Free Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen by Unknown

on—I’m very tense all the time before I go on. I got put in a weird situation for a lot of years; I got put in the situation for three years—and I’ll probably do this the rest of my life—where you got to go out every night. Probably a situation that other artists don’t have: you got to go out and prove yourself. Because I got so bombarded with all that stuff in the beginning, all that hype, I was put in a situation where I had to go out and prove myself. Night after night. It’s hard to do. And the longer you have to do it, the harder it gets. And for a while I thought it was that hype that made me feel like that, but then a few days ago, three or four days ago, I realized that that’s never what it was at all, that it was always me. And I think that’s what it is. I don’t know if it’s fate or what it is, but I go out there every night feeling that way: “Tonight, I gotta prove myself.” It never was to anybody, it was always to myself. And it’s funny, I just realized that the other night. It’s a weird thing.
    It might have to do with being brought up Roman Catholic. Where God will see you, everything you do—under your blankets—God will see you, and you will be punished. That brings a certain frame of mind that’s not really good. There are some Roman Catholics , including myself, who come to realize only later why they are so damn ambitious. They want to prove everything. I presume, or I guess I read somewhere, that you are from a middle class family, or lower middle class. And these people really want you to get somewhere. You said to someone that you phoned your mother saying you had a contract and she said, “Did you change your name?” I could really feel that, imagine my mother saying the same thing. All these years, through religion, through this lower middle class family, they push you and they bring about a huge guilt. And I think it’s from the guilt complex that you think you have to prove yourself. As you were nobody all your life. And it’s hard to come to realize that—and when—you are anybody. Maybe that’s what you really want .
    Yeah, it was really a mind-blower.
    And maybe it’s not good to realize that!
    Yeah, you have to deal with that too, all the time. You start to find out more about yourself, which changes what you do. But that’s what it’s all about. You can’t do one thing forever; there are things that change your work, I guess. It’s interesting because I started to read a lot about it, read reviews about the way different people see you onstage, and I started to wonder, yeah, why am I acting like that? And what is this thing that is driving me to be out there like that? Why do I do this every night? Why do I take myself to the exhaustion point, and if I don’t, why do I feel terrible about it? It was the whole thing with the three-hour sets: I had to take myself to a point where I couldn’t stand up, where I felt sick, where I absolutely knew that I couldn’t do anything else. I had to do this every night. I still do. I did it last night. And the fact that the audience is there and coming along with you is incidental [
laughs
]. It’s like a second thought. In the end I realized that they were an excuse for me to be out there, and in reality what I was really doing out there I could do to an empty hall. Almost. They provide a certain … you know. Of course I never did think I was out there for the audience, I always knew I was out there for me, but I really didn’t know the darker side of being out there for you. There’s a light side of it, and a dark side. You’re out there for you, you think to have fun, and play, but you’re also out there for
you
to prove yourself to yourself, to beat yourself down as far as you can go and see how much you can take. So there’s two sides to it every night. And it’s funny, I also realized that there’s a certain amountof illusion at work onstage too, no matter how easy it looks, it’s always a certain