The New Yorker Radio Hour - Bruce Springsteen Has a Gift He Keeps on Giving

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

At seventy-four, Bruce Springsteen has been cementing his status as a rock-and-roll legend for almost fifty years: he released his widely heralded, but not initially widely heard, début, “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” in 1973. But, true to form, the artist who became known to his fans as the Boss hasn’t rested on his laurels. After weathering a spate of health troubles this past year, which led him to cancel much of his tour, the rock icon plans to hit the road again in the new year, all over the U.S., Canada, and Europe. When Springsteen published his autobiography, “Born to Run,” back in 2016, David Remnick called it “as vivid as his songs, with that same pedal-to-the-floor quality, and just as honest about the struggles in his own life.” In October of that year, Springsteen appeared at the New Yorker Festival for an intimate conversation with the editor. (The event sold out in six seconds.) This entire episode is dedicated to that conversation. Springsteen tells Remnick how, as a young musician gigging around New Jersey, he decided to up his game: “I’m going to have to write some songs that are fireworks. . . . I needed to do something that was more original.” They talked for more than an hour about Springsteen’s tortured relationship with his father, his triumphant audition for the legendary producer John Hammond, and his struggles with depression. As Springsteen explains it, his tremendously exuberant concert performances were a form of catharsis: “I had had enough of myself by that time to want to lose myself. So I went onstage every night to do exactly that.”This episode originally aired in 2016.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For fans of Bruce Springsteen, and there are a lot of us, this has been a complicated year. Some shows had personnel changes because of COVID, and some of the fall tour was canceled in the end as Springsteen recovered from an ulcer. But in 2024, he'll go back out on tour all over the U.S., Canada, and Europe, from the fall. the spring through next November. This guy can't be stopped. Now, I'm not really impartial here.

I first set eyes on Bruce Springsteen in June of 1973. I was 14, a boy from North Jersey. And I told my parents some kind of lie, and I took a bus across the river all by myself to New York City, and I had a $4 ticket in my pocket to see a band called Chicago, which was huge at the time, if you're old enough to remember, 25 or 6 to 4 and all that stuff.

Anyway, I climbed to the highest seat in Madison Square Garden, the old blue seats, and outtrundled this opening act, a skinny guitar slinger and songwriter from down the shore. And it turned out this guy was outrageous. He was singing, dancing, stabbing at his guitar, leading the band with a crazy urgency, bursting all the while

through the indifference of an arena crowd that had not come to see him, at all. They had come to see Chicago. But in every sense, he was brilliant. Now, Springsteen hated those gigs at Madison Square Garden as a backup, but they were a breakthrough. His career took off, even as he reentered the realm of smaller arenas. And now 50 years later, 50 years later, he's racked up more than 20 top 10 albums, Presidential Medal of Freedom, an Academy Award, a one-man Broadway show, and more Grammys than you can count, as well as, a terrific autobiography called Born to Run. Born to Run came out in 2016, and I sat down with

Bruce Springsteen to talk at the New Yorker Festival. Let me ask you this. People tend to write their memoirs at different points in their lives. Barack Obama wrote his when he was, I think, barely in his 30s. You've waited. You've probably thought about this over the years, no. Why now? Well, I wanted to do it before I forgot everything. So it's getting a little edgy with some of that. So this was the time. Did you do any research? Did you think, oh, my, I forgot all about X, Y, or Z,

and I have to go look at the clips, or John Landau's going to remind me, or Patty's going to remind me. I had a few friends I called up. Buddy George Thice was in the cast. with me I gave him a call and we threw around some of the Castile's memories. The trickiest part to write, it was the third section of the book where it's all people you're living with and people you currently, you know, have a life with. And so you're, you know, you're

a little more sensitive about that section when Patty was very helpful with me there. As a censor? Or? No. Not really. She cut me a lot of slack and gave me a lot of room to express myself, you know, so I have to thank her for that. T-Bone Burnett one said that rock and roll is one long scream of Daddy. Wow! I believe that's true, you know?

