Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Landau presented Bruce with a different set of influences. Musically as steeped in the roots of rock, soul, and country music as Van Zandt was, he was also, as Bruce describes him, a formalist who believed that the best way to capture the riotous energy of rock ’n’ roll was to perform it professionally, record it clearly, and then mix it cleanly enough to reveal the nuances in each instrument’s tone.1 As Bruce knew, Van Zandt and Landau were going to disagree about a lot of things—another iteration of the Appel-Landau dichotomy he’d created for Born to Run. As he told filmmaker Thom Zimny in 2010, he had his reasons. As he admits, placing himself between two powerful influences has come naturally since he was a toddler. “It’s the rule of three,” Bruce says. “My grandmother, my mom, and me. Mike, Jon, and me. Jon, Steve, and me. And that still exists.”

  Drawn to the darkly comic family stories of southern writer Flannery O’Connor, Bruce also felt a connection to the emotionally fraught characters in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and the other noir novels of James M. Cain. “Those things were very in tune with my inner life, and something about my childhood,” he says. “Those noir heroes, the sand was always shifting underneath them.” The doomed atmosphere in noir fiction resonated with his Catholic spiritual identity. “That feeling of being rubbed up against and trashed, and you can’t get out from underneath it.” What could be more noir than living in a world patrolled by a tempestuous God whose consciousness is as unknowable as His all-seeing eye is judgmental?

  Taking up Landau’s attention to subtexts in films, Bruce now watched his favorite Westerns and B movies with an eye for cinematic history and technique. Bruce absorbed films on more levels than he’d ever known existed; even the drive-in screen seemed to widen, revealing symbols, messages, and insights he had never considered consciously. The new perspective also gave Bruce a new comprehension of his own work, particularly when it came to the virtues of stark images and simple, unadorned narrative points. Listening to Hank Williams and the other essential country music songwriters helped Bruce to whittle songs down to their barest essentials: a few chords, a straightforward melody, plainspoken, conversational lyrics. Solo breaks were short and to the point, and mostly reiterations or slight variations on the melody.2 “It’s an austere record,” Bruce says. “I was stripping everything down, making everything very straight-ahead.”

  Bruce stumbled on one of his most significant influences by accident while flipping through the TV channels late one night. Coming across an old movie about unsettled farmers trying to make their way in the Depression, the film starred Henry Fonda as an Okie named Tom Joad. Bruce missed the first half of the film and never did catch its name. But the tale of an impoverished family searching for work and dignity riveted him. At dinner the next night, he mentioned it to Landau, who knew instantly what he’d seen: John Ford’s 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. They talked about the film for a while, and soon Landau recognized a shift in Bruce’s sense of his next album. “He seemed to take a turn toward a different way of looking.” As Bruce told TV interviewer Bob Costas in 1995, Ford’s movie3 never left him. “There was something about the film that sort of crystallized the story for me,” he said. “Something in that picture that always resonated throughout almost all of my other work.”

  As on Born to Run, this batch of songs focused on the working-class characters Bruce had always known. The neighbors, teammates, and classmates who, like Bruce, were at the point in life where you’re mature enough to understand the need for steadiness but still young enough to yearn for something more. Only now, on the other side of his success, Bruce had come to understand what time and experience can do to the most closely held dreams. He was exploring the real start of adulthood, Bruce told his go-to documentarian Thom Zimny in 2010. The point in your late twenties when you’re grown up enough to realize that “life is no longer wide open. Adult life is a life of a lot of compromise. And that’s necessary. There are a lot of things you do want to compromise on, and a lot you don’t.” None of which you’d assume would apply to a rock ’n’ roll star whose most recent album had sold, by then, more than a million copies. “We’d had this one success,” Bruce told Zimny. “But I . . . went back to Asbury Park millions of dollars in debt.”

