Born to Run (47 page)

From here on, the hard gravitational pull of the past will have a formidable challenger: your current life. Together, Patti and I’d made one and one equal three. That’s rock ’n’ roll.

This new life revealed that I was more than a song, a story, a night, an idea, a pose,
a truth, a shadow, a lie, a moment, a question, an answer, a restless figment of my own and others’ imagination . . . Work is work . . . but life . . . is life . . . and life trumps art . . . always
.

FIFTY-FOUR

REDHEADED REVOLUTION

She is a one-woman, red-haired revolution: flaming beauty, Queen of my heart, waitress, street busker, child of some privilege, hard-time Jersey girl, great songwriter, nineteen-year New Yorker, one of the loveliest voices I’ve ever heard, smart, tough and fragile. When I look at her, I see and feel my best self. Vivienne Patricia Scialfa grew up in Deal, New Jersey,
sister of Michael and Sean, daughter of Coast Guard lieutenant commander Joe and great local beauty Pat Scialfa. A freckle-faced Raggedy Ann of a little girl, her smile beams, openly, expectantly, from childhood pictures. If we love those in whose company is reflected the best of us, that’s the light she shines on me. For a couple of loners and musicians, we’ve made it pretty far.

She grew up
next door to New Jersey mob boss Anthony “Little Pussy” Russo. Mr. “Pussy” wanted a Sicilian next door, so he sold the adjacent
beachfront house to Patti’s pop, Joe. Joe was not connected, but he was classic Sicilian stock. A crazy handsome man’s-man Italian mama’s boy spoiled by three sisters, Joe was a self-made multimillionaire via his local real estate speculations and as a proprietor of Scialfa
TV, a talented, manic, brutally tough act for a dad and a wild card for a father-in-law. Patti’s mom, Pat, was hardworking Scots-Irish, a sixties dream of a showpiece, determined, tough and every bit Joe’s match. She worked side by side with Joe at the TV store, day in, day out, while a young Patti slipped down in between the Motorolas and the Zeniths, doing her homework. From Long Branch,
Jersey’s Italian paradise by the sea, to Spring Lake’s Irish Riviera, Patti and I carried on the Irish-Italian mating ritual that seems to have swept our section of the central coast for the last century.

I first spoke to Patti when she was seventeen and I was twenty-one. She’d answered an ad I placed in the Asbury Park Press for background singers for my ten-piece rock ’n’ soul Bruce Springsteen
Band. We spoke for a while on the phone. She was very young and I told her we were a traveling gig and she should stay in high school. We met for the first time in 1974. Enthralled by the girl groups of the sixties, I was entertaining the idea of a girl singer in the band. She answered an ad in the
Village Voice
and auditioned a cappella for Mike Appel in his midtown office. Mike, feet up on his
desk, arms locked behind his head, would utter the command, “Sing!” A prospective E Streeter would then, completely unaccompanied, have to start belting out the Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron.” If you passed muster, you were sent down to a little industrial park in Neptune, New Jersey, where you’d find the pre–
Born to Run
band, preparing for their breakout release. I was twenty-five, she was twenty-one,
she sang some Ronnie Spector with the band, then we sat at the piano together and she played me one of her songs. She was lovely and very good but we ended up going with our regular lineup, not quite ready to break up the “lost boys” yet.

Ten years later, in 1984, one night as I hung out at the Stone Pony, a redheaded gal showed up and sat in with the Sunday night house band,
singing the Exciters’
“Tell Him.” She was good, had something I hadn’t seen in the area before, and she’d mastered that sixties quality in her voice along with something else that was distinctly hers. At the time I was a pretty big fish in a small pond and where I walked, ripples occurred. We found ourselves standing in a buzzing crowd at the back bar as I introduced myself to her and the rest was a long, winding
semi-courtship.

Patti told me I was always looking in “other fields” for companionship. I’d always had a lot of ideas about the who, what, when, where and why of my romantic choices that would prove in the long run irrelevant. When I opened up and stopped looking in those “other fields” . . . Patti was there before me. She’d eyed me up and waited ’til I was ready, then I was. It’s an unusual
story of two people who’d circled around each other, cautiously and tangentially touching for eighteen years, before connecting.

