Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  4According to CBS promotions man Paul Rappaport, Landau set up the club show to stir up buzz that the Forum shows had failed to ignite. “We need to do something to blow this town apart,” he told Rappaport. “We didn’t dent anything.” Once Landau booked the Roxy for the July 7 show, Rappaport helped set up a live broadcast on then dominant KMET-FM, and performed a variety of other tasks that did indeed give Bruce’s Los Angeles visit the electricity a single Forum show didn’t. Sitting in a bar chair just before dawn the morning after the show, Rappaport was approached by Bruce, who said he’d heard how much work the publicist had done to make the show happen. “You have no idea how hard I’m trying to make this go,” he said, talking about his career. “I can’t thank you enough for helping us do this.” At which point, Rappaport recalls, the musician took his left hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed it.

  5Unreleased by Bruce, “Because the Night” was familiar to audiences due to the Patti Smith Group’s hit (#13) version, released that same spring.

  6Which seems pretty luxe until you realize that the vehicle’s large and not particularly quiet engine rumbled and roared scant inches beneath the bedroom’s floor. The place vibrated when the driver switched on the engine, and when he shifted into high gear, the noise was overwhelming. How Bruce managed to sleep in there is anyone’s guess. And attempting anything like thoughtful contemplation, let alone relaxation, seems even more far fetched. But after playing high volume rock ’n’ roll for three-plus hours night after night, maybe he didn’t even notice the sound.

  7Clemons also swore that at a stop in Atlanta that year Bruce responded to the sight of fans streaming down the aisles by bolting outside and sprinting to the theater’s front door to order them back to their seats. “We ain’t done yet!” Which sounded apocryphal even as he said it, but Clemons insisted it was true.

  8Many of which are collected in her book, Springsteen Access All Areas, Universe/St. Martin’s, 2000.

  9Then winning enormous praise for his breakthrough performance as the titular character in The Buddy Holly Story, and thus years away from his latter-day career as a cheerful, if occasionally dangerous, Hollywood weirdo.

  Chapter 17

  1Who had to leave in order to fulfill previously made obligations, although he would later return to help mix some songs.

  2Kicking off a career that would include engineering and production work with Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Sting, Dire Straits, and many others.

  3The board members themselves, plus Nash’s partners David Crosby and Stephen Stills, the Doobie Brothers, Carly Simon, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Chaka Khan, Raydio, Gil Scott-Heron, Jesse Colin Young, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and others.

  4Referring to the 1960s mantra that no young person should trust anyone over thirty.

  5Browne says he remembers consoling Hyser, but not the part about having his arms around her. “But she was fine. Anyone would want to put their arms around her. She was ridiculously fine.”

  6Performed with Browne, who had a hit with his 1977 cover of Maurice and the Zodiacs’ 1960 chart topper.

  7The Lynn Goldsmith incident had been edited out of “Quarter to Three” long before Bruce saw a frame of the film, for obvious length, discretion, and nobody-wants-to-see-that-again issues.

  8See also the lyric sheet photo that traces the song’s inspiration to the real Cadillac Ranch, a long line of half-buried Cadillacs made by the conceptual art group known as Ant Farm (Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez, and Doug Michels) installed just outside Amarillo, Texas, in 1974.

  Chapter 18

  1“I don’t know what you thought about what happened last night,” he told the audience at Arizona State University’s arena the next night. “But I thought it was pretty frightening.”

  2Bruce would end the River tour with all the profits he hadn’t seen after Born to Run and the mammoth Darkness tours.

  3Later adapted into a hit movie starring Tom Cruise.

  4A lot of the Asbury Park musicians took their draft-beating instructions from Billy Chinnock, who turned his own successful strategy into an easy-to-follow formula for friends facing the same ordeal.

  5As Jon Landau recalls, the River shows grew even longer than the Darkness shows had been. Eventually Bruce realized he was losing control of himself. “I remember there was one night in LA when it was 1:20 a.m. when he came off the stage,” Landau says. “I remember him reflecting, ‘I’m going too far.’ We didn’t break one o’clock much after that.”

