Bruce Springsteen: The Ties That Bind

I forget, what were you saying there, Tony?

I was getting at this... I was getting at the process.

Oh, the creative life not being enough. Yeah.

HE STRUMS GUITAR So, by the time I was 30...

HE CONTINUES STRUMMING GUITAR

Well, I was thinking of all these things because they seemed to be...

So this was what was holding society together.

These imperfect ideas of how people connect

and relate to one another, or don't. And...

So I want to be a part of that.

I don't want to just be outside, looking in,

I don't just want to be a commentator, I just don't

want to be the audience, I don't want to be the observer.

You know, I want to be an active part of it in some way.

And so it was a lot of what I was telling myself on The River.

Ties that bind. Well, how do you make that?

How does that happen? You know?

How do people come together, fall apart?

How do... You know? I want to be a player.

You know? And... In...

So, I think, up to that point in my life,

I really hadn't had the courage to do that.

Or I tried and failed so quickly that, you know,

it didn't add up, so...

Part of The River was trying to find the courage to put my feet in,

jump in with both feet and...

..experience those things myself.

# I went out walking the other day

# Seen a little girl crying along the way

# She'd been hurt so bad, said she'd never love again

# Someday you're crying, girl, will end

# And you'll find once again

# Two hearts are better than one

# Two hearts, girl, get the job done

# Two hearts are better than one

# Once I spent my time playing tough guy scenes

# But I was living in a world of childish dreams

# Someday these childish dreams must end

# To become a man and grow up to dream again

# Now I believe in the end

# Two hearts are better than one

# Two hearts, girl, get the job done

# Two hearts are better than one

# Sometimes it might seem like it was planned

# For you to roam empty hearted through this land

# Though the world turns you hard and cold

# There's one thing that I know

# That's if you think your heart is stone

# And you're rough enough to whip this world alone

# Alone, buddy, there ain't no peace of mind

# That's why I'll keep searching till I find

# My special one

# Two hearts are better than one

# Two hearts, girl, get the job done

# Two hearts are better than one

# Now I believe

# Two hearts are better than one

# Two hearts, girl, get the job done

# Two hearts are better...

# Better than one. #

HE TAPS ON THE GUITAR

We'd moved to a large farmhouse in...

on Telegraph Hill Road in Holmdel, New Jersey.

It sat on 160 acres of land.

I think I paid 700 bucks a month rent on it, that's what I remember.

And so I started to write there for The River.

Living in the country was this very bucolic landscape.

There was a lot of ruralness in the... certainly in The River,

in the song The River. But I think sprinkled throughout the record.

Darkness, I have to say, that was kind of the Samurai record,

that was a record where there was a lot of isolation on it.

The River, I was trying to move my characters back towards,

towards the mainstream, I guess.

I wanted to write for my age, you know? I...

And really that started very consciously with Darkness

and continued through The River.

I was moving forward, but in a funny way

I was being inspired by things older than rock music at the time. And...

And that was where I was finding a lot of the commonality and content.

You know, was...in music that was older than rock music.

So I blended those two things, you know, I blended that

sensibility with the excitement of what I did with the band.

I was listening to quite a bit of classic country.

Roy Acuff and of course Johnny Cash and...George Jones,

Tammy Wynette. I just loved it, and I felt that,

you know, I felt the sympathy of it was set generally.

Once again, it was kind of small-town music and rural music.

But it also had adult concerns,

and I think I was interested in...in going there.

I dedicate this one to Max and Becky.

Come on, boys.

BAND START PLAYING

We used to all sit on the tour bus

and bet who was going to get married first.

And everybody would always be saying, "Not me!"

What about you? LAUGHTER

-No way.

-Nobody to marry?

No. What about you, big man?

When you got to go, you got to go.

You got to understand that the band at the time was not very grown-up.

That... In the sense that people were just starting to get married

and have their kids. So you forget we were still a bunch of kids.

And my family was gone, they were in California.

I wasn't much in touch with the rest of my family in New Jersey.

So there was the band.

You had your little, you know, rat pack,

and it was still very much the lost boys, you know?

By the time you're 30, you are...

You know, you have a clock that is ticking,

you are definitely operating in the adult world.

And I know I was...

..thinking about all these things by that time.

Relationships, they're a success, they're a failure.

