Shoot For The Moon: Jon Landau Interviewed | Features

In the crazy and capricious world of rock ’n’ roll, where bands and artists regularly require a steady hand to guide them unscathed down that often treacherous path to success – a trail littered with the bodies and broken hearts of those less fortunate – there are managers, and then there is Jon Landau.

This year marked the 50th anniversary of Landau’s friendship with Bruce Springsteen, which blossomed shortly after one fateful 1974 concert by the latter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Landau had begun his career in journalism, writing in the late-’60s for Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone, and was attending the show in a professional capacity for The Real Paper, a Boston-area free sheet.

At the time, newcomer Springsteen was in a decidedly precarious position; his first two albums, ‘Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.’ and ‘The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle’ had not sold well, despite the artist’s killer reputation as a live performer, and Columbia Records were beginning to question whether the commercial appeal of this New Jersey-born bard would ever extend beyond the East Coast.

Springsteen played just eight songs that night in the Harvard Square Theater, but they would have a powerful and lasting effect on an inspired Landau. “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen,” he duly reported. “And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the first time.”

This timely glowing praise would embolden Springsteen’s status with his label, and allowed him the creative freedom he required for his third album. However, after a year of problematic sessions, in which Springsteen felt unable to translate his sonic concepts into music, that album, as well as Bruce’s career, hung in the balance. He decided then to reach out to Landau, who’d become a valued sounding board since his enthusiastic review.

Landau had by this point also carved a career in production, helming the MC5’s studio debut ‘Back In The USA’ in 1970, and was drafted in by Springsteen to rescue proceedings. Thus, ‘Born To Run’ was finally released in August 1975, saving Bruce’s career and securing his status as a visionary singer/songwriter for the times. Landau went on to co-produce a string of now-classic Springsteen albums, and in 1978, was promoted to his manager.

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“I never wanted to be a manager,” a still-bemused Landau tells Clash, explaining that the title was bestowed merely as an extension to his role as Springsteen’s confidante and advisor. “It was just a collaboration that transcended all the categories.”

We meet Landau in London, as his prolific half-century partnership with The Boss continues to bear fruit with the release of a new documentary, Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band. Directed by long-time associate Thom Zimny and co-produced by Landau, it’s a stunningly intimate insight into Springsteen’s relationship with the stage and performing, and a revealing study of the artist approaching 75 as he navigates a particularly emotional world tour.

The film opens with footage of Springsteen reuniting with the E Street Band at rehearsals for their 2023 tour, as his pensive voice huskily reflects on his commitment to the stage. “Since I was 16,” he says, “playing live has been a deep and lasting part of who I am, and how I justify my existence here on Earth.” The COVID lockdowns, which prevented any live music and ground all tours to a halt, left Springsteen without purpose, and with the hope that if and when normality resumed, he would lead the celebrations. “I made a promise to myself, to my fans, and the band, that if we got through this,” he asserts, “I’d throw the biggest party I could.”

But the pandemic would have far more of an impact on the resulting tour than anyone could have predicted. “It made us all much more concerned about death,” notes Landau, a theme that was already very much at the forefront of Springsteen’s mind. His excellent album ‘Letter To You’, recorded in November 2019 and released just under a year later, dealt with the issues of age (Springsteen was 70 at time of composition) and death, as he grieved the recent loss of teenage bandmate George Theiss. By 2023, the album had still not been toured, but in the wake of COVID-induced anxieties, its subjects remained prevalent, and Springsteen was driven to explore them further.

“How do you do a rock show where one of your main themes is about dying?” says Landau, posing the question they’d all had to consider. “Well, he did it. The four key songs – ‘Letter To You’, ‘Last Man Standing’, ‘I’ll See You In My Dreams’ and ‘Ghosts’ – to me, were like the pillars of the show. Now, he wasn’t trying to make every song fit all that – he wanted to have the great rock show; he had the variety of musical styles – but they defined the show for him, and made it unique.”

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Weaving an interpretive narrative throughout the setlist, Bruce injected the sets on this tour with a profound reflection on mortality, building a carefully curated order of songs that heightened the penetrating depth of those newer tracks and the explosive, timeless spirit of his well-known hits.

