Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  And even cooler, as if anything could be cooler, here’s Bruce in the wee hours of the fifth of July, leading an assault on the embarrassingly large Darkness on the Edge of Town billboard on Sunset Boulevard, which he, Clemons, and Tallent, along with an eager platoon of crew members, deface with a hand-scrawled “PROVE IT ALL NIGHT” sprayed across the bottom, the work signed with a slightly smaller “E STREET.” “I wanted to get to my face, and paint on a mustache,” he told Marsh a few hours later. “But it was too damn high.” All of which reads as screen ready as Bruce’s own cinematic lyrics. Until Marsh poses a question about the billboard caper that, purposefully or not, compels Bruce to reveal the canniness behind his rowdiness:

  MARSH: “Were you worried you’d get caught?”

  BRUCE: “Naw, I figured if they caught us, that was great. And if we got away with it, that was even better.”

  In other words, if he had to get arrested in order to reestablish himself as rock ’n’ roll’s truest anticelebrity and regular guy, that would not be a problem.

  • • •

  The raves for the Darkness tour had started with the opening show in Buffalo, on May 23, 1978, and didn’t ease up from the first swing through the usual East Coast hotspots (Boston, Philadelphia, the New York–New Jersey corridor), the Midwest swing, and the first West Coast haul down to Los Angeles in early July. Still, ticket sales didn’t always follow suit. So while most of the theaters they visited were smaller than the ten-thousand-seat Kiel Auditorium in Saint Louis, where more than a third of the house went unsold, large sections of the country had either forgotten about Bruce since Born to Run or had never experienced the E Street show before. “We got nothing in the South, really,” Van Zandt says. “Austin was good, some other places in Texas were okay. Philly was good, Boston, Cleveland, some places in Texas. The rest of the country was soft. I remember playing to a lot of empty houses. A lot of empty houses.”

  But as Premier Talent’s Frank Barsalona made clear, the point of this tour was to make the entire country a hot spot for Bruce. Not by publicity or the grace of album reviews and national coverage but by showing up everywhere that would have them and playing as hard as they could, night after night, until every significant city or crossroads had a chance to experience their power. As if Bruce, or anyone in the band, needed to be told the virtues of working the road. But given the chance to wreak rock ’n’ roll havoc everywhere and take prisoners nowhere, Bruce’s natural intensity became all the more overpowering. “It all ties in with the records and the values, the morality of the records,” he told Marsh. “There’s a certain morality to the show, and it’s very strict. Everything counts. Every person, every individual in the crowd counts. To me.”

  Increasingly obsessed with the technical quality at the shows (particularly in the larger halls), Bruce extended the afternoon sound checks into three-hour marathons of jamming, correcting mistakes heard at the previous night’s show, rehearsing whatever new song(s) he wanted to add for the evening, and staging new theatrical bits to add dimension to his more grandiose comic stories. Then came Bruce’s painstaking ritual of patrolling literally every section and corner of the theater or arena, microphone in hand, listening for gaps in the amplification, drum tone, and, worst of all, echo. And if it turned out that things weren’t just exactly right, for whatever reason, Bruce stopped everything until they, and he, had gained control over that subsection of the hall. Such were the dimensions of Bruce’s expectations, and his overwhelming need to fix every problem and right every wrong that might stand between himself and his audience. He owed them his best, just as he owed it to Barsalona, Landau, every member of the band, the crew, and especially the fans who came out every night in search of something more perfect than they could find in their daily lives. In Bruce’s mind, the burden was as tormenting as it was inspiring.

  “Everybody had pressure on them, but mostly it was Bruce, because it was his name out there,” says Garry Tallent. “He [became] very dark, sometimes difficult to be around. Just in a bad mood a lot of time, always ready to hit somebody.” True enough, steely-eyed perfectionism had always been a central pillar in Bruce’s musical career. But what became increasingly clear as the tour rolled into the summer was that Bruce’s performances had gone from being displays of poetic craft and visceral release to something more like a crucible, a ritualistic ordeal of baring his own soul, reaching out for the communion and creating an energy powerful enough to carry the audience, and himself, to a kind of rock ’n’ roll salvation.

