Bruce became increasingly explicit about his politics in the 1990s, appearing at the fund-raisers for the left-wing Christic Institute in 1990, and then serving as a central face for the opposition to California’s Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot measure intended to bar illegal immigrants from hospitals, schools, and other social services.3 His biggest hit single of the decade, “Streets of Philadelphia,” made Bruce the first heterosexual rock star to give voice to a gay person’s inner feelings. The “American Skin” brouhaha, meanwhile, didn’t make much of a ripple outside New York City, where most citizens who didn’t have an immediate connection to the NYPD or City Hall saw it more as another chapter in the psychodrama of the Giuliani administration than an indication that one of New York’s and New Jersey’s most long-standing local heroes had revealed himself as a cop-hating radical.
So while Bruce’s sensibility flowed largely from New Deal liberalism, his working-class idealism came with bedrock principles on the virtues of work, family, faith, and community. None of which would be considered partisan had the collapse of American liberalism in the late 1970s and 1980s not included a large-scale redefinition of mainstream values as being conservative. That Bruce neither accepted nor acknowledged the politicization of traditional values could be seen in his own work ethic and the symbolic communities he formed with the E Street Band and the fans who bought his records and attended his shows. And even when his songs decried ruling-class greed and the fraying of the social safety net, they still came bristling with flags, work, veterans, faith, and the rock-solid foundation of home and family. “He does not attempt to hide his politics,” Christopher Borick and David Rosenwasser wrote in “Springsteen’s Right Side: A Liberal Icon’s Conservatism,” a paper presented at Monmouth University’s Bruce Springsteen symposium in 2009. “He’s got a Democratic ideology, a Republican vocabulary, and a Populist delivery system.”
Just as he’d synthesized gospel, rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, folk, jazz, and carnival music into a sound that echoed the clamor of the nation, Bruce’s particular magic came from his ability to trace the connections that hold the world together, even when it seems on the verge of flying apart.
• • •
For weeks the church bells in central New Jersey rang steadily, each heralding another funeral. Firefighters and police officers, bankers, stockbrokers, insurance executives. Also secretaries, support staff, the passengers on the airplanes bound for San Francisco and Los Angeles. The local newspapers ran thick with obituaries. Intent on acknowledging the lives of all three thousand–plus victims, the New York Times launched “Portraits of Grief,” a series of mini-profiles describing each person as their family and friends knew them. The rabid Giants fan, the committed gardener, the prize-winning tango dancer, and so on. Bruce read them all and found it stunning when his name started turning up. The memorial service for Jeremy Glick, one of the passengers who attempted to liberate United Flight 93 from the hijackers, ended with a high-volume sing-along to “Born in the U.S.A.” New Jersey native Thomas Bowden was remembered as being “deeply, openly, and emotionally loyal to Bruce Springsteen.” The profile of insurance executive Jim Berger came under the heading “A Fan of the Boss,” noting, along with his love for his sons and the New York Yankees, a penchant for singing “Thunder Road” to anyone who would, or couldn’t avoid being made to, listen. “Every time you rode in Jim’s car, Bruce was on, whether you liked it or not,” his wife, Suzanne, said.
Bruce wrote down the names of his fans’ survivors and often reached out to them. He called on the telephone, usually unannounced, to pay his respects and, if it seemed appropriate, learn more about the lives of the lost. Whether he considered the calls a tribute to the dead, a generosity to their survivors, or part of his method to create an even larger tribute seemed unclear, even to Bruce.4 But for Stacey Farrelly, whose husband, Joe, served as a New York Fire Department captain, hearing the voice, and the concern, of a man her husband had admired felt like a small blessing. “After I got off the phone with him, the world just felt a little smaller,” she told Time’s Josh Tyrangiel a few months later. “I got through Joe’s memorial and a good month and a half on that call.”
