Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Just like Adele Springsteen did for her son, Marie Appel nurtured Mike’s artistic side. Once a singer and performer herself, she recognized and encouraged her oldest child’s interest in music. When Michael first talked about playing the guitar, she bought him an acoustic and signed him up for lessons. When he tuned into New York City’s Top 40 stations she bought him 45s by Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Carl Perkins. When his love for rock ’n’ roll grew into overwhelming desire to make music for himself, she bought him an electric Silvertone guitar and amplifier, propelling her son into the work that would eventually define his life.

  Appel’s mother gave him the tools and encouragement, but when he got into a band and dug into the high school circuit around western Long Island, his father’s hard-driving ambition took over. Perpetually striving, Appel put bands together, wrote their songs, and ran rehearsals with strict discipline. He also cultivated the professional connections that would gain his band a foothold in the music industry. He took his first group, the Humbugs, to record demos in a New York studio, and the outfit won a contract to one of 20th Century Fox’s smaller rock ’n’ roll labels. A couple of the group’s instrumentals made the regional sales charts. Meanwhile, Appel earned a business degree at St. John’s University, and when the army came calling, he sidestepped the draft by joining a reserve unit in the marines, which allowed him to avoid all but six months of boot camp and training before depositing him back in civilian life, save for a few years of monthly service on weekends. Still, the hard-ass marines training fed into Appel’s already-growing reputation for being a taskmaster. “He was a real marine,” Stephen Appel says. Indeed, Appel held on to a drill sergeant’s hat he got at Parris Island, South Carolina, and perched it on his head when he went into ass-kicking mode.

  Appel took over the roles of lead guitar, lead singer, and songwriter in a proto-hippie group called the Balloon Farm, writing one early psychedelic single, “A Question of Temperature,” that rode its wild fuzz guitar and out-of-control lyrics (e.g., the “heat wave hurricane whirling in my head” that leaves Appel’s narrator with a “cool disposition hangin’ on a thread”) into the Top 40 in 1968. Appel signed a songwriter deal with a production house and eventually encountered Jimmy Cretecos, a young songwriter who had just written a top 20 single, Robin McNamara’s “Lay a Little Lovin’ on Me,” with the Brill Building icon Jeff Barry. Appel and Cretecos hit it off, and when Appel scored a staff songwriting job from Wes Farrell—already on his way to providing the songs and music production for the imaginary band portrayed in ABC’s sitcom The Partridge Family—he asked to bring in Cretecos as his cowriter. Farrell offered both $250 weekly salaries, and their partnership began.

  Tasked with writing snappy pop songs for AM radio, Appel and Cretecos were productive but also eager to land their own groups and take responsibility for their success. Given more subterranean tastes than their employer, the pair signed a production deal with an early heavy-metal band called Sir Lord Baltimore. Excited by the band’s prospects, Appel brought in the chummy Australian Dee Anthony to serve as the group’s manager. Anthony shared Appel’s enthusiasm, and was so grateful to be given the opportunity to work with the group that he convinced the musicians to ditch their producers and let him steer them to glory. Both furious and impressed (the balls on that guy!), Appel and Cretecos tried again with a country-rock outfit called Montana Flintlock, but the band failed to get any traction at all, and that was that. Except for the connection that Appel had established with the group’s soundman, the guy everyone called Tinker.

  Now that he had Bruce Springsteen in his life, Appel threw everything else away. His job, his health benefits, the financial security he’d built for his wife, Jo Anne, and their two small children, James and Germaine. “Mike had total devotion for Bruce Springsteen,” says Peter Philbin, a writer turned publicist who would soon become an evangelist for the cause at Columbia Records. “I’ve never seen a manager as dedicated as Mike. He had complete belief in him. And he should be saluted for that.”

  Bruce still does. “Mike was for real,” he says. “He loved music. His heart was in it, and everything else. That’s part of what attracted me to him, because it was all or nothing. I needed somebody else who was a little crazy in the eyes because that was my approach to it all. It was not business. If business had to be a part of it, then it had to be a part of it. But it wasn’t a business. It was an idea and an opportunity, and Mike understood that part of it very, very well. And that was important to me.”

