Bruce Springsteen: Bringing It All Back Home

“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’.”
When Springsteen was a young boy, his mother, Adele, sent him off to sleep every night with a story — a rhyme about the ranch hand Cowboy Bill. “She would say it to me before I went to bed,” Springsteen says. “It was like our good night to each other.” He starts the first verse from memory — “Of all the hands on the Bar-H Ranch, the bravest was brave Cowboy Bill” — but can’t remember the rest. “There were other good lines. I gotta find out what they are.”
Three weeks later, Springsteen sends them in a handwritten fax after his mom recited them again to him over the phone: “He wore tight boots with heels so high, a 10-gallon hat that hid one eye and sheepskin chaps with flaps/He named his pony Golden Arrow, and every day with a clip and a clop he rode into the highest mountaintop.” Later in the tale, published in 1950 as “Brave Cowboy Bill” in a Little Golden Book for children, the hero foils a gang of cattle thieves. “At some point, I told Patti my mother would recite this stanza about Cowboy Bill,” Springsteen says. “Patti said, ‘Outlaw Pete — I think that’s Cowboy Bill.’ I thought, ‘Gee, maybe you’re right.'”
The longest song Springsteen has recorded since “Drive All Night,” on The River, “Outlaw Pete” is the life story of a bandit and killer written in campfire-ballad cadence and swamped in spaghetti-Western ambience — Springsteen’s return to the cinematic-parable scope of his mid-Seventies songs “Jungleland” and “Incident on 57th Street.” “Outlaw Pete” was also, at first, his deliberate turn away from the struggle through 9/11 grief on The Rising and his Bush-years outrage on Magic. “I thought, ‘I should write a little opera’ something fantastic with a cartoon character, like ‘Rocky Raccoon,’ by the Beatles.” Springsteen cracks himself up quoting one of the opening lines : “At six months old, he’d done three months in jail.”
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