All Bruce Springsteen

Thanks to Backstreets.com

ON THE RECORD WITH JIM HENKE
Bruce talks with Rock Hall curator about songwriting as “a meditation,” a mining expedition, and “a magic act… Abracadabra!”
Curator Jim Henke has been with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum since 1994, well before the Cleveland institution opened to the public. For the past year, he’s worked in earnest — with help from Toby Scott, Kevin Buell, and Springsteen himself — to assemble artifacts for “From Asbury Park to the Promised Land: The Life and Music of Bruce Sprinsteen,” which opened on Wednesday. “There have been a lot of really good exhibits here over the years,” Henke tells Backstreets, “But I have to say, in terms of exhibits on an individual artist or band, this is probably the most comprehensive one we’ve gotten.”

Springsteen “obviously had a big role in picking the artifacts” for the exhibit, says Henke. “The nice thing was that in the last couple of months, as we were getting it together, Bruce really got more personally involved — it was his idea to loan us the Esquire guitar, for example.” And as Springsteen got engaged in the project, the effect was cumulative: “Initially, they said we could have two or three of his songwriting notebooks,” Henke continues, “but we wound up with way more than two or three. And then because we had that, then Bruce had this ciruclar table that was in his house — he said it’s actually that table and chairs where he sat to write about 90 percent of his songs. So he thought it’d be really cool if we had that in the exhibit, so he sent that out. Then along with it, to make it look more real, he sent some of his utility bills and stuff like that that we could lay on the table with some of the lyric books.”

While the exhibit is chockablock with concert artifacts like outfits and instruments, Springsteen’s songwriting doesn’t get short shrift, thanks to these lyric books on display. “He writes in these school spiral notebooks,” says Henke. “They’re pretty fat ones, like an inch thick, and most of them are filled from cover to cover.” For display purposes, visitors to the Rock Hall will see, for example, Bruce’s Darkness notebook open to “Badlands,” along with displayed reproductions of drafts for “Adam Raised a Cain,” “Racing in the Street,” “Darkness,” “Prove It All Night” and “Streets of Fire.”

Jim Henke: In general, what is your songwriting process like?
Bruce Springsteen: It’s very relaxed. It depends — you just get an idea and sit down with a guitar, and it’s a meditative state. Songwriting is fundamentally a meditation. It’s the exercise of your craft, your intelligence. But it’s primarily meditative, in that it works best when you go into a light trance-like situation. Where you just start to sort of… you’re scraping the top of your subconscious, like with a knife, and the shavings, sometimes they turn into a song. And then occasionally the knife plummets deeply in, and it’s not something you — it would be like having a shapeless piece of clay or something in front of you, and you start to run your fingers over it. You’re just sitting there with the clay, you don’t have an idea of what that clay is going to be yet, you just start running your fingers over the clay. And as you’re running your fingers over the clay, your emotions, who you are, the issues that are on your mind, the sounds you may want to hear, the shapes you may want to hear, the shapes you may what to see, your relationship to the world itself begins to define itself in the images, music and lyrics that are just kind of flowing out of you.

Then there’s a point where also your studied craft comes into play. In other words, okay, you’ve plummeted a certain amount: you’ve got your basic story, you’ve plummeted into some of your unconscious, and you’ve come up with something that feels like life. It feels like it has some breath and some blood in it. But now you’ve got to call on your craft to refine it, to write well, to make good choruses, or verses. And so your craft comes in, but you’re still listening. The main thing is what you’re doing if you have your clay in front of you: you’re seeing all the time. What is assisting you in moving forward? Your eyes — you’re seeing, you’re seeing. If you’re a musician, what is assisting you in moving forward with a song? Your ears. Every time you strum the chord, you’re listening. What is the song telling you? What is the character telling you about his fate? And if you listen hard enough and if you yourself are a seeker — in other words, your motivation is that you are in search of whatever it is you might want to call it, truth, experience, reflection of the world as it is — you want to sing your blues away, you want to sing about your gal, your friends your town, your country, your day at the beach, what ever it feels like, alright. These things come forth and begin to sort of give shape and refinement to your thoughts and emotions.

So it’s a magic act. Basically, nothing exists in this room when I walk in, and you literally pull something from thin air and give it physical properties, and by the end, someone out in the world holds it in their hand. You’ve taken something, you’ve literally, boom, you know, zoom there it is, Abracadabra!