And because of my own personal history.

It was a mystery to me how people

were successful at...

HE LAUGHS ..at those things.

And really, the writer's life is sort of

excavating those mysteries.

Working just with the acoustic guitar and a cassette tape

on a beatbox, you know.

I would simply sit with the cassette,

rewind it over and over and over and over and over and sit there

with my notebook and try to sing some successful lyrics on top of it.

The idea being, I would write all the songs and spare us studio time

and I would have a relatively good idea of what I was doing

before I went in.

# Beneath a street light too much fighting in the night

# Baby sitting here cause chain lightning... #

When the band comes to the house, it's our usual rehearsal situation.

In other words, I have a variety of specific parts

that I want the guys to play.

We learned those first and then the guys kind of add their, you know,

their flourishes as the rehearsal goes by and we'll see what works.

Beatbox always sounds great.

It's all compressed and it's slashing

and smashing around and it always sounds exciting.

I'm making my demos on my old cassette player...

..and I'm rehearsing the guys.

We're doing things like, a song called Night Fires,

The Man Who Got Away, a song called Under The Gun and those

are pretty exciting, musically.

So, I get about 13 or 14 of these things

and we decide it's time to try and make a record.

We go in and we cut the tracks and the tracks sound great

and I can't quite get the lyrics finished to them, you know,

which is a little unusual for me, but it happens.

So, my band did a lot of that music and, er, I move on.

I believe almost none of them worked out as realised pieces of music.

# Sitting at the lights around midnight

# Streaking lights and night

# We're chain lightning... #

I had a sense of what I could do, certainly what I wanted to do

and how broad I wanted the story I was telling, to be.

And if I didn't get it, I just didn't sleep well at night.

It wasn't...

This is what I was doing. I wasn't doing anything else.

I was only doing... I only had music.

And if I wasn't doing that right,

I just didn't know what I was doing on the planet at the time.

You have a sense of your reach and you hope that you can get there.

You don't know. When I took the record back from the studio,

I didn't know what record I was making. I was lost again.

I had to be willing to throw myself back into the wilderness.

Hacking away, not knowing if I was going to get where I wanted to go.

People were also used to the records being difficult

and once we had Born To Run, they were all hard records to make.

This is a continuation of the story of certain albums

and these were the days when we suffered tremendously trying

to gain the knowledge of how to make records.

Same thing on The River.

Now we're trying to make a different kind of record.

How do we make that record? I don't know.

How do we get this snare to sound the way we want it to sound?

Once again, we don't know.

How do we get the kind of mixes we want? Don't really know.

Once again, we were working outside the professional auspices

of the recording industry.

We hired ourselves and we knew we were going on an adventure

and a journey and a quest and when you got hired on,

that was the bar, that was the deal.

# Love fuelled not by the future

# But by a past we could... #

We were still in the process of carving out our identity.

For most of my audience, they were still familiar with two records,

Born To Run and Darkness On The Edge Of Town,

so we were still carving out who we were

and I needed a record that I felt had a very, very strong identity.

# I come from down in the valley

# Where, mister, when you're young

# They bring you up to do like your daddy done

# Me and Mary we met in high school

# When she was just 17

# We'd ride out of this valley

# Down to where the fields were green

# We'd go down to the river

# And into the river we'd dive

# Oh down to the river we'd ride...

'I think the biggest change on The River was,

'I started the narrative writing where I would inhabit a character.'

'With a very specific narrative story,'

I would sing in that voice,

a character, and it wasn't necessarily me.

It was partly me and partly other people, so, of course,

The River, that was my touchstone for all of the writing that came later.

Where you simply step into a character's shoes

and try to get your listeners to walk in those shoes for a while.

The River was the key to the record in that it was a throwback to

older folk music and an older voice. It was a very adult voice.

It was a political voice in the sense that it was dealing with

the Carter recession and its effects on working people.

# I got a job working construction for the Johnstown Company

# But lately there ain't been much work on account of the economy

# Now all those things that seemed so important

# They vanished right into the air

# I act like I don't remember

# Mary acts like she don't care

# I remember us driving in her brother's car

# Her body tanned and wet down at the reservoir

# At night on those banks I'd lie awake

# Pull her close just to feel each breath she'd take

# Now those memories come back to haunt me

# Yeah, they haunted me like a curse

# Is a dream a lie if it don't come true

# Or is it something worse

# That sends me down to the river

# Though I know the river is dry

# Sends me down to the river tonight... #

I think the, 'I come from down in the valley,'

you're laying claim to that character's experience

and you're trying to do right by it, as a songwriter.