That's true in my case, anyway. And your father and his, the reality of your relationship and his difficulties and the anxiety caused you when you're young, and its afterlife and its profound influence on your work is a dominant part of this book. And I wondered if you could read, there's a passage on page in fact 29

we discussed before we came in. Yep. Get out those reading glasses. Put those cameras down. I only use them in bed. What? There are, is. All right. Okay, here we go. Unfortunately, my dad's desire to engage with me always came after the

nightly religious ritual of the sacred six-pack. It was one beer after another in the pitch dark of our kitchen. It was always then that he wanted to see me. It was always the same. A few moments of feigned parental concern for my well-being, followed by the real deal. The hostility and raw anger toward his son, the only other man in the house. It was a shame. He loved me, but he couldn't stand me. He felt we competed for my mother's affections. We did. He also saw in me too much of his real self. My pop was built like a bull, always in work clothes. He was strong, physically formidable. Toward the end of his life, he fought back from death many times. Inside, however, beyond his rage, he harbored a gentleness,

a timidity, shyness, and a dreamy insecurity. These are all the things that I wore on the outside. And the reflection of these qualities in his boy repelled him. Made him angry. It was soft. He hated soft. Of course, he'd been brought up soft, a mama's boy just like me.

One evening at the kitchen table, late in life, when he was not well, he told me a story of being pulled out of a fight he was having in a schoolyard. My grandmother had walked over from our house and dragged him home. He recounted his humiliation and said, I's willing. I was winning.

I was winning. He still didn't understand. He could not be risked. He was the one remaining living child. My grandmother, confused, could not realize her untempered love, was destroying the men she was raising. I told him I understood. that we've been raised by the same woman

in some of the most formative years of our lives and suffered many of the same humiliations. However, back in the days when our relationship was at its most tempestuous, these things remained mysteries, created a legacy of pain and misunderstanding. I think, Bruce, part of the emotional power of that is that you understand so much of it now, but in real time,

as a young person you understood so little. In other words, what's the gulf? How long did it take you to begin to understand him from the inside? Well, let me see. 35, 40, I don't know, 50 years, two psychiatrists, one died on me already. Long time. and at the same time in this book there's a kind of a heroic and lightning presence

in your life and in this book that's a kind of counterpoint to your father and that's your mother and one of the most touching things about it is that she not only by force of will holds this family together but it's also a musical presence in your life she's sitting there watching this music that you would have thought was incomprehensible to someone of her generation she loved it Yeah, I mean, when you think about it, she was, you know, when I was 13, what was she 30, she's only in her early 30s probably, you know, mid-30s.

And so she was excited by Elvis Presley, and she was interested in the Beatles. And she had, we had the radio on top of the refrigerator that played top 40 music every morning when you came downstairs. music was a big part of her life, and she was, you know, we always had the radio on in the car, so I heard all the hit records of the day, and I think music was kind of passed down in the Italian side of Mepham. They all played piano a little bit, and, of course, there was a lot of singing and carrying on, you know.

But you couldn't possibly have thought that this is my way out, the way some kids will think about sports. No, it was just something that obsessed me when I was young, and you didn't have any idea where it was going to take you, you know. I mean, you looked at the covers of those records, and you dreamed and dreamed of... But it was a million miles away, so... Why was Asbury such a big music scene?

It's not such a big place. It's pretty far from New York. But it had an incredibly lively music scene, an outsized lively music scene at that time. It was like a Jersey scene. shore Fort Lauderdale. It was a place where, you know, people came to the summer. You know, it was a big season, and bands came from all over to fly their wares there in Asbury. So it was a center for top 40 bands who came in, played all the little beach clubs and

nightclubs, and it was just a natural gathering place for musicians. And it had a very, very unusual club called the upstage club where that was open from eight to there were no survivors so whoever's clapping. I don't believe you were there. But it was open from eight to five, which was very unusual. Sold no booze so you could be a kid and get in. And the bars closed at three. So those final two hours, every musician would line up on street outside the upstage to get in and play the music that they really wanted to play in the club after hour. So there was an amazing clearinghouse for musicians. When I listened to what surviving records there are in recordings from those early days and read about it, it seems

like a million influences are going on at one time. You had one band that was kind of like Mad Dogs and Englishmen. It was of this gigantic band. You had a trio at one point. Yeah, I had tried it all, you know, so. But it was just different. I was kind of following the times a little bit, you know, and I had a nice three-piece band. That was fun to play in where I got to play a lot of guitar, and we kind of half-assed Jimmy Hendricks and the cream stuff, you know. And I had a big band, 10-piece band, similar to the band we had out on the Wreckingball tour where there was a horn, a couple of horns and a couple of singers, and we played a lot of R&B and all original music. So I bounced around in a lot of different genres.

was trying to find something that would that settled me. And you played teen clubs you played, I think even trailer parks, and you even played the Marlborough Psychiatric Hospital. And if I'm right, you played the animal song, we got to get out of this place.

