Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Given the gleam in his eyes, it was difficult to figure if Clemons intended the story to be a journalistic account of actual events or an allegorical tall tale about his spiritual bond to Bruce. But once again, Bruce confirms the entire story, right down to the strange green glow of the liqueur that nearly capsized both musicians and the buddy sitting with them. “I had only just started drinking, so I was rolling with whatever came my way at the time,” Bruce says. “My take on it at the time was like, ‘I don’t like none of it, so I’ll drink any of it.’ But then we had a run-in with this green Chartreuse.1 Clarence could probably slug the bottle,2 but me and a pal of mine [remembered only as “Jimmy”] got caught in the middle of it. We started to bang some of it back, and my pal made a beeline for the door, heading straight for the curb. I think I broke out in a sweat. It was pretty funny.”

  As Clemons unspooled the facts of his past—growing up in Norfolk County, Virginia, of the 1940s and 1950s with his longshoreman dad and proper, no-back-talk teacher mom—he described his early life as a holy quest: an unconscious, years-long pilgrimage to the one musician powerful enough to accompany him through the gates of transcendence. “I was always searching for something,” Clemons said, describing the gospel choirs he heard on Sunday mornings and the shimmer of the saxophone he unwrapped on his ninth Christmas. Afternoons of gridiron heroics in high school and at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore stadium were meaningful but still, he knew, not a part of his destiny. The outlines of that revealed themselves only during the thousands of hours he spent with his bedroom record player, honking along with sax heroes King Curtis and Boots Randolph. The radiance in the young man’s eyes pushed him even further. Nearly from his first gig with his first neighborhood band, Clemons was the visual focus of every performance. Built larger than life, with a rich voice and magnetism to match, Clemons’s steps shook the stage while his glittering tenor sax connected the histories of rock, R&B, jazz, and gospel music to the promise of next Saturday night.

  Graduating with a sociology degree in 1964, Clemons had a shot at a football career with the Cleveland Browns, but it ended when a freak car accident shattered his knees. Clemons moved to New Jersey and took a job as a counselor for emotionally disturbed kids at the Jamesburg Training School for Boys, where he and his first wife, Jackie, doubled as caretakers, a job that came with an on-campus apartment. Clemons played in bands at night, first in a soul-jazz cover band called the Entertainers, and then in Norman Seldin’s Joyful Noyze, a tight, crowd-pleasing cover band popular enough to be booked months, and sometimes a year, in advance. Hired on the strength of a single sit-in session, Clemons quickly became a frontman for the group. He was also a lightning rod for club owners who couldn’t abide seeing a black face in their establishments. Seldin, to his infinite credit, didn’t care what they thought. “One guy called me a fuckin’ nigger lover,” he recalls. “I said, ‘We’re not playing the gig, then. Go to hell.’” Business picked up soon enough—Clemons’s magnetic presence didn’t hurt—but Clemons kept his horn with him on his off days too. If he drove past a lively looking bar and heard music coming out, he’d stop immediately and head inside, just in case he could get a shot at sitting in with the band. “I call that my searching time,” he said. “The time I spent trying to find Bruce.”

  In the fall of 1972, the object of his search realized that the thrill he’d felt that first night Clemons had stood next to him on the Student Prince stage had not been an illusion. Whatever doubts Bruce might have nursed were vanquished by Clemons’s sax work on “Blinded by the Light” and “Spirit in the Night.” When Bruce and Appel figured that the time had come to book some full-band shows, Bruce made a round of calls to re-form the five-piece Bruce Springsteen Band as his backing group. Lopez and Tallent came aboard happily, and when Sancious begged off to finish his own debut album (and sulk about Bruce having snatched his bass player), Bruce tapped Danny Federici to rejoin as his keyboard player. Then he called Clemons and asked him to join. Clemons didn’t hesitate, although he knew that meant walking out on Norman Seldin, who complained bitterly about being left in the lurch. “I was enraged,” says Seldin. “I said, ‘Clarence, it’s a one-in-ten-million shot!’ And I couldn’t see him fitting; I saw him as part of a Herbie Mann jazz quartet thing. But like it or not, that’s where he was gonna go.”

