Name: In Conversation with Steven Hyden (Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." book author)
Uploaded: 2024-06-06T17:00:07.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'In Conversation with Steven Hyden (Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." book author)' from Office Hours Live with Tim Heidecker on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-06-06.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'In Conversation with Steven Hyden (Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." book author)' from Office Hours Live with Tim Heidecker on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-06-06.

In Conversation with Steven Hyden (Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." book author)

well we were gonna i'm here with steve heiden and we're gonna get into a proper
intro
in a few minutes but before we started rolling steve jumped in to want to with
his desire to
discuss unfrosted which i feel like you made a point could you just make the
point again and
then we'll we're going to talk about bruce springsteen today yeah this is a
very special
episode of office hours with one of my favorite uh music writers um steve heiden
i'll introduce
i'll give you a proper intro but let's do this cold open where you tell me your
thoughts on unfrosted
yeah well i saw the clip of you talking about the jerry seinfeld pop-tart movie
and i assume that oh
tim is gonna crap on this movie like everyone else has and i thought your take
was really interesting
you weren't saying it was like the funniest movie you'd ever seen but you
seemed sympathetic to what
seinfeld was trying to do and you were actually kinder to it than a lot of
people i've seen
talking about it and it was interesting to me because i thought i had when i
was watching
it i didn't finish it i had to be on it but when i was watching it it did occur
to me that oh this would
be a better movie if someone like tim heidecker did it
let me just set this up so people listening um just want to introduce you
formally uh steve heiden is a
music critic an author a podcast host he's the author of your favorite band is
killing me
twilight of the gods the long road about pearl jams influence on a generation
co-host of the podcast
indie cast and you do a podcast with uh our friends the jokerman never-ending
stories and you're a writer
for uprocks you're always putting out these terrific lists you're making these
big decisions about the order of
things of people's careers i love that uh yeah and uh i've gotten to you've
interviewed me and now it's
time to interview for me to interview you because you've got a new book coming
out about my favorite
one of my favorite artists uh bruce springsteen called there was nothing you
could do about born in
the usa and that records cultural impact and i read it you sent me a copy a few
months ago i devoured it
there like there's nothing i love more than these kind of these kinds of books
and i can
i'm um we could talk about this maybe this genre in general too or like the
rock
john the rock book genre um yeah and what works about it and what doesn't work
about it sometimes like i'm
holding off on reading the mal evans book for some reason that might be too in
too into the weeds but
um i'm intrigued by that one too yeah i mean um go ahead i was just gonna say
mal evans for those
who don't know the beatles roadie yes and one of the people in the inner circle
like from the beginning
really of their at least their superstar career i don't know if he goes back to
like germany and
all i think he goes back to he goes back to the cavern i know i i i think he
might not have been in
hamburg but he was there he was like a roadie at the at the cavern i'm not a
roadie a doorman like a
security guy and you see him in the get back movie uh with the with the anvil
he's right yeah he's very
seems like he seems like a very sweet guy and then uh do you know about how he
died oh yes terrible i
mean i don't i don't know all the details i know he was shot by the lapd like
it was like a murder by
suicide suicide by what's that suicide by cop kind of situation yeah yeah and i
don't know all the
details of that but it's a very uh i mean obviously very tragic ending but you
just think of the guy and
and uh get back hitting the anvil and then you remember that's how he went out
it's a very yeah
incongruous situation but uh uh yeah i don't know i'm sure i'm sure that's a
fascinating book the thing
with beatles books is that there's a million of them but there's a million of
them for a reason it is
it's like greek mythology you can just hear those stories over and over i know
i know there's a good
there's a good one the one i just did read it's the audio book uh that i
experienced was the peter
brown book um which was a book he wrote about he'd written it he had written it
uh like in the 1980 or
1982 and he had interviewed everybody in the inner circle and you know he was
in the inner circle peter
brown calls say you can make it okay you can get married in gibraltar near spain
peter brown that
peter brown um he basically interviewed everybody and he recorded everyone and
what this book is is
the transcripts of everybody uh uh it's pretty good he interviews alan klein he
interviews yoko
you know like people that you don't always hear their side of the story because
yeah i think paul and
ringo and they're you know the that side of it has really done such a good job
of controlling the
whole narrative but um and it was contemporaneous sort of it was like done in
the late like right
in the late uh 70s so you're hearing like what paul thinks of john you know
months before john lennon
is killed you know so it's like it's it's not this revisionist history so much
i have i have the audio
book of that uh mark lewison book you know like where he's writing oh that's
yeah enormous i think
it's going to be three volumes in the first volume yeah it's like the rise and
fall of the roman empire
kind of you know yeah or like that linda johnson book that robert carroll wrote
but it's like 45 hours
this book and it's up until yeah and it's like even before they become famous
it's like just their
early life well no i mean that that's that that the joke i have about that book
is it starts in the year
1846 or something that's where that's where like and i think it goes it like
