Walk like a Man

by Robert J. Wiersema

  The album is darkness incarnate, story-songs with elements of autobiography, overwhelming desperation, and fleeting, crumbling redemption. Today, Nebraska is widely praised as one of Springsteen’s finest works, and is a fixture on most critics’ lists of the best albums of all time. It certainly bears the hallmarks of his immersion in the world of American folk music, which was kick-started by his reading of Joe Klein’s biography of Woody Guthrie, and of his reading of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

  Rather than touring, Springsteen spent more than two years, on and off, in the studio with the band, and hopping on stage at Jersey Shore bars to join up-and-coming acts, usually late in their sets. He became a fixture on the bar scene of his youth, to the point that a surprise appearance became, well, less than surprising.

  The recording sessions for the new album proceeded slowly but steadily, and with no small amount of turmoil for Springsteen himself. Part of the difficulty may have been due to Miami Steve Van Zandt announcing that he would be leaving the group upon the album’s release to pursue a solo career. Nevertheless, by the time the sessions were finished, in the spring of 1984, Springsteen and the band had created, consciously and deliberately, a sleek, of-the-times hit machine, designed for maximum impact. With former Neil Young guitar slinger and solo artist Nils Lofgren brought in to take Van Zandt’s place, and the addition of sassy, redheaded Jersey girl Patti Scialfa on background vocals, The E Street Band was ready to take on the world.

  On the heels of its first single, “Dancing in the Dark,” the Born in the U.S.A. album exploded into the public consciousness in the summer of 1984. Overnight, Springsteen was a household name. An ambitious world tour sold out stop after stop. Seven of the album’s twelve songs were released as singles, and they all charted in the top ten.12 Propelled by those singles, and driven by videos for five of those tracks, the album ended up selling more than fifteen million copies in the United States, and more than thirty million copies around the world.

  It wasn’t very far into Born in the U.S.A.’s life, however, that Bossmania transcended the music world and infused the culture at large. It was significant enough that Ronald Reagan tried to co-opt what he perceived as Springsteen’s patriotism in his run-up to re-election, while Reagan’s opponent Walter Mondale also tried to claim Springsteen’s endorsement. Adding to the effect was the sudden presence of Springsteen’s supposed heartland values being used everywhere in advertising. (Springsteen refused to licence his music or image for any advertising. Madison Avenue went with sound-alikes and lots of flags.)

  The biggest indicator of Springsteen’s new role in American culture, though, came in the crazed, frantic lead-up to his wedding in 1985.

  Springsteen met model and actress Julianne Phillips backstage at a Los Angeles concert in October of 1984. Within months they had announced their engagement, with a wedding scheduled for early May in the bride’s hometown, Lake Oswego, just south of Portland, Oregon.

  The announcement triggered a press reaction akin to that of a royal wedding. So rigorous (and ridiculous) was the attention, in fact, that the wedding actually took place a day earlier than scheduled. The midnight ceremony was accompanied by fake-outs, unmarked cars, police escorts, and other means of subterfuge.

  After the ceremony, the groom went back on the road and the bride went back to work.

  The final leg of the Born in the U.S.A. tour was a stadium swing through major U.S. markets. Springsteen, who had once balked at playing any venue larger than a bar, was now performing— comfortably—for seventy to eighty thousand fans on any given night. The shows changed in focus, growing bigger to fill the spaces, and inevitably losing much of their subtlety and depth. Yet Springsteen still had an impact. During the last shows of the tour, held in late September and early October at the Los Angeles Coliseum, Springsteen stood center stage to deliver a warning to the youth in attendance, a reminiscence of what it was like growing up with the Vietnam War in the background of his youth, and pronouncing that “in 1985, blind faith in your leaders, or in anything, will get you killed.” The band then slammed into a scalding cover of Edwin Starr’s mid-sixties hit “War.”

  When the tour was over, Springsteen returned home to New Jersey with his new wife and a new fortune—which some estimated at over $50 million.