  Clemons fit so easily into Bruce’s tight-knit crowd that it felt like he’d always been there, maybe because he’d been just beyond the fringe of their scene for so long. Clemons already knew Tallent from the bassist’s days as the lone white face in central New Jersey’s crack rhythm and blues outfit Little Melvin and the Invaders. “Melvin told me, ‘You should meet this white boy! This funky white boy!’” Clemons said, recalling the nights he subbed for the group’s regular sax player.

  “He already knew all the guys at the Danelectro factory,” Tallent says. “And he was Clarence, so we hit it off right away.” Federici, already delighted to be back onstage with his Steel Mill cohorts, soon came to recognize Clemons as a reliable partner in his offstage capers. And whatever crankiness Lopez displayed toward his new bandmate had more to do with having another alpha male moving into his pack. A loyalist to the core, Lopez bit back on his anxiety and accepted Clemons into the musical fraternity he still knew he’d started.

  Bruce greeted the band in a hail of backslaps and promises of a steady $35 weekly salary that he assured them would grow once they started playing more and bigger shows. They were all in it together, just like they’d always been, he said. Still, this would not be a band in the way that Steel Mill, or even the five-piece Bruce Springsteen Band, had been. “I wasn’t interested in being in a band,” Bruce says. “I might be interested in having a band. I loved playing with them . . . but I learned through Steel Mill that the small-unit democracy was dead.”

  The musicians heard the same thing from Appel, who made it as clear as glass that his only real concern was caring for his one and only client, Bruce Springsteen. “It wasn’t Steel Mill anymore, nothing like the band of brothers we used to be,” says Lopez. “We were hired hands. And you always knew, in the back of your mind, that you were expendable.” Bruce didn’t see it in such stark terms. “They were the guys I knew,” he says. “And I wasn’t looking for great players. I was looking for people who understood how to play in an ensemble together, people who were individual enough, that had character and their own kind of color.” These guys had all that, plus years of common history. “I’d had a lot of life experiences with these musicians before we went in the studio; the people who were willing to assist me in grabbing the sound that was in my head.”

  Given something as significant as a new major-label album to stand with, the as-yet-nameless group was excited to convene for three days of rehearsals at a hotel lounge in Point Pleasant. They then drove to West Chester State College in West Chester, Pennsylvania, to fill a brief bottom-of-the-bill slot for comedians Cheech & Chong on October 28. From there they turned back north to headline a Halloween concert that Tinker West produced at the Long Branch Armory. Afforded enough time to play a full set, Bruce performed the first part of the show by himself and then brought out the rest of the group for a more rambunctious slate of tunes. His shows would retain that acoustic-electric structure for most of the next year.

  The next few weeks brought more performances, mostly opening slots at the Kenny’s Castaways club on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But the most memorable show on the late-autumn–early-winter schedule turned out to be the afternoon show Appel had booked them to play on December 7, a special concert for the convicts of Sing Sing prison. For Bruce, the show would be a landmark, since he would be the first member of his family to see the inside of Sing Sing since Anthony Zerilli’s penal journey in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Bruce kept that to himself, although Appel, already pitching the prison show as a hook to music feature writers, would have loved the extra angle. And he could use the help: Appel had blizzarded his pitches to the journalists whose atten
tion would be crucial to Greetings’ success in January. But the only reply came from Peter Knobler and Greg Mitchell, two Bob Dylan–fixated Crawdaddy magazine editors and staffers. The writers got to Appel’s office on the morning of the seventh, chatted a bit about Bruce and his new record, and then piled into Appel’s car to connect with the band’s van and caravan their way to Ossining. “Bruce was scruffy and easy to talk to; just another guy in his sweatshirt, jeans, and boots,” Mitchell says. “They were all so approachable and grateful for our attention.”

