Springsteen: Silence Is Unpatriotic

This segment was originally broadcast on Oct. 7, 2007. It was updated on July 25, 2008.

It's hard to imagine, but Bruce Springsteen turned 58 last year. His breakout hit, "Born to Run," is 32 years old. While rock stars his age are content to tour with their greatest hits, Springsteen launched what may become his most controversial work ever as a songwriter.

Even now, Springsteen is an artist in progress, having moved from stories about girls and cars to populist ballads that echo the dust bowl days of Woody Guthrie. Springsteen has put all that together now in his first tour with the E Street Band in four years. As correspondent Scott Pelley first reported last fall, he has returned to full-throated rock and roll, and a message that's sharper than ever, damning the war in Iraq, and questioning whether America has lost its way at home.

"You have got to be, wild guess, worth somewhere north of 100 million dollars. Why are you still touring? You don't have to do this," Pelley remarks.

"What else would I do? You got any clues?" Springsteen asks. "Got any suggestions? I mean, am I going to garden? Why would you stop. I mean, you play the music and you know, grown men cry. And women dance. That's why you do it."

"It's good to be a rock star," Pelley says.

"I would say that yes it is," Springsteen says. "But the star thing I can live with. The music I can't live without. And that's how it lays out for me, you know. I got as big an ego and enjoy the attention. My son has a word, he calls it 'Attention Whore.'"

"But you have to be one of those or else why would you be up in front of thousands of people, you know, shaking your butt. But at the same time, when it comes down to it, it's the way it makes you feel. I do it because of the way it makes me feel when I do it. It gives me meaning, it gives me purpose," Springsteen explains.

"Some of the pieces in the new record are gonna be considered controversial. Give me a sense of what you think has to be said. Why are you still writing?" Pelley asks,

"It's how I find out who you are, and who I am, and then who we are. I'm interested in that. I'm interested in what it means to be an American," Springsteen says. "I'm interested in what it means to live in America. I'm interested in the kind of country that we live in and leave our kids. I'm interested in trying to define what that country is. I got the chutzpa or whatever you want to say to believe that if I write a really good about it, it's going to make a difference. It's going to matter to somebody."
To do that this time, he gathered up his nearly life-long friends in one of the most successful neighborhood bands ever, the E Street Band, named for the road where they used to rehearse. His wife of 16 years, Patti Scialfa, plays guitar. They have three teenagers back home.

Their reunions start where they first met, in Asbury Park, N.J. For a rock band, it's all very businesslike; rehearsal starts at 9 a.m.

There are more than 250 songs in the Springsteen repertoire. That's what makes rehearsals, like the one Pelley watched, so critical. Before each concert, maybe just an hour before, Springsteen writes by hand the list of songs, and their order. He changes it every night. But at least one song is always there, so familiar to the band that all he has to write on the list is "B-to-R," as in "Born to Run."

E Street keyboardist Roy Bittan and guitarist Steve van Zandt go back with Springsteen more than 30 years.

Do they hate playing "Born to Run" over and over again?

"It's funny you said that because I was watching something on TV. And it was Tony Bennett. And they asked Tony Bennett, 'Aren't you tired of singing I Left My Heart In San Francisco?' And his answer was, 'It gave me the keys to the world,'" Bittan says. "Well there it is, that's it."

"I figure if we do a few more tours I might actually learn it," van Zandt says, laughing. "So, you know. I mean, we live in hope, right?"

Humor helps if you're an E-Streeter, because in the 1980s, Springsteen walked away from them after more than 15 years together. He wanted to play with other musicians, and sometimes with none at all.

"How was the news broken? Did Bruce tell the band himself? Tell me about it," Pelley says.

"I think Bruce picked up the phone and called everybody. And I think everybody was shocked and, I'm hurt. And just felt really abandoned," Bittan recalls.

"Was that hard? Was it heartbreaking? You say, 'Look, I'm going on. I'm leaving you behind,'" Pelley asks Springsteen.

"Well, I didn't exactly put it like that," Springsteen says, laughing.

Asked how he put it, Springsteen says, laughing, "I soft-soaped it somehow. Or I tried, you know? And, you know, everybody had different feelings. I mean people were mad or angry and suddenly they're okay. I wasn't going to be any good to them at that moment. You know? And I think what happens is sometimes you got to break your own narrative."

"We all have stories we're living and telling ourselves," he says, laughing. "And there's a time when that narrative has to be broken because you've run out of freedom in it. You've run out of places to go."

The split forced the band to find other places to go. Van Zandt joined the mob on "The Sopranos" on HBO, and drummer Max Weinberg joined Conan O'Brien on NBC. But they always drop what they're doing to return to Springsteen.

60 Minutes watched the band do a small rehearsal out of the new material before an audience of 2,000 or so in Asbury Park. There's something special about a Springsteen audience: they know the words, and the stories they feel in themselves. This was the day after Bruce's 58th birthday, and Pelley found him immediately after the show, wringing wet.

"What did you learn about the band tonight?" Pelley asks.