We toured as bandmates through the
Born in the USA
tour. She had plenty of admirers and was a tough dance card if you tried to tame her New York independence. She lived alone and like a musician, like me. She was
not
domestic. She did
not
live to make you feel safe.
I liked all of this. I’d tried the other and it hadn’t worked. I knew something very, very different and perhaps difficult was called for and Patti was it. We settled into domesticity, slowly and very carefully. Her psychological intuition was very high and I felt the risk of a formidable partner. When I started seeing Patti, she was deeply pleasurable, intelligent and exciting, but she scared me.
I was putting my trust in her and despite her interest, I wasn’t so sure she really wanted it. Patti had a part of her that carried a charged sexuality; she could seduce and she could stir you to jealousy. There was a lot of emotional dueling, the occasional flying beauty product and plenty of arguing. We tested our ability to withstand each other’s insecurities, hard. It was good. We could fight,
surprise, disappoint, raise up, bring down, withhold, surrender, hurt, heal, fight again, love, refit, then go at it one more time. We were both broken in a lot of ways but we hoped, with work, our broken pieces might fit together in a way that would create something workable, wonderful. They did. We
created a life and a love fit for a couple of emotional outlaws. That similarity bound and binds
us very close.

My wife is a private person, not known through whatever her “public persona” may be, and not nearly as fond of the limelight as I. Her talents have only been hinted at in her work. She has great elegance and dignity and we’ve built a lot together out of those broken pieces. We found once those pieces were set in place, they weighed in as hard stone, each piece pressuring and holding
the pieces above and beneath it for twenty-five years (in a dog’s life and musical companionships, that’s somewhere around 175 years!). Two loners, we weren’t necessarily destined for the gold ring(s), but we stole them . . . and locked them away.

The night I fell in love with Patti’s voice at the Stone Pony, the first line she sang was “I know something about love . . .” She does.

FIFTY-FIVE

CHANGES

I spent some money. Quite a bit, actually. We bought a house on a canyon road near Sunset Boulevard. It was luxurious and extravagant and I was ready for some of that. I had a family now; I still drew a good deal of press attention and we needed to ensure we’d have some security and privacy. Our new digs, situated off a couple of private drives, delivered that. I bought some
nice guitars. I’d never collected before. I’d always considered my instrument a tool, like a hammer: one good one and maybe a spare or two were all you really needed. Now I wanted a beautiful guitar in each room. I wanted music throughout the house.

A lot had changed. The late eighties and early nineties had proved tumultuous, upending my life. I was working on new music in a new land with a
new love. At the moment I had no driving theme or sure creative point of view thundering through my head, and after the
Born in the USA
,
Tunnel of Love
and Amnesty tours, I felt a little burned out. I was unsure of where to take the band next and in ’89, I’d essentially placed them on hiatus.
Over time, like all the guys, I’d developed my own set of underlying grievances. Some of the fellas making
me a little too crazy, some feeling of a lack of appreciation coupled with the burden of having life issues and baggage constantly dumped at my doorstep with a little too much frequency and too many expectations that I should make it all better. All of this, along with my creative uncertainty and artistic curiosity, finally turned me around the corner. We’d all lived on E Street for a long while.
During that time, many good habits were formed, things that in the long run would keep us together, but there were also some bad habits that had taken hold. I felt I’d become not just a friend and employer for some, but also banker and daddy.

As usual, I’d created a good deal of our state of affairs myself by not providing clear boundaries and by creating an emotional structure where in exchange
for the band’s undying loyalty and exclusivity, I gave an unspoken and uncontracted promise to cover everyone’s back in whatever befell them.
Everyone
, without concrete, written clarification, will define the terms of your relationship in accordance with their own financial, emotional and psychological needs and desires, some realistic, some not. A lawsuit with some trusted employees that had
turned into a rather long and nasty divorce case made me realize the importance of clarifying your, and your band members’, commitments in as reasonably undisputable a fashion as possible. That meant contracts (previously anathema to me). The
Tunnel of Love
tour was the first time I insisted on written contracts with the band. After all this time, to some, I suppose, it suggested mistrust, but
those contracts and their future counterparts protected
our
future together. They clarified beyond debate our past and present relationships with one another, and in clarity lie stability, longevity, respect, understanding and confidence. Everyone knew where everyone else stood, what was given and what was asked. Once signed, those contracts left us free to just
play
.

