BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: Rock 'n' Roll Glory Days!

The Boss was beat. He had finished another in a series of marathon concerts, showered and had a rubdown. He reeked of Ben Gay, but the gleam was still in his eyes, the smile still on his face.

The fans had filed out of the arena more than an hour ago and the man they had come to see now leaned back in his locker room chair, his feet propped up on the coffee table in front of him. Bruce Springsteen was ready to talk.

“I always like to leave the stage with no regrets, you know,” he says, punctuating his point with nervous laughter. ‘‘That’s the way I am. This is your life and your last chance. A business-like attitude toward that sort of thing is not appropriate. I want our band to deliver something that you can’t buy. That’s the idea behind it.”

That’s why Springsteen performs every concert like it’s going to be his last one. The passion, the commitment, the urgency, the vitality...night after night. No one in the history of rock ’n’ roll has been so consistently exciting in concert for so long. And yet the Boss changes.

“My job is to blow into town and tell everybody to keep going, and blow on out.”

The Bruce Springsteen who is taking the Born In The U.S.A. tour around the world during most of 1984 and ’85 is not the same Bruce Springsteen concertgoers encountered during The River tour in ’81-’82. First, he’s more muscle-bound. His bulging arms fill out those sleeveless Boardwalk shirts and his neck looks like a monolith surrounded by a turned-up collar. Yes, the Boss has been pumping iron and running. Second, there are two new members in the E Street Band. Guitarist Miami Steve Van Zandt, Springsteen’s best friend, has his own band (the Disciples Of Soul), his own stage handle (Little Steven) and his own recording contract (with EMI-America). So Nils Lofgren, late of Crazy Horse, Grin and a checkered solo career, was brought in on guitar and Patti Scialfa, a New Jersey barroom singer, on background vocals. Third, and most importantly, the Boss’s music has changed, both in musical textures and in content.and tone.

In 1982, Springsteen recorded Nebraska, a pessimistic, Woody Guthrie-styled collection of intimate portraits. They don’t necessarily lend themselves to arena-rock in the spare, acoustic form in which they were recorded; moreover, their dark and troubled tone doesn’t exactly mesh well with the usual barrage of exhilarating anthems that made Bruce the Boss. Yet he takes a sidetrip through Nebraska during every Born In The U.S.A. marathon.

“They were good songs so I felt there was a place for ’em. I’ve always done a lot of different types of material during the show. I don’t think I’ve done stuff quite like that. I jqst felt I could make it work somehow. The reason I think they work is they’re just stories and people sit and listen to the story.”

He’s also telling stories on Born In The U.S.A., but they are fashioned with an economy that reflect his early rock influences rather than his early records. Like the tunes on Nebraska these seem fashioned around a theme—the dark side of the American dream and questioning our own apathy about these fading ideals.

“It’s supposed to be survival music, I guess,” says the songwriter who fashioned it. “That’s the idea behind most of the records. Just try to contain the new things that you learn, the new things that you know. Life gets pretty different as you get older, it changes quite a bit. For my life, you can probably hear it better in the music than I can explain it. It’s in ‘Glory Days.’”

I had a friend was a big baseball player back in high school

He could throw that speedball by you

Make you look like a fool boy

Saw him the other night at this road-side bar I was walking in and he was walking out

We went back inside sat down, had a few drinks but all he kept talking about was

Glory days well they’ll pass you by

—“Glory Days” copyright Bruce Springsteen Music

About half the songs on “Born In The U.S.A.” were actually recorded about the time Springsteen made Nebraska. And the making of Nebraska itself was a rather unusual experience for the Boss. “I wanted to make a certain type of record but I certainly didn’t plan to make that record. I was home (from touring) only for a month when I started writing all those songs. I wrote real fast—two months for the whole record. That’s real quick for me. It was just one of those times when you’re not really thinking about it; you’re working on it but it’s something you didn’t plan to make. Even the way we recorded it was just by accident. For the demo, I told the guy who does my guitars to get a tape player so we could record. What takes me so long in the studio is not having the songs written. So I said, ‘I’m going to write ’em and I’m gonna tape ’em. If I can make ’em sound good with just me, they’ll be fine and I can play them with the band.’ If you rehearse with the band, the band can trick you. The band can play so good you think you got something going. Then you go and record it and you realize the band is playing good but there’s no song there. And so that was the idea.

