INTRO TO: "TV Movie"
# I woke up last night shaken from a dream
# For in that dream I died
# My wife rolled over and told me that my life would be immortalised
# Not as a major motion picture or great American novel, you see
# No, they're gonna make a TV movie out of me... #
It's the greatest job in the world.
It was great before I made a record, before we made any money.
I always enjoyed it, had fun. I loved my life.
# Shake it up, baby... Shake it up, baby
# Come on and twist and shout now
# Twist and shout
# Come on, baby... Come on, baby
# We're gonna work it on out now
# Work it on out
# Twist it, little girls... Twist it, girls
# You know you twist so fine... Twist so fine
# Twist a little closer... Twist a little closer
# Let me know you're mi-i-ine Let's go...! #
The minute I began to sing and I went down to the Elks Club...
and I picked up my guitar -
I remember I sang Twist And Shout -
I felt different, you know, very different.
And I wish I had a tape to hear what it sounded like.
Probably didn't sound very good.
At the Elks Club in Freehold on a Sunday afternoon,
they charged 35 cents at the door.
There were four of five bands.
It was when people didn't sing.
The self-contained band
of the singers and the players didn't really exist locally.
Everyone played instrumentally.
It was the Ventures in the States, the Shadows in England.
Everyone modelled themselves on them.
I was right at the cusp where that still existed,
but then the British Invasion,
and everyone modelled themselves on the Beatles or the Stones.
# ..I had a friend was a big baseball player
# Back in high school
# He could throw that speedball by you
# Make you look like a fool, boy
# I saw him the other night at this roadside bar
# I was walking in He was walking out
# We went back inside, sat down
# Had a few drinks, but all we kept talking about was glory days
# Well, they'll pass you by Glory days
# In the wink of a young girl's eye Glory days
# Glory da-a-ays... #
This was about the size of the Prince.
The Prince held about 175 people, you know?
It was run by a bricklayer from Freehold, the town I grew up in.
He'd bought the place and it was dying -
there was nobody in the place.
Steve and I went down one Friday night.
We walked in and it was empty. There were two people at the bar.
We said we had a band and would he let us play.
He said, "Well, what kind of music do you play?"
"We play our own music and we play what we want."
He said, "I dunno." We said, "It won't cost you anything."
"I don't know. I don't think so." For free, he didn't want us to play.
So he conceded that we could charge a buck at the door
next Friday night.
And that's what we did - charged a buck at the door.
15 people showed up,
but it was 15 more than was in the place the previous Friday night.
So he gave us another couple of weeks
and pretty quickly, the crowd built up.
30, then it was 80.
In a month or two,
we were close to filling the place three nights a week -
our only income.
# Spread out now, Rosie
Doctor, come cut loose her mama's reins
# You know playing blind man's bluff is a little baby's game
# You pick up Little Dynamite
# I'm gonna pick up Little Gun
# Together we're gonna go out tonight and make that highway run
# You don't have to call me Lieutenant... #
My original nickname was the Doctor.
I had a band - Dr Zoom & The Sonic Boom.
That basically was almost everyone in the local music scene.
It was a combination of original music and...
I would hate to call it performance art,
because none of us had ever heard of the term at the time.
There'd be, like, a Monopoly game going on
and there'd be other people engaged in disconnected activities.
Steven was originally Miami Steve because he'd went to Miami once.
And he came back and he had on a Hawaiian shirt.
He would traipse around Asbury Park in a Hawaiian shirt
and, like, a winter Russian hat.
And Miami Steve - no-one had ever been to Miami at the time.
So the names came from anywhere.
There was Big Tiny, Little Tiny, White Tiny, Black Tiny...
and anyone who obviously wasn't tiny got that nickname.
And so...
they...it came out of... I think that... My recollection was...
the Boss was a result of the fact
that I was paying everybody at the end of the week in some fashion.
It was never meant for public dissemination
and I would have preferred that it had remained private,
but that's the way it goes.
# I had skin like leather and the diamond-hard look of a cobra
# I was born blue and weathered but I burst just like a supernova
# I could walk like Brando right into the sun
# Dance like a Casanova
# With my blackjack and jacket and hair slicked sweet
# Silver star studs on my duds like a Harley in heat
# When I strut down the street I could feel its heart beat
# The sisters fell back and said, "Don't that man look pretty?"
# The cripple on the corner cried out, "Nickels for your pity!"
# Them downtown boys sure talk gritty
# It's so hard to be a saint... #
Elvis evoked a world, a time, a place, a very specific world,
in particular on those Sun sessions.
