Bruce (65 page)

When they got to “Growin’ Up,” and the spot in the middle where the music had always hushed in order for Bruce to tell one of his shaggy dog tales about the birth of the band, he put on his dreamiest voice and began with what has to be the archetypical opening line of every band story he’d ever told.

“There I was . . . it was a stormy, stormy night in Asbury Park, New Jersey . . .”

The audience roared happily.

“A Nor’easter was blowing in, rattling all the lampposts and washing Kingsley Avenue clean. And me and Steve were in a little club down the south end of town. When suddenly the door lifted open and blew off down the street. And a large shadow of a man stepped in. I looked. King Curtis? King Curtis has come out of my dreams and landed right here! No! Jr. Walker! He walked to the stage and—”

Clemons, his eyes hard and face blank, stepped to Bruce’s microphone and spoke in his most sinister baritone.

“I wanna play witchoo.”

Bruce cracked up.

“What could I say? I said, sure! And he put the saxophone to his mouth, and I heard . . .”

Clemons played a pretty little riff.

“Something as coooool as a river.”

Clemons let loose a snarling run up the blues scale.

“Then I heard a force of nature coming out. And at the end of the night, we just looked at each other and went—”

The two men faced each other, gazed into each other’s eyes for a long
moment, and then nodded slowly in perfect unison. Clemons turned to face the crowd, put his saxophone to his mouth, and hunkered down low enough for Bruce—Telecaster against his waist—to lean against his shoulder in the iconic
Born to Run
pose.

“So we got in the car, a
loooong
Cadillac. Drove through the woods at the outskirts of town. And we got very sleepy. And we fell into this long, long, long, long dream. An’ when we woke up . . .”

Bruce paused, the crowd straining to hear what would come next.

“We were in fuckin’ Buffalo, New York.”

An avalanche of drums, and the song burst into its final verse, pushing Bruce right into that old parked car with the keys to the universe dangling from its ignition.

Three weeks later Bruce reconvened the surviving members of the 1978-era band—Bittan, Clemons, Tallent, Van Zandt, and Weinberg, with Giordano subbing for Federici—to perform all of
Darkness on the Edge of Town
in Asbury Park’s beachside Paramount Theater. The house dark and empty, save for documentarian Thom Zimny and his film crew, Bruce and the band played the songs without regard for their future audience, their eyes on one another, their bodies given over to the rhythm and the music. Shot by Zimny with virtually all of the color washed out of the shot, Bruce and the band seemed lost to time. Still squaring off to fight their way off the boardwalk, out of town, and onto the western highway. As if they hadn’t already been there and back a hundred times. As if the years had done nothing to shake their bond or weaken their belief in the music.

The
Darkness
box set, released in 2010, came five years after the multidisc commemoration of
Born to Run
’s thirtieth anniversary
.
Both included a remastered version of the original album, along with bonus CDs and documentaries directed by Thom Zimny, Bruce’s go-to documentarian since 2000. The
BTR
package included a full-length video of the notorious Hammersmith Odeon show from 1975, while the
Darkness
box included a 1978 show filmed in Houston and, to the endless joy of Van Zandt, a two-disc set of the sixties-pop-inspired songs Bruce had written and recorded, only to toss aside. “Thank God he finally put ’em out!” Van Zandt says. “That’s his highest evolution, and he takes
it completely for granted.”
⁸
As if to show he still had it in him, Bruce took the bones of “Save My Love,” an unused song seen in a filmed 1976 rehearsal Zimny included in his documentary film about
Darkness
, finished the lyrics, and got the
Darkness
-era band (plus Giordano) into his home studio to record it like they used to do: all in the same studio at the same time, playing it exactly as they had when they were skinny, frizzy-haired kids on a hot summer afternoon, making a big noise in Bruce’s basement rec room.

With no tour planned for 2011, Bruce made a few talk show appearances,
⁹
then in early December got the
Darkness
band together to play a handful of the unearthed songs in the Carousel House just off the Asbury Park boardwalk. Playing for a small invited crowd and Zimny’s cameras (which would capture the performance for an edited Internet broadcast a few days later), the band—enhanced by the Miami Horns and violinist David Lindley, who had played on some of the original sessions—seemed a bit stiff. Blame the winter chill in the unheated Carousel House, the year of not playing together, the crowding of the cameras. But also note the flatness of Bruce’s performance. And when he throws it to Clemons for his big solo in “Gotta Get That Feeling,” moving right over to cheer him on and maybe bump shoulders, Bruce finds him on his stool, his eyes hidden behind thick glasses, and his entire being focused on hitting notes he once played while stalking the stage like a colossus.

