Bruce played a few others—“Growin’ Up,” “Mary Queen of Arkansas,” and “If I Was the Priest”—and Hammond’s enthusiasm surged. “I didn’t want Appel to see how impressed I was,” he wrote, recalling how he nodded at the young guitarist and asked him to keep playing. The listening session went on for what Hammond recalled as two full hours. Afterward, Hammond nodded and asked Bruce if he’d be interested in playing a showcase set in a New York club that night, to show how he worked with an audience. Mike and Bruce said that wouldn’t be a problem, so Hammond picked up his phone and booked an early-evening slot at the Gaslight AuGoGo club in Greenwich Village, somewhere in the dead time between Happy Hour and blues singer Charlie Musselwhite’s show set to start at nine o’clock.
Bruce and Appel floated back to the producer’s temporary office on West Fifty-fifth, where Appel, Cretecos, and Spitz worked their phones to spread the news of the evening’s show, hoping to attract as many friends, fans, and sympathizers as possible. Meanwhile, Bruce went to Spitz’s Greenwich Village pad to catch a nap in the living room hammock. When Spitz got home at five o’clock he loaned Bruce his handmade Martin D-35 acoustic and escorted him to the Gaslight, where a small crowd watched the unknown singer-songwriter climb onto the stage and crack a few jokes while he tuned up.
Playing solo on the same stage that helped propel Bob Dylan a decade earlier, he went back to the songs that had lit up Hammond’s eyes that morning—“It’s Hard to Be a Saint” and “If I Was the Priest,” to name a couple—only now invested with the energy and charisma that always flowed through him on the stage. Even without his electric guitar and the forum for the lightning-fingered riffs with which he filigreed his band songs, Bruce’s instrumental skill shone through. After a half hour, Hammond gave Appel the signal. “Get him off,” he said, “and let’s go.”
Standing outside the club, Hammond told Bruce that his life was about to change. “You’re going to be a Columbia recording artist,” Spitz remembers Hammond saying. There would be a few steps between here and there—an audition with Columbia president Clive Davis, for instance—but Hammond promised to guide Bruce through the entire process, employing all of his juice and experience into making sure that the entire company would be aware of who he was and what he could do. They’d take the next step at the CBS building the following afternoon, when Hammond, with Appel serving as coproducer, would record enough demos to fill an acetate demonstration record he could circulate around the company. When Bruce walked into the studio with his guitar around his neck, the session flowed easily. “I just stood up and sang the best songs I had,” Bruce recalled in 1998. “I felt very confident about what I was doing . . . and nervous at the same time.” When Davis returned to the office a day or two later, Hammond appeared at his door holding a freshly cut acetate disc of the audition, laid it on his office turntable, and dropped the needle. Impressed enough to ask Hammond to schedule a face-to-face audition, Davis greeted Bruce warmly a few days later and asked him to take out his guitar.
Davis sat up in his chair before the first song was over. “I thought he was very special,” he says. “I was very impressed with his writing and imagery.” For while he could hear parallels between the young singer-songwriter and Dylan, Columbia’s president was even more excited to hear how Springsteen stood apart from the other songwriter. And as Bruce’s songs visited the gritty scenes from his real and imagined worlds in New Jersey and New York City, Davis felt drawn into a tableau that was as exciting as it was unexplored. “The subjects he was writing about, the poetry that made up his work, was very different from Dylan,” he says. When it was over, Davis told Hammond to sign young Mr. Springsteen to Columbia Records as quickly as possible.
The finished contract arrived at Appel’s office a few days later. Bruce took his copy back to Asbury Park to give it a thorough reading. Unable to parse the legalese on his own, he sat on the floor of his unfurnished apartment with Robin Nash, a friend from the Jersey Shore music circles, reading the vital document by candlelight, because he couldn’t afford to pay his electric bill. “We went through it word by word,” she wrote in a memoir published on a fan page. “I was looking up all of the big words in a dictionary.”