  6In 1957 Starkweather, with Fugate in tow, went on a bloody rampage from Nebraska to Wyoming, killing eleven people he happened to come across.

  7Why Bruce would choose to store a drenched tape player on his living room sofa is anyone’s guess. He was a young guy living alone, and it’s too absurd a detail to not be true.

  8It actually took a few years from Nebraska’s release for Morello to absorb the album. But his experience is still emblematic, particularly among fans who didn’t connect with the more commercial work Bruce would take on in the mid-1980s.

  9A man whose many careers include motorcycle shop owner, equipment parts rental shop owner, something that seems to involve booking and/or producing rock shows at nightclubs, and who knows what all else. Bruce and Delia have been fast friends for decades.

  10Glory Days, Pantheon, 1987.

  Chapter 19

  1Bruce shakes off direct questions about his achievements in the weight room, but when a visitor volunteers his own maximum bench press from the same era, Bruce chuckles happily. “Ah, I had ya beat! Not by much, though.”

  2Written originally for the R&B singer Donna Summer, who specialized in disco hits that sounded a lot like rock ’n’ roll songs.

  3Although Landau’s feeling for the music was also bone deep, just as Van Zandt could be a canny manager. If anything, their skills matched too closely.

  4As of the summer of 2011, Van Zandt says that Bruce still hasn’t said a word to him about the inspiration for “Bobby Jean.” “People say it’s about me; I don’t know that it is,” the guitarist says. “If it is, it’s nice, y’know. But we’ve never talked about it, to this day.”

  5The first home Bruce managed to buy in his home state, purchased with some of his proceeds from the River tour.

  6According to pop music historian Stephen Pitalo’s Golden Age of Music Video website, a large part of the problem with Stein’s video came from a disagreement Bruce had with cinematographer Daniel Pearl about whether he should be in a gauzy light or the sheer white beams Pearl thought would accentuate the star’s new musculature. Pearl talked Bruce into trying the harder light for a take or two, but Bruce didn’t feel comfortable, so after just a few takes, he went back to the green room for a break, and then kept going to the parking lot, his car, and then home. “He didn’t say a word to anybody,” Pearl told Pitalo. “He’s just out the door.” They tried to make do with what they had.

  7Heavy on the synth drums and looped vocal tracks, and also with a new background chorus and other added elements.

  8Full disclosure: also the professional home of the author from 1996 until 2000.

  9Best known for his work as a staff writer and editor for Rolling Stone during its peak in the 1970s, and then for his series of well-received books on country music.

  10Dressed in his customary bow tie and a double-breasted blazer.

  11Unlike that prancing, heavily rouged, and tongue-lolling Prince, for instance.

  12That feel-good war movie whose three main characters end up (a) crippled for life, (b) dead by suicide, and (c) leading a chorus of “God Bless America” in a bar.

  13Given Will’s observation that Bruce “is called the ‘blue-collar troubadour’ ” referred directly, if without attribution, to People magazine’s just-published story, it seems probable that Will lifted his interpretation of “Born in the U.S.A.”-as-grand-affirmation from Chet Flippo, too.

  Chapter 20

  1By this point, it wasn’t surprising that Bruce’s wedding would
be such enormous news—grist for another People magazine cover story and hundreds of front-page stories in newspapers all over the world. The Chicago Tribune thought it so significant that it devoted an editorial to praising the rocker’s nuptials as yet another sign of his steadfast American values.

  2Literally the same car driven by the goddess-like Suzanne Somers in the 1973 film American Graffiti.

