So you write in your book “the grinding hypnotic power of this ruined place and this
people would never leave me”.
I think you’re talking about your grandparents’ place where you grew up.
But you could be talking about New Jersey couldn’t you?
You’ve never really left New Jersey.
Could’ve been!
I mean, spiritually or in terms of real estate.
Well the only time I left was for a short period in the early 90’s where we went to
LA for about 4 years I think.
And we lasted until my kids were old enough to be in the 1st grade.
That was too long.
You had to make a choice.
Actually I like Los Angeles.
It’s an interesting city.
It’s in the desert.
You’re surrounded by the Mojave.
You’ve got the St. Gabriel Mountains, the Santa Monica Mountains.
You’ve got the beautiful beaches, and I enjoyed where it was located.
And I got a motorcycle, so I’d take it out into the mountains and the desert pretty often.
I miss that about it, I miss that about living out West.
But, as soon as my kids were school age, we had about an 80 member family back home – Irish
and Italian.
Even when we were in LA we were spending about half the year there and half the year in New
Jersey.
We knew we wanted the kids to grow up around family, in a smaller neighbourhood, where
people were used to seeing us, it was a much more normal environment.
School was very normal.
The kids got used to seeing you when they were very young, so they didn’t make a big
deal about it.
So that’s what we did.
So, you never really left your kind of people, Irish- Italian, that working class background,
that’s who you are.
Basically I live 10 minutes from my home town.
Where you grew up?
Yeah, and 20 mins from the beach.
I’m an old un-reconstructed beach bum.
There was something about staying close to those roots that I felt protected me, maybe
protected some part of my music and my work.
I was interested in writing about where I came from.
I was interested in the people that were there.
I wanted to continue writing about those subjects and I felt that staying close to home kind
of kept it very clear for me.
Because a lot of your songs are about your family, your troubled relationship with your
father, your loving devoted mother, and your people - if I can call it that -
Ok…
I mean, you know, working class blue collar, you know Irish Italian American immigrants.
They’re kind of in the news these days because everyone wants to get a piece of their action
for the election.
I suppose so you know.
I think that what’s happened is very visible right now.
The past 40 years as the deindustrialisation and globalization has affected a lot of work
lives, the issues that matter to a lot of hardworking folks haven’t been addressed.
If I couldn’t be a musician tomorrow and I had to find something else to do, I have
no idea what I’d do.
I’d be at a loss.
So, your steel mill closes down, your factory moves south or moves overseas, that’s your
life walking away from you.
It’s really a moment where their concerns have come out in front.
Sure it usually only happens when someone wants your vote.
Sure
But it has happened and so they’re demanding a response of some sort, and neither party
has really addressed their concerns.
The landscapes that you write about in your lyrics, and I’ve travelled through a lot
of these places in America myself, I think they’re heart-breaking.
They’re heart-breaking landscapes of urban desolation and despair and abandonment.
And a lot of the people I speak to on these trips, they love Donald trump.
They love him because they think that he is finally hearing them.
Do you get that in your community, in the people you used to know in New Jersey?
Can you understand where that’s coming from?
I know some Trump voters.
but I think that he’s really preyed upon in that part of the country because he’s
very glib and he gives very superficial answers to very entrenched and difficult problems.
But they’re answers that sound pretty good if you’ve struggled for the past 20 or 30
years.
So, you can understand his appeal?
Yeah, I can understand that he’s somebody with very simple answers to very complicated
questions, who sounds like they’re listening to you for the first time.
Do you think the people who like him are racists?
No, no I don’t believe that you can generalise like that that.
I think there are all kinds of people are interested in him for a variety of different
reasons.
In a way, that part of America has been looking for someone to talk to them for a very long
time, and in a way you did that with your music.
And you write about that very eloquently in your book.
But politically they’ve been left behind haven’t they?
I believe so, yes.
Are the democrats the answer this time?
Is Hilary Clinton the answer?
I don’t know.
I think Bernie Sanders has some appeal.
But I’m not sure if there’s anybody out there who really is going to dig into those
problems.
