Bruce Springsteen
Appearances
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
I thought I heard the captain say, pay me my money down. Tomorrow is our sailing day. Pay me my money down. Pay me, pay me, pay me my money down. Pay me or go to jail. Pay me my money down. As soon as that boat clears, pay me my money down.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
Well, I stood stone like at midnight Suspended in my masquerade I combed my hair till it was just right and commanded the night brigade. I was open to pain and crossed by the rain and I walked on a crooked crutch. Well, I strode all along to a fallout song and came out with my soul untouched. I hid in the clouded ramp of the crowd. They said, sit down. I stood up.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
Okay, my pleasure. I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I. By 20, no race car driving rebel. I was a guitar player on the streets of Asbury Park and already a member in good standing amongst those who lie in service of the truth, artists with a small A. But I held four clean aces.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
I had youth, almost a decade of hardcore bar band experience, a good group of homegrown musicians who were attuned to my performance style, and a story to tell. This book is both a continuation of that story and a search into its origins. I've taken as my parameters the events in my life I believe shaped that story and my performance work.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
One of the questions I'm asked over and over again by fans on the street is, how do you do it? In the following pages, I'll try to shed a little light on how, and more importantly, why. Thanks for reading that.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
That's actually not having to perform it on stage is a good one. But it's a little different, you know. I'm used to writing something. It becomes a record. It comes out. Then I go perform, and I play it, and I get this immediate feedback from the audience. So that's been the pattern of my life, but the book has been a little bit different, you know?
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
I mean, you get feedback from the press, and the fans are just starting to get a chance to read it, so I'm looking forward to that. But you still had to find the music inside your language, you know? It was... That's a big part of what sort of moved me to begin writing the book. I wrote a little essay and I felt, yeah, this is a good voice. This is a good feeling. It feels like me.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
But then once you get into the book, you've got to constantly find the rhythm of your prose. And it ends up being quite a musical experience either way.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
We went to work. But he'd been to war. He'd seen some of the world. It wasn't like he was going to be an extensive traveler or something. It didn't seem to be in his nature or in the nature of his parents or many of the folks in my family, really. We had a cousin that went off to Brown University. It was like... a nuclear explosion took place. It was just incredible for everybody.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
So you're correct. My parents did really sort of live out a big part of that story. And to a certain degree, he did find his little piece of what he was looking for in California.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
Yeah, they moved out west. which was a huge undertaking because no one, it's like, it was like moving to another planet for them. But I think that's what my father wanted to do. He wanted to move to another planet.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
And they had very little, they had $3,000 and they, I think they had an old Rambler and they slept two nights in the car and a night in a motel and they had my little sister with them with all their stuff packed on top. It was a really go-for-broke decision, and it did pay off for them. I think they enjoyed the West Coast and their California life quite a bit.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
My father still had periods of illness that were difficult to manage. But I believe he did feel like he found something there that he couldn't have found at home.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
Well, someone mentioned that to me the other day. I always thought it was just about me. But what do you know? And looking back on it, my parents lived out quite a bit of that story themselves.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
It certainly wasn't one he could articulate. It was just, I got to get out of here.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
T. Brown Burnett once said that much of rock music is simply someone going, Daddy! So I've got to take some blame for that myself, I guess. But yeah, just when I was young, I was very shy, and that was my personality. I was a pretty sensitive kid and quite neurotic, filled with a lot of anxiety, which
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
all would have been very familiar to my pop, you know, except it was a part of himself he was trying to reject, so I got caught in the middle of it, I think.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
I think it's both there. I think if you just... you know, I think plenty of folks, if you just looked at the outside, it can read, you know, it's pretty alpha male, you know, which is a little ironic because, you know, that was personally never exactly really me. I think I created my particular stage persona out of out of my dad's life and perhaps I even built it to suit him to some degree.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
I was looking for, when I was looking for a voice to mix with my voice, I put on my father's work clothes, as I say in the book, and I, and I went to work, uh, whether it was a result of wanting to emulate him. So I felt closer or whether it was, uh, I wanted to, as I say in the book, I wanted to be the reasonable voice of revenge for what I'd seen his, his life come to.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
It was all of these things. And, uh, it was an unusual creation, but most of these, most people's stage personas are created out of the flotsam and jetsam of their internal geography, and they're trying to create something that solves a series of very complex problems inside of them or in their history.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
And I think when I, unknowingly, when I went to do that, that's what I was, I was trying to integrate all of these very difficult things that I've been unable to integrate in my life and in my life with my parents.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
It was just my location at the time. I didn't move to Asbury with the thought of, you know, it wasn't an anthropological place.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
Reason, but I went and I just fit in there. Asbury was down on its luck, but not as bad as it would get. And so there was a lot of room to move. Clubs were open until 5 a.m. There were gay clubs. And even in the late 60s, it was a bit of an open city. So as young ne'er-do-wells, we fit very comfortably in that picture. And then when I went to write... I just wrote about what was around me.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
It fired my imagination. It, of course, was a colorful locale. The city was filled with characters and plenty of people at loose ends, and so it just became a very natural thing to write about. I didn't give it too much thought at the time, but I did think...
