Interview / Mai 1984 / MTV:
Bruce Springsteen "Born in the USA"

Born in the USA
Marc Goodman - MTV /  1984

I grew up in a little town where I wasn't interested in what they were teaching me in school. None of my friends… they were all in the same boat as I was and so were my folks. There was nothing coming… there was nothing getting in there. It wasn't a house where there were books or where there was any kind of cultural thing happening.


For me my mother and father, until I was 25, they were like furniture, they came with the house. I never thought of my mother as a woman, a girl with her own dreams and desires. And my dad he was just this guy that was a little older than me.


I wanted to see the Beatles once. My father hated it… Great! (laughs) He was like… we used to fight. He used to want to see Bonanza, which was on the same time as Ed Sullivan on Sunday night. We used to battle over that TV… life or death. And it was frightening. I think it was something… it was more than this.


Once of the things about rock 'n' roll is that it's an art of self-creation, and a lot of times you want to erase too much of your past. Like usually… that moment of explosion when… Bang! You run into whatever it was that made you pick up the guitar, the moment you hold that thing and you look in the mirror… You gotta want to get away from something real hard for it to happen.

When I was young I wanted to play. I wanted to perform. I wanted to travel. I wanted to feel as free as I could. I guess I consider myself lukcy that, when I was a kid, I found something that I liked to do, something that gave me some sense of personal satisfaction. I see so many people, so many friends of mine who still don't know exactly what they want to do. But it's only a piece of it… I mean, sometimes when I'm laying down… it's amazing… I can't believe it that when I was 14 or 15, I thought about doing this and somehow I did it, I got there. And all the things that had to go right, and just a certain amount of luck, and real hard work since we started. I guess that that's a part of it I feel a certain satisfaction about, because there's a lot of other people in the boat.

What I do is fun and it's brought me a lot of satisfaction, but there's a lot of other people who go by their lives in different ways, they don't get interviewed, they don't have a big fuzz made over them. But I don't think that what I do is more important… It's just noisier.


I never felt the necessity to have a record out every year or every six months. I don't think that that's what it was about exactly. I guess there's a bad thing about it, is that it feels like a friend who goes away and doesn't write. I can remember when I was 15 or 16 I was waiting for the next release of Rolling Stones… But there are many records coming out, and unless I have something that's worth saying… I don't want to have something on the shelves or just something in the store. That's not why I started to do it in the first place. I write a lot of songs before I release a record. Actually, that's one of the main things I want to change about the way we operate. I want to get more records out, more different kinds of records.


I try to make the songs real visual, like movies, real cinematic… like the Nebraska songs. Some of my best songs are like that.

Some people thought Nebraska is just about despair. I guess my feeling about it is that when I wrote it, I felt that it was true. It was the only record where after it was done, I really didn't care what people thought about it or said about it or anything. I just felt it was right. It was true. I guess basically where there's truth, there's hope. That's kind of my outlook.

A lot of times I feel lucky to have something to write about. The Nebraska stuff was something that had a lot of detail to it, but the details alone doesn't just work. You have to have some emotional structure to hang them on. That record was kind of a mystery. I wrote it in about two months. It just came kind of out of the blue. If it's a good record is should be. If you knew how you did it, it's probably not that good. The best stuff you do you don't really remember how you did it. It just kind of pops out of your mind.

Goodman: Do you think you've gotten better at developing characters?

The craft gets better. I've gotten better at doing that. I know more about it. I think I know more about what makes a good song. So I know if I'm writing one or not.

My songs are basically about people. I guess the cars came in because they're always about people in transition. Going from some place, going to some place. They've left, but they haven't arrived anywhere. It was funny, I remembered the other day that when I was a kid I used to cry to get in the car. I don't know why, but I guess it started back then. My mother always tells me. I heard somewhere that in thunder and lightning the safest place is in an automobile, because if the car gets struck it goes to the wheel (laughs).

Goodman: I read somewhere your dad used to throw everyone in the car.

He was a terrible dictator about that Sunday drive. The only place we used to go was get in the car, and he never stopped. He was always like, "We're gonna stop the next place". And then we'd see it coming, and we'd all get like, "Here it comes, here it comes!" And then he'd drive by! He was funny. Finally, at the end of the day we'd stop at some motel. We used to go to Bear Mountain. That's where he used to take us on the weekend. I guess I got some of it from him too.


Goodman: There's something else that's cropped up a lot these days. I hear it in "Dancing in the Dark", you talk about the passing of time, all the years going by… When you were 18 were you thinking, "Gosh, I'm getting old!"

Yeah, I did. Because I thought when I was getting 20, that was it, I'm not gonna be a teenager anymore. I remember when I was turning 20 it was like… disappointing. I turned 30 when I was 27. I started early. I remember thinking, "Oh, I'm almost 30." But I don't really think about it that much anymore. I'm kind of enjoying it, I guess.