  • • •

  Back on the Jersey Shore, Bruce called his friend Howard Grant and arranged for another night at the movies. He’d met Grant back in the late Castiles–early Earth era, when they both hung out around the same Jersey Shore coffeehouses. Grant’s family owned a few movie theaters around the shore, and when they bought the Cinema III in Red Bank, Howard managed the place. Soon his movie buff friend Bruce became a regular visitor—usually two or three nights a week, says Grant, who let the always underfinanced musician gorge on movies until the late show curtain fell. After Grant locked the doors, they swept up the scattered popcorn and candy wrappers and then rolled out a twenty-seven-inch television that Grant’s father had hooked to an early-model VCR. Grant would turn off the lights, slap in one of the rock ’n’ roll videotapes he had found, and the real focus of the evening began.

  They’d been doing the same thing on and off since 1968. “We’d watch anything we could get: Elvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, James Brown, and more,” Grant says. “And he’d want to watch the same things over and over. Studying James Brown’s dance moves, getting up, and doing it for himself.” Bruce fixated just as much on the idols’ personae—the way they spoke, moved, and behaved when they weren’t onstage. “Bruce would be asking, ‘What’s it like to be Rod Stewart or Mick Jagger?’ You could see he was already considering it as something that could—that definitely would—happen to him. He knew he could get there.”

  Desperate to become a successful musician, Bruce felt much less bedazzled by the prospect of fame and wealth. “It’s like they don’t have any friends,” he said, watching footage of some rock ’n’ roll superstars descending airplane stairs, interacting with the press, and then slipping into limousines, vanishing into a haze of polished chrome, glitter, and cigarette smoke. “Don’t ever let me get like those guys. And if I ever do get like that—not remembering who my friends are—you gotta come right up onstage and smack me around.”

  To this end, Bruce devised a plan straight out of the Dr. Zoom playbook: if Grant ever caught him acting like a superstar onstage, he wanted his friend to climb onstage with another pal, perch next to his microphone stand, and start playing chess. “Then I’ll figure it out, that I’m forgetting where I came from,” he told Grant.

  What struck Grant, beyond his friend’s commitment to retaining his humility, was Bruce’s confidence about where he was headed. “He already knew he was going to become one of those guys. His sights were that high. And good for him.”

  EIGHT

  NOW I WANNA SEE IF YOU’VE GOT ANY EARS

  BRUCE KEPT THE NEWS TO himself.

  His meetings with Appel. The management contract he’d agreed to sign. The fact that his new career as a solo artist would soon torpedo the Bruce Springsteen Band his friends and partners had built their lives around. “I kept my own counsel, you know. That was just my nature,” he says. Steve Van Zandt, for one, wasn’t hurt or even all that surprised by his best friend’s secrecy. “Bruce isn’t exactly a blabbermouth,” he says. And how deep did anyone’s loyalty to the band run? Given the lukewarm reception they’d received and the grim succession of lightly attended bar shows they’d settled for in recent months, the enthusiasm had drained from the BSB. Virtually everyone had a day job and at least one other regular gig by the spring of 1972.

  Still, they had a few gigs on the books, including a pair of high school shows that brought the Richmond-based members back to New Jersey in mid-March, right about th
e time that Tinker West put the final touches on the recording studio he’d built in the second-floor loft of the new Challenger factory. To help West work out the kinks in the setup, they put their gear on the studio floor and played some of their newer songs while Tinker ran tape, checked the balances, and twiddled his knobs and dials.

  The tape captures a half dozen songs from the band’s current set: four new Springsteen originals, a dirge-like cover of Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” and a spirited take on the Jimmy Jones R&B rarity “I’ve Got to Have You, Baby.” The most striking tunes are Bruce’s new compositions. There’s the frontier rocker, “Ballad of Jesse James,” also known as “Don’t You Want to Be an Outlaw,” and the slower, piano-led “Look Toward the Land,” while the nearly seventeen-minute “When You Dance” reveals the band’s proficiency as an Allmans/Grateful Dead–style jam band. The instrumental “Funk Song,” featuring bassist Garry Tallent (known variously as “Funk” or “Funky” or “Funky White Boy”) growling “Right on!” at crucial points, showed the group’s prowess in high-energy R&B workouts.