  3Despite Jones’s famous warning that all performers attending the session must “check your egos at the door,” it proved breathtaking to most that Bruce had piloted his own (rented) car to the studio, found his own parking space, and then walked into the event without an entourage in attendance. Richie, on the other hand, took the opportunity to observe loudly that if the A&M Studios exploded with so many fabulous stars inside, 1970s icon John Denver would be back on top of the charts, ha-ha. The jape became all the more amusing when you knew that Denver had actually asked to be included in the USA for Africa project, only to be turned away because he was no longer “cool.” That line of reasoning doesn’t explain the presence of Kenny Rogers or the guy from Huey Lewis and the News who wasn’t Huey Lewis. Arguably, Denver had never been cool, even when he was a chart-topper in the seventies. But Denver’s charitable works exceeded Richie’s by a vast degree, which made the snickering all the more odious.

  4No fewer than eight of U.S.A.’s twelve songs—which struck some listeners as overkill, particularly given the wealth of older and more offbeat songs that didn’t make the cut.

  5Although not heard on the album, this declaration of communal integration can be heard on the video made for the live “Born to Run” track.

  6And yet there was plenty of room for fan discussion and dissent: along with the songs that didn’t make the cut (“Incident on 57th Street”! “Jungleland”!), you could grumble about the editing choices (What happened to the entire middle part of the “Backstreets” they used [the Roxy, July 7, 1978]? Why did they censor Bruce’s midsong rap during “Raise Your Hand” when he urged radio listeners to grab their volume knobs and “turn the motherfucker up as loud as it’ll go”?) A big rap in the middle of “Fire,” also taken from that same Roxy show, vanished as well. And so on and so forth.

  7As of early 2012, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Live/1975–85 was credited with sales of more than thirteen million units. Whether that number is based on the mideighties calibration of one box = five vinyl albums is unclear, given the CD format’s primacy. Decisions of this nature come out of the murky realm where accounting merges with shamanism. Or perhaps magical realism.

  8Which did not include the fanatics who snapped up the single to play the live “Incident on 57th Street” on its B-side.

  9Duncan, who hadn’t seen Bruce in a decade or more, was getting the stern please-leave-Bruce-alone talk from gym owner Tony Dunphy, Bruce’s trainer, when the star came running up, wrapped his old pal in a hug, and took him off to the locker room to reminisce for an hour.

  10First written and recorded as a high-stepping rockabilly number.

  11An image adapted from the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter, starring Robert Mit-chum as a self-designated preacher who moonlights as a serial killer.

  Chapter 21

  1Recorded by Scott and an assistant, who spent the majority of a summer’s day recruiting and coaching the park’s customers to please direct their reactions to the microphones they’d see jutting up from the ground at the coaster’s final turn. The Schiffer family named in the song’s credits were the park’s owners and operators. This didn’t mark the first use of ambient sound effects in Bruce’s recording career. When the sound of crickets drifted through an open window into the basic track of “County Fair” several years earlier, Bruce asked Scott to take a recorder into the brush to capture the sound at closer range. The released version of the song (which emerged on the bonus disc of The Essential Bruce Springsteen in 2003) mixes the accidental crickets with the painstakingly recorded ones.

  2They’re most famous now for serving in the Max Weinberg 7 on NBC’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien from 1993 until the group became the Tonight Show band during O’Brien’s brief 2009 tenure in the eleven thirty slot. Weinberg left the outfit when O’Brien moved to cable TV in 2010; the horns stayed with the show.

  3Unprinted answer to its own question: not yet, but keep reading.

  Chapter 22

  1By then part of Japan’s media behemoth Sony.

  2No offense to that guy, but the years have sapped a lot of memories.

  3Particularly relevant after the April 29 rehearsal had been stopped by the rioting that tore through Los Angeles in the wake of the not-guilty verdicts handed down to the LA police officers who had been videotaped kicking and beating an unarmed African-American motorist named Rodney King.

  4Note to wiseguys: yes, the actual show began with “Better Days.” But we’re talking about the broadcast.

  Chapter 23

  1On the tumbledown streets of south Philadelphia, singing live (amid the ambient sounds of the city, barking dogs and all) to the camera-and-microphone rig driving alongside him.

  2Actually the temporary home studio Toby Scott put together in a rented home in Bel Air, made necessary when the powerful January 17, 1994, Northridge earthquake did enough structural damage to the Springsteen home to send the family to the guest house Bruce had been using for the Thrill Hill West studios.

