Bruce (20 page)

“Bruce started doing this song with mommy-daddy words, like he was singing in a little kid’s voice,” Wasylczenko recalls. The lyrics describe a man and boy walking hand in hand to fish in a lake, but they could just as easily have been on one of Fred Springsteen’s regular hunts for radio parts in the neighborhood trash cans. “You felt this incredible love the boy has for his grandfather, all in his description of this little fishing trip.” The audience nodded along with Bruce’s gently strummed vision right up until the song’s final verse, which follows the boy walking home from school a few days later. “He describes coming to their family home,” Wasylczenko continues. “He’s walking across the porch and being stunned by something he sees in the living room.” When the boy finally reaches his mother, his question serves as the song’s crushing climax.

“He asks, ‘Mommy, why is Grandpa sleeping in a box?’ And it stunned the audience,” Wasylczenko says. “I mean, the room was silent. No one applauded. They were just . . . breathless. Bruce turned away quickly, and I could see tears running down his face. I don’t think he ever played that song again.”

• • •

Bruce played a handful of solo shows that spring and summer, the most prominent of them being a July benefit old friend Howard Grant gave at his three-hundred-seat Cinema III theater in Red Bank to raise money for Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, the liberal senator from South Dakota. The show sold out quickly, with overflow seating in the back and the aisles. And yet, Grant says, Bruce grew visibly impatient during the political speechifying. “He was entirely apolitical,” Grant says. “He didn’t believe that anything would be better or worse at the end of the day because of politicians. But remember who McGovern was running against. And that was a generational thing. Bruce was going to support anyone who was running against Richard Nixon.”

And in the midst of the antihippie hostility in central New Jersey’s small towns, Bruce says, supporting any candidate felt like taking a risk. “I voted,” Bruce says. “For the first time, so I must have been thinking about [presidential politics].” And having some strong feelings about the issues, given what Bruce felt he’d risk by revealing himself to the authorities in Monmouth County. “To get involved in any sort of thing where you had to go in and identify yourself? That was going way beyond anything any of us cared to do. You must have needed some proof of identification, which people rarely carried. And an address, I’d imagine. I was floating probably in most of those days. I mean, in ’72, where was I living?”

The politics that actually did affect Bruce’s life stemmed from the growing conflict between the mentors who saw him as the lone singer-songwriter he had embodied since his first audition with Appel, and the ones drawn to the rock ’n’ roll guitarist and front man he’d been for the vast majority of his career. John Hammond insisted that Bruce perform in the style he had brought to his audition, and Appel obviously shared his vision. But as the recording sessions set for early July edged closer,
Bruce couldn’t stop hearing the new songs being played by a band. Certainly, a number of the acoustic songs slated for the album—“The Angel,” “Mary Queen of Arkansas,” and “Visitation at Fort Horn,” to name a few—would find greater resonance in a more intimate solo setting. But “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” needed Manhattan’s electric pulse, just as “Lost in the Flood” required boom and snarl to animate its postmoral wasteland. Cretecos felt the same way, and when the the issue got to Clive Davis’s desk, he sided with Bruce and Cretecos.

To some observers at Columbia Records, Davis’s overruling of Hammond seemed as rooted in the two execs’ low-boiling professional rivalry as in the sound of Bruce’s music. Hammond had certainly given Appel and Bruce the impression that his personal imprimatur guaranteed that Bruce would get a recording contract. That Davis had fallen just as hard for Bruce and signed him immediately implied that Hammond hadn’t overstated his power. But forty years later, Davis takes care to dispel the notion. “John was an A&R man who came up with a lot of ideas,” he says. “Some of [his artists] were signed, some weren’t. But I do know that after John saw Bruce, he had to play his songs to me. John didn’t have the power to sign artists.” Nor to maneuver his new signing to the label’s younger, arguably hipper subsidiary, Epic Records, which Appel recalls as Hammond’s plans for his latest discovery. Appel wasn’t crazy about the idea, and Davis, who stood to lose a promising talent from his own label’s ranks, shot it down instantly. Bruce stayed on Columbia.

