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

had a lot of free time. At night that’s what you do: you hang out down there. And you meet people, and you see things, and that was it. I don’t want to say “there was this girl, there was this and that,” you know.
    Let’s put it this way: what does Asbury Park mean for people who were growing up in New Jersey or in the neighborhood where you grew up?
    Doesn’t mean a thing. It’s just a dumpy town. It doesn’t mean anything.
    But it’s probably a meeting-place for people, isn’t it?
    There’s the boardwalk, people are always attracted to the bright lights, and the rides, the games and, yeah, a lot of people down there. It’s where the kids go, it’s where we all go at night. I used to go there a lot more than I do now; I’ve hardly been there this summer at all.
    How about New York City? You’ve written a lot about it, how do you see the difference between the two?
    New York City, for me, was a place where I could be myself. It was real tough down in Asbury; being like 16 or 15, you come to the city, step out of the bus, and you’re somebody else. Or you’re who you are. It was escape, a good escape. From my parents, and the kids and everything, from the whole scene. And I come to New York and it’s overwhelming. When you’re there, without a thing to do, no money but a few bucks, and you step out of that bus, it’s just an overwhelming thing. I just dug the feeling of it.
    And you put that into your music, like “Does That Bus Stop on 82nd Street?”
    I wrote that on the bus!
    And “New York City Serenade.” How did you come to that song?
    Part of it had been sitting around for about a year, a verse or two, and then that song just came together pretty quick, in a day or so. A lot of the songs did like that. These are things that just mean a lot to me. This is my life, and the songs are usually parts of my life that I want to remember. Even though they’re born, probably, out of the parts of my life that I’d most like to forget. The moments I write down are the ones that I want to remember. That’s confusing, maybe.
    So growing up in Asbury Park, but near the city …
    You’ve got a little more room. That was one thing I was fortunate to have, when I was a kid, there was always the option of splitting to the city, I could come into New York, and when it got too much for me I could go back. There were a lot of cats that just didn’t have that particular option. So I sort of was able to choose the best of both worlds. Which is why I can write optimistically about a lot of tough subjects. I can write about how good it is to be in the city in the summer, while a lot of people get trapped in there. I always had the option: I could runthere to get away from here, and I could run here to get away from there.
    You’re going to prepare another album now, what’s that going to be like?
    I write a lot during recording, I get those blasts of energy. Some new songs. We’ve been performing one or two of them, but I change my mind in the course of recording so much and I write so much new stuff that I couldn’t even say. Some new musicians, so it should be good, should be interesting.
    Let’s talk more about the songs. Tell me about “Kitty’s Back.”
    It’s a strip-tease number, that’s what that is. A follow-up to the David Rose Orchestra [
laughs
]. It’s a strange song. Sort of big band-y. I like it because it communicates the heat. You get the heat. That’s why I want to add a trumpet player to the band, because a trumpet communicates incredible heat. And that’s what I want. Different instruments have different temperatures. Depending on the guy that’s playing it, too, but a trumpet has just got that great Latin heat that I like. And “Kitty’s Back” does that too.
    Do you use different instruments to express certain feelings? I think that’s done very well in “New York City Serenade,” which starts very slowly and becomes more and more …
    Every time I do that number we do it a