Bruce (21 page)

Appel took the news badly. Didn’t Bruce know that Columbia had already accepted the finished record, had mastered the entire thing, and pressed dozens of test copies? Changing anything now would force the label to junk everything, remaster the entire album, print new tests, and more and more. “Mike was going nuts,” Spitz says. “We were sure Columbia would pull the plug; he’d already pushed them to the limit.” Appel steeled himself for outrage when he phoned the news to Hammond the next morning. Instead the A&R man took up Bruce’s cause immediately. “Whatever Bruce wants,” he said, “is how it’s going to be.”

Indeed, when Bruce appeared one day carrying an old-fashioned “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” postcard (with illustrated beach and boardwalk scenes incorporated into the letters), he told Appel that this picture was as perfect for the album cover as its message was for the album’s title. As far as he was concerned, that was the end of the discussion. Except for that Columbia had a rock-solid policy for new artists: every debut album cover
had
to feature a large photograph of the artist(s), the better to create an indelible image for the record-buying public to latch onto. When he left the room, Appel turned to Spitz. “This’ll be a disaster,” he said. “No one’s gonna know who he is!” But then, Columbia already knew that, which was why it had its hard-and-fast rule.

Then Appel, Spitz, and Bruce met with Columbia’s chief art designer John Berg. Entirely confident that the taciturn, no-nonsense Berg would shoot down the postcard instantly, Appel let his client present his idea, figuring they’d all move on to more realistic options after that. Instead Berg gave the “Greetings” postcard a long look and nodded thoughtfully. Reaching into his drawer, he pulled out a thick stack of similarly vintage postcards. “I gotta tell ya, I’m a huge postcard fan,” Berg said, handing his collection over to Bruce, who dove in excitedly while Berg went back to examining the Asbury Park card. “This is absolutely what we’re going to do,” the designer said. “This is brilliant. It’s perfect.” Appel was speechless. “We thought it would kill us,” Bob Spitz says. “But we were so wrong.”

Borne up by the enthusiasm of both Davis and Hammond, Bruce and his gang were as protected in the Columbia empire as any unknown,
unproven act could be—at least for the moment, as power and loyalties in record companies shift all the time, usually without warning. The sales reports that would come in after the album’s January 1973 release would be crucial. And although they didn’t know it at the time, the acetate copies of the record were already winning Bruce friends around the company’s sales, publicity, and A&R offices. Al Teller, then working in the company’s sales department, made a habit of listening to all the advance acetates that came his way. Mostly he played them as background music, but if something made him look up from his work, he says, he’d give it a closer examination. So while Teller had never heard of Bruce Springsteen when he lowered the needle on
Greetings
’ opening side, it only took about eight bars for Teller to drop his pen. “I listened to the whole thing straight through,” he says. “Then I called in some product managers and said, ‘You gotta hear this!’”

Acetate discs were too fragile to withstand more than fifteen or twenty plays; generally a week’s worth of repeated listening. But it took only a day of listening parties for Teller to wear the disc’s grooves down to nothing. Heading home that evening, he focused on the task at hand: selling the product. But who the hell is Bruce Springsteen? How could Teller drum up interest in an artist whose street rat poet’s sensibility ran so counter to every popular radio format? Fortunately, his daylong in-house sales campaign—and the other execs who got the same charge from their own acetates—seemed to be sparking an intra-office movement. “Everyone liked it,” Teller says. “But some of us
really
loved it.” Particularly a young promotions man named Paul Rappaport, a sharp-eared A&R executive named Steve Popovich, and, in the label’s Texas outpost, a promotions man named Michael Pillot.

All of them in the thrall of a thirty-five-minute album of songs written and performed by an obscure twenty-three-year-old from the Jersey Shore. Most of them could barely describe what they had fallen for, let alone why they had all been so enraptured so quickly. But in the midst of the river of music running through Columbia’s offices and hallways—at the very home of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Miles Davis, and the Byrds—this unknown new artist had swept them up in his own current. And just that quickly, they were converts on their way to becoming
evangelists. And it wouldn’t be long before others spoke of them—sometimes derisively, sometimes as the highest possible compliment—as Bruce Springsteen’s apostles. “We all got affected by his aura,” Popovich said a few months before his death in 2011. “Some things have that draw. You believe so deeply, you have such a focus on it. That’s what happened for Bruce. To us he was an underdog, from nowhere, and people picked up on that.”

C
LARENCE CLEMONS INSISTED THE STORY
was true.