In the evening of the day Clash met Landau, we attended a screening of Road Diary, after which was held a Q&A session hosted by presenter and former Clash scribe Edith Bowman with Springsteen, Landau, Zimny, and long-standing E Street Band guitarist and musical director Stevie Van Zandt, who commented on the challenge the group faced in bringing death to life on stage.

“Because it was a theme about mortality,” he said, “we knew we had to balance that out with vitality. Yes, we are closer to the end than we are to the beginning, but we’re not going out quietly. We’re going out fighting all the way.”

All 66 shows on the 2023 tour took the audience on an incredible emotional journey through song and Springsteen’s spoken-word introductions, as documented in Road Diary, which climaxes with the stirring fusion of ‘Last Man Standing’ and ‘Backstreets’. “That’s where it sort of says, ‘This is what I’m talking about,” Springsteen explains during the Q&A. “And the rest of the show is, ‘And this is how I respond.’”

Where Road Diary truly succeeds in emphasising the universal relevance of its core theme is in displaying the reception of songs such as ‘The Promised Land’, ‘Badlands’, and ‘Born To Run’ by the audience, who immediately exhibit their impassioned responses on screen – a deliberate call of director Thom Zimny.

“Thom had it very clear in his mind that he wanted the live material to show the interaction between Bruce and the audience. He wanted to really zero in on the audience’s point of view,” says Landau. “What Thom is looking for, and what he was looking for from his cameramen, was faces, eyes, meaning, and reactions. Real reactions. He wasn’t looking for that big, humungous behemoth that just shows how mighty we are with so many people, he was trying to show how touched people were. And I think he did beautifully with that.”

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Road Diary is the latest product of Thom Zimny’s trusted relationship with Springsteen, following the likes of his Letter To You, Western Stars, and Springsteen On Broadway films, and allows viewers direct visual entry into a mythic world that was once completely inaccessible.

“In the early part of Bruce’s career, we didn’t film,” says Landau. “He chalks that up to a certain superstition he had, or a certain feeling. He believed in the live show and what he was doing so much, and he really believed that filming it would lessen it, it would diminish the experience. He was very protective of that live show. For a long time, he just avoided it. It was the same thing with videos and MTV in the mid-’80s. We made videos, but Bruce was interested in writing songs, making records, and doing shows. The rest of it was a sideshow. However, when we came back together with the band around 1999, after a 10-year hiatus where he was working without the band, he had a different attitude about it.”

“Thom has given me a visual language that we didn’t have previously when we made videos back in the day when they made ’em,” Springsteen later related. “You need a collaborator, somebody with the visual skills. So Thom really came along and gave that to me, and we have been great partners for a long time. Once the band got back together, I said we’re going to film everything we do. We’re going to make one film for every sort of section of our work life, and if we use some of them, we use them, and if we don’t, they’re there in the archives, and so we’ve been doing that over the past 24 years.”

For his part, Thom says that it took those 24 years of working with Springsteen to get to a point where he felt they were ready to make a film like Road Diary, one which surpassed the usual restraints of concert movies and documentaries by combining the two mediums, and expressing the core issues in a more nuanced way. “I went to the shows so many times,” the director revealed, “and I looked at these emotional arcs that happened, and I wanted the film to mirror that. I saw all these themes, so I thought I’d stand in the shadow of the show, in some ways, and reflect it in the movie.”

Road Diary will be available to stream on Disney+, the same company who are developing an adaptation of Warren Zanes’ superlative book, Deliver Me From Nowhere, which chronicles the context and creation of Springsteen’s stark 1982 masterpiece, ‘Nebraska’. Landau is quick to point out that while Team Springsteen were not officially involved with the book or its adaptation – to be directed by Crazy Heart’s Scott Cooper – they do have their support.

“I don’t want to get ahead of anything,” he says, “but we are very optimistic that this is going to be a terrific film. These are people who are very serious, they are artistic, they understand the book, they understand the album, and so we are helping them only as asked.”

