Bruce (27 page)

Given a year’s worth of experience among a slightly higher orbit of performers, Bruce put more emphasis on his wardrobe, trading wrinkled T-shirts and hoodies for gleaming white T-shirts, usually set off by a vest or sweater. Even Bruce’s facial hair got itself together, graduating from the Spanish moss stage to something closer to a dark, filled-in beard. The
crew tightened up its act too,
¹
with a new generation of crew guys experienced enough to anticipate and fix “the fuck-up factor,” as they called it, before a club manager’s mistake or stray communication could screw up the night’s show. And if they needed someone to have a frank and useful discussion with an underperforming or annoying presence, that’s where Lopez came in. Only sometimes he didn’t think things through before he launched the missiles. And other times he aimed them at his own friends and compadres.

Everyone knew Lopez had started the original band. That he brought in Federici, who helped take stock of Bruce’s skills before they both asked him to join in with them in the winter of 1969. Lopez and Bruce had played together ever since, and while the drummer knew which one of them wrote, sang, and played lead guitar on their songs, he also knew which one was, on at least one level, the senior man in the organization. Look at the picture on the back of
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle,
and you can see it yourself: Bruce leaning against the windowsill with Clemons, everyone else seated or slouched, while Lopez stands tall behind them, shirt open and muscles rippling like a conquering hero. “[Fans] called me Bruce for the longest time because of that picture,” Lopez says.

The drummer took some heat from critics for his offbeat sound, but not from his boss. “He had this wildly eccentric sound,” Bruce recalled thirty years later. “A fabulous style that totally fit those [first] two records.” And yet Bruce knew his third album would have to sound more focused. They would have to act that way too, which was where Lopez’s fists got in the way. Particularly when the decreasingly subtle feud between the drummer and Clemons got out of control. One ridiculous argument
²
in the house they shared with Federici didn’t end until furniture was splintered, walls punched through, and Clemons wielded a heavy stereo speaker as a deadly weapon. “I figured I’d scare him,” Clemons
said. Message received. “He grabbed me by the throat, and then I was the bouncing ball,” Lopez says. “He was big, you know. After that, I moved out of the house.”

Lopez’s five-year tenure with Bruce hit its death spiral during an early-February recording session in Blauvelt. At one point in the evening, Stephen Appel showed up bearing the band’s weekly salaries. But when Lopez counted and realized the take was several hundred dollars lighter than usual, his fiery instincts took over. Storming out of the studio, Lopez found Stephen chatting with Louis Lahav in the lounge. Already roaring about the money, Lopez either shoved the cash into Stephen’s chest with enough gusto to accidentally knock him down (Lopez’s version), or else he punched him in the face hard enough to send him through an open door and into the next room (Stephen’s recollection). Either way, Bruce saw the whole thing.

“Bruce leaped up like a crazy man,” Stephen Appel says. “He screamed,
‘What are you doing!?’
and Vini just ran out into the woods.”

Stephen peeled himself off the floor and stalked out to his car, but Bruce caught him before he could climb in. “He said, ‘What the hell just happened?’ and I said, ‘You were there!’” The teenager screeched away a moment later, leaving Bruce to decide if he should chase his renegade drummer through the wild or return to the studio, where the rest of the band waited.

Two days later Bruce knocked on Lopez’s door in Bradley Beach, where the drummer stored the guitarist’s stage equipment. When he came inside, he delivered the news in a chilly monotone.

“Hey man, you’re fired.”

Lopez shook his head. What did Bruce mean?

“You’re not in the band anymore.”

The drummer tried to bargain: he’d fucked up, he knew it. And if his drumming was a problem, he could practice more. Whatever, he deserved a second chance. Everyone gets a second chance, right?

“Nope,” Bruce said. “No second chances. It’s a dog-eat-dog world.”

Lopez: “I could tell he felt bad about it. But he was Bruce about it too. Just a little bit detached.” Lopez wouldn’t accept it. He cajoled. He
argued. He nearly begged. Then he remembers it getting uglier. That Bruce called him a shitty drummer. That critics and friends had long urged him to find someone else for the job, and now he had no choice. Finally, Lopez pointed to the door and told him to get the fuck out, right now. “Ordinarily, I’d help him carry his stuff out to the car,” Lopez says. “But at this point, he could do it by himself.”

