COVER STORY : How Bruce Got a Life

“When I was young, I truly didn’t think music had any limitations. I thought it could give you everything you wanted in life,” Bruce Springsteen says during a break in rehearsals with his new band at a Hollywood sound studio.

“And music did that for me--more than I had ever dreamed of, in fact. But you eventually get to a point where you realize there are other things you need . . . things that music can’t give you. That’s when you have to put down the guitar and step into the real world.”

In his two new albums, “Human Touch” and “Lucky Town,” Springsteen celebrates what he found over the last three years in the real world: a happy marriage, children and a personal life that once seemed impossible for him. But the happiness celebrated in the albums was hard won and tempered by the fear that things can always go wrong.

Springsteen, 42, may call his last three years--which have included marriage to singer Patti Scialfa and the birth of two children--his happiest, but they followed what may have been his darkest period.

It was a year in which, after his first marriage failed, he questioned his self-worth and his ability to ever have a successful relationship. For a while, even his art appeared threatened.

“I just kind of felt lost for a little while after the ‘Tunnel of Love’ tour (in 1988),” he says in his first printed interview in four years. “I went through the divorce, and anybody who has been through that knows it’s tough. . . . You lose a lot of faith in yourself . . . your ability to connect with people.”

Wearing a print sport shirt and baggy jeans, Springsteen leans forward on the lounge sofa and stares at the floor, trying to find the words to express the transformation outlined so eloquently in the best songs on the new albums.

“The point is everything about you doesn’t grow at the same pace,” he says finally. “You can become very capable in a certain area, even to the point of doing something so well that you are heavily rewarded and everybody applauds you and tells you that you are great. But you can be completely unable at the same time to function in almost every other area.

“In my case, I wrote a lot about community and relationships, yet personally I lived very internally. But eventually, you notice that your friends are starting to get married and you see even some of the fans at the shows have kids on their shoulders, and you feel you are missing something important in your life.

“That’s when you have to see if you can live up to the words in some of your own songs. For me, that step took almost 10 years.”

If things are now smooth in Springsteen’s personal life, his standing in the rock world is more tenuous. Questions have been raised about everything from his character to his relevance on the contemporary scene.

That’s why his new tour, which begins June 15 in Stockholm and is expected to reach the United States a month later, is in many ways his most important series of shows since the “Born to Run” tour 17 years ago, when Time and Newsweek covers on the relatively unknown rocker led to widespread charges of hype.

But Springsteen’s talent overcame the skepticism. Combining the sensual celebration of the ‘50s with the introspective social commentary of the ‘60s, Springsteen helped restore the idea of “hero” to rock.

The challenge in 1992 may even be stiffer because the concerns are so multidimensional.

This round of skepticism began in 1989 when he called an end to the E Street Band, the colorful group that accompanied him on the climb from the New Jersey boardwalk to international stardom.

To millions of fans, the group was more than a body of musicians. It was also a symbol onstage of the camaraderie that was at the heart of so much of Springsteen’s music. By dismissing the band, Springsteen, to much of his audience, showed a lack of loyalty.

And there were the personal matters that touched on some of rock’s most formidable stereotypes. Since his last tour, in 1988, Springsteen has turned 40, making some wonder if he could still relate to today’s young rock audience, which is into such aggressive forces as Metallica and Nirvana. Plus, he has moved from his simple New Jersey roots to a $14-million Beverly Hills-area estate and has become a family man.

Among the questions asked:

Is he too old?

Too wealthy?

Too happy?

Is he, in short, still the Boss?

It’s a sign of the doubts surrounding Springsteen in recent weeks that sales of his two albums have been disappointing. Despite generally strong reviews, the albums, released March 31, stayed in the Top 10 only a few weeks--and have since tumbled out of the Top 30. Estimated sales: about 1.5 million each in the United States, plus another 4 million total worldwide. No one doubts that he will remain a strong live draw, but are his days as a dominant contemporary figure over?

Sure, Springsteen says, he’s heard the grumbling and he’s aware of the sluggish sales, but he is confident about his new material and band, and he’s eager to prove himself onstage.

“If someone has a problem with the fact that you are 42 or that you are wearing a blue shirt on this tour rather than your old red shirt, there’s nothing you can do about it,” he says, sipping tea while sitting in a studio lounge area. “You’ve got to let those things go. I got into music for some personal freedom, so if you build this elaborate cage and lock yourself inside because people don’t want you to change, then you’re a sucker, you know?

“I like being at the top of the charts as much as the next guy, but I don’t live by it, and I never really have. Besides, the way to me that you keep faith with yourself and your fans is through the music, and I know the music on these two records plays as straight as any music I’ve ever written. It’s there, it’s absolutely there.”

While much of the pop world spent the last four years wondering about the effect of such public issues as age and wealth and marriage on Springsteen’s music, he was involved with a more private question.

