Bruce (17 page)

So off he went. And when he said his good-byes to Lopez, Tallent, and Sancious, he guessed he’d see them when, or if, he got back. Days later Tallent got a call from a New Jersey manager named Peter Scherkeryk, best known for building the career of his wife, the folk singer Melanie, saying how much he loved the Bruce Springsteen Band and
wondering if they’d be interested in his taking on their group. The bassist just laughed. “What group?” he said. “Our main guy just disappeared.”

• • •

Once again Bruce drove west with Tinker, riding in the same pickup truck that had carried them two years earlier, when they came with the amps, mikes, and world-conquering hopes of Steel Mill. They’d been on a lot of roads since then. This time the highway seemed windblown, the passing towns a blur of shaded windows and closed doors. Arriving in San Mateo in the middle of the night, Bruce found the apartment locked and dark, so he tossed pebbles at the bedroom windows, eventually rousing nine-year-old Pam, who flew down the stairs to open the door for her big brother. He swept the wriggling girl into a bear hug, accepted his mother’s moist-eyed hug, and his father’s nod and handshake, then bid good-bye to West. He’d find his own way back, Bruce said.

The next few weeks were emotionally charged and creatively fertile. Some days Bruce sniffed around the clubs, searching for local musicians who might want to do some jamming with an out-of-towner. “I didn’t have a lot of luck with that,” he says. Possibly because Bruce had decided to get out of the rock ’n’ roll band business. “I’m going, ‘Okay, there’s a lot of guitar players, a lot of pretty good bands out there, a lot of musicians, but not a lot of people with really their own voice and story,’ and I had always been working in parallel through writing and other things, on this other voice. The solo voice. A guy, a story, some chords, some lyrics. And that was going to have to be enough.”

He’d been writing poems and verse since before he got to Ocean County Community College, and the self-revelatory work he’d been encouraged to pursue in his Advanced Composition class helped Bruce open himself to that part of the creative process. “The college writing melded with the songwriting,” he says. “It was about lyric writing, and I practiced my lyric writing very intensely. So it was something I continued to do, thinking that I wanted to be able to be completely independent and play completely on my own.”

Bruce’s new songs focused intently on the narrative, unexpected images, and metaphors that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, but were always compelling to hear. “Cowboys of the Sea” wove Bruce’s own
childhood dreams of Brave Cowboy Bill (now grown into the outlaw Billy the Kid) into a eulogy for the vanishing frontier and the toll of an increasingly restrictive, money-obsessed society. “If I Was the Priest” takes place in a dusty corner of the west where blood and hypocrisy cut channels in the dirt. Jesus works as the sheriff, while the Virgin Mary runs the saloon by night, says Mass on Sundays, and works as a prostitute on Mondays.

Bruce turned to the roots of his own consciousness to fill “Randolph Street” with nostalgic glimpses back to his sweet, haunted boyhood with Fred and Alice. “Border Guard” addressed Doug directly, if not by name, describing an authority figure who suffers more than the people he shoos away from his sight. “The night is his master / And you know the dawn light brings his captor,” he sang. Most of the other songs focused elsewhere, with a distinct tilt toward grandiose settings—the wild frontier, tarnished Hollywood royalty—and freakish characters who bear the mark of cruelty.

“I was starting to formulate the idea of myself: a guy and his guitar. And a group of songs that would just impress upon the bare basics,” Bruce says. “This music was me in the early stages attempting to find that group of songs that one guy, a guitar with no case and a cracked neck, could take up to John Hammond.”

A dozen songs emerged, then two dozen. They all seem like warm-up shots when compared to “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City.” Viewed from the surface, “Saint” seems an exercise in typical rock ’n’ roll bravado: the singer declaring himself a modern inheritor of Casanova,
The Wild One
–era Marlon Brando, and the street fighters staking their turf in the alleys and on street corners. But about halfway through, the urban landscape comes into view in such hellish terms that the narrator fades into the background. Satan materializes from a manhole cover, showing off cards powerful enough to send the police—and the civic structure they represent—reeling. Escaping into the subway, the singer feels the fires of hell (“It’s too hot in these tunnels / You get hit up by the heat!”). But then the train stops, and he fights his way back to the street, only to discover that he’s back where he started: surrounded by the ubiquitous hookers, cripples, and street fighters. “It’s so hard to be a saint,” he cries, “when you’re just a boy out in the city.”