  3The industry standard for greatest-hits packages in the 1990s, largely to inspire serious fans who already owned the original albums to buy the compilation too.

  4He says this in the fall of 2011, more than a dozen years after Bruce reconvened the band for good (albeit in his off-and-on-when-it-feels-right-to-me way) and months before the start of the long touring cycle Bruce had all but guaranteed would begin in 2012.

  5Landau soon decided to keep Fritz and his crew around through the end of the sessions.

  6Minus Scialfa, who wasn’t scheduled to turn up until the vocal sessions later.

  7Another also-ran from the 1982 Born in the U.S.A. sessions, finally released as Bruce’s tribute to the nameless fan who had attended dozens of shows during the eighties holding up the same “Murder, Inc.” sign.

  8Which seems odd, considering the amount of adoration so many of the same writers had larded upon the work in its original release. But the critics had their reasons. Some complained that the absence of pre–“Born to Run” songs distorted the collection’s use as a historical overview, while it didn’t quite work as a greatest hits either, given that some of Bruce’s biggest Born in the U.S.A.–era hits had been rejected too.

  9Particularly the title track and “Youngstown,” both of which became showstoppers in subsequent full-band arrangements.

  10Joad peaked at number 11 on the Top 200, his first album to miss the Top 5 since The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle in 1973.

  Chapter 24

  1The song would turn up as a bonus track on the single-disc boildown of the box set 18 Tracks.

  2With one callback to the 1977 Darkness sessions and a preview of the 1982 Born in the U.S.A. sessions, for some thematic reason I can’t figure out.

  3Given his full-time job as Conan O’Brien’s Late Night bandleader.

  4Exactly twenty-five years since the 1973 release of Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., since the ’99 festivities marked the induction of the 1998 class.

  5A particularly striking detail, the New York Times pointed out, given that 90-plus percent of all NYPD officers serve entire careers without unholstering their guns, let alone shooting at anyone.

  6Speaking now, Noah hastens to say that the piece was a blog entry, and thus closer to a random thought than the carefully researched and considered analyses he publishes in other venues. Noah also notes that he’s a longtime Springsteen fan and hadn’t intended to condemn him. “I don’t see anything wrong with achieving a political end with a song,” Noah says. “I think political engagement is a good thing.”

  7Lucente apologized alm
ost instantly when his words hit the media, although he never explained the meaning or derivation of the term floating fag.

  Chapter 25

  1Iovine founded Interscope Records in the early 1990s; by 2001, he was the chairman of Interscope-Geffen-A+M.

  2Consisting of Steve Van Zandt, Clarence Clemons, Patti, and longtime friends Lisa Lowell and Soozie Tyrell, and original Bruce Springsteen Band singer Delores Holmes and her daughter Layonne.

  3Prop 187 won handily at the voting box but never took effect due to a series of appeals, restraining orders, a lower-court ruling that the law was unconstitutional, and then the election of a Democratic governor, Gray Davis, who in 1999 dropped the state’s appeal of the lower court’s ruling.

  4He still shies away from discussing the calls seemingly out of respect for the survivors and his desire to not be portrayed as a saint or, conversely, a kind of pop-culture carrion.

  5Monmouth County lost more than 150 citizens on September 11.

  6“The Rising” was broadcast on July 31, while “Lonesome Day” turned up on the show the next night.

  7Although the NR’s critic, Stanley Kurtz, wagged a finger at the absence of stars and stripes, explicitly patriotic statements, or support of the war in Afghanistan. “Something fundamental is missing,” he complained.

  8“You can wander through The Rising for countless stanzas without tripping over a single concrete object,” Harris wrote. And he’s got a point, although stripping away details in favor of a universality was a considered decision on Bruce’s part.

  9Despite strong Bush administration assurances to the contrary, which turned out to be just as accurate as the administration’s guarantees that Saddam Hussein’s government possessed weapons of mass destruction, which is to say, not at all.