the end of that that that
volume is like 1962 is like and it's 600 pages right so it's like but i loved
it i think it's it really
changed the way i thought about a lot of things with them but again we're not
here to talk about
unfrosted we're not here to talk about the beatles we're here to talk about bruce
the boss
um tell me a little bit about this this book um specifically where what your um
you know
sort of thesis for this book was and did you go into writing this book did you
go into writing this
book you know timing it with the 40th anniversary um did you feel like that was
coming and you're like
not to not to say that you're being you know manipulative or cynical but did it
seem like this
was the time to sort of like uh reassess born in the usa and talk about it a
little more seriously
yeah i mean to answer your question yes like i i did have the 40th anniversary
in mind and and
thinking oh when if the book comes out around then that might be a way to
encourage people to
write about it you know like that's certainly something that crossed my mind
the marketing side
of my brain but um you know i've i've been wanting to write about bruce for a
long time
and he pops up in some of my other books too like i he's in three of my other
books i write about bruce a
bit uh but the problem with bruce is that there's you know like the beatles
there's so many books about
about springsteen and it was trying to figure out like what would be the right
vehicle to talk about him
and uh eventually i just hit upon born in the usa uh which it's the kind of
record that i think is
interesting on its own like the era that it came out of and how it's intertwined
with nebraska and
how it became this huge phenomenon all that stuff but then there's also
everything around the record
you know what it said about america at the time what it says about rock music
and
it seemed like it was a good opportunity to write about the changes that have
happened in culture
in the last 40 years uh and also in bruce springsteen's own career so like the
right so
like the book it talks about not just the record it talks about his career
leading up to the
born in the usa and his career afterward and the central thesis of the book
basically is that
the albums before born in the usa are really setting the stage for bruce
becoming the phenomenon that
he became in the mid 80s and then the albums after are in a way reacting to
that whether he's running
away from it or learning to embrace it again so it's not my favorite bruce
springsteen record i love it
but to me it was the most interesting one to write about it is crazy to think
because you have what's
what's what's the first like what's greetings from asbury park 73 74 73 70 yeah
so you have bruce as
this you know slowly climbing this ladder of success and you know by the by the
river i guess you have
i mean born born we in my mind i always think of born to run as this where he
becomes globally
famous or he is he becomes the icon bruce springsteen but that's not really
true i mean it was a good it
became such a staple of classic rock stations for me growing up and it i think
post born in the usa
you get a lot of people finding that record or you know you get a lot of that
that gets swept up into
the mythology but he still isn't really he's still like a i don't know you
wouldn't say an underground
artist because he had gotten he's on a major label and he's playing arenas and
stuff but he's not
necessarily like a household name through the 70s you know born to run comes
out that that record's a
big hit but you do see this pattern with bruce where he has the big success and
then he retreats
a little bit like with darkness on the edge of town at the time that was looked
at as not a very
commercial record he didn't do much promotion for it there was a lot of feeling
about born to run that
it was like this overhyped record you know he was on the cover of time and newsweek
famously right
same week new dylan or something like that yeah all that and and there's
stories about just bruce
being really uncomfortable with all of the hype around that record and he
scales back with darkness
the river comes out he has hungry heart it's a top 10 hit first big pop hit for
him and then after
the river of course you move into this era where he's working on nebraska and
born in the usa at the
same time and nebraska obviously is another retreat type record in a way and
then born in the usa comes
out and it sells you know 15 million some copies and has seven top 10 hits you
know just the epitome
of a monster 80s record in the mold of like thriller or purple rain like these
albums that just stick
around forever and just keep putting out hit singles yeah which is something
you don't really see anymore
you know like a record that can just linger uh forever or not you like for or
for like 18 months
in in in the cultural zeitgeist and and somehow he doesn't like the record is a
sonic departure from
maybe your the sound you're used to from bruce a little bit i mean you get the
introduction of
the yamaha cs80
you get the synthesizer i was trying to be too cute here but it is uh and i'm
not looking at notes i mean
that's just from my memory yeah i know but that's that's uh you know synth that
we get a synth sound
from bruce um but he doesn't lose his audience he you know exponentially gains
an audience i mean you
like going from from arenas to stadiums it's pretty significant i don't think
he was doing stadiums before
born in the usa yeah i mean i yeah the river i think was approaching that type
of level and then
it really blows up i mean bruce and i think this is still true today like i
mean the early 80s was
the beginning of him going into europe and now he's like bigger in europe than
he is in america like
he's talked about that and like the stadium part of the born in the usa tour
started in europe and then
it came to america uh but yeah the synthesizer thing is interesting um and i'm
i'm kind of curious about
your own journey with bruce i don't want to get into that but yeah um you know
because i read in the
book about how uh i heard this album when i was like really little when i was
six years old and it was
one of the first albums that i remember hearing as an album you know it was
this album obviously thriller
you know if you're around our age like thriller was just part of yeah the w