Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  How could any five-disc box of what was now classified as “heartland rock” live up to such superlatives? Debuting on the Billboard album chart at number one made for a nice start, and holding on to the top position through the holiday shopping season and well into January also helped reality transcend the hyperbole.7 Sales were also enhanced by the success of the box’s first single, a furious cover of Edwin Starr’s Vietnam-era protest song “War,” which peaked at number 8 on Billboard’s singles chart, stretching Bruce’s streak of Top 10 singles to eight. The next single, “Fire,” ended the streak in decisive form by stalling at number 46.

  As it turned out, the record buyers who left that single on the shelves8 weren’t alone in their desire to take a break from all things Springsteen. “I just kind of felt Bruced out,” Bruce told Jim Henke a few years later. “I was like, ‘Whoa, enough of that.’ You end up creating this sort of icon, and eventually it oppresses you . . . The whole image that had been created—and that I’m sure I promoted—it really always felt like, ‘Hey, that’s not me.’ It was never me.” Though, as he admitted in his next breath, that wasn’t quite true, either. “It might be a little more of me than I think.”

  • • •

  Temporarily relieved of the shifting burdens of art, fame, and commerce, Bruce turned his attention to the quieter challenges of domestic life with his new spouse. On one level, he and Julianne were a lot like any other pair of successful young professionals, juggling their relationship with their careers and the inner lives that had propelled them to the point where they had made themselves family. It’s difficult even when you’re not at the peak of one of the most high-profile careers in the world. Throw in a similarly motivated younger wife and a husband whose romantic/domestic commitment is counterbalanced by layers of doubt and psychological disquiet, and happily ever after becomes a tricky stretch of road. Were there conflicts? Of course there were conflicts: what couple doesn’t have them? But when they got back to New Jersey, settling into Bruce’s house in Rumson, he went right back to doing the things he always did, only now with his younger, movie-star wife on his arm. As far as friends and observers could tell, Julianne fit right in, as eager to get to know her husband’s old neighbors in Freehold as she was to spend an evening with his more famous friends. When Bruce ran into his childhood best pal Bobby Duncan at his gym one day,9 Julianne became an instant friend too, often tossing her mat next to where the golf course manager was stretching in order to chat and, Duncan says, be as warm and sweet as you would hope the wife of a childhood friend would turn out to be. “Juli was very down to earth and nice,” Duncan says. “She was trying to get her acting career going at the time. But mostly she was outgoing and warm, and seemed like a really kind person.”

  And seemingly on board for whatever her husband wanted to do. A night at the Stone Pony? She was right there at the bar, checking out the band with Bruce and then edging away subtly when a crowd of fans enveloped him. And if it turned out that he had to escape the crush through a side door—always making sure to ask a friend to get Juli out safely to a quieter rendezvous point—she took it in stride. When engineer Toby Scott came out to Rumson to help build a recording studio in the guest apartment in the adjacent carriage house, they seemed as cheerfully settled as any pair of newlyweds. “We’d all have dinner in the house, Bruce, Juli, and I,” Scott says. “They were very domestic. She liked to stay in, make popcorn, watch TV, and have some dinner. People kept asking if they had a problem, and I always said no. I thought Bruce and Juli were doing great.” But when they went out for a pleasant dinner with Roy Bittan and his wife, the pianist went home with an uneasy feeling about what he’d seen. “It just wasn’t like going out with the Julianne and Bruce that I knew,” he says. “Juli was a lovely girl, but he just seemed like he was trying to be a different person. I think he was trying to develop a way of being on a social level. And Julianne wasn’t anywhere on his train of thought.”

  To the extent that he could, Bruce tried to make it work. He’d made his vow, he knew he had to live by it. In every other relationship he’d had, the escape route was always there, as close as the front door and the highway outside. But that ring on his finger meant he’d surrendered his getaway keys forever. “The good thing about the [songs he’d started writing], was that I said you can feel like this and still make a go of it. Experience love or partnership, and also ambivalence, which is part of all human relationships,” Bruce says. “The key is, how do you live with it and deal with it in your life. I was kinda coming to grips with it, my adolescent idea of romantic love, and coming to grips with the complexity of what I was finding out.”

