“I think it was recorded as the largest concert ever in Europe,” Landau says. The show also underscored Bruce’s just-announced commitment to share the stage with Sting, Peter Gabriel, rising folk star Tracy Chapman, and Nigerian singer Youssou N’Dour, among others, on the globe-trotting twenty-date Human Rights Now! tour designed to help raise money and attention for Amnesty International. Bruce’s endorsement of the international rights organization came with a distinct political charge, given its connections to the world’s left-leaning groups and governments. The far-flung stops on the six-week tour—which visited Africa, Europe, Asia, India, and South, Central, and North Americas—stirred less controversy around the world than it did at the headquarters of CBS, where company president Walter Yetnikoff flew into a rage when he heard that Bruce had signed on with Amnesty.
Now Yetnikoff admits that his reaction had more to do with the extremes of his newly sober consciousness than anything else, but the strong supporter of the Israeli government harbored (and still harbors) a beef with Amnesty over its denunciations of the Jewish state’s human rights record. “So I called Landau and told him I was fucking pissed off, and he said, ‘You better not start this political stuff with Bruce.’” Landau offered to bring Amnesty chief Jack Healey to CBS headquarters so that they could all talk it over, but by then Yetnikoff stopped taking the manager’s calls. “Did I say I was right?” Yetnikoff says. “I was on my own farkakta ego trip. I wasn’t right, and I probably picked the wrong fight. But I had a lot of problems then.” Already on notice from CBS’s board of directors, the hot-wired executive lost even more support when Bruce and Landau publicly distanced themselves from him. Yetnikoff was finally escorted down the CBS execu-plank in 1990.
For Bruce and the E Street Band, the Amnesty tour made for an invigorating change of pace. The musicians liked the spirit of comradeship that bonded all the performers and their bands—in distinct contrast to the distance Bruce kept from the group throughout the Tunnel tour—and the visits to cities, nations, and continents they had never seen before, let alone performed in, were peak experiences for everyone. “That was my favorite tour,” Clarence Clemons said to me. “When we went to Africa, the whole audience was black. It was the first time I ever saw more than one black person at Bruce’s concerts. The people were all dressed up in bright yellows and reds, the jacaranda trees were blooming in purple, and I was like, Wow! Purple trees and no white people! This must be heaven!”
Bruce was having his own set of revelations too, and not all of them came from his own new sense of the globe and its people. Given the opportunity to spend quality time with similarly creative and successful stars, Bruce grew particularly close to Sting, with whom he shared a working-class background and a similarly troubled relationship with his father. “Bruce and I figured a way out,” Sting says. “But no matter how successful . . . you’re always hungry, which is a good thing too. To be complacent or even happy, that’s kind of a bovine concept, really. What’s interesting is that we both strive to understand what this fucking thing is.” Sting had cut his ties with the Police and scored back-to-back solo triumphs with The Dream of the Blue Turtles and . . . Nothing Like the Sun. Peter Gabriel had also scaled new creative and commercial heights since leaving Genesis in 1975. As the tour went on, and Bruce had a chance to watch Sting and his new band in action, the British musician could sense a growing fascination beaming his way. “Bruce would watch our band—Branford Marsalis and the amazing group of musicians—and it was obvious that Bruce was interested in doing that too, working with a different set of musicians.”
What Bruce saw affirmed his realization that the time had come for him to reestablish his own independence. From the shadows of the past, from the relationships that had always defined him, from the sights, sounds, and riffs that had shored up his existence since he was a boy.
• • •
Even with the Amnesty shows in the fall, the 1988 Tunnel touring cycle was the shortest post-album run Bruce had taken since the five-month Born to Run tour in 1975. Back home in mid-October, the weather turned chilly. The December issue of Esquire magazine featured an essay designed to deconstruct Bruce’s reputation on every conceivable level. Starting with a sardonic cover illustration portraying Bruce as a Catholic saint, anchored by a “Saint Boss” headline (subhead: “Has Fame Crucified Bruce Springsteen?”),3 the seven-thousand-plus-word story meandered through author John Lombardi’s lengthy disquisition on a new-to-him phenomenon he called “mass hip”—for example, popular culture—and then turned to an ill-reported account of Bruce’s life and career, culminating in his recounting of a concert marred by the fact that Lombardi’s backstage pass wasn’t powerful enough to get him into the band’s bathroom facilities. Redirected to the public bathrooms on the concourse by a pair of security guards, the author gained his revenge by gathering quotes from fans sitting in what seems to be the least articulate section of the arena. The story ended, inexplicably, with the thoughts of celebrity sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer. “Bruce is a national monument,” she proclaimed. “This is what America’s about!”
