An Interview with the Boss
Interviewing Bruce Springsteen - even with a pretty proscribed subject matter - was a joy and a bit of. thrill for this jaded journalist. The story and the interview below. PLUS A Bruce playlist!
Thanks for coming along with me on this journey. If you enjoy the post, please subscribe and please share. This is a word of mouth operation! Thanks for reading. Please check out my three books by clicking away:
One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band
Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan
A selected Bruce Springsteen playlist. Just some of my favorites, heavily weighted towards his first four or five albums.
I profiled Dion for The Wall Street Journal in June, 2020. You can read that whole story here.
I found him to be one of the most enlightened and enlightening people I’ve ever interviewed. I will work towards posting the entire interview here. The story was based around Dion’s album Blues With Friends, which includes duets and guitar playing by Joe Bonamassa, Jeff Beck, Steve Van Zandt, Van Morrison, John Hammond Jr., Brian Setzer… and Bruce Springsteen.
I thought it would be great to have a quote from one of the guests and I figured that I might as well start at the top – with the Boss. I emailed his manager Jon Landau, with whom I ‘ve had a friendly relationship since I interviewed him for One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band. He has an interesting history with the ABB, which goes back to Phil Walden’s management of Otis Redding. Read the book if you want to know more about that!
Jon quickly replied that he thought Bruce might be interested, and within a day or two an interview was being set up. I used a couple of nice quotes in the story, and share the entire, barely edited interview here. Bruce was MY GUY as I was first getting deeply into music as a young teenager and I can barely describe how much. a part of my junior high and high school life and his music were. Like breathing.
Before we get to the interview, some context via Dion’s description of how Bruce came to play on the song “Hymn To Him”:
“I had this song called ‘Hymn to Him’ I had written a long time ago, and I always thought it was strong. I thought it had heart, thought it was soulful. And I thought Patti Scialfa would sound great on this. She’s the Jersey soul girl, for sure. She’s gonna rumble doll, she’s gonna make this fly. So I sent it to her. She says ‘Dion, I love it. I wanna sing on it, I hear some stuff.’ Then she starts asking me what to do and I just let her go. She came up with a vocal arrangement that’s totally her own. She kept running these vocals, almost like Phil Spector. She laid about nine vocals on and it sounded like the wind of the holy spirit or something. It captures this whole beautiful, sublime sound.
“And Bruce loves the song from the very beginning. Patti told me that he came in with his guitar. He heard a solo, and she asked if I minded him playing it and I said, ‘Hey, if I don’t have to pay him, go ahead.’ So he does this solo and, you know, he has this gravitas, this big sound, which was just so perfect for what she did. it was a great example of how these great artists expanded my limited vision and made the songs better beyond what I could have imagined. I gotta tell you, it was like a gift. I really asked Patti to do it, and he just gave me a gift. It was like a Christmas present.”
Interview with Bruce Springsteen, conducted on the phone June 2, 2020.
“Hey, Alan! It’s Bruce!”
Hi Bruce. Thank you so much for calling. Can you hold on one second while I begin recording?
Sure.
[Gone about 5 seconds. Recording begins with mercifully no delays or glitches.]
Bruce, you there?
I’m here.
Thank you. It felt really weird to put Bruce Springsteen on hold.
[Bruce laughs a lot. Whew. My joke, which was actually a true statement, went over.]
I just hung up with Dion an hour ago and he said to tell you thank you again.
Oh, that’s great!
He told me his version of how you ended up on the song, but I’d like to hear it from you, so let’s start there and then talk about Dion.
It was really through Patti. Dion asked Patti to do something on the music and I was in the studio with her and she said, “Why don’t you put something on here if you have any ideas.” So I got to play a little guitar, which I like to do. Always like to do.
I love Dion and I have, gosh, since I heard ‘Teenager in Love’ on my mom’s radio as a small boy. That was the first thing I heard and, you know, we became friendly over the years and he’s just one of those guys whose artistic curiosity has never left him, which is very unusual for musicians. It usually fades, or they lose it somehow, but Dion has remained musically curious throughout his entire life and made all kinds of different records and has continued using what is probably one of the great white pop voices of all times in creative ways. That’s very inspiring.
To look to a musician who’s a generation older than you still recording vital music?
Yeah, actually older than me! [laughs] It’s fun to see people older than me now who are still artistically vibrant. [laughs] It truly is.
