Le Interviste del Boss

Bringing This Fair City Light
By David Hinckley
New York Daily News, April 01, 2001

Bringing This Fair City Light

Bruce Springsteen attacks the small screen with a dynamite New York show.

Bruce Springsteen looks cool, talks cool and fronts a pretty cool rock-'n'-roll band. But cool isn't what he's after this Saturday night, when HBO breaks out "Live in New York City," the first full-length film of Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert.
What he wants this time is for your television set to perspire. He wants moisture to pop out of that puppy like an overheated Chevy radiator on a last-chance power drive.
"TV tends to be cool," says Springsteen. "Even music that worked well has been cool. The Beatles were formal. They wore suits. TV cools everybody down.
"That's not our band. Our sound comes out of soul music. We generate heat, we generate sweat. We want you to sweat. We want you to get passionate about something."
Fans have been getting passionate about Springsteen for almost 30 years, probably because he puts on the best live show in rock.
He became a truly global star in the '80s with "Born in the USA," then spent much of the next 15 years exploring folk, country and other avenues. In 1999, he reassembled his E Street Band for a year-long tour that in a sense returned him to where he was in the late '70s - the biggest rock-'n'-roll star in the world who's almost never heard on the radio.
"Amazing as it is for an artist of his stature," says Chris Phillips, editor of the Springsteen magazine Backstreets, "in a lot of ways he flies under the radar. I suspect that's where he likes it. He did the stardom thing with 'Born in the USA' and I think that got it out of his system."
E STREET REPLUGGED
At 51, Springsteen has called his own shots for years. He has several lifetimes worth of money, which he has used largely to buy privacy. He does not take the fast cash of selling his songs for commercials, and he has been a generous benefactor to causes like hunger relief.
For most of the '90s, he kept a relatively low profile. Even when he toured in 1995-96 with his acoustic "Tom Joad" CD, he spent much of his time at home with his wife, Patti Scialfa, and their children, Evan, 11, Jessica, 9, and Sam, 7. He did not, he said, miss playing rock 'n' roll.
That changed. "After 'Joad,' I did three-quarters of another acoustic record," he says. "But I stopped because I didn't feel that was what I wanted to do."
So he started riffling through his back pages and found his way to E Street again. To most fans, this was an answered prayer, and he's pretty happy about it himself.
"This is the best E Street Band I ever played with," he says. "You never heard our songs played better. The way [drummer] Max [Weinberg] was playing. Three guitars - we'd never had that before. We pushed each other."
Springsteen laughs out loud at the crack by Keith Richards that Bruce should send him a card of thanks, "because when the Stones went out on the road after we passed 50, people used up all the age jokes on us." But, in truth, this Rolling Stones fan says, he never thought much about the age issue.
"I always assumed I'd play music all my life," he says. "In my late 20s and 30s I started writing songs you could do that with, songs that addressed human experience and life. I could see singing 'Darkness on the Edge of Town' when I was much older.
"It helped that none of my early songs were 'hits,' per se," he adds. "When that happens, songs can so etch themselves at a place in time that they always carry a little of that time with them. I think my songs absorb the years well."
And this raises Springsteen question A-1: What next?
He chuckles. It's not as easy as it sounds, but a good bet, he says, is shows with the band.
"Right now, it feels like an ongoing thing and I'm interested in pursuing it in the relatively near future. I'd like to go back out on the road." Ideally with a new album.
"There are some bands, like the Stones, where it's fun just to see them play," he says. "But this band needs a sense of purpose. I don't want to use the same language we've used in the past."
The only problem is that it can be easier to get a straight answer out of Bob Dylan than a studio album out of Springsteen. "The demands I make on that particular form," he says with droll self-awareness, "can make it a more complicated question. When the band got back together, I thought about a new record. But knowing myself, that could take forever. I didn't think it would, but I knew it could. So we decided against it."
In fact, he says, one of the few things he would change about his rather successful career is output.
"The Stones released records every four months," he says. "Their ability to do that had to stimulate them in some way. They were so great for so long. If there's one thing I've regretted, it's that I didn't put out more music. But what my records said was always very clear for me and I didn't want to dilute that."
Similarly, he says, the message of "Live" lies squarely in "Tenth Avenue Freezeout."
"That's where we say why we're there," Springsteen says. "It's an explanation of ourselves - who the band is, our relationship to each other, our relationship to the audience, what we expect of the evening. What it can be for us and for you."
