| Stan Goldstein |
It was an enjoyable conversation with Tom Hanks and Bruce Springsteen at the Beacon Theatre in New York City on Friday evening. Although we didn't learn much new, it was entertaining and a thrill to be there..
Spotted In the audience were Malia Obama, Patti Scialfa, Rita Wilson, Jon Landau and Gayle King. Also many of the fans from across the country, Canada and Europe packed the theater.
It lasted about an hour, with Hanks focusing mostly on Bruce's early bands and early work before he realized time was getting short and he rushed it a bit at the end.
Warning, this is very long, but does cover most of the conversation.
Hanks began the conversation by talking about Jonathan Demme, the director of "Philadelphia" who passed away earlier this week.
"I think the strongest union of our two names is probably 'Philadelphia,' " Hanks said. "God bless Jonathan Demme. We just lost him."
"He was such an inspirational guy," Bruce said. "No Jonathan Demme, no 'Philadelphia,' no 'Streets of Philadelphia' ."
Bruce explained his quick process of writing the song which Demme asked him to write after Neil Young sent him "Philadelphia," which closes the movie.
Demme wanted "more of a rock song for the beginning, so I said I'd give it a shot," Bruce said. "I tried for a day or so to come up with something, and I didn't come up with anything. I had some lyrics. Eventually, I just came up with that tiny little beat and the track, and I figured it wasn't what he wanted but I sent it to him anyway. He sent me that opening piece of film where the camera moves slowly through Philly, and I said, 'What do you think?' And he says, 'Great.' And that was it. It took about two days."
"Well, I have to tell you," Hanks said, "if you ever want to have a great moment in a motion picture, walk out a door and make sure they just put up a Bruce Springsteen song."
From there, Hanks took his notes from Bruce's autobiography "Born to Run" and a few times he would start the lyrics to a song and have the audience finish them. "I'm going to have to start doing that," Bruce said.
Tom asked Bruce "Did Jersey make Springsteen or did Springsteen make New Jersey? You write about New Jersey as a place you have to get out of and the place you must return to. Would you have formed the E Street Band if you had grown up in Texas?"
Bruce answered that by talking about a trip he took to San Francisco in 1970. "We played a little club, a place called the Matrix. I'm in the bathroom, I'm pissing next to this guy and he says 'you guys are pretty good. Where are you from?'
"I said New Jersey. He said, 'what's that?' He didn't say "where's that."
"My first record I wasn't a New York artist and I was from New Jersey, that's why I named it "Greetings from Asbury Park."
Tom then said: "One of the greatest addresses I've have ever heard and said something made up and Bruce replied: "39 1/2 Institute Street." (his second childhood home in Freehold).
"We need to put blue markers there saying Bruce Springsteen lived here," said Hanks. He then had Bruce talk about his early years.
" My grandfather was an electrician. We would go out to trash and go through every trash can in Freehold, New Jersey," he said to cheers from the audience. Bruce then said: "Is that for trash or for Freehold, N.J.?"
Bruce continued: "television was just taking hold. The centerpiece of the living room was the big radio cabinet."
Tom: "You stayed up til 3 o'clock in the morning."
Bruce: "Yes, I did. it was no coincidence that later on I took a job where I stayed up til 3 a.m. When I was very young I would sleep to three in the afternoon and get up at three in the morning because I could.
When I got in school, I hated school because I had to get up at 8 a.m. I hated every minute of it until I got out."
Tom said "You learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school" to laughs.
Bruce said how he grew up near the Catholic church and he saw funerals, weddings. He went to church twice a week, "the nuns were our neighbors. Faith was very big. We were an Italian, Irish family.
"It was a factory town."
Tom asked: "If you hadn't been dazzled by the music coming out of the radio, where would you have gotten your first job?
"The only honest work I've ever done in my entire life, at 14-15 years old, I was a lawn boy in the summertime and I painted houses for my cousins, and I tarred roofs in the summer time, to get money for my first guitar so I had a reason..
What would I have done? I don't know. They're coming for me now (as we all could hear a siren from outside the theater).
Bruce said it took him about three to six months to bang out that first three-minute song from his guitar..
Tom then had them put up one of the pictures from Bruce's book, when he was with the Castiles playing the guitar on a lifeguard stand.
"Should I describe this?," Bruce said. "This is how we opened the show. I have on a pair of sandals which I haven't worn on stage in a while, and I think I;m the coolest fucking thing ever. If you look you can see we are at the surf club, there are surfboards behind us."
"One of the earliest photographs where we can see Bruce got the guitar and he learned how to make it talk," Hanks said. .
Asked about the Castiles and where the name came from and Bruce said the name came from Castiles shampoo.
"The first night we played a swim club and I made $5. I remember coming home and thinking 'Jesus Christ someone paid me $5!." And that was the best money I ever made, except for all the rest!".