The story itself is less interesting than the vein of hostility it taps. The years of presenting himself as rock ’n’ roll’s last true believer, and being portrayed by the media as a paragon of moral and musical virtue, had elevated Bruce onto a platform too lofty to stand on. Love it or hate it, the music was beside the point. These were stories about image and public narrative. And while Bruce certainly contributed to, and benefited from, his superheroic aura, he also knew it was a trap. The food bank donations, the fund-raising for veterans, and the many tales of the dispossessed he’d written set a standard he couldn’t meet. If he’d given x amount of money to the cause, why did he stop there? How could he criticize any other tycoon’s selfishness when the size of Bruce’s own fortune could make the Monopoly man’s mustache droop? All this talk of faith and virtue from a guy caught on an Italian balcony not only without his pants but with a woman not his wife? And worse, how could Bruce stand up for the rights of working people when people who worked for Bruce said he’d violated their rights?
Wait. What?
In the midst of Lombardi’s polemic came actual news. Two of Bruce’s ex-employees, Doug Sutphin and Mike Batlan, had filed a lawsuit alleging, among other things, that Springsteen Inc. had violated federal labor laws governing the payment of overtime wages. Still, the actionable parts of the filing were less eye opening than the allegations about Bruce’s penchant for fining employees who disappointed him—such as when Sutphin was dunned $100 for touching Nils Lofgren’s guitar, while Batlan claimed he was docked more than $300 when a storm swept away one of Bruce’s canoes. Also, the litigants noted, house manager Obie Dziedzic had to cough up her own hard-earned cash for arriving late with Bruce’s preshow soup and sandwich. The withholding of the royal soup! Not an actionable offense, to be sure, but Bruce’s most precious fine would be exacted in the court of public opinion.
Batlan had resigned and Sutphin was shown the door after the U.S.A. tour, both walking out with six-figure severance packages that added up to about two years of their $50,000-plus salaries. Still, both departures had seemed friendly at the time, with, as Bruce recalled, “hugs and handshakes all around.” Everyone went on with his life for the next two years, until Batlan and Sutphin filed their complaint in Monmouth County civil court. Whether they intended the case to go to court or hoped to compel Bruce to buy his way out of a publicity nightmare is unclear. Either way, it was difficult to ignore the emotional undergirding to the complaint, which dated back to Batlan’s joining the crew in 1973, when Bruce and the band still earned $35 a week, and Mike Appel had to bounce checks to keep their vans running. The twenty-four-year-old Bruce talked in grand terms in those days, often declaring that everyone in his organization was part of the family, and that once he hit it big, he would make sure everyone else got dealt into his good fortune too. Whether such talk can or should be taken as legally binding fifteen years later is
an interesting question.
Still, some members of Bruce’s staff sympathized with Batlan’s sense of injustice. For while Bruce had come home from the Born in the U.S.A. tour toting an astronomical sum of money, twelve-year veteran Batlan didn’t have enough cash to make a down payment for a simple family home. When he went directly to Bruce to remind him of his age-old promise, the once openhanded boss shrugged him off. Or so Batlan said. But when ex-drummer Vini Lopez, who got the sack years before any serious money rolled in, was called to give a deposition about his own memories of Bruce’s verbal assurances, he quickly refuted Batlan’s claim. “Give me a fuckin’ break,” he says. “And don’t ask me any questions [in court] ’cause I’ll tell you the damn answers.”