It’s an examination that began long before the massive success of the “Born in the U.S.A.” album and tour in 1984 and before his highly publicized marriage to actress Julianne Phillips. The issue: his inability to achieve a permanent relationship.

An intensely private man, Springsteen rarely does interviews, because he prefers to keep the focus on his music rather than on his personal life. Once he agrees to an interview, however, he takes it seriously.

Like U2’s Bono Hewson, Springsteen seems to use interviews to explore his own feelings rather than offer glib or superficial answers. He tends to pause frequently to reflect on a question before responding to it, and it’s not unusual for him to return to one several minutes later to add to or amend his earlier answer. When things become too personal, he sometimes adds a nervous laugh--as if to soften the tone.

Springsteen is still muscular but he’s slimmer than he was on the “Born in the U.S.A.” and “Tunnel of Love” tours, having abandoned heavy weights for other forms of exercise.

Despite the enormous interest in him after four years of virtual silence, he seems unusually relaxed as he leans on the sofa in the lounge across from the sound stage during a rehearsal dinner break and speaks about his struggle to find the missing pieces in his life--pieces that he says make him now feel “blessed.”

“I think life goes through a cycle of losing and refinding yourself all the time,” he says. “Everyone has disappointments all the time, some of them pretty small, some of them pretty big. . . .

“I always had great admiration for my sister, my brother-in-law, what they did, their relationship, the kids that they had, and yet I was someone who grew up in isolation, emotionally. That’s how I learned to play the guitar. I played for eight hours a day in my room. I was not part of a clique or a group until I got into a band, and that was based around the music.

“I would occasionally come out and explore external things, but mostly I lived inside, probably initially because I experienced a lot of external rejection when I was growing up, which led me to create my own world. That’s not unusual--everybody lives in their head, and you don’t even notice it when you’re young. You’re out there on the road, and it even feels like a strength. It’s how you have the discipline to find the time, to be alone, to think about things, writing songs.”

Eventually, however, he felt a void--something he addressed in his songs, whose themes began shifting slowly from an emphasis on solitary struggle to the challenges of community and relationships.

“If you go back and look at my records, you can see at the end of ‘Darkness’ when I slip into ‘The River’ (in 1980), all of a sudden the subject of family and marriage and children came up,” he says, tracing his own musical footsteps.

“By the time of the ‘Nebraska’ record (in 1982), there were lots of references to family. During the ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ tour, I spoke about community a lot. . . . Yet, I had failed at most of my personal relationships. You finally realize that’s a struggle and it requires a commitment and will--as much as it takes to get your work to a certain point. . . . The tricky thing for me is that you have to go out and make your mistakes and you stumble and you fall in front of everybody--and that’s basically what I did.”

Springsteen’s search for a relationship culminated in his marriage to Phillips, an event that triggered considerable discontent among hard-core Springsteen fans. The problem was she was a Hollywood actress, not the Jersey Girl of his songs. To many, the marriage was a sign that Springsteen had become intoxicated by the enormous success of “Born in the U.S.A.” and had indeed changed--that he too was now just another rock star.

Springsteen, however, rejects the theory that his huge mid-’80s success threw him off stride.

“When you’re young, there is a bit of the expectation that fame is a way to achieve a life without complications,” Springsteen says, his voice slightly hoarse from the weeks of rehearsal. “But it’s a lie, and I think I realized that fairly quickly. Certainly by the early ‘80s, I knew that success doesn’t solve all your problems.

“At the same time, I think people who point to fame as the reason for their problems are just making an excuse. There were a lot of new experiences around the ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ thing, but remember, I had been around quite a while . . . and had been through a media barrage when I was younger. So, my basic memories of that time are good. I felt we said things on the tour (addressing the issues of homelessness and social indifference to the underclass) that needed to be said.

“There were elements of (fame), of course, that I don’t like . . . the invasion of your privacy and all that, but nobody likes everything that comes with your job. The bottom line is I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.”

Springsteen’s “Tunnel of Love” album in 1987 was one of his most captivating works--a series of penetrating tales about the complexities of modern relationships. There were some moments of optimism and tenderness, but it was mostly a dark, brooding album, filled with uncertainty.

Who imagined at the time that Springsteen was writing about his own marriage--and the difficulty of commitment--in such songs as the almost painfully introspective “Brilliant Disguise”?

We stood at the altar

The gypsy swore our future was bright

But come the wee wee hours

Well maybe baby the gypsy lied

So when you look at me

You better look hard and look twice

Is that me baby

Or just a brilliant disguise

Springsteen twists slightly in the chair when asked if indeed “Tunnel of Love” was a reflection of his first marriage.

“I really would be very cautious about that,” he offers. “People literalize music to me to an unrealistic degree a lot of the time. The albums do end up being some sort of emotional diary, but it’s not exact. You meet a lot of people who expect you to be your music, but you’re not. It’s part of you, but it’s never your complete self. At the time, I didn’t think anything. Those were just the songs I wrote.”

