Bringing It All Back Home

Drummer Max Weinberg remembers Springsteen leading endless E Street rehearsals for 1978's Darkness on the Edge of Town and the 1980 double album, The River. "Then, generally, everything we rehearsed would not get recorded — we would start rehearsing again in the studio," Weinberg recalls, relaxing on a floppy sofa in a small dressing room at his other job, the Rockefeller Center studios of NBC's Late Night With Conan O'Brien, where he has been the show's bandleader since 1993. "A lot of the tracks on those records were recorded rehearsals. 'Streets of Fire' [on Darkness] — it wouldn't even be legitimate to call it a demo. None of us had any idea where it was going."

"It was not exciting — it was the opposite of exciting," guitarist Steven Van Zandt says of those sessions with a guttural chuckle. One of Springsteen's oldest friends (Weinberg calls him Springsteen's "consigliere"), Van Zandt co-produced those two albums and 1984's Born in the U.S.A. with Springsteen and the singer's manager, Jon Landau. "I'm not that disciplined," Van Zandt admits. "If it's 10 percent less good if we did it in a day instead of a month, I'm cool with that. It's still 110 percent better than what anybody else is doing. Bruce understood that. But he said, 'We're going for 100 percent all the time. We're not compromising one iota.'"

"Yes, there was fear of failure," Springsteen concedes, surrounded in the Thrill Hill living room by vintage mounted photographs of what he calls "my saints," including the elder Bob Dylan, the young Elvis Presley and the folk-blues singers Elizabeth Cotten and Mississippi John Hurt. "This is all repair work, in one way or another. The guys I was interested in — Dylan, Hank Williams, Frank Sinatra, Bob Marley, John Lydon, Joe Strummer — all had something eating at them. Those are the forces you're playing with. And you're in the studio trying to figure out, 'How do I live with myself?'

"I'm not worried now about who I am," he says. "My identity, what people are connecting with — those things are set pretty firmly. I have an audience, of some kind. I also have a world of characters and ideas I have addressed for a long time. By now, at my age, those things aren't supposed to inhibit you. They are supposed to free you."

Springsteen goes quiet for a minute when asked if, even at 16, he had bigger dreams and a stronger will than the other guys in the Castiles. "We were kids, you know," he says. There is another pause. "A lot of it has to do with raw need, motivation. I was very isolated. That's a common story with rock musicians. We all feel like that. And it makes you mad." He smiles, then explodes with laughter. "I mean, really mad! But if you learn to organize your desires and demands and shoot them into something that is more than just being about you, you start to communicate. I wanted to be a part of the world around me."

Springsteen had a long-term advantage: the E Street Band, started in 1972, formally named in 1974, reunited in 1999 after a 10-year split and now numbering eight, including bassist Garry Tallent, an original member with Clemons and Federici; pianist Roy Bittan, who joined with Weinberg in mid-'74; guitarist Nils Lofgren, first recruited for the Born in the U.S.A. tour; and violinist-singer Soozie Tyrell, who first played on The Rising. (Charlie Giordano played keyboards after Federici's illness forced him to leave the Magic tour in November 2007.)

"They are my greatest friendships, my deepest friendships — irreplaceable things," Springsteen says. "I'll put The Rising, Magic and the new one against any other three records we've made in a row, as far as sound, depth and purpose, of what they're saying and conveying. It's very satisfying to be able to do that at this point in the road."

"It makes you proud to be his friend," Van Zandt declares with another rusty chuckle, "when so many others are, you know, cruisin'."