  When Bruce and the band hit the stage, they all came dressed in variations of the trim-cut, monochromatic blazers, trousers, and button-up shirts Bruce now favored. Often he set off his look with a thin tie, usually knotted loosely around an unbuttoned collar. Together with his clean-shaven face and shorter (if perpetually mussed) hair, the look he exuded was somewhere between urban poet and hassled salary man, although the sharp-toed boots emerging from his cuffs added rock ’n’ roll spark, particularly when he was up on his toes, guitar at the ready, leaping to “Badlands” ’s opening chords. The first hour of the show focused on the new songs, with “Spirit in the Night,” and its traditional leap into the arms of the crowd, holding a key spot during the opening sequence.

  Digging deep into the fabric of the Darkness songs, Bruce worked with Bittan to craft original piano-and-organ intros for the tunes he liked to introduce with the new, often haunting stories he’d composed. He added new or revised lyrics to “Streets of Fire” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” and rearranged “Factory” ’s opening verse into an atonal drum-and-organ-drone funeral march. The rockers also gained intensity, none more spectacularly than “Prove It All Night,” which rode a Bruce–Van Zandt guitar duel into becoming a twelve-plus-minute showstopper. Van Zandt’s arrangement of the unreleased “Because the Night” doubled down on the guitar fusillade, while renditions of new or largely unknown5 songs such as “Point Blank,” “The Ties That Bind,” “Independence Day,” and the vintage but rarely heard “The Fever” churned with the same friction between dread and hope. As a visual performer, Bruce prowled the stage like a warrior, hoisting his Fender like a sword in one moment, wielding it machine gun–style in the next. In the climactic sprint through “Rosalita,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” and then into the oldies-dominated encores, Bruce’s face ignited, and his dancing grew frantic. When the crowd surged to the stage, his boot heels seemed to leave the ground altogether. Zoom, he leaped onto the piano, standing up to boogie in the spotlight. Whoosh, he sprang down to the stage, only to clamber to the top of the tall speaker stack, where he struck a hero’s pose and then danced to the chorus before hopping back down to his microphone to hit the final verse of the last song. By the end, he was bathed in sweat and bent over, hanging onto the mike stand as he bellowed, raw voice and all, his final confession: “I’m just a prisonerrr! . . . [long pause for breath] . . . of rock ’n’ roll!”

  In the heat of the moment, washed in the light and noise of another triumphant performance, it rang like a promise. Then the stage lights dimmed, the audience streamed for the exits, and the crew dismantled the lights, drums, amplifiers, and keyboards, lugging them all back to the trucks. From there it was back on the bus, back to the highway that led to the next hall in the next city where the next crowd of fans and potential converts were waiting to see him do it all again.

  • • •

  The tour stretched through the summer, barnstorming back through the South, turning north at the East Coast, where Bruce and company played back-to-back sellouts at Philadelphia’s Spectrum arena. Following a night off, they played three straight sellouts at New York’s Madison Square Garden before taking another run around the eastern hot zone and then heading back to the Midwest.

  The traveling and backstage setups both reflected and amplified the pressures of the tour. Bruce, the band, production crew, management team, and their various assistants rode to gigs on a pair of buses defined by their top-ranking passengers. The Br
uce-led bus, also known as the Quiet Bus, had a few rows of seats, a dozen small bunk beds, and a separate chamber at the back where the front man could sleep or relax in privacy.6 The other bus, captained by Clemons, was the Party Bus, populated most heavily by crew members, hangers-on, and anyone else in the touring party (such as Federici) eager for a night of beer, booze, music, laughter, and many not-quite-legal substances.

  You didn’t want to do any of this in Bruce’s sight, however, or screw up something bad enough to make him suspect that your personal indulgences were affecting your commitment to the show. So when Bruce made an unexpected visit to the band’s dressing room just before a show at Boston’s Music Hall, things turned explosive once he walked through the door.