But it begins in the air; it begins as ideas and emotions and it begins as something that has no physical property whatsoever. So it’s a lot of fun to do, would be the way I put it, and I get great excitement, exhilaration, and enjoyment out of it. And of course occasionally it’s very, very frustrating. In the old days your percentage is about 95 percent failure to about 5 percent success, but hey, if part of your 5 percent success is “Born in the U.S.A.” or “Born to Run,” once those things are there, you forget about the 95 percent. It’s like coming home from the dentist: you forget about the pain, and you’re happy about how good your teeth look. It’s the same thing — it’s like once the song is played, all you’re thinking about is, wow, that was great.

Henke: Do you just start with the music first, or the words, or is it a combination?
Springsteen: I don’t have any rules. The only record I started words-first was my first record, because I imagined myself as being some sort of poet at the time… plus, I would sit there with a rhyming dictionary or just by myself and just pour forth with whatever the images were in my head at the time. Later on, almost immediately, I began to — and even on that record, the music is so evocative that you use it.

Say on this record, Working on a Dream, I had a very specific idea of what I wanted the music on the record to be like. I wanted a very big, orchestral kind of rock music…. Your inner world is a mine, and there are many, many different veins, and if you work one vein a lot it may go dry. Okay, I have The Ghost of Tom Joad and Devils & Dust; okay, I don’t have any more of these songs in me right now. But then you may — if you turn around and your eyes are open so you can see — you go, “Oh, what’s that over there?” Chip, chip, boom, you may find a vein of a certain kind of music may come bursting forth, and music will pour out of you — the minute you finish a record, sometimes.

This was something I didn’t allow myself to do in the early days. I only looked at one vein, the vein I was very concerned about defining about myself with, and ignored everything else — that’s what’s on Tracks, and I ignored a lot of good music. But now I don’t do that; I’m open to whatever feels like it’s going to come through my creative system at a given moment.

So at the end of Magic, wow, it grows into something… like, that was fun, I like that big production style, I haven’t done that in a long, long time. Brings you to, “I’ve come up with another song.” Oh, and then you go home that night and think, I really want to make something big and rich and romantic but that carries with it the concerns of somebody at my age. Innocent and kind of knowing at the same time. And take that sound, the sound of it — which is basically is the sound of innocence in those days of the Beach Boys and the Spectors — and take that sound and combine it with my 60 years of experience on the planet Earth, and so you have Working on a Dream. People said I was ripping off a Kiss song — actually, thought I was ripping off “Heroes and Villains.” But it was like, you just start to… there was a vein that just comes rushing out… and these days I’m able to listen to it, and work on it, and I’m able to get more music to my fans.

YOU CAN LOOK: ROCK HALL EXHIBIT NOW OPEN
In Cleveland, catch a ride “From Asbury Park to the Promised Land”
At this rate, Bruce Springsteen might have to start bumming rides.

First his 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air appeared at the Rock Hall Annex, which opened in December in New York City. Now his 1960 Chevrolet Corvette is parked inside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, where a major new Springsteen exhibition is on view through the spring of 2010.

“From Asbury Park to the Promised Land: The Life and Music of Bruce Sprinsteen” was officially unveiled yesterday, the same day the new E Street Band tour began, following a special preview the night before for museum members.

You’ll find the Corvette convertible (Bruce’s gift to himself for the success of Born to Run) in the museum’s lower lobby. Also on display is a motorcycle that Bruce rode on a 1989 road trip throughout the Southwest. The Harley-Davidson is on the museum’s fourth floor, with the rest of the exhibit spread over the uppermost reaches of the Rock Hall, on the fifth and sixth floors.

Along with the big-ticket items previously pictured below, the career-spanning retrospective also includes several of Bruce’s songwriting notebooks, as well as memorabilia from his pre-superstardom days, including a bar of Dr. Hunter’s Pure Vegetable Castile Soap, which is where the Castiles got their name.

Rock Hall chief curator Jim Henke says the exhibit is the most extensive installation ever devoted to a single artist at the museum, where the likes of John Lennon, the Clash and U2 have been the subject of previous exhibits.

“Even the most die-hard fans will see things they’ve never seen before,” Henke says.

The opening of the Springsteen exhibit coincides with the Rock Hall’s weeklong Induction 2009 celebration, culminating with the induction ceremony Saturday at Cleveland’s Public Auditorium. Max and Garry will be on hand to do the honors for Elvis Presley’s rhythm section, drummer DJ Fontana and bassist Bill Black, who will be inducted in the Rock Hall’s sidemen category.

Between the Springsteen exhibit and other induction-related activities, Rock Hall officials say they’ve seen an uptick in attendance this week.
- April 2, 2009 – John Soeder reporting – Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum/Design Photography.