Business & Finance Club - TORONTO – "We wanted to be important," Bruce Springsteen remembered of himself and the E Street Band in the ’70s.

"We came out of a little town and we wanted people to hear our voices."

Millions have.

And 470 more people got the chance on Tuesday night when, as part of the Toronto International Film Festival — and to promote "The Promise: The Making of `Darkness on the Edge of Town," an HBO documentary premiering there — the musician took the Bell Lightbox stage for a chat with Edward Norton.

It wasn’t as odd a couple as it might have seemed.

The two have known each other for more than a decade. They’re good enough friends that, if he knows Norton’s in the audience, Springsteen will slip one of his favorite songs into the concert.

A friendly gesture, Norton revealed, that once led to chaos when Steve Van Zandt looked down at the set list and instead of seeing " ‘For You’ — Ed,’" read it as a note to play "For You" in E-flat, a key that left the band in sheer panic.

So perhaps it was Norton’s way of making it up, serving as the friendly interviewer for a little over an hour this night, as the musician spoke out about his influences, his music and his New Jersey.

It was, Springsteen emphasized, a working-class, small-town life in a place where Top 40 radio ruled and "New York was a million miles away." Yet, "the good part was, you were very connected to place. It was unique, the place where you grew up."

Laughing, Springsteen remembered living in a surfboard factory, breathing in fiberglass fumes all day (which, Norton cracked, "explains a lot"). But the Boss also shrugged off the hungry-artist stereotype, and talked with stubborn pride of packing them in even then.

"I had a pretty successful local band," he said. "You charge a dollar, you play to 2000 people, you split that with the guys, you know… How long can you live on that? You can live forever, man. Young guys? But I knew that wasn’t going to be enough."

And then came the record contract. And then, Springsteen admits, came a kind of "survivor’s guilt."

"I was the only person I’d ever met who had a record contract," he says. "None of us in the E Street Band has even been on an airplane until Columbia sent us out to Los Angeles…No one (in your old neighborhood) knows anyone who has any money. They only know you."

And from that guilt, Springsteen says, came a feeling of responsibility to tell the stories of the people who never got that big advance, who never got the chance to slam the screen door on that life and get away from the house with the cabbage-rose wallpaper and bills on the kitchen table.
Norton had vowed he didn’t want to cover "Darkness on the Edge of Town" in detail, as the film at the festival, "The Promise," already did that. What he hoped to do, he told me before he went on stage, was "talk a little more philosophically about things."

That didn’t always happen, though. Because, despite Norton’s occasional talk about "widening the lens" to include topics like the Beats and Walt Whitman ("A New Jerseyan!" Springsteen proclaimed), the musician kept narrowing the focus to fonder, more familiar topics — back to family, back to Jersey, back to "Darkness."

"Usually, you’re motivated by fear rather than bravery," he said of that album’s ambition. "I was afraid of losing myself."

Success, he admitted, had begun to wall him off from his roots. So he turned to stories of struggle, "not so much out of any social consciousness, but survival of my own inner life, my soul."

Some of his immediate inspiration for songs came from his friends and family. Some came from old Hollywood films. ("‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ — that’s a very noir title.") Some came from current movies, particularly the kind that still played drive-ins.

"‘Rolling Thunder’ with William Devane," he said. "‘Cockfighter,’ with Warren Oates, anyone here see that? You should… ‘Jackson County Line.’ It was a terrific time in the movies."

And from those pictures and the books he was reading, trips out West and the memories of his childhood, came an album. And maturation, and a new way of thinking about music, that led to more albums, and more successes — and the threat of more barriers that he struggled to keep from walling him off.

"When you have some success, you have a variety of choices," he said. "I looked at some of the maps the people before me had drawn. ‘Here there be dragons!’ And the world was flat to them, and they fell off the edge. And that was something I’d rather not do. And part of that was keeping a sense of myself."

Obviously helping him keeping his sanity — and sense of proportion — is his wife, Patty Scialfa, and their family.

"People ask, ‘Do your kids come to see your shows’?" Springsteen asked. "Why would they? Why would kids want to see thousands of people cheering their parents? Now," he laughed, "thousands of people booing their parents…"

But even though he confesses to not being "cool" to his kids ("If you are, you’re doing it wrong") he does enjoy going with them to shows, and listening to their favorite new bands. And, yes, checking out the competition onstage, just a little bit.

"If you’re good, you’re always looking over your shoulder," he admits. "That’s the life. That’s the gunslinging life. ‘Yes, you are very fast my friend. But there’s a kid right now…’"