Bruce Springsteen would like to correct the record. “I’m not a billionaire,” he says, despite what Forbes reported earlier this year. ‘I wish I was, but they got that all wrong. I spent too much money on unnecessary things.”
The boss grins. After you’ve had a hard time, all those years on the road, sleeping on mattresses on concrete floors, in vans, on the beach, you should enjoy the things that come with “your happiness,” he says – “you do the work in.” But if you let those things become your focus, “that’s usually where people go south.” For Springsteen, protecting his talent was the most important thing. “If I had failed at that, in my opinion, I would have failed at everything.”
He didn’t. Springsteen remains one of the biggest rock ‘n’ roll stars in the world, with an appeal seemingly unchanged by time. We meet in a posh hotel room in London’s West End – I’ve already walked past the blue plaque that reads: “Jimi Hendrix lived here, 1968-1969” – and now I’m facing another immortal rock star, recently turned 75, looks sleek and neat in a neat blue jacket, crisp white shirt and earrings, hair combed back exactly like that. Springsteen is flanked by his longtime friend, manager and producer Jon Landau, and director Thom Zimny, who has worked with The Boss since the 2001 concert film Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band: Live in New York City.
Together they have created a new film for Disney, Road Diary, which documents the coming together of Springsteen and the E Street Band for their 2023 concert tour, two and a half years after the singer’s emotionally powerful late-career peak. from an album, Letter to you (2020), was confined to a world of condensed audio formatting by Covid-19. “Something changes in a song when you play it in front of a live audience,” Springsteen says. “People pay for that. They want to see it live.”
Yet the film, like the album, is also a meditation on the passage of time, combined with nostalgia for the good old days. The two sit side by side in Road Diary. There’s beautiful archive footage and classic new renditions of songs like Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out from the 1975 breakthrough album Born to Run, but it’s also explicitly about aging and mortality. Springsteen’s wife Patti Scialfa, mother of their three children and who has been singing with the E Street Band for 40 years, speaks directly to the camera about being diagnosed with early-stage myeloma, a form of cancer of the blood plasma, that leaves her unable to stand up . on stage every night.
“It’s a very difficult disease,” Springsteen says. ‘She’s had it for about five or six years. She’s been a real soldier, but it tires you out a lot, and causes other injuries. She needs a replacement shoulder and a replacement hip. So it’s very difficult for her.
“She was great about it, you know, but we don’t sign off on a show or do anything without Patti’s permission. We couldn’t hit the road without Patti, and we wouldn’t. Patti and I work that all out together, and we do what we think is right for our family first, and then of course we think about the fans and the music. But her illness and what she is struggling with are my first priority.”
Zimny talks that during the shoot it was important to “stay open” to something that could happen that he could not have foreseen or imagined. One such moment occurs during the cover of Nightshift, The Commodores’ famous 1985 paean to the late Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson, which Landau also identifies as a lament for the passing of “our boys”—the late members of the E Street Band, saxophonist Clarence Clemons and keyboardist Danny Federici. A shared moment between Springsteen and backup singer Curtis King produces something magical that takes the song beyond the veil of the mundane.
“One of the things our band stands for is memory,” Springsteen says. “We think that is important. I think it’s important in a country, it’s important in a family, it’s important in a band – you honor the people who gave everything.” It also speaks, he adds, to “the audience’s sense of loss”: “You go on stage to restore yourself, your pain and your difficulties, and in doing so you try to do the same for your audience. You address their mourning.”
We are talking about the death of One Direction star Liam Payne, who was only 31 years old. “That’s not unusual in my field,” Springsteen notes. “It’s normal. It is a company that puts enormous pressure on young people. Young people do not yet have the inner facility or inner self to protect themselves from many of the things that come with success and fame. So they get lost in many of the difficult and often pain-causing issues [things]…whether it’s drugs or alcohol to take some of that pressure off.
