watching my band play, making a few bucks. <\/span><\/p>\nBut the town became central to my identity, and it became central to the identity of my music\u2026.The town was filled with a bunch of characters, and I sort of took them and embroidered upon them on my first record, <\/span>Greetings From Asbury Park<\/span><\/i>, and<\/span> [my second,] <\/span>The Wild, the Innocent<\/span><\/i> & the E Street Shuffle<\/span><\/i>.<\/span> Those are all about my days in Asbury and on the East Coast and in this little blue-collar, sort of run-down amusement town.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSo it deeply affected the music that I was writing about\u2026.When I finally got a record deal\u2026I knew they were trying to say that I was a New York artist, because of the connection to Bob Dylan. My first photo shoot was a shoot in New York City, and if you go to the back of the <\/span>Greetings From Asbury Park<\/span><\/i> album, you\u2019ll see there\u2019s a picture of me that looks like I\u2019m standing by the ocean. Actually, I was in New York City <\/span>[laughs],<\/span><\/i> and they put the ocean in later. It was after I [had been] walking down the boardwalk and pulled [a] postcard out of a little rack and said, \u201cNo, I\u2019m not from New York City; I\u2019m from Asbury Park, New Jersey, and this is what I want as my album cover.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\nSo I particularly decided that I<\/span> wanted my identity to be connected to where I actually was coming from, and\u2026the stories I was telling. And luckily enough, I had an art director, John Berg, at the time who saw the postcard and said, \u2018Yeah, this is a good idea, let\u2019s use it.\u2019 So<\/span> it gave me my own personality and character and identity, and it gave my music its grounding in where it<\/span> really came from. And that was what I was interested in. The whole Asbury Park, the boardwalk was very central to the character I was trying to create, the world I was trying to bring to life on my first several records.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nRight; they\u2019re very evocative.<\/strong> <\/span>You\u2019ve written and spoken about how you were always drawn to music in which the singers sounded \u201csimultaneously happy and sad, hopeful and resigned\u201d\u2014songs like the Drifters\u2019 \u201cUnder the Boardwalk,\u201d \u201cUp on the Roof;\u201d music that was marked by, in your words, \u201ca deep longing\u201d and \u201ca casually transcendent spirit\u201d that made you feel like the \u201cwhole world opened up\u201d to you. I love that, and I see it as one of your great strengths and \u201cmagic tricks\u201d: your melding of sorrow and joy, kind of sitting with them as two sides of the same coin. And I\u2019m curious if you think there\u2019s something distinctly American, or even distinctly New Jerseyan, about that specific combination in music?
<\/strong>Well, that was the life I was living. The life I was living was the Drifters\u2019 \u201cUnder the Boardwalk\u201d and \u201cUp on the Roof.\u201d I had a little apartment above the shoe store\u2026where I lived on the third floor, and I would climb out my window and sunbathe on the tarred roof [laughs]<\/em> on Cookman Avenue in Asbury Park when I was 20 years old. And so those songs were very important to the beginning of my emotional life and my emotional connection to music.<\/p>\nBut then also\u2026in my teens, I grew up through some of the most influential years of my life in the \u201960s, so that brought a certain social consciousness into my music. And so those things together were very, very influential, in the beginning, of the structuring and building of the kind of music and the parameters of what I wanted my music to contain. Both of those things were very, very central.<\/p>\n
And if you look at the E Street Band, the E Street Band does two things very well. One is, it\u2019s one of the few bands that really communicates joy, you know? Playing \u201cRosalita\u201d or \u201cOut in the Street\u201d or \u201cHungry Heart.\u201d And there\u2019s a lot of bands that communicate cool, there\u2019s a lot of bands that communicate anger, but there [were] not a lot of modern rock bands at the time who communicated joy<\/em>, which was an enormous part of the music of the \u201950s and \u201960s. And so I\u2019ve always been proud of that side of my band that can speak to that part of people\u2019s lives. It\u2019s a very essential part of music.<\/p>\nAnd then at the same time, we can take on tough subjects and delve into them pretty seriously\u2026.As far as the boundaries of the music that the band can draw on and create, I\u2019m very proud that the band has such a wide emotional bandwidth that we can bring to our audience.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s funny\u2014we were in rehearsal the other day, and I said, \u201cOkay, we\u2019re gonna go out, it\u2019s gonna be kind of a political tour, very serious,\u201d\u2026I sequenced all these serious songs. I said, \u201cWait a minute. Where\u2019s the fun?\u201d \u2019Cause no matter how serious we\u2019re gonna be\u2026fun, joy, exhilaration are an essential part of people\u2019s lives. And I always want us to be able to address those things.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s lovely. Speaking of social consciousness, the first rotating exhibit at the new center is \u201cChimes of Freedom,\u201d which will explore protest songs across American history, including your most recent one, \u201cStreets of Minneapolis,\u201d and go all the way back to what is the archive\u2019s oldest handwritten lyrics of yours, an anti-war song called \u201cAll Man the Guns\u201d that you wrote during the Vietnam War when you were 18 or 19. Do you have any recollection now of writing that song?
<\/strong>Yeah, I do. Yeah, I remember that song really well. We had the [band] Steel Mill at the time, and Steel Mill was operating during the early \u201970s, which was really still the \u201960s, you know? The \u201960s really rolled over into the early \u201970s. So I was writing in Asbury Park, which had recently had the racial uprising, and Vietnam was still raging on. It was\u2026coming into people\u2019s living rooms on television every night, and it was an enormous, enormous issue. One of our first benefits we did was at a small theater in Red Bank\u2026to send folks down to the anti-Vietnam War benefit in Washington. We were probably 19 years old. So that was a very ongoing and central issue in my own life and in every young man\u2019s life, because the draft was still in [effect], and I wrote that song\u2014probably my earliest song addressing the Vietnam War. But I remember that song very well, and us playing it, right like it was yesterday.<\/p>\nThat\u2019s incredible. And there will be oral histories accessible in the center that focus on people like Bart Haynes, your first drummer in the Castiles, and Walter Cichon, from Freehold, [both of whom died in the Vietnam War]. The center\u2019s curator, [Melissa Ziobro], noted how it\u2019s very gratifying to be able to tell their stories, too, and ensure that people like that are more than just footnotes in history, which is wonderful.
<\/strong>Yeah, that\u2019s really<\/em> satisfying. The thing that I love about the center now is like, yeah, they have my stuff there, and that\u2019s great, and if people are interested, they can go and see it. But it takes on and will take on the entirety of American music, its influences, and will be a wonderful educational center for people who are interested in the broader connection between American music and American history. That really sort of convinced me to do it\u2026.The building itself is gorgeous<\/em>; the architect did a wonderful job. It\u2019s really an amazing place. It\u2019ll be a wonderful place to go. They\u2019ll have all these interactive services. I think\u2026[for] young kids who walk in, not knowing much about me or much about the history of American music, it\u2019ll really be a wonderful, eye-opening and valuable afternoon. And so I\u2019m excited to just be a part<\/em> of it, that\u2019s all.<\/p>\n