The New Yorker Radio Hour - Bruce Springsteen Talks with David Remnick

Episode Date: January 1, 2021

Bruce Springsteen, an American music legend for more than four decades, published his autobiography, “Born to Run,” 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. Every year, the New Yorker throws a huge festival that lasts for days. And in 2016, I had the pleasure of sitting down for an hour or more on stage with one of the great musicians of our time. Somebody I've admired since I'm a kid. And I'm hardly the only one. The event sold out, this was Town Hall in Midtown Manhattan, in six seconds. I first saw Bruce Springsteen in June of 1973. I was 14. A North Jersey boy, and I told my parents some sort of lie, and I took a bus across the river all by myself to New York City. I had a $4 ticket to see a band called Chicago. That was the headliner. It was a huge band at the time with a hit called 25 or 6 to 4. And if you're old enough, you'll remember that song, although I have no idea what that phrase meant. I climbed to the highest seat in Madison Square Garden at the time, the blue seats, and outtrundled the opening act. a skinny guitar slinger and a songwriter from the Jersey Shore.

And this guy was outrageous. He was like the white James Brown. He was singing, dancing, stabbing at the guitar, leading the band with some kind of crazy urgency, bursting all the while through the indifference of an arena crowd that had not come to see him. They'd come to see Chicago. And in every sense, he was brilliant.

He hated those gigs, but they were an incredible breakthrough. And things exploded. One reviewer called him the future of rock and roll, and that became the consensus view of Springsteen in rock circles. He was a future, and he became a cover boy for Newsweek and time in the very same week. And now, more than 40 years later, with a boatload of Grammys and Academy Award, a Presidential Medal of Freedom,

and a one-man Broadway show behind him, Bruce Springsteen is back with a new album, and it's called Letter to You. I sat down with Springsteen at the New Yorker Festival in 2016, and he had just published an autobiography called Born to Run. 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, you know. 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 Zees was in the Castile's with me. I gave him a call, and we threw around some of the Castile's memories. The trickiest part to write about, was the third section of the book, where it's all people you're living with

and people you currently have a life with. And so you're a little more sensitive about that section when Patty was very helpful with me there. As a censor? 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.

There it is. All right. Okay. Here we go. Unfortunately, Finally, 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 feign, 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 the 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 were all the things that I wore on the outside. And reflections of these qualities in his boy repelled him. It 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 school yard. My grandmother had walked over from our house and dragged him home. He recounted his humiliation and said, eyes welling. 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'd 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 relationships 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, I was she 30, she's only in her early 30s, probably, you know. 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

and the Italian side of my family. They all played piano a little bit, and of course there was a lot of singing and carrying on. 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. 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 Shore, Fort Lauderdale. It was a place where, you know, people came to the summer. It was a big season. 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 8 to 5, which was very unusual. Sold no booze, so you could be a kid and get in. And the bars closed at 3. So those final two hours, every musician would line up on the street outside the upstage to get in and play the music that they really wanted to play in the club after hours.

So there was an amazing clearinghouse for musicians. When I listen 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 sort of this gigantic band. You had a trio at one point. Yeah, I had tried it all, you know. 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-haping. 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 Wrecking Ball tour where there was 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, trying to find something that similar to me. And you played teen clubs, you played, I think even trailer parks, and you even played the Marlboro Psychiatric Holes. 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. And 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, 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 Hendricks. 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 played a lot, and we'd been around a lot by that time. And 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'd 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, 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.

Bruce Springsteen. I spoke with him at the New Yorker Festival. 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 Hammond, the record producer who had discovered everyone from Billy Holiday to Bob Dylan. We're going to hear exactly how that went down in a minute on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio. Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. This week on our podcast, you can find an interview with the staff

writer Lawrence Wright. Wright has spent the better part of the year reporting on one story, the year of the pandemic, the American response to COVID-19. And it's a remarkable, deeply reported look at who and the government knew what and when and how they reacted. You can read the piece at New Yorker.com, and you can find my conversation with Larry Wright by subscribing to the podcast of the New Yorker Radio Hour. And this week we're dedicating the entire episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour to the favorite son of New Jersey, Bruce Springsteen. In the late 60s and the early 70s,