Tom said being at a Bruce show is like going to church and "the preachers starts preaching right away. That set list is a moment."
"The thing is, being on stage, you either don't know what you're doing or aren't doing anything and it is terrifying," Bruce said. "We kinda of come out and go into a protective crouch right away by trying to finish the job in the first three minutes to give you your money's worth and the rest of the night is on."
"We are all satisfied," Hanks said. "We will follow you into hell sir."
Bruce then talked about what it was like playing in the Castiles.
"When you're starting out, you try to sound half-ass, all right and not embarrass yourself in front of the whole high school, CYO or YMCA. It's a big motivation at 15. You're feeling a strange empowerment that comes with a fucking guitar. All the sudden you are the prettiest girl in school. It's very strange, you come from the low end of the totem pole and the difference a few songs in a band makes."
At that point, Bruce stopped as he lost his train of thought and said "What the fuck were we taking about?"
Hanks then asked about Steel Mill:"Did anyone actually see Steel Mill?" he asked the audience and there were a few claps,.
"You become a quasi-legend locally. Jersey and Richmond are hotbeds of Steel Mill mania," Hanks said. "You wrote original material with a band called Steel Mill and eventually drawing a thousand people to a show."
"We played some clubs where we could skip through with a good amount of original music but then if I I had to thrown a cover in, Creedence was always a sure winner," Bruce said. ."That band worked real well for two or three years. It was kind of a heavy blues band, we played with our shirts off and our hair down to here. I had a Les Paul and a Marshall stack. The music was pretty original. You can go to Youtube and hear a ton of it is on there."
Bruce then said "He's guilty, he's guilty" and only a few people yelled out "Send that boy to jail." to follow up on the "next lyric" game Hanks was doing. "There was a lot of silence out there,"Bruce said.
Tom then asked about Steel Mill being a democracy, not having Bruce as the dictator.
"Actually the guy who got the whole thing rolliing was Vincent 'Maddog' Lopez," Bruce said. "He initially got me together with Danny (Federici) and Little Vinnie (Roslin). It was the four of us. I was originally going to join a cover band for the money in Asbury Park which i needed at the time. That didn't work out and we put together Child, then it became Steel Mill.
"After Steel Mill I decided I was going to go with my own band. Rock bands generally , you're in your 20s with all these misfits, people are hating one another, fighting, and getting thrown in jail, and you're bailing them out and another guy is going to jail and leaving marijuana plants on the front seat of the car. It was along list, these things were going on constantly and every day.
A gentle, controlling hand is not such a bad thing."
Hanks then talk about Bruce's first album, "Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J."
"We were big big fish in Asbury Park and Central New Jersey and I had a lot of people telling me I was great and I chose to believe them, by the time I got to making the record," Bruce said. "I had a lot of experience. I had been across the U.S. and back. I had been down south. I had a lot of road experience.
"I listened to the radio and said "we're as good as those guys.
"When i made my first record, you're a combination of overflowing with confidence and a complete phony where it could fall apart in 30 seconds. I went in with these new songs and I thought they were pretty good."
Bruce talked a little about his tryout for John Hammond and CBS Records.
"I've been around eight or nine years and had made a living" he said. "If this doesn't work out I can still sing and play as when I walked in here. I will still be who I am. If they don't like us, nothing will be lost because we had nothing."
Tom asked Bruce why there is no guitar on "Greetings.:
"I played one song, 'Saint in the City,' and John Hammond said, "You got to be on Columbia records.
"There was no guitar because initially they wanted me to be a folk singer, and John Hammond wanted it to be completely solo album with just me in a guitar and we wanted it to be a rock record. We settled in the middle and I like how it came up.
"I was living in an abandoned beauty salon in Asbury Park, and there I saw the street characters who were in Asbury at the time, and the record got mixed up with all those people and that setting, it was semi-autobiographical. The music came out of the boardwalk and carnival life. It just comes to you."
Next the talk shifted to "The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle.":
"The greasers who came down (to Asbury Park), they had no tans, just in their shark-skinned pants, They would invade the town on the weekend. All that came from life experience and a certain amount of imagination," Bruce said..
Hanks asked the crowd to tell the person next to you, your recollection of where you were and what you were doing the first time you heard "Born to Run."
"It's a specific recollection! Is it not?" he said.
"This is the moment for many of us when you transferred from the specificness of New Jersey to the heart and soul of Amercia."
"We made two albums and they hadn't done well and I was about to be bounced off the record label," Bruce said. "I was thinking broader at the time. We had done some touring by then, we had been around the states, we were road dogs, I knew I had a foot out of the door. We always came back to New Jersey because we felt safe there.