Davis’s support of the full band sound allowed Bruce to pick up the telephone and call in the other members of the Bruce Springsteen Band. To Garry Tallent, the message sounded like anything but a herald of future glories. “He just asked if I could come up and help him record.” Beyond the few days of recording he had on the schedule, Bruce offered no promises, no commitments, and no sense that his latest, rather dramatic revelation—he had been signed to a recording contract by one of the biggest and most highly regarded major labels—might require some clarity or even an explanation to the four musicians who had been playing at his side. Instead the band members realized that Bruce’s new team of managers and label executives saw them as something less than vital to the next
stage of his career. “We were like a band of hobos from New Jersey,” Tallent says. “Just Bruce bringing in his pals.”

If bringing along his buddies had truly been Bruce’s highest purpose, it would have been safe to assume that Steven Van Zandt would be there. They’d spent so much of the last seven years working toward this very moment. “I was his best friend, and sort of a consigliere since birth,” Van Zandt says. They’d shared so much music, and worked together so closely for the previous two years, Van Zandt had no doubt the collaboration would continue through Bruce’s debut record and beyond. “I knew what he wanted to hear,” he says. “But I was too close. They couldn’t go straight to him and manipulate him without me being the rock. Or at least that’s what they thought, so Mike Appel decided I was unnecessary.”

The other musicians saw the conflict building from the opening take on the first recording date. “Steve was there for the first session,” Tallent says. “But he had an opinion [about how things should sound], and Mike didn’t want another opinion.” Appel, on the other hand, says he had no role in Van Zandt’s quick ouster. “Bruce decided he wasn’t necessary,” he says. “I think he just decided that having another guitarist at that time was not the right musical mix. And you must remember that Bruce can play guitar pretty damn well too.”

No matter whose decision, Van Zandt didn’t get a chance to take his guitar out of its case. His sole contribution to the album came when he punched the reverb tank on the back of his amp to create the blast of thunder that kicks off “Lost in the Flood.” He got the news just after that session. “I can’t remember if Mike told me or if it was Bruce. I think it had to be Bruce. And yeah, it was a downer. Very depressing.”

For Bruce it came down to professional survival. “Don’t forget, here was a guy making his first record. And they didn’t want no band!” he says. “John Hammond wanted what he’d kind of seen from across his desk.” And while he had only just managed to convince Appel and Hammond (but mostly Clive Davis) to let him use a rhythm section on some of the songs, their appetite for layered guitars—or even one halfway noisy electric guitar—had already reached its limit. “I felt like I came in undercover,” Bruce says. “I always knew that some point when I got rolling, for
me rolling was full-out [electric band music]. But there was no interest in that at the moment.”

And what of the talk of static between Van Zandt and coproducers Appel and Cretecos? “They didn’t
know
Steve. Really, there just wasn’t interest in moving in an electric guitar. They were like, ‘We’ll go
here,
but we’re not moving
there
.’ I accepted it as a compromise between John Hammond and the record company and the record that I was trying to get Mike to make as producer. And I think I was also very caught up in the one-man, one-guitar, your-song thing. I was in the middle of that reinvention of myself. And that’s what we ended up with.”

Van Zandt went back to New Jersey, laid his guitar aside, and didn’t pick it up again, he says, for almost two years. Hearing this, Bruce furrows his brow. “Is that true? I don’t know, he may be being dramatic, but maybe not.” Van Zandt: “I was working construction, running a jackhammer, and played football on the weekends.” Bruce, recalling the incident now, laughs: “Oh, he
did!
He got a real job! What got into him?” When a football-related incident snapped one of Van Zandt’s digits, he started playing a lot of piano to strengthen the finger. Feeling the itch to play in public again, he formed a bar band that included a drummer whose cousin had scored a job playing in the stage band for the early-sixties singing group the Dovells, famous for “Bristol Stomp” among others. They recruited Van Zandt to be the bandleader for the group’s tours, and the musician put down his jackhammer for good. “We were on one of those oldies package extravaganzas. And it was fun for me. I got to meet all my heroes.”