  With his guitar in hand or notebook propped before him at the piano, Bruce followed the knotted strands of his married life, working to string them into words and music. Some songs had the gauzy sound of true love: “Rain and clouds and dark skies, well now they don’t mean a thing / if you got a girl who loves you, and who wants to wear your ring,” he sang in the lighter-than-air “All That Heaven Will Allow.” The sweet “Two for the Road” described the highway as an escape made for two, while “When You Need Me” and the lean ballad “Tougher Than the Rest”10 cast romantic commitment in the rock-solid terms of faith, love, and commitment: “The road is dark, and it’s a thin, thin line / But I want you to know I’ll walk it for you anytime,” he pledged in “Tougher.”

  But such gutsy proclamations don’t amount to much in the dead of night, and thus came “Cautious Man,” a spare, Nebraska-sounding ballad of the tightly wound Bill Horton (“a cautious man of the road”) and his stumbling attempts to adjust to domestic life. His love is deep, and he doesn’t question his wife’s faithfulness, but a deep-seated turmoil, symbolized by the words love and fear he has tattooed on his knuckles,11 unsteadies him. Late one night Bill rises from a nightmare, gets dressed, and slips out of the house to stand on the highway, where he has two epiphanies: the solitary road leads nowhere, and his urge to vanish into the nothingness will never cease. Returning to bed, he reaches for his wife and notices the glow of the moon in her hair, “filling their room with the beauty of God’s fallen light.” Bruce, who says most of the songs were not autobiographical, can’t deny the significance of “Cautious Man.” “That’s one of the good ones. If there was some part of myself I was trying to explain, for better or worse, that song describes a good amount of it.”

  From there the majority of the new songs traced the fault lines in romantic commitment in general, and Bruce’s marriage in particular. “Two Faces” described his restlessness in the terms of bipolarity, with the darker personality subverting his better nature at every turn. Even a bid for God’s help can’t banish the darker spirit: “he’ll never say good-bye / two faces have I.” The yearning “One Step Up” told a different version of the same story, describing a fraught romance as a series of blow-ups, reconciliations, and fantasies. And again, when the singer steps back from his anger, all he feels is his failure to live up to his own standards: “Somewhere along the line I slipped off track / I’m caught movin’ one step up and two steps back.” The one song that Bruce wrote specifically about his and Juli’s wedding, “Walk Like a Man,” was addressed to Doug Springsteen, recalling the years his son had yearned to follow his example. Fate and circumstance had pulled them apart, but the solidity of Doug and Adele’s nearly forty-year marriage once again put Bruce in the position of the child straining to match his father’s footsteps in the sand. “As I watch my bride come down the aisle / I pray for the strength to walk like a man.”

  In February 1987 Bruce called in Toby Scott to help him lay down some demo recordings in his new over-the-garage studio. Now equipped with a Kurzweil 250 synthesizer, which offered a variety of sampled horns, strings, various keyboards, and so on, along with a state-of-the-art drum machine and a bass guitar, Bruce built the tracks layer by layer, starting with a simple beat, adding hi-hats and other percussion accents, then cutting a two-bar stretch to loop through the song. The percussion establish
ed, Bruce took up a guitar or sat at the keyboard to play the basic chords, laid down a bass guitar track, and then went back to the Kurzweil to add other keyboard sounds, horn or string flourishes, additional guitar parts, and percussion. It took about three weeks to track the songs and add enough overdubs and effects to give them the rich sound of finished recordings. Listening to the final drafts, Bruce thrilled to how live and real his one-man-plus-engineer band sounded. “Man, this record’s done,” he said. What’s more, the process had been easy, even relaxing. “It’s the most fun record I’ve ever made,” he said. Gesturing around the studio, his eyes lit up at the absence of other musicians, and the needs and expectations they always bring. “It’s like, I don’t have six other people throwing in their input. I can just do what I want and what I feel. And it sounds great. Why aren’t these the masters? These should be the masters.”

