With so many songs in the backlog, and so many of them at least as good as the tunes that had already found their way onto his albums, Bruce took a long listen to his musical history, hearing the sound of his own development: from the solitary folksinger following John Hammond’s instructions in mid-1972 to the grandiose visions of Born to Run up through Born in the U.S.A. and beyond—right up through the early-nineties sessions, the cast-off 1994 album, and more. Bruce was particularly struck by the The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle outtakes, from the songs’ many cantilevered sections to the hell-bent way that Vini Lopez, Clarence Clemons, David Sancious, Garry Tallent, and Danny Federici played them. When an instrumental studio take of “Thundercrack” came up, his jaw dropped. “Oh geez, listen to that!” he said to Scott.
The original plan for the compilation album was to stick with the original rough mixes of the songs. But as Bruce’s enthusiasm for the project grew in 1998, so did his ambitions for how the material should be presented. What began as a simple collection of old roughs became a full-on production effort, with three sets of engineers and mixers working in three separate studios. Scott worked in the semipermanent studio Bruce had set up in the eighteenth-century farmhouse that stood on the edge of his land, a mobile recording unit parked nearby; and they had Bob Clearmountain’s Mix This! studios in Los Angeles, which could send and receive files via an ISDN telephone line. Bruce oversaw all of the operations, checking in every afternoon to hear the day’s work and either approve it or tell them how he wanted the songs revised. And when he heard a tune’s original take lacking a certain something—a horn section, a background vocal, or even a lead vocal—he took the tape into a recording studio and opened the tracks for improvements.
They did the most dramatic work on “Thundercrack,” which had only a patchy lead vocal and no backing vocals from 1973. Intent on re-creating the track as it would have sounded in the old days, Bruce called Lopez and invited him over for dinner and then a reunion session with himself, Federici, and Clemons, where they all sang the parts they had performed onstage so many years earlier. “I just did my parts that I used to do. And he was amazed that I still knew all that shit,” Lopez says. “But I don’t forget that kind of stuff. So we did the vocals, and it was fun. I can still hit those high notes.” Bruce summoned his 1973 voice to fill in the lead vocal, and when they were done, it sounded just about perfect. The only song they rerecorded completely turned out to be “The Promise,” which Bruce decided to add very late in the album’s progress.
Although they had a wide variety of recordings and arrangements of the song to choose from, nothing they had on hand seemed to do the trick. And when Bruce heard how convoluted a process they’d have to weather in order to prepare the original tapes to work with the modern technology, he shook his head and took a seat at the studio’s piano. He played through the chords once or twice and then looked up at Scott. “Toby, turn the thing on.” Two takes later he stood up. “Okay, that’s good. Put it on the record.”1
Named Tracks, to play off the recording studio term for individual songs while also referring to Bruce’s liner-note description of it as “an alternate path to some of the destinations I traveled to on my records,” the album turned into a sixty-six-song behemoth: a four-disc boxed set with a richly illustrated booklet of lyrics and song credits. Sort of, but not quite in chronological order, the discs divided Bruce’s twenty-five-year recording career into four eras.
The first disc begins with “Mary Queen of Arkansas” and three other solo performances from his studio audition for John Hammond; stops briefly at Max’s Kansas City for a live acoustic number; and then skips ahead to a handful of studio takes of live favorites (“Santa Ana,” “Seaside Bar Song,” “Zero and Blind Terry,” and “Thundercrack”) recorded during the The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle sessions in mid-1973. It ends with a pair of outtakes from Born to Run (“Linda Let Me Be the One” and “So Young and in Love”), and a scattering of leftovers from the Darkness on the Edge of Town sessions in 1977 and 1978.
The second disc starts with a long look at the The River sessions of 1979 and 19802 and then dips into the voluminous Born in the U.S.A. outtake collection. U.S.A. material makes up the rest of disc two and all but disc three’s last four songs, which come from the Tunnel of Love era. The fourth disc essays his solo era in the 1990s, with one leftover (“Back in Your Arms”) from the “Blood Brothers” sessions with the E Street Band.