Springsteen was a fixture on the Asbury Park music scene, someone who had played countless nights at bars and roller rinks, Elks clubs, and VFWs, with young comrades like Steve Van San. He was schooled in R&B and soul and the songwriting of Bobby. Dylan and the other giants of the moment. But by 1972, he had written some songs that he hoped would propel him to the next step to a record deal. 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, 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 guitar, so I had to borrow one from Vinnie Skibatz Mani 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 Mrs. Bats also. But, so I borrowed a guitar, except Vinnie 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, 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 of 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 but I try. But we went in and there was John Hammond sitting across the very small room, not much bigger than his carpet, little tiny corner room, had the gray suit on, the tie, the gray flat top haircut, the horn room, we walk in and Mike Appel, 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 and And, you know, 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, Saint in the City. Well, I had skin like leather and the diamond hard look of a cobra. I was born blowing. Whether the blood I burst just like a supernova. Well, I walk like Brando right into the sun And dance just like a casanoa.

Black Jack and Jacket and Harris Lake Sweet Silver star studs on my duds like a Harley in heat. When I flop down the street I could hear it's hard to beat. And old women fell back and said, don't that man look through. The cripple on the corner lies nickels for your pay. Gasoline boys downtown They show talk with it's so hard to be the same city And

When I was done, I looked up He had that big smile on his face 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

And this was not a lot of just somehow a musical addition to the band. This was, it was some, a spiritual dimension to it. Shamanistic, that's the word you use in the book. Yeah. A band is a dream, you know, 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 that where you feel you have, you're accepted. And a real band is a very, very, very particular and special thing. So the connections you make amongst your band members become near sacred positions as you get

older. Clarence was like a dream I had, you know. 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 saxophone is hard to come by. You know, 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. 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's 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 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 have 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 Yvine 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 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 in soul music.

What were you up to there? Why so large? Losing myself was a big, something I was shooting for. 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, playing is, is orgiastic. It's a moment of both incredible self-realization and self-eraturation 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. and why have people gotten intoxicated since the beginning of time 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 was too frightened I was 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'd lived around a lot of drug takers. I'd seen some of the really worst effects. You know, I'd 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, the audience part. I'll take some now, however. 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.

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 force, 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 know, your, you're, you're, you're pursuing so I always feel that's our job our job is you know we're repairment 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 you know we are you know if 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 purification ritual, which we are all taught to do.

And I would simply go out and play until I just, you know, burned up, 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 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. Bruce Springsteen, singer, songwriter, band leader. I spoke them 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 best songs. I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. Sandy, works are hailing over a little eating tonight.

Force and a light. those stony faces left stranded on this warm July. Down in time of circuits for a switch. Blade love is so fast. I'm David Remnick. Today's program was recorded at the New Yorker Festival, our annual event featuring dozens of performances and interviews. And we're spending the hour with Bruce Springsteen.

When we spoke, Springsteen had just published his autobiography, born to run. And in the book, he was incredibly, frankly frank about his troubled relationship with his father 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 seem reflected almost, if not word for word, but very directly in the memoir, which they seemed absolutely true. Well, it was an imperfect way to communicate with somebody who you love and whose love you're seeking, you know, it was, 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 Steinbecks 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 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, it 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 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 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 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. And you're that's here for

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.

Yeah, I mean, you're that person on stage for three hours. Most people get... Four, Bruce. Some of four. 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 auditioned. 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 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.

You know, 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, I've had my rough time.

She's been there and continues to be there 110%. You know, so. 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 Bruce. 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 is 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 little dinosaur? Well, that was when they were little, you know, 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 saying 10th Avenue freeze-down. 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 very, 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 um 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, walk 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, 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 the 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 so far. Who speaks to me? Thank you. Thanks. I was raised out of steel hair in swamps in Jersey, some misty years of gold.

Through the mud and the beer, the blood and the cheers I've seen champions come and cold. So if you've got the guts, mister, if you got the balls. Bruce Springsteen is the author of the autobiography, Born to Run, along with I don't know how many best-selling albums, His latest record is called Letter to You. I'm David Remnick, and I want to thank you for joining us today.

I hope you enjoyed the show. And I want to take this moment to thank my amazing colleagues here, producers, writers, editors, tech wizards, extraordinary, who have all worked so hard these past months to bring you the radio hour. And I want to wish you, our listeners, an infinitely better new year, a healthy year, a year filled with hope and possibility. See you next time. 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 Garbus of Tune Arts,

with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avey Corrieu, Riannon, Calilea, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. With additional help from Kyle Lawrence. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trurina Endowment Fund.