On the day I called each
band member to explain that after years with the same lineup, I wanted to experiment with other musicians, I’m sure it hurt, especially Clarence, but I was met to a man by the same response. The
E Street Band is old-school; we are filled with gentlemen, raucous, rousing, sometimes reckless rock ’n’ roll gentlemen, but gentlemen all. Everyone was generous, gracious—yes, disappointed, but open to
what I was saying. They wished me well and I did them the same.

It was painful, but in truth, we all needed a break. After sixteen years, a reconsidering was in order. I left in search of my own life and some new creative directions. Many of the guys did that as well, finding second lives and second careers as musicians, record producers, TV stars and actors. We retained our friendships and stayed
in touch. When we would come back together I would find a more adult, settled, powerful group of people. Our time away from one another gave us all a new respect for the man or woman standing next to us. It opened our eyes to what we had, what we’d accomplished and might still accomplish together.

FIFTY-SIX

LA BURNING

In 1992 the Los Angeles riots were sparked by the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers accused in the vicious beating of motorist Rodney King after a high-speed police chase. Widespread arson, looting and assault fanned out across the LA basin. The broadcast of a home movie videotape of the assault welcomed the LAPD into the information age and set Los
Angeles on fire.

As I rehearsed with my new band in an East Hollywood studio, someone came running in and shouted there was “trouble” in the streets. Two blocks from where we were working, he’d just barely escaped assault. We turned on the TV, realized we were uncomfortably close to the center of the disturbance and decided to call it for the day. I hopped in my Ford Explorer and headed west.
Sunset Boulevard was jammed, with “panic in year zero” dread coursing through the veins of fleeing motorists, all trying to get out of
the center and eastern parts of town. I had to get to Benedict Canyon and then on to the coast, where we’d rented a cottage that seemed safely removed from the events of the day. I’d ridden many of LA’s back roads, so I literally headed for the hills, threading
my way along the curves of Mulholland Drive. I stopped for a moment near the Hollywood Bowl, where my windshield was filled with city-wide fury. It was a fiery, smoking panorama from a bad Hollywood disaster picture. Large smoldering black clouds rose from fires all across the LA grid to mix with chiseled azure skies like billowing ink on blue tile. I moved on to Benedict Canyon, where I picked up
Patti and the kids.

Unlike the Watts riots of 1965, the fire this time looked as if it might spread out beyond the ghetto of those afflicted. Fear, and plenty of it, was in the air. The lapping waves of California’s surf paradise, the well-entrenched, well-paid-for silence of Trancas, Malibu and Broad Beach, was broken by the thukka-thukka-thukka rotors of National Guard helicopters running low
above the sea. Beach deck TV screens were filled with the flames of boredom, despair and protest, just a few perhaps-not-so-well-guarded miles east.

Fifty-three citizens died, thousands were injured, businesses were destroyed, lives were ruined.

This is America. The prescriptions for many of our ills are in hand—child day care, jobs, education, health care—but it would take a societal effort
on the scale of the Marshall Plan to break the generations-long chain of institutionalized destruction our social policies have wreaked. If we can spend trillions on Iraq and Afghanistan in nation building, if we can bail out Wall Street with billions of taxpayer dollars, why not here? Why not now?

FIFTY-SEVEN

GOING TO THE CHAPEL

Patti and I courted in Chelsea. Near her New York apartment there was a lovely little bench on the edge of a small park directly across from the Empire Diner. We’d meet there, spending spring days drinking beer from cans covered in a paper bag and talking. It became a very special place for us. One afternoon after a lunch at the Empire, on the way out, I grabbed
a twig from a small bush by the side of the diner. I twisted it into a makeshift ring, and by the time she got to the bench I was down on one knee. I popped the question, was proud when Patti said yes, and we were on our way. My next step was to get a proper engagement ring.