Yeah. Good set list. We just played all over, you know, and somehow we got booked at the psychiatric hospital. It was my main recollection was The guy got up on stage and gave a long introduction of the band.

Went on, went on, went on, went on. We were waiting to go on. Then somebody came up and took him away. And at some point, though, you realized, I'm a good guitar player, but I'm not Jimmy Hendrix. I'm a good singer, but maybe I'm not Roy Orbison. And my way to become an original is to write my own songs. How does that start?

How do you have the kind of give yourself the permission? to sit down and create for yourself? Well, we'd played a lot, and we'd been around a lot by that time. You know, I'd traveled across the country a couple of times with the band, and we'd seen some other bands, and we thought we were pretty good. But I would occasionally bump into somebody who I said, well, they got a little bit of an edge on us. And I'd come home, and at some point I was in my early 20s,

and I just tried to assess my talents one by one. And I said, well, a guitar player. Well, I'm a good guitar player. Better than a lot of guys. I'm not the best. So, singer, well, that's a tough one, you know. I never thought I had much of a voice. So I'm going to have to learn how to sing,

how to sing as best as I can. But I'm never going to make my way just as a singer, you know. Plus, I've been writing. all along, but I was at a moment where I just came to a crossroads and I said, well, if I'm going to take the next step, I'm going to have to write some songs that are fireworks, you know, that I'll be able to put across with just the guitar, my voice, and my song, because I wasn't working in a band at the time. And I felt I needed to do something that was more original and I just sat down at the piano

and I just started to hack out the songs from greetings from Asbury Park. Madman drummers, bombers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat in the dumps with the mumps of the animals I'm talking with Bruce Springsteen. Bruce realized that if he was going to make it, he'd have to make it as a song writer.

And pretty quickly after that, he had a life-changing encounter with John Hammer, a legendary record producer who had discovered everyone from Billy Holiday to Bob Dylan. We're going to hear exactly how that audition went down in just a moment on The New Yorker Radio Hour. So stick around. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. And this week, we're dedicating the New Yorker Radio Hour, all of it, to the favorite son of New Jersey. My home state, Bruce Springsteen.

In the late 60s and early 70s, Springsteen was a fixture on the Asbury Park music scene, playing night after night after night at bars and roller rinks, Elks clubs and VFWs with his comrades, people like Stevie Van Zan. He was schooled in R&B and soul, as well as the songwriting of new people on the scene like Bob Dylan. By 1972, he was looking for a recording contract. Now, at an early point, you managed to get an audition with the great John Hammond, who had discovered any number of jazz greats. Sitting across from John Hammond with just your guitar in an office, right? How did, he seemed to know right away, and that has happened historically any number of times.

Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Billy Holiday, Count Basie. Yeah, that was a wild, wild day because I didn't have an acoustic. the guitar, so I had to borrow one from Vinny Skibotz Mani Yellow, who was the original drummer in the Castile. You just made up that name, didn't you? No. There was a baby bots and a missus bots also. But, so I borrowed a guitar, except Vinny let me the guitar, but it didn't have a case. So I have to get on the bus, and I got to go to New York with kind of the guitar over my shoulder, which is very embarrassing, you know. But mythological almost.