And you're taking the risk of singing in that voice.

But that's the writer's job.

Your job is to faithfully imagine the world

and others' lives in a way that respects them, sort of,

honours them and records them in your own way somewhat faithfully.

# I pick you up with flowers when you get off work

# It's like you don't even care it's like I'm some kind of joke

# I take you out on a date and then you won't even kiss me

# But when I... #

The initial record of the River, we made it, we handed it into the

record company, we took that record back and worked for another year.

It was good, but as I listened to it, it just didn't feel big enough.

It didn't have the room to let in all of those different colours.

On that particular record, I needed more time to let in all

the colours and the feelings that I wanted to let in.

It wasn't quite funky enough.

It wasn't quite...

It didn't have the looseness that...

Darkness was a very tight, controlled record.

We wanted to go the other way with this record.

You know, the main thing we'd been continuing to hear was

the records were still not a exciting as the live show.

# Hey, hey, hey

# What do you say Sherry darling? #

Let me try and solve that problem if I can.

This was the first record that Steve came in, officially, as producer.

We were looking for an antidote to some of the sterility of what

we thought that '70s recordings had at that time.

The noise that creates mystery was being squeezed

out of records for the purpose of gaining more control over the sound.

It was a direction we didn't feel comfortable with.

The records we liked were noisy records, whether it's Hound Dog...

Dave Clark Five - Glad All Over, these were noisy, noisy records.

We need THAT now. We need the noise of our live show.

We got it off of Gary Bonds, you know, and

the party noises that were on the great Gary Bonds records, you know?

So we, sort of, took it from there and just said,

"Yeah, these records just sound like a house party."

We had four guys.

Everybody was doing, once again, everybody was doing something,

you know.

Steve likes things to be kind of noisy and trashy and raw

and exciting, you know.

John enjoys the classical, sort of, formality.

He likes clean records that are very well focused and he and Steve played

off each other during this record, which is what I wanted them to do.

You know, it might have been a little difficult for the two of them,

but I wanted them to be...

They're supposed to be at odds, to some degree.

And so I would kind of set them up against one another and I would find

my happy medium where I wanted the needle to sit

on this particular album.

That was the way I got the most out of the people that I had, you know.

John is somebody like...

If I wrote something like The River, I'd play it for him, you know.

He would immediately, kind of, process it and say,

"This is different than your other songs because..."

That might then inspire me to go further in that direction.

Charlie continued his position as a great technical adviser on how

to get the kinds of sounds that we wanted to get.

So I said, "Charlie, I want to get something very explosive.

"Snare sound, I want the band to sound wild and kind of loose."

We wanted to go back to the days when had a limited amount of control

over the ambience in the room, you know,

like when they recorded some of the Elvis things with a couple of mics.

Once again, we were going by... We were playing it by ear,

so some of those things worked out and some of those things

created problems in the end, but we didn't have any rules.

And we need, on this song, some slap back on the saxophone.

At least up here, a little bit.

A little effect on that saxophone.

We recorded and recorded and recorded and we were in the studio

day after day after day after day, you know.

I probably worked the hardest on some of the things

that ended up as outtakes.

You never knew. You didn't know where it was going.

I didn't know where it was going.

# Take 'em as they come... #

You think all of them are going to be on.

When you're cutting that song, you think,

"This is the one I've been waiting for."

# Take them as they come

# Take them as they come... #

The outtakes on The River are very complexly arranged.

There's a lot of singing, a lot of background vocal.

I can remember being exasperated that we couldn't get it together

to get something mixed or produce an album out of the

reams and reams of material that we had.

I had set myself up for certain standards

and I just had to sit tight until I felt like I was there.

Any time you're writing 70 songs, I've lost count how many,

you're just searching for something. You're searching for something.

I always say, "How did I end up making a record?"

I finally came out with ten songs I can stand.

I don't have the control that says,

"OK, I have this, this is toned or there's this aesthetic.

"I'm just going to write in this mind now."