  He didn’t rest, though. In November, Landau sent him a tape of four live tracks from late in the tour, including “War.” Springsteen, who had always balked at the idea of a live album, was won over by the tape, and within weeks planning was underway for what would become the mammoth five-record/three CD set Live 1975–85.

  When it was released in late 1986, the box set was a huge initial success. Propelled by the live performance video for “War,” it was a Christmastime hit, the highest selling box set in music history. It was what the fans had been waiting for—sort of. The tracklist came under fire for obsessive quibbles: too much reliance on 1984 and 1985 material, with only one track—the haunting acoustic “Thunder Road” opener—from 1975. There were glaring omissions and puzzling edits. That being said, the Live box set was still a fan’s dream come true, finally allowing the audience to take a bit of the action home. It was the Christmas release in 1986.

  After Christmas, though, the set lost all retail momentum, and quickly disappeared.

  Much the same thing was happening to Springsteen’s marriage. It didn’t take long for the Springsteen-Phillips fairytale to turn into drudgery and rancor. What was happening off stage has never been fully explained,13 but fans became aware of discontent in the household with the October 1987 release of Tunnel of Love.

  Tunnel of Love was a departure for Springsteen in many ways. Coming off the bombast of Born in the U.S.A. and the Live box set, it was a quiet album, focused on the perils and problems of love and intimate relationships. And it occupied an uneasy middle ground between a true solo album and an E Street Band project, drawing on the talents of the band members in isolation.

  Rather than a celebration of marriage and domestic bliss, as one might expect from a newlywed, Tunnel of Love was instead a hard-eyed look at the difficulties of romance and the lies and betrayals between and within individuals in intimate relationships. If anyone had bet money on the longevity of Springsteen’s marriage, by the fall of 1987 they were ready to begin counting their losses.

  The upheaval in Springsteen’s personal life echoed upheaval in his professional life. The Tunnel of Love tour was different from any previous E Street Band outing, with many of the traditional warhorses missing in favor of a setlist geared toward songs examining love and relationships, “Born to Run” recast as a mournful, solo acoustic number, and arrangements based on the inclusion of a new horn section, reducing Clemons’s importance to the band’s sound. Most significantly, Clemons was no longer Springsteen’s main onstage foil. That role was now filled by Patti Scialfa, moved up to the front line, within arm’s reach of Springsteen.

  The shows were powerful and dramatic, as one might expect, but the lingering memory of the concerts wasn’t musical, it was personal. The chemistry between Springsteen and Scialfa was palpable: romantic and sexual and clearly electric. When photographs of Springsteen and Scialfa in flagrante in Italy surfaced that summer, it was clear that Springsteen’s marriage was over.

  The news that Springsteen had hitched his star to Scialfa was met with mixed feelings by much of Springsteen’s fan base: no one likes to be confronted with their hero’s feet of clay,14 but the fact is, most of the fandom—especially the female members—had never really taken to Phillips, and the news that Springsteen had now taken up with a fellow musician, and a Jersey girl to boot, was seen as largely positive. It likely helped matters that one of the most compelling rumors concerning the divorce was that Phillips didn’t want to have children, or at least not yet. Recasting Springsteen into the role of would-be family man went some distance to ameliorating, in some people’s minds, the hint of unsavoriness around the whole matter.15

  On the h
eels of the Tunnel of Love tour, Springsteen and the band embarked on a multi-artist tour, called Human Rights Now!, in support of advocacy organization Amnesty International16 and in celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The six-week tour that fall took the band around the world, and included stops in eastern Europe, India, and Africa before finishing in South America. More significantly, it brought Springsteen into close contact with fellow performers Sting, Peter Gabriel, Tracy Chapman, and Youssou N’Dour.

  After the tour ended in late 1988, Bruce Springsteen, for all intents and purposes, disappeared. Springsteen moved from New Jersey to Los Angeles with new girlfriend Scialfa, and, with a few exceptions, was silent for almost four years.

  Those exceptions, those moments of broken silence, were significant, to say the least.