  “I was with him,” road manager Bobby Chirmside remembers. “And when we walked in, one member of the band was holding a cocaine spoon up to the nose of another member of the band. And they got caught. And it was like time froze.” Watching from a few feet away, Clemons could only stare: “I just thought, ‘Oh, shit!’ And then all the first guy could say was, ‘Oh, hi. Do you want some?’ And Bruce said, ‘Uh, no.’” As Chirmside recalls, the color flooded into the bandleader’s cheeks, and his muscles tensed with fury.

  “If. I. Ever. Fucking. See. This. Again.” Chirmside heard him snarl. “I don’t care who it is. They’re gone. On the spot. I’ll fire them.” He spun on his boot heel and clomped back to where he’d come from. When Chirmside got to Bruce’s dressing room, he gave the still-furious bandleader a few moments to calm down. “Then I said, ‘Boss, are you serious? You’d fire them on the spot?’”

  Bruce didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely,” he shot back. “I could replace any of those guys in twenty-four hours.” Then he thought for a moment. “Except for Clarence. Replacing Clarence would take some time.”

  Indeed, the Scooter and Big Man legend was a crucial part of the band’s onstage chemistry. So even as Bruce’s new music tilted away from sax-laced rhythm and blues, Clemons’s hulking profile, so often cloaked in silk suits and carried with an elegant blend of sweetness, artistry, and urban menace, remained Bruce’s key foil. He was the shoulder to lean on in midsolo, the glowering vision of Stagger Lee, the golden sax gleaming as heroically as Bruce’s own six-stringed Excalibur. So even if Bruce was also likely to call to Van Zandt for onstage musical and theatrical support, his bond with Clemons—and the enactment of racial harmony, mutual admiration, and the power of fraternal love—gave the concerts their mystical glow. “The spontaneity between us was so amazing,” Clemons told me a few weeks before his death. “I’d start each show wondering, ‘Where is he gonna take me today? Where’s the music going to take us? What can we do today to really fuck ’em up?’”

  When they got deep into the encores, well past the point where an ordinary band would be back on the bus, and it would have been perfectly okay to give one last wave and call it a night, Bruce turned to Clemons to read the crowd for him. “He’d say, ‘Big Man! Are they still standing?’” the saxophonist remembered. And if Clemons peeked out from behind the curtain and saw the crowd crushed against the stage and screaming for more, he’d give the nod, and Bruce would holler to the rest of the band, “Boys! Let’s go back out there!”7

  If only because Bruce had nothing else to do that night. Nor anything the next day besides waiting for the next show to start. And according to Clemons, the rest of the band felt exactly the same way. “Man, the other bands back then, they always wanted to get back to the party,” he says. “But for us, the party was onstage. That was our joy. Not what might happen afterward. We left it all onstage, all the time.” Except for whatever he brought onto his own personal party bus, of course—but given the Big Man’s shamanic sense of music and life, that was all part of romancing the spirits and letting them shoot right through you.

  • • •

  As a tour-credentialed photographer and Bruce’s girlfriend, Lynn Goldsmith saw it all unfold from the inside. Her black-and-white photographs from the Darkness tour8 reveal the rock ’n’ roll road as a daily grind of jarring contrasts, from the dust-wreathed buses to the truck stop breakfasts, to the cramped and often tumbledown dressing rooms. Suitcases erupt in tangles of unfolded shirts and loose socks. Meals come from steam trays and are served up on plates stamped from Styrofoam, with plastic utensils on the side. The scene pivots 180 degrees when the house lights go down and Bruce and the band step onto the stage. Elevated by the lights, noise, and his music, Bruce strides like a rock ’n’ roll superhero. He strikes poses with his battered Fender, towers over his followers, sweeps his fingers over their heads, stands among them in the aisle, cuddles into a lap here, rests his head on a shoulder there. Then comes Clemons, a vision in white and gold, blowing his horn like a much larger and cooler Gabriel.