“I plugged in this cassette recording and the first song I did was ‘Nebraska.’ I just kind of sat there. You can hear the chair creaking, particularly in ‘Highway Patrolman.’ I recorded them in a couple of days. Some songs I only did once, the other songs I did maybe two times, three times. Four tracks—I could play guitar and sing and then I could do two other things. It was just in my bedroom with two microphones. Then I had this tape and mixed it on this old machine. I carried the tape in my back pocket for a couple of weeks. | lost the case. I was gonna teach the songs to the band. Then I said, ‘I better stop carrying this around like this. Could somebody make a copy of this?”’

Funny thing was Springsteen eventually ended up releasing the copy of the tape in his back pocket.

The sales of Nebraska didn’t exactly bring the cash flow of the platinum River, but Springsteen sensed that he had built a bond with his fans and they would allow him to change and grow. In fact, he feels his relationship with his followers has allowed his old songs to change and grow. “A certain amount of the old songs have come to mean so much to me because they mean so much to the audience. When we go into ‘Thunder Road’—that song is as much their song as it is my song. People just like take it over. That’s where it becomes more powerful. It’s like songs that are little touchstones. That’s when the rock ’n’ roll thing is really happening, it’s realized. It’s ‘Born To Run,’ ‘Badlands’ and ‘Thunder Road.’ I don’t get tired o( ’em. They’re different every time I come out. They don’t.mean exactly the same thing anymore. They can take those extra couple of years. They’re in there. Even if the words are the same and the music’s the same, the extra two or three years are in there—the song breathes and lets them in. That’s nice.”

In concert, Springsteen and his E Street Band try to balance the favorites from his earlier LPs with new material from his last two efforts. The tunes from Born In The U.S.A. certainly jump right out at you because the synthesizer-defined selections sound so different from his familiar guitardriven, saxophone-and piano-accented sound. The Boss doesn’t really remember how he became involved or intrigued with synthesizers, but the band first used them on “Drive All Night” on The River.

“I think it originally started when I wanted to get a merry-go-round organ sound, like a roller rink. That’s the sound of ‘Glory Days’ and ‘Working On The Highway.’ It’s that roller-skating sound. It’s a happy sound. I always loved that sound. Sir Douglas Quintet—‘She’s About A Mover.’ Then when I did (the song) ‘Born In The U.S.A.’ we did it off the cuff, never taught it to the band. We went in and I said, ‘Roy (Bittan), get this riff.’ And he just pulled it put on the synthesizer. We played it two times and the second take is on the record.”

Also on the record, Springsteen continues his fascination with country-flavored rock and rockabilly (“It’s got a sense of rawness, a real down and dirty sense of life”), takes his first stab at what might be considered reggae (“Cover Me”—“We didn’t say play the off beat—it just popped out”) and delves into synthesizer dance-rock (“Dancing In The Dark”). “I just wanted a song with that beat,” Springsteen explained about the first single from Born In The U.S.A. “Jon (Landau, the critic who became his manager in ’75) came in and said, ‘We don’t have a single.’ I went home and said, ‘How do I feel?’ I said, ‘I’m bored.’ So I went jn my room. The record(ing) was almost over. I said, ‘I could do something right now.’ I had : a song that said, ‘I get up in the morning.’ And I said, ‘No, what do I do? I get up in I the evening. And I’m just tired and bored with myself.’ And you don’t even think of it, you just sing it.”

Sometimes, though, the Boss can get just downright philosophical and self-conscious about what he’s doing. Just ask him about his job. “My job is doing something that’s (ike what life is like or what it feels like. The last two records felt very real to me in an everyday kind of sense. The type of things that make people’s lives heroic are a lot of times very small, little things. Little things that happen in the kitchen or things between a husband and a wife or between them and their kids. It’s a grand experience, but it’s not always grandiose. That’s what interests me now. There!s plenty of room for those types of victories. The sense of life is in the spirit, not necessarily in the facts of the (new) songs.

“To me, it’s the whole richness of the thing. It’s that old ‘let freedom ring.’ It’s just an everyday thing. That’s what I want to say. My job is to blow into town and tell everybody to keep going, and blow on out.” (Jon Bream is pop-music critic for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune and author of “PRINCE—Inside the Purple Reign’’ [Macmillan].)