Usually, I mean, you may end up with something like that.

You may end up with something very austere or something particular

but I splashed on The River, I splashed around for a year to

try and find out what that might be,

so, I didn't have a lot of control over it, to be honest with you.

Live, we'd play a wide variety of material from some jokey things,

comedy things, to deadly serious things.

Maybe I need the space to do that, you know? Maybe I need...

I didn't... I don't believe I took the record back

with the idea of making a double record, but,

I had some ideas about what the record needed to contain.

And I think the night that we said, "Well, we're making a double album,"

that was a big leap forward as far as giving me the freedom to go

where I needed to go.

You know, I could stop worrying about taking space up with stuff

that sounded like good bar band music, there was room for that

and that was a big decision.

MUSIC: Hungry Heart by Bruce Springsteen.

The scope of the record was enough to contain an actual hit single

which we had never had before.

The canvas of the record was broad enough to go... To go there.

I saw the Ramones at the Fast Lane, in Asbury Park

and they were great and we went backstage and we sat around talking.

I said, "I'll write these guys a song."

I ended up writing Hungry Heart before I went to bed that night,

you know.

It was one of those songs where you write it in the time it takes

you to sing it, practically.

Yeah, well, I was trying to lay down all

the variations on relationships, the various outcomes, I think.

And so...

So, the character, while he's going through something somewhat tragic,

is whimsical about it, you know.

That's funny.

-# Everybody's got a hungry heart

-Yeah, Yeah.

# Everybody's got a hungry heart

# Lay down your money and you play your part

# Everybody's got a hungry heart... #

He just thought with the heart of an accompanist.

He never stepped on anybody's toes,

he never got in the way of his singer.

He was one of the most natural accompanists I ever heard.

My recollection is he just went in,

we sat at the B3 and it flew out of his fingers.

The River was much more... A lot wider open.

There was a lot of different kinds of things

that were going to fit.

You know, Cadillac Ranch, Sherry Darlin,

they were going to fit on to the record, I decided.

How I chose, in the end, you know, I could've...

That was a record where I could've switched a lot of things around.

A lot of the things that ended up as outtakes, easily could've made it

on to the record or I could've taken some things on the record off.

I know there's a lot of outtakes. I mean, obviously, you have Roulette.

That was the big oversight.

That was the one that, say, instead of Crush On You,

Roulette should've got on the record.

A lot of them got dumped.

Loose Ends was on the first record, Be True was on the first record.

They never made it to the second record.

And I'm not sure why.

I like all the outtakes from this record, but a lot of them

seemed like they would be on a different record, you know.

One of the things that represented the band as the glorified bar band

that we are, I wanted to get that stuff on.

And then I wanted to get.... Then I had a lot of ballads.

The ballads were, kind of, the heart and soul of the record.

Point Blank, Stolen Car,

The River, Independence Day.

Those are the ones that are very cinematic, but they're all slow.

They're all slow, you know.

And so you couldn't have that many slow songs on a single album.

You had to spread it out over a couple of albums

and then in turn, I was able to get fun things on.

My trashy single sort of things.

What the band did and that we needed for exciting live concerts.

The end, the decision to take the record back, make a double album,

allowed me to get closer to what I thought the fans were asking for.

It was a record that felt like the band show live and allowed me

to create a large canvas, where I could create the world that

I wanted to talk to people about.

# But there ain't no doubt, girl, down here

# We ain't going to take what they're handing out

# While I'm out in the street... #

So, finally, when I went out on the road, it was enormous relief.

# While I'm out in the street

# I talk the way I want to talk

# Out in the street... #

I always said I felt River was...

I, kind of, captured my characters, Independence Day,

Point Blank, The River, Stolen Car

and then I also gave them the music they were listening to

when they went out at night in the bars or in the clubs.

Out In The Street, it was like a Friday On My Mind.

It was my rewrite of a weekend song.

The minute you go to play live, everything expands.

The minute you step out onto your...

Before the audience comes in, you get the band together

on the rehearsal stage and suddenly you hear the arrangements

begin to blow up and expand into something that's going to reach out

and grab the audience.

The more formal sounds,

you would tend to stick a little closer to the recorded

arrangement and the more things that were based in soul or R&B

or rockabilly, those were things that you could then take on stage

and blow up into a showpiece.