Settled eventually for an undisclosed amount rumored to be in the neighborhood of $325,000, the lawsuit left a bitter taste in Bruce’s mouth. “I worked with these two people for a long time, and I thought I’d really done the right thing,” he told David Hepworth in 1992. “Then about a year later, bang!” Continuing the thought with Rolling Stone’s Jim Henke that same year, Bruce noted that the majority of his crew members tended to stay with the organization for years, even decades. “But it only takes one disgruntled or unhappy person, and that’s what everyone wants to hear. The drum starts getting beat . . . but outside of all that . . . if you spend a long time with someone and there’s a very fundamental misunderstanding, well, you feel bad about it.”
Sutphin’s and Batlan’s postlawsuit thoughts, feelings, and/or regrets were (and remain) impossible to know: as part of their $325,000 payoff, they signed away their right to ever utter a public syllable about the case, Bruce, or his related enterprises “until the end of time,” as the legal documents were rumored to say.
• • •
With the rush of 1987’s album, 1988’s tour, and the supercharged early days of his romance with Patti behind him, Bruce once again found himself adrift. Once again, the day-to-day pleasures of ordinary life didn’t register in his consciousness. And yet again, the same bony fingers tugged him back into the netherworld. “I’d made a lot of plans, but when we got home, I just kind of spun off for a while,” Bruce told Henke. An attempt to settle into the Rumson house dissolved in the spectral presence of Julianne and other figments of the recent past. Bruce and Patti tried an apartment in New York, but the close quarters made the small-town boy feel cramped: not enough room to move, no car at his doorstep, and way too much traffic to navigate even if he did keep a car in the city. “I just got lost. That lasted for about a year,” he said. “Somewhere between realization and actualization, I slipped between the cracks. I was in a lot of fear. And I was just holding out. I made life generally unpleasant. So at some point, Patti and I just said, ‘Hell, let’s go out to LA.’”
Settling into a new house near the top of the Hollywood Hills, Bruce girded himself for another shot at domestic life. “I knew it was going to be challenging for me because I had so much personal license,” he says. “I didn’t even know the language of a partnership. I didn’t know basic behaviors, of, like, if you’re out and gone, it’s nice to call. I hadn’t called anyone for twenty years. So a million little things were hard to adjust to. I’m sure it’s like that for a lot of people. But I pursued it, so I suppose I was ready, as ready as you can be. I had pursued it since my early thirties, really.” One thing that made it easier, he continues, was that Patti had also spent her entire adult life in the rock ’n’ roll world. “She was an outsider also; the domestic thing was unusual for her too. So maybe that’s why it worked. It was a little strange for the two of us, and we thought, ‘How are we going to invent this for the two of us?’”
Eventually Bruce felt the southland breeze softening his impenetrable core. Perched above the city of illusion and reinvention, the bonds of the past no longer seemed quite so constricting.
“People always came west to re-find themselves or to re-create themselves in some fashion,” he told David Hepworth. “Mostly in some distorted way, but the raw material is here.” But when it became apparent to Bruce—and, perhaps more importantly, to Patti—that his psychic scars were not going to be burned off by the Southern California sun, he rededicated himself to psychotherapy. “I knew I’d had to spend eight hours a day with a guitar to learn how to play it,” he told Jim Henke. “And now I had to put in that kind of time just to find my place again.” Moving beyond the symptoms of his discomfort, Bruce dove in as deep as he could go. “I crashed into myself and saw a lot of myself as I really was. I questioned all my motivations. Why am I writing what I’m writing? Why am I saying what I’m saying? Am I bullshitting? Am I just trying to be the most popular guy in town? I questioned everything I’d ever done, and it was good.”
Progress came slowly, but it came. Back in New Jersey for the summer of 1989, Bruce made the rounds of clubs, sitting in with whatever friends, acquaintances, or just-made friends happened to be onstage. The summer hijinks came to a climax on September 23, when Bruce celebrated his fortieth birthday at his friend Tim McLoone’s Rum Runner bar just up the coast in Sea Bright. With a house full of friends and the entire E Street Band—including Steve Van Zandt—around him on the bandstand, Bruce faced his latest landmark birthday with far more aplomb than he had ten years earlier. He led the band through a long list of favorite oldies and rock ’n’ roll oddities, and then led into a wild run at “Glory Days” by shaking his fist at the passing years. “I dedicate this song to, to, to me! I may be forty years old, but goddamn it, I’m still handsome!” Bruce hit the opening chords, Van Zandt and Lofgren followed, with Bittan and Federici joining in behind them, and they were all in lockstep, with Bruce leading the way back to the glories of the past and the natural yearning to re-create moments that can never be relived. “Oh, they’ll pass you by,” they all sang together. “In the wink of a young girl’s eye . . . glory days.”