The thunder, the lightning, the gale-force winds blowing across the Jersey Shore. Just another late-summer Nor’easter. Except that this storm became part of a rock ’n’ roll legend in which the karmic explosion triggered by the meeting of two musicians nearly reduced Asbury Park’s Student Prince club to rubble right there on Kingsley Street. Or something. Whatever, the incident took place in September 1971, months before Appel, Hammond, Columbia, and all the rest. But it set the tone for what was about to happen, so . . .

“I swear on a stack of Bibles that that door blew off its hinges,” Clemons told me a few weeks before his death in June 2011. “I swear on
two
stacks of Bibles. And it was a sturdy door. The front door. The wood one with the lock, so when you close that door the place is closed, okay? A big, heavy fucking door. And when I opened it, it blew down Kingsley. Tumbling north, toward the Wonder Bar. That really happened.”

Garry Tallent is less sure. And he was there with everyone else, taking a break from his bass duties partway through the Bruce Springsteen Band’s nightlong show at the club. When it comes to the dramatic entrance of Clemons, and the dramatic departure of the front door, he shrugs. “I don’t remember the stormy night,” he says. “And people came in to jam all the time, so I don’t recall. Look, it could well be. But you think it would be memorable, though.”

Asked directly, and only a few months after Clemons’s death, about the Student Prince door question, Bruce turns solemn. “It did. That’s for certain.” And what of the people—the
band members
—who insist it didn’t? “They would be wrong.”

Bruce and Clemons were thinking back to late September 1971, a few days after Bruce had caught part of the Joyful Noyze’s set at the Wonder Bar. The band was led by keyboardist Norman Seldin, but Bruce’s ex-girlfriend Karen Cassidy sang lead vocals for the group, and she had been telling Bruce about this charismatic sax player who shared the front of the stage with her. When the set ended, Cassidy went over to greet Bruce. “I asked him what was going on, and he had this gleam in his eyes,” she says. “He asked about Clarence, and I just laughed. ‘I knew it! You’re gonna steal him!’” No matter. Cassidy walked over to the sax player and pointed out Bruce, nursing a Pepsi at the bar. “I told him I had a friend who I knew was gonna be a really big star, and he needed to come meet him,” she says. When the Bruce Springsteen Band settled into the Student Prince, just a flew blocks down Kingsley Street, she took Clemons to check out Bruce’s band. It meant walking through a rainstorm, but Clemons didn’t care. He packed his saxophone into its case, and off they went.

When Clemons stepped into the Student Prince, the ripped-off door tumbling away behind him, his eyes fixed on the skinny white boy he’d met a few nights earlier. Bruce and the band were taking a break, but Bruce saw him coming and, he said many years later, felt transfixed. “Here comes my brother, here comes my sax man, my inspiration, my partner, my lifelong friend.”

Some kind of vibe hung in the air, to be sure. And when Cassidy pulled Clarence over to say hi, the horn player pointed to the saxophone he had carried through the rain. Would it be okay to sit in during
the next set? Well, of course it was okay. A few minutes later Clemons stepped onstage with the rest of the band and listened for the count-off. They began, he recalled, an unnamed instrumental.

“I will never, ever forget the feeling I got when we hit that first note,” he said. “It was so urgent, so real, so exciting to me. It was like I’d been searching for so long, and now, thank God, I am finally, finally, where I’m supposed to be.”

Bruce felt it too. Even in the midst of an impromptu jam session, held in a dingy bar with half of a half-capacity crowd paying half of its attention to the music, the onstage chemistry crackled. “Standing next to Clarence was like standing next to the baddest ass on the planet,” Bruce wrote later. “You were proud, you were strong, you were excited and laughing with what might happen, with what together you might be able to do.”

“And that,” Cassidy says, “was it.”

Actually, it would take nine months for Bruce to track down Clemons at another gig. But when he showed up at the Shipbottom Lounge in Point Pleasant that night in June 1972, Clemons insisted that Bruce come up to jam with his band. Bruce had to borrow a guitar, but they all knew the same rock and soul oldies, and the groove they found at the Student Prince came right back. The two musicians traded telephone numbers when the set was over—Bruce misspelling his new friend’s last name as “Clemens”—and pledged to stay in touch. This time it took only a couple of weeks for Bruce to track down the Joyful Noyze and jam alongside Clemons one more time. The feeling between the two musicians grew even more that night, and when the sets ended, they went off together to get a drink (Bruce, at twenty-two, had started having a sip every now and again) and talk for a while. The early-morning drink stretched into a dayslong spiritual adventure. “We went down South and went to bars, talking and listening to music nonstop for two or three days,” Clemons told me. “It’s all a blur now, but I get tingles when I think about it.”