This is just what "Tenth Avenue" did in his live shows. But unlike the live show, HBO's ends with the somber "American Skin," whose chorus of "41 shots" was born in the Amadou Diallo shooting. Unlike in concert, this "American Skin" does not segue into the sunnier "Promised Land."
"The placement of 'American Skin' took us quite a while," Springsteen says. "It's a ballad and there's already a long ballad section: 'The River,' 'Mansion on the Hill' - even 'Youngstown' is a kind of hard-rock ballad.
"The film just got too slowed down, so we were looking for someplace else for 'American Skin.' As soon as we saw it at the end, it felt right. It's the latest thing the band has done. It's right in the present. You come out of 'Land of Hope and Dreams,' which is idealistic, then 'American Skin' brings you back down into the real world, where we do the real work."
"American Skin" drew a volley of criticism when Springsteen first performed it, primarily on the mistaken assumption it had simplistically taken sides.
"I think most people who listened understood it from the beginning," says Springsteen. "I can't explain the misinterpretations or the misguided things said by people willing to go on the record about a song they had never heard.
"I don't know what that says about your business," he adds with a laugh, "but in my business we usually listen first. So I didn't pay a lot of heed."
The rest of the HBO show parallels the live show, as does a companion CD coming out Tuesday (see Jim Farber review, page 16). The CD has extra material, and so, says Springsteen, will a DVD expected this summer.
'BORN' AGAIN
The show opens with "My Love Will Not Let You Down," which he left off the "Born in the USA" album "and which, looking back, I should have put on it." "Land of Hope and Dreams" and "American Skin" were written for the tour, while some Springsteen classics, like "Badlands" and "Two Hearts," sound familiar and others, like "The River" and "Born in the USA," are radically overhauled.
"The first time you do a song," says Springsteen, "you think that's the only way. 'Born in the USA' began as a song for 'Nebraska,' the acoustic version that's on 'Tracks.' A week or so later, I realized it could be a big rock song, so we eventually did it with the band. Then it comes out, people interpret and misinterpret it, then I start to think of it as a 'G.I. Blues' type of song, so I do it in a blues version. Then it gets some Eastern tonalities, from the 12-string, and you get to the version here."
Fans haven't even heard, so far, all the styles he has worked in. During the "Joad" sessions, he cut tunes with a country band, including some "straight-ahead country songs … that were a lot of fun. I may go back sometime and finish them up."
But what it all adds up to, at least right now, is rock 'n' roll.
"There's a direct line from 'Louie Louie' to what this band does, although this band is obviously much more developed," says guitarist Steve Van Zandt, and Springsteen agrees. "It's always there. Whatever you do, there's a part of everything you've ever heard in it. 'Louie Louie' is still a great record. It's got such conviction."
He only decided to do the TV special, he says, when he was finally convinced it could convey the conviction of his own show.
"At first we wanted to film it just to have it," he says. "There's so much stuff we never filmed that I wish we had. I didn't film the 'Joad' tour and I always regretted it. So it wasn't until after this tour that I looked at the film and realized how it captured the show. I think someone could see this film years from now and have a sense of what the E Street Band did."
Conveying a message through music - a message of struggle and faith - has been Springsteen's life work. For obvious reasons, he has conveyed considerably less about his family and home life. Except for Scialfa's role in the E Street Band - she's featured here in a lovely country-style duet of "Mansion on the Hill" - he keeps his family and home life well out of the public eye.
The children are seen at concerts, though, so it would seem Springsteen and Scialfa must at least get points for having an unusually cool job.
"Nah," he says. "If anything, I think we lose points for being showoffs."

STARFILE

Born: Bruce Frederick Springsteen, Sept. 23, 1949, in Freehold, N.J.
Parents: Douglas, bus driver, and Adele, secretary
Sisters: Virginia and Pamela (both younger)
Education: St. Rose Cathedral School, Ocean County Community College
Marriages: Julianne Phillips (1985-87), Patti Scialfa (1991 to present)
Children: Evan, Jessica, Sam
Big break: Rolling Stone critic Jon Landau's 1974 statement, "I saw rock-'n'-roll's future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen."
Key albums: "Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J." (1973), "The Wild, the Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle" (1973), "Born to Run" (1975), "Darkness on the Edge of Town" (1978), "The River" (1980), "Nebraska" (1982), "Born in the USA" (1984), "Tunnel of Love" (1987), "The Ghost of Tom Joad" (1995).
Dubious honor: President Ronald Reagan appropriated the phrase "Born in the USA" as part of his reelection campaign.

by David Hinckley

New York Daily News, April 01, 2001

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