I studied the great bandleaders, as I have said in the past.

Sam Moore from Sam & Dave, James Brown.

They set the band up as an incredible, expressive

extension of themselves so that the band could respond to every breath.

That was what was exciting onstage.

That was the essence of great band leading.

I wanted to incorporate that into a rock show.

# Shiny and black

# Open it up

# Now it's tearing up the highway like a big old dinosaur... #

Because we had so many soul influences, that was...

That was what we aspired to.

We aspired to playing like these great bands, but as a rock band.

THEY PLAY CADILLAC RANCH

Part of our concerts, a lot of joy and a lot of fun.

That was important.

Sometimes I'd write something just to hear Clarence play

a particular type of solo.

Big man!

We were schooled on the sax solos from the Dion records.

They were very, very specific, melodically.

We wanted those kind of classic sax solos where you could

come away humming them after you heard them a few times.

The songs where you create a very kind of classic melody

and it would be more of a composed, written piece,

very similar to the way we built solos on

Born To Run or Darkness On The Edge Of Town.

The band was sophisticated by that point.

People's playings had gotten...

People playing in the band together had gotten very good

and so it was a nice place in our development, also.

That was... That was a powerful tour, The River tour.

At the time, I was pouring through a variety of history books just

to contextualise myself, understand where I came from

and what that meant...

And I wanted to write songs of breadth that had some breadth

and depth to them and I wanted to write about the place I lived

and wanted to write about my own history,

the history of my family and I wanted to write about social forces

that I felt played...

Er, played through that history and...

So I devoured quite a few history books at the time just trying

to get a sense of where everything came from.

You're brought in on a very late night, intimate conversation

between two people, so that brings you in right away.

# Papa, go to bed now it's getting late

# Nothing we can say is gonna change anything now

# I'll be leaving in the morning from St Mary's Gate

# We wouldn't change this thing even if we could somehow

# Cos the darkness of this house has got the best of us

# There's a darkness in this town that's got us too

# But they can't touch me now

# And you can't touch me now

# They ain't gonna do to me... #

It was kind of a part of a series of songs I wrote about my dad that

weren't completely autobiographical,

but were pretty emotionally autobiographical.

# It's Independence Day all down the line

# Just say goodbye, it's Independence Day

# It's Independence Day this time

# Now I don't know what it always was with us

# We chose the words, and yeah, we drew the lines

# There was just no way this house could hold the two of us

# I guess that we were just too much of the same kind

# Well, say goodbye, it's Independence Day

# All boys must run away come Independence Day

# So say goodbye, it's Independence Day

# All men must make their way come Independence Day... #

He's leaving but he's looking for something, you know,

he's leaving with purpose.

You know, he's trying to find those things that give him impact

and presence and mass, in the world.

# Now the rooms are all empty down at Frankie's joint

# And the highway she's deserted clear down to Breaker's Point

# There's a lot of people leaving town now

# Leaving their friends, their homes

# At night they walk that dark and dusty highway all alone

# Well, Papa go to bed now it's getting late

# Nothing we can say can change anything now

# Because there's just different people coming down here now

# And they see things in different ways

# And soon everything we've known will just be swept away

# So say goodbye, it's Independence Day

# Papa, now I know the things you wanted that you could not say

# Say goodbye, it's Independence Day

# I swear I never meant to take those things away. #

It was just a discussion.

You've reached some understanding of who your parents are and their

humanity and you're alone, also, and you're going to take different paths.

It is a song that's...

It's quite without bitterness.

Some regret and some sad understanding.

And also the exhilaration of being cut free.

It's always public and personal, I guess, simultaneously, for me.

Erm, I don't ascribe to myself any great political

conscience or social conscience, for that matter,

and I always believe I'm trying to write my way out of some box

that I've found myself caught in when I was younger and myself

and my parents caught in.

Really, most of the writing I've done,

it's always personal in some way

and then it connects to the outside world

and connects to issues of the day, but it begins as a personal

conversation between me and myself, about something that still is

digging at me from either my past or the present.

The idea of losing someone, you know, in that way.

We all lost friends and partners.

You know, somebody is there and then they're just gone, you know.

That song makes its bones in the last verse.

Where I think it really grabs... Grabs people.

