The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [138]
This was in Rumson?
Yeah. When I was sixteen or seventeen my band, from Freehold, was booked in a beach club. And we engendered some real hostile reaction. I guess we looked kind of—we had on phony snakeskin vests and had long hair. There’s a picture of me in the Castiles, that’s what it was. And I can remember being onstage, with guys literally spitting on it. This was before it was fashionable, when it kind of meant what it really meant.
So it was a funny decision, but I bought this house, and at first I really began to enjoy it, but then along came the Born in the U.S.A. tour, and I was off down the road again.
It was during this time that you met Julianne [Phillips, Springsteen’s first wife]?
Yeah, we met about halfway through that tour. And we got married. And it was tough. I didn’t really know how to be a husband. She was a terrific person, but I just didn’t know how to do it.
Was the marriage part of your whole effort to make connections, to deal with that part of your life?
Yeah, yeah. I really needed something, and I was giving it a shot. Anybody who’s been through a divorce can tell you what that’s about. It’s difficult, hard and painful for everybody involved. But I sort of went on.
Then Patti and I got together, on the Tunnel of Love tour, and I began to find my way around again. But after we came off the road in 1988, I had a bad year right away. I got home, and I wasn’t very helpful to anyone.
Some of your fans seem to think along the same lines, that by moving to L.A. and buying a $14 million house, you’ve let them down or betrayed them.
I kept my promises. I didn’t get burned out. I didn’t waste myself. I didn’t die. I didn’t throw away my musical values. Hey, I’ve dug in my heels on all those things. And my music has been, for the most part, a positive, liberating, living, uplifting thing. And along the way I’ve made a lot of money, and I bought a big house. And I love it. Love it. It’s great. It’s beautiful, really beautiful. And in some ways, it’s my first real home. I have pictures of my family there. And there’s a place where I make music, and a place for babies, and it’s like a dream.
I still love New Jersey. We go back all the time. I’ve been looking at a farm there that I might buy. I’d like my kids to have that, too. But I came out here, and I just felt like the guy who was born in the U.S.A. had left the bandanna behind, you know?
I’ve struggled with a lot of things over the past two, three years, and it’s been real rewarding. I’ve been very, very happy, truly the happiest I’ve ever been in my whole life. And it’s not that one-dimensional idea of “happy.” It’s accepting a lot of death and sorrow and mortality. It’s putting the script down and letting the chips fall where they may.
What’s been the toughest thing about being a father?
Engagement. Engagement. Engagement. You’re afraid to love something so much, you’re afraid to be that in love. Because a world of fear leaps upon you, particularly in the world that we live in. But then you realize: “Oh, I see, to love something so much, as much as I love Patti and my kids, you’ve got to be able to accept and live with that world of fear, that world of doubt, of the future. And you’ve got to give it all today and not hold back.” And that was my specialty; my specialty was keeping my distance so that if I lost something, it wouldn’t hurt that much. And you can do that, but you’re never going to have anything.
It’s funny, because the night my little boy was born, it was amazing. I’ve played onstage for hundreds of thousands of people, and I’ve felt my own spirit really rise some nights. But when he came out, I had this feeling of a kind of love that I hadn’t experienced before. And the minute I felt it, it was terrifying. It was like, “Wow, I see. This love is here to be had and to be felt