Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  When Bruce made a final pitch to keep Van Zandt on board, he made sure that his friend knew how wild the buzz surrounding U.S.A. had become. “He had a sense the record was going to be successful,” Van Zandt says. “I think he legitimately wanted me to share in what he felt I deserved, since I had coproduced the album and was a big part of it.” They talked for hours, briefly kicking around the prospect of the Disciples of Soul joining the tour as the opening act, with Van Zandt playing both ends of the show. But given that Bruce never had opening acts—and on this, of all tours, he couldn’t imagine limiting his own stage time—the idea didn’t stick. Van Zandt also wasn’t crazy about Bruce’s newly supersized commercial ambitions. When you can sell a million or two million albums and fill sports arenas while still having a generally normal offstage life, working to become a global superstar seemed ridiculous. Nevertheless, Van Zandt says the talk, and his decision to finalize his departure from Bruce’s band, marked a significant moment in their friendship. “It wasn’t a fight, but it was a very deeply emotional moment,” he says. “A kind of emotional reconciliation. An acceptance that we were going our separate ways. A separation of brothers going their own ways, for their own reasons. It was emotional, and disappointing. But not adversarial at all.”4

  • • •

  In early May Bruce called Lofgren at his home in Maryland. “Hey, if ya feel like it, you can come back up and do a little jamming with the band.” Lofgren answered just as casually (“I said, ‘Sure!’”) but inside his head, lights flashed and alarm bells chimed. “I’m thinking, ‘What’s that mean? Jamming? Why?’” But, of course, he knew what it meant. Ever the A student, Lofgren went immediately to a bootleg-collecting friend, borrowed a few of Bruce’s shows, and wrote out the chord charts to every song he heard. Lofgren’s buddy also had a bootlegged tape of the still-unreleased Born in the U.S.A., so he wrote down those charts too. Taking a commuter jet to a tiny airport in south New Jersey, Lofgren found Bruce waiting for him in the parking lot. As Lofgren had assumed, he had been summoned to audition for Van Zandt’s position in the band. But the guitarist still felt taken aback when they got to Bruce’s house in Rumson, New Jersey,5 and discovered the rest of the E Street Band sitting around the dining room table. Bruce slid into one empty chair and gestured toward the last chair, sitting alone at the foot of the table. “So I went, ‘Damn!’ But look: who else if not me?”

  The band rehearsed in Red Bank, in the empty building that had once housed Clemons’s never quite profitable nightclub, Big Man’s West. Lofgren played with the band for a couple of days and packed up his guitars at the end of the second day feeling good about what had happened. No matter how it turned out, he’d given it his best shot, he figured. Bruce vanished into a side room in the moments after they’d quit playing, and when he came out, Lofgren went over to give him a thank-you hug. Bruce just smiled.

  “He said, ‘Look, I talked to everybody. It feels good to us. So do you want to join the E Street Band?’ I said, ‘What? You mean now? Like a full member of the band? Not just a sideman?’ And he said, ‘Yeah. Join the band.’ So I said, ‘Absolutely! Count me in!’” Lofgren flew back to Maryland that night, packed up everything he’d need for a tour, threw it into his car, and drove back up to New Jersey.

  He had five weeks before the opening date of the tour, set for Saint Paul, Minnesota, at the end of June. Lofgren took over the guitar parts without much sweat, but he had a tougher time doing all that while also summoning the grit and power for Van Zandt’s high vocal harmonies. Bruce, however, already had a solution on hand. He called Patti Scialfa, who had managed to do all the growing up that Bruce and Van Zandt had asked her to do when she tried out for Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom thirteen years earlier. Bruce had considered adding a female voice to the band even before Van Zandt left (Scialfa had auditioned months earlier, in fact), so when he offered her a backup singer job, she jumped at it and became the first woman to become a full-fledged member of the E Street Band. Scialfa, a willowy redhead with sparkling green eyes and a playfully sexy stage presence, had been a fixture on the Asbury Park scene for so long that her joining did little to disrupt the E Street boys’ club. She also came with serious academic credentials, including a music degree from New York University and training from the jazz conservatory at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. Scialfa had spent years busking and playing club dates with her all-woman band Trickster (with Soozie Tyrell and Lisa Lowell), and toured and recorded as a vocalist for both David Johansen and Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. “Patti saved my ass,” Lofgren says. “She got thrown in even later than I did, but Patti can sing anything.”

