The idea that Springsteen was manipulated into acting out his mentor's literary fantasies is tempting, but the initial results can't be faulted. Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), The River (1980) and Nebraska (1982) are his work's core. The previously apolitical singer wrote Nebraska under Guthrie's influence, as a stark tour of the small-town America he grew up in, laid waste by Reaganomics. The River's title song remains his best. Its young married couple in a closing factory town have no future in a way more crushingly solid than punk's teenage mantra. "Is a dream a lie if it don't come true/Or is it something worse..." the man wonders, of an American Dream he has been forced awake from. It was a heartbreaking political song because it barely looked up from personal concerns; as good as Guthrie, but Springsteen's own."
Nick Hasted
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum will open the world’s first exhibit devoted to the life and music of Bruce Springsteen: From Asbury Park to the Promised Land: The Life and Music of Bruce Springsteen. This will be the first major artifact-driven exhibit about Springsteen’s legendary career. It will be a comprehensive look at his music, from such early bands as Child, the Castiles and Steel Mill through his work with the E Street Band and as a solo artist. The exhibit will include several of Springsteen’s guitars, including the Fender Telecaster that is on the cover of Born to Run. It will also include the outfit he wore on the cover of Born in the U.S.A., as well as numerous handwritten lyric manuscripts, posters and handbills from all phases of his career, and various awards and honors. In addition, the exhibit will include Springsteen’s 1960 Chevrolet Corvette, which he purchased after the success of Born to Run. The exhibit will run through the spring of 2010.
Experts restore a river of the Boss' ephemera
Inside the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts in Center City, dozens of the Boss' notebooks containing lyrics, phone numbers, personal notes, doodles, set lists, and tour information are getting the same types of careful treatment.
Jim Hinz, who heads the nonprofit organization's book section, said conservators are akin to book doctors, taking a "Hippocratic Oath of Paper."
"We handle everything the same," Hinz said. "We have to be just as careful with someone's daughter's drawing as we have to be with a Rembrandt etching."
Some of the cleaned pieces are already on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. The show "From Asbury Park to the Promised Land: The Life and Music of Bruce Springsteen" runs through next spring.
It is the most extensive exhibition on a rocker the hall has ever done, occupying two floors of the seven-story museum. It includes the 1960 Chevy Corvette Springsteen purchased after his success in 1975 and a round table where, he says, he's written a majority of his songs.
Among the treated paper products on display is a typed petition, signed primarily by girls from Springsteen's high school, arguing that his band at the time, the Castiles, deserved more attention and respect.
"He's obviously a major figure of 20th- and 21st-century American life," said Jim Henke, the hall's curator and vice president of exhibitions. Because of that, taking steps to preserve Springsteen's writings make sense, he said.
"It's important to keep them for generations to come," he said.
A Springsteen associate brought the more than 40 spiral notebooks, binders, folders, and scrapbooks to the conservation center's attention last year. The materials date from 1966 to 2005. Springsteen was archiving his collections, and the materials he sent to the center have personal notes, letters from fans both famous and not, and even a few vinyl recordings tucked between pages.
"He's very forward-thinking to consider preserving his legacy for future generations," said Ingrid Bogel, the center's executive director. "The type of musical things we've worked on in the past are Bach manuscripts."
For a Springsteen fan, the documents are a trove that gives insight into not only Springsteen the artist, but also Springsteen the man.
These everyday items include a "to do" list that has "extra garage door openers," a note to bring a camera and "vests - blue, purple, gray, black" on the tour supporting The Rising, and a typed series of phone messages for "Bruce and Patti," with a reminder to attend a parent-teacher conference.
There's a notebook from a University of Pennsylvania shop, another bearing a map of New Jersey, at least two with Snoopy on the cover. One orange composition book has lines on the cover for the user to fill in a name, address, and subject. Someone filled those spaces in to read: "Bossinheimer Jones / Cool Street / Your Mama."
"It's like looking into the past of a common human being who had common methods and common materials, and in a way it's kind of appropriate for who he is and what he does with his music," Hinz said.
On a recent day, conservation technician Val Kremser was working on one of Springsteen's tour notebooks, which contained set lists and notes on how to play certain songs. Springsteen often went back to the lists, putting down exactly how long a given concert had lasted. And he prepared for his overseas tours: One notebook has English-to-Italian translations of common stage phrases such as "Be right back." (Torno subito, although Springsteen spelled it differently.)
He sometimes included a few words about the weather or the crowd: "Wild night" reads a notation next to a New Jersey show, the words circled by what seem to be stars. (Two Philadelphia shows from the same period might not have gone as well: "Humid" was the notation next to one show; "new stadium," read the other.)
Kremser's job is to repair and clean, not alter. The tools of the conservator's trade are wheat starch paste, Japanese paper, and vulcanized rubber. Folded pages are unfolded. Dirty pages are cleaned. Then each page is scanned and a digital photo taken. Each finished notebook is placed in a custom-made cloth box.
Kremser delicately reattached a perforated notebook cover. She showed an imperfection she was planning to fix, a minuscule blemish that probably would go unnoticed by most observers.
"That little tear, someone grabs a page too roughly and it's torn," she said.
While she's a little young to be part of Springsteen Nation, Kremser said, she likes working on documents belonging to a living person, someone she saw on TV just the other night. "It's nice to see he's a real person who makes lists about things. I make lists, too," she said.
Among the Springsteenabilia were two scrapbooks, covering 1965 to 1968, put together by the wife of the man who managed the Castiles, one of Springsteen's early groups. The woman considered the five band members part of her family, labeling pictures "my sons" and including birthday-party photos and locks from each teenager's hair.
The paper conservators' worst enemy - or best friend, since it keeps them in business - is pressure-sensitive adhesive, what the rest of us call tape.
Senior conservation assistants Jilliann Wilcox and Anna Krain took on the scrapbooks. Some pages had as many as eight layers of tape, which stained pages and marred images.
"There were a lot of challenges, and that was the fun part," said Krain, who met Springsteen after a Philadelphia concert and kissed his cheek, which she recalled as "sweaty."
Each scrapbook was unbound so its pages could be addressed individually. After a surface cleaning with the vulcanized rubber, the tedious tape removal began, manually or with a heated spatula.
"Adhesive tends to yellow and brittle and disfigure the object by staining it," Hinz said. "If you don't remove it, it could release on its own, and the item that it attached could fall off and be quite possibly lost forever."
Each scrapbook required at least 80 man-hours. After the pages were cleaned and repaired, the items - photos, newspaper clippings, ads such as one for a Castiles show at a VFW for 50 cents - were reattached with black photo corners or tiny hinges in their original positions.
Conservators often don't have time to analyze what they're preserving, Hinz said. "We can't luxuriate in the reading of artifacts," he said.
But he did notice, for instance, that the words Well, they, which kick off "Atlantic City," were used in multiple songs. And Springsteen has hundreds of songs scrawled in his notebooks, many unrecorded or unreleased.
The Hall of Fame's Henke said the papers gave glimpses into Springsteen's songwriting style. Henke has seen songwriters who cross out and revise a song on paper. Springsteen is more likely to write out an entire song, move on to something else, and then rewrite the earlier song in full with changes. A song can appear three times in a notebook, with slight revisions each time.
Henke also noted a difference as Springsteen matured. "Going back to the earlier years, he'd write and rewrite and rewrite, and there's far less of that by The Rising," Henke said. "He sort of gets it out much quicker now."
As she surface-cleaned a black-and-white composition book that still contained Springsteen's high school schedule - steno was first period, and he had two English classes - Krain noted that the artist's simplest personal writings had a certain timing and rhythm.
"Even the notes he wrote had the potential to be songs," she said. "They had the quality of lyrics."
Following the well-documented ticket fiasco of Springsteen's recent New Jersey dates, where fans were shut out or directed immediately to Ticketmaster's resale site, TicketExchange, New Jersey Rep. Bill Pascrell is introducing the BOSS ACT into Congress. While the acronym stands for Better Oversight of Secondary Sales and Accountability in Concert Ticketing, it's an obvious nod to Springsteen, who's nicknamed the Boss.
The legislation could be a potential boom for ticket buyers frustrated by scalpers and hard-to-get tickets. Among the bill's most important aspects is a requirement by ticket agencies like Ticketmaster to reveal -- seven days before the on-sale date -- exactly how many seats are being sold, how many are being held for fan clubs, presales and industry, and the total number of service charges. The legislation would also attempt to prohibit brokers from buying tickets in the first 48 hours following an on-sale.
The New Jersey Attorney General has already filed five lawsuits against people attempting to resell tickets to the just-announced Springsteen Giants Stadium shows on Sept. 30, and Oct 2-3.
Springsteen has yet to comment on the bill, but there is one down side: The veteran rocker has long lamented the Boss nickname, even frequently changing the lyrics in the live version of 'Rosalita' to "You don't have to call me lieutenant, Rosie/Just don't call me Boss!" No chance of shaking that name now. The Light in Darkness
Come per "For You", in questo nuovo libro, l'autore raccoglierà le testimonianze di chi ha vissuto quel periodo musicale e di chi ha assistito ai concerti di quello che è ritenuto uno dei migliori, se non il miglior tour di Bruce.
Memorabilia e foto, moltissime delle quali inedite, arrichiranno il volume già atteso dai fans. The Light in Darkness
Lawrence Kirsch Communications, creator of the recent book For You, is beginning work on a new book called The Light in Darkness, to focus specifically on the Darkness on the Edge of Town era. Like For You, the forthcoming book will feature concert photography and stories from fans. Kirsch tells Backstreets, "This tribute to Darkness will be something special: more passionate stories, breathtaking never-seen-before photos, and some discovered artwork and memorabilia gems that will be of great interest to fans no matter when they were introduced to Bruce's music." Visit thelightindarkness.com for more information and to contribute.
April 05, 2009  Gary Graff, Cleveland Max Weinberg was happy to play the proud papa at Saturday's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, accepting well-wishes about his 18-year-old son Jay's appointment as his fill-in in the E Street Band for a selection of dates on Bruce Springsteen's current world tour. "What can I say? I'm very proud," Weinberg told Billboard.com after inducting Elvis Presley's drummer DJ Fontana into the Hall -- while E Street Band bassist Garry Tallent did the honors for Presley's bassist, Bill Black. "I never taught him to play drums. He did it all by himself. He did all the work. He started less than four years ago and basically taught himself. He's like a prodigy or something. "I give my wife more credit than me. Maybe it's in the genes. It could be genetic." Weinberg, who has to miss the shows to help Conan O'Brien make his move to "The Tonight Show," acknowledged that he idea of an E Street Band concert happening without him was odd -- but less so because it will be his son filling in for him. "As Bruce said to me one night, 'It's good to know there'll always be a Weinberg on the drums in the E Street Band," the drummer said. "It's just a scheduling thing, but to have your child acquit himself so well and do it his own way...it's a wonderful feeling. There's nothing negative about it. He sounds great with the band." And the silver lining? "I've never seen the band," notes Weinberg, who during the recent rehearsal shows in Asbury Park "stepped down front to watch, and it's a helluva show." The Springsteen tour, he reports, is off to a strong start, too. "We found that with very little rehearsal, the first night it was largely there, the second night, boom, it was all there," Weinberg says. "The new material's going over great. 'Kingdom of Days' is an instant, epic song for us. People seem to really respond to that song. 'Outlaw Pete' has taken on a whole other dimension playing live. It's quite a different show for us, very exciting." |
Alive: Sean Penn
While most of the guys he grew up with are dead, Sean Penn has become the greatest actor of his generation. In this interview conducted before the Oscars, he tells Mark Binelli about his intriguing life, his amazing career and his disgust at the Academy
By Mark Binelli
March 2009
One afternoon in January, Sean Penn answers the door of his Bay Area home, shoeless, in jeans and a grey thermal undershirt, his hair sort of crazily mussed, looking as if he's just woken up. It's a couple of minutes past noon.
