Bruce (30 page)

When the sessions finally ended, Bruce described the era as an endless loop of unplayable parts, unfixable mistakes, and unmixable recordings. The experience, he told the
New York Times
’ John Rockwell in late 1975, was “like a total wipeout. It was a devastating thing, the hardest thing I ever did.” The fact that Bruce actively resisted help from more experienced hands, particularly when it came to mixing final versions of the songs, only made it more difficult. For all that he required absolute control over every aspect of the album, holding that much authority also multiplied his psychic burden. The closer he clutched the thing to his chest, the less of it he could see, or comprehend.

Steve Van Zandt dropped in one day to see how things were going, and found Bruce, Landau, and Appel trying to coach a handful of high-dollar session horn players
⁸
through their parts on “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” an old-school R&B romp that celebrated Bruce’s spiritual connection to the band. As always, the process dragged on for hours. Increasingly frustrated and burned out, Bruce approached his old friend, then lying on his back on the control room floor. “Whaddaya think?” he asked. Van Zandt looked up from the carpet. “Me? I think it sucks.” Bruce recoiled and then issued a sharp snort. “Well, then
fix it!
” he snapped and plopped down hard into a chair.

“It sounds like a myth, but that’s one story that’s actually true,” Van Zandt says now. So as his dispirited friend watched from the control room, Van Zandt climbed to his feet, pushed through the studio door, and walked to the center of the studio floor. “Okay, boys!” he called. “You can toss those charts away now.” Working on his feet, Van Zandt pointed to each horn player in turn and sang him his new part. After a quick horns-only run-through, Van Zandt gestured to the engineer to roll tape. And when the track played again, it knit perfectly with the bouncy
Stax-style groove they’d been chasing all evening. At which point Bruce turned to Appel. “Let’s get this boy on the payroll,” he said. Van Zandt accepted his old friend’s offer, but, he says, mostly because he didn’t think he was making that much of a commitment.

“As far as I knew, Bruce’s thing was over,” he says. “They had seven gigs booked, and that was it. So the offer I got was really, ‘Hey, come out and play these last seven shows with us.’” Which felt exactly right, since Van Zandt’s central project—managing, producing, and writing for the Asbury Jukes—was starting to pay dividends now that they had become the most popular bar band on the East Coast. Even so, and no matter what had happened between them in the last few years, Van Zandt still considered himself to be Bruce’s true consigliere. When his buddy beckoned, Steve would be there, no questions asked. “And then I ended up staying seven years.”

• • •

Mixing the tracks—the process of filtering, enhancing, and then blending together the many individual performances that make up a multitrack recording—quickly bogged down into another tortuous process that dragged until the dawn of July 20, just hours before Bruce and company were due to launch their summer-fall tour in Providence, Rhode Island. Finally escaping the Record Plant struck the entire band as an enormous relief, but the emotional respite didn’t last long.

Five days later Appel showed up at the band’s hotel in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, with an acetate pressing of the master recording of
Born to Run
. With Bruce, his new girlfriend, Karen Darvin, and the entire band gathered to listen, Appel placed the disc on the inexpensive portable record player Bruce took on the road and let it spin. When the last notes of “Jungleland” faded out, the band whooped, applauded, and reached out to slap hands. Stephen Appel, still serving as road manager, noticed that his big brother’s eyes glistened with tears. Relief seemed to blow in through the open window, except for Bruce, who sat with his face clenched, staring into the carpet. “I dunno,” he said darkly. “I’d do things differently.” Beard abristle, he jumped to his feet, snatched the acetate from the turntable, and stalked out to the hotel courtyard, where he flung it into the swimming pool.

What was wrong? How about
everything
. The sax parts sounded like a bad Bruce Springsteen imitation. (That’s when Clemons stalked out of the room.) The piano drowned out the guitars. The mix had the clarity of a shit storm. All this time, all that work, and
this
was the best they could do? And in conclusion:
“Fuck!”
No longer quite so happy, the rest of the band drifted out of the room, bound either for their rooms or (more likely) the bar. Alone with the brothers Appel, Bruce swan dived into the gloom. Did he understand that an acetate never sounds as good as the finished album? Did he take a moment to consider that the portable stereo he’d just been listening to, with its plastic speakers, tin tonearm, and Easy-Bake Oven design, might not even be capable of reproducing the dense, intricate recordings they had made? Apparently not.