Unable to connect with simpatico musicians in California, Bruce went back to the Jersey Shore in mid-January 1972. He played a handful of shows as the rhythm guitarist with the Sundance Blues Band (Van Zandt, Lopez, Sancious, and Southside Johnny) before heading south to start the Bruce Springsteen Band’s ten-show, monthlong residency at Richmond’s Back Door club. But while he had a handful of new songs for the band to play and would continue to write more as the winter passed, Bruce had secretly committed himself to relaunching himself as a solo performer. “There was a moment when I had the band and a group of new songs, and I had my acoustic music, and I was sort of debating which way I was going,” he says. “So I’m thinking, ‘Okay, I played a lot of different genres that I put my own stamp on.’ If someone had picked up Steel Mill at the time, we might have done well.

“But at the end of the day, I just thought what I was doing on my own was more interesting. There was more of an original voice in it.”

• • •

When Bruce dialed the Wes Farrell offices in February 1972, Mike Appel had no idea who was on the line. Nearly three months had passed since the aspiring manager had greeted Tinker West and his skinny guitar player for that short visit. But when Bruce mentioned West’s name, it all came back, and Appel invited him back to play his new batch of songs. Come on Monday, the fourteenth, after business hours, Appel said. And this time his production partner, Jimmy Cretecos, would be there to listen too.

Bruce took the bus from Asbury Park to the Port Authority on the westside of midtown Manhattan, then carried his guitar the mile or so to the Farrell office on Avenue of the Americas. He appeared at the front door just past eight thirty dressed up in his usual faded jeans, T-shirt, and hooded sweatshirt. Most of the offices in Farrell’s suite were dark, but Appel and Cretecos, accompanied by Farrell’s newly hired twenty-one-year-old song plugger Bob Spitz, ushered their guest to a chair in the reception room. Spitz might have been younger and less experienced than Appel and Cretecos, but he shared their determination to climb the showbiz ladder as quickly as possible. So while the songwriters stayed late trying to figure their way into their own production offices, Spitz
clattered a typewriter, hoping to string together a usable script for the
Patridge Family
sitcom. But he’d try anything that seemed promising, so when Appel poked his head through the door and invited him to check out this new kid they had coming in, Spitz jumped up happily. “Bruce sat down, and I said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna tape this!’ I had this little reel-to-reel, so I came back and set it up, and Bruce pulled out his guitar and sang a song.”

He started with “No Need,” a yearning ballad about a beguiling rich girl who looks past the singer’s awkwardness to see the beauty in his music. “And she knows I stumble when I talk,” Bruce sang, “so she says, ‘Don’t talk at all babe, just sing.’” Something in the song—the combination of Bruce’s vibrant verse, the melody, and the urgent belief in his voice—pushed the three men against the backs of their chairs. “Mike, Jimmy, and I were looking at each other, gaping,” Spitz recalls. Then came “Cowboys of the Sea,” “If I Was the Priest,” and “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City,” which made Appel’s pulse race. A handful of other songs followed, including early versions of “For You” and “The Angel,” but Appel and Cretecos had already made up their minds. When Bruce finished, Appel talked at length about how these new songs were so much better than the ones he had played earlier: the lyrics more vivid; the chord changes so unexpected; the melodies so striking. These, Appel continued, were sophisticated songs that could turn the industry on its ear. So yes, he and Jimmy wanted to work with him. And if Bruce could find a more passionate manager—some guy who would sweat more, bleed more, and crawl over more glass for him—he’d better go sign with that guy right now.

In its way, Appel’s performance had all the passion and fire the musician had just displayed. Flattered beyond belief, Bruce agreed to come back the next day to talk about contracts and other business matters. He said his good-byes and left Appel and Cretecos alone with Spitz, whose eyes had taken on a lemur-like shine. “I was fucking in love,” Spitz says. “I would have sold my mother to go with those guys. And they knew it.”

The trio closed down the offices and went to dinner at the nearby Burger Heaven, where they sat in a booth and schemed for hours, talking their way through the next few weeks and months. Their moment had
arrived, Appel insisted. Farrell, best known for writing the smash “Hang On Sloopy,” was then working almost exclusively on providing songs for the imaginary band at the core of ABC-TV’s hit sitcom
The Partridge Family.
They’d been searching for their way out of the
Partridge
factory, and now Appel had no doubt that Bruce Springsteen would kick open the door for them. Once they had that kid’s name on a management contract, they’d have to leave everything else behind. He’d promised Bruce his sweat, his blood, his life. And if the kid kept giving his all to his music, they had to invest themselves completely. “By midnight we decided we were all leaving Farrell,” Spitz says.