To say that Penn has 'aged well' is to employ a non-standard usage of the term. He does not look younger than his 48 years. His forehead is baroquely creased, his long face haggard, his hair soaring and grey-streaked and parted down the middle. Something Penn is wearing, or Penn himself, exudes a beer-and-cigarettes musk particular to the morning after a rough night. All of which sounds like the opposite of a compliment, and for many it would be -- but Penn has aged into exactly the type of guy he's always seemed to want to be. When he was younger, not yet anointed the greatest actor of his generation, Penn had a habit of befriending older men he'd long idolised (Jack Nicholson, Charles Bukowski, Dennis Hopper, Hunter S Thompson) who had, aside from their obvious talents, seemed to figure out a way of living, a way of living very hard, that also became an integral extension of their art. Like the brilliant character actor that he is, Penn studied these men and lived hard himself -- fistfights, benders, jail, Madonna, public references to a sitting president's "soiled and blood-stained underwear". "I'm not an alcoholic," he told The New York Times Magazine in 1998. "I'm just a big drinker, and there's a difference." You get the sense that Penn would welcome, somewhere down the road, a Bukowski-esque level of physical decay.
Inside the house, Penn's daughter, Dylan, 17, and a friend are preparing food in the kitchen, where a holiday card from the Coppolas (Francis Ford and wife pictured on the front) hangs on the wall. A massive stone fireplace dominates the living room: if there is not such a thing as a walk-in fireplace, the term should be invented for this one. Son Hopper, 15, is nowhere to be seen. In another room, there's a framed poster of a film noir called Fall Guy, which starred Penn's father, Leo, an actor and director who was blacklisted in the Forties and Fifties. To bypass the blacklist, Leo Penn was billed in Fall Guy as 'Clifford Penn'.
Sean Penn has just been nominated for Best Actor for his title role in Milk, Gus Van Sant's triumphant biopic about the pioneering gay politician Harvey Milk, who in 1978 was assassinated, along with the mayor of San Francisco, by a deranged city supervisor played in the film by Josh Brolin. It's another virtuosic performance by Penn, who has amassed nearly 30 years' worth of them, beginning with Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, one of the few Penn characters, incidentally, who comes to a good end -- and even he blows all the reward money he gets from rescuing Brooke Shields from drowning by hiring Van Halen to play at his birthday party. Post-Fast Times, Penn has starred in exactly three comedies: the forgotten Crackers; the excellent, bittersweet Woody Allen movie Sweet and Lowdown, in which Penn plays a Thirties jazz guitarist; and the Robert De Niro buddy flick We're No Angels. "I like doing comedies," Penn says, not smiling, "but I'm not the first guy they go to on that shit." No, Penn's IMDb page is mostly bad news: juvie (Bad Boys), death row (Dead Man Walking), war crimes (Casualties of War), murdered daughters (Mystic River), unsuccessful heart transplants (21 Grams) cokehead amateur spies (The Falcon and the Snowman), cokehead Hollywood bottom-feeders (Hurlyburly), cokehead mob lawyers with very bad hair (Carlito's Way), psychotic fathers played by Christopher Walken (At Close Range) and next up -- for director Terrence Malick -- the troubled son of a troubled Brad Pitt (The Tree of Life). Which makes Penn's utter transformation into Milk, a charismatic, unflaggingly positive grassroots activist, all the more remarkable. What's most surprising is not the fact that Penn is so good at playing a proudly out gay man -- it's that he's so good at playing such a nice guy. As his friend Brolin half-joked in a speech at the New York Film Critics Circle awards: "We've known Sean as an actor who doesn't smile very much. And the fact that you smiled as much as you did in this film is amazing. Truly incredible. You are going to get the Oscar. Because you smiled so much."
Penn and I spend about five hours together over the course of two days. A decent amount of the time, we drive around Marin County in my ridiculous rental car, a tiny, bright-red convertible. Penn rides shotgun, smoking, sunk low in the seat, often forgetting to give me directions until the last minute, then seeming pleased when I'm forced to cut off other cars or ubiquitous cyclists. (Penn: "Do you ride a bike?" Me: "No." Penn: "Good.") When not in character as Harvey Milk, Penn is not exactly generous with those broad smiles. His blue eyes constantly seem to be peering at you over a pair of reading glasses, even when he is not wearing reading glasses, which gives him a perpetually sceptical air. But despite his reputation -- moody, hates journalists -- Penn is an easy man to get along with. One day at brunch, we're joined by his wife, the beautiful actress Robin Wright Penn. The next day, we drive out to a Puerto Rican chicken place in San Rafael that Penn loves, taking an outdoor table near the parking lot.
One thing Penn doesn't want to discuss much is politics. But the topic is inevitable: After he wrote an article for The Nation, the weekly "flagship of the left", on his visits to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and Cuban president Raul Castro -- a longer version appeared on liberal news website The Huffington Post --he was scolded by a chorus of journalists as being fawning and hopelessly naive. Penn, of course, gives as good as he gets. At one point in our interview, railing about the lack of commitment displayed by some of his acting peers, he says: "People are spending too much time modelling for some fucking clothing company instead of acting, and I resent it. It's like, 'I'm sorry -- are you going to do the Chanel ad today? I thought you were in the middle of shooting a fucking movie.'
"You see wonderfully talented actors everywhere, which almost makes it sadder," Penn says wearily, lighting another cigarette. "It's not about what kind of movies they make. I don't care if they make love stories -- there are great love stories. Just let me know you mean it. I want to know you're trying to write the Great American Novel every time. Fail all you want. But fucking try."
Mark Binelli: So congratulations on the Oscar nomination. Did you get up early to hear it?
Sean Penn: I'm 48 years old. I turned off my phone and was sound asleep.
MB: Do you get excited by this sort of thing, or is it more about how awards can help a film such as Milk reach a wider audience?
SP: Well, we actually got more nominations than we expected. And frankly, the key was Best Picture -- that's very important to getting the movie out there, more so than my category. But I was very excited, because if we hadn't gotten these eight nominations, we'd be straight to video right now. That's just the nature of the beast.
MB: When Gus Van Sant first approached you about this film, were you aware of Harvey Milk?
SP: I was graduating high school the year Harvey Milk was killed, so I was in California, and I was certainly aware of it -- it was national news, anyway. I didn't know anything more than this openly gay politician was murdered alongside the mayor of San Francisco. I think it was only a month after the Peoples Temple thing [the Jonestown mass murder] had happened, which was mostly San Francisco people, so it was kind of a crazy moment in Northern California.
MB: Did you know gay people as a kid?
SP: I never heard the word 'fag' until I was in high school. I might have heard about homosexuals from Life magazine, but I never heard anything derogatory. Politically, it might have been discussed in my home. But it never landed. Did I know gay people? I later came to find out that there were gays in the theatre world who were friendly with my family. I remember being at a party as a kid, and Paul Lynde telling my mother how sexy my father was, and thinking, 'What's that about?'
MB: Playing a real-life person like Milk, with so much archival footage to look at, is there a danger of just doing an impression?
SP: Yeah, but I don't know how to do impressions. I can't sing, either. So there's that. The main problem was that normally, to tell a whole life in two hours, you want to get somebody more charismatic than the real person. And in this case, one could only aspire to that.
MB: What's Van Sant like as a director?
SP: Among the best. God knows, there are directors whom I love, where you get into something one day where a scene's not working -- maybe it's the writing, maybe your talent's just not going to be able to rise to it -- but at some point, you will point your finger at the director, and on your drive home from work that day, you're saying, 'That motherfucker . . .' That never once happened with Gus. I have a pretty photographic memory of attacks I might have made on a scene -- whether it was two takes or 30 takes, I'll remember every one of them. So I have 30 years of going and watching what directors did with those things, how they laid down that track.
MB: You really can watch a film, see a scene and say: 'I remember doing that a different way, and it worked so much better'?
SP: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And Gus has great taste. He's elegant. You feel that throughout the process.
MB: Besides the script and the opportunity to work with Van Sant, was there political motivation in taking the role?
SP: No. I certainly appreciated the politics of it. But that wasn't a conscious factor.
MB: It was strange watching the film post-Prop 8 [which wiped out the legal status of same-sex marriages in California] -- how eerily it paralleled that fight. And of course in Milk, they win out on the ballot issue, while we're watching 30 years later having just lost on a similar issue. Were you surprised?
SP: No. Only because I was talking to people in the system, including [San Francisco] Mayor [Gavin] Newsom here, who were worried. I was surprised when I heard the numbers among black voters, which was fucking shameful. And, of course, the Mormons. What it comes down to is the churches are not operating like instruments of love. They're hate machines. They're ignorance factories.
MB: What do you think Harvey Milk would have become, if he had lived?
SP: The only significant speculation I make is if you look at the timing, what an incredibly powerful voice he would have been when the plague hit, which was a year after. You had an entire administration that never said the word 'Aids'. He would have pushed that issue, and there would be people alive today that aren't. That seems a pretty safe bet.
MB: Is it known if he had higher political aspirations?
SP: My impression is he would have taken the movement as far as it could have gone.
MB: Josh Brolin made a very funny speech about you the other night at the New York Film Critics Circle awards. Did you guys have an immediate rapport?
SP: We'd spent some drinking time together before we knew we were going to make this movie. He just cracks me the fuck up. And, yeah, we're both California surfers, we both race cars, we ride horses, our dads worked together. I think I might have even met him once, as a kid. I remember going out to James Brolin's house with my dad. Josh is much younger than I am, though.
MB: What did your dad do with James Brolin?
SP: Marcus Welby, MD
MB: Did you ever visit your dad on the set of TV shows he was directing?
SP: I was on that show. I was an extra. I had one line. My older brother [musician Michael Penn] and I went in. My brother's starting a car, and it won't start, and I say: 'You flooded it, dummy.' I was on the set all the time as a kid.
MB: Was that exciting for you, or did it become familiar?
SP: It was a Going to Work with Dad Day thing. I'd venture off into the back lot while they were working, just on my own. That was fun. But I wasn't dreaming of participating at the time. I was dreaming of being a cowboy but not a movie cowboy.
