Swept up in the music and the prospect of becoming a part of such a talented musician’s blossoming scene, Philbin quit his job at the Free Press, packed up his stuff, and moved to New York. “I wanted to see more of what this guy was about,” he says. “And once he lets you in, you’re in.” Philbin found a job with CBS Records’ international publicity offices, where he soon became one of Bruce’s most impassioned advocates in the company. A lucky break for Bruce, since he would soon need all the friends he could get.
• • •
Back on their home turf in mid-March, Bruce and company got back to the nightclub and college circuit, bouncing from the seven-night headline gig at Oliver’s in Boston to a variety of opening slots with the touring bands of the day. Sha Na Na here, Lou Reed there, then Stevie Wonder, then the Beach Boys. Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Connecticut, and then the occasional headline show at the Main Point and so on. The grind was relentless, the road ahead endless, so you had to be a believer. Not just in Bruce’s abilities, although that was obviously the point of entry. But more importantly, in the core beliefs that propelled him forward: that no matter how corrupt the world may seem, certain things remained pure; that these things deserved to be respected; and that rock ’n’ roll was the most important of these things. “There was no separation,” Tallent says. “We traveled together, we lived together; it was still kind of like all for one and one for all.”
The road, and the sacrifices that life required, drew them close enough to recognize, and see into, one another’s flaws and foibles. And make no mistake, the band didn’t just look like long-haired, largely unshaven eccentrics. They acted like it too. Consider the seraphim-cheeked Federici, with his endless schemes and Danny-centric perspective on personal responsibility. Tallent kept his thoughts to himself until something tripped his scarily detailed memory for virtually all historical facts regarding pop, rock, soul, and country music of the past seventy-five years. Meanwhile, Lopez’s volcanic approach to problem resolution only intensified with the pressure, exhaustion, and poverty of touring. The drummer never shied away from meting out two-fisted justice, and his reputation as a rough-and-ready brawler only got worse, Lopez says, when Bruce started calling him “Mad Dog” on stage. As he says, Lopez wouldn’t back down for anyone. Including Clemons, who figured that he had become Bruce’s go-to protector and foil, and bitterly resented anyone who threatened his sense of being the first among equals in this musical enterprise. If they managed to keep it relatively cool for the time being, the air between the big men crackled.
Bruce’s own conflicts generally played out in the confines of his own thoughts. Already torn between his loyalty to his bandmates and his own creative independence, he also had to consider his commitment to the machine that had sprouted around him. If he could keep all that out of his mind, then came the visions, memories, and haunted spirits that played across his mind’s eye; the internal disturbance that had compelled him to cling to his guitar in the first place. So everyone else in the band knew to give the guy some breathing room. Until he went out to buy himself something for dinner. Because that absolutely, positively, required a physical intervention.
“Bruce was still eating like a teenager, buying all his food at the convenience store,” Albee Tellone says. “His idea of a meal was Ring Dings, Devil Dogs, and a Pepsi. We’d finally have to say, ‘Man, put that shit down. You need to have real food: A steak! Some fish! A salad!’” If Bruce put up an argument, they’d simply hijack him, with Clemons grabbing one elbow, Big Danny Gallagher gripping the other, and Tellone leading the way to a restaurant with real, human sustenance on the menu.
Appel, in his guise as stern but loving authority figure, wielded his power with such whip-cracking exuberance that he seemed determined to aggravate everyone he encountered. So while the manager spent most of his time in New York, agitating for publicity, gigs, and the greater good of Bruce Springsteen, his jaunts with the band were always memorable. Something about that drill sergeant’s hat put an extra edge in his rounds of the facility, barking orders and raining intimidation on everyone who stumbled into his path. “He just went into character with that hat,” Tallent says. “Marching around like a little Hitler. I may have called him that, even.” But Appel was also a charming, charismatic guy with a consuming devotion to his client. “It’s all true,” Tallent says. “And it was classic music biz stuff because he really believed in Bruce. He took out a second mortgage to keep the band on the road, all those things. So I don’t care what anyone says about Mike. He made it work.”