" 'Born to Run' was just the next song I wrote. I didn't know if it was going to be a hit or if it wasn't going to be a hit. if you listen to something you think it's going to be good, but that hadn't been the case up to that point."
Bruce said 'Born to Run" is "cinematic!"
"It came from life experiences from being in Asbury on a Saturday night when you had the circuit with all the hot rods going around and around on a Friday and Saturday," he said. "That life was there in front of me and that came from every B hot-rod movie I had ever seen. "Thunder Road" (the movie) with Robert Mitchum played opposite Keeley Smith. I saw all, those B-Hot Rod pictures.
"The basic sound (of Born to Run) was wide screen. It gave you a world and a life outside of New Jersey.
"We were clueless about making records. Jimmy Iovine became the engineer, I don't know if he ever engineered anything before that.
"We could never get that sound again but we only had to do it once."
Hanks then brought up about Bruce not paying his taxes.
"A man also has to pay his taxes. Which you did not do until your entire life. Until someone said "Hey Mr. Time Magazine cover," do you pay taxes?" he said.
"We were Willie Nelson in reverse " Bruce said. " I never met anyone in New Jersey who was paying taxes. Certainly no one under 25 was paying taxes. Mike Appel, who handled our business, said 'I"m not paying any fucking taxes.'
"All this time went by and no one is paying any taxes, some guy at the IRS must have gotten smart and then they came after us. I had to work for a couple of years for someone else every night. I didn't work for myself until 1980. I had to pay all the taxes. I had to pay, and bills I had to pay because I didn't pay any bills either. Then we had to pay for the lawyers, then we made records that were expensive because we didn't know how to make them. In 1980 I only had $20,000.
"You got to have the insane hunger, ego ambition, and desperation to take the chance, anything that comes your way and try to bust those doors down. I didn't pay any taxes, but I do now."
With which Hanks followed up with "Although it's looks like you may not have to pay so much now" to laughs from the crowd.
It was here where Hanks realized he had a lot more to talk about but only about 20 minutes of time left.
He touched briefly on "Darkness on the Edge of Town" and "The River."
"One of my great mentors, Mr. Jon Landau, who was a film critic and he had me watch films." Bruce said. "Tat had a big impact on me was John Ford's Grapes of Wrath.
I wanted some of that in my music: "The Promised Land," "Racing in the Street.'
You tell a story to save your life. That's really what your motivation is.The writer tells a story to save his life, to experience life at its fullest. "
Bruce said that "Born to Run" had one extra song (although the aficiondos say it's three). Hanks said "Darkness" had 57 songs and he had to cherry pick it down to 10 songs.
Hanks brought up "the biggest record in Bruce Springsteen's career: 'Born in the U.S.A.' " as he recited some of the lyrics to "No Surrender.":
"Steve convinced me to keep that song on," Bruce said. "I thought it was too glib, I still think that. It's about the band and the brotherhood of the band and the fans, and at that time I gave him the benefit of doubt. I was always a little frightened of it. The whole record I have mixed feelings about."
Hanks asked Bruce about people misinterpreting the meaning of the song "Born in the U.S.A."
"People hear the music, the beat, then they hear the chorus and if they have the time or inclination then maybe some of the the versus," Bruce said. "That's the way the political rock and roll ball bounces.
"I still feel it's one of the best songs I've ever written. Something about the original recording I feel is at its best".
Bruce then discussed about writing about Vietnam.
"I had some close friends, Bobby Muller, Ron Kovic, who came home in wheelchairs. I was a stone-cold draft dodger. I pulled the whole Alice's Restaurant. 'I'm sorry sir I don't understand what you're saying. I'm high on LSD.'
"I did the draft-dodgers text book and perhaps I felt guilty about that later. I had friends who went and died and who were seriously hurt. It was an event that defined a generation.
"It was something that had to be reckon with. Whether books or film, it was something I needed to sing about."
Hanks touched briefly on "Tunnel of Love" and "Brilliant Disguise" before Bruce wrapped things up with this:
"Musically we make our own little worlds, .we sell them to you, you can live in them, for a while. They can be important, they can get you through the day, though the night, they can change the way you think, the way you look, the way your dress, the way you approach your own life. Or it can just thrill you for three-minute of bliss, but they can't give you a life.
"At the end of the day we're all stuck on earth trying to carve out a life for ourselves. It took me a long time to learn that lesson, thanks Patti. It was a tremendous struggle for me. I found I like to happen to the world, we don't like the world to happen to us. I'm going to create my own new world, got to let the the chips fall where they may."
Hanks said he had notes on 11 more albums but he would not be able to get to that. "You continue to talk to us on these records," he said. "I think what you have done more specially for all of us, is you have made us part of something very good in ourselves."
Yes Bruce Springsteen has done that for all of us.
Thank you for reading.
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