The next day, Bruce called his parents’ home in San Mateo and told his mother the good news. Pam Springsteen, just finishing fifth grade, recalls hearing the exchange from Adele’s perspective. “Mom was saying, ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh . . . really? Really? Well, what are you going to change your name to?’ Silence. Then: ‘You’re not changing your name?’
“My mom was very excited,” Pam says. “And I think my dad was pretty excited too.”
More than that, Bruce’s move into the big time (in Doug’s estimation) prompted the start of a gradual but distinct shift in his conception of the world and its possibilities. “That,” she remembers, “was when he began to say, ‘From now on, I’m never going to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t do with their lives.’”
• • •
Now Bruce had a new set of advisors and helpers, all of them full of their own expectations and rock-solid advice. They didn’t always agree, and it soon became clear that the brawl-ready Appel honed a growing rivalry with the courtly insider who had given them the break he and Bruce had craved so desperately. And not because he and Hammond had different ideas about Bruce’s work and career. Still stung by his experience with Dee Anthony and Sir Lord Baltimore, Appel couldn’t help but be suspicious of anyone who might threaten his own primacy in Bruce’s career.
The contracts that Appel produced for Bruce to sign in the next weeks and months all established Appel and/or Laurel Canyon Ltd. as full partners in the artist’s creative and financial careers. The first set of papers outlined a recording contract that committed Bruce to work exclusively with the production team of Appel and Cretecos. So when the time came to sign with a record label, that deal would be between the record company and Laurel Canyon, in exchange for exclusive rights to Bruce’s recorded music. The next contract made Laurel Canyon and its music publishing branch, Sioux City Ltd., 100 percent owners of the songs Bruce wrote. Which sounds outrageous, particularly for that era in the recording industry. But statutes and industry standards funneled about half of a song’s proceeds back to its writer-performer, which would then divide Bruce’s and Appel’s share to something closer to fifty-fifty. Still, a generous percentage for Appel, who would also retain control over how and where the songs would be reprinted and reperformed.
The management contract, which Bruce stopped short of signing for several months, also entitled Appel to 50 percent of Bruce’s earnings. “I was under the impression that Elvis Presley and Colonel Tom Parker had a fifty-fifty management arrangement,” Appel explained later. When his lawyer, Jules Kurz, noted that Parker’s share of Presley’s career was actually closer to 25 percent, Appel revised the contract to give Bruce the heavier half of a 75-25 split.
Even given his foot-dragging, Bruce signed all of the contracts without even a glance from an independent lawyer. Which seems ridiculous, but from Bruce’s perspective, trusting Appel’s word that these were fair and equitable contracts was a matter of honor. They had already shaken hands, and Mike had been the first to leap, making his commitment in blood by quitting his job, going deeply into debt, and throwing his young family’s security into limbo. All because he believed in Bruce and his music. So as far as Bruce was concerned, he had to extend the same faith to Appel. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t deserve to be treated fairly.
For now they were all in it together: Appel, Bruce, and Cretecos. Brothers united to give Bruce and his music the audience, acclaim, and rewards it, and they, deserved. Everyone had his own job to do and judgments to make, so Bruce didn’t raise an eyebrow when the first wave of record company money fueled Laurel Canyon’s move to its own suite of offices just around the corner on East Fifty-fifth—in the same building that housed Dylan’s eccentric but notoriously effective manager, Albert Grossman. And if Appel wanted to spend a c
hunk of the advance on an office-furniture-shopping jaunt to Macy’s, Bruce had no problem with that either. He also didn’t care (or notice) how much an office suite’s wall-to-wall carpeting, desks, chairs, sofas, and coffee tables might cost. And if his blood-oath manager felt like following Grossman’s bizarro example by installing a King Arthur–style throne in order to peer down at anyone who entered his personal sanctum, well, that just seemed cool.
More than cool. Closer to life-affirming. Because for Bruce, after so many years of playing to the same fans in the same small circuit of New Jersey and Virginia clubs and colleges—rarely trying to break into the more competitive New York market—Appel had swept him up like a showbiz superhero. He kicked down doors. He turned naysayers into fools and made the powerful lick his hand. When Bruce looked at Appel, he saw an alter ego: a relentless fighter with music in his soul and the whole world in his sights. The $35 a week in salary, rent, and money for a new guitar and other occasional indulgences seemed like more than enough. He was on his way.
