Where It's At: The Rolling Stone State of the Union (1998) (TV) Directed by Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky. With Fiona Apple, Beck, Sean Combs. Get Where it's at: The Rolling Stone State of the Union movie reviews from critics and fellow moviegoers and find new movie reviews on Fandango. Bruce Springsteen's State of the Union. They have a lot to talk about this evening, these two guys from New Jersey, these serious men with silly jobs. He wants his music to be about something. But there's another way to look at it, Stewart suggests with a laugh: ! What is wrong with you? It's very hard to reconcile sitting and fishing in a little pond in New Jersey with a guy you spent many years hitchhiking the 1- 9. Philadelphia back in the day. The only band I think I've seen more than Bruce Springsteen is the Springsteen tribute band Backstreets. I try not to let him know how pathetic I truly am. With fiercely populist tunes like . When it was over, Stewart handed the recorder to a Rolling Stone staffer: ! We've been starting rehearsals with the whole band – on the abandoned military base at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. I know that place. Every time I drive by there, I think about The Andromeda Strain. I always think that it's one of those horror movies where all the structures still stand, still somewhat manicured, but the shit is just empty. That's what it's like. There's a rehearsal studio, and we are the sole citizens. We're the only game in town on that thing. And the funny thing was, I played there at the teen club and the officers' club when I was 1. It's funny to be back there now when it's completely empty. This was more of a solo album than an E Street Band album – what was the process behind it? TubePlus, Watch WHERE IT'S AT: THE ROLLING STONE STATE OF THE UNION (1998), watch free movies and free online movies.It basically all started out as folk music – it was me and my guitar singing these songs. But while I was doing that, I was hearing maybe 5. So the minute I stopped playing, I would run around on all the instruments, and in about an hour or more, I would rough out the sound I was hearing in my head while I was singing. A lot of it was cut with acoustic guitar, singing and a sample, like maybe a hip- hop loop or country- blues- stomp loop. And the actual drums came later – there was no preconceived set of instruments that needed to be used. I could go anywhere, do anything, use anything. It was very wide- open.
There are songs on here that feel like you and the Chieftains went out for a beer, and you decided to go kick it. I called on a lot of roots and Celtic elements because I use the music to give the story a historical context. I want to give people a sense that this is something that's happened over and over and over again; what happened in 2. They could have been singing in 1. It's powerful. He played beautifully. That's a loss we haven't gauged, or will be able to gauge. Did it make you reticent to tour? No, I knew we were going to play, and I knew the band was going to continue. I knew that, I guess, it's two things: One, people need to know that the band is going to continue and be OK and carry on its service and its entertainment. And the other part of the show will be that people need to miss Clarence – and they will, and so will I. But all it says is that the currents of life hold their sway even over the dream world of pop music, and that's the way it goes. We're like everybody else. We're just trying to figure it out. I don't know what's going to happen the first night we walk out onstage or the 1. It's an experience we're going to have with our audience on this tour. How did his death affect this album? The record was pretty much done, except that I wanted to get Clarence on it. The week before he died I called him to come in and record on his way back from Los Angeles, where he'd worked with Lady Gaga. He was having problems with the feeling in his hand. He was worried and asked if he could go home to Florida first and have it checked out. It was the only time Clarence passed on a recording session, so I said sure, we'd catch it later down the road. A week later, he was in the hospital from the stroke. I flew to Florida and spent the week with his family at his bedside. He never really regained consciousness, but in the first few days he'd squeeze my hand when he heard my voice. Then things got worse. After the funeral, I returned home to my studio to finish the record. I didn't know what to do when I heard, so I went home to Los Angeles and put this together from one of the live takes of the song. So he's there, through a little technical magic . The song's chorus is posed as a challenge and a question. Do we take care of our own? What happened to that social contract? Where did that go over the past 3. How has it been eroded so terribly? And how is it that the outrage about that erosion is just beginning to be voiced right now? I've written about this stuff for those 3. Darkness on the Edge of Town to The Ghost of Tom Joad through to today. It all came out of the Carter recession of the late Seventies, and when I was writing about that, my brother- in- law lost his construction job and went to work as a janitor in the local high