Bruce Springsteen Talks New Documentary and His Deep Love for The Doors at Q&A

“The setlist is how you communicate your story to your audience,” says Bruce Springsteen near the start of Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, the new Thom Zimny-directed documentary on the Boss’s life as touring musician that debuts on Hulu on Friday (Oct. 25).

 The movie had its Los Angeles premiere Monday night (Oct. 21) before a star-filled audience at the Academy of Motion Pictures Museum’s David Geffen Theater, which included Catherine O’Hara, Danny DeVito, Judd Apatow, John Densmore, Jackson Browne, Richie Sambora and Brandi Carlile.

As anyone who has seen Springsteen’s current tour knows, this outing’s setlist is relatively static for a Springsteen show,  with the themes of mortality and loss interspersed with the joy of being alive running throughout. What it lacks in the spontaneity of past Springsteen tours, it more than makes up for in the emotional resonance Springsteen and the expanded E Street Band bring to the often transcendent material.

The documentary, which is a must-see for any Springsteen fan, pulls back the curtain on how the tour came together. By the time the first show was played in Tampa in February 2023, Springsteen had released three new albums and it had been six years since the E Street Band had toured due, in part, to the pandemic.  The film takes fans behind the scenes from the first day of rehearsals in a small, black box theater in New Jersey to stages across the world and, in the process, tells the story of the band’s 50 year friendship.

In one of the film’s more poignant passages, musician and Springsteen’s wife Patti Scialfa reveals she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2018 and how that has affected her ability to tour with the band. The deaths of longtime band members Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons are also discussed in loving detail.

As to why now was the right time to reveal the behind-the-scenes machinations, at a Q&A following the screening, Springsteen, 75, kept with the mortality theme and half quipped, “Well, if we didn’t make it now, I’d be dead pretty soon so we got to make these while we can. That’s all there is to it.”

The tour, which picks up again in Europe next Spring, has as its tentpoles four songs from Letter to You, Springsteen’s 2020 album inspired by the death of George Theiss. His passing left Springsteen the only living member of his first band, The Castiles, which he joined as teenagers.

“I was with him the last few days before he passed away,” Springsteen said during the Q&A, moderated by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation chairman and iHeart president of entertainment enterprises John Sykes. “I came back from George’s, and I think he filled me with something where I think all of Letter to You was written in about two weeks and recorded in four days. It’s just, hey, you get up around our age and those are the things you’re thinking about, and Patti and I have had to deal with her illness and you’re worried about…it’s just part of your life now, questions and mortality. Like I say in the film, there’s a lot more yesterdays and goodbyes once you get up around where we are then there was 30 or 40 years ago.”

Zimny, who has worked with Springsteen on projects for 24 years, said during the Q&A that the project unfolded as shooting progressed. “I think it evolves every day that I was experiencing the band, filming and seeing what was going on. I think it’s a conversation that happens with Jon [Landau, Springsteen’s manager] and Bruce from day one and I just stay really open to what I’m experiencing. The first day of rehearsals. I was just so blown away by that sense of everyone’s happiness and I knew that I wanted that to come across, that sense of gratitude that they can perform again. But by time I reached the American concerts and Europe, the film evolved. I think a big thing is to be open, not have a set POV. I go for the adventure.”

The movie, which is narrated by Springsteen, ends with his citing a quote from The Doors’ Jim Morrison. In the Q&A, which also featured Landau and Springsteen’s longtime right-hand man Steven Van Zandt, Springsteen revealed the origin of its usage. He and Scalfia were at the same Doors show at the Asbury Park (N.J.) Convention Center in 1968, though they hadn’t met yet. Then, he told an endearing story that showed that, ultimately,  the pair are music nerds just like his fans.  Decades later, he and Scalfia were talking about the Doors show and found the setlist online. “We got in bed and we said, ‘OK, we’re going to recreate the entire show,’” he recalled. “I found live Doors cuts and we recreated the entire show from 1968 and listened to it before we went to sleep…Suddenly, I sort of went on a bit of a Doors binge and I started reading several book and I came across the quote and it just seemed like the perfect way to sum up what the band is about, what our relationship to our fans means, what our mission statement has been for the past 50 years. It just seemed to sum it up in those four very brief lines.”

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