  • • •

  First came the video. In 1984, with the three-year-old MTV established as the hub of the nation’s (and increasingly the world’s) pop music culture, any bid for mainstream success had to include a video that showcased the artist’s single, while also establishing his or her image and the mood of the new song and/or album. Bruce had resisted MTV’s gravitational pull in the bleak “Atlantic City” video in 1982, but his heady ambitions for Born in the U.S.A. required a much more industry-friendly campaign. Still, Bruce, who fell in love with music the old-fashioned, AM-radio-driven way, was wary. “I kind of agreed with him,” Teller says. “I knew that videos hampered people’s ability to comprehend the music in their own way.” But Columbia’s president also knew how the music business worked in 1984, and Landau said he’d try to make something happen.

  When the manager came back to show what they came up with while working with director Jeff Stein (best known then for The Kids Are Alright, his spectacular 1979 documentary about the Who) for a day in the Kaufman Astoria film studios in Queens, New York, Teller was baffled. Rather than featuring the band or any kind of onstage setting, the video featured Bruce alone. Appearing on an all-black set and dressed in black pants, a white, sleeveless T-shirt, thin black suspenders, and a thick black bandanna tied across his forehead, Bruce looked mostly like a mime with ants in his pants. Set loose on the empty soundstage, Bruce lip-synced the lyrics while doing his best back-and-forth boogie, with occasional 360-degree spins for odd measure. And that was the whole production, until a white-suited Clemons popped in to simulate his saxophone solo at the end of the song. “No background, no band, that was it,” Teller says. “It really just showed you how uncomfortable he was with videos.” When the executive caught Landau’s eye at the end of the clip, he shook his head. “Jon and I just looked at each other, and I said, ‘No way!’”6 Landau, he says, nodded—almost as if he’d expected Teller to say that—and said he’d try to come up with something else.

  Then a miracle occurred. Bruce agreed to not only shoot a real performance video but also cooperate with the Hollywood-style enhancements suggested by director Brian De Palma, who had helmed the bloody horror movie Carrie and the even bloodier gangster movie Scarface. Shot onstage on the first night of the Born in the U.S.A. tour in Saint Paul, DePalma’s video began with a boots-up pan of Bruce, dressed in new blue jeans and a short-sleeved white button-up. Dancing to the opening bars of the single, he came into view as a popcorn movie version of himself, shiny to the point of seeming premoistened, with a silly grin on his face. With artificial smoke floating behind him, Bruce and his similarly shiny band members pantomimed their parts while shots of the real crowd’s reaction moved to focus on one suspiciously gorgeous woman (who turns out to be future Friends star Courteney Cox) dancing excitedly in the front row. When the song moved into its final, instrumental bars, the still-grinning Bruce reached out for the woman, who just happened to be wearing the official U.S.A. tour T-shirt, thus inspiring a brief array of oh-my-God-this-can’t-really-be-happening expressions to flow across her own shiny face until she’s right there dancing with Bruce Springsteen in the Hollywood-enhanced spotlights.

  And in 1984 that’s what you called a state-of-the-art MTV music video. “I winced at that, too,” Teller says. “It looked so goddamned stagey. I told Jon, ‘That’s
so cheesy!’ I could never watch Friends as a result.” No matter, the clip was an immediate sensation. From July until February 1985, the Born in the U.S.A. album traded the top spot on the album chart with Prince and Purple Rain. And the LP’s run, and Bruce’s leap to the apex of mainstream culture, had only just begun.

  • • •

  Through the first leg of the American tour that summer, everything felt like business as usual. Granted, business was especially good. Shows sold out with lightning speed, often leading to multiple appearances at venues they had once struggled to fill. Already the audience had grown beyond the usual core of Springsteen zealots, due both to the broad appeal of “Dancing in the Dark” in radio and video formats. Bruce and Landau had also hired the industry’s leading dance record remixer, Arthur Baker, to create an extended, heavily revised mix aimed at dance clubs7 around the world. At the same time, Bruce acquiesced to requests for interviews with major celebrity media outlets including People magazine,8 and the syndicated celebrity news TV program Entertainment Tonight, among others. They also worked with MTV to hatch the “Be a Roadie for Bruce” contest, the winner of which would be rewarded with a temporary job as a crew member (and thus be granted the opportunity to call the Boss “boss”).