Released in the fall of 1998, Tracks didn’t become the hit that the live box set had been a dozen years earlier, although it did cast a spell on listeners and fans who recalled again how powerful Bruce’s music sounded in the hands of the E Street Band. No surprise, perhaps, that his own full-body submersion into his lost works infused Bruce with a new appreciation for his old musical companions. “I remember it was Rosh Hashanah [in September 1998], and he asked me to come over,” Max Weinberg says. “I was on my way to my mother’s house, and he said he’d been working on the Tracks thing and had fallen in love with the E Street Band all over again.” When Weinberg came over to listen, they compared memories of the songs until Bruce mused lightly about the future. “He sort of felt me out about touring. I told him I had a bit of a time-scheduling complication,3 but I’d love to.” The musing didn’t end there.
Later in the fall Bruce called Roy Bittan to gauge his interest in a reunion tour. Bittan, while riding high on his coproduction of and playing on alt-country singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams’s breakthrough album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, was more than interested. “It was a great band, headed by an amazing singer-songwriter-performer,” the pianist says. “Dylan and Elvis, all in one. And how often do you see something like that?” Bruce had other questions too. What did Bittan think of bringing Steve Van Zandt back into the fold?
Well, everyone knew Steve belonged in the band. And as Bittan knew, the doubt in Bruce’s voice came from somewhere far deeper than his concern that Steve and Nils Lofgren would get in each other’s way. “He always has ambivalence. He was maybe fearful about putting it back together and taking a step back instead of forward,” Bittan says. “I think that he had a lot of concerns.”
“I just wasn’t sure, you know,” Bruce says. “I was worried it would be a nostalgic exercise, and I wouldn’t be comfortable with it.” He was even less comfortable with the emotional currents that would surely run through every step of a full-scale reunion. According to Landau, “We’d had conversations about doing a band tour, and Bruce suggested booking ten shows, because he was unsure of the chemistry. I said that is something we can’t do, because if we announce we’re doing ten or fifteen shows, then our true fans become a factor, and what are we saying to them? What are we saying to the band members?” Bruce couldn’t argue with that.
When he made his first call to Clarence Clemons, he made certain to appeal to the Big Man’s sense of majesty. “He called and said, ‘Big Man! I need you!’ ” Clemons told me in 2011. “I expected it. It had to happen. He took that other band out there, and it sucked compared to what I was used to. I thought I brought something to Bruce that he didn’t have, or really didn’t have ’til I came. I don’t mean to blow my horn, but it was just how it was, the way it was supposed to be.”
Still, Bruce’s ongoing insecurities seemed to play out in the calls made to band members by one of the accountants in his financial manager’s office, where such contracts were often negotiated. At least two of them—Garry Tallent and Danny Federici—hadn’t heard directly from Bruce, so the first they heard of the proposed reunion came in the form of a telephone call from an accountant who seemed to be reading a script that began by emphasizing how gracious Bruce was being in including the E Street Band in his new tour. It ended with a lowball offer that, according to several members of the band, bumped them back to what they earned during The River tours in 1980 and 1981. The musicians’ pay had increased significantly during the Born in the U.S.A. tours, and ebbed on the Tunnel of Love tours
only in accordance with the smaller scale of the shows and the brevity of the itinerary. Tallent, for one, felt more than a little slighted. “After all that time, to get a call from the accountant telling us we should be thankful we were being allowed to do this? I was insulted,” he says. “I said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ ” Tallent called Weinberg, who had already gotten the same call from Federici. What the hell was this supposed to mean? they both wanted to know. What are we supposed to do about it? Weinberg suggested keeping calm and seeing what happened next. “I agreed with them that it seemed incompatible with the status of the band, the abilities of the band, and the reunion factor,” he says. “But on the other hand, that’s what managers do. They have a constituency of one, their client, so they’re out for the best deal for their client, if they can get away with it. And I don’t blame anyone for trying.”