MB: What was growing up in Malibu like?
SP: I would say it was a combination of Huck Finn and Rumble Fish. It was an idyllic kind of thing. I'd walk to elementary school, about a mile. My feet hit pavement for about 20 feet in that mile. Since then, they've built it up -- there are more streets.
There was a culture of what I'd call soft violence, in the sense that we didn't let outside surfers surf our beach. We were vandals, we brought wrist-rockets to the beach, beat people up. Some people are kind of shocked by this -- but 10 of the guys I grew up with are dead. That's a big number. This group of surfers -- in some kind of Lord of the Flies way, these guys found reasons to put their lives into situations that were horrifying.
MB: Of these 10 people . . .
SP: One lived in Hawaii, came home to Malibu to visit -- this is later, in his mid-20s -- intentionally ran over somebody with his car, got out of the car, stripped naked and started screaming about God. That was one of them. One guy we surfed with, we used to go to Zuma Beach in the morning before junior high school. We took a bunch of quaaludes before we went out surfing, and he just drifted off into the ocean, and nobody ever found him. Another guy I surfed and played Little League with, he was dealing and doing blow and shot himself off the edge of a cliff in a car. Another guy killed his mother. Another guy I was in jail with, actually -- I think he's dead now.
MB: But you saw him in jail?
SP: This is when I was in my 20s. I was in LA county jail, and I had a trustee come to my door, and it turned out to be this guy I surfed with. The core group of surfers that I was in the water with for years at a time, that was about eight guys. And there are about half of us left.
MB: Your kids are teenagers now. Have they watched many of your films?
SP: They've hardly seen any of them.
MB: By design?
SP: By their design. It weirds them out. They've seen a few. They both came to the Milk premiere. I don't think either one of them has seen more than four movies that I've been in. Of my wife's movies, maybe a few more than that.
MB: But they liked Milk?
SP: Yeah, but the joke was that my son's problem was seeing his father kiss [James] Franco, and my daughter's problem was seeing Franco kiss her father.
MB: I heard that Van Sant wanted that first long kiss to happen very early on, otherwise people would be distracted waiting for it to happen. Was that at all difficult to shoot, or just another day?
SP: It was pretty much another day, yeah.
MB: One of my editors -- and he meant this as a compliment -- compared your playing Milk to Michael Jordan playing baseball, except you were successful. Meaning that you seem to choose increasingly difficult roles, as a way of challenging yourself.
SP: That's not the way I view it, really. With this character, I assume most of that perception is related to homosexuality. There's a thing Cleve Jones [a Milk campaign worker, portrayed in the film by Emile Hirsch] said early on. He said gay-rights activists, talking about straights who are sympathetic to the movement, will often say, 'They're just like us -- it's just the sex is different.' And Cleve said: 'It's actually quite the opposite -- we're nothing like you, it's just that the sex is the same.' And that's really true. There's more shared with American blacks -- growing up with a level of oppression, and what kind of personalities are bred out of that, either fighters or those who succumb or whatever.
MB: But was it appealing to play Milk, who's so different from your public persona?
SP: He appealed, period. I liked him so much, and I just thought, 'Can I find him in myself?' I didn't know. And there were times when I'd given it a go and really felt like I failed. You don't know. You just hope. Something kind of good happened, right as we were about to start. I was finishing Into the Wild at Skywalker Ranch, and Paul [Thomas] Anderson was finishing There Will Be Blood there. So we showed each other our movies. And it was really good timing for me. Seeing Daniel Day [Lewis], who I think is a great, great actor -- there's something rejuvenating about seeing what it is to suit up. I'm not talking about talent here, I'm talking about commitment -- I don't feel challenged by too many of my colleagues in terms of commitment. A lot of them put more effort into selling their pictures than making them. You need people like Daniel Day. Even if you think you're doing your best work or trying your hardest, he woke me up about, you know, 'You've got some fucking work to do.' That was very healthy for this movie.
MB: So was it almost a kind of -- I don't want to say 'rivalry', but . . .
SP: No, it would be the opposite of a rivalry. It would be more of a brotherhood. He's on your team, and he just beat six tackles . . . now do him a favour and beat seven. Something about that just got the juices flowing.
MB: The first film you directed, The Indian Runner, was inspired by Bruce Springsteen's song Highway Patrolman. What was it about that song that spoke to you?
SP: I thought it could be a movie as soon as I heard it. I spoke to Bruce that day.
MB: Was this after Nebraska came out?
SP: It was before Nebraska came out, because I was living with his sister at the time [Pamela Springsteen, to whom Penn was briefly engaged], so he sent her a rough. We were actually living in an apartment in California that he owned and I was piggybacking on -- I was like some homeless guitar player.
I called him and said I wanted to make a movie out of his song. I was just a kid, so it was safe for him to say yes. He was like, 'OK, Sean, sure.' Probably thinking, 'I'll never be hearing about this again.' But he kept his word.
MB: Have you learned things about directing from directors you've worked with?
SP: Oh, yeah. I actually observed Scorsese on Cape Fear. I had just finished The Indian Runner, and I said: 'Having just made a movie, I've never been more curious about how you do what you do. Can I come down and watch?' I just had to promise I wouldn't smoke anywhere near him. Asthma. Clint [Eastwood] is a very unusual case. The only thing I learned from him [on Mystic River] was the value of a sense of calm and quiet on a set. How he makes a movie is a mystery to me.
MB: He's very fast, right?
SP: I remember checking into a hotel in Boston to start on the very first day of shooting. Nine weeks later from that day, the entire movie was finished -- including the score that he wrote and recorded! This year, two major pictures, and acting in one of them? I don't know how he does it.
MB: It's like a supreme level of confidence.
SP: That plays a big part, yeah. I don't know what the rest is. He'll say: 'You want to rehearse this scene?' So you get done with your first rehearsal, and he says: 'I'm OK. Want to move on?' He's had the camera rolling -- he shot it. I think the most takes I ever did on Clint's movie was three, and that was rare. A lot of one-takes.
MB: How about the famous scene in Mystic River, where your character is being held down by that huge group of police officers as he tries to get to his daughter's body?
SP: This is my favourite story of his guidance. In the script, it was written that six guys are stopping me. I thought maybe two of them could take me. But if it's only six of them, someone might get hurt if I really let myself go, so I don't know what to do. I don't want a really fake fight, and I don't want to hurt anybody. Clint said: 'I'll figure it out,' and that's all he said. When I came back to the set, he had about 15 guys jump on me, and I was locked down -- I was literally able to try to head-butt people, I was able to try to bite people, I was able to try to kick them. I didn't have to hold back at all, and it freed me to do anything. This is Clint thinking.
MB: What about working with Woody Allen?
SP: [Laughs] He surprised me, because he had written a fairly eccentric character, one that I had never done anything like. And he never asked me what I was going to do until the first day of shooting. If Woody didn't like something, he'd say: 'You know what was wrong with that take, Sean? Everything.' Which was a kind of clarity that made things easy, because you didn't go and try to adjust what you did -- you just changed it. I loved working with him. Certain directors I've gotten on really great with. Clint, Woody, [21 Grams director] Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Gus.
MB: An early film of yours I just re-watched was At Close Range, which was incredibly intense. Did you feel like that was your first really substantial role?
SP: That was the first one I was very involved with. I nursed the thing along for five years. I hired the director, Jamie Foley. I had noticed the value of building a partnership between an actor and a director, like with Scorsese and De Niro, certainly. And I was trying to find a director like that, because I had had a few early missteps. Jamie ultimately was not in step with that idea. We were in step on that movie, but he didn't want to be my director and me be his actor.
MB: I assume that casting your mother [the actress Eileen Ryan] and your brother [Chris Penn, who died in 2006 at age 40] was your doing?
SP: Sort of. Jamie was a close friend at that time, and he knew them both.
MB: Did you and your brother talk much about acting?
SP: As much as anybody, he got me into film. As much as my dad did, he did. I don't know how old he would have been when he saw Apocalypse Now, but around that time, he became like this Vietnam War aficionado. From the time he was 13 or 14, he was making Super 8 movies, Vietnam War movies, and using Phil Ochs as the soundtrack. He would get on the bus by himself, at a young age, and go to Santa Monica to look for a guy who was the age who might have served in Vietnam. And he'd drag these guys home, these veterans. I'd get home from surfing, and he'd be sitting in his room in a circle of six bearded guys with tattoos, just writing notes, their dialogue, this and that.
MB: And your parents were OK with it?
SP: They loved it. So he started making these movies, then he started including me in them, and then it expanded, and we started making thrillers. At that time, I was still telling myself I was going to be a lawyer. I was reading all of F Lee Bailey's books. The Defense Never Rests. I was reading law books, precedents. I wanted to have them all memorised before I ended up going into pre-law. Meanwhile, I had Cs and Ds in school, because I was staying up all night making movies. By that time, I'd had to start acting in the movies I was directing, because there were only six or seven guys you could get out there at night. And they're dead, too, by the way, most of them. Weird.
MB: What was making Taps, your first film, like?
SP: It was a hoot-slash-devastating, because I'd only done theatre, principally, prior to that, and the process of film acting, it took me a long time to fall in love with it. On Taps, I was nearly suicidal about it. The director, who in later years I realised was actually quite good and a lovely guy, Harold Becker -- I fought with him so much. I must have been a nightmare, because I was so desperate to have the kind of freedom I had on the stage. It takes some time to embrace that. I talk a lot to Nicholson, who really became kind of the angel on my shoulder, as far as directing goes, and a great influence. He says the only reason he doesn't make more pictures isn't because he's tired or getting older. There's just not that many directors he wants to work with, because it's got to be somebody you thrive in depending on.
MB: How did you get to know Nicholson?
SP: Tim Hutton [Penn's co-star in Taps] brought me up to his pad. I guess it would've been the year that Fast Times at Ridgemont High came out. It turned out that he and I have a very easy shorthand with each other. He's stepped it up for me. It's like you're speaking the same language but with somebody whose instincts are that much sharper and more experienced.
MB: I've read stories about you and Tom Cruise and Timothy Hutton getting pretty wild during the filming of Taps.
SP: Well, they forced us into a fraternity on that one. They had us set up at this hotel in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. And we were all kids running around. We had a great time. But since then, I'm always the guy who stays at the other hotel than the other actors stay in. I remember, we were shooting in Thailand on Casualties of War, and some guys were going to the hospital, showing up with stitches.
MB: From being out partying?
SP: It started because groups of young actors can forget what they're there to do. I didn't want to get caught up in that.
MB: What was Cruise like to work with?
SP: Loved him.
MB: Any specific memories of what you guys got into?
SP: I'd be quite indiscreet if I spoke about it. But in my view, it was all positive. I haven't seen Tom much over the years, but it's always a pleasure running into him. And he smoked in Tropic Thunder.
MB: What did you think of Robert Downey Jr's speech in that film that references you not getting the Oscar for I Am Sam because you went 'full retard'?