  The first came in the fall of 1989, when it was revealed that Springsteen had fired the members of The E Street Band. Springsteen wanted to try new things musically, and to avoid becoming hidebound in the still-imposing wake of the Born in the U.S.A. experience; the cosmetic changes of the Tunnel of Love tour clearly weren’t enough. “You can get to a place where you start to replay the ritual, and nostalgia creeps in,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1992. “I wanted to get to a spot where if people came to the show, there’d be a feeling of like, well, it’s not going to be this, it’s going to be something else.” He called each band member individually to tell them the news. “Initially some people were surprised, some people were not so surprised. I’m sure some people were angry, and other people weren’t angry. But as time passed, everything came around to a really nice place.”

  That idea, of coming around to a “really nice place” might be seen as a theme to Springsteen’s lost years of the late eighties and early nineties. Although it wasn’t a public matter at the time, Springsteen spent those years deliberately stepping away from the machinery that had grown up around him, off the rock star treadmill, and trying to find peace.

  His first year with Patti was, apparently, one of almost constant darkness and pain as Springsteen attempted to deal with both a lifetime of emotional scars and the systems he had put into place to deal with those injuries. “The best thing I did was I got into therapy,” he recalled in the 1992 Rolling Stone interview. “I crashed into myself and saw a lot of myself as I really was.” The man who had created a mask for himself as a teenager in order to survive had never really left it behind. It wasn’t that he lived to perform; it was that performing was the only place he felt alive, for good and for ill. “I had locked into what was pretty much a hectic obsession, which gave me enormous focus and energy and fire to burn, because it was coming out of pure fear and self-loathing and self-hatred. I’d get on-stage and it was hard for me to stop. That’s why my shows were so long. They weren’t long because I had an idea or a plan that they should be that long. I couldn’t stop until I felt burnt, period. Thoroughly burnt. It’s funny, because the results of the show or the music might have been positive for other people, but there was an element of it that was abusive for me. Basically, it was my drug. And so I started to follow the thread of weaning myself.”

  In this light, Springsteen’s firing of the band and his withdrawal from the music world can be seen not as destructive, but as a positive means of stripping away the edifices he had built around himself. As he said, “now I see that two of the best days of my life were the day I picked up the guitar and the day that I learned how to put it down. Somebody said, ‘Man, how did you play for so long?’ I said: ‘That’s the easy part. It’s stopping that’s hard.’ ”

  After the Amnesty tour, Springsteen put his guitar down. He stopped. By most reports, the first year was one of darkness and self-exploration. The next was one of doting fatherhood—to son Evan James, born in the summer of 1990—and delight in his new relationship. He worked with Scialfa on her own album, but most of his time was spent being a father and being a husband. Looking at his life, and what he has said about it, it’s clear that he spent the time of his seclusion addressing his own issues about identity, love, and family. He stripped away at the mask. He became the father that he never had, and gave his children—Evan, and later Jessica Rae and Sam Ryan—the childhood that he lacked.

  When Springsteen picked up his guitar again, his songwriting and performing reflected these changes and an increased self-awareness.

  The first public indication that something was different came in late 1990. Along with Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne, Springsteen performed two benefit concerts at L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium in support of the Christic Institute, a left-wing think tank. The two solo acoustic shows, during which Springsteen performed on guitar and piano, were a revelation, and a signal of where he was at, personally speaking.

  The setlists for the shows drew deep from Springsteen’s catalogue, and also featured several new songs. Older songs, including “My Father’s House,” “Brilliant Disguise,” “My Hometown,” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” were given a thematic unity by the inclusion of three new songs performed over the two nights.