• • •

Back in his Florida penthouse, Clemons was in his living room, rolling the shades up after previewing his documentary,
Who Do I Think I Am?
, about the spiritual evolution he experienced traveling through Asia,
where no one knew or cared about his fame and achievements in the Western world. Now it was about to be screened at a couple of festivals. He had a lot going on. Clemons played some sessions with pop sensation Lady Gaga a few weeks earlier and found the experience thrilling.

“When I asked her what she wanted, she just said, ‘Just be Clarence Clemons. Play what you want, be who you are. I’m gonna drop the needle, and you go.’” The memory opened a smile. “So that’s what I did, and she loved it. That was very cool. Something I hadn’t experienced in a long time, not since Bruce’s first albums. Sit down to play, and just play. It reminded me of why I love being a musician and doing what I do.” Now she wanted him to be in her videos and accompany her to
American Idol
for her performance on the series’s season finale.

He had one foot in ecstasy and the other planted in irritation. Bruce is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and deservedly so. But what about the E Street Band? Didn’t they have something to do with that big, and always distinctive, noise that made Bruce so beloved? “What the fuck are we, chopped liver? I’ve gotta go to jail because of the band but still don’t end up in the Hall of Fame.” The Big Man was clearly pissed, but then he shrugged and his smile returned. “The thing is, now they have a saxophone of mine in the Hall of Fame. My manager at the time told me it’d be a good idea to let ’em have that. But
I’m
still not in there. My fuckin’
saxophone
is in there, but I’m not. And I’m the one who fuckin’
played
it. So my sax is in the Hall of Fame, my ass is on the cover of
Born to Run
, and here we are. Oh man!”

• • •

Victoria Clemons called the paramedics at about three o’clock on the morning of June 12. Clemons had suffered a serious stroke. The surgeons did what they could to seal the blood leak in his brain, to mend the artery and relieve whatever swelling or damage it created. When Bruce got the news in France, where he and Patti were celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary, he flew immediately to Palm Beach, with Patti and the rest of the band in close pursuit. The official diagnosis made clear that Clemons was seriously ill, with significant paralysis on his right side. Still, the next hours and days seemed promising. By Tuesday, reports had him conscious and in stable condition. “Miracles are happening!” one
unidentified friend told the
Backstreets
fanzine website. Friends and family got another message: get here fast.

Clemons’s condition grew worse; then his brain function collapsed entirely. Realizing that his body no longer contained his soul, the Clemons family chose Saturday, June 18, to allow his body to take its leave. When the machines switched off, Bruce brought his guitar to the room and sat close for the next three hours, singing and playing with the Clemons family, giving witness to his friend’s departure and, perhaps, on some level, easing his journey. “I’ll miss my friend, his sax, the force of nature his sound was, his glory, his foolishness, his accomplishments, his face, his hands, his humor, his skin, his noise, his confusion, his power, his peace . . .” Bruce said in his eulogy.

But his love and his story, the story that he gave me, that he whispered in my ear, that he allowed me to tell . . . and that he gave to you . . . is gonna carry on. I’m no mystic, but the undertow, the mystery and power of Clarence and my friendship, leads me to believe we must have stood together in other, older times, along other rivers, in other cities, in other fields, doing our modest version of God’s work . . . work that’s still unfinished. So I won’t say good-bye to my brother. I’ll simply say, “See you in the next life, further on up the road, where we will once again pick up that work, and get it done.”

A
FEW TI CKS AFTER TWELVE NOON
on March 15, 2012, Roland Swenson, the executive director of the South by Southwest indie music festival in Austin, Texas, got the day’s festivities started with a worshipful introduction of the keynote speaker. Uncompromising artistry, he said. Wild energy, unwavering commitment to righteousness and the determination to “give it all he’s got, without hesitation, every time he steps on the stage.” And with that, Bruce Springsteen came clomping out to the lectern, pulled a few wrinkled yellow legal sheets out of his jeans pocket, and gazed across the convention hall crowd.

“How can we be up this early in the fucking morning?” That was his hello. “How important can this speech be if we’re giving it at noon? Every decent musician in town is asleep. Or they will be before I’m done with this thing, I guarantee you.”