  Set up in a prison chapel jammed with hard-eyed offenders, they tuned their instruments with their backs to the crowd and then nodded uneasily as Lopez counted in the first song. They launched into the tune, but somehow the sound seemed to make the convicts more aggrieved than they’d been a few minutes earlier. They concluded the first number to a few pissed-off shouts from the back and then kicked into a second song. “That didn’t go down with the inmates either,” Mitchell says. Minds seizing up with images of the recent riots at the Attica prison across the state, the group’s confusion spun toward low-grade panic. Then Jim Fainer, the soundman who had come up from Tinker West’s shop for the day, stuck an ear out beyond the range of the stage monitors and realized that the group’s PA system wasn’t working. “I’d plugged it in backward,” he admits. The system crackled to life just as Bruce called for Buddy Miles’s acid R&B hit “Them Changes.” Finally able to hear, the prisoners roared happily and pounded their hands to the backbeat. They bellowed their delight when the song ended, and as Bruce and the gang prepared to count in the next tune, “a short, squat, bald black guy with bunched muscles came rumbling down the aisle like the law was still after him. He got past the guard, hit the stage at a gallop, reached into his shirt, and pulled out . . . an alto sax!” (From Mitchell’s and Knobler’s Crawdaddy story.)

  Bruce called for a twelve-bar blues in the key of C. The band members leaped to it, and they all stood back while the mystery sax man blazed away. And it might have been awkward and painful, except, as Mitchell and Knobler recounted, “. . . he was great!” Miracles never cease. And when he jumped back into the arms of the guards, Bruce led the applause and then crowed into the mike, “When this is over, you can all go home!”

  The Crawdaddy writers stuck with the band for its show at Kenny’s Castaways that night. “I didn’t get any sense of what kind of writer he was or if he was good,” Mitchell says. “But I liked him and the band, and we were impressed enough, just based on their vibe, to drop everything and go see the gig.” They joined an audience of about thirty restive clubgoers, most of them too engaged with their drinks and friends to glance at the source of the music coming from the small stage across the room.

  The group played another three nights at the club, then took off almost three weeks before heading west to Ohio to play bottom-of-the-bill support for the retro-1950s comedy/nostalgia band Sha Na Na’s shows in Dayton (where the promoters believed they had booked someone named Rick Springsteen)3 and Columbus. Then they motored back to the Jersey Shore to wait the five days before the official release of Bruce Springsteen’s debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. on January 5, 1973.

  • • •

  “Madman drummer bummers, and Indians in the summer, with a teenaged diplomat / In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat.”

  That’s Clive Davis talking. Sitting at his desk. Gazing squarely into the dark eye of the video camera recording his performance for eventual replay in the offices of radio programmers, regional distributors, and record store owners all across the United States of America. “I wanted to make very sure that people got the uniqueness of his lyrics,” says Davis. Indeed, they sounded remarkably distinctive coming from the mouth of a forty-year-old record company president dressed in shirtsleeves and a tie. “I wouldn’t say it was Broadway caliber,” says then marketing chief Al Teller. But the fact that Davis had taken that much time and effort to let the music industry know exactly how much belief he had in this particular artist was a significant card to throw down. “Clive’s presence had massive gravitas,” Teller says. “And every office got handwritten notes [about Bruce] from him. He was deeply involved in every aspect” of the record’s release and promotion.

  But in a company built on personal taste and individual loyalties, the label president’s say-so went only so far. Particularly when it came to a scruffy, unknown quantity whose songs bore no audible relationship to anything else on the hit parade. “I wouldn’t say there was overwhelming enthusiasm for Greetings,” says Ron McCarrell, then the twenty-two-year-old manager of Columbia’s college publicity program. McCarrell didn’t need to hear a Springsteen pep talk, since he had already seen one of the shows at Kenny’s Castaways. That performance, with its acoustic and electric set list, struck McCarrell as disjointed; the work of an artist “still trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t.” So why did it grab him by the lapels and pin him to the back of his chair? McCarrell shakes his head. “Something special . . . he hadn’t found it yet, and neither had we. But it was there.” And like John Hammond, Clive Davis, and the small but growing cult of believers inside Columbia’s offices in CBS’s Black Rock building on Sixth Avenue, he was determined to do whatever it took to make Bruce Springsteen a star. Paul Rappaport says, “I remember jumping up and down on a sofa begging for money for live broadcasts, yelling, ‘We’re on the verge of rock ’n’ roll history!’ It was definitely like a brotherhood. Everyone was on the same mission.”