And there's so many ghosts that get called up, the early rock things.
He just was...he was...
That's just what he did.
Hank Williams did the same,
Woody Guthrie, Dylan, the Beatles and Stones -
the people who created these very...quite complex,
very entertaining, pleasurable,
but complicated creative pictures, you know?
And, er...
I was interested in doing that in some fashion
and writing about myself and my own life
and sort of presenting that to a listener
as something you could get involved in.
# ..By the time we made it up to Greasy Lake
# I had my head out the window Janey's fingers were in the cake
# Well, I think I really dug her but I was too loose to fake
# I said, "I'm hurt," She said, "Honey, let me heal it."
# We danced all night to a soul fairy band
# She kissed me just right like only a lonely angel can
# She felt so nice - just as soft as a spirit in the night
# Baby don't know what she do to you... All night
# Just like a spirit in the night... All night
# Stand up now and let her shoot through you... #
I'd met Mike Appel. He was interested in that music.
Basically, I was thinking, well, I know a guy in New York.
He's connected to the music business in some fashion.
He's interested in what I'm doing now.
And so that was...that was the only connection I had at that time.
I just began to write that way and I pursued it.
I was live in Asbury above this little beauty salon.
It was closed and it had an old piano in the back.
At night, I'd go down and sit amidst all the hair dryers
and try... I wrote a bunch of the songs
from that album around that time.
Mike was enthusiastic about it.
He just talked his way into an audition with John Hammond.
Bruce Springsteen - Columbia pop audition, job number 79682.
# Well, I stood stonelike at midnight
# Suspended in my masquerade
# I combed my hair till it was just right
# And commanded the night brigade
# I was open to pain and crossed by the rain
# And I walked on a crooked crutch
# Well, I strolled all alone through a fallout zone
# And came out with my soul untouched
# I hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd
# When they said, "Sit down," I stood up
# Ooooh-ooooh
# Growing up... #
I was 22 and walked into his office.
I remember I came up on the bus
with my acoustic guitar with no case.
I was embarrassed carrying it around New York at my side.
I'd borrowed the acoustic I think from...from...maybe it was
from the drummer from the Castiles.
And I went to the city with it. We had the audition.
I played a couple of songs and he said,
"You've got to be on Columbia Records."
# ..Thundercrack, baby's back
# This time she tell me how she really feels
# And bring me down to her lightning shack
# You can watch my partner reeling
# She moves up, she moves back
# Out on the floor There ain't nobody cleaner
# She does this thing she calls the "Jump back, Jack,"
# She's got the heart of a ballerina
# Straight from the Bronx Hung on the line
# She slips, she slides, she slops, she bobs, she bumps, she grinds
# Even them dancehall hacks from the west side of the tracks
# Move in close to catch her timing
# She moves up, she moves back
# Out on the floor There ain't nobody cleaner
# She does this thing she calls the "Jump back, Jack,"
# She's got the heart of a ballerina... #
People played very, very personally and eccentrically.
If you listen to those cuts from The Wild And The Innocent
and from that period, the band plays very unusual.
It's a little carnie band.
You hear the influence from Danny - the boardwalk, the accordion...
and then just the atmosphere from the lyric writing,
which came out of that particular environment.
# ..The machinist climbs his Ferris wheel like a brave
# And the fire-eater's lying in a pool of sweat
victim of the heatwave
# Behind the tent
the leather boy tightens his legs on the sword-swallower's blade
# Circus Town's on the short wave Down... #
Initially, I felt uncomfortable with those records
after I made a few albums.
But now I really like those records,
because they were records I made before anybody was listening.
You wrote the way that... You didn't hear it yourself.
I had never heard myself singing these songs
until they were recorded at that time.
I didn't have a tape-player at home
and I didn't have any way of hearing what I was doing.
# ..Little Angel works down at Easy Joe's
# It's a joint where all the riot squad goes
# When they're cashing in on a hustle
# And them kids are still on the corner
# Got the same faces
# In the same old places
# And them summer nights turn into summer dreams
# Little Angel picks up power
# And he slips on his jeans... #
It was a particular moment in time, it lasted a very brief period.
Immediately, the next record, which was Born To Run,
was immediately less eccentric.