Not immediately, though. Recalling their contractual obligation to share all potential discoveries with Farrell, Appel dutifully brought Bruce to his boss’s office to play a few songs just in case his boss heard an echo of the sound that had bowled over Appel. Whether he thought the man behind Keith Partridge (aka David Cassidy) would actually fall for such a rough-hewn artist is debatable. But Appel ushered his tangle-haired singer into Farrell’s office. Two songs and ten minutes later, they were on their way. “It wasn’t his cup of tea, so he passed on Bruce Springsteen,” Appel says with more than a tinge of disbelief.

Cleared of their contractual obligations, Appel and Cretecos spent the next month making calls for their new artist and drafting agreements and contracts to serve as the foundation of their new entertainment concern. Most of this took place in the office of Farrell’s office manager, Vel Thornton, who spent hours tending to business in other offices in other buildings. Spitz worked at a desk just outside Thornton’s front door, and when he saw her marching in, he’d smack his elbow against the wall, signaling the songwriters to dash out of the office’s rear door toward the small songwriter’s office where they were supposed to be cranking out breezy pop tunes for the next Partridge Family album.

They quit their jobs in mid-March and formed a fifty-fifty partnership as co-owners of a management company they called Laurel Canyon, Ltd.
³
Spitz joined up too, serving as some combination of bookkeeper,
office manager, demo recorder, and hotelier for Bruce, who took to crashing in the hammock Spitz had strung across the living room of his tiny downtown apartment. Still searching for a permanent address for their offices, the trio set up temporary residence in the West Fifty-fourth Street offices belonging to Jules Kurz, an old-time showbiz attorney Appel used, and with whom he had become friendly. When Appel needed a boilerplate set of contracts for his new client, Kurz cranked out the documents that defined the governance of Bruce’s writing, performing, and recording careers. Whether Bruce—or Appel, for that matter—gave the documents a thorough reading is unclear. But both signed the management deal within a week of the February audition. And from that moment, Bruce’s and Appel’s lives would be linked through hard times, good times, and times that could be described only as truly awful.

• • •

The oldest of the five kids raised by Thomas and Marie Appel, Appel was born in the Bronx in 1942, and grew up in the wealthy village of Old Brookville, on the North Shore of Long Island. Appel’s father worked obsessively to build his real estate business and expected his children, particularly his oldest son, to live up to his example. If they didn’t, things got very bad, very quickly. “My father was dominant, domineering, and very restrictive,” Mike’s younger brother, Stephen, says. “It was tough for Mike. Very tough. Dad had a tough relationship with all of us, but Mike really bore the brunt of the physicality—the hitting.”

Just like Adele Springsteen did for her son, Marie Appel nurtured Mike’s artistic side. Once a singer and performer herself, she recognized and encouraged her oldest child’s interest in music. When Michael first talked about playing the guitar, she bought him an acoustic and signed him up for lessons. When he tuned into New York City’s Top 40 stations she bought him 45s by Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Carl Perkins. When his love for rock ’n’ roll grew into overwhelming desire to make music for himself, she bought him an electric Silvertone guitar and
amplifier, propelling her son into the work that would eventually define his life.

Appel’s mother gave him the tools and encouragement, but when he got into a band and dug into the high school circuit around western Long Island, his father’s hard-driving ambition took over. Perpetually striving, Appel put bands together, wrote their songs, and ran rehearsals with strict discipline. He also cultivated the professional connections that would gain his band a foothold in the music industry. He took his first group, the Humbugs, to record demos in a New York studio, and the outfit won a contract to one of 20th Century Fox’s smaller rock ’n’ roll labels. A couple of the group’s instrumentals made the regional sales charts. Meanwhile, Appel earned a business degree at St. John’s University, and when the army came calling, he sidestepped the draft by joining a reserve unit in the marines, which allowed him to avoid all but six months of boot camp and training before depositing him back in civilian life, save for a few years of monthly service on weekends. Still, the hard-ass marines training fed into Appel’s already-growing reputation for being a taskmaster. “He was a real marine,” Stephen Appel says. Indeed, Appel held on to a drill sergeant’s hat he got at Parris Island, South Carolina, and perched it on his head when he went into ass-kicking mode.