  As per Davis’s orders, the regional sales reps made the rounds of radio stations and record stores, playing Davis’s video reel on their suitcase-sized Fairchild video machines, papering the place with promotional displays and sales posters. Radio ads started playing on major-market FM radio stations just after the new year: “Bruce Springsteen packs more images into one song than most artists do on their entire albums!” When the albums finally emerged from their boxes on the morning of January 5, the public anticipation had built to—well, not very much. But excitement grew markedly in the Springsteen homelands of Richmond, Asbury Park, and especially Freehold, where Victor Wasylczenko transformed his record shop’s windows, display shelves, and nearly all of its wall space into a gallery of Greetings album covers, posters, and promotional photos. “It looked like all I was selling was Bruce,” he says. “My mission was to get everyone who came into the store to buy the record.” It wasn’t nearly as effective as the record store owner had hoped. “I sold more Partridge Family albums than I did of Bruce that first day. I had record-breaking numbers on the Partridges, in Bruce’s hometown, the day his first record came out.”

  And maybe it wasn’t surprising. The Partridge Family Notebook came with the throw weight of a still-popular weekly network series—whereas Greetings sounded as squirrelly as the bearded character framed by the postage stamp borders on the back cover looked. Casual observers could feel safe assuming that they had stumbled upon another sad-eyed troubadour chasing after Dylan’s pixie-dusted boot heels.

  Those who dropped the needle on Greetings found themselves confronting something else: a collection of twisty, wordy tunes whose individual styles, sounds, and production values were linked by a voice that sounded as weathered by life as it was eager to dance circles around it.

  Kicking off with a double-quick journey down the guitar neck, “Blinded by the Light” careens into a whirlwind of tinkling guitars, bass zooms, and light-handed drum fills, all colliding with a braying sax before falling in line for the first verse, in which Bruce uncorks the hurricane of memories, observations, and fantasies that form the first of what he later called a series of “twisted autobiographies.” And it’s all here. The unruly drummers, Little League games, horny teenage boys, speeding hot rods, crumbling amusement parks, ill-intentioned local authorities, and the corn dogs sweating grease on the weather-beaten boardwalks. Only in this vision, the action plays out in an otherworldly glow: they’re all racing to get somewhere else, all on the h
unt for something bigger, if only a glimpse into the heart of the infinite whatever.

  The discursive storytelling picks up again in the high school outcast memoir “Growin’ Up,” then pivots to the present in the urban fantasia of “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?” Here the New Jersey rube marvels at the Technicolor swirl of advertisements, strip club signs, and the many-hued throngs churning on the sidewalk until he glimpses something as fleeting as it is beautiful: a woman tosses a flower, a man snatches it from the air, and their connection sweeps the music and everything else aside.

  The pair of acoustic songs, “Mary Queen of Arkansas” and “The Angel,” have their striking images, and, in “The Angel” ’s case, a shimmering piano and acoustic bass (played by session pro Richard Davis) to set the mood. But viewed in retrospect, both songs are most interesting for the clues they offer about Bruce’s budding authorial vision. In “The Angel,” it’s the allure of the open road and the danger that lurks in its shadows; while “Mary” traces the vision at the core of the still-undreamed “Born to Run”: the perpetual yearning for somewhere else. “But I know a place where we can go, Mary,” the song concludes, “where I can get a good job and start all over again clean.”

  Darkness looms. It’s all over the spiritually apocalyptic war ballad “Lost in the Flood” and rumbling like the D train beneath every line of “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City.” And its sweet, ruined aroma perfumes “For You,” the stunned lover’s ambivalent farewell to a luminous but emotionally damaged girlfriend who may have just fulfilled her own suicidal ambitions.

  “For You” is a killer—perhaps the killer—track on the album. Or it would be if it wasn’t followed by “Spirit in the Night,” the storybook retelling of that road trip to Greasy Lake. Here the midnight love story plays out à la A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the action is sanctified by the magical spirits spinning through the branches. Bruce had felt the magic in the air that night. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that “Spirit” ’s musical presence is defined by Clemons’s saxophone. You can glimpse his own magically realistic form in the scene too and hear the echoes of the heavens-wracking storm that, in his telling, heralded his arrival into his musical brother’s arms. Which makes it all the more frustrating to consider how absent the band feels on Greetings, even when the musicians are a central part of the songs’ arrangements.