# In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream
# At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines
# Sprung from cages on Highway 9
# Chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected Steppin' out over the line
# Whoa! Baby, this town rips the bones from your back
# It's a death trap It's a suicide rap
# We gotta get out while we're young
# Because tramps like us Baby, we were born to run... #
For the first time, I went in to use the studio as a tool
in a way that was unnatural,
in a way that was not an attempt to replicate the sound when we played
or when I did this.
It was meant to use it in an unnatural fashion,
which is basically what Phil Spector did.
I worked on each song very, very intensely, lyrically and musically.
That's all we did, was shape those eight pieces of music.
Immediately, on Darkness, the stakes had changed.
They'd gotten higher. All of a sudden, I had an audience.
Hadn't really had anything but a small grassroots audience.
The first record sold about 20,000.
I remember asking Mike, "How many did we sell?"
"Well," he said, "About 23,000."
And he was disappointed.
And I said, "We did?! Who are all those people buying the records?!"
It was a shock to me that there were 23,000 people whom I did not know
who'd gone out and got our music.
I felt it was a great success.
And the second record did probably about the same or something.
But when the third record hit,
suddenly, we had an audience that the record company noticed.
And I had a...
It was the beginning of a real relationship going.
So, all of a sudden, you're being observed and watched
a lot more closely than you had been previously.
All of a sudden, your actions have implications.
It was a very, very different moment in my work life,
and I thought differently about everything.
I began to think about who I was, where I came from.
# Light out tonight Trouble in the heartland
# Got a head-on collision Smashing in my guts
# And I'm caught in the crossfire that I don't understand
# But there's one thing I know for sure
# I don't give a damn for the same old played-out scenes
# I don't give a damn for just the in-betweens
# Honey, I want your heart, I want your soul, I want control
# Right now
# Talk about a dream Try to make it real
# You wake up in the night The fear is so real
# You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don't come
# Don't waste your time waiting
# Badlands You've got to live it every day
# Let the broken hearts stand as the price you gotta pay
# We'll keep pushing till it's understood
# That these badlands start treating us good... #
I always think you're always writing about yourself.
You're not writing literally or specifically about yourself,
but there's got to be some part of you in everything.
I think that no matter how...
You may choose a story or a set of characters
that you may have had no experience with or in,
but...but...
the job is to connect
and create understanding.
The song always fails
unless you can find yourself in those characters in some fashion.
# I come from down in the valley
# Where, Mister, when you're young
# They bring you up to do
# Like your daddy done
# Me and Mary, we met in high school
# When she was just 17
# We'd drive out of this valley
# Down to where the fields were green
# We'd go down to the river
# And into the river we'd dive
# Oh, down to the river we'd ride... #
By the time we got to The River, I felt adulthood was on the horizon,
if it had not yet arrived, you know?
So I knew I was going to be following my characters
over a long period of time.
I thought it would be fun. It was what I was interested in doing.
I thought it would be interesting and fun for my audience
to have a certain kind of continuity.
Not real explicit or overly literal or confined,
but just a loose continuity from record to record
that allowed people to know who you were and where you were going.
# ..She asked if I remembered
# The letters I wrote
# When our love was young and bold
# She said that last night she read those letters
# And they made her feel one hundred years old
# Well, I'm driving a stolen car
# Through the pitch-black night
# And I keep telling myself
# Someday I'm gonna be all right
# But I ride by night
# And I travel in fear
# That in this darkness
# I will disappear... #
If you don't connect yourself
to your family or the world through your job or whatever you do,
you feel like you're disappearing, like you're fading away.
I felt like that for a very long time.
Grown-up, I felt like that a lot -
I was just an invisible person.
And, er...
I think that that feeling wherever it appears -
and I grew up around people who felt that way -
it's an enormous source of pain...
..the struggle to make yourself felt, visible,
to have some impact and to create meaning for yourself
and for the people you come in touch with...
was central to all my work.
And then with Stolen Car,
the idea that that includes being able to have an intimate life,
an intimate life that is essential to...to...
filling out the rest of your life.
He was the first guy that started to wrestle with that idea.
# Well, my soul checked out missing As I sat listening
# To the hours and minutes ticking away
# I was just sitting around waiting for my life to begin
while it was all just slipping away
# And I'm tired of waiting for tomorrow to come
# For that train to come rolling round the bend
# I've got a new suit of clothes A pretty red rose
# A woman I call my friend
# These are better days
# They're better days, it's true
# These are better days, baby
# Better days with a girl like you... #
Isolation is a big part of the American character, you know?