Looking back a few months later, Bruce was careful to point out that he hadn’t set out to make an album about September 11. He’d been working on new songs for several months before the tragedy, already thinking of making a new record with the band. When the writing came more slowly than he’d hoped (he suffered a crisis of confidence, having not made a real rock ’n’ roll album since Lucky Town in late 1991), Bruce teamed up again with Pittsburgh bar rocker Joe Grushecky, cowriting “Another Thin Line,” “Code of Silence,” and another half dozen songs before the horrors of 9/11 consumed his thoughts. With the ruins of the World Trade Center still smoldering in New York, mourning banners strung across so many New Jersey streets,5 and President George W. Bush already setting the stage for a war with Afghanistan’s terrorist-supporting Taliban government, Bruce’s muse clicked back into gear. “Into the Fire,” a blues-and-gospel tune that evoked both the sadness of the rescue workers’ deaths and the spiritual beauty of their sacrifice, came just after the attacks and had been his first choice for the America: A Tribute to Heroes telethon until he realized it needed more work and adapted “My City of Ruins” instead. “You’re Missing,” a metronomic ballad adapted from the 1994 outtake “Missing,” arrived soon after.
Other songs came on their heels, and after laying down a few demos with Toby Scott, Bruce moved into the recording process. After nearly thirty years of coproducing his own albums, twenty-five years with various combinations of Landau, Scott, Chuck Plotkin, and Steve Van Zandt, it seemed like a good time for him to both find a new producer and step back from his own position in the control room. A series of recommendations led to Brendan O’Brien, an Atlanta-based producer-mixer-multi-instrumentalist known for his work with Pearl Jam, Paul Westerberg, Stone Temple Pilots, and many others. Bruce invited O’Brien up to listen to demos in his own New Jersey studio, and they got to work immediately.
“He played ‘You’re Missing,’” O’Brien says, “and I remember saying, ‘Your bridge is actually your chorus; you should top the chorus and rearrange it. I can play it for you on the piano right now.’” Bruce listened to O’Brien’s revisions and then picked up his guitar to record a new demo of the song. He seemed impressed at the time. But as O’Brien found out later, in an interview that Bruce gave to Rolling Stone, his prospective client was less than thrilled. “I’d immediately set to messing with his songs, and he didn’t like it. In fact, he was pissed off.” No matter, Bruce liked what he heard enough to offer O’Brien the job.
When the sessions started in O’Brien’s Atlanta studio, Bruce kept his focus on being the artist while his new producer handled everything else. Starting with the band’s four-piece rhythm section—Bruce, Garry Tallent, Max Weinberg, and Roy Bittan—O’Brien led them quickly through the recording of a basic track for “Into the Fire.” Leaving so many other parts for overdubs certainly marked a departure in the band’s recording style. But it also allowed O’Brien, Bruce, and the core band to produce a dense foundation upon which the soloists and vocalists could later overdub their parts. If the overdub process lost some of the excitement of the live, in-studio feel that Bruce and the band had used for so long, it would also gain clarity and precision. “There were a lot of guys, and a lot of personalities,” O’Brien says. “I wasn’t sure how close they were anymore; it was all very hush-hush.” Nevertheless, the sessions ran quickly and productively. Clemons, Federici, Lofgren, and Patti came down to put on their parts while O’Brien brought in a string section, and when they listened to the playbacks, Bruce marveled at how different yet perfectly right the re-formed E Street Band sounded in O’Brien’s studio. “The band sounded like the band, but not like I’d heard them before, and that was what I was looking for,” Bruce told Uncut magazine’s Adam Sweeting. “I wanted it to be like, this is the way we sound right now.
”
The band members liked what they heard too. Mostly. “The tracks sounded cool immediately and were experimental. We spent time trying to get different sounds,” Tallent says. “People came in to do their parts individually, so there wasn’t a lot of camaraderie. But it was all efficient. The record’s a bit murkier than something I’d have produced, and it’s a departure. But it’s still Bruce and the E Street Band.” Van Zandt, Bittan, Weinberg, and Clemons felt the same way. “Brendan’s style has a sensibility that’s a bit different,” says Van Zandt. “The tracks are good. They really are. And Bruce was a lot more relaxed than he used to be. But he was very involved.”
