Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  So came “Streets of Philadelphia,” and with Toby Scott in his new studio next door to the Rumson house, Bruce experimented with a hard-rock arrangement. Then he slowed it down into a slower rock rhythm. Shifting back toward the contemporary feel Bruce tried to achieve during the Human Touch sessions, the piece evolved into a spare urban ballad. Built on a gently funky drum loop, with synthesizer and organ chords and a background chorus of “lah-lah-lah-lahs,” the mournful lyric is as simply stated as the few notes that comprise the melody. If the chords rise for the song’s bridge, neither they, nor the song’s narrator, are headed anywhere heavenly: “Ain’t no angel gonna greet me,” he sings blankly. “It’s just you and I, my friend.”

  Released the day before Christmas 1993, Demme’s film Philadelphia, which starred Tom Hanks as an AIDS-infected lawyer who sues his firm after being fired for suffering from such a stigmatized illness, became a critical and commercial smash—and, in the eyes of gay activists, a crucial step in the campaign to combat prejudice. Although the voting members of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences bypassed the film in its Best Picture and Best Director categories, Philadelphia earned nominations for five Academy Awards, including two separate nods for Best Original Song: both “Streets of Philadelphia” and Neil Young’s contribution to the film, the equally moving “Philadelphia.” The film eventually won Hanks his first Best Actor trophy. And when they opened the Original Song envelope, the winner was . . . Bruce Springsteen. The lifelong movie buff accepted his trophy with a brief speech, thanked the movie people for “inviting me to your party,” and then carted it home to his parents. When he placed the Oscar on the kitchen table in front of Doug Springsteen, his father wept with pride. Then he repeated the phrase he’d first said when his son called to say he’d signed a contract with Columbia Records: “I’m never going to tell anybody what to do ever again.”

  Columbia president Don Ienner, on the other hand, got paid for telling people what to do. Or, in the case of Jon Landau and Bruce Springsteen, convincing them to cooperate when his instincts told him he had a product that could live up to the company’s full-court promotion treatment. So when the airplay for “Streets of Philadelphia” spiked after the Academy Awards, he met with Landau to talk about releasing Bruce’s Oscar-winning song as a single. Ten years earlier, the answer would have been obvious. By the mid-nineties, however, the structure of the pop music industry had fractured into subcategories that rarely overlapped with one another. “[The song] didn’t fit anything on the radio at the time,” Ienner says. “That video of Bruce walking down the street1 wasn’t exactly like anything on MTV then.” When Landau worried about the single falling through the cracks (“This record can’t come and go to number ninety-nine on the charts!”), Ienner admitted that he had no guarantees. “But wouldn’t it be a horrible shame if we didn’t try?” he countered. “If we just made it not get to where it needed to get because we’re scared it won’t chart?” That argument made an impact on Landau.

  The manager gave his go-ahead, and though the category-defying song waded against the currents of radio formats, beats-per-minute restrictions, and the offbeat look of its video, Ienner and his sales force kept working. “It was up, it was down, it was going to be a hit, it wasn’t going to be a hit,” he says. “It was just wild.” Their work paid off: upon its February 1994 release, “Streets of Philadelphia” blew up into a worldwide smash, crowning the charts in eight countries, peaking at number 9 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles list, and selling more than a half million copies in the United States alone.

  With “Streets of Philadelphia” on the charts, Bruce returned to his studio in Los Angeles.2 Armed with a stack of premade drum loop CDs, he passed most of the year working on a new collection of synthesizer-based songs. Working with occasional help from Zach Alford, Shane Fontayne, and especially Tommy Sims (who coproduced a few of the songs), Bruce’s burst of experimental work went much further than what he had done earlier in the decade. Much of what emerged, Toby Scott remembers, shared an undulating, trancelike sound unified by what he describes as “a pulsating underbeat.” Most of the twenty or twenty-five songs they finished have never been heard or even named in public. The two exceptions, an early version of “Secret Garden” found on an extended CD single released in late 1995, and “Missing,” which became a part of the soundtrack to the 1995 Sean Penn–directed movie The Crossing Guard, allow for a fragment of insight: the insistent percussion, drifting veils of synthesizer, a chukka-chukka rhythm guitar filtered through a wah-wah effect, and, as the song builds to a close, a metallic guitar solo spidering up through the layers.