Yeah. So we get to the city, and amazingly enough, the music business was, was at that moment was such that John Hammond, one of the greatest A&R men and producers of our time,

were seeing idiots off the street, you know? So, you know, that was the lay the land, amazingly enough. So I had two choices. I could say, well, okay, this is your moment, Mr. Big Shot, when you're going to see if you've got anything or you don't. I decided not to do that to myself. And instead, I tried to do a little mental jiu-jitsu where I said, well, I have nothing. So I have nothing to lose. If nothing happens,

I'm going to walk out the same as I walked in. And, yeah, I almost convinced myself of it by the time I got out there. I couldn't completely buy my own bullshit, but I tried. But we went in, and there was John Hammond sitting across this very small room,

not much bigger than his carpet, a little tiny corner room, had the gray suit on, the tie, the gray flat top haircut, the horn rim glasses. We walk in, and Micah Pell, my manager, immediately begins to hype me

the next biggest thing since Shakespeare and Bozo the clown. and tells John Hammond that he brought me to him to see if he really had ears or if discovering Dylan was a fluke. Now, I'm standing there with my naked guitar having one of the biggest weenie shrinkers of all time. Now, so Mike is happy that he said his piece

and he goes and sits on the window sill and folds his arms. And John Hammond says, who's ready to hate us by that time, says, well, play me something. So I sat down and I closed my eyes and I played him, St. the City. Well, I had skin like leather and the diamond hard look of a cobra. I was born blowing weather. But I burst just like a supernova. Well, I walk like Brando right into the sun. And dance just like a casano.

My black jack-and-jacket and hair slink sweet. Silver star studs on my dudge like a harling hit. When I flop that, it's hard to beat. And old women fell back and said, don't that man look pretty. The cripple on the corner cries nickels for your pity. And gasoline boys downtown, they sure talk ready. It's so hard to be a same city. When I was done, I looked up, he had that big smile on his face that,

you've got to be on Columbia Records. Now, one element we haven't discussed is that the great addition to the musical presence of your playing was Clarence Clemens. And this was not just somehow a musical addition to the band. This was, it was a spiritual dimension to it. shamanistic, that's the word you use in the book. Yeah. A band is a dream.

It's a dream that you have. It's a dream that all your band members are having. It's a dream of another world, of some other place, you know, a place that feels adventurous, that feels, I suppose, safe, where you feel you have mere accepted. And a real band is a very, very,

very, very particular and special thing. So the connections you make amongst your band members become near sacred positions as you get older. Clonix was like a dream I had. I've been looking for years for a saxophonist because I love the great saxos from the great soul records and the Dion records, and I just wanted to hear that sound, you know.

and a real rock and roll saxophon is hard to come by you know you don't want to you don't want a jazz guy that'll come in and kind of slum with you you need somebody who just is an r&B player and that was clarence clarence was playing with a band called little melvin and the invaders uh they were a local soul band that gary talent happened to be playing bass in so clarence was a bit mythic in the area before anyone met him with the exception of gary And then, of course, he came into the club we were playing in one night, and he wandered to the stage and asked if he could sit in. And he got up, and the sound that came out of his saxophone was a real force of nature. It was, you know, so I'd get to stand next to Clarence, and I hear Clarence's sound before it goes into the microphone. It was just an amazing thing to stand next to and to hear. and then also Clarence's presence was unique. He was just a unique person on the planet. He was just only one of them.

Let's play the beginning of a song that's the title track of the book, if we can call it that. Okay. You've heard of that song. So a lot is going on there. You've got Peter Gunn and Dwayne Eddy and Elvis and Dylan and you and a million things going on all at once. Everything I could think of.

But seriously, it is everything you could think of. It was everything you could get in there, isn't it? Oh, it was. I threw the kitchen sink and everything else at it. You know, it was, I talk about it in the book. I said, I wanted to make a record that felt like, okay, this is the last record you're ever going to hear. And then the apocalypse, my friend.

And so I wanted to make a sound that would feel like that. It would feel completely cathartic, you know, over the top. You know, I was trying to make one of the greatest records I'd ever heard, you know. And you succeeded. God knows. And if you... And yet, if I remember when the record was finished, rather than release it, you threw it into a swing pool because you didn't think it was ready yet.

Well, I had second thoughts. I had second thoughts, but I had second thoughts. second thoughts about everything. So the record came down and the album was supposed to be done. And I'm not sure if I was ready for it to be done because it would mean people were going to hear it. And I wasn't sure I was ready for that. So Jimmy Iveen visited me somewhere out on the road in Richmond, Virginia, I think. And we played it. We had to go down to a stereo store in town because there were only records in those days. and you needed a record player, and you didn't carry one on the road.