“I don’t remember ever talking to Bruce about giving the album a 9/11 theme,” O’Brien says. “When he was around, we just worked and figured it out as we went on.” Indeed, only a few songs addressed the September 11 terrorist attacks in specific terms. “Into the Fire” and “The Rising” evoked the crumbling World Trade Center—witnessing the horror of the moment and finding inspiration, even transcendence, in the courage of the fire fighters, rescue workers, and the many who risked everything to help other victims. “Nothing Man,” “You’re Missing,” “Mary’s Place,” and “Empty Sky” gave voice to the survivors trying to build new lives or maintain a connection to what they lost beyond the poison-belching wreckage. The identity of the attackers and any analysis of their motives and morals are unexplored. Instead the songs stay in the personal realm, sketching a modern variation of Romeo and Juliet in the divide between the Western world and the Middle East in “Worlds Apart,” and the deadly temptations encountered by a suicide bomber and a grief-stricken spouse in “Paradise.” Other songs—“Lonesome Day,” “Further On (Up the Road),” “Countin’ On a Miracle,” “The Fuse”—underscored the personal connections that make life worth living, and how their absence can push someone to believe that a particular ideology or conflict can reduce the value of another human life until it seems worthless.
• • •
With the album, titled The Rising, finished and ready for a late-July 2002 release, Bruce and Landau set to laying the groundwork to make sure it got the attention they felt it deserved. That it was Bruce’s first record with the E Street Band since Born in the U.S.A. would have been big enough news on its own. But as Bruce’s response to 9/11—and arguably the first major work of popular art to address the meaning and ongoing impact of the terrorist attacks—The Rising carried even more cultural significance. It certainly had intense meaning for Bruce. Speaking at an advance listening party with the Columbia/Sony executives, he made certain they knew how far he was willing to go to get the new record across to the largest possible audience. “It ain’t business,” he said. “It’s personal.” As Columbia president Don Ienner recalls, the phrase became a rallying cry for the company. “The next day we had T-shirts printed up with ‘The Rising’ on it, and his quote ‘It Ain’t Business, It’s Personal,’” he says. “It was one of those galvanizing moments of Bruce with the company. We didn’t give a shit about radio, or anything. We just went out on it.”
Bruce led the charge, diving headlong into the highest-profile sales campaign he’d ever signed on for, prefacing his new album’s release with a series of in-depth interviews in major magazines and newspapers around the world. Then he sat for a multipart interview with ABC-TV’s Ted Koppel which aired several times on his late-night news show, Nightline, during the week the new album came out. The Rising’s actual release date, Tuesday, July 30, kicked off like a kind of national holiday, starting with NBC’s Today show broadcasting from Asbury Park. With hosts Matt Lauer and Katie Couric stationed on the boardwalk and reporters filing reports from other locations in town, the two-hour news program revolved around Convention Hall, where Bruce and the band performed a handful of Rising songs, along with an oldie or two, for an audience of 2,500 contest winners. The publicity tour continued the next day when Bruce and the band performed two songs on David Letterman’s Late Show.6 The Rising concert tour opened with a single show at the Continental Airlines Arena on August 7. An instant sellout—as any single show would be, given that they had sold out a fifteen-date run at the same venue in 1999—the crazed atmosphere around the arena served as the exclamation point to weeks of album publicity that were now paying off handsomely. First-week sales of The Rising rose above a half million copies, propelling it instantly to the top slot on Billboard’s Top 200 albums list. It stayed there for three weeks, fast on its way to selling better than any of Bruce’s albums since Tunnel of Love in 1987.