  Bruce entered the 1984 cultural mainstream with unexpected force. In a decade of popular music increasingly dominated by women (Stevie Nicks, Debbie Harry, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, among others) and men pushing the edges of male sexual identity (Michael Jackson, Prince, Boy George), Bruce’s jeans and T-shirt, along with the old-school rock ’n’ roll framework of his songs, shifted music back to familiar territory. When the celebrity-entertainment mags dropped by to kick Bruce’s tires and take the aspiring idol out for a spin around the block, they came back as impressed by his offstage humility as they were by his onstage heroics. “The trappings of rock superstardom were astonishingly absent backstage,” wrote People’s Chet Flippo in a cover story titled “Blue-Collar Troubadour.” “No stretch limos for the rock stars; just unobtrusive vans . . . there were no drugs and nothing stronger to drink than beer.” Certainly not where Flippo could see them, at any rate. Still, Bruce’s commitment to keeping his boots on the ground stayed firm. As he told Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder (also the central face in MTV’s thriving music news broadcasts), the superstar treatment achieved nothing more than separating the artist from the people he most needed to understand, and vice versa. “The life of a rock band will last as long as you look down into the audience and can see yourself, and [they] can look up at you and see themselves,” he said. “If the price of fame is that you have to be isolated from the people you write for, then that’s too fuckin’ high a price to pay.”

  And yet Bruce’s all-star physique, along with his ability to elevate his concerts into something like the First Church of Rock (to quote People’s Flippo) gave him the aura of a superhero: a larger-than-life figure keeping the world safe for truth, beauty, and the cleansing tide of rock ’n’ roll. Factor in the red, white, and blue imagery all over Born in the U.S.A. and its songs about work, home, and family, and here rose the profile of an American hero. Or, as Flippo put it to People’s forty million weekly readers, “He’s a folk hero in his biker boots, tight jeans, kerchief headband, and short-sleeved sport shirt with the sleeves rolled up to display his newly pumped-up biceps.”

  In a presidential election year defined by the gauzy “Morning in America” ads promoting the reelection of Ronald Reagan, the star-spangled subtext to Bruce’s popular image made him an irresistible target for political maneuvering and manipulation. The first wavelet came in People magazine’s profile when Flippo described Born in the U.S.A.’s title track as a proud anthem sung in the voice of a war-ravaged Vietnam veteran who suffers “every raw deal imaginable but remains a ‘cool rocking Daddy in the U.S.A.’” How a sophisticated music journalist like Flippo9 could hear the rage written into that song and come away thinking that the brutalized narrator’s final roar amounted to anything other than bitter irony is difficult to comprehend. But the worst was yet to come.

  It began with a well-intentioned invitation from Max Weinberg. The drummer and his wife, Becky, were regular watchers of ABC-TV’s weekly political talk show This Week with David Brinkley, mostly for the panel discussion segments that included ABC’s liberal-ish newsman Sam Donaldson and the conservative pundit George Will. Curious to see what the hardcore pols would make of a rock ’n’ roll concert, the drummer invited the show’s entire panel to see Bruce and the band when the tour came to Largo, Maryland, a thirty-minute drive east of the capital. Will was the only panelist who showed up,10 so when Weinberg took his guest backstage to see the show’s inner workings, the conservative writer alone got to meet Bruce and take in the atmosphere. Will left the concert after the intermission but was still moved to devote his September 13 nationally syndicated column to Bruce and the event. The piece, titled “Bruce Springsteen, U.S.A.,” dragooned the band in general—and Bruce in particular—into a political fantasy that said more about the author’s electoral agenda than it did about his subject’s beliefs and message. Starting with an approving nod to the absence of androgyny in Bruce’s image,11 Will compared his macho look to Robert De Niro’s in the battle sequences of The Deer Hunter.12 All of which clarified Will’s vision of Bruce as a “wholesome cultural portent” whose own rags-to-riches story proved the conservative belief that no amount of socioeconomic privation could stand in the way of hard, honest, nonunionized work. That Bruce’s extraordinary success was a result of otherworldly talents unavailable to virtually everyone else on the planet did not occur to Will. What did occur to him, however, was that uttering and repeating the words “Born in the U.S.A.” amounted to an affirmation of patriotism and, thus, of Ronald Reagan and his administration. Will was so enamored of the idea that he repurposed it for the column’s kicker: “There still is nothing quite like being born in the U.S.A.”13

