February 28, 2008
By Danny Clinch
Music and 'Magic': Bruce Springsteen resumes touring tonight with the E Street Band. Performing inspires the veteran rocker, who remains upbeat about music.
ASBURY PARK, N.J. — Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band begin a new trek through North America tonight with a concert in Hartford, Conn. If you score tickets to one of the shows, be forewarned: The Boss may be watching you.
"The first thing that I do when I come out every night is to look at the faces in front of me, very individually," Springsteen says. "I may find a certain person and play to that single person all night. I'm playing to everyone, but I could see one or two people and decide, 'You're the reason that I'm out here right now, and that I'm going to push myself till it feels like my heart's going to explode.' "
Certainly, anyone who has caught Springsteen live might assume that he or she was that lucky fan.
The singer/songwriter, who added three Grammy Awards to his collection this month, is famous for throwing house parties in arenas and stadiums, channeling his charisma and camaraderie with his longtime bandmates into performances that seem at once intimate and majestic.
Sitting in his dressing room during a rehearsal break at Asbury Park Convention Hall — just a stone's throw from the Stone Pony, the decidedly smaller venue that the 58-year-old Jersey boy helped make a national landmark — Springsteen is true to his persona: a regular guy with a larger-than-life presence (and an endearingly goofy laugh).
Tour keeps going
After releasing last fall's critically acclaimed Magic, his first album with the E Street Band since 2002's The Rising, he and the group played dates in the USA and Europe. The current leg of their tour will wrap April 30 in Charlottesville, Va.; then they head back overseas, returning for three homecoming gigs at Jersey's Giants Stadium in late July. (Sessions Band keyboardist Charles Giordano, who played on Springsteen's Pete Seeger albums, fills in while E Street's Danny Federici undergoes treatment for melanoma.)
"On any given night, what allows me to get to that higher ground is the audience," Springsteen says. "I look for an audience that's as serious about the experience as we are, which, after all these years, continues to be pretty serious."
Springsteen tends to use the pronoun "we" a lot in discussing his creative process these days. His career with E Street has been littered with detours, including starkly haunting acoustic albums such as 1982's Nebraska, 1995's The Ghost of Tom Joad and 2005's Devils & Dust. His colleagues have enjoyed side outings as well.
"Each one of us has at one time or another stepped out, to protect not only our own interests but the interests of the band," Springsteen says. "It's rare to be with the same people 35 or 40 years after you started with them, and at this point in our lives, its pleasures are very great. You really appreciate the guy next to you, you know?
"You ask for your audience's investment in your music; you're in a relationship with them. And their relationship with the E Street Band is separate from whatever else I might do. I like the idea of us being something that people rely on."
He's been in the studio with E Street, along with Brendan O'Brien, who manned the boards for both Rising and Magic. The singer also is "recording on my own, for an acoustic record. I work on a lot of projects at once." But he acknowledges that he was excited by the pop-savvy songwriting and lustrous production that distinguished the tunes on Magic.
"I got to use muscles that I hadn't used in a long time," he says. "It's been fun going back to more lush arrangements and not being afraid to craft a bigger sound, to get back to writing choruses and hooks."
By Bill Kostroun, AP
Old friends: Bruce Springsteen, left, with Stevie Van Zandt, says, "It's rare to be with the same people 35 or 40 years after you started with them. You really appreciate the guy next to you, you know?"
The songs on Magic, like much of Springsteen's work with and without the E Street Band, also drew attention for their social and political consciousness. "Part of what I'm doing is chronicling the times we live in. The people that have really moved me, whether it was Frank Sinatra or Hank Williams or Bob Dylan or James Brown or Curtis Mayfield or the Sex Pistols and The Clash. When you hear their music, it defines a particular moment."
But "in the end, music is an emotional medium and a sensual medium. I don't like to write rhetorically or get on a soapbox. I try to make the stuff multi-layered, so that it always has a life outside its social context. I don't believe that you can tell people anything; you can only draw them in."
That's Springsteen's philosophy not only as an artist, but also as an extremely famous citizen. "I don't think that people take their political opinions from musicians or actors," he says, alluding to his endorsement of John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election and participation in that year's Vote for Change tour. "You can be marginally helpful sometimes, and if you're not careful, you can be marginally damaging. I always try to tread carefully."
Thoughts on politics
In the current presidential race, "there are two really good Democratic candidates for president. I admire and respect them both enough to wait and see what happens." But while he won't endorse Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama yet, he specifically praises the latter, who cited Springsteen as the person he would most like to meet in a recent interview with People.
"I always look at my work as trying to measure the distance between American promise and American reality," Springsteen says. "And I think (Obama's) inspired a lot of people with that idea: How do you make that distance shorter? How do we create a more humane society? We've lived through such ugly times that people want to have a romance with the idea of America again, and I think they need to.
"The hard realities and how things get done are important, too, but if you can effectively convince people that it's possible to make things better, they get excited."
Springsteen is equally avid in championing members of his profession. "I buy CDs all the time. I'll go into a record store and just buy $500 worth of CDs. I will! I am singlehandedly supporting what's left of the record business." His iPod selections include "everything from old American music and old jazz to a lot of new stuff."
His three children with his singer/songwriter wife (and E Streeter) Patti Scialfa are similarly eclectic in their tastes. Elder son Evan, 17, "likes political punk: Rise Against, Against Me, Rage Against the Machine, who I knew from being friends with (Rage guitarist) Tommy Morello. He's always telling me, 'Hey, check these guys out.' He'll take me to shows with him sometimes, which is nice. He doesn't stand with me. He's usually in the mosh pit or something."
Younger son Sam, 14, "likes reggae music and tends to be more of a classic rock guy," while daughter Jessica, 16, "is into top 40, so I'll hear a lot of Rihanna and Mary J. Blige. There's actually an enormous amount of good music in the top 40 these days, well-written songs and well-made records."
Springsteen is more ambivalent about downloading. "I hate to see record stores disappear, and I'm old-school in that I think you should pay for your music. But what my kids do is download a lot of things, pay for them, and then if they love something, they'll get the CD. That may be the future."
With Magic approaching 1 million sold, Springsteen isn't lamenting the end of the music industry's glory days, when pop stars released blockbusters such as his Born in the U.S.A., which has sold more than 15 million copies since its 1984 release. "There are people who still view making albums as a vital form of expression — I know I do." He and the E Street Band "lucked out and had a few singles here and there for a while, but it really wasn't in our nature. Sales go up and down, but we tour a lot, and we've had a pretty consistent audience."
That audience now includes a substantial chunk of his children's peers, Springsteen notes proudly. He has spotted many young fans at recent shows, "probably more than we've had in a decade here in the States. And in Europe, we have an enormous young audience. Every time we go over there, there's a new wave of 16-year-olds."
Still, sustaining the illusion of eternal youth has never been part of this rock icon's long-term plan. "I was 24 when I wrote 'We ain't that young anymore' " in the song Thunder Road.
"If you go back to Darkness on the Edge of Town, which I wrote when I was 27 or 28, or The River, where there are a lot of songs about relationships coming together and falling apart — the characters on those records are all adults.
"I was interested from when I was pretty young in writing music that I felt I could sing at the ancient age of 40 — or maybe even older. It was important to me, along with the exhilaration and rhythm and sexual vitality of youth, which I wanted to maintain, to add a certain complexity — the kind of complex questions you have to sift through once you reach adulthood.
"I've written in that voice consistently, and I assume that I'll continue to go where life leads me."
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