So you had to go to the record player store and ask the guy if you could play your album on one of their systems. So we went in the back, and Yvim was walking back and forth and back and forth and watching me, watching me, watching me to see what my response was. And my response internally was,

I just want to get out of here, you know. I don't want to have to listen or think anymore, and I think at the end of the day we came back to the motel and I threw it in the pool when that was my... But it all worked out later. I think... I think... I took it.

I think John Landau helped me out. He said, look, he says, you know, sometimes the things that are wrong with something are the same things that make that thing great. And that's the way it is in. life. That's the way art works. So I said, well, all right, let's put it out. And then you take this stuff on the stage and the performances in the mid-70s and into the late 70s get more and more developed, longer, as if you are trying to do, to lose yourself

on stage. It's really like no other performances that we had seen, anybody had seen until that moment, except maybe from James Brown and soul music. what were you up to there? What, why so large? Losing myself was a big, something I was shooting for. You know, I'd had enough of myself by that time to want to lose myself. And so I went on stage every night to kind of do exactly that. You know, it was a, it's, it's, it's, it's, playing is, is orgiastic.

It's a moment of both incredible self-realization and self-realization. and self-erathrasure at the same time. You disappear and blend into all the other people that are out there and into the notes and the chords and the music that you've written, you kind of rise up and vanish into it. And that was something I was pursuing. I was pursuing intoxication. Why have people gotten intoxicated since the beginning of time?

and why will the war on drugs never be successful? Because people need to lose themselves. We can only stand so much of ourselves. But you... But on that topic, you never... You didn't lose yourself in drugs. In fact, you had a no-drugs rule for yourself and the best you could manage it.

I was too frightened. I was also very... It took me so long to find a piece of myself that I could live with, that I was very frightened with losing that when it came to other substances, plus I had, I lived around a lot of drug takers. I'd seen some of the really worst effects.

You know, I had friends that killed themselves and friends that really kind of went and never came back. And so I was very frightened of a little, just it wasn't from me. You would say that the audience part. I'll take some now, however. Yeah. If you have any.

I've got something here. All right. I think I've got 14 beta blockers, if you'd like to do it. You once said that the audience, for the audience's part, they come not to learn something, but to be reminded of something when they come to see a performer like you or something that they love deeply.

Yeah, I mean, what are you doing? You're getting people in touch with the center of themselves. You know, their life, you know, the part of them that feels, why do people come to a show? Well, you want to be reminded of how it feels to be really alive, you know?

And, you know, it's, that's what, that's what a great three-minute pop song does. In three minutes, you get the entire picture. You get the possibility of life on earth and what that can mean and what it can do for you

and do for others. It's just encapsulated in three minutes of what feels like nothingness, but for some reason has had the power to inspire and lift up and just bring you closer to Godhead or whatever you're pursuing. So I always feel that's our job. Our job is, you know, we're repairmen and we're reminders. you come to our show and we will, my voice figured I don't get paid necessarily to play this song or that song or this song. I get paid to be as present as I can conceivably be on every

night that I'm out there. Because if I'm there and I'm a lot, then I know you're feeling it too. initially music was the first way that I kind of medicated my anxieties and so I used it being a good Catholic boy of course as a yep as a purification ritual which we are all taught to do and I would simply go out and play until I just you know burned up or felt incandescent inside and that's what at the end of the night, that's what momentarily satiated all the jagged little pieces of my puzzle that I had running around inside of me. And really, that hasn't changed over the years. I basically worked till, I always say exhaustion is my friend, you know, and partly because I realized when I was done working the night the next day, I'd feel incredibly clear and quite free. and simply too fucking tired to be depressed, you know.

It was like, I mean, you've got to have some energy for your, to be depressed. You've got to be able to get out there and search through the weeds for the one thing that's going to, you know, bust your ass that particular day. And then you've got to put a lot of energy into that thing. Well, if you're too tired to do that,

you're feeling better, you know? You're feeling pretty good. I spoke with Bruce Springsteen at the New Yorker Festival in 2016, and in a minute, we'll talk about how Springsteen's troubled relationship with his father fueled some of his very best songs. I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Sandy, the works are hailing over a little eating tonight, forcing a light, and tall those stony faces left stranded on this warm July. down in time of circuits for a switch blade love is so fast