school. It changed his life. So these are issues and things that occur over and over again in history and land on the backs of the same people. In my music – if it has a purpose beyond dancing and fun and vacuuming your floor to it – I always try to gauge the distance between American reality and the American dream. The mantra that I go into in the last verse of ? What happened to the social fabric of the world that we're living in? What's the price that people pay for it on a daily basis? I didn't feel that so much from this particular instance, but you write the best piece of music you can, and you put it out there, and then you see what comes back at you. Lately, it seems as if the polarization of the country has gotten so extreme that people want to force you into being either a phony . I can't go for that and I won't write that way. What's the thinking behind . That's the guy that's saying, . That lack of accountability is the poison shot straight into the heart of the country. It goes back to Watergate. Watergate legitimized the hustle at the top of the game – it legitimized every street- corner thug. You almost had the country brought down by it, basically. All the radical hippies, longhairs – no one ever came as close to sinking the USA as the guys in the pinstriped suits. You cannot have a social contract with the enormous income disparity – you're going to slice the country down the middle. Without jobs, without helping folks with foreclosures, without regulating the banks, without some sort of tax reform . Mitt Romney paid 1. Without addressing those issues in some way, I don't think the country is going to hold together. I understand the effects of globalization, I understand all that, but at the end of the day, you can't have a society and you can't have a civilization without a reasonable amount of economic fairness, full employment, purpose and civic responsibility. You've been writing about poor men wanting to be rich, rich men wanting to be king since the Seventies. That's what I like about what you were saying earlier – there's a certain universality to it that's ageless. The motivations don't seem to change. For the majority of my lifetime, you saw an increase in inequality. It has only been in the news since Occupy Wall Street, but it was something that was a long, long time coming, and I think that, for better or for worse, I experienced the dynamic as a child, and it was something that I never forgot. I experienced what happens when, say, the male figure in your house struggles to work, can't find work, and the woman in the house becomes the primary breadwinner. That was my house. That's happening in homes all across America right now: guys that worked outside, guys that worked construction, guys that worked manufacturing, particularly those kinds of guys, suddenly those jobs disappeared. Their attitude, their education may not be suited immediately for the service economy – the economy now. It's been devastating on middle- class and blue- collar men, particularly. That was my story, that was the story I've written about. I've written about that story for 3. I lived that story as a child, and I witnessed it day after day after day, and I saw its effects. I saw the crisis that it creates. I saw the loss of your sense of masculinity. It was a wrenching thing to watch for a child, a young child, on a daily basis, and it never, ever let up. I think people would look at it and go, . It just doesn't matter. We talk, we write, we think, and even as late in the day as I am, we experience so much through the veil of the formative years of our life. That never goes away. I have a metaphor. New people can get in, but nobody ever gets out: The child from 1. The teenager, the adolescent boy, no one can get out. They are with you until the end of the ride, and you're going to pass a certain amount of them on. And they exert an amazing amount of influence. The key is, of course, who's driving. On any given day, you're hoping that one of your better angels is at the wheel. That's not necessarily always the case, but that's what you work toward. Why do you always hear of the tycoon hoarding Kleenex, like they are the last he's ever going to see? Why is my mother- in- law switching out all the lights in her house? She came up through the Depression, when those fucking lights had to go out, and you used the one that you needed. These enormous economic shifts imprint people at an incredibly deep level. People who are going through the pain of this one, it's a life- changer – it will change the way you grow up and the way you think for the rest of your life for the people who are suffering through this one. You lose trust. And that stays with you even if the economy gets better, even if you get a better break. The cumulative effect of these kinds of recessions and this kind of punishment of people is so deep, and so those things are always there. So how does that shape your work? For me, it's the thing that pisses you off the most, the thing you want to fix the most, right? They're the things you want to heal the most, they're the things you want to repair the most. They're what obsess you, and what makes your art interesting to other people: .
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