Bruce Springsteen Talks with David Remnick

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, Storytelling, New, Society & Culture, Yorker, Wnyc, Books, Remnick, Politics, Arts, David

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2021

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bruce Springsteen, an American music legend for more than four decades, published his autobiography, “Born to Run,” in 2016. David Remnick called it “as vivid as his songs, with that same pedal-to-the-floor quality, and just as honest about the struggles in his own life.” In October of that year, Springsteen appeared at the New Yorker Festival for an intimate conversation with the editor. (The event sold out in six seconds.) This entire episode is dedicated to that conversation. Springsteen tells Remnick how, as a young musician gigging around New Jersey, he decided to up his game: “I’m going to have to write some songs that are fireworks . . . I needed to do something that was more original.” They talked for more than an hour about Springsteen’s tortured relationship with his father, his triumphant audition for the legendary producer John Hammond, and his struggles with depression. As Springsteen explains it, his tremendously exuberant concert performances were a form of catharsis: “I had had enough of myself by that time to want to lose myself. So I went onstage every night to do exactly that.” This episode originally aired in 2016.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.6	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Every year, the New Yorker throws a huge festival that lasts for days. And in 2016, I had the pleasure of sitting down for an hour or more on stage with one
0:21.9	of the great musicians of our time, somebody I've admired since I'm a kid. And I'm hardly the
0:27.2	only one. The event sold out, this was Town Hall in Midtown, Manhattan, in six seconds. I first saw
0:33.8	Bruce Springsteen in June of 1973. I was 14, a North Jersey boy, and I told my parents
0:41.4	some sort of lie, and I took a bus across the river all by myself to New York City. I had a $4
0:48.5	ticket to see a band called Chicago. That was the headliner. It was a huge band at the time with a hit
0:54.1	called 25 or 6 to 4.
0:57.9	And if you're old enough, you'll remember that song, although I have no idea what that phrase meant.
1:02.8	I climbed to the highest seat in Madison Square Garden at the time, the blue seats, and outtrundled
1:07.9	the opening act, a skinny guitar slinger and a songwriter from the Jersey Shore.
1:14.2	And this guy was outrageous. He was like the white James Brown. He was singing, dancing, stabbing at the guitar, leading the band with some kind of crazy urgency, bursting all the while through the indifference of an arena crowd that had not come to see him.
1:29.5	They'd come to see Chicago.
1:31.6	And in every sense, he was brilliant.
1:35.1	He hated those gigs, but they were an incredible breakthrough, and things exploded.
1:41.1	One reviewer called him the future of rock and roll,
1:43.6	and that became the consensus
1:45.1	view of Springsteen in rock circles. He was a future, and he became a cover boy for Newsweek
1:52.1	and time in the very same week. And now, more than 40 years later, with a boatload of Grammys,
1:58.6	an Academy Award, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a one-man
2:02.3	Broadway show behind him, Bruce Springsteen is back with a new album, and it's called Letter to You.
2:08.7	I sat down with Springsteen at the New Yorker Festival in 2016, and he had just published an
	...

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