SP: All fantastic. Everyone in that movie was fantastic.
MB: Is there something to Josh Brolin's joke about your uncharacteristic amount of smiling in Milk? He's a much more optimistic character than you usually play.
SP: The fact of the matter is, when you've got a mug like mine, you're not getting scripts that are calling for smiles that much.
MB: But some of it has to be career choices you've made.
SP: Yeah. And I'm sure part of it is not liking my teeth. It's choices, and it's not.
MB: You've done so few comedies . . .
SP: That's not been a choice so much. Even when I did Fast Times at Ridgemont High, years ago, quite a successful comedy, immediately the next thing I think I got offered was Bad Boys.
MB: I'm surprised they didn't try to pigeonhole you as . . .
SP: It never happened. I'm more interested in the way drama tends to resonate in people's lives, versus that kind of escapism. But I certainly would have done 10 more comedies had I been offered them. I was talking to someone the other day and said: 'Who would have thought when I was younger that I was going to end up being the poster boy for the Queer Nation and Robert De Niro was going to be the biggest comedy star in America?'
MB: How did you feel, early on, hearing yourself described as a 'rebel' or a 'bad boy'?
SP: Um, you know, I didn't read that stuff. The worst of my time in the spotlight was the Eighties, and back then, I was more interested in acting during the day and drinking at night.
MB: Do you think that image of you has stuck to this day, though?
SP: If you're suggesting that people lock onto a narrative and then have trouble having original thoughts beyond that, I'd say that I'm in your camp on that one.
MB: Your last film as an actor was All the King's Men, where you also played a politician, and it's kind of a funny contrast. Milk feels like it's presenting the most idealistic vision of what politics can accomplish. Whereas in All the King's Men, it's this world of corruption.
SP: A little more Blagojevich going on.
MB: So is your view of politics closer to one or the other film?
SP: I probably have a little of both. It's funny, All the King's Men was one of the only times I got blindsided by the reaction to a movie. I liked that movie, and it was loathed and disparaged. I really thought that [director] Steve Zaillian got an unfair break. Even this year the fact that there aren't crowns on [Steven] Soderbergh's and Benicio Del Toro's heads right now, I don't understand. That is such a sensational movie, Che. Benicio is so fucking good in it. And the fact that I'm not running into these people on this awards-party circuit, it's crazy.
MB: Do you think it's the length?
SP: Maybe because it's in Spanish, maybe the length, maybe it's politics.
MB: I know you don't want to talk about politics, but I'm sure you saw the recent columns attacking your . . .
SP: No, I didn't. I'm pretty out of the loop.
MB: The gist was, they praised you as an actor but said you're a naive journalist.
SP: Well, I think that they're professionally naive journalists. I have no regard for 90 per cent of American journalism. That's why I travel and look for things for myself. If you're going to get on Cuba for its lack of free press, well, we don't have any press, as far as I'm concerned. We supposedly have the right to it. But we don't fulfil it. I'm flattered by their disparaging remarks. And with the television guys, a lot of it's based on actor envy. They're all a bunch of failed actors. Bill O'Reilly wanted to be an actor more than anything. So they have to diminish it. I've heard plenty of actors say: 'I don't like it when actors get political.' They're just trying to appease these people.
MB: Maybe they don't want to get boycotted.
SP: Or laughed at. People are more afraid of being laughed at than boycotted. It's a really cowardly position to take.
MB: Do you have any regrets about not challenging Raul Castro more during your visit on things like the historic repression of gays in Cuba?
SP: I wasn't intending to paint the whole picture. I was talking about the United States and our gullibility. Just a few weeks ago, I was doing a reading for Paul Newman's foundation, and we had people outside with [murdered gay student] 'Matthew Shepard, burn in hell' signs. We've got a few closet-cleaning numbers to do before we start attacking them.
MB: This is still a homophobic country, no doubt, but it's different from the history of what happened to gays in Cuba.
SP: But we also lynched blacks all over the South at one time. Did they have massive oppression of homosexuals in Cuba? At one time, yeah. But things change. I'm not a defender of Cuba. But you have to consider the lens you're looking through.
MB: Is there a conflict between the empathy you need as an actor and the colder eye you need as a journalist?
SP: As an actor, you have to be able to suspend judgment, and instead function within the behaviour and the personality of somebody. So I don't think you're literally empathising with some rapist or murderer as much as just accepting the burden of shared humanity with them.
MB: Have you seen other Oscar-buzz films?
SP: I thought about getting out later today, start with Gran Torino and The Wrestler, and then see Benjamin Button later in the week. I run into Clint and Mickey all over the place lately and have to keep saying: 'Sorry! I haven't seen it yet . . . ' [In a follow-up interview, Penn said he'd seen The Wrestler: 'I wept. Beautiful piece of work.']
MB: The only one of those I've seen is Benjamin Button. Brad Pitt is good, but I found the movie unwatchably sentimental.
SP: Yeah, but I don't care: David Fincher was robbed on Fight Club, and he deserves whatever he gets. If this one is sentimental, it's not just some guy jerking off. You know it's coming from his heart, as a sincere attempt at dealing with the world.
MB: It seems like the press is pushing an Oscar rivalry between you and Mickey Rourke.
SP: Mickey called me up and said: 'There's this thing . . .' [Gossip websites reported Rourke text-messaged a friend to mock Penn's Milk performance.] I said: 'I don't ever want to read it. It doesn't matter.'
MB: You've claimed not to know how to turn on a computer. Is it to avoid that stuff?
SP: It's that, and laziness. I could also see myself staying up all night looking up things. But I do feel cleaner without it.
MB: You didn't act in Into the Wild, but I got the sense that the Emile Hirsch character, his spirit of adventure, was close to . . .
SP: That movie was the closest to my heart of anything I've done as a director or an actor. It disgusts me the way they [the Academy] snubbed that picture. We got fucked by our distributor, Paramount Vantage. If we got Academy Award nominations, then they'd invest in the fucking thing. I just thought of the look on that whole crew's face when nothing came through that morning, with the exception of Hal Holbrook, who should have walked away with the next five years' worth of Academy Awards. When that morning came, I thought about giving Bill Ayers a call and giving him the address of Paramount Pictures.
MB: Politically, are you feeling optimistic?
SP: Yeah, I am. I'm optimistic about this man, not about him by himself, and not about his Cabinet. But I'm optimistic about the people who put him in office -- if they support him first but then challenge him.
MB: Do you have anything nice to say about Bush as he leaves office?
SP: No. I truly think the man should be imprisoned for the rest of his life. I know that sounds like some lefty thing, but I think the state of accountability is a sham. It's one of my biggest problems with Barack Obama. When Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon, a lot of people were upset about it, but then when Ford died, these Democrats who'd once criticised Ford for that pardon suddenly had these revisionist opinions: 'We needed to be unified.' But long term, do you think Bush and Cheney would have gone to the trough like they did if Nixon had gone to jail? No.
So when Barack Obama came out militantly opposed not only to impeachment but censuring, I thought, 'What the fuck is that for accountability?' Yes, I do think that Obama is a deeply elegant, bright, human person who gives a shit and can do it, who can actually help change the world. But I don't know yet if all of us are going to do our part.
MB: Do you ever think of moving back to Hollywood, or are you happy here in Marin?
SP: Here's the thing: I've always figured I'd like to die in the tropics. So it really depends on when I sense that coming. What's in between is subject to a day-by-day reassessment.
NEW YORK (Billboard) – As strange as it is to see a band with its own huge live draw play an opening set, Wilco were the perfect choice to prime the crowd at Madison Square Garden on Monday for Neil Young.
In fact, watching Jeff Tweedy and company cruise through their abbreviated set (a breakneck nine songs that left the crowd palpably desperate for more) illustrated the fact that they could very well become the Neil Young of a younger generation.
Their songs are intricately written but still accessible, their live shows are raucous and they reference early rock and country without stealing from it. After a playing a set filled with incredible songs like "Jesus Etc.," "I'm the Man Who Loves You," and "Spiders (Kidsmoke)," there were still dozens of others in their catalog that the audience was dying to hear.
The floor of the Garden was almost completely cleared of seats to accommodate a standing audience, and the thousand fans who were devoted enough to stand for four hours straight were rewarded with an experience so intimate it seemed unreal. When Young finally took the stage in a paint-splattered blazer and Frank Zappa t-shirt, diving immediately into a fuzzed-out, energized of "Love and Only Love," it felt like being transported back in time to a crowded club.
Young, 63, clearly has no intention of resting on his laurels. Besides blasting through noisy, wild and achingly sincere versions of classics like "Cinnamon Girl," "The Needle and the Damage Done," "Old Man" and "Heart of Gold," Young packed the set with recent and brand new tracks like "Off The Road," "Hit the Road and Go To Town," and "Get Behind the Wheel." He even egged the crowd on to make a big stink about his newer songs because his new record label executives were in the audience.
Pure fearlessness poured out of Young's signature gigantic Magnatone cabinet as he leaned on his whammy bar, distorting the tunes in the style for which he's become famous. He tore into "Rockin' in the Free World" before the encore, leaving the audience to wonder what was left to finish the show. He then defiantly returned to the stage to howl through "A Day in the Life," a track even the Beatles never played live (and Paul McCartney flubbed when he tried to do it this summer). Young finished the song in a swirl of noise, angrily ripping strings from his guitar and grinding them together for maximum chaos.
Between the nostalgic and mournful vocal harmonies of his '60s and '70s hits and the ear-bleeding (not to mention politically charged) shows he puts on in the 21st century, Young seems to have done the impossible: capture the zeitgeist of two generations.
Just like Ronnie says...
"People go bonkers on 'Sleigh Ride' and 'Frosty' and 'I Saw Mommy.' The audience really goes nuts."
Congratulations on being named one of Rolling Stones 100 Greatest Singers.
I know. I’m excited about that too. I can’t believe it. I’m still in awe.
How did these yearly Christmas shows start?
You know what Nolan, we started it almost 10 years ago and the people there at B.B. King’s started asking me back every year. There were lines around the block every year and I’d ask “who are these lines for” and they’d say “they’re for you Ronnie”. Now more and more people want to see my Christmas show and it amazes me. Even me, Nolan. Christmas only comes once a year and I always hear my other hits year round. People go bonkers on “Sleigh Ride” and “Frosty” and “I Saw Mommy”. The audience really goes nuts.
Do you do strictly Christmas songs at the shows?
Nolan, if I did strictly Christmas songs at the show, it wouldn’t be a long show, would it. Of course I do all my hits. I do an Amy Winehouse song because she wanted to be me when she grew up. I do some Doo Wop songs. My show is a far range of the eras.
Do you just tour at Christmas time now a days?
No! I might work once a week. I might work every other week. I’m always out there. It’s my life. I have my kids and my home life, but if I didn’t have that stage life you would only see half a person. It’s like a disease.
Did you take some time off over the years?
The only time I took some time off was when I had a couple of kids. And I was still out there because I didn’t know I was pregnant. My mother in law told me when she came to one of the shows. I think this is the best time in my whole life… my whole life!
