A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

IT'S THEATRE, YOU KNOW. I'M A THEATRICAL PERFORMER. I'M WHISPERING IN YOUR EAR, AND YOU'RE DREAMING MY DREAMS, AND THEN I'M GETTING A FEELING FOR YOURS. I'VE BEEN DOING THAT FOR FORTY YEARS:  I recognize that we've got a segment of the audience here who'll say enough with the Springsteen, but for the rest, David Remnick's lengthy New Yorker profile of the artist at age 62 will be immensely satisfying. Springsteen is particularly revelatory in discussing his mindset in putting together a concert (and this post-Clarence tour in particular), his thirty years of psychoanalysis, the role of politics in his music, and how his personal wealth plays into all of it:

In their early days as a couple, Bruce and Patti’s idea of a perfect vacation was to get in the car and drive to Death Valley, rent a cheap hotel room with no TV and no phone, and just hang out. Now they are more likely to take a trip with the kids or cruise the Mediterranean on David Geffen’s yacht. “I remember when my family became pretty wealthy, and some people tried to make us feel bad about being wealthy,” she said. “Here’s the bottom line. If your art is intact, your art is intact. Who wrote ‘Anna Karenina’? Tolstoy? He was an aristocrat! Did that make his work any less true? If you are lucky enough to have a real talent and you’ve fed it and mined it and protected it and been vigilant about it, can you lose it? Well, you can lose it by sitting outside and drinking Ripple! It doesn’t have to be the high life.”

As Springsteen sees it, the creative talent has always been nurtured by the darker currents of his psyche, and wealth is no guarantee of bliss. “I’m thirty years in analysis!” he said. “Look, you cannot underestimate the fine power of self-loathing in all of this. You think, I don’t like anything I’m seeing, I don’t like anything I’m doing, but I need to change myself, I need to transform myself. I do not know a single artist who does not run on that fuel. If you are extremely pleased with yourself, nobody would be fucking doing it! Brando would not have acted. Dylan wouldn’t have written ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ James Brown wouldn’t have gone ‘Unh!’ He wouldn’t have searched that one-beat down that was so hard. That’s a motivation, that element of ‘I need to remake myself, my town, my audience’—the desire for renewal.”

Among the nuggets in the article: as an editor with Rolling Stone, Jon Landau assigned the review of Springsteen's debut album to Lester Bangs. Go read it. ("He's been influenced a lot by the Band, his arrangements tend to take on a Van Morrison tinge every now and then, and he sort of catarrh-mumbles his ditties in a disgruntled mushmouth sorta like Robbie Robertson on Quaaludes with Dylan barfing down the back of his neck. It's a tuff combination, but it's only the beginning.")