10The album was completed without the help of the decade’s regular producer, Brendan O’Brien, largely because off-the-cuff recordings of folk songs were something other than his thing. “He knew I wasn’t going to like it, and he didn’t want to hear about it from me,” O’Brien says. “He was absolutely correct. I just said, ‘Dude, thumbs up to you. Don’t worry about me.’”
11Based in part on Obama’s connection to a fairly radical African-American minister named Jeremiah Wright.
Chapter 26
1His first run-in with Bruce came in 1972, when Bruce, playing with Van Zandt’s Sundance Blues Band, played Magovern’s Captain’s Garter club in Neptune, New Jersey. They drew a decent crowd, earned a great response, and went to the club owner thinking he’d be delighted to book them regularly. Instead Magovern fired them. For all the crowd’s size and enthusiasm, they didn’t buy enough drinks. And, Magovern said, in case they hadn’t noticed, selling drinks was what he did for a living.
2Despite being one of the most underappreciated, even hated, songs in Bruce’s catalog, “Queen” is actually really cool, particularly when you consider the creative process Bruce described to Mark Hagen: “I hadn’t been in one in a while, and I thought this place is spectacular . . . it’s a fantasy land! . . . The subtext in here is so heavy! It’s like, ‘Do people really want to shop in this store or do they just want to screw on the floor!?’ They’re sort of shameless; the bounty in them is overflowing.” And thus the vision of loveliness stacking cans in the aisle, “something wonderful and rare,” and the smile powerful enough that it “blows this whole fuckin’ thing apart.” Love ballads don’t get much quirkier than that, but set to an airy piano riff, with the glockenspiel ringing, a light scrim of strings, and Bruce’s Big Voice sailing at the top of its range, the whole thing feels delightfully alive and real.
3Premiered at the rallies for Barack Obama during the fall of 2008.
4Featuring Danny’s son Jason on his old man’s accordion.
5Ann Powers, writing in the Los Angeles Times, summed it up nicely: “Only a great artist could make an album that’s at once so stirring and slight. This is the Boss, after all; he can wring meaning out of a dish towel.”
6Bruce took up the practice of tossing his guitars at Buell during the 1999–2000 reunion tour. What began as gentle heaves from not far away grew eventually into long-distance, often sky-high hurls, some better thrown than others. Long since resigned to do his part in a now beloved bit of stage theater, Buell is still not fond of the ritual. Electric guitars are both heavy and unwieldy, with a lot of sharp edges and moving parts. If they come at you neck first, you’re in trouble. If the tosser doesn’t take care in aiming, or if he’s the kind of guy who might occasionally try to catch you off guard, you’re also in trouble: snapped fingers, forearm bruises, and so forth. If you look carefully at the Super Bowl video, you’ll see Buell, who came into the show with a broken finger, trip on an uneven seam in the stage and nearly crash into the percussion setup before coming up with the guitar. Later, Bruce called it the best catch of the entire game. “I don’t try to screw him up,” he says. “I try to make it exciting.” Asked if he’s ever let a guitar crash to the ground, Buell shakes his head. “I’d say there were a few wild pitches, but no passed balls.” Bruce responds by changing the terms of the discussion. “There may have been a few that glanced off of him, y’know. But he’s pretty good with it.”
7Including the 1999–2000 reunion tour shows, which often kicked off with the just-released Tracks song “My Love Will Not Let You Down,” and made set pieces from songs never played by the E Street Band, including “Youngstown,” “Murder Incorporated,” “If I Should Fall Behind,” and the instant classic “Land of Hope and Dreams.”
8Van Zandt continues: “My favorite song ever is ‘The Little Things (My Baby Does).’ Why? Because it’s perfect. Everything is right about it. You hear how the guitar and piano answer the vocals, and the level for once is pretty close to right. And the whole arrangement, the sensibility, is the greatest thing ever.”
9Including a visit to Jimmy Fallon’s iteration of NBC’s Late Night, where Bruce performed “Save My Love” with Bittan, Van Zandt, and the show’s house band, the Roots, and also participated in a remarkable skit during which he donned his old Born to Run– era clothes (and curly brown wig) to perform Willow Smith’s lighter-than-fairy-floss hit “Whip My Hair” with ace Neil Young impersonator Fallon accompanying him on acoustic guitar and yearning high tenor vocals.