Hi, I'm David Remnick. Three of the New Yorkers critics recently sat down to talk about the year in culture, and they declared 2023 to be the year, wait for it, the year of the doll. And they're not just talking about Barbie. Staff writers, Alexander Schwartz, Nomi Fry, and Vincent Cunningham always have an interesting take on what's happening in the movies and fiction and so much more, and you can find that on the podcast of the New Yorker Radio Hour. Now, our program today was recorded at the New Yorker Festival,

our annual event featuring dozens of performances and interviews, and in honor of the holiday, we're spending the entire hour with Bruce Springsteen. I spoke with Springsteen in 2016 when he just published his autobiography Born to Run, and in the book he's incredibly frank about his troubled relationship with his dad and his own struggles with depression. One other thing that you were doing on stage was having a conversation with your father. There's a lot of songs about him.

When you asked him which songs he liked the best, he said he liked the songs about him. How did that help to do that, not to a shrink, which came along a little later, but to be on stage, and as a kind of warm-up to a lot of your songs, you would have these kind of spoken stories, some of which seemed reflected almost, if not word for word,

but very directly in the memoir, which they seemed absolutely true. Well, that was an imperfect way to communicate with somebody who you love and whose love you're seeking. But it was the only thing that I had. I was always trying to sort out what our relationship was about. And so I think I initially, obviously, obviously Steinbeck's East of Eden, and I said,

oh, I get that. You know, I've had some of that. And so I cast this a little bit in, you know, in that way. And it was a way that I could talk about our relationship without, I was never going to have a direct conversation about it because it just wasn't possible. My dad was very ill and wasn't susceptible to doing something like that, even on his best days, you know.

So I had my music, which is where I went to sort out everything in those days. And so that was naturally where I went to sort that out. And I just started to write about it. It worked out somewhat in the end, you know. Bruce, how did you become a more politically engaged person? That seemed to happen over time. How did that happen and why? Well, we grew up like that.

We, you know, if you grew up in the 60s, you know, politics, was just in the air. It was a part of your cultural experience. And we were doing things for, you know, we were playing benefits for any Vietnam war benefits when we were 19 or 20. And so that was a very big part of just growing up at that time. And it was just, it really came up out of my life experience.

I didn't have some, it wasn't any eureka moment, or it just came out of living and growing. There was a piece in the Times, and it went through various landscapes in your songs. Youngstown, Badlands, South Dakota, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which is the scene of the river, Darlington, South Carolina. These are all Trump voting areas.

And white working class areas have changed dramatically in their political orientation since the day. days of, say, Bobby Kennedy. What do you make of that? And do you feel that you have as an acute hold on some of these landscapes as you once might have? Well, I think if you look at the history of Youngstown or any of the places you've mentioned, you see that basically I've written about the last 40 years of deindustrialization and globalization, hit a lot of people very, very, very hard. And there was never, their concerns and their problems and their issues were never addressed by either party, really. So there's this sea of people out there who are waiting and hoping and looking for something that's going to bring some meaning and back into their lives.

So it's not a surprise. If someone comes along and says, you want your jobs back, I'm going to bring them back. you're uncomfortable with the browning of America. I'm going to build a wall. Keep all these folks out. You want to hear these kinds of solutions to your problems. Unfortunately, they're, you know, they're fallacious. And it's a con job, you know.

But I completely understand why a voice like that would be appealing. I want to go back to, it seemed to me that there was a kind of framing in this, in this book that if the hero of the first part of the book, in some ways was your mother, Adele, there's a heroic presence in the latter part of the book where your wife, Patty. That's here for her. And she is a presence in the band,

but you're the singular primary presence in the band. And then you come home where things are not as ecstatic. And she's the boss. I gather. But also, and not to make it too programmatic, but what holds you together?

That you've had some tough times and tough years. This is not a book that has a fake happy ending where depression is concerned. That this is something that even if you're carried across a sea of people surfing the crowd and standing ovation after standing ovation,

that has no effect whatsoever, on the next morning necessarily. If only, in my wildest dreams. You know, yeah, I mean, you're, you're that person on stage for three hours, most people get... Four, Bruce. You know.