  Then they’re backstage again, Bruce collapsed but elated on a folding metal chair, and then glaring into Goldsmith’s lens as she finds him scrubbing off the sweat in a locker room shower. She’s careful to keep the perspective above the waist, but the hardness in his eyes describes the tension in their personal/professional relationship. Goldsmith is welcome into his most private space, but her camera, and the power it affords her, is not.

  The feeling was mutual. Already a well-respected photographer in the rock ’n’ roll world, Goldsmith spent much of her time with Bruce worrying about what the relationship would do to her professional reputation. “I didn’t want to be known as anything but Lynn Goldsmith,” she says. “I didn’t like the idea of working like I did while being Bruce’s girlfriend. It was not a positive thing to me.” Other pictures show the tenderness between them: Bruce dancing goofily to the music in his dressing room; slouched in front of his living room television, the week’s TV Guide flopped open next to him on the sofa. But it was always an on-again, off-again relationship, Goldsmith says, for which she takes as much blame as her ex might place on himself. “At that period, I always did a kind of come here/go away [with boyfriends],” she says. “I wasn’t capable of loving someone in the way I would have liked to have been loved at that time. As his girlfriend, I really wasn’t there for him.”

  So onward. During the same Los Angeles visit that included the Roxy show, Bruce met Joyce Hyser, an effervescent young actress. Raised in Philadelphia, Hyser graduated high school at sixteen and moved west to try to work as an actress. When the tour settled at the Sunset Marquis hotel on Sunset Boulevard, Hyser came to say hello to a friend who was married to a crew member. When Bruce saw the sparkle-eyed brunette by the pool, he was smitten enough to ask the actor Gary Busey9 to introduce him. They talked for hours, Hyser recalls, and she liked him instantly. But she hadn’t come to Los Angeles to become another star’s girlfriend. “I wanted to make it on my own and be an artist in my own right,” she says. “But he was so incredibly sweet.” Bonnie Raitt, who also happened to be at the hotel that afternoon, felt the sizzle between them too, and wrote “This is where Joyce and Bruce met” on the wall just above where they had been sitting.

  When Bruce invited her to come with him to San Diego for the next night’s show, Hyser agreed, on the condition that she stay with a friend rather than in his hotel room. He thought that was a fine idea. “He was getting out of his relationship with Lynn, and he said to me that he had never in his life had a one-night stand, and I thought, ‘How is that even possible?’” she says. “He was a huge star. But he had also never smoked a cigarette and never smoked a joint, and I’m like, ‘Shut up! Is this the beginning of the bullshit?’”

  Well, yes and no. “I meant in the context of musicians, not actual people,” Bruce says. “Particularly in the early days you were always dependent on the kindness of strangers. I think I had a general sense that it was bad karma to fuck with the citizens. But rules were always made to be broken, and if someone rang my bell, or if a circumstance presented itself . . .” You can imagine why he didn’t bother completing the sentence.

  Whatever, the couple bonded, and by the fall they were constant companions. When
Bruce moved from Holmdel to a rented ranch house on the edge of a reservoir in Colts Neck, an exurban area ten minutes east of Freehold, Hyser helped him to furnish the place by cruising the neighborhoods around Monmouth County on garbage day in search of cast-off chairs and tables others had left by the curb.

  Whatever they couldn’t get for free they bought at the warehouse-sized ABC Carpet & Home in Lower Manhattan or dug out of one of the tiny antique shops Bruce favored in Long Branch. Bruce also rented a small apartment in Los Angeles’s middle-class Miracle Mile neighborhood to use when Hyser worked in Hollywood. And when they drove north to visit his parents in San Mateo, the couple either slept in the tiny guest room or, if other relatives were around, on the living room floor. “We barely ever saw other celebrities, and we didn’t hang out with other rock ’n’ rollers,” Hyser says. “We’d go to movies or go out for dinner. Our life was small, and mostly revolved around family.”