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

now? Critics really respond to your music .
    I don’t know. I guess it’s good. It’s nice—okay, it’s dynamite. But I don’t get hooked up in it or involved in it, because papers are just papers. I don’t know how much they influence people; we get a lot of coverage, we get a lot of reviews, but all I know is I still make $115 a week, I still live in New Jersey. The main thing is I’m glad I’ve got a good band, and I can have jobs to play and some things to do, and I get to travel around. I don’t know anything about the press, and what’s going on with them.
    But, I mean, suddenly you are recognized .
    Well, I don’t know if it’s real sudden. Two years ago when I recorded my first album it was a big deal, then it cooled out and the record company cooled out on us and didn’t want to promote our second album. Then they decided they
did
want to promote the second album. Then we played in New York, and I hadn’t played in New York in a while, and the band had changed a lot. I don’t know, it’s like I’m getting better.
    Why didn’t they want to promote the second album?
    A million reasons, a million reasons that were like no reason at all. I guess somebody didn’t believe in it, didn’t think it was right. It was business. See, in the end, it doesn’t matter. That’s the funny thing people don’t realize, is that, all right, so you don’t get promoted, and this doesn’t happen and that doesn’t happen, but in the end it doesn’t matter. If you’ve got the music and you’ve got
something
—the music
and
—then that’s it. If you’re going to win, you’re going to win. No matter what. Say the second album didn’t get promoted, which it didn’t at first. But it came out, and it got a lot of good reviews in the press, so they couldn’t keep it down. There weren’t any ads, but it was written about all the time. So I don’t necessarily even believe in ads. I hate all those ads—I haven’t seen an ad of mine that I like. It’s unnecessary. They hype you, and they don’t have to. When they’re dealing with a certain type of artist, there shouldn’t be any need for that whole hypeattitude. If you’re dealing with certain people who can’t play [
laughs
], you
better
hype ’em because they ain’t gonna make it! But if you’re just dealing with people who are in control, who are good, then it’s not necessary because the music speaks for itself. That’s why it’s unnecessary even for me to talk about any of this stuff, because the music speaks for itself. There’s nothing I can possibly say that could add or give any insight to it.
    Where did you learn to write songs and lyrics?
    I never learned. You don’t learn any of that stuff. I don’t know about learnin’. I don’t believe in learnin’ [
laughs
]. You just do it, that’s all. I can do it. I mean, I learned how to write in first grade, but besides that … I can do it. I woke up one day and started to write some songs when I was, I don’t know, 13 or 14 years old. At first they were pretty lousy. And I just kept writing and writing. It’s not something you can learn, you just do it.
    How much personal experience went into your songs?
    I don’t know, it’s all based on that. There ain’t a word or a note played that didn’t come from something that happened to me somewhere long the line. It depends on how literally you want to take the whole situation, but it’s all based on personal experience directly or indirectly. You change it around—you change the names to protect the innocent [
laughs
], stuff like that.
    Can you give me any examples? I like “4th of July, Asbury Park.” What kind of personal experience inspired that?
    Well, I live in Asbury Park! I’ve lived there for a while now. I live like a block from the boardwalk. Before I was doing anything—okay, the past two years I’ve been busy, the past year and a half. But before that, I wasn’t doing anything. I scraped up gigs here and there, and I