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It’s reported that The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White will be assuming the lead role. Does Landau think he’d make a good Springsteen? “I’m positive of it,” he smiles. “And I’ve been blessed with Jeremy Strong from Succession playing me. We’ve gotten to know each other a little bit, and the only thing I said to him is – because I don’t know that he would call himself a “method” actor, but his preparation is very intense, very serious – I said: ‘Now listen, you don’t have to go down the Raging Bull road and start gaining the weight to look like me in 1982. Let’s not go that far!’”

All these cinematic projects, arriving in the latter half of Springsteen’s career to record it for posterity, are part of a concerted effort by Landau to preserve his charge’s legacy and the stories he wants to tell. He says he actively thinks about what is going to be left behind, and is excited about the construction of a new exhibition centre to house the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center For American Music at Monmouth University in New Jersey.

“You do become concerned with legacy,” he says. “I am. I want all this great work to be remembered in a certain way, and to have meaning going into the future. I think the meaning is in the work, and I don’t want it to be forgotten, that’s for sure.”

Preservation, Springsteen tells his London guests, is also at the heart of Road Diary. “The film,” he proclaims, “is also about the rewards of working on a band staying together.” Most bands, he goes on to say, are destined to split, such is the pressure of maintaining a close chemistry after years in each other’s company, citing Oasis as an example. “Staying together is a separate art itself,” he says. “You’ve got to imagine you were in high school, and those four people that you hung around with in high school? How about them being the same four people you’ve worked with every single day of your life until you’re 75? That’s insane to expect any sane person to be able to stand.”

Springsteen is asked how he managed to keep the E Street Band united. “I pay a tremendous amount of money,” he quips.

“No,” he promptly follows up, regaining his composure after the audience’s laughs quieten, “the truth is you needed to cast your band well, with people who have the same sort of respect and feeling and seriousness about what they were doing as to what you are doing. Everybody has to hold that music in a very high place, and knows there are certain boundaries – ‘Hey, we don’t fuck with that’ – so the band has to be cast very well. And, luckily, Steven and I have been friends for 60 years. He’s a musical companion that’s unlike anything else. Jon and I, 50 years. But that’s an art, and in each and every one of those relations there are more than one moment where it could have gone the other way and you could split, you know? That appeals to me in the film, watching a bunch of people work together after that long.”

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That Bruce Springsteen has endured this long is not surprising at all. Relentlessly inquisitive and creatively boundless, he has forever followed where his instincts led – growing, learning and adapting all the way along. His music has never failed in connecting with the man in the street, because they are written of the streets. Having never lost the grounding that a blue collar childhood in New Jersey instilled in him, his songs remain intensely authentic, resonating with anyone who ever cherished dreams of hope, escape, and possibility amid the daily struggles of working life.

He talks about his whole career as a “spiritual journey”, and for Landau himself, the same is true. “That’s the journey I’m on,” he says. “I believe in what we’re doing with all my heart, let me tell you. That is the truth.”

As Springsteen boldly ventures onward, determined to perform “until the wheels come off”, the indispensable Landau will no doubt be where he belongs, at his side as they continue to explore new, uncharted territories together – entirely fitting for the man Springsteen lovingly called “the Clark to my Lewis” in his autobiography.

So, at 77, and paired with an unstoppable, adventurous artist in an industry struggling to survive in this digital age, what does the intrepid Landau see are the biggest challenges they face going forward?

“I think the challenge is to keep doing great work and finding creative ways to release it,” he insists. “Do we have some special goal that we haven’t [achieved]? Well, awards? He’s got quite a few of those. Honestly, it sounds a little hokey, but we aim for great. ‘Born To Run’; when we were in there, we thought we were making the greatest album of all time. Fortunately, my kids still think that it is. In other words, whatever we’re doing, we’re aiming for great. Time will tell. It’s a state of mind. But we’re aiming high; we’re always shooting for the moon. Sometimes we get it, and sometimes we don’t, but if you don’t aim high, you’re not going to get there at all. So I just think that’s what we do: we just keep doing what we do and just keep trying to make it better and greater.”

“Do we have some masterplan?” he laughs. “No, we don’t. He may have one, but he hasn’t told it to me yet!”

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