  When Landau came down to listen to the new music a few days later, he said virtually the same thing: “Let’s put it out like this!” But this time, hearing it come from a voice that had never actually been in the E Street Band, Bruce thought again. “Hold up, though,” he said. “I’ve got a band.” It was one thing to put out the Nebraska demos as solo recordings—everyone knew how distinctive those songs were and that their attempts to cut full-band hadn’t worked. But these songs, on the other hand, were band songs. No reason why the band couldn’t play them, except for that Bruce had beaten them to it. And maybe that wasn’t the right thing to do. “I probably oughta get the guys on this,” he said. But he still couldn’t stop thinking about how freeing the sessions had been. No disagreements, no arguments, no explanations required.

  Whether Bruce’s turn toward musical isolation stemmed from the intimate nature of the songs or the emotional stress that had inspired them (if his central relationship was in trouble, how could he confront the many relationships, needs, and opinions that would surely confront him when the band reconvened?) was less clear than the fact that he was raring to be a one-man band. So when Chuck Plotkin flew out to New Jersey to give it a listen, the coproducer’s first reaction—after nearly bursting into tears when the procession of fractured love songs made him realize, “Oh God, that boy’s in trouble”—was to suggest that at least a few of the songs might sound fuller with the actual E Street Band playing the parts. Bruce’s eyes flashed. “He’s pissed off. Really pissed,” Plotkin says. “And I asked as easygoing as possible, ‘I don’t know if we can improve it at all, but one thing that might be interesting would be trying some of these tunes live with the band. Like, we might get a different feel that we like, or we don’t.’ But he does have a temper, and it’s not hard for him to get pissed. It felt to me like he was maybe going to send me back to California ’til I got my mind right.” Instead Bruce came up with a scheme that was intended to give every band member a shot at contributing to the album. However, it succeeded only in making most of them feel even more wounded than the Bruce-only album might have done.

  They called the process “Beat the Demo.” Bruce invited each musician individually to Rumson to come up with parts on his instrument that improved upon what Bruce and Scott had already recorded on their own. “And if they played it better, we used their part,” explains Scott. “And if they didn’t play it better, we used Bruce’s original part. And that’s tough because Bruce always prefers the demo.”

  The way Garry Tallent remembers his sessions, the new way of doing business made for a long afternoon of organized humiliation. “One day they give me a call and ask me to come in and play bass. I’m presented with an album’s worth of material, and they’re like, ‘Play this, play this, play this!’” he says. “I’d never heard the songs before, but okay. I was like, ‘Give me five minutes to come up with something!’ But it was really, ‘Okay, here’s your chance.’ And the album comes out, and I’m on one cut, maybe? Turns out they liked what they already had on the demo. So it was demeaning.”

  The other musicians either made their peace with the process or kept their feelings to themselves. Unsurprisingly, the individual players’ aggravation correlated almost exactly with the amount of time they had been in the band. The original Asbury Park guys (Clemons, Federici, Tallent) were furious; the class of ’74 (Bittan and Weinberg) took it with a grain of salt (Weinberg: “The point is that it’s not the first solo record. They’re all solo records”), while latecomer Lofgren was happy to do any recording with Bruce. “Though I certainly understand why the other guys were upset,” the guitarist says. When the album was released, the vague credit to the E Street Band was little more than a gesture. The real story could be found in the individual credits, which revealed how sparse the band’s contributions actually were. Weinberg adds drums or percussion to eight of the twelve songs, while Federici plays organs on four, Tallent adds bass to a solitary tune, and Clemons’s saxophone doesn’t appear anywhere. His sole credit is as a voice in the background chorus on “When You’re Alone.”