Bruce was too busy declaring the entire project a waste of time. A cruel satire of rock ’n’ roll. Overheated dogshit. Appel dialed Landau, who had gone to California to check in with his colleagues at
Rolling Stone
, told him what had happened, and handed the phone to Bruce. Thus began, as Landau recalls, a “combative” conversation. “My point was . . . part of the job is finishing,” Landau says. “I was saying, look, you can’t and will not be able to put every thought, every idea, and every creative impulse onto one record.” From this point forward, Landau insisted, Bruce should take all of his new ideas and put them in his notebook for the
next
record. “There
is
going to be a next record, believe me,” he swore.

Bruce remained unconvinced. He hung up the phone and looked over at Appel, now reclining in a chair and shaking his head. “Fuck it,” Appel said. “Let’s scrap the whole thing. I mean, obviously. Just
fuck
it.” He kept going, talking about how he’d break the news to Columbia’s Bruce Lundvall the next morning. Sure, he’d be pissed. But that’s showbiz, right? And maybe, Appel continued, they could let the label release the “Born to Run” single as a stopgap, and then rerecord the songs live in the studio without any overdubs or Phil Spectorian witchcraft? That’d work. Or better yet, they could record some shows and use the live performances of the new songs as album tracks. Anything was possible, right?

“I was being crazier than him, see?” Appel says. “Now
he
had to be
the voice of reason.” Bruce, Karen Darvin, and the two Appels all piled into Mike’s car and headed for the turnpike back to the city. They were maybe halfway home when Bruce started to laugh. Quietly at first, then uproariously. “He thought it was hilarious that Mike was so crazy,” Stephen Appel says. “Suddenly he was in a great place. Both Mike and Jon had said exactly the right things to him. I never saw Bruce happier than on that car ride.” By the time they got back to New York, Bruce shrugged off the last six torturous hours with a wave of the hand. “Then again,” he said, “let’s just let it ride.”

Born to Run
would be released in exactly a month.

• • •

The band swung through a few of its more reliable cities in early August, girding for a five-night, ten-show stand at the Bottom Line in the West Village. The shows sold out instantly—not a major feat given the club’s four-hundred-seat capacity—but once again, the crucial factor had less to do with the paying fans than with the CBS-comped tastemakers, critics, and industry
machers
who would decide exactly how the much-anticipated album by the so-called future of rock ’n’ roll would be received. “The whole world came to those shows,” Van Zandt says. “And not in a supportive way, either. It was more like, ‘Okay,
show
me something!’ ”

So Bruce did, with eight compact but intense ninety-minute performances that mixed selections from his first two albums with songs from the new record and sixties covers (the Beach Boys’ arrangement of “Then I Kissed Her,” the Searchers’ “When You Walk in the Room,” and Ike and Tina Turner’s “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”) that shed light on Bruce’s connection to rock’s foundations. And while the band played with its usual fire and discipline, Bruce performed like a man possessed. He waved his arms, broke into a strange herky-jerky dance (imagine a marionette with fifty thousand watts of AC running through its strings), and then leapt off the stage to dash across the lines of tables as enthralled clubgoers tried to slap his hand and grab their drinks at the same time. Back onstage he flirted with the girls in the front, shouted out to his relatives sitting in the back, and told elaborate shaggy-dog stories about his childhood and his days with the Castiles and Steel Mill.

Celebrities came in flocks, including actor Robert De Niro, who took
special note of Bruce’s pre-encore “Are you talkin’ to
me?
” routine (which the actor later transmuted into a creepy highlight of his performance as a psychotic in 1976’s
Taxi Driver
), along with director Martin Scorsese, who came away eager to cast the rocker in one of his movies. When Clive Davis showed up with Lou Reed in tow, the former Columbia president
⁹
could barely believe how far the shy folkie he’d met in 1972 had come. “I was stunned, actually,” he says. “He was the best live performer I’d ever seen in my life.” When Davis came backstage to say hello afterward, Bruce wrapped him in a hug and whispered slyly into his ear, “Am I moving around enough for ya now?”

