Bruce Springsteen

The blues don__ jump right on you. They come creeping. Shortly after my sixtieth I slipped into a depression like I hadn__ experienced since that dusty night in Texas thirty years earlier. It lasted for a year and a half and devastated me. When these moods hit me, usually few will notice__ot Mr. Landau, no one I work with in the studio, not the band, never the audience, hopefully not the children__ut Patti will observe a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track. During these periods I can be cruel: I run, I dissemble, I dodge, I weave, I disappear, I return, I rarely apologize, and all the while Patti holds down the fort as I__ trying to burn it down. She stops me. She gets me to the doctors and says, __his man needs a pill._ I do. I__e been on antidepressants for the last twelve to fifteen years of my life, and to a lesser degree but with the same effect they had for my father, they have given me a life I would not have been able to maintain without them. They work. I return to Earth, home and my family. The worst of my destructive behavior curtails itself and my humanity returns. I was crushed between sixty and sixty-two, good for a year and out again from sixty-three to sixty-four. Not a good record.

Antidepression medication is temperamental. Somewhere around fifty-nine or sixty I noticed the drug I__ been taking seemed to have stopped working. This is not unusual. The drugs interact with your body chemistry in different ways over time and often need to be tweaked. After the death of Dr. Myers, my therapist of twenty-five years, I__ been seeing a new doctor whom I__ been having great success with. Together we decided to stop the medication I__ been on for five years and see what would happen... DEATH TO MY HOMETOWN!! I nose-dived like the diving horse at the old Atlantic City steel pier into a sloshing tub of grief and tears the likes of which I__ never experienced before. Even when this happens to me, not wanting to look too needy, I can be pretty good at hiding the severity of my feelings from most of the folks around me, even my doctor. I was succeeding well with this for a while except for one strange thing: TEARS! Buckets of __m, oceans of __m, cold, black tears pouring down my face like tidewater rushing over Niagara during any and all hours of the day. What was this about? It was like somebody opened the floodgates and ran off with the key. There was NO stopping it. 'Bambi' tears... 'Old Yeller' tears... 'Fried Green Tomatoes' tears... rain... tears... sun... tears... I can__ find my keys... tears. Every mundane daily event, any bump in the sentimental road, became a cause to let it all hang out. It would__e been funny except it wasn__.Every meaningless thing became the subject of a world-shattering existential crisis filling me with an awful profound foreboding and sadness. All was lost. All... everything... the future was grim... and the only thing that would lift the burden was one-hundred-plus on two wheels or other distressing things. I would be reckless with myself. Extreme physical exertion was the order of the day and one of the few things that helped. I hit the weights harder than ever and paddleboarded the equivalent of the Atlantic, all for a few moments of respite. I would do anything to get Churchill__ black dog__ teeth out of my ass.Through much of this I wasn__ touring. I__ taken off the last year and a half of my youngest son__ high school years to stay close to family and home. It worked and we became closer than ever. But that meant my trustiest form of self-medication, touring, was not at hand. I remember one September day paddleboarding from Sea Bright to Long Branch and back in choppy Atlantic seas. I called Jon and said, __r. Landau, book me anywhere, please._ I then of course broke down in tears. Whaaaaaaaaaa. I__ surprised they didn__ hear me in lower Manhattan. A kindly elderly woman walking her dog along the beach on this beautiful fall day saw my distress and came up to see if there was anything she could do. Whaaaaaaaaaa. How kind. I offered her tickets to the show. I__ seen this symptom before in my father after he had a stroke. He__ often mist up. The old man was usually as cool as Robert Mitchum his whole life, so his crying was something I loved and welcomed. He__ cry when I__ arrive. He__ cry when I left. He__ cry when I mentioned our old dog. I thought, __ow it__ me.__ told my doc I could not live like this. I earned my living doing shows, giving interviews and being closely observed. And as soon as someone said __larence,_ it was going to be all over. So, wisely, off to the psychopharmacologist he sent me. Patti and I walked in and met a vibrant, white-haired, welcoming but professional gentleman in his sixties or so. I sat down and of course, I broke into tears. I motioned to him with my hand; this is it. This is why I__ here. I can__ stop crying! He looked at me and said, __e can fix this._ Three days and a pill later the waterworks stopped, on a dime. Unbelievable. I returned to myself. I no longer needed to paddle, pump, play or challenge fate. I didn__ need to tour. I felt normal.