TWENTY-TWO
GET THE HOSTILITY OUT NOW, I CAN TAKE IT
ON OCTOBER 18, 1989, BRUCE sat down with his address book and a task he’d both feared and fantasized about for most of the decade: breaking up the E Street Band. “I think we got into a rut in our relationships, that had something to do with it also,” he says. “Relationships got a little muddy, through codependence, or whatever. Probably that aggravated everyone a little bit. I needed to take a break, do some other things, probably play with some other musicians, which I hadn’t done in a long time.
“So I called the guys up and talked to them as best I could. I never looked at it as the band being done or kaput or finished. But it was a call that said, ‘I’m gonna do something else, and you’re not gonna be a part of it for a while.’ And that was very difficult for the guys and me.” The suspicions that Max Weinberg and the others felt at that last show on the two-year, world-conquering Born in the U.S.A. tour turned out to be exactly right.
“I just didn’t know where to take the band next,” Bruce reflects. “It seemed like we’d reached an apex of what we were trying to do and say.”
Some found it easier to accept than others. Tallent, for one, noticed that absence of finality in what Bruce had to say. “He never said he was breaking up the band,” the bassist says. “He was like, ‘Just so you know, for the next little while I’ll be doing some other things, and you’re free to do other things.’ It was a courtesy call to let you know you were free to go down any pathways you found appealing. So it seemed like a very nice, gracious call.” Lofgren, who had started his sideman career working with the always unpredictable Neil Young, didn’t blink. “You gotta understand that this guy had spent his whole life playing with the same seven people,” he says. “No matter how good they are, you want to play with other people, try some different things.”
Weinberg had seen it coming. “You would have had to be completely blind not to notice there were major changes coming here,” he says. But the news was still “unrelentingly depressing,” if only because just a few weeks earlier Bruce had mentioned, in his usual offhand way, that he’
d been writing new songs and expected to call the band together to start recording in January 1990. But then Weinberg opened Rolling Stone and learned that Bruce had already returned to the studio to record a rollicking “Viva Las Vegas” for an Elvis Presley tribute album with a studio full of high-end LA session players. On the phone, Bruce urged him not to take it personally. “It’s just something I feel I’ve got to do artistically.” Sensing the shock in the drummer’s voice, Bruce did what he could to put him more at ease. “I know it’s going to hurt,” he said. “But someday you’ll realize it was the right thing.”
Clarence Clemons got the call in Japan, where he, along with Lofgren, was touring with Ringo Starr’s first All Starr Band. As Clemons remembered, Bruce sounded so casual, he assumed he was being called back to E Street. “I picked up the phone and heard him say, ‘Hey, Big Man!’ I said, ‘Hey, Boss!’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s all over.’ I said, ‘Oh, uh, okay,’ because I thought he meant the Ringo tour was over, and I had to come back home to go into the studio or start another tour.” The sax player said he’d get home and check in as soon as possible, but then Bruce set him straight. “He said, ‘Naw, naw, naw. I’m breaking up the band.’” Bruce recalls talking to Clemons for a while. “I had the kid gloves on delivering what I knew would be very bad news.” But Clemons was outside of himself by then, juggling his surprise and grief with a sudden urge to reduce his hotel room to ruins. So many years on the road, so much sacrifice, the thousands of hours spent waiting for Bruce to hear just the right sound from the recording studio speakers. “And I’m thinking, ‘It’s all for this? My whole life dedicated to this band, this situation, this man, and what he believes in, then I’m out of town and I get a fucking phone call?’” Fortunately, he was in the company of Ringo Starr, who had experienced his own traumatic breakup when the Beatles imploded in 1970. And it wasn’t long before Clemons simply accepted the change for what it was:
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