Given the gleam in his eyes, it was difficult to figure if Clemons intended the story to be a journalistic account of actual events or an allegorical tall tale about his spiritual bond to Bruce. But once again, Bruce
confirms the entire story, right down to the strange green glow of the liqueur that nearly capsized both musicians and the buddy sitting with them. “I had only just started drinking, so I was rolling with whatever came my way at the time,” Bruce says. “My take on it at the time was like, ‘I don’t like none of it, so I’ll drink any of it.’ But then we had a run-in with this green Chartreuse.
¹
Clarence could probably slug the bottle,
²
but me and a pal of mine [remembered only as “Jimmy”] got caught in the middle of it. We started to bang some of it back, and my pal made a beeline for the door, heading straight for the curb. I think I broke out in a sweat. It was pretty funny.”

As Clemons unspooled the facts of his past—growing up in Norfolk County, Virginia, of the 1940s and 1950s with his longshoreman dad and proper, no-back-talk teacher mom—he described his early life as a holy quest: an unconscious, years-long pilgrimage to the one musician powerful enough to accompany him through the gates of transcendence. “I was always searching for something,” Clemons said, describing the gospel choirs he heard on Sunday mornings and the shimmer of the saxophone he unwrapped on his ninth Christmas. Afternoons of gridiron heroics in high school and at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore stadium were meaningful but still, he knew, not a part of his destiny. The outlines of that revealed themselves only during the thousands of hours he spent with his bedroom record player, honking along with sax heroes King Curtis and Boots Randolph. The radiance in the young man’s eyes pushed him even further. Nearly from his first gig with his first neighborhood band, Clemons was the visual focus of every performance. Built larger than life, with a rich voice and magnetism to match, Clemons’s steps shook the stage while his glittering tenor sax connected the histories of rock, R&B, jazz, and gospel music to the promise of next Saturday night.

Graduating with a sociology degree in 1964, Clemons had a shot at a football career with the Cleveland Browns, but it ended when a freak car
accident shattered his knees. Clemons moved to New Jersey and took a job as a counselor for emotionally disturbed kids at the Jamesburg Training School for Boys, where he and his first wife, Jackie, doubled as caretakers, a job that came with an on-campus apartment. Clemons played in bands at night, first in a soul-jazz cover band called the Entertainers, and then in Norman Seldin’s Joyful Noyze, a tight, crowd-pleasing cover band popular enough to be booked months, and sometimes a year, in advance. Hired on the strength of a single sit-in session, Clemons quickly became a frontman for the group. He was also a lightning rod for club owners who couldn’t abide seeing a black face in their establishments. Seldin, to his infinite credit, didn’t care what they thought. “One guy called me a fuckin’ nigger lover,” he recalls. “I said, ‘We’re not playing the gig, then. Go to hell.’” Business picked up soon enough—Clemons’s magnetic presence didn’t hurt—but Clemons kept his horn with him on his off days too. If he drove past a lively looking bar and heard music coming out, he’d stop immediately and head inside, just in case he could get a shot at sitting in with the band. “I call that my searching time,” he said. “The time I spent trying to find Bruce.”

In the fall of 1972, the object of his search realized that the thrill he’d felt that first night Clemons had stood next to him on the Student Prince stage had not been an illusion. Whatever doubts Bruce might have nursed were vanquished by Clemons’s sax work on “Blinded by the Light” and “Spirit in the Night.” When Bruce and Appel figured that the time had come to book some full-band shows, Bruce made a round of calls to re-form the five-piece Bruce Springsteen Band as his backing group. Lopez and Tallent came aboard happily, and when Sancious begged off to finish his own debut album (and sulk about Bruce having snatched his bass player), Bruce tapped Danny Federici to rejoin as his keyboard player. Then he called Clemons and asked him to join. Clemons didn’t hesitate, although he knew that meant walking out on Norman Seldin, who complained bitterly about being left in the lurch. “I was enraged,” says Seldin. “I said, ‘Clarence, it’s a one-in-ten-million shot!’ And I couldn’t see him fitting; I saw him as part of a Herbie Mann jazz quartet thing. But like it or not, that’s where he was gonna go.”