• • •

The first audition went to Johnny Arnzt, a hard-hitting Asbury Park regular whom Tallent and Federici had played with as teenagers. But when Sancious brought in Ernest “Boom” Carter, the versatile Richmond drummer that he and Tallent had played with in the first iteration of Sancious’s jazz-fusion trio, he fit in immediately. “This guy
plays
the damn drums,” Bruce told a reporter during Carter’s first tour with the band. “He knows the subtle. He don’t beat the drums, he don’t smash the drums. He’s understated. A very subtle cat.”

Carter was also fast enough on his feet to play a show less than a week after they started rehearsing together. Mike Appel had already cancelled a handful of dates in order to give the drummer a chance to get the hang of the band’s songs and style. But the owner of the Satellite Lounge in Cookstown, New Jersey, refused to accept the cancellation. Everything was set up, the tickets were sold, this was going to be a huge moneymaker for him. And they were going to let an unrehearsed drummer upend the whole thing? No fucking way. So Appel cited a litany of other reasons: the recording sessions, exhaustion, and what about the gas crisis? The nation’s supply had dried up. Drivers had to wait for hours to fill their tanks. They could end up stuck in south Jersey with no gas and no way to get home.

“I’ll take care of that,” the guy said. And if they didn’t show up, by the way, he’d take care of
them
. “The word we got was that he had people who were going to shoot us if we didn’t play the gig,” Tallent remembers. “The big quote was something like, ‘
I know where you live.
’” So as it turned out, they
could
work a gig into their break. And when the show ended and the time came to drive back to New Jersey, the gas came to them, delivered to the club’s parking lot by a pair of state troopers.

So even if they couldn’t find their own albums in record stores within
walking distance of the clubs they played,
³
the months of touring—and a scattering of enthusiastic disc jockeys—began to pay off, and not always where they expected it. Swinging through Texas and Arizona in the spring, they played to a nearly empty room in Dallas but found an enthusiastic mob in Houston, a riotous club crowd in Austin, and, astonishingly, a sold-out concert hall in Phoenix. “I have no idea why we became so popular in this particular spot,” Bruce told a reporter after the show. “We don’t sell out a place that size, ever. So what happened here don’t happen. I don’t know what’s goin’ on down here.”

A few weeks later, in April, Bruce and the band drove to Boston to play a string of shows at Charlies Place, a small bar off of Harvard Square in Cambridge. Standing in the mist before the evening’s late show, reading the Boston
Real Paper
review of
Wild
posted on the wall, Bruce heard the voice of the clean-cut young man now standing next to him.

“Whaddaya think?” the guy asked, pointing to the review.

“It’s pretty good,” Bruce said.

Eyes gleaming behind his wire-rim glasses, the guy held out his hand and introduced himself. His name was Jon Landau, and yes, that was his name on the story. Bruce laughed, shook his hand, and stuck around to chat for a moment. Then he went backstage to pull things together for the show. Landau went inside to find the guy who had brought him to the show—a music writer named Dave Marsh—and find a place to sit.

When the show began, Landau could only gape. Transfixed by Sancious’s improvised opening to “New York City Serenade,” the critic was knocked backward by the full-tilt attack of “Spirit in the Night,” “Kitty’s Back,” and “Rosalita.” During the encores, Landau was on his feet, howling like a creature whose only contact with serious rock criticism would come when someone rolled up a newspaper and used it to swat its furry ass.

After the show, Landau introduced himself to Appel and hung
around to chat about Bruce and the intricacies of record production. “The next day I got a call from Bruce, and we talked for several hours,” Landau says. An eagle-eyed reader of reviews, Bruce had already fixed on the part of Landau’s review that criticized the production of Bruce’s first two records, and after having read that same beef in a variety of reviews, he needed to know exactly what Landau meant. “One thing led to another, and we just talked, just drifted all over the place, and we agreed to talk some more. That was the beginning.”

When Bruce and the band came back through Boston a month later to open for Bonnie Raitt at the Harvard Square Theatre, Landau showed up again. This time his step had lost the bounce that carried him through that night at Charlies. In a crumbling marriage, doubting his own commitment to his craft and to the rock and soul music that had inflamed his imagination since he was a boy, Landau was also scant hours from his twenty-seventh birthday. Feeling crushed and faded, the writer sat by himself, his face as empty as the life he thought he’d built for himself. Right until the lights faded and the music began. Because that’s when Landau felt it all again, even more strongly than before.