And the solo you played is cool and evocative, and it fits perfectly.
It was just fun! It was… Patti was really kind of producing the session, so she gave me a lot of direction as to where to go. She’s quite good at production.
Dion said that the layered vocals were completely her idea.
Yeah, totally. She went in and said, “I have this idea.” She had all these different vocal parts and it was just incredibly creative. It was really something… I didn’t know where she was going with it until she was finished and she spent quite a few hours just very carefully layering part after part after part until something really happened. It was a great day in the studio.
Was the approach you wanted to take on that solo clear to you? Did you try different approaches?
I don’t know. I picked up a Gretsch guitar, which has a tremolo bar on it. That’s what Duane Eddy played, so that defines a little bit the sound you’re going to get, where you’re going sonically, and Patti was assisting melodically and just telling me what she was hearing and I really was there supporting her. She made it easy and it was fun. It’s an incredible song and it’s really just very, very difficult to write well about that subject and not sound preachy. He just wrote a beautiful hymn.
You talked about hearing “Teenager in Love” and being so inspired as a kid. What came next? I think all of Dion’s stuff holds up incredibly well.
Oh! Yes! First of all, it all swung like crazy. You put on “Ruby Baby,” “The Wanderer, “Runaround Sue” … all of these things have a swing, you know? And then the other thing is the sax… the great great sax solos. The guy’s name is slipping my mind right now. Um…
It’s…
What was his name?
Buddy Lucas.
Right! That affected me a lot, too, you know. Obviously when Clarence and I got together, and after Clarence passed away and Jake [Clemons] got in the band, I said, “These are some essential saxophone parts that you just need to know if you are going to work in our band.” The sax solos from the Dion records are certainly part of that.
I know that when you encountered Clarence, you just wanted him in the band, but do you think that’s part of what you heard in your head?
Yeah, of course! You can go back in, if you look at your rock history, the use of the saxophone on the Dion records is very, very specific and incredibly well done. So when I contemplated sax on my records, yeah, I wanted those big, swinging sax solos. That sound! All of these solos... you can hum them. They’re melodic and built from such concrete melodically. [Sings “The Wanderer” sax solo.] You can sing them and I wanted people to be able to sing Clarence’s solos. They’re formal. They are not improvisations. They’re actually quite formal. That just, I don’t know, it just ingested into my music somehow.
The guys on the Dion records are incredible – Bucky Pizzarelli playing rhythm guitar and Mickey Baker, lead…
Yeah!
The rhythm section is Panama Francis and Milt Hinton, top-flight jazz guys.
Yeah, and you can tell. You can tell.
Thank you very much for this. That covers it, but may I ask you one other completely obscure question?
Sure.
I wrote a biography of the Allman Brothers…
Yeah.
I’ve always heard that they were a big influence …
Oh yeah! When I had a band Steel Mill, they were a huge influence. Huge influence. The two guitars, and if you’re ever to go onto the internet and dig way, way down deep into the Steel Mill material you will eventually hear the kind of guitar playing that came out of the Allman Brothers. We had the two guitars, we did the third melodies… and actually yes I was a huge Allman Brothers fan when they hit and with the band I had at that time, which was 69-71. That was right in the wheelhouse and yeah they were a huge influence.
A taste of Steel Mill:
Thanks. That’s what I thought but I have never heard you discuss it.
Yeah. Not so much when I started making my own records, but right previously to that when I had a big, bluesy hard rock band, they were a huge influence.
Well, thanks Bruce. That was great and it will give the story a nice boost.
Of course. It was a pleasure. God bless.
Postscript: As soon as we hung up, I regretted not throwing in one more followup and asking about his experience opening for the Allman Brothers in 1971.
And now I realize there’s a soundboard recording of the Allman Brothers from that very show! Includes the end of “Liz Reed” and a complete “Hot ‘Lanta.”
A few days later I saw Stevie Van Zandt praising Gregg on Twitter so I asked him about it, and he promptly replied, “They were great. And Duane complimented my slide playing.”
Alan-fun stuff. New for me was that he once opened for the Allman Bros. It would have been interesting to see them together.
Such a wonderful interview! Great that you brought it to Steel Mill, too. Richmond was a great town for them (and Child and the Bruce Springsteen Band). They played at the University of Richmond and VCU and the Back Door and, famously, atop the Seventh Street parking garage. Love that connection.