Neither did Bruce, as Tallent discovered the next day. “Bruce called, and I guess he was driving in a convertible, I don’t know. There was all this wind, and I could barely understand what he was saying, but he was definitely laughing, going ‘Ha-ha-ha, that’s right! Stick it to ’em! That’s how it’s supposed to work! Go for it!’ Something like that. I didn’t quite understand it, but I took it to mean, okay, he has no problems with me negotiating. So we did, and obviously it worked out.” But even after the band convened for rehearsals in February 1999, Bruce’s doubts remained.
“So now we’ve got the band rehearsing, so it was done. We were doing this, unless he really . . .” Landau doesn’t finish the sentence, if only because the nightmare scenario he had imagined seemed to be taking shape when a rattled Bruce called after the first few days. The old connections weren’t there, he fretted. Something important was missing—some spark or electric current or something—so maybe this was all a huge mistake, and . . .
“So,” Landau continues, “I said to him, ‘Look, I think it’s going to work out; that you’re going to make the connections. Because the way I look at it is that you’ll be performing Bruce Springsteen songs with Bruce Springsteen’s band to Bruce Springsteen’s audience.” His client still wasn’t sure. Not until they decided to end one rehearsal by giving a handful of fans a sneak peek. “We let fifty people in that were hanging out in the front of the theater in Asbury, and then, boom, everything became electric suddenly,” Bruce recalls. “And I never worried about it again.”
Once Bruce’s nerves settled, the company of his oldest and closest collaborators eased a trace of the grief that had been growing in him since 1997, when it became clear that Doug Springsteen would soon lose his yearslong struggles with emphysema and a weakened heart. (Doug had undergone a quadruple-bypass operation several years earlier.) “He was sick, we knew it was coming,” Bruce says. “The medicine that was helping one part of him was hurting some other part of him. Eventually there’s no window of tolerance, and you just run out of time.” And while Bruce never quite felt as if he had breached the walls around his father’s spirit, there was no escaping the warmth in the old man’s eyes and in the grasp of his weathered hands. “One generation before that, he would have probably died like his parents did, in their sixties. But he lived to see all the grandkids. They knew him, and that’s very important.”
Doug’s ailing heart ebbed to silence on April 26, 1998, and his grieving family moved quickly from there, transporting his body back home to Freehold, where he was laid out in Freeman Funeral Home for a late-night viewing for family and friends. At the funeral at St. Rose of Lima, only a small clutch of family and local friends filled the pews. When the eulogies began they heard glimpses of a warm-spirited son, husband, father, and cousin, and a quiet but friendly friend and classmate who never had a harsh word for anyone. This was the man who emerged whenever the fog lifted enough to grant him a precious few hours or days of clear vision. “Dougie, you’re sleeping at last, the struggle and horrors past,” his cousin Glenn Cashion said in his eulogy. “Wearing a captain’s headdress and a smile, sleeping at last.” Cashion concluded with one last thought: “He loved warmly, he was warmly loved.”
“It rained for many, many days after my father died,” Bruce says. “It truly rained for weeks. I didn’t want to be inside, for some reason. I spent a lot of time outside. I sort of made my way through it, but that was difficult. A big loss.”
• • •
The tour rehearsals dovetailed nicely with the mid-March festivities for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, into which Bruce would be inducted in his first qualifying year.4 No surprise there—Bruce had not only helped launch the organization’s Cleveland edifice in that star-packed (if star-crossed) stadium show in 1995 and been a regular at the annual ceremony’s climactic jam sessions, but he’d also spent his entire career being the vision of mainstream rock ’n’ roll’s most satisfying character: the outsider/rebel with the ambition to bend the mainstream to his will, the vision to balance art and commercialism, and the common sense to do it from within the confines of a major record label, selling one hundred million albums and filling every significant concert venue, repeatedly, all over the world. As with Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan, Bruce’s ascension was a foregone conclusion.