• • •
When Bruce felt uncomfortable playing at a certain venue or for a particular audience, he couldn’t resist the urge to follow his most subversive impulses. At one executive-packed show in New York City, he spent his entire set playing slide guitar with his microphone stand riding the strings. The squeal ricocheting around the room sounded more like a wounded cat than the eloquent solos he could play with two hands. “I brought about ten executives with me that night, and it was so awful he cleared the room,” Peter Philbin says. Flown to Los Angeles to play one of the A Week to Remember shows that Clive Davis produced to celebrate Columbia Records’ most important artists, Bruce started strong with a tight, bluesy “Spirit in the Night.” But given a muted reaction from the industry-heavy crowd, the famously electric performer became so subdued onstage that Davis cornered him later to give him the most basic of pointers: “You might want to consider using the vastness of the stage,” he said. “Because . . . you’re just standing there.”
Bruce never liked playing for people whose enthusiasms could be traced to the bottom line of their paychecks. That his own thirst for success had steered him to the point of performing at CBS’s annual sales convention in San Francisco curdled the artist’s blood. Hustled onstage in the smoky wake of the fireworks-and-lasers spectacle put on by the Edgar Winter Group, Bruce came out seething. Given a fifteen-minute limit for his set, he played more than a half hour, ending with the mini-epic “Thundercrack,” made even longer by a comic rap in the middle and a series of meandering solos that would have tried the patience of his most dedicated fans. Such as John Hammond, who glowed with frustration when he confronted his wayward artist backstage. “What are you doing, Bruce?” he cried. “You can’t follow bombast with something like that!” Bruce shrugged and left it at that.
It had less to do with Hammond than with the mix of ambition, appetite, and self-control roiling in Bruce’s stomach. What part of himself would he have to give up to be successful? And how would he feel later if the virtues he grasped so stubbornly turned out to be nothing more than animations of his own fears? “When you’re young and vulnerable, you listen to people whose ideas and direction may not be what you want,” Bruce told writer Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times a few years later. “If anyone ever told me I was going to make [my first] record [almost entirely] without guitars, I would have flipped out. I would not have believed him. But I did make an album like that.” And now the only thing worse than failing his new patrons was realizing he had surrendered so much of himself to become what they wanted him to be.
In the spring of 1973, Appel called Bruce with big news: Columbia’s smash pop/jazz group Chicago (for whom the Bruce Springsteen Band had opened in 1971 when they were still known as the Chicago Transit Authority) had offered them a slot as the featured opener on their summer tour of basketball arenas. Riding its first number one album and a three-year string of hit singles, Chicago stood solidly at the height of its career. And once the group’s manager-producer Jim Guercio saw Bruce play Max’s Kansas City during the summer of 1972, he had been eager to help however he could. “I thought he was fucking great,” Guercio says. When the time came to plan his group’s next national tour, Guercio made sure that Bruce got a shot at the opening slot. “I thought they’d all get along,” Guercio says.
Even if the pay ($1,000 a night) took them a step down from the $1,500 they’d been averaging since mid-February—and the
y were rarely invited to ride on the headliners’ private jet—Bruce and the band did share the higher grade of hotels, food, and drink accorded to chart-topping bands in the early seventies. “And the best part was the guys in the other band,” Bruce said in 1974. “They were great guys, just really, really real.” Hanging out together at night, the bands’ parties took place to the sound of Chicago bassist-singer Peter Cetera playing Polish music on Federici’s accordion. On one particularly rowdy night in Hartford, Connecticut, a group of Chicago guys took Lopez and one or two other band members on a trek to find some friendly women that the Chicago guys knew from a previous visit to the city. The whole mob, plus Bruce and the rest of his guys, spent the rest of the night having a giggly, wee-hours party in the hotel pool.