  The between-song chatter revolves largely around mike levels and feedback but with a good amount of goofing and teasing. Both Bruce and Lopez address Tinker as “Stinky.” Van Zandt sticks it to Bruce for his obsessive tinkering with his guitar strings: “Brucie gets in tune, take thirty-three!” And Bruce reminds his band that in a studio setting, a song is “a groove when ya move, but a take when ya shake!” When a microphone lets loose a shriek of feedback, he goes on a giggly, hipster rant denouncing electronics altogether. “I mean, what’s dis electronic stuff, my boys play acoustic! My boys don’t dig that electronic gadgetry . . . I mean, my boys play da roots. And they don’t give two hoots.”

  The Bruce Springsteen Band played one last Richmond show on March 17, with a college gig in Hampden-Sydney, Virginia, the next day. A month passed before the band played the Rutgers College student union in mid-April. After that, the members went their separate ways until late June, when they performed at a private party held in a warehouse in Point Pleasant, New Jersey. Then the calendar went white. “All of the sudden there was nothing going on,” Tallent says. “I’d pretty much given up on the whole thing.”

  With their group back in limbo, the five musicians drifted apart for the summer. Lopez stayed on the Jersey Shore, working at a Point Pleasant boatyard. Van Zandt, Garry Tallent, and David Sancious returned to the lives they were building in Richmond. Van Zandt formed a country-blues duo with John Lyon called Southside Johnny and the Kid and caught other club gigs where he could. Sancious worked at the just-opened Alpha Recording Corp. studio, while the freshly married Tallent took a job at a Richmond music store and contemplated opening his own music shop across town. Meanwhile, Sancious had been writing jazz-fusion tunes, and when Alpha had an empty studio to work in, he tapped Tallent and a jazz-and-rock drummer named Ernest “Boom” Carter to form a trio for the sessions.

  In New York, and particularly in the Midtown offices of Columbia Records and the just-founded Laurel Canyon Ltd., the wheels of passion, hubris, and industry spun toward a series of events that would eventually seem so significant that virtually everyone involved would come to remember it in his or her own unique fashion. Particularly when the time came to divide the credit, the blame, and the subpoenas. All this for the underfed, undereducated guitar player standing at the Asbury Park bus stop, anxiously awaiting the bus that would carry him back to Manhattan.

  • • •

  While Bruce laid low on the Jersey Shore, Mike Appel, Jimmy Cretecos, and Bob Spitz worked their contacts in search of a friend or colleague who might help them unlock a record company’s doors. They dialed. They charmed. They asked, asked again, and then implored. “You’ve never heard anything like him,” Appel promised time and again. “And if you’re too deaf to even give him a listen, that’s gonna be your problem.” Snake eyes.

  Weeks went by. Pitch after pitch ignored or flat-out rejected. Unbowed, Appel opted for a more daring strategy. If the grinds in the small offices couldn’t be bothered to even listen to Bruce, then he’d call Columbia Records president Clive Davis directly. Told that Davis was out of town, Appel scanned his memory for a Columbia executive—any executive—who might have the authority to hold an audition. Only one name flashed into his mind.

  “All right, lemme talk to John Hammond.”

  The man who had brought Bob Dylan to Columbia in 1961. After he’d found, cultivated, and signed Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, and Pete Seeger to exclusive contracts. Recognized roundly as one of the true visionaries in the history of the American music industry, Hammond’s reputation was not to be taken lightly or approached with anything beyond complete respect and deference. Most people thought so, anyway. So when Hammond’s secretary, Mickey Harris, picked up the line and heard Appel request a personal audition for his unknown singer-songwriter, she shot him down instantly. Mr. Hammond simply didn’t have the time, she explained. Just send in a demo tape, and she’d let her boss know it was waiting for his perusal. So thanks again for calling, and Mr. Hammond will be in touch if he’s interested, so . . .

  Appel kept talking, only now in a sharper tone. Wasn’t Columbia the label that was so committed to signing the most talented musicians and building them long-term, even decades-long, careers? Because if that was true, she was making a mistake—a huge mistake—in keeping her boss away from Bruce Springsteen.