It wasn’t a sleepy kind of speech. Leaning crookedly against the podium and kicking his right foot against the stage floor, Bruce channeled
his scrawled notes about music and life into the jazzy rhythms of a beat poet. “Doo-wop!” he chanted. “The most sensual music ever made! The sound of raw sex. Of silk stockings rustling against leather upholstery, the sound of bras popping open all across the USA. Of wonderful lies being whispered into Tabu-perfumed ears. The sound of smeared lipstick, untucked shirts, running mascara, tears on your pillow, secrets whispered in the still of the night, the high school bleachers in the dark at the YMCA canteen. The soundtrack for your incredibly wonderful, blue-balled, limp-your-ass walk back home after the dance. Oh! It hurt so good.”

Ignore the temptation to draw lines, make rules, and dismiss anyone offering another way of doing things, he said. “Purity of human expression and experience is not confined to guitars, to tubes, to turntables, to microchips. There is no right way, no pure way, of doing it. There’s just doing it.” Talking directly to the musicians in the audience, the ones still sleeping off whatever SXSW hijinks they’d been up to the previous night and all the others in the world, Bruce projected his own internal experience into a universal code of being.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. Take yourself as seriously as death itself. Don’t worry. Worry your ass off. Have iron-clad confidence, but doubt. It keeps you awake and alert. Believe you are the baddest ass in town—and [that] you suck! It keeps you honest. Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideals alive and well inside of your heart and head at all times. If it doesn’t drive you crazy, it will make you strong. And when you walk on stage tonight to bring the noise, treat it like it’s all we have—and then remember it’s only rock ’n’ roll.

Nine hours later at Austin’s Moody Theater, Bruce delivered the same speech in musical terms. Starting with an acoustic, chorale-of-singers cover of Woody Guthrie’s “I Ain’t Got No Home,” the nearly three-hour show moved easily from the folk-rock-soul of his just-released (and currently chart-topping) album,
Wrecking Ball,
to the boardwalk R&B of “The E Street Shuffle,” to the dust-and-grease visions of “The Promised Land” and “Badlands” and beyond. Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, the very image of thrash-and-scream musical anarchy, added
vocals and guitar screams to the live arrangement of “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” and the pair of
Wrecking Ball
songs he played on. Then the encores ranged even further, with collaborations with reggae hero Jimmy Cliff (“The Harder They Come,” “Time Will Tell,” and “Many Rivers to Cross”); old-school British Invasion with the Animals’ Eric Burdon (“We Gotta Get Out of This Place”)
¹
; then a stage-filling “This Land Is Your Land” sing-along, with all of the above, the night’s first two artists (the Low Anthem and Alejandro Escovedo), Garland Jeffreys, and members of reigning indie-rock heroes the Arcade Fire.

Bruce’s apparent mission, to establish his credentials and ongoing artistic vitality with the younger generation(s), proved enormously successful. From the festival’s Austin Convention Center headquarters, up to the beer-stained clubs on Austin’s Sixth Street, and out to the weird old roadhouses on the far side of the freeway, the roughnecks agreed with the city punks who agreed with the geek bloggers: the man could put on a show. “One of the most stirring and inspiring shows in SXSW history,” Dennis Shin wrote on PopMatters. Josh Modell, writing in the Onion A.V. Club, described his reaction like this: “I’d never seen Springsteen live before, though of course I’d heard the stories about him and the E Street Band . . . it was, as expected, an incredible experience.”

• • •

Fifteen months earlier, in late 2010, Bruce called Ron Aniello, a producer-arranger who Toby Scott and Brendan O’Brien had recommended (and who had worked on Patti’s record,
Play It as It Lays
), asking if he could help finish some tracks he’d been working on. As Aniello remembers, the thirty or forty unfinished tracks sounded like nothing Bruce had ever done. “It’s stunning, really. Like Aaron Copland, the American landscape style. Soft and deep and open sky. There’s definitely a story going, but it’s different. Just gentle and beautiful, gorgeous, and so disarming.” Aniello wrote a symphonic arrangement for one of the songs and worked with
Bruce for the next few months creating similar treatments for a handful of the other tracks. They worked steadily until Valentine’s Day 2011, when Bruce interrupted one of Aniello’s work sessions to play him a song he’d written while running errands that afternoon. Bruce picked up an acoustic guitar, Aniello set up a microphone, and three and a half minutes later they had a rough demo for “Easy Money,” a front-porch-style three-chord stomper sung in the voice of a stickup man who finds inspiration in Wall Street traders and bankers. Bruce came with another new song the next morning, and when they played back the rough demo for “We Take Care of Our Own” a few minutes later, he looked up at Aniello. “This day is gonna change your life,” he said.