Inducted by U2 lead singer Bono—whose band rivaled Bruce’s masterful balance of art, protest, and big-league commerce, and whose persona straddled grandiosity and humility—Bruce delivered a funny but heartfelt tribute to all the major totems in his life and work: his mother, of course, for buying him the Kent guitar they both knew she couldn’t afford; his father for giving him so much to write about; Tex and Marion Vinyard for giving him and the other Castiles a place to play rock ’n’ roll; Tinker West for helping him turn pro; and Mike Appel for launching him into the big leagues. Then came Landau, of course, and every member of the E Street Band, including David Sancious, Vini Lopez, and Ernest “Boom” Carter, the latter two of whom took up Bruce’s invitation to attend the festivities as his guests. When the time came for Bruce to take up his guitar and perform the traditional miniset of greatest hits, the revived E Street Band came with two weeks of rehearsals at its back. When Bruce caught Lofgren’s eye in midsong, their faces broke into silly grins. He was even more giddy clowning with Clemons during “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” and when Bruce found a moment to shout “C’mon, Steve!” at Van Zandt, his once-and-future consigliere took on a beatific shine: the look of a man who had finally reclaimed the musical job he was born to do.
Heading straight to Europe to launch the tour, Bruce and the band started out with a pair of riotous arena shows in Barcelona, Spain, on April 9 and 10, and then made straight for Munich en route to what would be a three-month journey through most of the major cities on the continent and in the British Isles. After more than a decade’s absence, the Bruce and E Street lineup sparked joyous receptions everywhere they played. Particularly when they got to the night’s climactic song, which Bruce introduced by promising that this reunion was not a onetime deal. “This is the rededication of our band, the rebirth of our band,” he proclaimed at the end of each night. “We’re here to serve you, so . . . we’re gonna leave you tonight with a new song. This is called ‘Land of Hope and Dreams.’”
An avalanche of drums resolving into a soul-shaking gospel stomp. A chiming, two-chord guitar riff and then an airy organ line, joined quickly by an entirely different piano melody and then an even sharper melodic riff from Van Zandt’s mandolin. Then Bruce, his voice taut with conviction: “Grab your ticket and your suitcase / Thunder’s rolling down this track / Well, you don’t know where you’re going now, but you know you won’t be back . . .” Then a prime Clarence Clemons saxophone solo and a chorus that describes both the essence of faith and the heart of the place Bruce’s songs had yearned for, questioned the existence of, and kept right on chasing. Written for the tour and adapted in part from Woody Guthrie’s “This Train Is Bound for Glory” with a touch of “Mystery Train” and the DNA of too many gospel songs to count, “Hope and Dreams” takes up the theme of
faith as a force as sure and mighty as a steam engine. Only, in direct contrast to Guthrie’s vision, Bruce’s train opens its doors to everyone in sight: saints, sinners, losers, winners, whores, and gamblers, the powerful and the forsaken, the good, the bad, and the truly egregious. All welcome where “Dreams will not be thwarted / [and] faith is rewarded.”
To launch the American tour in mid-July, Bruce and the band started with an unprecedented fifteen-night stand in the Meadowlands basketball arena, then called Continental Airlines Arena. All 308,000 tickets had sold out within twenty-four hours, and the homeland fans flooded the arena like pilgrims returning to a Mecca that had been barred for more than a decade. From the moment the houselights snapped off each night, the emotional energy in the air made Bruce’s comic proselytizing seem something less than ridiculous. Because even when he put his full Jimmy Swaggart into claiming that he’d come “to resuscitate you, regenerate you, reconfiscate you, reindoctrinate you, resexualate you, rededicate you, reliberate you with the power and the promise . . . with the majesty, the mystery, and the ministry of rock ’n’ roll!” the twenty thousand faces turned up to see him let loose a roar from so deep in their chests it didn’t seem anything like a joke.
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