Don__ take yourself too seriously. Take yourself as seriously as death itself. Don__ worry. Worry your ass off. Have iron-clad confidence, but doubt. It keeps you alive and alert! Believe you are the baddest ass in town _ and [that] you suck! It keeps you honest. Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideas alive and well inside of your heart and head at all times. If it doesn__ drive you crazy, it will make you strong. And when you walk on stage tonight to bring the noise, treat it like it__ all we have _ and then remember it__ only rock_ n_ roll.

The endorphin high of birth will fade, but its trace remains with you forever, its fingerprints indelible proof of love's presence and daily grandeur. You have offered up your prayer. You have vowed service to a new world and laid a bedrock of earthly faith. You have chosen your sword, your shield, and where you will fall. Whatever the morrow brings, these things, these people, will be with you always. The power of choice, of a life, a lover, a place to stand, will be there to be called upon and make fresh sense of your tangled history. More important, it will also be there when you waver, when you're lost, providing you with the elements of a new compass, encased within your heart.

I would spend my life on the road logging hundreds of thousands of miles and my story was always the same. . . man comes to town, detonates; man leaves town and drives off into the evening; fade to black. Just the way I like it.

As we'd slogged away for weeks on the Convention Hall stage in isolation, trying to pump life into our much-vaunted songbook, there'd been only one thing missing: you.

As Branford Marsalis said in a beautiful essay he write upon Clarence's death, C was blessed with 'the power of musical intent.

Rock 'n' roll music, in the end, is a source of religious and mystical power. Your playing can suck, your singing can be barely viable, but if when you get together with your pals in front of your audience and make the noise, the one that is drawn from the center of your being, from your godhead, from your gutter, from the universe's infinitesimal genesis point... you're rockin' and you're a rock 'n' roll star in every sense of the word. The punks instinctively knew this and created a third revolution out of it, but it is an essential element in the equation of every great musical unit and rock 'n' roll band, no matter how down-to-earth their presentation.

Talk about a dream,try to make it real

The best music... is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.

The hungry and the haunted explode in a rock'n'roll band.

First, you write for yourself... always, to make sense of experience and the world around you. It__ one of the ways I stay sane. Our stories, our books, our films are how we cope with the random trauma-inducing chaos of life as it plays.

The primary math of the real world is one and one equals two. The layman (as, often, do I) swings that every day. He goes to the job, does his work, pays his bills and comes home. One plus one equals two. It keeps the world spinning. But artists, musicians, con men, poets, mystics and such are paid to turn that math on its head, to rub two sticks together and bring forth fire. Everybody performs this alchemy somewhere in their life, but it__ hard to hold on to and easy to forget. People don__ come to rock shows to learn something. They come to be reminded of something they already know and feel deep down in their gut. That when the world is at its best, when we are at our best, when life feels fullest, one and one equals three. It__ the essential equation of love, art, rock ___ roll and rock ___ roll bands. It__ the reason the universe will never be fully comprehensible, love will continue to be ecstatic, confounding, and true rock ___ roll will never die.

There is no evidence of the soul except in tis sudden absence. A nothingness enters, taking the place where something was before. A night without stars falls and for a moment covers everything in the room.

Don't run back inside, darlin', you know just what I'm here for. So you're scared and you're thinkin' we ain't that young any more...Show a little faith! There's magic in the night. You ain't a beauty, but hey, you're all right.

Someday we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny.

All I do know is that as we age the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier...much heavier. With each passing year, the price of our refusing to do that sorting rises higher and higher.

My dad was young; he went to work. But he'd been to war. He'd seen some of the world. It wasn't like he was going to be an extensive traveler or something. It didn't seem to be in his nature or in the nature of his parents or many of the folks in my family, really.