Because I saw you playing with Barack Obama in Madison Wisconsin, I think it was his last
rally in his last election in 2012.
Massive crowd.
Are you going to play for Hilary Clinton this time round?
I don’t have any plans at the moment you know.
It’s only three weeks left in the election.
Has she asked you?
They’ve been in contact to use a piece of music or something, which is fine by me.
I think she’ll be a good president.
I don’t hear undiluted enthusiasm.
But you’re not going to play for Trump?
No.
There are so many fascinating things about the book.
One of the things that was really moving, and of course I didn’t know this until the
book came out, was your struggle with depression.
And that for you, concerts, and I just went to see one the other day, it was 4 hours and
ten minutes long.
I was tired sitting down for that long and clapping and singing along.
But this depression thing – you use concerts as a form of self-medication, don’t you?
I think that’s how it all started.
You’re young and you don’t understand the different things you’re feeling.
You certainly don’t understand if there’s any chemical imbalance in your make up so,
all I knew is when I played it deeply centred me and chased away my blues for whatever reason.
I think there was an enormous amount of self-realisation in playing and you walked off the stage that
night you knew who you were.
And you felt you’d done something constructive.
You’re left with a certain feeling of lightness and a positivity that eluded me in a lot of
the rest of my daily life.
So music was really my first refuge against things that were bothering me, so it did help
a lot.
But then when you give a concert in front of thousands of people, tens of thousands
of people, you end up on a high
Oh yes you do
You’re body-surfing through the crowds, then the low is just that much more dramatic
afterwards.
Or is it not?
It can be.
I tended to struggle most when I was off the road, when I was not playing, and I was not
necessarily my own best company.
So, I definitely tend to have a harder time with it during the periods when I’m not
working.
During the periods when I’m working I always have the shows to fall back on, and they always
lift you and I’ve never found it to be an issue in my work whether I was recording or
whether I was playing.
So, it does cut up a little bit into your off time and your on time, and I definitely
struggle with it a little more when I’m not working.
One of the chapters in the book is called wrecking ball and it was also the title of
one of your albums, I gather written after the Great Recession of 2008.
That made you very angry didn’t it?
The state of Wall Street and how Wall Street was not taken to justice?
You had a very small group of people who damaged so many other people’s lives, people I’m
friends with, people lose their homes, they lose their retirement.
At the end of the day there was very little accounting that went on.
There was very, very little accountability.
So when I went to write that record, that was deeply on my mind at the time.
A sad chapter in American history.
Is some of that lack of reckoning accounting for some of the rage, the real rage that we
hear today?
I think so
And do you think that rage will go away after this election?
No.
I don’t know how it’s going to manifest itself but it will manifest itself somehow.
Do you think there might be some trouble?
I mean, we’ve already seen some strife on the streets.
The trouble at the moment is that you have Donald trump who is talking about rigged elections.
And he has a feeling he’s going to lose now, which of course he is going to lose.
You’re confident.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, he’s going to lose.
And he knows that.
He knows he’s going to lose.
He’s such a flagrant, toxic, narcissist that he wants to take down the entire democratic
system with him if he goes.
If he could reflect on these things maybe he’d have - but he’s such an unreflective
person.
And he simply has no sense of decency, no sense of responsibility about him.
And the words that he’s been using over the past several weeks really are an attack
on the entire democratic process.
And is that dangerous?
Yeah it is.
I think it’s very dangerous.
He does have a lot of people’s ears.
And I don’t think he’s going to go quietly, gently into the good night.
I think he’s going to make a big a mess as he can.
And I don’t know what that’s going to mean, but we’ll find out shortly.
I mean if you look at the state of America today, if you look at the language used in
this election campaign, would you say that you’re ‘proud to be born in the USA’,
to quote your most famous song?
America is a place that still has an enormous amount of wonderful qualities about it.
I mean, I just love the country itself, I always have.
I think that I have had the critical but creative voice, it’s the voice I search for in my
music, whether it was born in the USA
I think the thing about that song is that there was a critical voice in the verses and
yet there was a sense of pride in birthplace in the choruses, and that’s where I’ve
always come from.
