Read Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen for Free Online Page A

Joe Cocker doing “Spirit in the Night.” When I wrote the song I had his kind of voice in mind which is something that I rarely do.
    Give us a little bit of Cocker doing it, how would you imagine that?
    I wouldn’t imagine it.
    Going to play an old tune here. What is this tune, “The Fever”?
    What is this? It’s an old demo tape that you got. I don’t know where. It’s something we did a couple years ago, a little after the first album. It was done as a demo for other artists. It was done in one take.
    Who played on this?
    Who played on it: Me. Danny, Clarence, “Mad Dog” Vini [Lopez], Garry.
    And Mad Dog sings the backup .
    Mad Dog sings the backup.
    I want to thank you for coming down, because I know you don’t like to talk too much about things .
    It’s nice down here. It’s been a town where the band has got a lot of incredible support from Philadelphia. Because we are still really scuffling to make it work. And it’s getting better and getting better. And Philadelphia was the first town that really responded.
    You better make another record, because this one is getting worn out .

“The Lost Interviews,” 1975
    The following interviews date to 1975, both pre- and post
-Born to Run
. Little is known about their provenance; unearthed by
Backstreets
magazine in the ’90s, they were professionally recorded, conducted by European journalists (likely for promotion, as Springsteen would cross the ocean for the first time that fall), and stored in a record company vault. They are remarkably personal and revealing—speaking with a Swedish interviewer, Springsteen takes great care in describing his background and his concerns for a foreign audience. Having just completed
Born to Run
, Springsteen confesses, “The tension making that record I could never describe. It was killing, almost, it was inhuman. I hated it. I couldn’t stand it. It was the worst, hardest, lousiest thing I ever had to do.” Excerpts from the interviews appeared originally in
Backstreets
magazines #57 and #58, Winter 1997 and Spring 1998.
    Tell us a little bit about Asbury Park, and E Street, because that’s one thing we don’t know anything about .
    I guess you must have coastal canals? Boardwalks, fast wheels drivingaround? That’s what it is. It’s a small, sort of has-been resort town, where mostly older people go and people that ain’t got enough money to go burn gas and go farther south to a bigger resort town, they stop there. It’s okay, it’s nice, I liked it, I lived there for quite a while. E Street, that’s just a street … [it’s] where my piano player, who played with me on the first two albums, named Davey Sancious, that’s the street he lived on. We just took the name of the street for the name of the band.
    What sort of music did you listen to when you grew up and started to play in small bands?
    At the time I listened to whatever was on AM radio. There was no FM, of course. Is there FM in Sweden? There is? Well, at that time there was no FM radio, but the radio had some good music on it. In the early ’60s, when I started playing … Elvis was big then, the Ronettes, all the [Phil] Spector stuff, and the girl groups from New York, which is a big part of my background. The Ronettes, the Shirelles, the Crystals, the Chiffons, who put out a lot of great music at the time. And then the big English thing happened, the Beatles and all that stuff, and the Stones, Manfred Mann …
    AM radio was fine right up until about 1967 when FM came in and started to play long cuts, and you could see the disappearance of the really good three-minute single. So the music that got me was what was on AM from 1959 to 1965. And then later on I got into the early ’50s. They had that big San Francisco thing which went down over here; I never got too involved in that. My roots were sort of formed by then: Roy Orbison, the great English singles bands, the girl groups from New York. Chuck Berry, of course—your classics.
    You were