"We made fewer screw ups than I thought we might. The main thing you learn is not so much the band, because the band will just play better from tonight on out. You know? But you learn a lot about the set, you know, you're trying to work your new things in. You're trying to get in what you're trying to say. You're trying to get people just to rock. You know, to go crazy and have fun. It's ultimately sort of supposed to be a bit of an ecstatic experience," Springsteen says.

Was it?

"And we got there a few times. It's pretty good," Springsteen says, laughing. "And so, you're trying to figure out, 'Okay, now how do you take it up to a certain height? And how do you get there?'"

"Pretty good for 58," Pelley remarks.

"Oh. That's nothing. I'm still a chiseled hunk of muscle so…I guess I'll keep going for a while," Springsteen says, laughing.

Springsteen's music career began over four decades earlier as a teenager in Freehold, N.J.

"I was probably one of the smartest kids in my class at the time. Except you would've never known it," Springsteen says, laughing. "You would've never known it. Because where my intelligence lay was not, wasn't able to be tapped within that particular system. And I didn't know how to do it myself until music came along and opened me up not just to the world of music but to the world period, you know, to the events of the day. To the connection between culture and society and those were things that riveted me, engaged me in life," Springsteen says. "Gave me a sense of purpose. What I wanted to do. Who I wanted to be. The way that I wanted to do it. What I thought I could accomplish through singing songs."

"It's not just the singing. It's the writing, isn't it, for you?" Pelley asks.

"Of course. Every good writer or filmmaker has something eating at them, right? That they can't quite get off their back . And so your job is to make your audience care about your obsessions," Springsteen says.

His recurring obsession is the life that he knew as a boy, the harsh relationship with his working class dad who didn't think much of a rock and roll son.

"It was a tough, struggling household. People struggled emotionally. People struggled financially to get through the day," Springsteen remembers. "Small town. Small town world which I continue to return to. It's like when I went to write, though, I put my father's clothes on. You know the immersement in that world through my parents and my own experience as a child and the need to tell a story that maybe was partially his. Or maybe a lot his. I just felt drawn to do it."

"Your dad wasn't all that proud of you as a young man?" Pelley asks.

"Oh, he was later. When I came home with the Oscar and I put it on the kitchen table, and he just looked at it and said, 'Bruce, I'll never tell anybody what to do ever again,'" Springsteen remembers, laughing. "It was like, that was his comment. So I said, 'Oh. That's okay.'"

The music that emerged from his upbringing was a kind of blue collar ballad set to rock and roll, Elvis meets Dylan, uniquely Springsteen. Much of the new music is a protest. Some of it blunt, as in the song that asks "Who will be the last to die for a mistake," but most of it subtle, like "Long Walk Home," the story of a man who returns to his all-American small town but doesn't recognize it anymore.

"What's on your mind? What are you writing about?" Pelley asks.

"I guess I would say that what I do is I try to chart the distance between American ideals and American reality. That's how my music is laid out. It's like we've reached a point where it seems that we're so intent on protecting ourselves that we're willing to destroy the best parts of ourselves to do so," Springsteen says.

Asked what he means, Springsteen tells Pelley, "Well, I think that we've seen things happen over the past six years that I don't think anybody ever thought they'd ever see in the United States. When people think of the American identity, they don't think of torture. They don't think of illegal wiretapping. They don't think of voter suppression. They don't think of no habeas corpus. No right to a lawyer … you know. Those are things that are anti-American."

"You know, I think this record is going to be seen as anti-war. And you know there are people watching this interview who are going to say to themselves, 'Bruce Springsteen is no patriot,'" Pelley remarks.

"Well, that's just the language of the day, you know? The modus operandi for anybody who doesn't like somebody, you know, criticizing where we've been or where we're goin'," Springsteen says. "It's unpatriotic at any given moment to sit back and let things pass that are damaging to some place that you love so dearly. And that has given me so much. And that I believe in, I still feel and see us as a beacon of hope and possibility."

Springsteen sees himself following a long American tradition reaching back through Vietnam and on to the Great Depression.

"There's a part of the singer going way back in American history that is of course the canary in the coalmine. When it gets dark, you're supposed to be singing. It's dark right now," Springsteen says. "And so I went back to Woody Guthrie and Dylan and the people who said, say take Pete Seeger, who wants to know, doesn't want to know how this song sounds, he wants to know what's it for."

"What needs to be said, in this country at this moment, in your opinion, what needs to be said?" Pelley asks.

"I think we live in a time when what is true can be made to seem a lie," Springsteen says. "And what is lie can be made to seem true. And I think that the successful manipulation of those things have characterized several of our past elections. That level of hubris and arrogance has got us in the mess that we're in right now. And we're in a mess. But if we subvert, the best things that we're about in the name of protecting our freedoms, if we remove them, then who are we becoming, you know? Who are we, you know? The American idea is a beautiful idea. It needs to be preserved, served, protected and sung out. Sung out on a nightly basis. That's what I'm going to try to do."

Produced By John Hamlin