At 75, the singer continues to fill stadiums. Still living near where he grew up in New Jersey, married for 33 years and performing with the same band he had in the Seventies, he’s not your average megastar. Will Hodgkinson meets him.
Back in April 2023, Bruce Springsteen played a concert at Barcelona’s Olympic Stadium that felt like a life-changing moment, and not just because it featured Michelle Obama on tambourine. The opening night of Springsteen and the E Street Band’s first European tour in six years was one of those rare events where everything came together: the passion of the crowd; the chemistry of the band; the vitality of a 73-year-old man leading his equally no-longer-young gang through impassioned renditions of Born to Run, Born in the USA and so many other odes to American life in all its vigour and complication. No wonder Barcelona is such an important feature of Road Diary, a highly personal documentary on Disney+ about how the E Street Band keep the show on the road 50 years into the game.
“It must have been some Catalan connection,” says Springsteen, just turned 75, in that sandy growl of his, on why all E Street Band concerts are good but some are great, Barcelona being one of them. “Barcelona was slightly different from any place else and it must be down to the audience. We can only bring you so much. It takes the crowd to help lift that weight and bring us all the way there, and when that happens I come off stage and feel I’ve realised my full self. Then I go home and make breakfast for the kids.”
We’re in a room next to a recording studio attached to Springsteen’s house on a ranch in New Jersey, where poplar trees, barns and stables exude an air of discreet wealth and rustic solidity. Nearby is a garage filled with vintage motorbikes and cars, including the 1960 open-top Corvette in which Springsteen once went cruising around New Jersey with Barack Obama in the passenger seat, much to the consternation of the Secret Service agents they left back at the house. The room has an Americana-tinged elegance suitable for a rock star of Springsteen’s standing: copies of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Robert Frank’s The Americans on the coffee table; a silver-tipped cane broken in a fit of rage by Elvis Presley in a glass case; outtakes from Born to Run’s famous cover photograph, the one with Springsteen’s arm draped around the band’s late saxophonist Clarence Clemons, on the wall.
As it turns out, Springsteen was indeed born to run – about 10 minutes up the road. He must be the only world-famous rock star who lives just a few miles from where he grew up in Freehold, New Jersey, albeit under different circumstances from the ones in which he now finds himself. “It’s certainly not Los Angeles,” Springsteen says of the state where he and his wife, the songwriter and E Street Band member Patti Scialfa, brought up their children, Evan, Jessica and Sam. “I feel safe here. This is where my people are, where the folks I wrote about are. I was never a worldly young man.”
What he means is that he was never an urbane, cosmopolitan sophisticate. “I was not comfortable in Los Angeles for the time I lived there [on and off for about a decade from 1982]. I was not comfortable in New York. I don’t think you can find photographs of me falling out of nightclubs in either of them. And when Patti and I had children, we were not comfortable about them growing up in Los Angeles. I grew up on a block that had six houses with my relatives in them, so we came back here. The kids had aunts and uncles nearby and it was a good payoff for not being where the industry is: normal life. You know, it’s funny. You grow up in a place that you weren’t so sure about for a variety of reasons. Then, whether for nostalgia or the feeling that you’re on solid ground, you find yourself returning. Now I love my hometown.”
To the visitor, it all feels like Springsteenland around here. Drive from New York and you’ll pass the New Jersey Turnpike, the Jersey swamps, factories, oil refineries, signs to Asbury Park, the coastal city where he did his earliest gigs with the E Street Band – all mentioned in his songs, all redolent of the blue-collar lives with which he has concerned himself. Springsteen has never been a political songwriter as such, but he has written about the American dream versus the American reality and what that means for everyday people. Now we’re speaking a month before another US election that could tip American reality in a new direction entirely.
“I could be wrong – and I have been wrong about this before – but I don’t think Trump is going to win,” says Springsteen, who goes on to film a public endorsement of Kamala Harris an hour or so after our interview comes to an end. “An American president who doesn’t believe in the sanctity of the constitution, of democracy, of the peaceful transfer of power, is a man who should never be president of the United States.”
Springsteen connects Trump’s 2016 win with the forces he wrote about on his 2012 album Wrecking Ball, which documented the joblessness of New Jersey’s post-industrial landscape and the disenchantment it caused. “I saw the industry move out of my hometown of Freehold. That affected a lot of people, and some of those people saw Trump as a protest vote because the system that was meant to take care of them had not done so. Some people are voting for Trump out of their own wallet because they want lower taxes. Some are just crazy. Now Trump looks like old news, something that happened yesterday, but I don’t know. Let’s see what happens.”
