Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen by Unknown Read Free Book Online

this old van, me and Steve riding up and down the East Coast, riding to Virginia and Atlanta, all these different towns, just scrubbing away, and that damn van was breaking down all the time … and now here we were on the air. And I said “Steve.” And he said “Yeah!” And I said, “This is it! Remember all those towns, we’d be riding in the van saying ‘when this happens, when this happens …’ ”—and I never stopped to think that
it was happening
. And him either. But it’s something that I’d never take for granted, not for a second. Like last night with that crowd in that hall, I’d never take that for granted. For every night like last night, there were a hundred other nights that we played in these little bars in Jersey, and there was nobody there.
    What did your family and schoolteachers think about you in the early years, playing guitar in bars?
    Oh, they hated it. My mother—you know, your mother’s your mother. And she tries to be cool with you and let you do your thing. My father, he hated it, couldn’t stand it, wanted me to stop. Always was down on it. Wanted me to be a lawyer, some kind of heavy thing—a doctor. Guaranteed income. But I was a stubborn and strong kid, did what I wanted to do and just figured I could do it. Eventually they moved away, and before they knew it, it was happening.
    You’ve talk about influences; how influenced are you, as you see it yourself, by rhythm & blues and Latin American songs?
    I would say that I’m the kind of guy that whatever goes in my ear I digest. But I’m not a big looker; I don’t go around looking for it. I’m not a big record collector, I’m not real familiar with the old R&B artists. But whatever I hear I digest very quickly, and it comes right back out the way I want it to. All the Stax stuff and Atlantic stuff, I’m very into that. Wilson Pickett, Sam Cooke, Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd, the MGs, Steve Cropper … yeah, the band has moments when it’s based a lot on those rhythm & blues bands, especially in the way I use the band. If you see Otis Redding in Monterey Pop, the way he uses his band; the way James Brown uses his band. Because most of your better bandleaders have all been your soul bandleaders.
    Because the white guys always tend to be a little too sloppy, too lazy; they think it’s part of the act to be not together or something, I don’t know. The best bandleaders of the last ten, twenty years, from what I’ve listened to, have been your soul bandleaders. They whip them bands into shape. I tend to use my band that way. I’m doing different things, but in that tradition … Ain’t nobody does it better than them soul artists. Like Sam and Dave, James Brown. James Brown is an idol, man … he spits, and those guys do somersaults. It’s incredible.
    You don’t write what you could call ordinary love songs; it’s more about life, and you could read the lyrics without listening to the music and you’d get some sort of picture about life .
    That’s what some people say. [When] I write the songs, I write them to stand up as
song
lyrics. You’re supposed to listen to the song and hear the lyrics. You’re not supposed to read the lyrics, because they’re
song
lyrics. They go to a song, you know? That’s the idea. I’m a songwriter, I’m not a poetry man. That’s what I concern myself with. They describe whatever I write into them: just what I know about, what I grew up with.
    Could you talk a little bit, from an autobiographical standpoint, about your background?
    A screw-up, in a small town. I ran away a mess of times, and to New York all the time and stayed there, and played in the Café Wha? downin the West Village, banged around down there for a few years. Met some people and my parents moved away and I stayed around here and I just kept playing. I just played and hung around. Went to school, to high school, that’s about it. That’s the capsule version.
    What do you think about getting so much coverage right