Being a person who'd rather be doing than thinking, I started to wonder what I'd gotten myself into.

As I've said in four or five hundred interviews, I'd been forced to think a year earlier when, during the River Tour, some German wise-ass had accused me of putting missiles in his country. I told him he was a little mixed up and if he cared to attend the show that night he would see I was the guitar player in a rock band and not some asshole in the defense department. But the damage was done.

I reluctantly came to the conclusion that I was an American citizen and maybe some responsibilities went with that. So okay I'm putting missiles in this guy's country and I start reading books to see what else I've been doing since World War II. Well, I found the United States' record of fostering democracy around the world appalling, to say the least. From the Philippines to Haiti, from Guatemala to South Africa, we'd been supporting a very high percentage of the world's most despicable fascist despots.

I had my third epiphany and they tend to come when you need them. Up until then I was busy. All right, maybe busy is too strong a word but I was definitely occupied. I'd just spent the previous seven years doing everything I could to help make Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band as good and as big as we could be (and the ten years before that doing I don't know what). It was the only thing I'd ever really dedicated myself to and I was proud of it. But now, I felt like we'd done it. For the first time in many years I was actually starting to look around and see what I'd missed. Not too much as it turned out but I never had paid much attention in school and I didn't know about very much outside of the world of rock and roll. All of a sudden I felt like learning.

So you're about to make your first record and you don't know where to begin. Eventually you realize it all comes down to one question and that's who are you?

Well I had some ideas on the big stuff but the details were a little sketchy. Worse than that, I had no idea where to begin to look. So I figured it like this. I'd try and discover what is going on out there in the world and I'd pass along whatever I'd learned with each record and hopefully learn something about myself in the process.

I grew up in the 60's and no matter how often journalists write books about it, produce T.V. specials, or make movies about it, the extraordinary goings on and importance of that decade remains underrated. Every week I'd see three groups at the Fillmore East. One-third of them were legendary, one-third good or great, and one-third, at the very least, interesting.

The point is every new group that came out was unique. They all had a distinct personality. By the 80's most of that was gone but what you experience as a teenager tends to stick with you. So since I was doing it anyway I figured politics would be my thing. I didn't see anybody doing it in the rock world, certainly not 100% full time. Anyway I felt it justified my existence which is something love songs wouldn't have accomplished at the time.

I needed some kind of blueprint so I started looking around. I found 44 wars of various sizes in 1982 and it would stay in the 40's throughout the decade. The idea was I would trace our foreign policy (and our tax dollars) to all those wars and see where we stood. Somewhere along the way I became obsessed with exposing the horrors I was discovering and the vampires responsible. That meant accepting responsibility myself and realizing ignorance is no excuse for one's country's actions. I never thought anything I said or did would make much difference but I knew if I maintained an extreme position my missionary zeal would politicize all my friends and everybody else I came in contact with and eventually something might get done. Stimulate thought and you might stimulate a discussion. Stimulate a discussion and you might stimulate some action and who knows, right? That was the idea anyway but it was all secondary to my own education.

The idea of writing personally expressive lyrics in rock was only 17 years old in 1982. Blues and folk artists had always done it and once in a while something deeply personal, poetic, or reality based, would appear in the pop world - probably through Frank Sinatra - but it was rare. In 1965 Bob Dylan took the folk and blues traditions, and the integral consciousness of existing reality, and went electric. His profound impact and influence on the Beatles - the archetypal pop band, the Rolling Stones - the archetypal rock band, and with the road paved by the Byrds - the archetypal sound of the new consciousness, changed everything forever. The release of Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone," was at least symbolically if not literally, the birth of the art form of rock. The rock era would both encourage and reflect the birth of consciousness that would permanently change our culture. Particularly in the following five years. It would introduce a whole new sensibility and cultural significance to the world of popular music, as well as new rules of conduct and doing business, and last about thirty years. The art form of rock will always be with us in one form or another but its cultural significance ended symbolically if not literally with the death of Kurt Cobain.

Up until 1964 I was a music fan but I don't remember having more than a dozen singles. I don't think anybody had a rock and roll album or the device to play it on until the Beatles. The first record I remember buying was Little Anthony and the Imperials' "Tears On My Pillow." My Aunt Addie got me the Coasters' "Poison Ivy" because I used to get it every summer. I also had "Charlie Brown" by then. My emotional involvement increased a bit when I was 11 or 12 with "Twist and Shout" by the Isley Brothers, "Pretty Little Angel Eyes" by Curtis Lee, and "Sherry" by the Four Seasons. Other than those I had "Bristol Stomp" and "You Can't Sit Down" by the Dovells, "Duke of Earl" by Gene Chandler, "Mack the Knife" by Bobby Darin, a Dion or two, a Shirelles, a Chiffons and the next four or five Four Seasons singles of course. My Uncle Sal would introduce me to Smokey Robinson with "Going to a Go-Go" but that was a bit later. I didn't have too many but I was passionate about the records I had. Believe it or not I had to re-buy "Twist and Shout" and "Sherry" because I wore them out! A virtual scientific impossibility. I'm sure the wearing out had as much to do with those little boxes we'd carry singles in with no sleeves for protection but I did play them hundreds of times.