  In the wake of his enforced two-year exile from the recording studio, another question loomed: would anyone beyond his cult of mostly East Coast fans remember who Bruce was or be interested in the long-delayed follow-up to his big hit? The music scene had changed radically since 1975, the leading edge of rock ’n’ roll now defined by the raw, aggressive sound of the Clash, the Sex Pistols, and the Ramones. Once again Bruce could feel the Grim Reaper’s chilly breath on the back of his neck. Once again he went into the studio half convinced that this would be the final hurrah. “[I] didn’t know, this might be the last record I ever make,” he told Zimny. “Everything I had, I had to get it out now, on this record. There may be no tomorrow—just this moment.”

  But on the other hand, if it turned out that fame and privilege continued to define his existence, that might be even worse. Even his brief journey through the mass-media tinsel machine had “separated me from things I’d been trying to make connections to all my life. And it frightened me because I understood that what I had of value was at my core. And that core was rooted in the place I’d grown up, the people I’d known, experiences I’d had.”

  To put it another way, he was already damned for having become famous. If this record failed, he’d be damned for being forgotten. He was, simply, damned. Maybe that suspicion comes easily to Catholics. But for Bruce, the acrid taste of hellfire had less to do with the righteous fury of God than with the dark spirits that fumed inside him, both tormenting and igniting his desperate needs, just as they had ignited the anguish that continued to blaze in his father’s lightless kitchen in California. “A lot of the songs [from that era] deal with my obsession with the idea of sin,” he told Zimny. “What is it? What is it in a good life? Because it plays an important place in a good life, also. So how do you deal with it? You don’t get rid of it. How do you carry your sins?”

  The path to his own redemption was as clear as it was vertiginous: “More than rich, more than famous, more than happy, I wanted to be great.” It wouldn’t be easy. In fact, it was the opposite of easy. “He needed to try as hard as he could, ’til he’s bleary eyed, delirious, and collapses in some way, emotionally or physically,” Roy Bittan observes. “That level of creativity you can’t just consciously get. There’s something underneath you tap into. And when you do that, you’re coming from another place.” Bruce knew it too. “It was both self-indulgent and the only way we knew how to do it,” he told Zimny. “The obsessive-compulsive part of my personality was that I was driving [everyone] crazy because I could. I was a dangerous man to be around.”

  • • •

  Road manager/home front factotum Rick Seguso figured that out the hard way. Having been handed some basic managerial chores during the lawsuit era, Seguso figured he’d run with the ball. Maybe they could put together an in-house management company, thereby allowing themselves to function without having to rely on unfamiliar and perhaps ill-intended outsiders. Bruce didn’t say yes to the idea, but he also didn’t say no, which put Seguso in the curious position of being in charge of nothing but responsible for a lot. Working in such an undefined role led to trouble when Seguso had to reconcile the band’s tour dates with the obligations that Clarence Clemons had taken on by accepting a role in Martin Scorsese’s 1977 film New York, New York. When a two-night stand in Philadelphia in October became a conflict for what Seguso describes as a last-minute call for the sax player to be on the set in Los Angeles, the film’s star, Robert De Niro, called Bruce to complain. The actor and musician were friends, but movie fan Bruce admired De Niro’s work so much that when the actor started seething in his ear, he became furious at Seguso too. Uninterested in his employee’s recounting of the film producers’ often late and occasionally i
ncoherent messages, Bruce presented one command: “Fix it!” Thrown into a panic, Seguso pleaded with the Philadelphia concert promoter to knock back the date of the second show by twenty-four hours, thus allowing Clemons time to take one red-eye flight to California, where he’d do his scene, and then take another red-eye back to Philadelphia to do the second show. But Seguso still felt tainted by the mix-up, and it wasn’t long before Bruce let him go.4

  With Seguso gone, Bruce called on Bobby Chirmside, another veteran crew member, to fill the road manager’s job. Which, of course, didn’t end when they got off the road. “The thing is, you gotta move in,” Bruce said. Chirmside, who lived with his parents at the time, had no problem with that. Oh, but Bruce had one more question: “Do [your parents] have any extra furniture? ’Cause all I’ve got is a Buckaroo pinball machine, a desk, two beds, a nineteen-inch portable TV, and a pool table. And that’s it.” Chirmside moved in a few days later, living room sofa in tow, and Bruce’s existence in the ten-bedroom house on Telegraph Hill Road moved into a new era.