You always had the guys,
and it got a little crowded, and they went further on.
Whether it's to leave behind what you've created,
which everyone wants to do at some point,
everyone wakes up some morning and just wants to walk away
and start brand-new.
# I got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack
# I went out for a ride and I never went back
# Like a river that don't know where it's going
# I took a wrong turn and I just kept going
# Everybody's got a hungry heart
# Lay down your money and you play your part
# Everybody's got a hu-u-ungry heart
# Yeah, yeah
# I met her in a Kingstown bar
# We fell in love I knew it had to end
# We took what we had and we ripped it apart
# Now here I am down in Kingstown again
# Everybody's got a hungry heart
# Lay down your money and you play your part
# Everybody's got a hu-u-ungry heart... #
I think at that particular point, America was really...
It was the early '80s,
and really for the...
I think the sense of...of...
the violence of...of...of... that was in the air
on a daily basis sometimes
was one of the things we noticed when we went to Europe.
It seemed there was just less.
It was reported differently, it was contextualised differently,
it was a different type of violence,
and I think that...that for me, personally,
that was something I really noticed at that time,
and it made me very sad, actually.
It was something that...
I was 30, having kids was on the horizon in some fashion,
and, er...um...
and it was just something that I noticed less.
I don't even mean just physical violence or the threat of it -
it was just sort of...er...er... the way things were put to you,
whether through television or through different...
It was just much more aggressive and abusive,
truly abusive.
I experienced less of that in Europe, just less of it.
It seemed to make more sense.
It seemed more civil, it just seemed more sane.
# ..Well, I got a job and tried to put my money away
# But I got debts that no honest man can pay
# So I drew what I had from the Central Trust
# And I bought us two tickets on that Coast City bus
# Now, baby, everything dies Honey, that's a fact
# But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
# Put your make-up on Fix your hair up pretty
# And meet me tonight in Atlantic City... #
HARMONICA SOLO
I didn't think politically about Nebraska at all
until I'd read it in a review someplace
that someone said the record had a variety of political implications.
At the time, that was my most personal record.
I felt it was the record that felt most like my childhood.
It was the record that reminded me of the way my childhood felt.
Just in the tone of it,
the colours that it had on it, just the house that I grew up in...
I think, in my own life, I'd reached a point where I was old enough
to realise what was missing.
And so I felt like I was teetering on this sort of void very often,
and I felt a deep, deep sense of isolation...
very difficult to get in...
It became very, very intense around that time.
I think that led me to those characters and those kinds of story.
I think when you get old the price for not sorting through...
your...the issues that...that... make up your emotional life
and the choices you're making
doesn't stay the same - it gets higher all the time.
It gets higher from the same answers and the tricks
and the lies that you told yourself at 22 -
"Feels pretty good! I'm just going on down the road!" 25, 26, 28...
You feel a little less comfortable, but everything's OK.
The older you get, the price goes up, the price goes up.
It keeps getting higher and higher and you pay more on a daily basis
for not coming to grips with some of those things.
At that point, I felt like I was at a place
where I could start to really feel that price.
I just felt too disconnected.
# Born down in a dead man's town
# First kick I took was when I hit the ground
# You end up like a dog that's been beat too much
# Till you spend half your life just a-covering up
# I was born in the USA
# Born in the USA... #
The late '70s, early '80s
was the first time
when there was a literature and films began to be made about Vietnam.
It was a subtext on a few earlier things.
There was a Nick Nolte movie Who'll Stop The Rain?
And it was in and around a few things,
but all of a sudden it began to be very directly addressed.
# ..Got in a little hometown jam
# So they put a rifle in my hand
# Sent me off to the foreign land
# To go and kill the yellow man... #
I did The Draft Dodge Dodger Rag there at the time, you know,
but, er...uh...
that's all... I was 19, my drummer had gone...
and died. The best I remember... This fellow Walter Ciccone
was THE best front man in Central New Jersey at the time.
He joined the Marines and he was MIA.
On the street at that time, people were frightened
and everybody was trying to figure how to get out.
# ..I come back home to the refinery
# Hiring man says, "Son, if it was up to me..."
# Went down to see my VA man
He said, "Son, don't you understand...?" #
I didn't come out of a political household.
You were a part of...
I was a part
of what I suppose would be considered a counterculture at the time,
though probably I was the conservative part!