  Weinberg, to put it gently, felt chagrined. He hadn’t known that Will intended to write about the concert, let alone transform Bruce into a character in Ayn Rand’s libertarian Atlas Shrugged. And while Bruce never mentioned it to him one way or another, the drummer felt a distinct chill backstage when he got to the next show. “I was practically excommunicated by certain factions in our touring party,” he says. “Blacklisted. Akin to being a traitor to some ideology. And while [Becky and I] did invite him to the show, it would be a stretch to say George Will was a friend of mine. I mean, I met him that night.”

  The situation grew even more complicated a week later, when Reagan made a campaign stop in Hammonton, New Jersey, and ingratiated himself to the southern Jersey crowd by declaring that “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts; it rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.” Cue the balloons, cue the cheers, cue the presidential motorcade for the ride back to Air Force One and the next campaign stop. “He got his picture taken with the red, white, and blue balloons, and he mentioned me,” Bruce says. “It was part of a shopping list of things that needed to be done for the six o’clock news. And I didn’t want to be part of the shopping list, y’know?”

  Heading to the next tour stop in Pittsburgh, Bruce and Landau agreed that he had to say something to deflect Reagan’s attempt to claim spiritual kin. Five songs into the first set, Bruce stepped up to the microphone, acoustic guitar in hand, and noted that the president had mentioned him the other day. “I kind of got to wondering what his favorite album of mine must’ve been, you know,” he said. “I don’t think it was the Nebraska album. I don’t think he’s been listening to this one.” Then came an intense reading of “Johnny 99,” the tale of the unemployed auto plant worker who spirals into a bloody crime spree. Talking about the war memorials he’d seen in Washington and grown up among in Freehold, Bruce stopped short of mentioning Reagan by name but still drew a sharp line be
tween the president’s laissez-faire policies and his own progressive ideals. “It’s a long walk from the government that’s supposed to represent all the people to where it seems like . . . there’s a lot of stuff being taken away from a lot of people that shouldn’t have it taken away,” he said. “Sometimes it’s hard to remember that this place [the nation] belongs to us. That this is our hometown.”

  The Democratic nominee for president, former vice president Walter Mondale, took advantage of Reagan’s political overstep by declaring that Bruce “may have been born to run, but he wasn’t born yesterday.” But when the Mondale campaign claimed falsely that Bruce had agreed to endorse its candidate, his handlers had to issue an official retraction. Bruce, for all his eagerness to impact American culture, still had no interest in diving into the partisan electoral fray. “I don’t think people come to music for political advice,” he says. “They come to be touched and moved and inspired, and if you’ve written about [political] things as a part of what you’re doing—and you do it well—then you’re moving and inspiring them with those things. But people aren’t coming on an informational basis. I was attracted to Dylan because he sounded like he was telling the truth. I didn’t sit there with a lyric sheet. It was just in the way it sounded.”

  TWENTY

  SMILIN’ KIND OF FUNNY, EVERYBODY HAPPY AT LAST

  BY THE END OF 1984, Bruce’s image—the close-cropped curls, strong jaw, concrete shoulders, and wood-hewn Fender Telecaster—had ascended into the international register of American icons. In the wake of all the magazine covers, the TV news stories, the endless loop of “Dancing in the Dark” and “Born in the U.S.A.” videos on MTV, newspaper stories, and more, you didn’t have to be able to identify a note of his music to grasp exactly who he was and what his profile signified. But most sensate people had heard the music, which was just as unavoidable as all the media coverage. So now Bruce was a brand, and when the Born in the U.S.A. tour reached Australia in late March 1985 for a monthlong swing—Bruce’s first shows Down Under—the fame he had chased for the previous year turned to face him.