  The first, “Red Headed Woman,” was a blatantly carnal paean to the pleasures of one particular redhead, who was watching the song’s debut from backstage. It was Springsteen playfully revelling in the joys of the flesh, the simplest, and most intimate, of pleasures. Springsteen as a man, shall we say.17

  The second new song, which premiered the second night, was “The Wish”; it was the first song Springsteen ever wrote about his mother. It’s simple and haunting and beautiful, an account of his mother’s buying him his first guitar, of her working to support the family—but, more, of her maternal goodness in opposition to his father’s darkness: “If pa’s eyes were windows into a world so deadly and true, You couldn’t stop me from looking but you kept me from crawlin’ through.” The song finishes by acknowledging the nature of the gift, this song, and his awareness of how overdue it is:

  Well tonight I’m takin’ requests here in the kitchen

  This one’s for you, ma, let me come right out and say it

  It’s overdue, but baby, if you’re looking for a sad song, well I ain’t

  gonna play it.

  Years later, Springsteen acknowledged, “To sing about your mother, that’s usually reserved for country singers and gangsta rappers.18

  The third new song was a revelation. “Real World”19 is, in a word, stunning, and these performances of the song are among the strongest of Springsteen’s career.20 An account of spiritual and emotional searching, and of eventual love and acceptance, “Real World” has the force of a gospel number while deliberately eschewing the tropes and symbols of such a song: “Ain’t no church bells ringing, ain’t no flags unfurled, It’s just me and you and the love we’re bringing, into the real world.” Over the course of the song, Springsteen dismisses his old self-pity, and the “shrine” he built of “fool’s gold memory and tears cried” before confessing “I wanna find some answers I wanna ask for some help, I’m tired of running scared.” It’s breathtaking, and if you wonder what Springsteen was doing in his “missing years,” it’s all right there, nicely encapsulated in a single song.

  In early 1992, after another year of almost complete silence (and more than four years after Tunnel of Love), it was announced that Springsteen would release two new albums, simultaneously, that spring.

  Human Touch was the result of a lengthy writing and recording process that spanned almost two years (the record included “Real World” and “57 Channels,” both performed at the Christic benefits more than a year earlier), and featured the talents of a variety of hired studio players, as well as former E Streeter Professor Roy Bittan.

  After working on it for more than a year, Springsteen had apparently shelved the album in mid-1991 (as he had done with several other projects), but returned to it shortly thereafter, deciding he needed one more song to round it out before release. “Living Proof,” the song he wrote to fill that slot, didn’t fit, thematicall
y. It felt like a new beginning, and Springsteen treated it as such, writing nine more songs and recording an entire second album, Lucky Town, in less than two months. Springsteen elected to release Human Touch and Lucky Town at the same time, as distinct but complementary halves of an uneasy whole.

  Springsteen’s instincts were spot on: there is a marked difference in tone and theme between the two albums. Human Touch, with songs like the title track and “Real World,” highlights the movement from the fear and the difficulties of relationships explored on Tunnel of Love toward acceptance and trust. It’s a difficult journey, and the album’s final track, a hushed, intimate version of “Pony Boy,” serves as a grace note—a sign that perhaps, just this once, the journey ends in the safety and comfort of a home and family.

  If Human Touch is the journey, Lucky Town is the destination. The record has its roots in “Living Proof,” which begins by chronicling Evan’s birth, but also explores the power of the singer’s own mind to imprison him, and his escape from his own self-imposed bonds to find a family, “a close band of happy thieves.” The album also pokes good-natured fun at Springsteen’s fame, celebrates the singer’s current happiness, acknowledges the risks of trust, and confirms the faith and confidence he has in the relationship. Yet it’s not all hearts and flowers. “Souls of the Departed” is a political anthem rooted in the deaths of soldiers in the Gulf War and a child in Compton.

  It’s useful to consider Human Touch and Lucky Town alongside Tunnel of Love when measuring of Springsteen’s developing inner consciousness. While they are unquestionably the work of the same man, one can see, vividly, the changes worked by and within those five missing years. As Springsteen told Rolling Stone, “Human Touch was definitely something that I struggled to put together . . . At the end, I felt like it was good, but it was about me trying to get to a place. It sort of chronicled the post–Tunnel of Love period . . . I’d spent a lot of time writing about my past, real and imagined, in some fashion. But with Lucky Town, I felt like that’s where I am. This is who I am. This is what I have to say. These are the stories I have to tell. This is what’s important in my life right now.”