I never had any real drug experience.
I lived in a little town, a small town, you know,
and there were lines drawn everywhere.
# ..I had a brother at Khe Sahn Fighting off the Viet Cong
# They're still there He's all gone
# He had a woman he loved in Saigon
# I got a picture of him in her arms... #
What led me to write about it
was it seemed like,
whether you were there or whether you were at home in the US,
it was a defining moment in American culture. Things really changed.
You felt things really changed.
There was before and there was after
and the world and the United States felt like a different place.
I think that's what led me to write about it.
It just felt central in some fashion.
And it sort of, it finds its way at this point
time and again up through some of my songs,
whether it was Galveston Bay or...
It's always at the edges in some fashion
of a lot of experience.
Whether you went or you didn't at the time,
it was a big part of your life, you know?
# ..Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
# Out by the gas fires of the refinery...
# ..Ten years burning down the road
# Nowhere to run, nowhere to go
# Born in the USA
# I was born in the USA
# I'm a long gone daddy in the USA... #
I think that the recorded version had two things going.
One was the lyrical content...
The story of someone returning home and trying to find where they belong,
IF they belong,
and then the music was sort of martial
and powerful and it was expressing a survivor instinct -
"I've been through this and I'm out the other side. I'm alive!"
I feel like the record is right on the money.
There may be some misinterpretations of it, but it was the right record.
# I get up in the evening
# And I ain't got nothing to say
# I come home in the morning
# I go to bed feeling the same way
# I ain't nothing but tired
# Man, I'm just tired and bored with myself
# Hey, there, baby
# I could use just a little help
# You can't start a fire
without a spark
# This gun's for hire
# Even if we're just dancing in the dark... #
I was 33, 34. I had already been playing for 20 years.
But I knew when we cut that song
it was going to capture people's imagination
in a way that possibly I hadn't since Born To Run.
I just felt there was something.
You could just tell when you heard it.
The first time we walked in the studio, we knew it was something.
Er...
And, er... So then I think you just ride, you take the ride.
# Well, Jimmy Lee was hooking round the fan turn
# Of a funky southern Florida dirt track
# He had mud caked on his goggles
and a screaming 350 stacked up on his back
# As he passed the stands He's feeling all tuckered out
# When through the roar of his engine he heard somebody shout
# Stand on it - come on, boy Stand on it
# Mary Beth started to shift
she hit the shift, but she couldn't get a hand on
# Chasing some Red Hill boys, has the deed to the ranch and a grand on
# With eight grand blowing out on the red line
# She blew past a hitchhiker out on Route 39
# Stand on it - come on, boy Stand on it
# Well, when in doubt and you can't figure it out, stand on it
# If your mind's confused,
don't know what you're gonna do, stand on it
# Well, if you've lost control of the situation at hand
# Grab a girl, see a rock'n'roll band, stand on it
# Come on, stand on it Stand on it, boy... #
I look back on it now
and I feel I must have felt imperilled to some degree,
or there was an enormous amount of exposure
and that's something you might feel uncomfortable with.
But part of that exposure was what's drawing people in, you know?
And, so, you get out there on the tightrope
and you just walk across.
# ..Well, man at the top says it's lonely up there
# If it is, man, I don't care
# From the big White House to the parking lot
# Everybody wants to be the man at the top
# Here comes a banker Here comes a businessman
# Here comes a kid with a guitar in his hand
# Dreaming of his record in a number one spot
# Everybody wants to be the man at the top
# Yeah, everybody wants to be the man at the top
# Everybody wants to be the man at the top now
# Aim your gun, son Shoot your shadow
# Everybody wants to be the man at the top
# All right now... O-O-Oh, yeah
# Oh, yeah now... O-O-Oh...
# Who's the man at the top? O-O-Oh...
# Yeah, I wanna know now... O-O-Oh...
# Who's the man at the top now? O-O-Oh...
# Yeah, I just wanna know now... O-O-Oh...
# Who's the man at the top...? #
I tried to avoid responsibilities. That's why you became a musician.
You became a musician to avoid the responsibilities.
So to find myself coming to terms with those ideas,
things that I ran from for a very long time,
is quite a change, you know?
But you get older,
and you realise that's where life's satisfactions and new freedom,
new freedoms reside...
is in making specific choices,
in choosing the way your life is going to go...
I think you experience those choices as confining when you're young -
you want everything, you wanna have everything,
you see every gal, this one, that...