Springsteen’s commitment to unchanging regularity, the traditional idea of a job for life, is reflected in the way the E Street Band, bar the deaths of Clarence Clemons and the organ player Danny Federici, has kept the same core members for the past five decades. As his manager, Jon Landau, says, “Bruce loves stability. So when he finds the person to match what he needs, he keeps that person.”
“This band has been solid since 1975, when Steve [Van Zandt, the guitarist who also played Silvio Dante in the quintessential New Jersey crime series The Sopranos] came in,” Springsteen says, looking pretty solid himself in jeans and a plaid shirt with cropped grey hair. “The arc of most bands is to break up. How many marriages stay together over 50 years? Now imagine five guys staying together for that long, or even two guys. Simon doesn’t like Garfunkel. Sam doesn’t like Dave. Hall doesn’t like Oates. That’s just people and who they are. What I’ve learnt is that if you want to stay together, take your little grudges and find where to put them. It takes some adult thinking to make it work.”
It also changes over time, with the E Street Band being an example of how to keep on rocking well into the free bus pass years. “The biggest change is taking time off between shows,” Springsteen says of the challenge of the E Street Band playing for three hours a night. “If we do that we can play at our top form, which is what I like to do at this point. I don’t want to go out there tired, because we put the pedal to the metal for three hours straight. It’s fun to overwhelm the audience.”
In Springsteen on Broadway, his one-man show from 2017 that combined acoustic renderings of songs with a monologue on why he does what he does and how he does it, Springsteen said those three-hour shows were a product of “manic insecurity”.
“Well, now I’m in a different place in my life and I don’t feel I’m under the gun any more,” he replies when I ask if he still feels manically insecure. “But I do have an enormous drive, every single night, to, I suppose, prove myself to myself.”
Where does that come from? “You’ve got to have the fire in the furnace that you haven’t resolved, so irresolution is where a lot of it comes from and that goes back to childhood. It all does. Am I proving it to myself every night, or am I proving it to my long-dead father? I don’t know.”
Doug Springsteen, a former bus driver and factory worker with lifelong mental illnesses that worsened as he got older, seemed to view his son through a lens of silent rage: at best as a layabout, at worst a rival for the affections of his wife, Adele. On top of that there was the shadow of Doug’s sister, Virginia, who died aged five in 1927 after being hit by a truck. Springsteen’s paternal grandparents lived with the family for a while, which meant a visit to Virginia’s grave each weekend. As Springsteen sings on Independence Day, a lyrical letter to his father, “The darkness of this house has got the best of us.”
On top of dealing with a conflicted relationship with his father, “a man who said fewer than a thousand words to me”, there was the challenge of life beyond the family home. Steve Van Zandt describes his childhood friend as “the most introverted guy you’ve ever met in your life. For him to go from that to the world’s biggest entertainer is remarkable.” Springsteen does indeed appear to be someone driven by early demons; someone whose time at Catholic school in Freehold involved being “bullied, choked, locked in a closet”.
“I was very quiet at school,” he reflects. “The quiet rebel. I would be thinking, ‘This is all bullshit.’ I wasn’t made for it at all. I was introverted, but songwriters do tend to be introverts. You’re living in your own head, living in your own worlds, populating them, giving them problems and solutions. All that happens internally and creates a mirroring of your life. I didn’t always know what I was doing but I knew what I was feeling, and I was feeling better when I discovered music and songwriting. That’s why, from the age of 14, I knew what I wanted to do.”
Early Springsteen songs were filled with tales of wild adventure: hot-rod riders in Racing in the Street, teen lust in Rosalita (Come Out Tonight). “All of The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle was based on romantic or abstract creations of people I knew or saw,” Springsteen says, citing his second album, which came out in 1973 just before his career went stratospheric. “Asbury Park had a lively street scene in ‘68, ‘69, and there were a lot of local characters I based the songs on. By Born to Run, I stretched out and wholly imagined the characters. I was becoming less provincial.”
I ask him about a long-held rumour concerning Born to Run: that he became so obsessed with distilling the essence of Fifties rock’n’roll into the perfect Seventies rock album that he went crazy and threw the tapes into the snow. “No,” he says, laughing at the suggestion. “What happened is that Jimmy Iovine, the producer, was trying to make me sign off on the final version. He was chasing me around on the road, and we went into music stores and played the record in the back room and it just didn’t sound good to me, so I went back to the motel and tossed the tapes in the pool. I was wrong. I learnt afterwards that the things that sound a little strange or off can be the things that really make a record rumble. It was an important lesson.”
