Springsteen’s dreams of the dead

Bruce Springsteen has mortality on his mind, said Brian Hiatt in Rolling Stone. The 71-yearold rocker recently lost his friend George Theiss, who’d been his partner in his very first band, the Castiles. As teens, the pair had played Bo Diddley, Jimi Hendrix, and Sam and Dave covers at union halls and Jersey Shore beach clubs. Springsteen visited with Theiss shortly before he died of lung cancer; afterward, he realized he was the Castiles’ only surviving member. “You can’t think about it,” he says, “without thinking of your own mortality.” It led to the song “Last Man Standing” on his new album, Letter to You, which Springsteen made with his longtime outfit the E-Street Band. He wrestled with other ghosts during the recording sessions: those of departed E-Street saxophonist Clarence Clemons, who died in 2011, and organist Danny Federici, who died in 2008. “I live with the dead every day at this point in my life. Whether it’s my father or Clarence or Danny, all those people sort of walk alongside you.” His departed friends sometimes appear in his dreams. Springsteen’s longtime assistant Terry Magovern, who died in 2007, shows up “a couple times a year.” Clemons stops by occasionally. “What we’re left by the dead is a beautiful part of living. We see all those folks in our dreams until we become a dream ourselves.”

Hammer’s lockdown breakdown

The Cayman Islands might seem like the perfect place to be locked down, said Jonathan Heaf in GQ (U.K.), but it nearly sent Armie Hammer off the deep end. “The experience sucked so badly,” says the 34-year-old actor, who was visiting his father and new stepmother on Grand Cayman when the pandemic hit. “It was a very draconian lockdown. If you’re out and they see you, you go to jail for a year.” Hammer, his wife, and their two children had to remain inside his dad’s apartment. With a lot of “big personalities” in a tight space, Hammer started to feel “intensely trapped. I was just like, ‘I can’t do this.’” Desperate, Hammer called a friend who works in mental health and was put in touch with a therapist. He received “crisis therapy,” and it worked. “It just gave me the tools for dealing with things. It gave me a fresh perspective, and it was incredibly helpful.” Now home in California, Hammer—who in July split from his wife of 10 years—is now riding out the pandemic in the desert, helping a friend renovate an old motel. It offers a different kind of therapy, he says. “You accomplish tasks and you can see the fruit of your work on the floor in a pile of dust. Knock out a wall with a sledgehammer and you’ll feel great.”