Now everything Bruce did mattered. Directed to list all the songs he’d written, Cretecos and Spitz spent weeks helping Bruce record professional-caliber demos that they could use to copyright all of his work. Most of these songs were never released in original form, although some (such as “Circus Town” and “Vibes Man”) would lend components to, or evolve into, other completed songs. In the titles alone, Bruce’s fascination for outsized characters and gothic imagery fairly explodes from the page. From “Balboa vs. the Earthslayer” to “Calvin Jones & the 13th Apostle” to “Black Night in Babylon,” the allusions are as explosive as the daring of their author: a twenty-two-year-old already addressing the fundamental riddles of faith, war, God, life, and death.
And as Bruce confronted the darker currents guiding his artistry, the memories and visions felt just as piercing as when they had first abraded his skin. The writing process afforded some comfort—the rush of catharsis and then a sense of mastery over the tumult. But the work was always harrowing, the pleasures fleeting. And still Bruce craved connection, needed the balm of the lights and the energy that flooded from beyond the rim of the stage.
In mid-April Freehold record store owner Victor “Igor” Wasylczenko hired Bruce to play an acoustic set at a concert he was staging at Freehold Township High School, a crosstown rival to the Freehold Regional High School Bruce had attended. Visiting with Wasylczenko a few days before the show, Bruce walked the streets of his old neighborhood for the first time in months. He’d already been gone for three years. A long stretch for such a young man. But back on those same sidewalks, stepping gingerly up Randolph Street, taking a moment to lay a hand on the rough bark of the beech tree that still marked the place of his first childhood home, it was like he’d never left. Like he never would, no matter where he was or how long he stayed away.
Appearing unannounced at the concert (Steel Mill’s regular opening act Sunny Jim had signed on as the headlining act, and he had no intention of stealing their glory), Bruce switched off between guitar and piano, working through an array of new songs, including several destined to become mainstays in his recording and performing career. But the one song that hit the audience the hardest—that left them with mouths hanging open and arms limp at their sides—would never be heard again.
“Bruce started doing this song with mommy-daddy words, like he was singing in a little kid’s voice,” Wasylczenko recalls. The lyrics describe a man and boy walking hand in hand to fish in a lake, but they could just as easily have been on one of Fred Springsteen’s regular hunts for radio parts in the neighborhood trash cans. “You felt this incredible love the boy has for his grandfather, all in his description of this little fishing trip.” The audience nodded along with Bruce’s gently strummed vision right up until the song’s final verse, which follows the boy walking home from school a few days later. “He describes coming to their family home,” Wasylczenko continues. “He’s walking across the porch and being stunned by something he sees in the living room.” When the boy finally reaches his mother, his question serves as the song’s crushing climax.
“He asks, ‘Mommy, why is Grandpa sleeping in a box?’ And it stunned the audience,” Wasylczenko says. “I mean, the room was silent. No one applauded. They were just . . . breathless. Bruce turned away quickly, and I could see tears running down his face. I don’t think he ever played that song again.”
• • •
Bruce played a handful of solo shows that spring and summer, the most prominent of them being a July benefit old friend Howard Grant gave at his three-hundred-seat Cinema III theater in Red Bank to raise money for Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, the liberal senator from South Dakota. The show sold out quickly, with overflow seating in the back and the aisles. And yet, Grant says, Bruce grew visibly impatient during the political speechifying. “He was entirely apolitical,” Grant says. “He didn’t believe that anything would be better or worse at the end of the day because of politicians. But remember who McGovern was running against. And that was a generational thing. Bruce was going to support anyone who was running against Richard Nixon.”