Still, he doesn’t deny in retrospect that the album reflected some of his own inner turmoil.

“That always happens in music,” he continues slowly and deliberately. “If you write really well, it is coming out of your subconscious. You are never writing as well when all you are putting down are just what your conscious thoughts are. That’s not the deep water from the well. The deep water is when it becomes mystical, and it doesn’t happen that often. But I think anybody who is creative will tell you, it’s when you don’t know how you did what you did, that’s when you really did something.”

The “Tunnel of Love” tour didn’t just mean the end of the E Street Band. It also marked the end of the marriage. Though he doesn’t discuss the specifics of his marriage, his failure to establish a permanent connection made him look deep inside himself.

Much of that emotional self-questioning is apparently contained in “Living Proof,” the highlight of the two new albums and one of the most affecting songs he has ever written. He doesn’t say so precisely, but he nods his head slowly at the mention of some of the lyrics.

Just tryin’ so hard to shed my skin

I crawled deep into some kind of darkness

Lookin’ to burn out every trace of who I’d been

About those months after the tour, he recalls:

“I find it important to spend a lot of time off the road because that’s when all these (issues) tend to become uncovered because you don’t have the high of performing. Performing is druglike. I’ve always had an awareness of it, but especially the past eight or nine years. Just like any drug, you can abuse it and use your job to hide in your work.

“Right around ‘Nebraska,’ for instance, I had a bad time. I got very, very isolated and took this big trip across the country, and I was bottoming out. Then ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ came along, and it was funny because the act of work can distract you and fool you into thinking, ‘Oh, I’m OK now. . . . It was just a bad couple of months or a bad year.’

“But you start seeing a pattern . . . things you didn’t notice about yourself earlier or things you rationalize . . . how all your relationships fail. You just go on to the next girl. But at some point, you don’t have any feeling left.”

After the humbling divorce, there was no hiding.

“I tried Patti’s patience pretty regularly,” he says of the time. “I think I was just trying to refind myself and dig up the guts to try to move ahead, and I was having a hard time doing that.”

Slowly, however, Springsteen emerged from the gloom and began building a foundation with Scialfa. Their son, Evan James, was born in 1990, and the couple were married last summer. A daughter, Jessica Rae, was born last New Year’s Eve.

About the birth of his first child, he says:

“It was just this unbelievable feeling of unconditional sort of love for Patti and the baby. It was probably the single most powerful thing I ever felt, and I understood why I ran from it for so long. . . . Because along with it came this enormous fear . . . probably the fear of loss, the fear of showing your cards, admitting something is that important to you and that you can’t have it unless you show yourself. Part of it is you are with somebody who makes you feel safe enough to do that, and Patti just gave me that particular confidence.”

If his personal life was at a peak, Springsteen was still having a hard time getting back into music. One reason he broke up the E Street Band was to have a chance to work with other musicians and explore new musical avenues.

“I loved the band,” he says about his decision three years ago. “I think it was probably the greatest band in the world for as long as we were together, but I did reach a point where I felt I just needed a change. My idea was basically to have some of the freedom that Neil Young has. Sometimes he plays with Crazy Horse, sometimes he plays with other musicians.

“When we did the live record,” he says of the retrospective box set that came out in 1986, “I felt like I closed the book on a certain chapter of what I was doing. . . . I didn’t think loyalty to your musicians necessarily meant always playing together. When we got together in the beginning, I made a lot of promises about what we would do together, what we would accomplish, and I think I came through on them for everybody.

“If the right thing came up, I wouldn’t hesitate to use the band again in some fashion. But at the moment, I also must say, I think the guys I put together right now are going to be a really, really great thing.”

Before he could work with the new musicians, however, Springsteen needed songs. That wasn’t easy.

After almost five months of trying to write material, Springsteen got together in 1990 with E Street keyboardist Roy Bittan and they started doing some tracks in the style of the R&B; he loved as a teen-ager. In some ways, it was like regaining the love of making music.

“The idea was to do something like a rock-pop-soul collaboration, a kind of generic album, and that’s pretty much what it turned out to be,” Springsteen says of “Human Touch.”

However, Springsteen felt incomplete artistically.

“By the time I finished the album, I was at a different place in my life,” he recalls. “I was a father and having this uplifting and happy relationship. I felt revitalized, and I didn’t feel it was reflected in the ‘Human Touch’ album.

“I didn’t hear the ‘hallelujah, raise your hands to the sky’ (spirit) of someone who felt as thankful and as blessed as I did. I had been away a long time, and I could imagine people asking, ‘What’s happened . . . where are you nowadays?’ I also felt like I hadn’t risked enough artistically. So I put the record aside and sat with it two or three months. I felt I needed one more song.”