The shows themselves weren’t always as convivial. Given the constraints of union rules and the crowd’s patience, Bruce had to boil his usual ninety-minute set down to a tight forty, with no time for encores. Bruce started the tour with full access to Chicago’s sound and video systems, but after a night or two, Chicago’s crew reined in the volume. They switched off the video screens a night or two after that, reducing the impact of Bruce’s performance to a dull ripple off in the distance. “I did that tour because I’d never played big places before,” he told writer Paul Williams in 1974. But the nightly displays of audience lassitude rattled Bruce’s confidence. “I went insane during that tour,” he said. “The worst state of mind I’ve ever been in, I think, and just because of the playing conditions for our band.”
Demoralized and angry, Bruce cornered Appel and told him he would never again play an extra in some other band’s superstar tour. “From now on, we’re a club act, and we’ll work our way up from there.” As Peter Philbin says, Bruce’s stand was both gutsy and foolish. “Chicago was as big as they came,” he says. “When a new act that isn’t in favor with anyone just walks off their tour—well, that doesn’t go down well with the label. And Bruce had a number of those incidents.”
Worse, he had just lost his most important supporter at the company. Despite the golden reputation that Clive Davis enjoyed in the rest of the music industry, the years of internecine struggle with former president Goddard Lieberson, among others on the Columbia/CBS executive floors, caught up with him in the final days of May 1973, when Davis got fired amid allegations that he had misused company money to pay for his son’s bar mitzvah. A lot of accusations, most involving crimes much more sinister than the cost of a boy’s bar mitzvah reception, had torn through CBS offices that spring. But for Bruce, the threat was more simple. Without Davis backing him up in the top office, his position at Columbia had started to crumble.
• • •
When they had a long drive to the next gig, Bruce liked to ride with Albee Tellone in the equipment van. Perched on the passenger seat, he had the space to open his notebook and let his imagination wander through the world that flashed past the windshield.
Everywhere, fragments of stories jumped out from the storefronts, the street signs, and the faces walking the sidewalk, chatting on the corner, and carrying a wading pool out of a small town Woolworth’s. When they passed a roadside strip club announcing the return of a popular dancer, Bruce wrote “Kitty’s Back” on the page, building a door to an urban noir of dealers, schemers, and faithless, irresistible women.
Eyes open wide mile after mile, Bruce traced a vision of modern American life as viewed by the perpetual passerby. All of it reminded him of his own life. “We spent hours talking about everything,” Tellone says. “My ex-wife, his ex-girlfriends, music, and songwriting.” When he focused on the words he’d scratched onto the page, Bruce often collided with the disengaged student he had been in high school. “He needed the basics,” Tellone recalls. “He was catching up, he had his thesaurus and rhyming dictionary with him, and he’d find words and ask if they worked in this or that context.”
Bruce didn’t read a lot of books, so he used movies as tutorials on narrative writing, dramatic pacing, and the significance of the characters’ voices and relationships. He looked to the directors’ visual imagery to see how one well-shot scene could reveal ideas and themes that the dialogue could never carry. Bruce found a rich conceptual vein in a 1959 Audie Murphy Western about a pair of frontier teenagers whose first journey to the big city nearly corrupts them both. Glimpsing himself in their story, Bruce wrote the film’s title into his book: The Wild and the Innocent. Which became all the more vibrant when he saw the same story reflected in the faces of the musicians who accompanied him from town to town. “There were just a lot of characters around; everybody had nicknames. A lot of street life, and the boardwalk,” Bruce says. “I was drawing a lot from where I came from. I’m going to make this gumbo, and what’s my life?” Bruce already knew the answer to that question. “Well, New Jersey. New Jersey is interesting. I thought that my little town was interesting, the people in it were interesting people. And everyone was involved in the E Street shuffle: the dance you do every day just to stay alive. That’s a pretty interesting dance, I think. So how do I write about that? I found it very compelling, and I also wanted to tell my story, not somebody else’s story.”