And in the midst of the antihippie hostility in central New Jersey’s small towns, Bruce says, supporting any candidate felt like taking a risk. “I voted,” Bruce says. “For the first time, so I must have been thinking about [presidential politics].” And having some strong feelings about the issues, given what Bruce felt he’d risk by revealing himself to the authorities in Monmouth County. “To get involved in any sort of thing where you had to go in and identify yourself? That was going way beyond anything any of us cared to do. You must have needed some proof of identification, which people rarely carried. And an address, I’d imagine. I was floating probably in most of those days. I mean, in ’72, where was I living?”
The politics that actually did affect Bruce’s life stemmed from the growing conflict between the mentors who saw him as the lone singer-songwriter he had embodied since his first audition with Appel, and the ones drawn to the rock ’n’ roll guitarist and front man he’d been for the vast majority of his career. John Hammond insisted that Bruce perform in the style he had brought to his audition, and Appel obviously shared his vision. But as the recording sessions set for early July edged closer, Bruce couldn’t stop hearing the new songs being played by a band. Certainly, a number of the acoustic songs slated for the album—“The Angel,” “Mary Queen of Arkansas,” and “Visitation at Fort Horn,” to name a few—would find greater resonance in a more intimate solo setting. But “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” needed Manhattan’s electric pulse, just as “Lost in the Flood” required boom and snarl to animate its postmoral wasteland. Cretecos felt the same way, and when the the issue got to Clive Davis’s desk, he sided with Bruce and Cretecos.
To some observers at Columbia Records, Davis’s overruling of Hammond seemed as rooted in the two execs’ low-boiling professional rivalry as in the sound of Bruce’s music. Hammond had certainly given Appel and Bruce the impression that his personal imprimatur guaranteed that Bruce would get a recording contract. That Davis had fallen just as hard for Bruce and signed him immediately implied that Hammond hadn’t overstated his power. But forty years later, Davis takes care to dispel the notion. “John was an A&R man who came up with a lot of ideas,” he says. “Some of [his artists] were signed, some weren’t. But I do know that after John saw Bruce, he had to play his songs to me. John didn’t have the power to sign artists.” Nor to maneuver his new signing to the label’s younger, arguably hipper subsidiary, Epic Records, which Appel recalls as Hammond’s plans for his latest discovery. Appel wasn’t crazy about the idea, and Davis, who stood to lose a promising talent from his own label’s ranks, shot it down instantly. Bruce stayed on Columbia.
Davis’s support of the full band sound allowed Bruce to pick up the telephone and call in the other members of the Bruce Springsteen Band. To Garry Tallent, the message sounded like anything but a herald of future glories. “He
just asked if I could come up and help him record.” Beyond the few days of recording he had on the schedule, Bruce offered no promises, no commitments, and no sense that his latest, rather dramatic revelation—he had been signed to a recording contract by one of the biggest and most highly regarded major labels—might require some clarity or even an explanation to the four musicians who had been playing at his side. Instead the band members realized that Bruce’s new team of managers and label executives saw them as something less than vital to the next stage of his career. “We were like a band of hobos from New Jersey,” Tallent says. “Just Bruce bringing in his pals.”
If bringing along his buddies had truly been Bruce’s highest purpose, it would have been safe to assume that Steven Van Zandt would be there. They’d spent so much of the last seven years working toward this very moment. “I was his best friend, and sort of a consigliere since birth,” Van Zandt says. They’d shared so much music, and worked together so closely for the previous two years, Van Zandt had no doubt the collaboration would continue through Bruce’s debut record and beyond. “I knew what he wanted to hear,” he says. “But I was too close. They couldn’t go straight to him and manipulate him without me being the rock. Or at least that’s what they thought, so Mike Appel decided I was unnecessary.”
The other musicians saw the conflict building from the opening take on the first recording date. “Steve was there for the first session,” Tallent says. “But he had an opinion [about how things should sound], and Mike didn’t want another opinion.” Appel, on the other hand, says he had no role in Van Zandt’s quick ouster. “Bruce decided he wasn’t necessary,” he says. “I think he just decided that having another guitarist at that time was not the right musical mix. And you must remember that Bruce can play guitar pretty damn well too.”
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