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

amount of struggle, always a struggle going on underneath. Sometimes the struggle is closer to the surface and it’s more visible—like at the Troubadour or the first set at the Bottom Line—you can see it. You can see it on my face; I don’t think I smiled once during the first set at the Bottom Line, and I know I didn’t smile at all at the Troubadour, because it was too close—it was so close to the surface, it affects you physically.
    That was the menacing part of it: it was like a death-rattle for yourself .
    So that’s the hardest, when it has captured you. That means I’m not in control, it is in control of me and I’m in the middle of this battle with this thing. Last night, it’s always there, but maybe I have an edge on it. And it goes up and down during the set. You can see it come out. Last night I had an edge on it, like I was on top of it, but it’s always there. What it is is the potential for failure is always there. That’s what’s exciting about it, especially when you get to the point where you’re a big winner [
laughs
].
    It’s the same thing you said before, but now you’re approaching it from the other side, the same thing as trying to prove yourself, looked at from the other side .
    Big winners are big losers. It’s like that. When you’re at Las Vegas and you’re a big winner, and you’ve got all this money in front of you, then all it takes is
that
to be a big loser. So I’ve found now that I’m more tense before I go on. Last night for the first time since I don’t remember when, I was real tense. I was uptight, almost. I was scared, I think. I might not have been scared, but I was close to being scared. Which I haven’t been in years.
    So you like that?
    I like it and I don’t. The whole thing of winning is also an illusion. People yelling don’t mean you won. I’m the only guy who knows, I think, if I made it that night. This is totally from my viewpoint. Other people, like John Rockwell, for one, his favorite set at the Bottom Line was the first set. He’s one of those guys who just sat there and just enjoyed watching the incredible struggle onstage. He came up to me and said the second set was fantastic, it was like clockwork, it was more exciting,it was tighter, it got everybody going more, but I liked the first set better. Because I was able to sit there and watch a guy struggling with his thing. He liked that. And I was! The first set I was fighting like a madman with that stuff. Other people, they’d rather get off and groove along with it. So it depends. It’s something that you would not want to see every night. There were other people who were disappointed, like Paul Nelson, who came down and was disappointed in the first set. He came back Sunday, and he said it in his article, the set Sunday night was like the perfect set: the band was in control, and that’s a beautiful sight in itself. When everything is working right with our band, it’s smooth. It’s like the finest machine you’ve ever seen. It’s something. And the other way, that’s the darker side. Which comes out more on the record than on anything else. That’s a very hard record to play live, the new record. Because the situation I was in at the time, on that record, that comes out more. For me it does anyway.
    I can hear that in some lines, the tension .
    The tension making that record I could never describe. It was killing, almost, it was inhuman. I hated it. I couldn’t stand it. It was the worst, hardest, lousiest thing I ever had to do.
    Were there pressures outside yourself?
    Once again, you would tend to say yes, but I’ve come to decide that, no. I know myself enough to where I know that in a way I didn’t care if it was late, I didn’t care if the record company didn’t like it or what. For me to say, yeah, it was the tensions put on me by the press, or by the record company … I would tend to say that’s what made the record so hard for me.
    You had to prove yourself against