• • •

The recording of
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.
began in early July with full-band sessions held at 914 Sound Studios, located in the out-of-the-way (and thus inexpensive) town of Blauvelt, New York, located about forty-five minutes northwest of Manhattan. Appel and Cretecos ran the control room, with deference to their artist, who directed the band from the studio floor. The sessions were crisp and businesslike; closer to a gathering of music professionals than the kind of all-for-one, one-for-all vibe that had knit together Steel Mill and the Bruce Springsteen Band. With so many padded walls and glassed-in booths separating Bruce, Appel, and
the Asbury Park crew, it was easier for everyone to focus on his own licks than on what this new twist in their leader’s career meant to their own futures. Instead Bruce led the musicians, minus Van Zandt, through “For You,” “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City,” “Lost in the Flood,” and “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?” Recording the basic tracks took two days, Tallent recalls. When they were done, the farewells in the 914 parking lot were as casual as they were indistinct. As far as anyone knew, it could well be the last time they would ever play together. Tallent and Sancious headed back to their lives in Richmond. Lopez went back to his boatyard. “And as far as any of us knew,” Tallent says, “that was it.”

Bruce, Appel, and Cretecos spent another week or so perfecting the full-band tracks and then turned their attention to the acoustic songs Bruce would perform on his own. Working with a sense that the album should be divided evenly between acoustic and electric songs, they recorded five songs with Bruce accompanying himself on guitar and, in one case, piano: a nearly eight-minute morality tale about war called “Visitation at Fort Horn,” the impressionistic biker ballad “The Angel,” a late-night noir tale called “Jazz Musician,” the non–Middle Eastern ballad “Arabian Nights,” and a dreamy circus performer lament called “Mary Queen of Arkansas.” The relatively speedy sessions ended in early August, with the tapes handed over to Columbia within a few days. When Clive Davis turned his ear to the tapes, he liked what he heard. The songs were just as well constructed and beautifully observed as they had been on Bruce’s studio demo. The band arrangements added zest without obscuring the all-important lyrics. They were, in short, great album tracks. But would any of these deeply felt, wildly imagined songs find their way onto the nation’s radio airwaves? After a day or two, Davis picked up the phone and dialed Bruce directly.

“I asked him if he’d consider writing some additional material,” Davis says. Specifically, he added, at least one or two tracks that he could imagine being played on the radio. “That’s always a touchy subject with artists. But part of what made Bruce so special was that he didn’t take offense.”

Not even close, in fact. “I said, ‘Well, that’s probably true,’” Bruce said. “So I went down to the beach and wrote ‘Blinded by the Light’ and ‘Spirit in the Night.’ So that was a good call. They became the two best songs on the record.”

Adding the new songs meant calling for another day or two of band sessions. But with three-fifths of his musicians down in Virginia and the clock running down, Bruce came up with another plan: Lopez would play the drums, but they’d hire well-known session pianist Harold Wheeler to handle the keyboards, and Bruce would, through the miracle of overdubbing, handle both the guitar and the bass. And he had one more card to play too: another Asbury Park musician he’d gotten to know a bit over the previous year. Bruce could already hear the recorded songs in his head and knew that the key musical element could be played only by Asbury-based saxophone player Clarence Clemons. The sax player, then the front man for Norman Seldin and the Joyful Noyze, was happy to come up and record, and as Bruce suspected, his Junior Walker–inspired riffs gave the songs just the right rhythm and blues feel. Clemons and Lopez hung around to overdub backing vocals and hand claps, and once the new songs replaced “Arabian Nights” and “Jazz Musician” on the master tape, the final lineup for Bruce’s debut album was complete.

Job done and final test pressings stamped, Bruce returned to Bradley Beach while Appel and Bob Spitz took an acetate of the new album to Los Angeles to build excitement and new connections in the West Coast’s entertainment capital. They took a room at the notorious Hyatt House hotel/rock ’n’ roll star hangout on Sunset Boulevard
¹
and made the rounds of music executives, Appel’s well-placed friends, and record company
machers
. Everyone got a preview of the new album, along with the usual dose of Appel-style bonhomie and braggadocio. He’d picked himself a winner, he wanted LA’s musical core to understand. No one had wanted to believe him, but now the whole world would know that Bruce Springsteen, and the man who had discovered him, were the real thing.

All that got thrown aside when Bruce called their hotel room at ten o’clock one night and told Appel that he had decided that the abstruse, seven-minute “Visitation at Fort Horn,” had to be stripped off of the second side of
Greetings
. It was too long, Bruce insisted. It dominated
the end of the album and stole focus from “Spirit in the Night” and “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City.” It simply had to go, Bruce said.