The publicists at Columbia/CBS were making plenty of moves of their own. Directed by label president Bruce Lundvall to spend $250,000 to get the word out as far, wide, and as inescapably as possible, Glen Brunman designed the
Born to Run
sales campaign like a D-day invasion, with multiple forces poised to attack in calibrated waves. Starting with posters and stand-up displays for retail stores, they rode the reviews and features stirred up by the star-packed run of shows at the Bottom Line, all setting the stage for the scores of ads placed in newspapers to herald the album’s release at the end of August. An endless barrage of Bruce this and Bruce that, all of it illustrated by striking portraits of the bearded, curly-haired artist looking like a poet biker in his black leather and jeans, an Elvis Presley button on his chest (or sleeve, depending on the shot), clutching his now weathered Fender and a pair of Converse sneakers hanging from the guitar’s tuning pegs. And right there you could see the whole album in front of you: the essence of fifties rock ’n’ roll and the beatnik poetry of sixties folk-rock, projected onto the battered spirit of mid-seventies America.

And if that didn’t seem iconic enough, take a long look at the album itself: the black-and-white shot of Bruce—cloaked in black leather, guitar in hand, Elvis button on his strap—leaning hard on the mighty shoulder of Clemons, whose white shirt is set off by a broad-brimmed black hat and, of course, his radiant black skin. For in this picture, Bruce knew, resided the heart of the band: unity, brotherhood, a small fulfillment of
the American ideals of strength, equality, and community. The essence of e pluribus unum, as filtered through the unity of rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues. “A friendship and a narrative steeped in the complicated history of America begin to form, and there is music already in the air,” Bruce wrote thirty-five years later, describing the picture in the foreword to Clemons’s whimsical memoir,
Big Man
. “The album begins to work its magic.”

As image creation goes, it worked on every level. The visual union of Elvis, Dylan, and Marlon Brando, with a touch of Stagger Lee looming over his shoulder for bad-ass measure. And if that bit off a big chunk of cultural iconography, the songs themselves dug even deeper with their visions of young love, small towns, rumbling highways, and the wicked fast streets of the city. And thrumming beneath the entire tableau, the spark of hope, and the promise—shaky, but still—that an American road can take you anywhere you had the imagination, courage, and luck to find. But in the midst of the Gerald Ford administration, after a dozen-plus years defined by assassinations, war, political corruption, and the collapse of the flower child/hippie/Woodstock culture, the sound of such belief—particularly from a veteran of the same cultural conflicts—was stunning.

But there it is, right from the rusty music-box opening of “Thunder Road,” as Bruce’s voice, sounding younger and clearer than on his earlier records, greets a girl as she steps into a twilight breeze. He’s a social reject, and she’s an outsider, both left to pray for chances that never come. So the singer holds out the only thing he has left to offer: the engine in his car and the highway leading out of town. “Hey, the night’s bustin’ open / These two lanes will take us anywhere!” The band detonates, but Bruce, singing in a strikingly rich and powerful croon, crowns everything. “That must have come straight out of [the Orbison] records,” Bruce says of his new vocal technique. “That big, round operatic tone. I just loved the sound of [Orbison’s] voice, and I gave it a shot. Just said, ‘Well, here I go.’ And I didn’t get there. But I got someplace.” Indeed, the stereo speakers boil over with romantic urgency. Even when the lyrics glow purple (the killer in the sun, the talking guitar, the screaming ghosts), the belief in Bruce’s voice keeps it riveting. Bruised, burned, and somehow unbowed,
he’s taking the American ideal at its word, betting it all on the open road and his own stubborn will. “It’s a town full of losers, I’m pulling outta here to win!” On a hero’s journey that flows as much from
The Iliad
as it does from
The Wild One
.

Every song plays for the heart; every piano intro, organ line, drum fill, and bent guitar note is meant to revive a memory, trace a scar, point to the future. The light-footed “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” serves as the E Street Band’s creation myth and a meditation on the transformative power of friendship. The squealing guitars in “Night” paints the Ocean Avenue–Kingsley Street circuit as a last-ditch arena for working-class glory, while the alternately brooding and explosive “Backstreets” casts its broken teen romance against a dying, spiritless city. Flip the album, and a blast of drums erupts into the bombast of the album’s title track. Faster, harder, and more deliriously phrased than the companion piece at the start of the first side, “Born to Run” plays like a meld of Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” As in the former, the imagist lyrics of “Born to Run” (the cages, the suicide machines, the velvet rims, the hemipowered drones) define a strikingly new vocabulary. And like the latter, the layered music is powerful enough to make lyrics all but unnecessary. Woven together, it all comes at hurricane force, blowing houses apart, ripping trees from the earth, hurling cows into the next county.