One of the strangest, certainly the bleakest, albums in Springsteen’s career – so strange that the making of it inspired Deliver Me from Nowhere, a forthcoming film starring Jeremy Allen White of The Bear as Springsteen and Jeremy Strong from Succession as Jon Landau – is Nebraska. This portrait of small-town lives spiralling hopelessly out of control came out in 1982, sandwiched between the huge success of 1980′s The River and the preposterously huge success of 1984′s Born in the USA. It was based loosely on Badlands, Terrence Malick’s 1973 film starring Sissy Spacek as a South Dakota teenager who goes on a killing spree with her James Dean-like lover, played by Martin Sheen. To think this intense album, with its desperate vocal delivery and subdued menace inspired by the underground New York duo Suicide, came from the air-punching hero of Born in the USA is remarkable.
“Actually I recorded Nebraska and Born in the USA at the exact same time, just on different nights,” Springsteen says. “I don’t want to spill the beans on the film because I’m not the director [that would be Scott Cooper], but it is about how the making of Nebraska played into my psychology. Born in the USA was looming, so it was a very strange part of my life and the movie should capture that.”
Springsteen says his goal was to capture in album form a mood similar to the one evoked in Badlands. “I loved the tone of Terrence Malick’s film and wanted to represent something similar: a very quiet surface with this tremendous violence underneath. Nebraska had a dark openness, which the country can sometimes feel like it has. It had people with a lot of stress in their lives, whether from [their] family or not finding a job, and showed how they reacted to that stress. It all tied into my own mindset at the time, which was not good.”
You wonder why, given that by then Springsteen had achieved every rock star’s dream: critical acclaim combined with commercial success. “Your mental state doesn’t have a lot to do with those elements,” he points out. “You think you’ll be going, ‘Woo! I made it!’ But while I was pleased with the success I had, it didn’t clear 30 years of psychological difficulty. It didn’t come with a broom that allowed me to sweep away my problems. They stayed, as did success. Now I had to figure out how to manage both things.”
Jarvis Cocker of Pulp once told me the desire for fame comes from thinking it will fill a hole in you, so once you achieve fame only to find that hole is still there, it is really disappointing. “What’s more, you’re now surrounded by people who claim they can fill the hole for you,” Springsteen adds when I relate this to him. “When you’re young, you don’t know that you can’t fill that hole with success. Success is lovely, but it is not something that can take care of your psychological well-being. That’s your job and your cross to bear. And you have to figure it out so you don’t pass it on to your children and your children’s children.”
On Springsteen’s Adam Raised a Cain, a song about the weight of his taciturn dad’s crushing depression, the father figure “walks these empty rooms, looking for something to blame/ But you inherit the sins, you inherit the flames.” He says he has shaken off that inheritance by embracing real life: not stage life, not songwriting, but the everyday, as much as that is possible for one of the most famous rock stars on the planet.
“It’s about family, kids, dealing with their problems, a connection to the people around you … things that everyone else has to deal with,” he says. But how do the kids deal with being the son of Bruce Springsteen? Sam is a firefighter, Jessica is a showjumper and Evan is a music content editor, which suggests his children, the boys at least, have gone for unstarry lives.
“When they were little, if they heard me on the radio they would go, ‘Bruce Springsteen!’ It was their way of separating their dad from this abstract character who also seemed to be a part of their lives,” he says. “A lot of times, we just didn’t expose them to it. They came to concerts a few times before going back to their rooms to play video games, and didn’t know much about it beyond what they may have read. When they were older they wanted to bring their friends to the show, but apart from that they chose their own lives, developed their own work, found their own partners and families, all at a nice distance from the strangeness of my job.”
Then there is Patti Scialfa. “She’s a very good songwriter, but she hasn’t got the credit due because she lives with a suck-all-the-air-out-of-the-room attention whore,” he says with a chuckle. “She’s had a problem there. She’s got a beautiful record about to come out, but she’s had a tougher time getting her work recognised because of who she’s married to.”