  Ordinary days at home began around eleven o’clock or noon, when Bruce shuffled out of his bedroom and fixed himself a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast. Fueled up for his day, he usually climbed into his dusty white pickup truck, cranked up a Hank Williams tape, and rumbled off to search the public library stacks for new books, troll the antique stores in Long Branch, or take a walk on one of the beaches or boardwalks. “This was really his loner period,” says Chirmside, who stayed home to scrub the dishes, push a few loads of Bruce’s jeans, T-shirts, and sweatshirts through the wash, and then hit the supermarket to stock the kitchen for the next few days. When Bruce returned home in the midafternoon, he had a sandwich and then either fiddled at the piano or took an acoustic guitar into his bedroom. He spent hours each day working on new songs, concocting a chord progression and then singing or humming a melody over the top. A snatch of lyrics appeared next, sometimes from the pages of his ever-present notebook. He’d work like that for hours at a time but never said a word about what he had worked on or how it was going.

  “When you’re writing well, you’re not exactly sure how you’ve done it,” Bruce says. “Or if you’ll ever do it again. You’re looking for the element you can’t explain. The element that breathes life and character into the people or situation you’re writing about. So to do that, you’ve gotta tap something more than . . . well, it can’t just be math. There’s got to be some mystical aspect to it. And when that third element arrives, it’s sort of one and one makes three.” The perpetual romancing of the muse, and the constant (if self-generated) pressure to make his work more and more powerful kept Bruce’s focus locked on his work. Not that he didn’t have time for friends, girlfriends, and nights out at bars. But all that fit in around the edges of a life dominated by its own internal visions, machinations, and riddles.

  As Bruce had warned Chirmside, the decor in the Telegraph Hill house redefined sparse, with its emphasis on stacked books, crates of albums, and scatterings of magazines. Imagine the bachelor digs of an English major with a music fixation and a Monmouth County library card, and that’d be about right. A pool table and bumper pool table filled one back room. Gold records and other industry awards ended up in the closet, but Bruce saved his most prominent display spaces for the paintings and dioramas that fans sent to express something about their feelings for their favorite songs and albums. “Someone sent in a box with a gravel road and a hot rod on the road, and a sign reading ‘Thunder Road,’ and he put it on his mantel,” says Lance Larson, a veteran Asbury Park musician and friend of both Bruce and Chirmside. “We were not allowed to fuck with that stuff. He’d get pissed—‘Don’t touch that!’ He cherished that stuff.”

  The intensity of Bruce’s feelings for his fans came to be symbolized in the form of Obie Dziedzic, whom he’d first met as a teenage fixture in the front row of Child/Steel Mill concerts in 1969. Dark haired, owl eyed, and shy, Dziedzic kept a respectful distance from her hero for the first year, even as she left homemade meals for Tinker West and the other crew members at the band’s soundboard. West pointed out Dziedzic to Bruce, and he began to look for her near the stage, and was rarely disappointed, since hardly anything could keep her away from his shows. When Steel Mill played its final gig at the Upstage in 1971, Bruce called out to Dziedzic from the stage and made a place for her at the band’s table at the postgig party they held in the Green Mermaid coffee bar. Dziedzic stayed just as committed during the Bruce Springsteen Band era, so Bruce began to call on her to drive him to the Student Prince shows. Ever since, Bruce made a habit of putting her name on his guest list at every show he played. When he got popular enough to play theaters and then arenas, he inserted a clause into his standard performance contract calling for a pair of tickets—front row center—to be left at the box office with Dziedzic’s name on them. Every night. No matter what city or country. “She’s like patient zero,” Bruce says. “The genesis point. It was like, ‘Look! We have a fan! She came more than once! She does the things a fan does!’ She carried that for us, and still does.”