Joey Ramone helped produce and sang a duet with you on your EP “She Talks to Rainbows”. How did you link up with Joey?
Well first of all, when I came back from California all these people knew me. I didn’t know them but they knew me. I did a thing with Bruce Springsteen I did something with David Bowie. I got a call from Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones. Even Patti Smith who is on the new CD. When I got back from California, she actually hid under the piano when she heard I was there because “Be My Baby” was her favorite song. All these people that I didn’t know, they all knew who I was and loved my voice. But I didn’t know that because I was in California for 7 years and didn’t get on stage once. I did some records for Apple records and some records for A&M, but I was never on stage. When I was growing up I thought you made records to go onstage.
Are you referring to yourself by calling your record “The Last of the Rock Stars”?
Yes, I am. Every song on that record has a meaning. With “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow”, I thought that my career was there and then gone… I’m the last to tell about these stories. Even people like Joey Ramone are gone. They can’t tell the story and I can still tell them. I was with Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles-the Rolling Stones were my opening act. I’ve lived such a life that I can put out a story like that. When I perform, I laugh, I cry, I go with my feelings and it’s something I love and I can’t help it. If it’s a sad song, you’re gonna see tears. It’s all me. Rock ‘n’ roll can’t be fake. I’ve seen so many people come and go because people want to be Elvis or something similar. You have to be your own person. When it comes to Ronnie Spector, you only see me.
Many of your songs are written by others. Do you consider yourself a singer or a songwriter?
Oh, I’m definitely singer. I do a little writing but I’d rather get up there and perform.
Do you remember your first ever show?
Yeah, I did a bah mitzvah. I was 13 years old. It was before the Peppermint Lounge and all that stuff. A lot of the 13-year-old boys wanted the Ronnettes so we did so many bah mitzvahs. That was my whole thing at that age.
Do you talk to the other members of the Ronettes often?
Not much. They went their way, and I definitely went mine.
What keeps you busy when you’re not performing?
I’m with my kids a lot. I go shopping-grocery shopping. I try to make nice meals, but I’m not a good cook. The best I can do is spaghetti and meatballs. But I get it at Trader Joe’s, so it’s all natural. I try to keep the house organized, even though I have a maid come in. I don’t do much up in Connecticut, but that’s what I like. I can lay back and relax. When I don’t rock ‘n’ roll, I like coming home and doing nothing.
What’s it like to hear your songs on the radio after all these years?
You know what? That’s me. I can say, “that is me” and it takes me all the way back to those recordings. I believe in moving forward. I get in the car and hear “Be My Baby” and “Walking in the Rain” and I adore those songs. I would never not do my hits in concert. And I throw out extra songs too, like an Amy Winehouse song. People enjoy stuff. I explained to the audience that she wanted to be me when she grew up. But I didn’t take drugs. That’s where her downfall’s gonna be. All these bands in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s those bands with their crazy hair and breaking guitars on stage… how are you gonna shake your hair like that and be serious when you’re 60? It’s like those old metal bands. How long were they going to last in this business? And I was right. Where are they now… they’re about 6-feet under… even my good friend Jimi Hendrix. And I adored him. I knew him before, and Bob Dylan would come in and I would get up on stage and sing with them. But I never knew he’d go that far. That was before he took drugs and he was a really good guy. He hurt me a lot. John Lennon hurt me even more, because someone assassinated him. Jimi was doing drugs. When I saw Lennon he was screwed up. Then the next time I saw him he yelled, “Hey Ronnie Ronnette”… he always called me that. At that time he had cleaned up his act, he had no beard and the hair and he was straight and I went right back to loving him like I did in the ‘60s. And for him to get assassinated like that, it really destroyed me. Even George [Harrison], who wrote and produced all my records on Apple — he got me too. If someone told me today, “Two of the Beatles will be dead, and the two of them you hung around with all the time”… John and George would take me shopping and to the clubs at night to show me what London was all about. The drugs all came later. And you would have taken drugs too if you were a prisoner. When I was with them, I thought I was a prisoner too. But I would take them to Spanish Harlem to barbeques, and no one would even look up at them. They viewed them as no different from them and they loved that.
Posted By: Sheila Roberts
We go in the ring with the battered and bruised Mickey Rourke and discuss his resurrection as The Wrestler! MoviesOnline sat down with Mickey Rourke to talk about his new film, “The Wrestler,” directed by Darren Aronofsky from an original screenplay by Robert Siegel. Evan Rachel Wood and Marisa Tomei co-star.
On the surface, the film is an archetypal fable of a downtrodden sports hero seeking one last triumph – but underneath, in the bones of the story, is a lean, rugged, Hemingway-esque parable about the struggle for honor, dignity and love among men and woman on the tougher side of life. “The Wrestler” had its North American premiere at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival and won the Golden Lion at the 2008 Venice Film Festival. Rourke was recently nominated for a Golden Globe Award for his amazing performance in the film.
At the center of “The Wrestler” is a galvanizing, physical performance that rips the steely layers from the steroid-shooting, iron-pumping, hard-fighting Randy “The Ram” Robinson to reveal the equally funny and touching core of the man underneath. Director Aronofsky explains, “I’ve been a very, very big fan of Mickey since ‘Angel Heart’ and I’ve often wondered what happened to him. Why is this great talent not being shown to the world? I also knew how challenging this role would be both physically and emotionally and I knew I needed an actor willing to make all the sacrifices to transform themselves into this character and I believed Mickey could do that.”
Yet no one could have predicted the extent to which Rourke would embody Randy, shedding – and at times literally shredding – his skin, in a performance so nervy and unguarded, so equally focused on beauty, wit and pain, so infused with the hunger for human affection, that it took the story to places even the filmmakers never imagined. The physical demands alone of the role would be quite extreme, for Rourke trained with real wrestlers, did all his own fight scenes and put on about 30 additional pounds of muscle for the role.
Rourke came to the fore in the 1980s as one of his generation’s most promising young actors, with acclaimed roles in such films as “Diner,” “Angel Heart,” and “Barfly.” But after running into his own hard times, Rourke quite nearly disappeared off the map. He recently made a return to the screen in Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s comic-book-come-to-life, “Sin City,” but it has been many years since Rourke has been in as complex and sympathetic a role as Randy “The Ram” Robinson.
Aronofsky personally approached Rourke in a meeting that convinced both men they were going to push each other to interesting places. Rourke says that it was Aronofsky himself, rather than the story, that sealed the deal. “He makes very uncompromising, innovative films,” says Rourke, “and the whole wrestling thing seemed like such a departure for him, that the idea of this New York intellectual guy delving into this world of blood and sweat really interested me. I knew he would bring a completely different perspective to this story.”
Mickey Rourke turns in an impressive performance in “The Wrestler” and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us:
MoviesOnline: You didn't bring your dog today.
MICKEY: No. Well, she's like 16 1/2 now. I've got to like pick and choose my time and place with her. She's resting upstairs.
MoviesOnline: We had a good time with her last time.
MICKEY: Yeah, she's an old gal now. She had a stroke and she's got what's called old dog syndrome. So I've got to be real gentle with her.
MoviesOnline: What attracted you to this project and how was it working with Darren Aronofsky?
MICKEY: Well, I think the main thing that attracted me to the piece was the fact that I had an opportunity to work with a really special director. In the years I've been working, I can count them on maybe four or five fingers, and I could put him right there, right at the top of the list, with Coppola and the rest of them, (Michael) Cimino, Adrian Lyne. I think guys like him come around every 30 years, and he's going to have a long, very distinguished career and break some new ground with the way he shoots films.
You know, what I like about him right now is he's not making movies to become rich. He lets his wife do that. He's very uncompromising. He has a lot of integrity, and he's smarter than the rest of us. I knew why he wanted me to do this part. I mean, it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. But he really fought for me to do this role when he had a lot of resistance, and he kept fighting for me to do it. And then finally, I lost the part, and I guess even when I lost it, he kept fighting for me to do it. And it worked out.
I think the thing I was afraid of most is when I met him, he's very much an authority kind of figure. He's very direct. He's very uncompromising with everything in his life, I think. He likes to think of himself as this liberal, open-minded kind of person, but he's really the captain and he runs the ship, and that's just the way it is. And when he points his finger at you, he doesn't understand that going like this, that somebody may break it. And he didn't meet me 15 years ago, thank god. [laughs] If somebody said to me, "Do you think you could have given the same performance 15 years ago?" and I went, "Fuck yeah." And then when I thought about it, I went, "No. I would have told him to [fuck off], or kicked him in the ass," you know?
He just was smart enough and instinctive enough that when we had to do really hard scenes, or important scenes, emotional scenes like the one with Evan, he brought the best out of me in a certain kind of way that he spoke to me. And I had already, as an actor, made an inner choice in what I was using, and he didn't disturb that at all. But he would say little things to me to just raise the bar each take. And he said the right things, and he just surprised me, because I had thought I already delivered two takes that were gold. And then he'd come over, and he'd just talk to me in a way that maybe Vince Lombardi would talk to a player when he just needed like two more yards, "Just give me two more yards," you know? And I really enjoyed that way. It was competitive in a way. He challenged me in a way.
I remember one time I was at a boxing match and I was getting the piss kicked out of me, and I went back to the corner and Freddy Roach said something to me and slapped me in the face, and I was able to go back and take care of business because I had to. And with Darren, it's the same way. You got to keep moving forward. And you can only do that with a director if you trust him and you respect him. He just earned more and more trust and respect each day. And I think he felt that way about me, and I felt that way about him.
MoviesOnline: How was it working with Evan Rachel Wood?
MICKEY: When we were working with Evan, it just rubbed off, and she was already talented enough in her own right. To me, she's the best actress I ever worked with. Like I said, I didn't even know her name. We just did it. We introduced ourselves like a week or two later. I couldn't remember her name anyway.
MoviesOnline: What was the hardest part of the shoot?
MICKEY: The hardest part, really, was getting myself physically ready to pull off looking like these [wrestlers] because these guys are fucking huge. I weigh around 192 pounds, and to get up to 235 over a six-month period, it took a lot of work. So it started there, you know? I remember when it was, "Oh, we're going to work." I just felt like I did three movies in the gym, you know? And like I said, there weren't even chairs to sit in. The extras were like half of Darren's family from Brooklyn. It was that kind of shoot. Everybody was sweating and working 17 hours a day. And I remember waking up in the morning [after] getting like a 4 1/2, 5-hour sleep, because we were pushing, doing double turnarounds. I remember getting out of bed. I couldn't get out of bed until the trainer would pick me up, because everything just didn't work -- the knees and the back -- and getting out of bed feeling like I just got into bed. It was grueling. It was really hard, and it wasn't hard just for me. It was from the camera operator all the way down to Darren. Nobody really slept, nobody really rested, and everybody just worked their ass off for this guy.
MoviesOnline: You've overcome a lot of personal obstacles in your life. How does it feel to be back on top of your game? You've been mentioned for several awards.