You know, so, you know, Patty's got to live with me the other 20 hours of the day. And most people, see the best of me and she unfortunately bumps into the worst of me, hopefully not that regularly, but sometimes. But we connected right from the very, very beginning. Patty came down to New Jersey in 1974 before the Born to Run tour, and she came in and audition. We were going to take a singer out at the time, which we didn't end up doing, but we sat at the piano together, and She played me some of her songs.

And this was when we were, I was 24 years old, and she was probably 20. And then we saw each other regularly after that. And I always kid Patty, I say, yeah, we get along because before you were you, you were me. She was a musician. She was independent. She was very You know Be careful

You know She was just very Single-minded Pursuit of her work And we just had a lot in common Which has sustained us for a long time And she's Needless to say that when I've had my rough time

She's been there And continues to be there 110%, you know. Bruce, you have three kids who are grown, and I have to think that no matter how great a father and mother, it's got to be a little weird on college visiting day or you're driving down this avenue or that,

and people are screaming bruise. And how do you kind of keep that at bay for your children? at one point you described in the book. It's not as hard as people think. A lot of it's how you think about it. I mean, basically we just go about our business. If something a little strange starts to happen,

you can kind of move away from it, or you calm it down. It comes up once in a while, but we've been pretty lucky. Didn't you tell your kids that you're like Barney, the people dinosaur? Well, that was when they were little. They were wondering, you know, why?

It didn't work when they were in their 20s. Why do people want you to scribble your name? Pre-selfie, why do people want you to scribble your name on a piece of paper? And they were just puzzled by people approaching us, you know, and I said, well, to explain it to them, I said, okay, you know, Barney, you're a dinosaur. Are you interested in Barney? He said, yeah, well, people are interested in me in the same way, except growing up people. So that actually, you know. And that worked?

It actually made a lot of sense to them. And so they were pretty divorced from it. I think one day Evan came home and said, Dad, what's 10th Avenue freeze-out? So I said, 10th Avenue Freezer, where did you hear that? I heard it at school. Somebody said their parents are always singing 10th Avenue Freezer. So I said, well, I don't know, I'll show you what it is.

I got the guitar. And I started to play it to him kind of Barney style. He said, no, Dad, no, Dad. Play it for real. All right? So I played in the song. I said, that's it. That's 10th Avenue Freeze Out, you know.

And it seemed to satisfy him. And there was a moment when the children were actually saying, okay, we're old enough now to where we need to be a little bit of a part of what you're doing. And we need to understand that. And Patty was really good at saying, Because at the time, I was so overprotective of the children that I would just basically hide them. And she'd say, look, you know, they're going to grow up wondering, why were we being hidden all the time? In the attic.

And so she said, yeah, they may get their picture taken, but it's more important for them to feel that we stand as one as a family. And from then on, you know, we went about our business. and I think the kids felt better if you took their hand and you, you know, whatever, walked to your car or your van, even if somebody took a picture, they felt better that you were claiming them and they knew they were an intimate part of even that part of your life. One of the great stupid questions I've ever asked in an interview, and there are many. As I said to you some years ago, well, you know, you jump off the piano and you run up and down. the ramps and you crowd surf and it's probably going to come a time, probably, not necessarily

definitely, that you might find that when you wake up in the morning as I do you feel like you've been beaten by a baseball bat and all I do is pick cartoons for a living and I don't do that. And I say, what are you going to do when that happens and you said, well I won't do that anymore, which was a stupid question. But can you see yourself becoming like, like, you know, years and years from now, like an old blues man sitting in a chair doing your songs instead of jumping around like a maniac? Well, part of it is you have to not mind feeling like you've been beaten up with a baseball. So pain has to become your friend. But I don't know, you know, As I say in the book, you know, I forget I have a piece where I say, well, you know, the day may come when, and when this happens, and when that happens, but not tonight.

And not right now. So that's the way I approach it. I also will have no problem whatsoever, sitting in a nice little chair with my acoustic guitar, knocking out the songs from Nebraska or something. There is no end in sight. far. Bruce Springsteen. Thank you. Thanks. of soul and R&B songs called Only the Strong Survive. I'm David Remnick. Thank you for joining us.

If you're celebrating this week, I hope you have a wonderful holiday, and all the best for the year to come. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbass of Tune Yards. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Adam Howard, Pallalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May,

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