  The 1994 sessions ran into the week before Christmas, when Bruce, Patti, and the kids went back to New Jersey to spend the holidays with their families. Scott went back to his place in Whitefish, Montana, where he was still musing on the snow-heavy mountains on January 5 when a ringing telephone produced Landau’s voice. “Tobe!” he crowed. “Y’know all that stuff we were working on? Well, we’re done. We’re moving on to something else.” That’s when Scott started taking notes. “Look, I’ve got the E Street Band coming to New York on Monday. The guys are all ready, so I need you to find a studio, get us in there, and get back here to record.”

  When Landau rang off, Scott looked at the calendar on his desk. It was Thursday. He had until Monday. Four days. He got out his book of New York recording studios and started dialing.

  • • •

  The plan started with Bruce’s suspicion that the synth-driven album he’d spent most of 1994 creating could push his core audience beyond the brink of its connection to him. “I felt like I needed to reconnect around the basics, around our history,” he says in retrospect. Putting out a greatest-hits album—an ace that he and Landau had kept up their sleeves since the Born in the U.S.A. era—was an obvious plan. But the prospect of reuniting the E Street Band to record some new material3 only took shape as the project launched. “Really, the band for me at that time was a way of restabilizing,” Bruce explains. “Of letting people know that I honored their feelings, and these things that mattered a great deal to them also mattered to me. It was just a way of staying in touch.”

  Which felt particularly important to a veteran artist who couldn’t abide the prospect of being dismissed as a figure from yesteryear. “You’re having a conversation with your audience,” he says. “If you lose the thread of that conversation, you lose your audience. And when people say so-and-so don’t make any good records anymore, or people talk about favorite bands from whom they haven’t bought any records of in the past fifteen years, I always feel that the reason is they lost the thread of that conversation and the desire to make that conversation keep growing.” With the success of “Streets of Philadelphia” shoring up his currency, the external timing seemed as good as it would ever be. So more than six years after the E Street Band’s last scheduled gig, and eleven years since they last entered a studio as a unit, Bruce sat down to write a song or two for the band to record.

  When Clemons got the call at his house in San Francisco, he flew back to New York so quickly he didn’t have time to cancel the birthday party his friends had planned for one of the city’s largest, flashiest nightclubs. “I’m sure there are some people still walking around San Francisco looking for that party,” he said to me in 2011. More than fifteen years later, his face still lit up at the thought. “I was so ready to go.”

  But while the other band members felt just as excited to play with Bruce, their enthusiasm came with equal amounts of confusion, hurt, and resentment. All had struggled to build their own careers in the post–E Street era. Some found it easier than others at first, but a half dozen years later, they had all adjusted to the new reality. Clemons recorded and played with his own band; Max Weinberg was leading the band on NBC’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien; Roy Bittan produced artists and played sessions in Los Angeles, while Garry Tallent did the same in Nashville. Danny Federici pursued a career in jazz, and Nils Lofgren went back to hi
s own career, playing with Ringo Starr on two of his world tours and writing music for TV series. The fact that this invitation had come with such clearly stated limits—don’t expect it to stretch into a full-length new album or a tour or anything like that, they were told—didn’t help.

  “The wound was still open,” Bittan says. “And so here you are: you get a call to come in. And like always, it’s abrupt. ‘Come tomorrow.’ Or maybe we had some notice. But the question was, well, what for? What are we doing? And as usual, our thing is that we don’t ask, we just do. And are happy to do it.” Only now the prospect of coming back together came with something like post-traumatic stress disorder. Even Weinberg, by then a fixture on network television, still reeled from the band’s dismissal. “I’ve never gotten over the breakup,” he says.4 Still, he could sympathize with the emotional complexities Bruce faced. “I think it was a very distasteful thing for Bruce to have to do. And sometimes when you have to do things that are hard like that, it gets the better of you. So [the reunion] wasn’t a pleasant occurrence, just the whole way it was done.”