During that period, Springsteen listened to “The Bootleg Series,” the Bob Dylan retrospective, and he heard a previously unreleased song, the mystical “Series of Dreams,” that triggered something in him.

“I loved the song,” he says. “I think it was one of my favorite things of the past decade, and it inspired me.”

The result was “Living Proof,” a song reflecting on the joy of the night his son was born.

“I realized here was one of the biggest experiences of my life and I felt like, ‘I’m hiding something.’ I hadn’t written anything about it,” he says. “But suddenly I wanted to talk about all I felt . . . the way you walk through the fear to find the love. In the song, you find the world of doubt, of loss, of faithlessness, of humiliation, self-debasement . . . along with the world of hope, of love, of transcendence and redemption and thankfulness and a world of beauty.”

Sample lines:

Well now on a summer night in a dusky room

Come a little piece of the Lord’s undying light

Crying like he swallowed the fiery moon

In his mother’s arms it was all the beauty I could take

Like the missing words to some prayer that I could never make

In a world so hard and dirty, so fouled and confused

Searching for a little bit of God’s mercy

I found living proof.

Though Springsteen, whose background is Dutch-Italian and who attended Roman Catholic schools, has used religious imagery in his songs over the years, this one has a more overtly spiritual tone.

“When you open yourself up, I think that’s what comes rushing in--faith,” he explains. “I don’t mean it in any dogmatic sense whatsoever, I just mean you get a sense of your own temporalness, your own fleetingness, some sense of spirituality. That’s an important part of both records. . . . the fact that you may surrender to despair, but that if you push on, you can walk through that world of fear and another world is waiting.”

So what about the tour?

In the semi-darkness of the rehearsal hall, everything looks like the glory days as Springsteen, shoulders slightly hunched, stands next to the microphone with the guitar strapped across his shoulders.

When the lights come on, however, it’s startling at first to see him in the company of strangers. Instead of the old gang of Clarence Clemons, Danny Federici, Nils Lofgren, Gary Tallent, Max Weinberg and Miami Steve Van Zandt, he now has a new group, anchored by the sole E Street holdover, keyboardist Bittan.

The music, however, seems energetic and full-bodied--and the song being played is definitely familiar: “My Hometown,” one of Springsteen’s signature songs from the ‘80s.

There had been speculation among Springsteen devotees that the veteran rocker might play only new material this time around--as part of a total break with the past.

“If I was doing an hour and a half, that’s most likely what would have happened,” he says. “I have a lot of confidence in it and it plays really great live, but I’m looking to follow the structure of the last tour, which was two sets that total about 2 1/2 hours.

“By going that long, the show broadens enough to where emotionally you want to pick something up from here, something from there. The important thing is picking up songs that work in the new context. That’s why we spend so long in rehearsal. It’s not to teach the band the songs. This (rehearsal) is for me to listen to songs, which ones work together, see how you can find new meanings in them. If you can’t find any new emotional resonance in the songs, you skip them because it’s just nostalgia.”

During the rehearsal, you could see the beginnings of the integration of the old and new songs as he followed “My Hometown” with “Souls of the Departed,” a song from “Lucky Town” that laments the death of a soldier during the Persian Gulf War and the gang-related shooting of a 7-year-old on a Compton playground.

It’s a surprising but effective pairing, songs linked by their shared concern for young people and their future in troubled times. “Souls of the Departed” was especially touching in view of the L.A. riots.

“The country is still in a state of denial about the inner city,” Springsteen says when asked about the song, which is the closest link in the new albums to the social commentary of his “Born in the U.S.A.” period.

“After the ‘60s there was a commission established by Lyndon Johnson, and they spelled out what it would take (to correct the conditions), but it didn’t happen. Some of the programs that did come in were good and they helped, but it wasn’t enough, and when a lot of those programs were rolled back, everybody just watched.

“I think that for a lot of people it was not only not surprising,” he says of the riots, “but it was surprising that it hadn’t happened sooner over the last decade. I don’t think you can abandon people and give people absolutely no stake in the society they are living in and expect peace and quiet.

“We have left our children a legacy of dread. That’s what being born in the U.S.A. is all about now, and it is not going to go away until we address the problems we face as a society.”

Springsteen and the new band have been rehearsing in this Hollywood sound stage for weeks for the world tour. He had canceled the two previous days’ sessions because his voice was hoarse from his appearance May 9 on “Saturday Night Live.” He wasn’t even supposed to sing on this day, but he was eager to get back to work.

“I know some people have questions, but basically an artist’s defense is your own words and your own work . . .,” he says in closing. “I feel very good about who I am and what I’m doing and where I’m going. I’m a lifelong musician. That’s what I was 20 years ago and what I’ll be 20 years from now and I’ve had the happiest three years of my life recently. I’ve never felt more free.”