  “My life had changed, I was married, experienced the ambivalence of relationships that had always been an undercurrent in my psychological life,” Bruce says. “So I was writing about that, and I was looking for another path where I could be of value to both my own self, my inner life, and the fans. And we had such a huge impact at the time, I didn’t want to take it for granted and take it down the road in the fashion we had been doing. I thought it was my responsibility to offer up something different to my fans and myself. Thought that was the deal you make with your fans, though it might not have been the deal I made with all of my fans, some of whom might have preferred something else.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW THE LANGUAGE OF PARTNERSHIP

  MIDWAY THROUGH THE ALBUM’S EDITING and mixing in the summer of 1987, Bruce came up with another song that seemed like a centerpiece for the work in progress. Built around the analogy of marriage as a carnival ride, it was bigger and glossier than the other songs he’d recorded that year. “Tunnel of Love” seemed a clear choice for a full-band treatment. But given the distinctive feel of the synth-driven tracks that Bruce and Scott had already created, Bruce stuck with the synthesizer-drum machine-and-many-handed-musician tactic for the album’s crowning track. “I drew out a road map, programming drums and assembling the percussion,” Scott says, “and then Bruce started to play through it” on his many instruments. “And he was like, ‘Wow, this is great!’ He’d never been freed up for his own creativity like that.” Still, the clash of different styles and sounds pulled at Bruce’s ear, guiding him to use four E Street Band members (Weinberg, Bittan, Lofgren, and Scialfa), along with the delighted screams of roller-coaster riders at the Point Pleasant Amusement Park.1

  Now titled Tunnel of Love, the album arrived in record stores on October 9, 1987, with a cover portrait showing the thirty-eight-year-old, married artist dressed up like a cowboy romantic, his black suit and white button-up set off by a silver-tipped bolo tie and the gleaming silver buckle on his black leather belt. The music inside was striking both for Bruce’s turn away from Born in the U.S.A.’s bombastics and for his clear-eyed portrayal of love’s struggles—which seemed particularly striking given his careerlong avoidance of what he had dismissed, only three years earlier, as “married music.”

  Taken as a follow-up to U.S.A. the new record struck critics as a daring move against expectations. Noting Bruce’s reputation for romanticizing his subjects, Rolling Stone critic Steve Pond began his celebratory review by declaring that on Tunnel, “he doesn’t even romanticize romance.” And while most critics also noted the dramatic shift away from Bruce’s previous albums’ full-volume blasts of celebration and fury, rock critic Jon Pareles of the New York Times described a recognizable parallel between the new record’s fraught love songs and the earlier albums’ stark analyses of opportunity and fair play in America: “[Now] he’s confronting another illusion: the myth of love as perfect bliss and panacea.”

  Although Bruce had consciously stepped away from recapturing the mass audience he’d
commanded in the mid-1980s, he didn’t exactly oppose the thought of making a splash with the new record. So he, Landau, and everyone at Columbia/CBS were pleased to see Tunnel holding its own in the market, claiming the throne of the bestselling album chart three weeks after its release, and selling more than three million copies in the United States within the first year. A trio of hit singles (“Brilliant Disguise,” which hit number 5; “Tunnel of Love,” number 9; “One Step Up,” number 13) were all accompanied by popular video clips on MTV. But even the additional millions of albums sold in the foreign market weren’t enough to hold back talk that America’s biggest rock ’n’ roll icon of the 1980s was already fading. Bruce’s mind was elsewhere.

  “I was always interested about how do I take this music and bring in adult concerns without losing its vitality, fun, and youthfulness. I’d thought about that since ’77, with Darkness. So ten years later, it manifests itself in a different way. So I thought, okay, we’re growing up together, me and my audience. And I took that idea seriously. So my usefulness as a thirty-eight-year-old is gonna be different than my usefulness as a twenty-seven-year old. And I was always looking for ways to be useful. That’s what mattered to me, and excited me, and how I thought I’d be of good service and be entertaining.”