MICKEY: Yeah. I mean, when shit started to happen for us in Venice, we didn't even have a distributor. I mean, I knew and felt we had something after like six days, but I didn't know it would go this far. [laughs] Then we went to Toronto, and people were really receptive and some reviews came out that were really [positive]. I wasn't really surprised at that. I think the thing that's kind of unreal is after like ten years went by and I wasn't working, you know, I thought, I really don't want to be in this business if I'm going to come in and work a day or two, you know, that kind of career. If I can't be the man, then I'd rather just go back to Miami and do whatever the fuck lands on my lap. And I think after Sin City, that kind of opened the door a little bit, and then this thing kicked the door down.
I'm really lucky to have a second chance, because I really misbehaved for 15 years really fucking badly. And I regret it. I just didn't have the tools to change at the time, and to really work and change myself outside, and work with somebody, get information on why I misbehaved and destroyed everything I worked so hard to do. I worked really hard to be the best actor I could be when I was at the Actors Studio. I think early on, with early success, that brought old wounds up, and I questioned my life and what happened in my life. And instead of feeling good about it, I was really angry about it.
MoviesOnline: Were there moments playing Randy where it felt uncomfortable?
MICKEY: Many. Yeah. It was one of the reasons when I was replaced early on where everybody was upset about it but me. Because when I sat across from Darren, I was looking at him and listening, and the monotone voice he has, and the way he looks at you. You can see how smart the guy is just hearing him. I knew he'd want his pound of flesh, you know? And I knew why he wanted me. And I thought, I'm going to have to revisit some really dark, painful places. I wasn't so much worried about the physical stuff as I was that, and then not getting paid to work so hard. I think I was relieved when I was replaced, because I thought, oh, let me just go do some half-ass movie, get paid ten times more than they're offering me on this. But there was the other side of my brain that went, this is a chance to work with somebody really good. I think there was a lot of the character in the movie that I kind of didn't really want to go there, you know, the closeness of it [and] the guy's desperate, sort of hopeless situation that he's in.
I remember when the movie was over, during my lost years, Springsteen and I were friends for 20 years, and I didn't even talk to him for like 13 years. I wrote him this letter, this long letter about how I had been lucky because I hit bottom, and then I was able to find someone to give me information why, and why these things happened to me, why I reacted, why the anger and the armor and the toughness and all that macho shit and the craziness and the being unaccountable and not worried about consequences -- why all that surfaced again. There were issues I had that weren't really about those, it was more about shame and I was hiding with the other thing, and I think the success made me just short circuit and hate being...I don't know, I hated stuff. I think I wanted to be taken care of when I was little, and not when I was an adult.
MoviesOnline: Would you say you're lucky to be alive now?
MICKEY: Oh, yeah. Due to natural circumstances or my own, fuck yeah. [laughs] I mean, thank god. But when I wrote Bruce's letter, I said in the letter to him, I'm lucky that I was able to meet a few good men to help me change my ways, and the change took place over a long period of time. And I wrote to him, how Randy doesn't have this available. So, I think when you hear the song, he got it. He got it all. And I think that's one of the reasons why he wrote the song for us. We couldn't afford to pay him. And we couldn't afford to pay Axl (Rose). And those guys stepped up to the plate for us in a big way.
MoviesOnline: Was "Sweet Child of Mine" your theme song?
MICKEY: Yeah, when I used to fight, I used to come out to that song. So, there was one day when I was getting ready to come out in front of this live arena, because we were shooting between live shows. I remember standing backstage, and I started going like this (reacting to the music). "Whoa!" It's not a boxing match. But it's got..."Fucking bring it!" Because in the dressing room, you're all nervous and scared, but when your music comes on, that's when you come out and you're not supposed to be afraid anymore. That's when the fun stuff starts.
MoviesOnline: Is acting kind of the ring for you?
MICKEY: Sure. Man, you know, I love competition. I used to love playing football in high school. I played with the same guys for 10 years. We played as a team, and it was competitive, you know? I don't want to lose a game by one touchdown or one point. I don't want to fucking lose at all, you know? I don't want to lose when I'm playing sports, and I don't want to lose when I'm acting. Darren's going to challenge me to bring it, and to be the best actor I can be. And I'm going to give him every fucking thing. I'm going to give him my fucking blood. I got no problem with that at all, you know? And people go, "Oh, it isn't competitive." It is competitive. I worked with actors that can competitively raise you to another level, because they're working off you. You can get some son of a bitch in there that wants to do something different, and then I'll just roll him up and smoke him like a cheap cigarette. So, either you can work together and bring each other up to another level, or you can do that other thing, and then I'll make toast out of your ass. So it's up to the other person, you know?
MoviesOnline: Have you spoken to some of the wrestlers who have seen the movie?
MICKEY: Yes.
MoviesOnline: What was their reaction?
MICKEY: Well, that was one of the big hoorahs we got. We went up to do one of them BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Q&A’s and Darren with his big mouth goes, "I hear Rowdy Roddy Piper's in the audience. Are you there?" And we hear a few seconds later, "Yeah, I'm here." And he looks at me and so then he goes, "We'd like to know...This is your world, and we hope we made a movie that depicts you in a way that you could...Did you like it or did you hate it? Do you have anything to say?" And there was a long pause. Darren looks over at me and he did that thing with his eyebrows. Darren's nervous. It's like when I took him to see Springsteen and he shit himself. You know, there's 85,000 people in Giants Stadium, and we go backstage to meet him. Darren goes, "I'm nervous, I never get nervous." And I go, "Shut up and come with me." And then Rowdy Piper went on to give us the highest compliments that anybody could give. I mean, man, it was like we made this movie and these are the guys we wanted to pay homage to, other than make a respectable movie. So Rowdy Piper and I and Darren, we met backstage, and he was very emotional about it, and he said some things about being at the other end of your career. You know, he's not in Madison Square Garden right now, and it's a really hard thing to hear.
MoviesOnline: Did you base your character on a specific wrestler?
MICKEY: Only the hearing aid thing was from a wrestler that I knew that my brother was friends with. We'd be in Gold's Gym pumping iron--we're talking 15, 16 years ago--and I'd say, "Magic..." (His name was Magic.) And I would joke, and my brother would go, "Bro, he ain't got his fucking hearing aids." [laughs] So I'd say something to him and I'd walk over, and I'd see Magic go... But he did it in both ears. He had one in each ear.
MoviesOnline: Are there any projects on the horizon that you're looking at taking on?
MICKEY: I've got one more day's work on this movie called “13” with Ray Winstone. Great actor. One of the reasons I'm doing it is the ensemble of actors who are in it. It's a remake of a French movie called “13 Tzameti” about all these guys playing Russian roulette [with] Jason Statham, who's a fucking great actor. I mean, he does The Transporters, you know, but if you see him in “Snatch” and these other movies, “London,” he's incredible. The ensemble's great -- Curtis Jackson, who's ‘50 Cent,’ Ben Gazzara. There is a really interesting young actor, Sam Riley.
MoviesOnline: Who do you play in this film?
MICKEY: It's not a character that's in the original movie. It's a character that he wanted to develop and we added. It's an added character. It's a guy who is from Texas who they end up smuggling out of a jail in Mexico because all the guys are in this ring, this circle who play Russian roulette. Ray Winstone's from an insane asylum, the other guy's from a jail, the other guys, two busboys they capture. And then you've got all these guys in there, 17 guys playing Russian roulette. And it's based on like the kid #13, Sam Riley's role, who's there by accident. And it's a
very interesting director, Gela Babluani. It's like I'm not always going to be able to work with Darren Aronofsky, so I said to myself, "So things don't go wrong again, I've got to work with people who have integrity and are very interesting, and smart, and want to cast the best people they can, and then I'm going to feel good about myself." I'm not going to go off and make “Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man” because they're paying me a whole bunch of money. I'd rather take a whole lot less money and work with really good people, or just not work at all.
MoviesOnline: Can you talk about when you first went into the ring in front of a crowd?
Because you did it in between...
MICKEY: ...in between real wrestling matches, yeah. I was shitting myself. I was 234 pounds of muscle, and I had to do this one scene where I flip over and do the scissors. And I hadn't nailed it in rehearsals. We got real close. And I wanted to do it because it was hard to do. My hands are pretty busted up from boxing, and they lock on me. So, I remember for that scene, I put extra tape on my hands and I took my kneepads out so I'd be a little lighter, because I thought, if I nail it, I'm going to nail it on the first take. Or, in front of all these people, I'm going to be falling down worse and worse and worse. And I hit in on the first. And it's a real hard maneuver, especially being 30 pounds heavier. I remember going, I've got to press down, I've got to jump. And I did it. And I'm more proud of that than anything in the fucking movie, really. [laughs] I looked over at Darren and I had a big smile on my face, so did he, and I go, "That's it, one take. Let's go. Move. I can't do that again."
MoviesOnline: Have you reached a place of peace with yourself now?
MICKEY: I'm getting there. I'm almost...I'm pretty much there, kind of, sort of. As much as probably I'll ever be. If that's the question, that's the answer: as much as I'll ever be. There's always going to be a war going on inside of me. That's just, I think, my make-up. It just gives me the fire to burn to keep moving forward. But a lot comes with the territory. I've just got to keep a lid on it.
MoviesOnline: What's the status of Sin City 2?
MICKEY: I have no idea about that. You'll have to talk to them confused people.
MoviesOnline: Did you watch the De La Hoya fight?
MICKEY: I absolutely did, and the right guy...The best trainer was in Manny Pacquiao's corner, and the best fighter kicked his [De La Hoya's] ass.
Steven Van Zandt: From Rocker to Marketer
Q&A: E-Streeter, Actor, DJ Talks About Managing His Diverse Personas and Charity Work
NEW YORK -- Any diehard Bruce Springsteen fan can attest that at least three different Steven Van Zandts have emerged over the last three decades.
There's Little Steven, his nickname as Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band's lead guitarist in the 1970s and early '80s, when the group disbanded. Formally reunited since the late '90s, they are about to play the halftime show for Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa Bay, Fla.
There's also Silvio Dante, the smooth-talking mob henchman/strip-club owner from HBO's "The Sopranos," a role he played from 1999 until the show's finale in 2007.
Then there's his current gig as radio host, presiding over "Little Steven's Underground Garage," a weekly radio show currently syndicated on more than 146 radio stations in 202 markets across the U.S. and Canada, reaching more than 1 million weekly listeners. He also programs two 24-hour rock channels for Sirius Satellite Radio.
Now all three of those Van Zandts are merging, courtesy of a new deal with IMG, the global sports and entertainment marketing company. Mr. Van Zandt has signed with the agency for an exclusive worldwide marketing pact, expected to include everything from endorsements and integrated radio deals to philanthropy, as part of Little Steven's Rock N Roll High School, a foundation he co-founded with Menc: The National Association for Music Education, Scholastic and the Rock N Roll Forever Foundation.