Recording sessions for Bruce’s second album began at the 914 Sound Studios in mid-May. Given how crucial touring was to the group’s week-to-week income, the sessions were squeezed into dayslong increments through late September. The postmidnight recording (so aggravating to Hammond, who figured Appel was trying to keep him away) was actually part of a scheme hatched with chief engineer Louis Lahav to record for free while studio owner Brooks Arthur was home in bed. The arrangement worked perfectly until Arthur arrived unexpectedly one night and realized what was going on. “He wasn’t happy,” Tallent says. “Let’s put it that way.”
Working on the cheap had become second nature. While Bruce and the rest of the band made the daily two-hour drives to and from Blauvelt for the sessions, Lopez and Federici set up a tent in the studio’s parking lot and camped out. When David Sancious got tired of Richmond and moved back into his mother’s house in Belmar, New Jersey, Bruce invited him to rejoin the band on piano, thus relegating Federici to the organ, accordion, and other incidental keyboards. None of which pleased the Phantom, particularly when his younger colleague came on like a section leader. “He’d get up and come over to me and say, ‘You shouldn’t play that, you should play this,’” Federici told writer Robert Santelli in 1990. “That really disturbed me. So we didn’t have a good rapport.” What they both shared, however, was a dedication to the band and its leader.
Bruce walked into the studio with a thick stack of songs, many of them well polished from months of live performances. But as the album found its voice, it resisted some of Bruce’s most reliable showstoppers. Crowd favorite “Thundercrack” fell out of consideration early, along with “Zero and Blind Terry,” “Seaside Bar Song,” “Santa Ana,” and the one song everyone agreed sounded like a killer single: Bruce’s smoldering R&B ballad, “The Fever.” All sacrificed for the same all-important yet perfectly ambiguous reason: they didn’t fit into the movie Bruce imagined himself writing and directing. Set partly on the Jersey Shore and partly in the New York City he’d discovered—and then reimagined as the setting for his own variations on West Side Story—the album became a series of stories about liberation: through music, through friends, through lovers, through the realization that even a junkman like Fred Springsteen can walk with his head held high and a song on his lips.
Given Bruce’s renewed passion for full-band rock ’n’ roll, it’s fitting that the first moments of the album’s opening song, the not-quite-title track “The E Street Shuffle,” feature a horn section tuning up to play. Quickly organized, they play a brief intro to a high-spirited R&B guitar riff (lifted from 1963’s “The Monkey Time,” by Chicago soul singer Major Lance) establishing the groove for the horn-fortified band to leap into. From there, Bruce describes a typical night in the lives of the street kids and hustlers populating this mythical E Street2 on pa
rty night. Nothing all that significant happens. But everyone finds his or her way to the party, and when the band kicks into gear, the revelers whoop, converge on themselves, and dance. Horns blaring, rhythm section gliding at top speed while the clavinet bops and that guitar riff slinks and slides, the building lifts off its foundations, and the entire enterprise floats skyward.
By the end, the tune’s main characters, Power Thirteen and Little Angel, slip away from the dance floor, “and they move on out down to the scene.” Perhaps to the quieter end of the boardwalk, where the acoustic guitar-wielding narrator of “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” looks past the carnival lights and corn dog haze for something more substantial. He’s already tasted the forbidden love of his boss’s daughter, but whether escape is a real option or just another illusion remains a mystery.
From there the adventure abandons the shore for downtown New York City for “Kitty’s Back,” which strings its Tom Waits–meets–The Aristocats lyrics across sprawling instrumental jams highlighted by the first and last epic guitar solo Bruce captured in the recording studio.
Flip to the album’s second side, and the opening piano chimes of “Incident on 57th Street,” in which Spanish Johnny and Puerto Rican Jane3 find a lovers’ respite in the midst of gang warfare, police incursions, and a noirish heat wave. Here liberation comes in the vague promise of another part of town “where paradise ain’t so crowded.” But as in Shakespeare’s original, paradise doesn’t last: Johnny vanishes in search of easy money, leaving Jane with the shakiest of promises: “We may walk until the daylight, maybe.”
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