  When Van Zandt got serious about managing and producing Southside Johnny, he hired Dziedzic to be his assistant. She remained with him until 1977, when Bruce insisted that she come work for him instead. (“What about Steve?” she asked. “Don’t worry about him,” Bruce said, with a wave of his hand.) From there she became an integral part of Bruce’s staff, buying his groceries, running his household errands, cleaning his house, tending to his wardrobe, and cooking the dinners he chose from the menus she’d crafted to broaden and add real nutrition to his stubbornly adolescent palate. Amazingly, it worked. Bruce let Dziedzic maneuver him into eating vegetables and sauces beyond the tomato-based kind you ladle onto spaghetti. When Lance Larson came over for supper, he was always surprised by Bruce’s staunch demand that no food ever go wasted from his table. “If I left a little salad on my plate, he’d look at me: ‘You gonna eat that?’ And if I was already into the chicken parmesan or whatever, he’d eat it off of my plate, like ‘Whaddaya doing? Gimme that salad! It’s healthy for you!’”

  If Bruce felt like going out, the three of them piled into the truck or one of his other cars and made for the Stone Pony. Bruce usually tossed back a beer or two, maybe with a shot of Jack Daniel’s. But while Chirmside and Larson got swept up onto the dance floor, Bruce stuck close to the bar, chatting with friends or just watching the band, feeling the buzz of another party at full, booze-fueled throttle. “He’s very into himself, is the thing,” Larson says. “We’d say, ‘Oh great, he’s comin’ to watch us have experiences, and then he’s gonna write about ’em!’ So it was like, ‘Hey, Bruce, you need some more songs? Come on!’”

  Women edged up to say hi, old friends were always on hand, and when the music got going, Bruce pulled a woman into the crowd and worked up a glow. If midnight stretched to two or three and he’d been dancing with the same girl for a few hours, he would slip out quietly, helping his friend up into the cab of his truck and drift away down the block. And just when Chirmside and Larson started to think he wouldn’t be back, Bruce reappeared. “He treated them like they were his sisters,” Larson says. “He dropped ’em off, then came back to pick us up.” As his buddies knew, Bruce’s love life now revolved around Lynn Goldsmith, a well-known music photographer who also happened to be a striking, long-haired brunette possessed of the same operatic passions that had drawn Bruce to Diane Lozito just a few years earlier.

  • • •

  Recording sessions for the do-or-die fourth album began at the Atlantic Studios in midtown Manhattan a week after the legal settlement separated him, once and for all, from Appel. With Bruce and Landau coproducing, and Van Zandt assisting with arrangements, the gang settled in for the long haul.

  The problems began with Max Weinberg’s drums, and the seemingly impossible pursuit of a miking setup that would make his instrument sound like a drum rather than a drumstick hitting a drum. Only later would they realize that the flaw they co
uld never quite fix was a result of faulty rigging in the studios. But for Bittan, the unrelenting quest for God’s own drum sound also registered as foot-dragging: an anxious artist’s subconscious attempt to avoid the soul-abrading struggle he required to draw out his best work.

  The sessions crawled through the summer. Then in September everyone moved to the Record Plant, where work continued through January 1978. Unlike the Born to Run sessions, this nine-month process moved quickly from song to song, with Bruce leading the band through the enormous catalog of songs they had started working on at his Holmdel house over the last year, along with the new songs that continued to come to him. By the end of the recording sessions, they committed something like seventy new songs to tape, knowing that at least 80 percent of them would end up on the reject shelf or be given away to another artist. Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes ended up with “Talk to Me” and “Hearts of Stone,” which suited Van Zandt’s purposes. But when Bruce showed up with the Elvis-inspired fifties rocker “Fire”5 and the torrid love song “Because the Night” only to reject them both, Van Zandt could only walk away grumbling. “Bruce was constantly giving away his best stuff or not releasing it. It’s all part of his thing.” Landau, even with one eye on industrial matters—publicity, radio, retail outlets, and sales—still understood Bruce’s creative purpose. “I think he may have suspected that if ‘Fire’ had been on the album, that would’ve been the hit, and that would’ve defined [the entire album],” Landau explains. “He couldn’t put ‘Fire’ on there and tell the record company that it can’t be the single. He would have lost control of that.” So, Bruce figured, better to be proactive and keep the song out of sight.