  Watching from the control room, coproducer Chuck Plotkin knew exactly where, and how large, the unacknowledged elephant in the room stood. “They’re trying to figure out what happened here,” he says. “‘Did we get bad all of the sudden?’ Everyone’s trying to figure out what Bruce is thinking. But the E Street Band is not the most socially comfortable group of people on the face of the earth. And I learned a tremendous amount from Bruce about the power of not talking.”

  Bruce’s attempt to write a song that captured the essence of the E Street Band’s history had none of the lion-hearted fraternity he’d written into “No Surrender” a decade earlier. Instead “Blood Brothers” describes onetime Kings of the Mountain reduced by time and experience into ordinary stiffs, so consumed by daily tasks that long-ago proclamations of faith and friendship ring as hollow as “a fool’s joke.” Speaking directly about the series of telephone calls he’d just made to his erstwhile band and friends, Bruce sounds doubtful, at best, about what lay ahead. Why had he decided to reunite the band? Why did it even matter? Not exactly a stirring call to arms. What it was, he says, was honest. “It captured the feelings of the moment. I still had ambivalent feelings about the band at that time.”

  Still, to observers, and to the cameras of Ernie Fritz, the filmmaker Jon Landau Management had hired to shoot the first day of recording for publicity and historical purposes,5 it looked like it could have been a scene from the River sessions. With Landau, Plotkin, and Scott at their usual stations in the control room and Bruce at the center of the studio floor describing a new song to the E Street Band,6 all of whom sat scribbling chord changes, riffs, and feels, it could have been a return to the source of modern American rock ’n’ roll.

  So then they took up their instruments, waited for Bruce to count to four and then tiptoed into “Blood Brothers” ’s first verse, led by acoustic guitar and piano. They picked it up a notch when the organ and brushed drums came in to greet the light guitar stings Lofgren added, and then leaned hard into the final verse to hurl the song across the finish line. And maybe it was all a little too hard. When the next takes still didn’t work, Bruce came back with a completely different version of the song, rewritten into an electric, minor-key rocker with a shouted backwoods melody and lyrics that spent more time on hard, dirty roads than in the blood oaths of young rock ’n’ rollers. When that didn’t work, they moved on. As ever, Bruce had more than a few new songs to try out.

  Next came the semi-apocalyptic love song “Waiting on the End of the World” and the spookily erotic “Secret Garden.” Then came a heart-wringing soul crooner called “Back in Your Arms,” a nearly note-for-note cover of the Los Angeles folk-punk band the Havalinas’ “High Hopes”; a weak-kneed party song called “Without You”; and a fresh go at the wonderful 1982 outtake “This Hard Land.” As filmmaker Ernie Fritz recorded it all for posterity, he noticed how carefully all these long-bonded friends addressed one another. “If these guys were pissed, they weren’t showing it,” he says. “Everyone was on their best behavior. It was more like, ‘Hey! It’s nice to see ya!’ Period. They were all walking on eggshells but happy to be doing so.”

  Eventually Bruce came up with an arrangement of “Blood Brothers” that suited both him and Landau; a return to the original structure, only hushed to the point where, except for Clemon’s gentle sax licks, the band’s contributions barely peek from behind Bruce’s own guitar, harmonica, and whispery voice. With the recording sessions completed by mid-January, the gang returned to their lives until February 21, when they reconvened in New York to shoot a live video (for the cameras of Philadelphia director Jonathan Demme) for the hits package’s lead single, “Murder Incorporated.”7 Set up on the cozy stage at the Tramps nightclub in New York, the band crowded together to run through a half dozen live takes for the cameras and then rewarded the crowd’s patience by playing a rough but spirited miniset of thirteen E Street favorites, including “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “Prove It All Night,” “Thunder Road,” and “Badlands,” all worked out in the space of a short break between Demme’s video shoots.

