Behind the scenes of the return of Springsteen and the E Street band
It is simply titled “Road diary”: it is the new documentary by/about Bruce Springsteen, arriving on October 25th on Disney+ and presented at the Rome Film Festival. It tells the behind-the-scenes story of the E Street Band’s return to tour in 2023, after the pandemic – but with the presence of unreleased archive material: an unprecedented look at the Boss’ creative process, between past and present.
Behind the camera is Thom Zimny who has been responsible for all of Springsteen’s audiovisual projects for over two decades, both the big ones (the film “Western Stars”, the specials on “Springsteen on Broadway” and “Letter to You” for mention the most recent ones) and the smaller ones (he shot the endorsement video for Kamala Harris recently released on social media). Zimny also takes care of the audiovisual archive of the Boss, from which “The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts” came and from which the various inserts from the 70s that enrich the story of this film come.
“I’ve been working on music videos, documentaries, short films and live concerts for Springsteen for twenty-four years,” Zimny tells Rockol via connection from America. “But in this new adventure I tried to tell a different kind of story. A more thoughtful story.”
The story of a particular tour
The story, he explains, wrote itself, without input from the Boss: the band’s return to tour. In 2022 the E Street Band was ready to return to the stage, then the tour was canceled at the last moment – some posters had already been put up – because the post-pandemic situation of live music was unclear. Everything postponed to 2023: a triumphal tour, but also different from the past (here is the beautiful story that Ernesto Assante gave about it). A much less improvised show, more written and scheduled – which also made those fans who wanted surprises every night nervous.
Zimny defines himself as “a fly on the wall” of the room that saw the birth of that tour: “When we started filming
Road Diary I wasn’t sure what the story would be. I arrived during rehearsals and was struck by the location, an old theater in New Jersey, in a sleepy, cold town. I thought it was a nice way to start the story: I grew up in those parts too, I know well the isolation in the winter streets of a seaside town. But that place allowed us to talk about the spirit and brotherhood of the E Street Band, the gratitude of still being together. But also the leader of the band, Bruce, who understands piece by piece the story he wants to tell with that tour, leafing through his notebook, deciding which songs to play, taking notes and deleting them.”
Although Springsteen has co-signed as director in the past (“Western stars” of 2019), in this case he gave no indications or rules: “In this phase his job consisted of finding the story to tell on stage, not in the documentary: he had to get the band back in shape. I never talked about it with him: just a hello and then we went back to filming and he forgot about the camera. Instead, I have an excellent relationship with Jon Landau: I can stay on the phone with him for hours discussing the day and what we saw,” he says of the Boss’ historic manager.
Documentaries or hagiographies?
A widespread trend among music documentaries, especially after the proliferation due to video platforms that commission tons of them, is to transform themselves into hagiographies, stories of the lives of saints kissed by success.
Zimny’s films on Springsteen (and his other productions on Elvis Presley, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and the Beach Boys) use a drier and less celebratory style: “I’m not interested in this hagiographic approach.
I’m fascinated by the artist, I’ve never looked for celebrities or information on sales or success. My job as a director is to wear different clothes: one of them is to be the fan who is amazed by what he sees. For me, the hardest thing to talk about is the quiet intimacy of an artist, of a man who looks back on his life as he creates a story, saying: If I take this old song from 1975 and put it next to this song from 2022 what am I talking about?”.
The first part of the documentary is precisely centered on these moments, on the backstage of the creation of a tour, told with flashbacks from the past: “Road Diary was a great opportunity to delve into the archives: I found these fantastic videos of the band in 1973 , in which Bruce jokes with Clarence Clemons, and they talk about where the chemistry between these people came from.” Making films like this, Zimny explains, is like using a time machine, which helps take you back to the place where a story was happening.
The fans’ story
The second part of the documentary is the diary on the road, with live songs, but above all with the stories of the fans. “How do you capture the magic of a Bruce Springsteen concert without talking about his fans?” explains Zimny. “With Road Diary I had full access and tried to talk about what I think is the magic of being in the pit and enjoying the show.”
The Italians will not be happy to know that a lot of space is being given to their Spanish rivals in the race for the title of “biggest fans of the Boss”.
Several fans from our country are interviewed, but above all we talk about how special Spain is for the E Street Band, and Barcelona in particular: “The public’s beauty of their faces: these are some of the aspects we wanted to convey. “But I met some great Italian fans, sat at their table and ate and drank with them, saw their houses,” Zimny says.
Rockumentary today
What is the role of rock documentaries nowadays? “I started in 2005 with Bruce making documentaries about his albums, one of the first was about “Born to Run”. In that period, rock documentaries that chronicled the lives of artists were less frequent. I think it’s exciting this opportunity to see how a film like Road Diary, because there is much more material around this represented a great challenge but”, he continues, “I am tied to a classic idea, that of old cinema. I don’t try to place the story in a specific period, I don’t want to chase the cinematic language that seems contemporary to me at a specific moment. I want to do something that’s timeless and that twenty years from now will make you say, “Oh, that’s who Bruce Springsteen was. He’s an ever-evolving artist and you have to keep your eyes open, be the fly on the wall that sees the little details.” .