But first and foremost on Mr. Van Zandt's agenda for 2009 is bringing rock 'n' roll back to TV, and he is currently courting sponsors to help back a TV pilot before he starts pitching networks. "With the economy as it is, we want to make it easy for the networks to embrace us," Mr. Van Zandt said. "Everyone we've talked to has loved the idea -- we've been waiting for this for a long time. There hasn't been a real rock show on TV for 50 years."
David Abrutyn, senior VP-managing director of IMG Consulting North America, said Mr. Van Zandt's diverse talents and commitment to the preservation of rock music made him a perfect fit for IMG's client roster, which already includes Tiger Woods, Eli and Peyton Manning, Venus Williams and Jeff Gordon.
"When you look at Steven, what's he's accomplished over the course of his career both in music and television certainly fits our model of the type of talent we like to work with," he said. "Steven is a great story -- there's no one more authentic in rock 'n' roll than him."
Mr. Van Zandt, 58, recently spoke with Madison & Vine about his deal with IMG, his thoughts on becoming an ad pitchman for the first time and why Silvio Dante is definitely not sleeping with the fishes.
Madison & Vine: So now that you're teaming with IMG, how soon before we see you on TV doing commercials for different products?
Steven Van Zandt: I've never endorsed anything, so it's going to be a whole new world for me. But it's time to start, you know, it's a nice way these days of being visible. Obviously I'm not going to endorse something I don't already use or do. It's going to be a natural, sort of organic thing, whatever I do.
It's nice just to have that feeling of support from a serious and wonderfully run organization as IMG. I'm just honored they were interested in working with me and the company -- more the company than me, probably. There's not a whole lot of time to take an acting job, and I may be touring again next year, we'll see -- so it's nice to sneak those things in when I can.
M&V: Who would make a good fit for a potential endorsement -- what kind of advertisers are you working with currently on your radio show?
Mr. Van Zandt: We've done a lot of sponsorship deals with various people through the years – Dunkin' Donuts, Pepsi, AT&T, Rolling Rock, Budweiser. Hard Rock Café was one of our first sponsors and Hard Rock remains one of our premier presenting sponsors, they've been just terrific.
I think we appeal to a lot of people in this fragmented world. We own the rock 'n' roll niche. People come to us and know we're the most credible in the world. And we have good inventory, not this 12- to 16-minute inventory some people engage in. We limit our inventory to eight minutes an hour, and four of our national sponsors take up half the time and split the other four minutes with our other affiliates. There's only room for four [premier sponsors] a year, so it's a nice fit for sponsors who want a special relationship with us.
M&V: You recently revisited Silvio in video-game form for the new "World of Warcraft." Any chance you'd be willing to revisit him in any future IMG endeavors?
Mr. Van Zandt: Ah, Silvio ... I think people need to know he's still breathing, still alive and well. I had a fun little couple lines in "World of Warcraft." I tried him out, people seemed to like it, so I think it might be time to bring him back.
M&V: What are you hoping to accomplish through your music-education foundation with Scholastic and Menc?
Mr. Van Zandt: Everyone has been wonderfully supportive. Right now, fundraising is at $3 million of the $9 million we need to do the pilot program. If fundraising keeps going as it is, we could be in schools with a pilot program as early as 2010. We're also working on a 40-chapter history of rock 'n' roll book, being written by the biggest writers in America. We need teachers to actually embrace it and endorse it, so we'd be honored by that. I feel it's a very strong way of fighting this dropout rate, which I'm hearing could be as high as a third. A third! I've never heard of these numbers before, we just can't have that. Talk about competing in a global economy -- if a third of our kids are dropping out of school, we should be doing everything we can to fight that on the nonprofit side.
M&V: With your radio show, you seem to have filled the niche left wide open by all the former "modern rock" stations that have long since switched to classic rock or other formats entirely. What other aspects of rock culture are still untapped, do you think?
Mr. Van Zandt: Our radio format is based on the best new music in the world. Nobody else is playing new rock 'n' roll but us. You can hear new hip-hop, new hard rock, new indie rock. You can't hear new rock 'n' roll except on our format. That is something we have got to change in order to serve the most underserved market in the world. The Stones, Bruce, Bon Jovi all served 3 million fans on their last tours. And that's not the same 3 million. We're talking about tens of million of people not being served by radio. That's why people love our syndicated show and are being attracted to the Sirius channels we program 24 hours a day.
The most unique thing we did was combine playing the best new rock 'n' roll with the best old rock 'n' roll. Everybody said that couldn't work, but cool is forever. People who really love rock 'n' roll, they love Little Richard, they love The Yardbirds and they love The Hives. And we're the only one in the world serving all those. It really is a place where people are tuning in get a chance to learn a little history, and still play the top 10 hottest records in the world every week. Because who has time to keep up? That's the service we provide, and that's our job.
Bruce Springsteen "Working" on a new hit
Reuters – Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band perform at Veterans Park NEW YORK (Billboard) – Triple A radio, a format targeted at older rock fans, has been kind to Bruce Springsteen in the past decade.
The good vibes continue this week for "Working on a Dream," the first single and title track from the Boss' upcoming album, which comes out on January 27 via Columbia. "Dream" debuted at No. 13 on trade publication Radio & Records' Triple A chart, making it only the fifth title to debut in the top 15 since the chart expanded to 30 positions in August 2006.
Springsteen is also the only artist to achieve that distinction twice; "Radio Nowhere" debuted in the same position in 2007 and eventually climbed to No. 2. Since the chart launched in 1996, Springsteen has notched five top 10s, including a No. 1 with "The Rising."
Springsteen debuted "Working on a Dream" during a November 2 rally for Barack Obama in Cleveland. Excerpts from the studio version soundtracked a package of NFL highlights that aired November 16 on NBC, while the full track hit digital retailers November 24. In its debut week, the song sold 8,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
A second new track from the album, "My Lucky Day," went live December 1 on Amazon and MySpace. Fresh off winning the top tour honor at the Billboard Touring Awards, Springsteen and the E Street Band will return to live duty February 1 as part of the Super Bowl halftime show in Tampa, Fla.
First, he quit on his team midway through a season. Then, he turned on his former coach. Next, he took a shot at the quarterback who ultimately led the team to a Superbowl title. Well, Tiki Barber is at it again. Only this time, he’s taking aim at the fanbase’s biggest cultural icon.
Neil Best from Newsday sums it up.
“This Bruce Springsteen deal, I guess I’m too young to get it,” the former Giants running back said during an NBC conference call Wednesday. His tone was light, but he wasn’t kidding.
“I went to a concert last year and I didn’t get the euphoria. But I guess I’m a couple of years too young.” (Tiki was four months old when “Born to Run” was released in 1975.)
The Boss is unveiling his latest single during half-time of this week’s Sunday Night game on NBC.
Hey, Tiki, guess what. I’ve seen Springsteen at Giants Stadium a few times. He’ll have his number retired there some day. Can’t say the same for you.
Bruce Springsteen helps out food bank
Bruce Springsteen
The Boss appears in an ad in his home state
As a longtime supporter of the organisation that provides food to needy families throughout his home state, The Boss has now agreed to let it use his likeness in an ad that says "We Can't Let This Bank Fail!"
The ad states that the current economic crisis has left many people jobless and unable to afford to put food on their tables, and encourages people to make donations, saying "The payoff will feed your soul."
In the backdrop of the black-and-white ad, Springsteen is leaning against his pickup truck looking into the camera. .
http://www.njfoodbank.org/site/PageNavig
Monday, Nov 10, 2008
There's at least one benefit to living in the former home of Neil Young. Sometimes, instead of getting visits from fans, you get visits from musical icons.
John Kiernan lives in Young's former Winnipeg, Manitoba, home. About a week ago, he looked out the window and saw his wife talking to two strangers on the front lawn. "And I'm looking around and I realize, this guy having a tuque on has really great boots on, these sort of cowboy, motorcycle boots," Kiernan told CBC News. "And he was wearing really nice leather pants. And I realize I'm staring face-to-face with Bob Dylan." Dylan and his manager came to visit prior to a tour stop at Winnipeg's MTS Centre. The two men were invited inside and Dylan apparently asked a lot of thoughtful questions, including about Young's old bedroom. "OK, so this was his view, and this was where he listened to his music," Kiernan recounted. "It suddenly dawned on me, when you're looking at Bob Dylan standing in a hallway, that he had a very parallel experience 200 miles to the south [in Hibbing, Minn.], sitting in his room, listening to his music, looking out his window."
First, let me thank you for the great opportunity tonite to help you & Associated Press out, and express my gratitude at getting paid for something (videotaping parts of the concert) I would have gladly done for free!
On the way home, my thoughts started to coalesce more coherently, as they usually do after a great show, and of course, i wished i had said some of the following things to you earlier tonite when i had the chance, during the interview. Oh well--Murphy's law: you always wish you said the right thing at the time, instead of later, when you've had the time to think of it.
So here goes: random thoughts about the show:
It was a historic meeting of new jersey & long island, as bruce said at the beginning. Even john legend, who opened up the show with a great rendition of U2's "in the name of love" to properly set the tone of the show (a tough feat), acknowledged he (and indie arie) was "the warm-up act." But they both performed and sang well, tho they were kind of in the same hierarchy that Youssou N'Dour & Tracy Chapman were in 1989's Amnesty International Human Rights Tour, that Bruce headlined with Sting. And even going back further, the No Nukes Concerts at Madison Square Garden in 1979 that Bruce also headlined: these shows all inevitable become Bruce shows, with a coupla opening acts, as it were. And Bruce's legend has only grown stronger and more respected as the years have passed.
So here comes Bruce's biggest tri-state "rival," Billy Joel, come to share the stage with him. Who would get the preferred "placement"? Who would close the show?
But, as i might've said earlier to you, Legend was right: it WAS about the historic sharing of the stage of maybe america's 2 greatest solo-personality rock & rollers of the modern era, Bruce & Billy: billy piano based (kind of like the american elton john, whom I always thought billy most resembled, not bruce's long island twin son of different mothers), bruce guitar-based (tho Born to Run, the album, bruce's masterpiece, was written on piano).
So Bruce & Billy are flip sides of the same rock & roll coin in many ways, because, tho they grew up on opposite sides of manhattan, they had more in common than not: both about the same age, true baby boomers, same musical influences, both were in numerous flailing rock bands in the late 60s/early 70s, both broke on the national stage around the same time (billy w/piano man in '74, bruce with BTR in '75, tho his first 2 albums precede billy's), went to each other's shows in the early years, and now, here they were, finally sharing a stage, and doing each other's songs! (also kinda like when billy & elton john first toured together in '93, and did each other's songs).