  Although the Greatest Hits album came out at the end of February 1995, the not-quite-reunited band went on hiatus for the month of March. Bruce celebrated the start of the break by winning three Grammy Awards (Best Rock Song, Best Male Rock Vocal Performance, and Song of the Year) for “Streets of Philadelphia.” Then he returned to New York to reunite with the E Streeters to prepare for a long day of work on the fifth, which began with a group performance of “Murder Incorporated” on David Letterman’s Late Show, followed by a move to the Sony Music Studios soundstage, where they prepared to tape the E Street Band’s first rehearsed concert since the end of the Amnesty International tour in October 1988. It would also be the last engagement planned for the minireunion, and with no hints that anything else might come in the future backstage nerves ran more raw than usual. No one mentioned it, of course. Not until Bruce and the band started their walk from the dressing rooms to the stage and the already cheering mob on the other side.

  Somewhere in midstroll, Bruce noticed the pattern on Federici’s shirt and concluded that he didn’t like it. So like any bandleader would do, he turned to his keyboardist and asked him to run back and grab a new one. Federici’s face went abruptly red. “No!” he barked. “I love this shirt! I’m wearing this shirt! So what are you gonna do: fire me?” Bruce stiffened and snarled right back, which was when everyone else, including Nils Lofgren, figured the time had come to be somewhere else, anywhere else, and right away. “Look, there was justifiable tension,” Lofgren says. “But no one had a gun, no one’s throwing fists. It was a philosophical argument.” Which, as they all knew, had nearly nothing to do with Federici’s shirt. “It was a silly shirt,” Tallent says. “We all knew the parameters of what to wear. So I think he changed, but everyone was on edge.”

  The Greatest Hits album, a single disc collection featuring fourteen songs that were either hit singles (such as “Hungry Heart” and “Dancing in the Dark”) or nonhits that had taken on the career-defining weight of a hit (“Thunder Road,” “The River”), plus one outtake (“Murder Incorporated”), a rerecorded outtake (“This Hard Land”), and the two new E Street songs (“Blood Brothers” and “Secret Garden”), received only middling reviews.8 Yet it topped album charts in a dozen countries, selling more than ten million copies. Invited to play a significant role in the opening festivities of the Cleveland-based Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in September, Bruce gathered the band (with Steve Van Zandt on board) to perform a few of their own songs while also serving as the backup band to Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. They gathered at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, where the problems began when Lewis heard that the show would open with Bruce and the band playing with Berry, whom “the Killer” considered a bitter rival. “So Jerry Lee Lewis was in a very bad mood,” Landau says. “He had taken offense to something and was very tense.�
� For whatever reasons, the sour energy took root in the E Street Band. “That was one of the only bad shows I’ve ever done with anybody, let alone the E Street Band,” Van Zandt says. “Nobody was into it, and it was just so weird. I didn’t get the feeling Bruce wanted to be there, and it was all uncomfortable. Everyone felt like ‘What am I doing here?’ And even now I’m not sure why. Too soon, I guess.”

  • • •

  Back home in Los Angeles, Bruce pulled out his motorcycle and headed off for one of his regular trips into the desert. “It takes about thirty minutes to get to the foothills of the San Gabriels. Once you’re there, you go up the hills, and the views are incredible,” he says. “If you have a couple of days, you can go over them and down the eastern side of the foothills and ride all those roads down through there, which are still relatively empty. I got to know people just in different little rest stops and restaurants, and would occasionally go to visit.”

  When longtime pal and motorcycle buddy Matty Delia came to visit with his brother Tony, they all mounted up and took off together. “We were at some old motel, some four-corner desert town on the California border, just sitting around and met some guy. We ended up talking about his brother, who died in a motorcycle accident.” That tragedy, like so many of the similar stories Bruce heard or intuited, was far from random. At night came the dusty armadas of migrant workers on the hunt for jobs, and not so far in the distance, the nickel-and-dime drug runners. An entire sub-rosa economy whirring away on the wrong end of the law, powered largely by people compelled to do whatever it took to get by. “The stories were just floating around, just in the air,” recalls Bruce. “Clashing cultures and people trying to fit in, accommodating and conforming to these norms.”