As he releases a new tour film, the Boss talks Kamala Harris’s election chances, the tragedy of Liam Payne and the truth about his finances
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 real wrong. I’ve spent too much money on superfluous things.”
The Boss grins. After coming up the hard way, 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 good fortune”, he says – “you put 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 primary. “If I had failed at that, I would have failed at everything, in my opinion.”
He didn’t. Springsteen remains one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll stars on the planet, with a drawing power seemingly unaltered by time. We’re meeting in a swanky hotel room in London’s West End – I’ve already walked past the blue plaque that says, “Jimi Hendrix lived here, 1968-1969” – and now I’m opposite another of rock’s immortals, recently turned 75, looking straight-backed and dapper in a smart blue jacket, crisp white shirt and earrings, hair slicked back just so. Springsteen is flanked by his long-time friend, manager and producer Jon Landau, and director Thom Zimny, who has been working with the Boss since the 2001 concert film Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band: Live in New York City.
Together, they’ve made 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 high of an album, Letter to You (2020), was confined by Covid-19 to a world of condensed audio formatting. “Something changes in a song when you play it in front of a live audience,” Springsteen says. “That’s what people are paying for. They want to see it live.”
Yet the film, like the album, is also a meditation on the march of time, combined with nostalgia for the good old days. The two sit side by side in Road Diary. There’s wonderful archive footage and classic new performances of songs such as Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out from the 1975 breakthrough album Born to Run, yet it’s also explicitly about ageing and mortality. Springsteen’s wife Patti Scialfa, mother to their three children, who has sung with the E Street Band for 40 years, speaks directly to camera about being diagnosed with early stage myeloma, a form of cancer of the blood plasma, which prevents her from being up on stage every night.
“It’s a most difficult disease,” Springsteen says. “She’s had it for about five or six years. She’s been a real soldier, but it fatigues you very, very, very much, and causes other injuries. She needs a replacement shoulder and a replacement hip. So it’s very, very difficult for her.
“She’s been amazing with it, you know, but we don’t sign off on a show or do anything without Patti’s OK. If it wasn’t for Patti, we couldn’t be on the road, and wouldn’t be. Patti and I work all that out together, and we do what we feel is OK for our family first, and then, of course, we think about the fans and the music. But her illness and what she’s struggling with are my first priority.”
Zimny talks about how during the shoot it was important “to stay open” to something that might happen that he couldn’t have foreseen or imagined. One such moment happens during the cover of Nightshift, The Commodores’ famous 1985 paean to the departed Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson, which Landau identifies as a lament also for the passing of “our guys” – the late E Street Band members, saxophonist Clarence Clemons and keyboardist Danny Federici. A shared moment between Springsteen and back-up singer Curtis King produces something magical that takes the song beyond the veil of the everyday.
“One of the things our band is about is remembrance,” Springsteen says. “We believe that’s important. I think it’s important in a country, it’s important in a family, it’s important in a band – you honour the people who gave their all.” It also speaks, he adds, to “the audience’s sense of loss”: “You go out on stage to repair yourself, of your hurts and your difficulties, and in doing so, you try to do the same for your audience. You address their grief.”
We’re talking in the wake of the death of One Direction star Liam Payne, who was just 31 years old. “That’s not an unusual thing in my business,” Springsteen notes. “It’s a normal thing. It’s a business that puts enormous pressures on young people. Young people don’t have the inner facility or the inner self yet to be able to protect themselves from a lot of the things that come with success and fame. So they get lost in a lot of the difficult and often pain inducing [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 had my own wrestling with different things.” In his superb, poetic 2016 autobiography Born to Run, Springsteen talks frankly about facing the “big black sea” of depression, as well as the paparazzi pressures that came with huge fame after the 1984 album Born in the USA sent him into the stratosphere. “The band has all wrestled with their own issues,” he says.
“And Danny [Federici] certainly did. Drugs were not uncommon in the E Street Band, you know. There was a boundary, however – I stayed out of your business, but if I was on stage and I saw that you were not your complete self, there was going to be a problem. And so it made a bit of a boundary around that stage, where people had to be relatively sober and at their best. And I always say, one of the things I was proudest of is that if one of my fellas passed on, they passed on of natural causes.”
Landau mentions Hendrix and Janis Joplin – “and Kurt Cobain,” Springsteen adds, “and people continue to fall to it. It’s a death cult.”
“The romance that can surround this kind of thing was not appealing at all,” Landau insists. “And so we, as a group, we just never went down that road.”
Springsteen nods. “It’s a grift, man. That’s a part of the story that suckers some young people in, you know, but it’s that old story. Dying young – good for the record company, but what’s in it for you?”
The film captures the astonishing sense of connection and community that unites the Boss with his fans. Zimny describes reading the eyes of the audience and trying to capture what he saw on film: “There’s a transformation happening.” Has Springsteen seen Taylor Swift, another artist with an extraordinary bond with their fanbase, play live? The Boss nods. He went to see her with his daughter a decade or more ago. “She was a huge fan – ‘Dad, Taylor Swift’s coming. Will you take me to see her?’ We’re in the front row standing, you know, just in the pit, and she was excellent. This was before she blew up… She’s quite wonderful, a good songwriter, independent and tough.”
That sense of community among Springsteen and Swift fans, I note, stands in stark contrast to the enormous divisions in America today. Springsteen has endorsed Kamala Harris in the upcoming US presidential election, describing Donald Trump in a video as “the most dangerous candidate for president in my lifetime”. How anxious is he about the possibility of Trump winning? “On one hand, I’m not that anxious, because I do believe Kamala Harris is going to win,” he says.
“Of course, I’ve been wrong before about this. I think in the States, there’s an enormous anxiety, however, at losing the things that are dearest to us, the danger of losing democracy, rule of law, peaceful transfer of power. And this is a guy who is committed to none of these things. He’s an insurrectionist. You know, he led a coup on the United States government, so there’s no way he should be let 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. “The whole thing of standing and swaying for 40 minutes at your town hall? I mean, swaying to music, that’s my job.” He’s genuinely concerned, describing this as “one of the most consequential elections in our nation’s history”, and adds: “Are you going to sleep well knowing that the nuclear codes have been given to Donald Trump? No. No one is.”
We talk about the planned biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere, about the making of the 1982 album Nebraska. The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White will play the Boss, while Succession’s Jeremy Strong is taking on the role of Landau. The producer has spoken to Strong, famous for his deep immersion techniques. “I did tell him that he didn’t, in terms of his weight, need to go the full Raging Bull on the character development,” Landau laughs.
“They tried to get him in the fat suit,” Springsteen jokes. (These two have been pals for a long time, and it shows.) As for playing Springsteen, Landau says, it’ll present White with the challenge of “depicting a very interior person. There’s always a tremendous amount going on, some of which gets articulated, and some of which is held back.” Springsteen’s verdict? “I only had to see him on The Bear, and I knew he was the right guy, because he had that interior life, but he also had a little swagger.”
For now, though, we can revel in the real thing. Zimny is a talented film-maker, whose two-part documentary The Searcher is perhaps the best Elvis film ever made. Road Diary captures Springsteen as he pushes on towards his next decade on the road. If he gets there, he’ll be coming back to the UK, not just as scheduled in 2025, but into the future as well. He smiles. “It’s hallowed ground.”
Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band will be available on Disney+ from October 25
