Bruce Springsteen gets asked all the time when he plans to hang up his guitar. “You meet people who go, ‘When are you going to retire?’” he said on Monday, likening it to someone asking him: “Are you still alive?”
Indeed, Springsteen and the E Street Band are still hard-charging around the world, more than a half century after their founding. As for retiring, the 75-year-old rock icon has an unequivocal answer: Never. “At this late date, like we say in the film, we’re going to be rolling until the wheels come off,” he said.
The Boss made these remarks at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in North Hollywood on Monday after a screening of his documentary Road Diary, an Emmy hopeful that’s streaming on Hulu and Disney+. Joined by his longtime E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg and the film’s Emmy- and Grammy-winning director, Thom Zimny, Springsteen was in a reflective mood. The film intercuts the band’s recent global tour with flashes back to its legendary past. It’s no coincidence that his 1984 hit “No Surrender” opened most shows.
Springsteen has won 20 Grammys over the decades, with 51 total nominations, and in 1994 he won the original-song Oscar for “Streets of Philadelphia” from the Tom Hanks–Denzel Washington film Philadelphia. He was honored with a special Tony Award in 2018 for his storytelling Broadway show. If he gets an Emmy this year as the writer and producer of Road Diary, he’ll be one of the few artists in the world to score a full EGOT.
Even Springsteen acknowledged how unusual it is that he and the E Street Band are still working. “I mean, we’ve been together for 50 years. The nature of bands is to break up, it’s not to stay together,” he says. “Everything deteriorates in the natural world.”
Weinberg has been playing with Springsteen since 1974. The only two longtime members of the band who aren’t still playing with them are organist Danny Federici and saxophonist Clarence Clemons, who died in 2008 and 2011, respectively. The film explores how their influence on their bandmates continues, even more than a decade after their deaths. Springsteen says such bonds are typically unheard of in the music industry.
“Forget about bands breaking up; usually two people can’t stay together,” he says. “Simon can’t stay with Garfunkel. Sam hated Dave. Phil Everly hated Don Everly. Hall don’t like Oates. You know, the Gallagher brothers…forget that. So that’s just human nature.”
He theorized that for most people, the test of time is simply too much to overcome. “Imagine this, if in your job, the people you went to high school with—you are still with those people 50 years later doing the same job. I mean, you go through everything with those people. So it’s a very, very unnatural thing for bands to stay together. And particularly bands when you get to our vintage.”
Springsteen then counted on his fingers the reasons that such musical acts do continue to tour. “I mean there’s a lot of reasons bands stay together. You know, money. Uh…money. And money,” he joked. “So in our case, we’re lucky. Our band still legitimately likes one another. The film sort of encapsulates an amazing thing—the band remains as committed to its ideals as it was from the beginning.”
The drummer persisted with the band even when he experienced grave medical concerns. “You have to understand something about Max Weinberg,” Springsteen said. “Max, how many operations have you had on your hands?”
“Oh, I’ve had eight operations on my hands,” the drummer answered. “Two on my back, with my shoulder rebuilt…all to serve.”
“And he’s skipping over his 13-hour heart surgery,” Springsteen added. The drummer kept that procedure hidden from his bandmates until he was on the mend. “I said, ‘Max, Jesus Christ, why didn’t you tell me, man? I could have killed you doing one of the encores,’” Springsteen said. “But I have to salute Max. As you can watch in the film, he’s doing things that guy half his age would have a very difficult time doing.”
As for other difficulties, Springsteen and Weinberg revealed at the Q&A that they got over their squabbles early. “When Max initially got in the band—and I don’t think he’d mind me telling you this—he had trouble staying in time,” Springsteen says. “It was on The River album. I said, ‘Max, here’s why you have to stay in time. When you stay in time, you deepen the characters in my writing. You make them more steadfast, steady. You dig deeper into their souls and you bring more meaning to my music.’ And what’d you do? Max went home and slept with his drum kit.”
“It was my rock-and-roll bar mitzvah conversation,” Weinberg says. “It took place in June of 1979, in the lounge of a recording studio in New York. I was 28, and it really did change my life. I had a lot of potential. At that age, I also had a lot of anxiety that I brought out in my drumming. But Bruce sat me down and we talked. Well, I listened. He talked.”
Weinberg said Springsteen made a cinematic reference to get him to see the beat of the song in a different way. “He used a wonderful metaphor,” Weinberg says. “He said, ‘Picture a John Ford movie. The character is on the horse going across Monument Valley.’ And I’ll never forget this: ‘You are the mountains. You have to be the mountains.’ That conversation changed the course of my life, because I’d been in the band five years. I could have gone one way; I went the other way. When Bruce said I slept with a drum set, I went into this deep, deep [study].”
The drummer said he essentially relearned how to play. “I went back, took drum lessons, I talked to drummers,” he said. “The expedient thing would have been just simply bringing in someone else. Very common. But Bruce came in and said to me, ‘I know you can do this.’ And the strength of that conversation, the belief that he had in me, that I could rise to the occasion…I think that’s what Thom captured in this movie.”
Zimny has been working with Springsteen since the 2001 special Live in New York City, and directed the 2018 film Springsteen on Broadway among other projects. He said his approach was to stay close, but also stay out of the way. “I have been blessed with a lot of time that people don’t think about me being there, and I don’t make myself a presence. I’m taking in everything, but I’m not announcing anything. I’m just invisible,” he says. “There’s an energy there that you just want to be part of.”
Weinberg recalled his earliest days playing with Springsteen, when they were doing marathon shows in September 1974. “Bruce will remember this. It was outside of Philadelphia, and we had yet another show to do. [I said,] ‘Bruce, how do you do this twice in a row?’ He said, ‘The key is, you don’t pace yourself. You give a thousand percent all the time.’ And that was really important to hear. When you adopt that and internalize it, it just becomes a natural way of doing it.”
“It’s a good job,” Springsteen concluded. “And…it pays very well.”
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