I grew up in America and my music is thoroughly American and while I certainly have a lot
of criticisms about where we live, it’s something I’ve also always had a lot of
pride in.
If your father, with whom you had a very troubled relationship, was alive today, do you think
he would be tempted to vote for Donald Trump?
That’s a good question.
If he voted at all.
I’m not sure, I don’t know, he’d have a hard time.
He was an angry man though, wasn’t he?
An angry, depressed man
I think if you just looked towards my music and you’ll hear the way I created a little
bit of an archetype in my songs about him and it was a little one-dimensional, a one-dimensional
portraiture.
He had a lot of qualities beyond the fact that he struggled with his life and with workings.
So, he was a much more complicated character than that.
What about your mother?
Would she be in love with Hillary Clinton as a candidate?
That’s a good question, I’m not sure.
My mother, who when I was very young, I know was very democratic.
She was the first one to say “Who are we mum?”
“We’re democrats, they’re for the working people.”
That was the only political discussion we had in my house when I was a kid.
But, she tended to get a little more conservative as she got old.
But she wouldn’t be a trump-voter.
Because it’s very tribal in America and you’re a democrat or you’re a republican,
and then that tribal thing seems to become diluted in recent years.
I think that people’s politics are shaped by tribe, by psychology, by the way you were
brought up and nurtured.
That’s why I always say people don’t come to musicians looking for their political points
of view.
With the size of my audience, I’m sure that I have people with all different points of
views that come to see us.
But don’t you fell at this crucial juncture – I mean, this is a really important election
for America, the whole world is watching, it’s the only topic of conversation in this
town – do you think it’s your duty as a famous musician, as a lyricist, as a guardian
of the America soul, do you think it’s your duty to get involved politically?
Not necessarily.
I think that I’ve had a voice that has spanned over a period of 40 years now.
People generally know where I’m coming from and my point of view.
I believe that if you get out there on the stump, which I have done a few times…I think
it’s nice to show some support but I don’t necessarily believe that musicians turn the
tide or have any deep, deep political influence in that sense.
That’s sort of my approach towards it.
The trash talk that we heard on the tape the other day, on that famous tape about women
from 2005, he said it’s just locker-room talk.
Do you agree with that?
No.
It was obviously something that at the core of his person.
You never get that kind of talk on the trailer or on the tour bus or ?
Not really
Not like that
Looking ahead, you know, you’ve done so much.
What else are you going to do?
What are the things you haven’t done yet?
What’s your bucket list?
I just keep doing the same old thing.
I mean, I work, I put my records out, I continue to talk about the things that I’m interested
in.
That’s the way I approach my job.
I take it day-to-day.
You’ve written this great book, so obviously now you’re going to get the Nobel Prize
for Literature like Bob Dylan.
I don’t think so.
That’s why you wrote it no?
Oh yeah sure!
Not just for your lyrics but also for a real book.
Youi congratulate him.
He’s one of your heroes Bob Dylan?
Oh I think it’s fabulous yeah.
I think it’s really wonderful.
I’m very happy about it.
Just one more: I watched your concert the other day, 4 hours and 10 minutes I think
I told you.
How do you do it?
I mean, how you do keep it up for so long.
It’s extraordinary.
I always have trouble stopping.
Ah, so it’s the opposite.
The night has an organic life of its own.
I come out at night not quite knowing exactly where the audience is going to take me or
where I’m going to go.
We have such a big body of work behind us.
I like to play a lot of it, my audience comes to hear a lot of it.
Plus I want to give people something
that they’re hopefully never going to forget.
I want to give them something that feels epic to them.
I want to try to push beyond normal realms of performance.
I want people to go home feeling like they’ve had a night that’s going to resonate within
them.
We go out to entertain, we go out to inspire, we go out to stir you with action.
So, there’s a lot at stake when I go out onstage at night.
I like that, I like playing for those stakes, I always have ever since I was a young man
and that’s the way I got about it.
So you’re going to carry-on touring?
Carry on performing?
Can’t stop
No sir.