And...er...you sort of live in...
you...you live in a fantasy of endless possibility.
And if you have some success,
there is an enormous amount of real possibility handed to you,
a dangerous amount.
If you go too far down that particular road,
you realise it isn't what it appears to be.
Those aren't really possibilities, you know?
I think that, um...you can...
you can mistake...endless choice for freedom.
That's an easy mistake to make, you know,
particularly when you're in a position
where everyone wants to say yes to you all the time.
Your ideas of what freedom is can really get very distorted,
until sometimes it's not too late -
you can find your way back - sometimes it is too late,
and you're in the wrong room on the wrong night
and some small thing comes back and gets you.
# You got your book, baby, with all your fears
# Come, let me, honey, and I'll catch your tears
# Sha-la-la la-la, I'll take your sorrow if you want me to
# Sha-la-la la-la, I'll come tomorrow, that's what I'll do
# So listen to me - Janey, don't you lose heart, no, no, no
# Janey, don't you lose heart No, no, no
# Janey, don't you lose heart
# Well, you say you got no new dreams to touch
# You feel like a stranger, babe, that knows too much
# Sha-la-la la-la You come home late and get undressed
# Sha-la-la la-la Lie in bed and feel your emptiness
# Listen to me - Janey, don't you lose heart, no, no, no
# Janey, don't you lose heart No, no, no
# Janey, don't you lose heart... #
A couple of years ago, I came back. I had some spare time.
So I asked my engineer Toby Scott
to send me all the archive, everything that we'd recorded,
because I take so long between records very often,
and because when I begin a record,
it's open-ended and I don't know when it'll be finished,
I said if I was going to be a year or longer in between records,
I have all this music that I've never released,
and I should release some of it.
In that period of time, I should put something out.
People would like to have it.
# Your scrapbook's filled with pictures of all your leading men
# Well, baby, don't put my picture in there with them
# Don't make me some little girl's dream that can't ever come true
# That only served to hurt Make you cry like you do
# Well, baby, don't do it to me
# And I won't do it to you
# You've seen all the romantic movies
You dream you'll take the boys home
# But when the action fades You're left all alone
# You deserve better than this, little girl, can't you see you do?
# Do you need somebody to prove it to you?
# Well, baby, you prove it to me
# And I'll prove it to you... #
What you find to your surprise
is that the minute you begin to sequence them,
there's some internal logic takes over,
and you are going chronologically,
so it follows the arc of the music you've already created in some way.
At the beginning, there's a young man.
At the end, there's a guy my age.
And they're very different people.
They're the same and yet they're different.
It ends with a...basically with a folk piece and it begins with one.
So you do sort of... There's a trip that's taken.
I think you could go in and interpret it pretty easily.
You could follow its arc
and, like I say, it's the alternate route to the road that I took
on the records that I released.
It tells a similar story,
but you're going down a different road
where all the roadside markers are a little different
and the sights are different.
# I was bruised and battered I couldn't tell what I felt
# I was unrecognisable to myself
# I saw my reflection in a window
# Didn't know my own face
# So, brother, don't leave me wasting away
# On the streets of Philadelphia
# I walked the avenues till my legs felt like stone
# I heard the voices of friends vanished and gone
# At night I hear the blood in my veins
# Just as black and whispering as the rain
# On the streets of Philadelphia... #
Occasionally, someone says "I was in New Jersey in Freehold."
"What were you doing there?" "Oh, I'm a big fan."
It's just a small town, you know?
But I suppose it's interesting for people -
where your favourite music came from.
You go back and it's just interesting to see those streets.
When I first went to Memphis, I was just fascinated.
I went past Sun Studios
and I've had a taxi driver drive me out to Graceland
in the middle of the night.
I just wanted to see that it was real, that it existed,
because it was a place of such tremendous fantasy inside my head.
I had imagined a world that went along with that music.
I was interested to see if it was what I had imagined,
what that world was actually like
or just that it existed -
that there was a real place where the music I loved came from.
# I hold you in my arms
# As the band plays
# What are those words whispered, baby
# Just as you turn away?
# Saw you last night
# Out on the edge of town
# I wanna read your mind
# Know just what I've got in this new thing I found
# So tell me what I see
# When I look in your eyes
# Is that you, baby
# Or just a brilliant disgui-i-ise...? #
You're always searching for the voice to sing a particular song in.
