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

should have been a hit single, that song, on the radio, all over the country.
    But it didn’t. And, you know, so many good musicians are just trying to make it happen, just trying to make it through to the next day.
    Your manager has to approach things more professionally than you, with more business consciousness than perhaps you do—he has to take a financial view of things. How is your relationship with him in that respect? If he wants for you massive commercial success is there any situation here when you’ll say to him: “I’ll go no further than that because I don’t like it”?
    Sure there is. I gotta watch out with that stuff. There’s not going to be an easy way out for anybody just hanging round here, you know. I think everybody realizes that and anybody who doesn’t realize it that’s working with us will soon realise it, you know. Because it’s not going to get easier. It’s gonna get harder, ’cos it gets harder on me.

Robert Duncan
    Creem
, January 1976
    Founded in 1969 and based in Detroit,
Creem
billed itself as “America’s Only Rock ’n Roll Magazine.” Edited by Lester Bangs, who became one of the premier rock critics of the 1970s, the magazine also featured the early writing of such notable critics as Dave Marsh, Greil Marcus, and Robert Duncan, who wrote this feature. Referring back to the recording of
Born to Run
, Springsteen says, “that was the most horrible period of my life.” Telling his “crooked mirror” story about the making of the album (see “The Lost Interviews”), Springsteen also tells Duncan, “I thought [
Born to Run
] was the worst piece of garbage I’d ever heard. I told Columbia I wouldn’t release it. I told ’em I’d just go down to the Bottom Line gig and do all the new songs and make it a live album.”
    Understand. New Jersey has no baseball or football teams and half of it stinks. It used to be that if you were from Jersey and you came over to New York—by that I mean Manhattan, naturally; Queens certainly doesn’t count—you didn’t admit you were from Jersey. No, if there was one thing we New Yorkers could get together on it was Jersey: not a oneof us would’ve given a second thought to blowing the joint off the face of the universe like the infected pimple that it was …
Was
, I say. My God, how times change. I mean, I stopped going to the Academy of Music on 14th Street because the average patron there was a Jerseyite—you know, loud or nodded out or smelly or in any way obnoxious. But now, just like the guys down the hall from me who pretend that they’re
black
and jive and shuffle about the building all day, I—a New York chauvinist if ever there was one—wonder why my mother wasn’t considerate enough to have gone to Jersey to borne me. And when folks ask,
these
days, if I have any interest in impressing them, I say: “Me? Hey, I’m from
Jersey
, man!” Because—may Fiorello LaGuardia rest in peace—it’s finally and unmistakably
hip
to be from the “armpit of the nation,” that newly venerable State of New Jersey …
    But, of course, I don’t try to fool these guys, these authentic specimens, and besides, they probably have ways of checking …
    “I was born in Sheboygan,” I tell Bruce Springsteen, Miami Steve Van Zandt and company, who unanimously fall over in their seats laughing, having just discussed the drag scene that had gone down in Wisconsin—they think it was “some place like Sheboygan probably.” And they’re still laughing while this chick journalist who is accompanying the band and who lives in England “but originally came from Jersey”—I bet,
bitch!
—asks me with a singular ridiculing distaste, “Exactly how do you spell that … She-boy-gan?” Well, all I know is God wasn’t shittin’! The last shall be the first,
indeed!
And I begin to counterattack.
    “Sure, I know,” Springsteen readily admits. “When I was 18 and playing in this place in California in this bar band these people would