Weighing in at fifteen songs and nearly seventy-five minutes long, The Rising hit the ground with the weight of a monument. Back on the cover of Time, an unshaven Bruce peered past a red, white, and blue headline, “Reborn in the USA: How Bruce Springsteen Reached Out to 9/11 Survivors and Turned America’s Anguish Into Art.” Writing in USA Today, Edna Gundersen dismissed the post-9/11 anthems produced by country musician Toby Keith and Paul McCartney as “flag-waving bombast,” before asserting that “it took populist rocker Bruce Springsteen to get it right.” So right, in fact, that New York Times film critic A. O. Scott, writing in the online magazine Slate, declared him “the poet laureate of 9/11.” Traditionally conservative publications, including the National Review and the New York Post (the latter of which played a lead role in sparking the “American Skin” controversy) published rave reviews.7 Not every critic fell head over heels, particularly when they stepped past the album’s emotional ballast to point out that it might have gained power by losing a song or two—“Let’s Be Friends (Skin to Skin)” and “Further On (Up the Road)” being prime candidates—and what the Village Voice’s Keith Harris called the “eternal vagueness” of the lyrics.8 Nevertheless, the album and its creator had already been cast in triumph. And as the rocket-fast first legs of the 2002 Rising tour (forty-six shows in forty-six American cities, and then seven shows in seven European cities, leaving many markets sorely underserved) led into a long march through 2003 that concluded with thirty-three stadium shows, including ten nights at Giants Stadium and ending with three nights at Shea Stadium in Queens. While the E Street reunion tour of 1999–2000 succeeded in part due to the nostalgia of fans eager to hear the old songs, the 2002–2003 shows drew their power from Bruce’s most recent work. A segment of the crowd came to hear The Rising songs in the same way that Born in the U.S.A. drew so many unfamiliar faces in the mid-1980s. By the end of the final encore at Shea Stadium on October 4, 2003, the Rising tour was even more successful than the reunion tour had been, grossing more than $221 million in 120 concerts.
• • •
When Bruce sat in front of his TV and saw the bombs pounding the streets of Baghdad, Iraq, in March 2003, when the troops flooded over the border and the United States of America was at war, one thought echoed. “I knew that after we invaded Iraq I was going to be involved in the [2004] election,” he told Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner. “I felt we had been misled. I felt [the George W. Bush administration] had been fundamentally dishonest and had frightened and manipulated the American people into war . . . And I don’t think it has made America safer.”
Once Bruce would have spun his anger into music, perhaps into a small-scale narrative such as “Seeds,” which deconstructed and then reconstructed Reagan-era economics into the story of an unemployed itinerant oil worker forced to spend a frigid night with his family in the cramped shelter of his car. But as 2003 marched into the presidential election of 2004, he felt compelled to expand his influence beyond the limits of rock ’n’ roll music. “Sitting on the sidelines would be a betrayal of the ideas I’d written about for a long time,” he told Wenner. “Not getting involved, just sort of maintaining my silence or being coy about it in some way . . . wasn’t going to work this time out. I felt that it was a very clear historical moment.”
It had all been sown in the panicked weeks following September 11. And while the quick mobilization of American forces against Afghanistan’s Taliban government made sense in l
ight of its cooperative relationship with the Al Qaeda terrorists, the creation and passage of the Patriot Act, which strengthened government powers (particularly regarding law enforcement) at the expense of civil liberties, infuriated Bruce. When the Bush administration’s military ambitions shifted away from Afghanistan, which had aided America’s attackers, to Iraq, which had not,9 the specter of the attacks all but silenced debate and made dissent seem akin to sedition. With his teenage son exactly the age Bruce had been when young men from Freehold were first being shipped to combat in Vietnam, his decision had already been made. If George W. Bush’s administration could leverage 9/11 into a wide array of unrelated points on the neoconservative’s to-do list, he could take whatever authority he’d earned with The Rising and push in the opposite direction. Most of the stadium shows in the summer of 2003 paused in mid-encore while Bruce made a speech (“my public service message,” he calls them) urging the audience to pay close attention to what their government might be doing in the name of national security. “Playing with the truth during wartime has been a part of both Democratic and Republican administrations in the past,” he said. “Demanding accountability from our leaders and taking our time to search out the truth . . . that’s the American way.”
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