# Once I dreamed we were together again

# Baby, you and me

# Back home in those old clubs

# The way we used to be

# We were standin' at the bar, it was hard to hear

# The band was playin' loud and you were shoutin' somethin' in my ear

# You pulled my jacket off and as the drummer counted four

# You grabbed my hand and pulled me out on the floor

# You just stood there and we started dancin' slow

# I pulled you tighter I swore I'd never let you go

# Well, I saw you last night down on the avenue

# Your face was in the shadows but I knew it was you

# You were standin' in the doorway out of the rain

# You didn't answer when I called out your name

# You just turned and then you looked away

# Like just another stranger waitin' to get blown away

# Point blank

# Right between the eyes

# Baby, point blank

# Right between the pretty lies they tell. #

So that was just vivid, you know. And...

Yeah, when I nailed that verse, I nailed the song.

The four songs on the last side of the record, are all summational,

they all... They all...

are goodbyes in one style or another.

It was one of those songs you wrote, didn't know what to do with.

It seemed like a small piece.

It was just this little jam and then it came up

and ended up closing a record.

It was, you know, love and death, life and death

and I wanted the record to...

..to break down to that at the end, at the very end.

You have your love song - Drive All Night.

And then there was just this quiet reckoning,

that this character has internally.

You know, with themselves on a...

..on a particular evening when, kind of, the...

What's at stake in life, is made vivid to them.

You know. It's got that...

# Last night I was out driving

# Coming home at the end of the working day

# I was riding alone through the drizzling rain

# On a deserted stretch of a county two-lane

# When I came upon a wreck on the highway

# There was blood and glass all over

# There was nobody there but me

# As the rain tumbled down hard and cold

# I seen a young man lying by the side of the road

# He cried, "Mister, won't you help me please"

# Ambulance finally came and took him to Riverside

# I watched as they drove him away

# And I thought of a girlfriend or a young wife

# And a state trooper knocking in the middle of the night

# To say, "Your baby died in a wreck on the highway"

# Sometimes I sit up in the darkness

# And I watch my baby as she sleeps

# Then I climb in bed and I hold her tight

# I just lay there awake in the middle of the night

# Thinking 'bout the wreck on the highway. #

So that was...

I just wanted to leave the listeners with their thoughts, you know,

that the stakes of the record boil down to life, death,

love, you know, time, limited amount of time that you have.

If felt right. It felt right.

First record dealing with men, women, marriage, children,

all the mundane things that turn life into life, you know.

I think I was thinking about how to make these things more than

aesthetic ideas in my own life, you know.

You know, how do I practically...?

How do I practically live life like this?

You know, where I make the kind of connections that I'm very

frightened of, but that I feel that if I don't make,

I'm going to disappear or get lost, you know.

The creative life, an imagined life is not a life.

It's merely something you've created.

It's merely a story, you know.

A story is not a life. A story is just a story.

So, I was trying to link this stuff up in a way where I thought

I could save myself, you know...

..from my darker inclinations...

..by moving into an imagined community where people were

struggling with all those things, in a very real way, you know.

And that was the community that I created on The River.

# You been hurt and you're all cried out, you say

# You walk down the street pushing people outta your way

# You packed your bags and all alone you wanna ride

# You don't want nothing, don't need no-one by your side

# You're walking tough, baby, but you're walking blind

# To the ties that bind

# The ties that bind

# Now you can break the ties that bind

# A cheap romance, you say it's all just a crush

# You don't want nothing that anybody can touch

# You're so afraid of being somebody's fool

# Not walking tough, baby, not walking cool

# You walk cool but, darling, can you walk the line

# And face the ties that bind?

# The ties that bind

# Now you can break the ties that bind

# Whoa, whoa, I

# I'd rather feel the hurt inside

# Yes, I would, darling, than know

# Than know the emptiness your heart must hide

# Yes, I would, darling

# Yes, I would, darling

# Yes, I would, baby

Hey!

# You sit and wonder just who's gonna stop the rain

# Who'll ease the sadness who's gonna quiet your pain

# It's a long dark highway and a thin white line

# Connecting, baby, your heart to mine

# You're running now but, darling, we will stand in time

# To face the ties that bind

# The ties that bind

# Now you can break the ties that bind

# You can't forsake the ties that bind

# Whoa whoa whoa Whoa whoa whoa. #