  “I’m just trying to figure out if anyone there has a clue about music,” Appel barked into the receiver. Meanwhile, Cretecos and Spitz, listening from just a few feet away, felt their eyes widening with rapidly growing alarm. “We were waving our hands and hissing at him, ‘Don’t do this, man! Don’t fucking do this!’” Spitz says. But Appel’s righteous fury had flown into overdrive, and no man, let alone a record company receptionist, was powerful enough to hold him back. Harris sputtered something else, but Appel’s fusillade had the secretary so flustered and/or aggravated that she had lost the will to argue with him. When Appel hung up, he turned to his aghast compatriots and smiled. “I got Hammond,” he said.

  Cretecos and Spitz gaped at each other. Finally, Cretecos spoke. “Did you book an actual appointment?” Appel waved off the question. “They’re gonna call back in ten minutes.” Now Cretecos and Spitz were even more incredulous than they’d been a moment earlier. “We thought, ‘No way!’ No way in hell is anyone calling back in ten minutes.” And yet the telephone rang almost exactly ten minutes later. Appel snatched the receiver and started scribbling in his date book. “It was Mickey in Hammond’s office,” Spitz says. “Mike had his audition.”

  When Hammond got back to work a week or two later, he glanced at his calendar for May 2 and drew a blank. Mike Appel? Who was this Mike Appel they had coming in at eleven o’clock? Just some manager who wouldn’t take no for an answer, Harris explained. Other record executives might have been outraged. Their time is valuable, they have no intention of wasting it with some pushy manager and his completely unknown kid-with-guitar. Hammond, by contrast, was intrigued. As he’d learned decades earlier, the pursuit of interesting, and occasionally great, artists required a sharp eye for clues that might have nothing to do with music. The way Mickey described him, this Appel fellow seemed bonkers. But maybe something truly extraordinary had pushed him there. “Sometimes,” Hammond wrote later, “that’s just the way it is.”

  Born into the social and economic privilege reserved for descendants of the Vanderbilt family, the prep-school-and-Yale-educated Hammond re-created himself as a stalwart advocate of civil rights and every other form of populism. A rail-thin, tremulous fellow—the toll of a childhood bout with scarlet fever that had weakened his heart—Hammond had been a jazz obsessive since the 1920s when he scaled the walls of the exclusive Hotchkiss School to take a commuter train to Harlem’s jazz and blues clubs. His fixation led to an early career as a music critic, which ultimately landed him his dream job as a talent scout and artists-and-repertoire ex
ecutive, the artists’ in-house advocate, advisor, and controller, for Columbia Records.

  Unfailingly polite, particularly to musicians and their ilk, Hammond still spoke his mind when he smelled mediocrity or cynicism. “I’d sit next to him [at company meetings], and when they played a record he didn’t like, he’d whisper to me, loudly, ‘What a piece of fuckin’ shit that is!’” says then junior executive (later Columbia president) Al Teller. “But he was truly democratic, a music junkie, and he’d listen to anything that was presented to him.” And if what he heard appealed to him, Hammond wouldn’t hesitate to take it on as his next crusade.

  But he still hadn’t quite encountered a force as relentless as Appel, who led his client into Hammond’s cluttered realm at precisely eleven o’clock on the chosen day. They all shook hands, and Hammond gestured to the album-stacked chairs in his office. When they were seated, Appel launched into his blistering sales spiel. “So you’re the man who is supposed to have discovered Bob Dylan,” he said by way of hello. “Now, I wanna see if you’ve got any ears, ’cause I’ve got somebody better than Dylan.”

  “This,” Hammond wrote in his 1977 autobiography, “was rather more belligerent than the situation seemed to call for.” Bruce, while thoroughly aghast, could only listen. “I went into a state of shock,” he told writer, biographer, and friend Dave Marsh a few years later. “I’m shrivelin’ up and thinkin’, ‘Mike, please give me a break. Let me play a damn song!’” When Appel paused for a breath, Hammond shot back. “I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, but you’re succeeding in making me dislike you,” he said. Then he turned to Bruce and asked him to play a song. Bruce snatched his guitar and launched into the opening bars of “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City.” Instantly, Hammond took note of the young man’s powerful way with a guitar. Then he tuned into the lyrics. “I heard immediately that he was a born poet,” he wrote. “I kept a lid on my excitement.”