Of course, Bruce was at a seeming "disadvantage," because he was playing with Joel's band (but on "neutral" turf, NYC), and only Roy Bittan, bruce's piano player, was on hand to play--but only on Bruce's songs. Why? Because it seems Billy didn't really know Bruce's material! (Even Bruce mentioned, casually--or a little miffed?--that he was "surprised" that Joel didn't know "Spirit in the Night" but man, the crowd sure did). And Bruce, the master of rock & roll covers, sure knew Joel's material. They alternated on an abridged version of both their greatest hits, among them: Bruce's "10th Avenue freeze-Out,' "Thunder Road," and "Glory Days"; Joel's "Movin' Out," "A Matter of Trust," & "In The Middle of The Night." And then, there was "New York State of Mind"...
"New York State of Mind," one of Joel's most signature songs, was, without a doubt, the highlight, the legendary moment of the evening, with Bruce & Billy trading vocals with each verse. To hear Bruce's unfamiliar vocals where your mind expects to hear Joel's was startling, and yet thrilling, because Bruce's booming, soulful, full-throttle voice sang Joel's classic with such intensity that it sent collective shivers down the audience's spines. Obama's staff should immediately put it out as a fundraising single: I predict it would outsell Elton John's custom-"Candle in the Wind" that followed Princess Diana's death in 1997.
An interesting footnote, coming from an admittedly biased bruce fan (tho I've always liked & respected Joel, too): no offense to joel's band, which performed admirably thruout the evening, but to hear Bruce's songs backed by Joel's band was like hearing a bruce cover band doing bruce; anyone who's familiar with the E Street Band knows that had they been there instead, with Billy playing HIS songs with THEM, the Hammerstein Ballroom would've become an instant ampitheater--because Bruce & the E Street Band would've blown the roof off the joint!
Bruce did close the set, with a smashing version of Born to Run. Who can EVER top that, our true national anthem?
And speaking of our national anthem, and the impending presidential election, the reason we were all there that evening, in support of Barack Obama (who had the unenviable position of following BOTH Bruce & Billy, yet he came through beautifully, because he understood that all he had in the face of their talent, was the power of WORDS--which Obama used to rally the crowd to its feet, roaring at the end to "fire it up!"): the REAL president of the United States of America is--and has been, for over 30 years--Bruce Springsteen, as I once wrote:
"Bruce is doing what a true leader should be doing: living his life by example, using it to inspire and exhort others to do the same, a bona fide moral leader for our age." For You.
ROLLING STONE REVIEW
Shortly after a roof-raising version of “Born To Run” featuring Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel and key members of both their bands, Bruce turned to the back of the stage at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom and said “We want to bring out the next President of the United States!” With that, Barack Obama took the stage to the loudest cheers of a very loud night. “What a magical evening,” Obama said to the crowd, who donated between $500 and $10,000 to his campaign and the DNC for tickets. “I just told Michelle backstage that the reason I’m running for president is because I can’t be Bruce Springsteen.” He went on to warn the crowd not to get “giddy” over his high poll numbers with less than three weeks left in the election. “Don’t underestimate the power of Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”
One also can’t underestimate the ability of a ninety-minute set of Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel hits to bring a theater packed full of middle age tri-staters to screaming fits of hysterical joy. “Good evening bridge and tunnel elite,” Springsteen said in the middle of an early show mini acoustic set. “I know you spent a lot of money, but like you did with the vice presidential debate: lower your expectations.” Three songs into Billy Joel’s set — when Springsteen, his wife Patti Scialfa and E Street Band keyboardist Roy Bittan joined Joel and his band for a rousing “10th Avenue Freeze-Out” — expectations were already exceeded. From here, an only-for-Obama supergroup was born. Springsteen stayed onstage for the next hour and a half, with the setlist rotating back and forth between Joel and Springsteen classics. Each sang big portions of each others’ tunes, often with their eyes focused on what was surely a teleprompter.
The pairing worked surprisingly well. When Springsteen sang “they’re closing all the factories down” in “Allentown,” it sounded like it could have been a Darkness On The Edge Of Town outtake. Likewise, Joel made the sweet nostalgia of “Glory Days” seem like one of his own. “Movin’ Out” was dedicated to Bush and Cheney, and featured Springsteen singing the verse about “Mister Cacciatore’s” and the “Cadillac-ack-ack-ack-ack.” Other highlights included “Thunder Road,” “A Matter Of Trust,” “Spirit In The Night” and “New York State of Mind.” If anyone on earth was ready for such an evening, it was Joel’s multi-instrumentalist Crystal Taliefero, who toured with Springsteen in 1992/93 tour. Whether it was playing the bongos on “River Of Dreams” or filling in for Clarence on the sax “10th Avenue Freeze-Out,” the woman knew what she was doing.
Earlier in the night John Legend and India.Arie played “Ordinary People” and U2’s “Pride (In The Name of Love)” during a brief acoustic set. They came out again at the end for a cover of “People Get Ready” and the grand finale of “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours,” during which Barck and Michelle Obama stood center stage clapping and occasionally singing along. It was a great night — worth every penny — though there was much work to be done. As Caroline Kennedy told the crowd before the show while urging them to volunteer: “This is the last time you can have this much fun for the next twenty days.”
Hi, my name is Stuart and I’m a Bruce-aholic.
“Hi Stuart.”
I remember my first taste of Bruce juice. It was 1981 and I was a freshman at Cal State Northridge, vegging out after class in the student union music center where you could choose a record — yes, we’re going back to the days of vinyl — and listen to it in sound-proof booths.
Familiar with the legend of “Born to Run” but not having listened to it in its entirety until then, the music captured me in a way no song or album ever had to that point. Growing up in New York, I was a fan of Billy Joel — that’s the law if you’re raised on Long Island — but Joel’s songs never grabbed me the way Springsteen’s did.
From the opening harmonica of “Thunder Road” to the closing primal scream of “Jungleland,” “Born to Run” left me virtually speechless. It was a masterpiece on first listen and remains Springsteen’s greatest work.
The joy of the live show
But Springsteen, the maker of albums, and Springsteen the concert performer are two entirely different creatures. The music at a Springsteen show doesn’t just come alive, it encompasses you in the way a train would affect your balance if you were standing on the edge of the platform and it passed at 150 mph. It leaves you barely holding on, as you feel the rush of energy move through you on every note, on every lyric sung.
My first show came during the 1984 “Born in the USA” tour, but that’s a somewhat sad story in the fact that I could’ve attended one of “The River” shows three years earlier. In one of those decisions that you regret as soon as you’ve made it, I passed on a ticket because I had English homework that night.
So I’m forced to wait an excruciating three years — after collecting all the bootlegs, buying the albums, reading the Time and Newsweek cover stories, making friends who had been to the ’78 Roxy show and the famed Winterland set in San Francisco — and it’s finally Oct. 25, 1984. I have no idea what time my daughter was born, but I still remember everything about that day. The drive on the Santa Monica Freeway to the Los Angeles Sports Arena, finding a parking spot, checking out the T-shirts, getting to our seats, and waiting … and waiting some more for the show to start. And then, when the venue went completely dark at 8:13 and, above the screaming, all you heard was Springsteen counting down, about to burst into the title track, and it sent me a place I hadn’t been before.
From that point on I was hooked. Springsteen played seven nights in L.A., and I went to all seven shows. On the second leg of that tour, he played the cavernous Los Angeles Coliseum and I was front row, dead center. By that point, the album, tour and even his own persona had taken on industrial-strength proportions.
A staggering seven singles were released from “Born in the USA,” including “Dancing in the Dark” (yes, that’s Courtney Cox dancing with him in the video), “I’m on Fire” and concert fave “Glory Days.”
His energy on stage had no bounds. He’d play a 90-minute first set, an hourlong second set and then three encores, closing out around midnight. The set list changed every night but you could be assured of the staples, songs that had more resonance that others, that, as Springsteen liked to say, “made you glad you‘re alive”: “Thunder Road,” “Badlands,” “The Promised Land,” “Rosalita” and the traditional closer, the “Detroit Medley.”
Change is good
When Springsteen hits the road for the upcoming “Magic” tour, I certainly don’t expect to hear those same songs in concert that I heard over 20 years ago. That’s OK as I’ve been to over 100 shows and I’ve pretty much heard everything. He’s added a lot to the canon since those days — and grown up as a musician and family man. He once said he’d never be able to write songs about being a father, but he has, and, whether he’s liked it or not, has taken on the role of Everyman, commenting on the American experience.
Look no further than Sept. 11, when he watched the Twin Towers fall from across the Hudson River. From that he came up with “The Rising,” in which he delivered the album’s powerful message of agony, sorrow, redemption and joy.
While Springsteen will forever be connected with the E Street Band, their association in the last 20 years or so has been tenuous at best. From 1973’s “Greetings at Asbury Park, N.J.” to “Tunnel of Love” in 1987, he and the band were inseparable, but Springsteen has taken a more solo route since then, offering up material that seemed better suited for an acoustic guitar than a full-band treatment. Understandable? Absolutely. He deserves to present his material in any way he seems fit.
But that’s what makes both the upcoming “Magic” album and tour such a joy. It’s the Big Man (and, at 65, a much older Clarence Clemons) back on sax again, Professor Roy Bittan tinkling the piano, Little Steven Van Zandt (aka Silvio Dante from “The Sopranos”) strumming guitar and sharing a mic during “Two Hearts,” and all the other E Streeters returning to deliver the goods again. Back in the day, we used to take the band’s contributions for granted. Now, longtime fans treasure every show, every song.
Back in the ’80s and ’90s, traveling around the country to see a Springsteen show was always de rigueur, never even given second thought. Jersey shows, Philly shows, maybe a stop in Texas, or Boston, or D.C., or even somewhere in the heartland was something that wasn’t discussed so much as implied. Of course, these days — with jobs, families, bills to pay — road trips are a bit tougher, though certainly not impossible.
At 58 years old, it’s hard difficult to say how much longer Springsteen will be able to play these marathon concerts. And though he said a “farewell tour” now or later is out of the question, one needn’t be a mathematician to figure out that, with the band getting older as well, there will be fewer and fewer tours to come.
So, to repeat what the late, great American songwriter Warren Zevon said when asked what advise he would give just before he passed away a few years back, he said, simply, “Enjoy every sandwich.”
Relish in the revelry of “Cadillac Ranch,” in the quiet pleasures of “If I Should Fall Behind,” in the communal nature of “10th Avenue Freezeout.”
And know that more magic is on the way.
Stuart Levine
- Bob Lefsetz
A rock star is not someone who takes the temperature, who gauges the marketplace before he creates his "art". A rock star is someone who needs to create and is willing to tolerate the haters along with the fans. He’s someone who incites controversy just by existing. That’s what we lost in the dash for cash. Unique voices. I’m not saying we haven’t ended up with some pleasant music, but it just hasn’t hit you in the gut, it’s the aural equivalent of Splenda, it might do the trick, but it’s not the real thing. The real thing grabs your attention, drives down deep into your heart and lodges itself there. A rock star doesn’t follow conventions, doesn’t go disco or add drum machines just because everybody else does. A rock star exists in his own unique space, and if you met him you probably wouldn’t like him.* Because he tends to be self-focused to the point of being narcissistic.**
Because he cares. He needs to get his message out. ForYou
* ** I agree with everything stated except these lines.
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