Goodman: It's like you're having fun, you're making kind of a joke about it?

Yeah, right now… the band's great, everybody's feeling great. I feel the best I ever felt on stage. I don't think that's such a big a deal as it once was, if it ever was that big a deal. It's just what you're doing and what you've got inside of you. I guess I kind of wanted to sing about it in those songs, because it was kind of happening. I was always concerned with singing about somebody that was my age. I wanted to, like, stay current with myself. I don't know, when I'm 40 I can sing this song and laugh. It started with "Rosalita"… I was looking back already and I was only 24 then.


Goodman: As the years progress and you look back at your library of songs, are there songs that grow up and change or mature?

Well, most of them. They funny thing is that most of them hang in there pretty good. I guess I still feel like a part of all of them. Like tonight we did "Spirit in the Night" and I haven't done that thing in, I don't know how long. And that was fun. I always go back and there's always some wise in it. I look back, especially on my first record where I was kind of writing anything that came into my mind. That was my style. I'd write on the bus, I'd write on the subway. It was real kind of stream of consciousness. And the main thing was it all had to rhyme. Like "Blinded by the Light". I was just trying to find a bunch of words that rhymed. And I always find lines in those songs that I still feel, like, yeah, I still feel like that!


["Born to Run"] breathes a lot. That opens up. That's still one of the most emotional songs for me When we play it at night. It's just that big roar. To me, when I sing "Born to Run" now I hear "Nebraska" in it, I hear "Born in the USA" in it. All that stuff was in those songs. It just wasn't… At different times you focus on a different aspect of what you do. That's one that seems to mean the most to the people, and that makes those songs more powerful, because like people take them and make them their own.


The only thing that really feels like what I should be doing is when I play with the band. It's great. I miss just being with those guys like that off stage, 'cause when we're off we don't see each other a whole lot. We see each other a little bit. That's where our main basis for our communication and friendship is, playing in the band.


Goodman: Steven is no longer in the band. What happened there?

Well, he had all these songs, they were great songs. The record he made, Voice of America, is one of the best records I ever heard. He just was at that place where it was time for him to do… to have his own band. We've been friends since we were real young, 15 or 16. I met him in the Hullabaloo Club in Middletown, and we just kind of hit it off. We used to go to New York and Café Wha in Greenwich Village on the weekends, and they had these matiné shows. We just did all that stuff together. Then we'd come home and try to get the sounds those guys would get on their guitars. We'd both go down in the basement and, you knnow… "How do we do that?" And turn the amp up as loud as we could. He was always a lot of laughs. We'd always get together, go to the movies. We just got along real good. But I'm glad he's doing what he's doing, because I think he's got something real important to say, and I think he's saying it just real… tremendously.


I've known Nils for actually quite awhile. I met him about 10 years ago. When we knew that Steve wasn't gonna do the tour, he was just one of the first people I thought about. We didn't audition anybody or anything. He just kind of came up and stayed in my house. We just talked, and his feeling about music and rock 'n' roll is like our feeling, the rest of the band. He was a guy that I knew I was gonna get the commitment out of, and he won't look at it like a job. It's a dedication for him. And he just stood over there and it felt good. And Patti… that was… she joined the band only a couple of days before we left to go on the road. I met Patti at Stone Pony in Asbury Park, and she just came out to where we were rehearsing and she sang with the band, and it was a big relief, because "wow, somebody's gonna hit that note every night and it's gonna be in key!" And it's nice. She's been great. I like having her there too. It's nice having a woman there. It changes the feeling a little bit. I want to get to where I can use them more, her and Nils. First night it really felt like a different band. It felt really different. It was funny. It feels just real natural.


Me, I make the records so I can be in a show. That's the thing I always felt meant the most… ever since the first time I got up at the Elk's Club and sang "Twist and Shout".


My education was [listening to records at night] and that taught me the most important thing… that there's more to life than what you see around. And that was something they couldn't teach me in school, you couldn't learn it in the house, and you couldn't learn it from people you were hanging with on the street or anything. That was the most important lesson of my life. I guess at night that's the only thing we try to say. It's the only message: don't sell yourself short.

Goodman: One of the other things happens during the show is toward the end you let out a call to "let freedom ring".

I guess for me in the end that's what Elvis Presley said to me and what I felt from his music. That was it. That's the rock 'n' roll message if there is one. That's just what it's always said. What Elvis says, what Prince says… that there seems to be… what I always felt from it… Just tear down the walls a little bit, look outside, see what's going on around you, what's happening to your friends or your family. Just making a little more room for everybody, just a little breathing room. Maybe we can change the world, or change something. I think you can change people's lives. It happened to me.