Springsteen Hears Voices
We’re in the ballpark,” Bruce Springsteen tells his band during a rehearsal of “Devils and Dust” at the Paramount Theatre, in Asbury Park, New Jersey. “One more time, then we’ll take a break.” The band runs through the song one more time, as instructed, yet the promised break doesn’t come. In fact, Springsteen shows no signs of stopping. “The first note is dark,” he tells the guitarist. To the backup singers: “Underline ‘Fear’s a dangerous thing’ on the lyric sheet.” The band members look exhausted. They have been going for five hours straight.
“It’s lunchtime,” Patti Scialfa, Springsteen’s wife, backup singer, guitarist and timekeeper, suggests.
“Let’s just see what we got.”
“Maybe we should do lunch first,” she hints again.
“One more time, then we’ll all take a break,” Springsteen presses on.
Wearily, horns are put to lips, violin bows to strings, fingers to accordion buttons. When it comes to energy level and focus, Springsteen, even in rehearsal, remains superhuman.
The band has three weeks until its debut performance, at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Scheduled afterward are a ten-date European tour and a monthlong American roadshow, which kicks off on Memorial Day. However, this ensemble is not Springsteen’s walloping blood-brothers the E Street Band. It’s a mix of old friends and new faces, a thirteen-piece outfit that has been nearly ten years in the making. In various incarnations, it has convened exactly three times before this stretch of rehearsals. Those three times led to Springsteen’s newest and perhaps least commercial album, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, a collection of labor, civil-rights, protest and story songs from the repertoire of Pete Seeger, the pillar of the midcentury folk revival, now eighty-seven and laid up with a bad leg in upstate New York.
When the promised break finally comes, Springsteen pulls off his horse-emblazoned country & western shirt, revealing a thinning but still solid frame, and wriggles into a faded black T-shirt. He has small hoop earrings in his ears, string bracelets fraying on his wrists, brown work pants bunched around his boots and two days of stubble mottled with gray.
He wanders through the tangle of musicians and crew onstage, glad-handing and making small talk, slightly uncomfortable in an effort to make sure everyone else is comfortable. At fifty-six, Springsteen has earned his Neil Young pass, entitling him to basically record whatever he wants because, be it good or bad, commercial or noncommercial, it’s done with integrity.
“My goal has been to try and put more things out, because in my youth I was so spare with ray releases,” Springsteen explains. “So now, like, the rules are off. By the time you’re fifty-six, hell, if you’re worrying yourself at that point, then you haven’t learned your lesson. And I can say one thing: I have learned my lesson. The kind of fretting I did as a young man, I don’t do anymore. I’m an old guy who can do what he wants, you know.” He takes a step backward, laughs and spreads his arms, letting it be known that a big, heartfelt conclusion is on its way. “Right now, I just feel like I’m at the top of my game. And I’ve never felt freer or like I’ve had more music in me.”
People often use words like “real” and “grounded” when they describe Springsteen, but to get more specific, what’s most unusual about him is that he doesn’t have a fiber of pretension in his being – especially rare for a guy who’s been called the Boss for most of his adult life. Beyond that, he’s the only rock-star dad I’ve ever interviewed who not only seems happy to chauffeur his children around but can actually remember and quote papers they’ve written for school.
“We’ve got two teenagers and one on the cusp,” Springsteen says after discussing a paper his eldest son wrote on George Orwell. “And they’re people now. I like that a lot. I remember walking in my son’s room one day, and I looked at him and it was a man sitting there. And there was something in the way he looked at me where I said, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s going to be OK.'”
After lunch, the musicians attack the material with renewed energy. Once Springsteen becomes aware that people are watching, the rehearsal turns into a full-fledged performance.
“Get out the way, old Dan Tucker/You’re too late to get your supper,” he rasps. Guitar cocked back along his hip like a machine gun, right leg thrust forward like a sprinter on the starting block, horse shirt once more on his back and stuck to the sweat, he powers through a performance of the bluegrass-tinged lead track from the new CD.
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