“I understand that very well,” he adds. “I mean, I’ve struggled with different things myself.” In his beautiful, poetic 2016 autobiography Born to Run, Springsteen talks candidly about dealing with the “great black sea” of depression, and about the pressure from the paparazzi who rose to fame after the 1984 album Born in the USA launched him into the stratosphere. sent in. “The band has all struggled with their own issues,” he says.
“And Danny [Federici] certainly did. Drugs weren’t uncommon in the E Street Band, you know. However, there was a limit: I stayed out of your business, but if I was on stage and saw that you weren’t quite yourself, there would be a problem. And so it kind of created a boundary around that stage, where people had to be relatively down to earth and at their best. And I always say, one of the things I was most proud of is that if one of my boys were to die, he or she would die of natural causes.
Landau mentions Hendrix and Janis Joplin – “and Kurt Cobain,” Springsteen adds, “and people keep falling for it. It is a death cult.”
“The romance that can surround this kind of thing was not attractive at all,” Landau emphasizes. “And so as a group we never went down that path.”
Springsteen nods. “It’s a scam, man. That’s part of the story that draws some young people in, you know, but it’s that old story. Dying young – good for the record company, but what do you get out of it?”
The film captures the amazing sense of connection and community that unites the Boss with his fans. Zimny describes how he read the audience’s eyes and tried to capture what he saw on film: “There is a transformation taking place.” Has Springsteen seen Taylor Swift, another artist with an extraordinary connection to their fanbase, play live? The boss nods. He went to visit her with his daughter ten years or more ago. “She was a big fan – ‘Dad, Taylor Swift is coming. Will you take me to her?’ We sat in the front row, you know, just in the pit, and she was excellent. This was before she blew up… She’s pretty awesome, a good songwriter, independent and badass.”
I note that that sense of community among Springsteen and Swift fans stands in stark contrast to the enormous divisions in America today. Springsteen has endorsed Kamala Harris in the upcoming US presidential election and described Donald Trump in a video as “the most dangerous candidate for president in my lifetime”. How concerned is he about the possibility of Trump winning? “On the one hand, I’m not that worried because I believe Kamala Harris will win,” he says.
“Of course I’ve been wrong about this before. However, I think there is enormous fear in the United States about the loss of the things we hold most dear, the danger of losing democracy, the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power. And this is a man who is not committed to any of those things. He is a rebel. You know, he led a coup against the US government, so there’s no way he’s going to be allowed anywhere near the office of the presidency.”
Landau describes Trump’s message as the opposite of Barack Obama’s, “diametrically, literally, line by line.” “Not to mention he’s mentally ill,” Springsteen interjects. “That whole thing of standing and waving at your town hall for 40 minutes? I mean, swaying to music, that’s my job.” He is genuinely concerned, describing this as “one of the most consequential elections in the history of our country,” adding, “Are you going to sleep well knowing that the nuclear codes were given to Donald Trump? No. That’s no one.”
We talk about the planned biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere, about the making of the 1982 album Nebraska. The BearJeremy Allen White will play the Boss, while Succession’s Jeremy Strong will take on the role of Landau. The producer spoke with Strong, famous for his deep immersion techniques. “I did tell him that, given his weight, he didn’t need to go full Raging Bull in terms of character development,” Landau laughs.
“They tried to get him into the big suit,” Springsteen jokes. (These two have been friends for a long time, and it shows.) As for playing Springsteen, Landau says, White will face the challenge of “portraying a very interior person. There is always a huge amount happening, some of which is articulated and some of which is held back.” Springsteen’s verdict? “All I had to do was see him in The Bear, and I knew he was the right guy, because he had an inner life, but he also had a bit of swagger.”
But for now we can enjoy the real thing. Zimny is a talented filmmaker, whose two-part documentary The Searcher may be the best Elvis film ever made. Road Diary captures Springsteen as he continues his next decade on the road. If he gets there, he will come back to Britain, not only as planned in 2025, but also in the future. He smiles. “It is sacred ground.”
Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band will be available on Disney+ on October 25