Chapter 27
1Bruce had rhapsodized over Burdon and the Animals at his keynote speech, only to learn that Burdon himself was in Austin that very day. Invited to perform at the show, Burdon popped by the sound check, spent fifteen minutes with the band, and then nailed the song during the encore. “He’s still got that hard-ass sound,” Bruce told me the next day.
2Bruce had spent the previous evening watching the St. Louis Cardinals pull out an improbable eleventh-inning win over the favored Texas Rangers in the World Series. Too thrilled to sleep, Bruce had been up for hours afterward, toasting the underdogs. Asked if some portion of his joy came from watching a team so closely allied to (former owner) George W. Bush crumble, Bruce grinned. “Exactly,” he said.
3For a guy whose life has revolved around guitars, Bruce has almost no interest in collectible or exotic instruments. “I was never a guitar aficionado,” he says. “I’m not an audio freak. I don’t pay much attention to equipment. My goal is very simple: to play something that worked and to hear something that I liked.” Beyond the one legendary Telecaster-Esquire mutt, all of his guitars are interchangeable. Most of his electrics come in as stock reissues of 1950s era Telecasters (with some Mustangs and other models thrown in), only to be stripped apart and rebuilt by guitar tech Kevin Buell, who does God only knows what to the wiring and electronics, and then goes at the body and neck to make it look and feel like a lovingly worn-in axe. If there’s one exception beyond the Esquire/Telecaster to the interchangeable-guitars rule, it’s the acoustic sunburst Gibson J-45 Toby Scott gave him for Christmas in 1987.
4“Long Walk Home,” from Magic, 2007.
5Manion led trombonist Clark Gayton, trumpeters Curt Ramm and Barry Danielian, and another young saxophonist whose last name seemed oddly familiar.
6As Jake described it a few weeks later, the story is nearly as fairy tale–like as his uncle’s door-smashing entrance into the band. Born into a musical family (his father was also a performing musician, his chops honed as a Marine Corps band director), Jake traced his obsession for the sax to the night he saw his uncle perform on the Tunnel of Love tour in 1988. A fine guitarist and songwriter in his own right, Jake came with years of experience as a bandleader and journeyman saxophonist. Nearly as imposing as Clarence, with his own kind of magnetism, Jake filled his uncle’s place in the band by being his own soft-spoken self.
7A surprising number of the bad reviews, particularly those of Jon Caramanica in the New York Times and Jesse Cataldo in Slant magazine, asserted that “We Take Care of Our Own” was intended as a “jingoistic” (as both Cataldo and Caramanica called it) celebration of the American spirit rather than the bitter criticism of those who had violated it that it actually was. Given the fury in the song’s verses, and the striking references to the botched rescue of post-Katrina New Orleans, the critics may have benefited from giving the songs a closer listen.
8In a nutshell: the effect Bruce wanted depended on one of the venue’s own spotlight operators, and he wouldn’t report for the show for another couple of hours.
9Whose ability to keep the show running smoothly in very unsmooth circumstances, along with his preternatural ability to produce, say, twenty-five cups of hot coffee and pieces of pie, all on china with nice silverware, at two in the morning in response to someone else’s spontaneous joke, have long made him legendary throughout the music industry.
10“I sure use the word ‘great’ a lot when I’m talking about Bruce, don’t I?” he ad
ds a bit sheepishly.
11Although, of course, she did, even after her first husband died in World War II before he could lay eyes on the son she named Frank Bruno Jr.
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Copyright © 2012 by Peter Ames Carlin
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First Touchstone hardcover edition October 2012
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Designed by Ruth Lee-Mui
Endpapers credit: Neal Preston/Corbis
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carlin, Peter Ames.
Bruce / Peter Ames Carlin. —1st Touchstone hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. Springsteen, Bruce. 2. Rock musicians—United States. I. Title.
ML420.S77C37 2012
782.42166092—dc23
[B]
2012020890
ISBN 978-1-4391-9182-8
ISBN 978-1-4391-9184-2 (ebook)
Bruce Page 60
