moment. There was so much familiarity in the music that for a lot of people it felt like home; it touched either your real memories or just your imaginary home, the place that you think of when you think of your home town, or who you were, or who you might have been. And the music collected those things, so there was an element that made you feel comfortable. And yet at the same time we were in the process of moving some place else, and that was acknowledged in my music also, and that’s why I think people felt deeply about it.
I think that it made some people comfortable, and there were stylistic things that caught people’s ears, that they were used to hearing … but that alone wouldn’t have made people feel very deeply, it was the other stuff. That’s why “Born to Run” resonates and “Thunder Road”; people took that music and they really made it theirs. I think I worked hard for that to happen. I am providing a service and it’s one that I like to think is needed. It’s at the core of trying to do it right, from year to year. It’s the motive when you go out there. You want that reaction: “Hey, I know that kid. That’s me!” Because I still remember that my needs were very great, and they were addressed by things that people at the time thought were trash, popular music and B-movies … But I found a real self in them that helped me make sense of the self that I grew up with—the person I actually was.
1
A few years ago, a friend gave me a DVD of early Springsteen performances, bootleg stuff taken from the Internet, and on it there’s shaky black-and-white film of Bruce performing solo at some folk club, probably in 1970/71. And, of course, there’s a difference between performing solo as an unknown artist and performing solo when you’re one of the biggest acts in the world. Back then, it would have been very hard for Bruce to kid himself that anyone in the crowd had come to see him; they’d come to see the headline act, or they’d come for a
drink. And if in those circumstances you can delay one person’s retreat to the bar, then you’re doing well. At the Royal Albert Hall, people had paid £50–£60 to watch Springsteen’s every move, for over two hours. That must focus the mind.
2
This sounds like a throwaway remark, but how many shows have you been to where the band pretend to be unaware that there’s a show going on? All that tuning up and talking to each other, while the audience waits for something to happen. Springsteen’s simple recognition of the fact that people pay for every onstage second separates him from almost every single other act I’ve seen.
3
Every now and then,
No Nukes
, the film of a big 1979 anti-nuclear concert in Madison Square Garden, turns up in the middle of the night on Sky Movies. Springsteen is one of the artists featured: he sings “The River,” “Thunder Road” and then “Quarter to Three,” the old Gary U.S. Bonds hit that he used to play as an encore. In “Quarter to Three,” he does the whole hammy James Brown thing; he collapses on the stage, the band attempts to lead him off, he suddenly pulls away from them and does another couple of verses, stripped to the waist. It’s electrifying, and funny; but what’s remarkable, looking at it now, is that Springsteen’s uncomplicated showbiz gestures seem way more “authentic” than all the smiley, gleaming-teeth sincerity that James Taylor, Carly Simon and the rest of the performers are trying to project. What, after all, could be more sincere than a performer performing—and acknowledging that he’s performing?
4
Springsteen closed the Royal Albert Hall shows with an extraordinary cover of “Dream Baby Dream,” an old song by the scary punk-era experimental duo Suicide. He got some kind of echoed loop going out of his pump-organ and strolled around the stage singing the song’s disconnected phrases; there were no beats, of course, but it was as hypnotic and as hymnal as Underworld’s “Born Slippy.”
5
“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,” said the critic Walter Pater. As it turns out, even musicians aspire towards the condition of music—something less wordy, less structured, more visceral.
In this interview conducted on tour for
Devils & Dust
Springsteen talks about his earlier albums, and he defends the work that many considered his weakest—the songs on
Human Touch
and
Lucky Town
. He also reminds readers that for all he talks about himself and his experiences, “trust the art, be suspicious of the artist. He’s generally untrustworthy.”
Chicago United Center is home to the Bulls, the NBA basketball team who used to win everything back when Michael Jordan was king. It’s the usual big, dark cave. But when, for the soundcheck,
Mojo
takes a solitary spot in the semi-darkness among the 9,000 empty seats, the place bears a strangely private air. Bruce Springsteen is alone on-stage at the piano talking through the mike to a soundman in a remote location, marked only by a reading lamp. Nobody else is visible except when a tech walks on with the next instrument to check.
Springsteen’s wearing a sartorial hodgepodge of suit jacket, blue jeans and baseball cap—reversed part way through, the only whimsical moment in the entire process. He sings a verse or two of each song—“Saint in the City,” “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch),” “Jesus
Was an Only Son”—working briskly through piano, electric piano, pump-organ, various acoustic and electric guitars, harmonica, a ukulele (given to him by Eddie Vedder) and finally autoharp. He checks out the “bullet” mike, beloved of Tom Waits, which twists his voice into a deranged howl for “Johnny 99.” Everything’s in good order and requires no comment beyond “OK” and muttered thanks as each new instrument is handed over.
When he’s done he picks up some papers, shoves them in a battered black briefcase, walks off on his own like some slightly bohemian clerk on his way to the office, and goes straight to his dressing room.
It’s a prime year for Springsteen, one that’s drawn the threads of his past and present together. In the spring, he released
Devils & Dust
, the third of his powerful solo-ish and mainly acoustic albums following
Nebraska
(1982) and
The Ghost of Tom Joad
(1995). In November it was the plush 30th anniversary reissue, with bonus DVDs, of
Born to Run
, the album that made his career. The two records could hardly better represent the extremes of his appeal down the years, from the big adrenaline thrill of youth to the dark knowledge and doubts of middle age (he was 56 in September).
Born to Run
was uninhibited: the appassionato vocals like a street-rough Roy Orbison, the almighty rockin’ R&B grunt and Spectortinselled grandeur of the E Street Band with Clarence Clemons’ sax in excelsis and Roy Bittan’s piano hinting at dirty concertos. His third album and breakthrough after his first two failed to nail it, it teemed with all-but-doomed youth living it large in a small world, wheeling and dealing, fighting and romancing, chasing a dream of nobody-knew-but-what-the-hell. And it was the last album like that Springsteen ever made.