You end up coming up with a connection,
a mix of your own voice
and then... and then your character's voice.
When you meld them well is when you feel at ease.
On the Tom Joad record I spent not a lot of time,
but I had something when I located that voice,
even before I had a full song.
If I had a verse, but I knew how the person spoke,
I was able to translate that into a vocal style,
very plain, very presentational,
but then I felt I'd a sense of who the person is,
and that assists you with your writing.
If something feels false, the line is probably not right.
# ..Well, the highway's alive tonight
# But nobody's kidding nobody about where it goes
# I'm sitting down here in the campfire light
# Waiting on the ghost of Tom Joad
# He pulls a prayer book out of his sleeping bag
# Preacher lights up a butt and takes a drag
# Waiting for when the last shall be first and the first shall be last
# In a cardboard box 'neath the underpass... #
I feel real at home with country music,
and it's just something...
Since my late 20s, it's been an enormous source of inspiration.
Hank Williams just created a world, an entire world,
that was one you had never been presented with before,
but that you recognised as YOUR world, you know,
the world that some part of you lived in.
# ..Cadillac, Cadillac
# Long and dark, shiny and black
# Open up your engines, let 'em roar
# Tearing up the highway... Like a big old dinosaur... Cadillac!
# Cadillac! Cadillac! Cadillac! Long and dark, shiny and black
# Open up your engines... Let 'em roar
# Tear up the highway just like a big old dinosaur... #
I was interested in taking those sort of very basic images
and images I felt comfortable with,
and using them just to tell my stories, you know?
And also this was a very big...
On Fridays and Saturday nights in the '70s and '60s here,
there was an endless line of muscle cars
that used to just travel in a circuit,
right past all the bars.
It was a pretty intense local car culture, you know?
So you were around it a lot
and it felt like it came out of where I was coming out of,
and I think I wanted to connect with the people whose music I loved also.
I always loved the Beach Boys' Don't Worry, Baby and Chuck Berry -
hey, my coffee-coloured Cadillac outside!
I was interested in using some of those images
that everyone carried with them to some degree.
# You and me, we were the pretenders
# We let it all slip away
# In the end what you don't surrender
# Well, the world just strips away
# Girl, ain't no kindness in the face of strangers
# We ain't gonna find no miracles here
# Well, you can wait on your blessings, my darling
# I gotta kneel for you right here
# I ain't looking for praise or pity
# I ain't coming around searching for a crutch
# I just want someone to talk to
# And a little of that human touch
# Just a little of that human touch... #
What's your talent?
It's something that everyone experiences, first of all.
Everybody has a memory where they remember...
Why do you remember when you were 11 in a particular street...
and there was a certain wind blowing through the trees,
the sound your feet made on the stones as you came up the drive...
the way the light hit a particular house...?
Everyone has memories they carry with them for no explicable reason,
and these things, whether you call them sense memories or...
they live within you, they're an essential part of who you are.
They may not be connected to any specific event -
you'd some moment of pure experience that stayed with you.
Maybe nothing happened,
but, for some reason,
on that particular day, you'd a moment of pure experience
that revealed to you what it meant to be alive,
what it means to be alive, what the stakes are...
The wind on a given day, how important it is,
what you can do with your life can be brought back to you
by the sound of your feet on gravel
at a certain moment.
That's the writer's job to collect and create those moments
from out of your own experience and the world that you see around you.
Then you use your imagination and you put those things together
and you present that experience to your audience,
who then experience their own inner vitality, their own centre,
their own questions about their own life,
their moral life, whatever you're writing about.
And there's a connection made.
That's your job, that's what you're paid for.
You put something on, someone says, "Hey, I'm not alone,"
put something on about the way people treat one another.
That alchemy, or whatever you want to call it,
I think is what you're paid for.
You can do it on stage. It doesn't necessarily mean literally -
it can be done just through an explosion of energy at some moment
that makes someone want to stand up
and move their...themselves...
go home and do whatever they feel they need to do...
And you try to make... You just try to bring forth experience
and get people in touch with all of those things
in their world, you know?
That's the real job, the job that keeps you writing.
That's what keeps you wanting to write that next song -
if I do it for you, I'm doing it for me.
# For a while I've been watching you steady
# Ain't gonna move till you're good and ready
# You show up and then you shy away
# But I know pretty soon you'll be walking this way
# Because sailors never li-i-ie
# Sailors never li-i-ie... #