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
that it gave me a very individual identity, and that if I was going to go out into the musical world on a national level, I was very interested in being connected to my home, my home state. There wasn't anyone else writing in this way about these things at that time. So it was something I did intentionally, in a sense, as creating a certain very, very specific identity and original identity.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
You just go where your psychology leads you, I think. I've always loved the fact that Bob's been able to sustain his mystery over 50 or 60 years. In this day and age, that's quite a feat in itself. And the things that I loved about... Bob's music, and I describe him in the book as the father of my country, which he really is, were things that just didn't fit when I went to do my job.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
You know, I'd come out of a somewhat different circumstance and the clothes just didn't fit.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
When I thought about signing a record deal or writing something that might put me in the position, because I'd already had plenty of things that had fallen through with my rock bands, I looked at myself and I just said, well, you know... I can sing, but I'm not the greatest singer in the world. I can play guitar very well, but I'm not the greatest guitar player in the world.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
What excites me about a lot of the artists I love? And I realize, well, they created their own personal world that I could enter into through their music and through their songwriting. There's people that can do it instrumentally, like Jimi Hendrix or Edge of U2 or Pete Townshend. I didn't have as unique a purely musical signature. I was a creature of a lot of different influences.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
And so I said, well, if I'm going to project an individuality, it's going to have to be in my writing. And at the time, for one of the few times in my life I didn't have a band, I just had myself and the guitar. So I was going to have to do something with just my voice, just the guitar, and just my songs that was going to move someone enough to give me a shot.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
So I wrote songs that were very lyrically alive and lyrically dense, and they were unique. But it really came out of the motivation to where I understood I was going to have to make my mark that way.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
But people see you on stage and, yeah, I'd want to be that guy. I want to be that guy myself very often. I have plenty of days where I go, man, I wish I could be that guy. And, you know, it's not quite, there's a big difference between what you see on stage and then my general daily, my daily existence.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
Don't let that bother you. It's part of my illness. I do it all the time.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
Oh, of course. You're immediately pulled out of the inside of your head, and it immediately changes your frame of mind. I've never been on stage where I've... That's not true. I have been on stage on a few occasions where I felt I couldn't escape the interior of my interior thoughts. But Peter Wolfe once said, what's the strangest thing you can do on stage? Think about what you're doing.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
There's just nothing weirder you can do. If you're up there thinking about what you're doing, you're just not there, and it's not going to happen. So trying to learn how to overcome those, which is a normal thing to do. You're in front of a lot of people. People are going to get very self-conscious.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
So you have to learn to sort of overcome that tendency towards self-consciousness and just blow it wide open, and you jump in and join all those people that are out there, enjoying what you're doing together.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
Yeah, I tend to be not in my own best company. I can get a little lost if I don't have my work to occasionally focus me. But at the same time, you've got to be able to figure that out. The year and a half I was home, my son was in his last year of high school, and it was kind of my last opportunity to be here with him in the house, and I wanted to get that right.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
We just had a series of concerts where the show was very interesting because we'd start out with my earliest material, and we played about... half a record off of our first record, and then half or three quarters off of the second record. So it was going back to my earliest music and re-singing my earliest songs that I wrote when I was 22. And it was funny that they just fit perfectly well.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
They sort of gather the years up as time passes, and you can revisit The wonderful thing about my job is you can revisit your 22-year-old self or your 24-year-old self any particular night you want. The songs pick up some extra resonance, I hope, but they're still there, and I can revisit that period of my life when I choose, so it's quite a nice experience.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
The songs themselves do broaden out as time passes and take on... subtly different meanings, take on a little more meaning, I find.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
A lot of the ones that are people's favorites, Born to Run, that expands every time we go out. It just seems to The memory of your life fills it in, fills in the story. And when we hit it every night, it's always a huge catharsis. It's fascinating to see the audience singing it back to me. It's quite wonderful to see people that intensely singing your song.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
I just felt very comfortable here, and I was uncomfortable with city life. I was more or less a kid that came out of a small town, and I was a beach bum and loved the ocean and loved the sun. I liked the people that were here. I liked who I was when I was here. I wanted to continue writing about the things that I felt were important, and those things were pretty much here.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
I felt like a lot of my... heroes from the past lost themselves in different ways once they had a certain amount of success. And I was nervous about that, and I wanted to remain grounded. And living in this part of New Jersey was something that was essential to who I was and continues to this day to be that way.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Dems Try To Buy a New Joe Rogan, and Deadly Anti-Israel Terror Attack in D.C, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian | Ep. 1078
In my home, the America I love, the America I've written about, there has been a beacon of hope that liberty for 250 years is currently in the hands of a corrupt democracy.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Dems Try To Buy a New Joe Rogan, and Deadly Anti-Israel Terror Attack in D.C, with Michael Knowles and Ana Kasparian | Ep. 1078
We ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom reign.