Springsteen does it all. He is a rock ’n roll punk, a Latin street poet, a ballet dancer, an actor, a joker, a bar band leader, a hot-shit rhythm guitar player, an extraordinary singer, and a truly great rock ’n’ roll composer.

And something else, too. A tonic for the soul. A flash of hope across the murkiest skies he’d ever encountered.

When his two-hour set ended, I could only think, can anyone really be this good; can anyone say this much to me, can rock ’n’ roll still speak with this kind of power and glory? And then I felt the sores on my thighs where I had been pounding my hands in time for the entire concert and knew that the answer was yes.

Four decades later it’s still a breathtaking piece of writing. A cry for help, a declaration of purpose, a call to arms. A piece so hotly emotional that
Landau spent years feeling sheepish about it. “I was writing to myself, writing to the reader, and I was writing to him.”

On a night when I needed to feel young [Springsteen] made me feel like I was listening to music for the first time. I saw my rock and roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else. I saw rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.

Even if it came from an alternative-to-the-alternative newspaper in Boston, the May 22 column hit the music industry, and especially the offices of Columbia/CBS Records, with the force of a thunderbolt.

“That got people’s attention,” CBS marketing executive and Bruce booster Ron McCarrell says. “We’d been hanging by our thumbs, hoping we were right. That bolstered our feelings.” And single-handedly revived the company’s interest in an artist it had all but abandoned. Suddenly the reps snapped back into gear, pushing Bruce’s records back into shops nationwide, accompanied by a promotional campaign pegged almost entirely to Landau’s column. “I remember turning the quote into a poster for record shops,” McCarrell says. “And that was kind of the beginning of what led into the massive campaign for
Born to Run
.”

You’d think Bruce would be thrilled. And he was. Except for the part of him that hated it. “I [was] just getting over the Dylan thing,” Bruce said to the UK
New Musical Express
’s Tony Tyler in 1975. “And I’m sitting home thinking thank God people seem to be letting
that
lie go, and phwoooeeee! ‘
I have seen.
’ No! It can’t be!”

So okay, Landau’s column had meant a lot to Bruce. But seeing it dragooned into yet another massive hype campaign? “It was like they took it all out of context and blew it up, and who’s gonna swallow that? It’s going to piss people off, man. It pisses
me
off. When I read it [in the ad], I wanted to strangle the guy who put that thing in there.”

Though, of course, the advertising guys had taken the critic’s proclamation in the
exact
context he had intended. But to Bruce, the distinction between a critic’s well-considered praise and the screamy hype of record company posters couldn’t be larger. “It’s like I’m always ten points down,
’cause not only have you got to play, you’ve got to blow this bullshit out of peoples’ minds first.” Only the music mattered, which explained why Bruce forbade Appel to produce T-shirts and other merchandise bearing his name and image, a purist move that also served to choke off a revenue stream that could help sustain the still-sputtering organization.
⁴
And although only a small number of promoters had reason to ask about booking shows in arenas, Bruce made it clear that he had no intention of playing in halls that would dilute the connection he could establish in clubs and smaller theaters.

Appel, for one, thought his client had the right priorities. “We were the wonder boys,” he says. “If we were going to invest time and money into anything, it had to add up to something cool for the performance. That was the driving force. The payoff was the artistry.”

• • •

As the spring warmed into summer, momentum for the live shows grew. The promotions staff at Columbia/CBS turned the three-night, six-show mid-July stand at New York’s Bottom Line club into a showcase for all the industry figures, journalists, radio programmers, and DJs who might be tempted to see the show for themselves. This time, virtually all of them clamored to be included. And Bruce came through like he’d never done in the industrial spotlight, turning in tight, fiery shows that linked rocked-up versions of his own songs with performances of the Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me”
⁵
and Chuck Berry’s “No Money Down” that invested the oldies with the depth and passion of rock ’n’ roll liturgy. And early drafts of “Born to Run” and “Jungleland” upped the ante that much more. Back in Phoenix at the end of the month, tickets for a return to the 2,650-capacity Celebrity Theatre sold out so quickly the promoter added a late show, which also sold out. The band’s take for the night added up to $11,500, nearly three times what it had ever made for a single night’s work.