When it comes to that marriage, the roles are delineated. “When Patti comes on stage with me, she understands I’m the captain of that particular ship,” Springsteen says. “The minute I step off stage, I’m the chauffeur who gets the kids to school at 6am. I’ve known Pats, on and off, since she was 17, and we had a steady relationship as friends until we got together as a couple in 1988, when I was 38 and she was 34. It’s worked out pretty well … except for the fact that I tend to take up a lot of space.”
Scialfa has also been living with multiple myeloma, a rare blood cancer, since 2018. “They found it early on and she’s got really good doctors who have helped a lot. But it does fatigue her, very intensely, and that’s a problem. I’m doing a three-hour show, which is fatiguing for me and I’m pretty much at the top of my health. But she’s been great. We’ve worked out that she can come out and sing a few songs, and it’s important that the fans know what’s going on because they haven’t seen her in five years. Patti decided she owed that to her audience.”
Rock stars of Springsteen’s generation showed us how to be rebellious, how to fall in love, how to be our own person. Now they are at an age when they have to show us how to grow old. In 2020 Springsteen released Letter to You, an album inspired by the realisation that all the other members of the Castiles, the teenage garage band he joined in Freehold in 1965, were dead. The Castiles’ drummer, Bart Haynes, signed up for the Marine Corps and was killed in Vietnam in 1967. The singer, George Theiss, died in 2018. In a song on the album called Last Man Standing, Springsteen reflects his own situation with more than a touch of survivor’s guilt, underlining the fact that songwriters of his generation can no longer write about girls and cars with any sense of authenticity.
“The key to songwriting is that you have to remain curious. Curious about the world, curious about yourself,” he says. “As you get older life is pretty interesting, and I want to write to my age, not to the 21-year-old I once was. The problem is, you go out on stage at night and end up inhabiting all your ages: the kid from Thunder Road, the man from Letter to You. It’s fun for me and fun for the audience, but you have to remember: this is who we are now.”
Not just Springsteen, but Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, the Rolling Stones… all the artists he took his early cues from. “Dylan keeps making good albums. The Rolling Stones are playing the best they’ve ever played. These guys are trying to figure out the same thing I’m trying to figure out: how do you do this now and how do you stay great? Today, the music of youth is Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan. You have to let other people have their time, but you still have a bunch of older guys with something to say. Ultimately it’s simple: you’re still trying to bring joy, thought and inspiration into people’s lives.”
Springsteen has suffered debilitating depression throughout his life. Before Letter to You he went for two years without writing anything, although he says he has learnt not to force it. Ideas for songs will be bubbling away within him and when he’s ready to write, he’ll get them down and out into the world as quickly as possible. You wonder if he believes this life was inevitable for him.
“I had no other skills,” he replies. “I had done a bit of physical labour, not much, and I knew I would be a musician whether that meant playing in a small club on a Friday night or Madison Square Garden. I was happy as a musician. I was happy in a small house before I lived in a bigger house. I didn’t have a needy life. And though I struggled intensely with it, being a musician gave me a sense of joy that I don’t think I could have got in any other way. It was in my soul.”
We’ve been talking for an hour. I realise I’ve forgotten to ask Springsteen about the really important stuff, like: how did he end up on Curb Your Enthusiasm, in an episode where Larry David gives him Covid and ruins an entire tour?
“I’ve laughed as hard at Larry David as I have at anybody, so when someone called up, I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go on,’ " he replies, laughing hard at the memory. “I flew out there with very few hints of what might happen, spent the afternoon filming, and went home. I knew they would figure out something to do with me. As it turns out, it was getting Covid.”
Is it true he eats only one meal a day?
“Pretty much. I’ll have a bit of fruit in the morning and then I’ll have dinner. That has kept me lean and mean.”
Finally, I ask Springsteen if he can only truly escape his demons when he’s up on that stage in a concert like the one I saw at Barcelona: giving it his all, knocking them dead.
“Your psychological make-up is enormously important to the job,” he says, by way of an answer. “Personally I can be going through all kinds of changes, a lot of depression, but there is something about me that can be the leader of the band. I’ll stay busy; I’ll stay focused. I have people depending on me. I have a craft I can pursue. The minute I step in the room with the band, those things come to the fore. The other things, when I’m wandering around in a daze, not knowing who I am, recede into the distance. It is one of the reasons we play so intensely, and so often. The stage has been a safe space where I get to focus my personalities – plural.”
Springsteen gets up from his armchair, slowly and with something of a groan, and concludes, “Well, that’s how it worked out for me.”
- Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band premieres on Disney+ on October 25
Written by: Will Hodgkinson
© The Times of London
