The Ties That Bind

I forget, what were you saying there, Tony?

I was getting at this... I was getting at the process.

Oh, the creative life not being enough. Yeah.

So, by the time I was 30...

Well, I was thinking of all these things because they seemed to be...

So this was what was holding society together.

These imperfect ideas of how people connect

and relate to one another, or don't. And...

So I want to be a part of that.

I don't want to just be outside, looking in,

I don't just want to be a commentator, I just don't

want to be the audience, I don't want to be the observer.

You know, I want to be an active part of it in some way.

And so it was a lot of what I was telling myself on The River.

Ties that bind. Well, how do you make that?

How does that happen? You know?

How do people come together, fall apart?

How do... You know? I want to be a player.

You know? And... In...

So, I think, up to that point in my life,

I really hadn't had the courage to do that.

Or I tried and failed so quickly that, you know,

it didn't add up, so...

Part of The River was trying to find the courage to put my feet in,

jump in with both feet and...

..experience those things myself.

We'd moved to a large farmhouse in...

on Telegraph Hill Road in Holmdel, New Jersey.

It sat on 160 acres of land.

I think I paid 700 bucks a month rent on it, that's what I remember.

And so I started to write there for The River.

Living in the country was this very bucolic landscape.

There was a lot of ruralness in the certainly in The River,

in the song The River. But I think sprinkled throughout the record.

Darkness, I have to say, that was kind of the Samurai record,

that was a record where there was a lot of isolation on it.

The River, I was trying to move my characters back towards,

towards the mainstream, I guess.

I wanted to write for my age, you know? I...

And really that started very consciously with Darkness

and continued through The River.

I was moving forward, but in a funny way

I was being inspired by things older than rock music at the time.

And that was where I was finding a lot of the commonality and content.

You know, was in music that was older than rock music.

So I blended those two things, you know, I blended that

sensibility with the excitement of what I did with the band.

I was listening to quite a bit of classic country.

Roy Acuff and of course Johnny Cash and George Jones,

Tammy Wynette. I just loved it, and I felt that,

you know, I felt the sympathy of it was set generally.

Once again, it was kind of small-town music and rural music.

But it also had adult concerns,

and I think I was interested in going there.

I dedicate this one to Max and Becky.

Come on, boys.

We used to all sit on the tour bus

and bet who was going to get married first.

And everybody would always be saying, "Not me!"

What about you?

- No way. - Nobody to marry?

No. What about you, big man?

When you got to go, you got to go.

You got to understand that the band at the time was not very grown-up.

That... In the sense that people were just starting to get married

and have their kids. So you forget we were still a bunch of kids.

And my family was gone, they were in California.

I wasn't much in touch with the rest of my family in New Jersey.

So there was the band.

You had your little, you know, rat pack,

and it was still very much the lost boys, you know?

By the time you're 30, you are...

You know, you have a clock that is ticking,

you are definitely operating in the adult world.

And I know I was...

..thinking about all these things by that time.

Relationships, they're a success, they're a failure.

And because of my own personal history.

It was a mystery to me how people

were successful at...

..at those things.

And really, the writer's life is sort of

excavating those mysteries.

Working just with the acoustic guitar and a cassette tape

on a beatbox, you know.

I would simply sit with the cassette,

rewind it over and over and over and over and over and sit there

with my notebook and try to sing some successful lyrics on top of it.

The idea being, I would write all the songs and spare us studio time

and I would have a relatively good idea of what I was doing

before I went in.

When the band comes to the house, it's our usual rehearsal situation.

In other words, I have a variety of specific parts

that I want the guys to play.

We learned those first and then the guys kind of add their, you know,

their flourishes as the rehearsal goes by and we'll see what works.

Beatbox always sounds great.

It's all compressed and it's slashing

and smashing around and it always sounds exciting.

I'm making my demos on my old cassette player...

..and I'm rehearsing the guys.

We're doing things like, a song called Night Fires,

The Man Who Got Away, a song called Under The Gun and those

are pretty exciting, musically.

So, I get about 13 or 14 of these things

and we decide it's time to try and make a record.

We go in and we cut the tracks and the tracks sound great

and I can't quite get the lyrics finished to them, you know,

which is a little unusual for me, but it happens.

So, my band did a lot of that music and I move on.

I believe almost none of them worked out as realized pieces of music.

I had a sense of what I could do, certainly what I wanted to do

and how broad I wanted the story I was telling, to be.

And if I didn't get it, I just didn't sleep well at night.

It wasn't...

This is what I was doing. I wasn't doing anything else.

I was only doing... I only had music.

And if I wasn't doing that right,

I just didn't know what I was doing on the planet at the time.

You have a sense of your reach and you hope that you can get there.

You don't know. When I took the record back from the studio,

I didn't know what record I was making. I was lost again.

I had to be willing to throw myself back into the wilderness.

Hacking away, not knowing if I was going to get where I wanted to go.

People were also used to the records being difficult

and once we had Born To Run, they were all hard records to make.

This is a continuation of the story of certain albums

and these were the days when we suffered tremendously trying

to gain the knowledge of how to make records.

Same thing on The River.

Now we're trying to make a different kind of record.

How do we make that record? I don't know.

How do we get this snare to sound the way we want it to sound?

Once again, we don't know.

How do we get the kind of mixes we want? Don't really know.

Once again, we were working outside the professional auspices

of the recording industry.

We hired ourselves and we knew we were going on an adventure

and a journey and a quest and when you got hired on,

that was the bar, that was the deal.

We were still in the process of carving out our identity.

For most of my audience, they were still familiar with two records,

Born To Run and Darkness On The Edge Of Town,

so we were still carving out who we were

and I needed a record that I felt had a very, very strong identity.

'I think the biggest change on The River was,

'I started the narrative writing where I would inhabit a character.'

'With a very specific narrative story,'

I would sing in that voice,

a character, and it wasn't necessarily me.

It was partly me and partly other people, so, of course,

The River, that was my touchstone for all of the writing that came later.

Where you simply step into a character's shoes

and try to get your listeners to walk in those shoes for a while.

The River was the key to the record in that it was a throwback to

older folk music and an older voice. It was a very adult voice.

It was a political voice in the sense that it was dealing with

the Carter recession and its effects on working people.