Bruce (31 page)

“She’s the One” cuts back to musical basics, stringing its tale of obsessive love to a Bo Diddley beat played with the subtlety of an approaching tank. But such is the pain of lust; such are the pleasures of a powerfully fucked-up romance. The corner-bar jazz of “Meeting Across the River” casts its doomed hero in a 1950s
cinema noir
, only to send him into shadowy streets already buzzing with the action described in the album’s climactic piece, the 9:23 epic “Jungleland.”

Here a violin prelude gives way to piano and Bruce’s elegiac tale of the renegade Magic Rat, who joins forces with a barefoot girl only to be chased off by the “maximum lawmen,” antagonists to the city’s street gangs, rock bands, empty-hearted lovers, and every other character tramping the streets. And on this night, they’re dressing like visionaries, waving guitars “just like switchblades” and then wielding their knives
with balletic grace. The Magic Rat and the barefoot girl slip off together, and their connection stops the city in its tracks. A lone saxophone blares across the night, and when the ineffably sad melody concludes, everything has changed. Singing in a somber monotone, Bruce recounts the death of the Magic Rat, gunned down not by the cops or a rival but by his own tender heart. Just that quickly, the streets burn, battles rage, dreams vaporize. When the smoke clears, the devastation is so complete that even the poets have been struck dumb. “
They just stand back and let it all be.
”

As the critics would say,
Born to Run
lived up to every promise ever made about Bruce Springsteen. From the breezy opening moments of “Thunder Road” through the blood-borne passion of “She’s the One” and “Night,” the restless ambition fueling the title track, and the tragedies in “Backstreets” and “Jungleland,” the album stood as a summary of the previous twenty years of rock ’n’ roll, a portrait of the moment, and the cornerstone of a career that would reflect and shape the culture for the next twenty years, and the twenty to follow. Like the Beatles’ American debut,
Meet the Beatles
, Bob Dylan’s
Blonde on Blonde
, Elvis Presley’s first album, and Nirvana’s
Nevermind
,
Born to Run
established a sound and identity powerful enough to permanently alter the perceptions of those who heard it, whether they liked what they heard or not. “It was the album where I left behind my adolescent definitions of love and freedom,” Bruce wrote. “
Born to Run
was the dividing line.” Nearly four decades later, it still is.

T
HE CRITICAL APPRAISALS GREETING
BORN TO RUN
read like news accounts of the second coming. “The purest glimpse of the passion and power of rock ’n’ roll in nearly a decade,” sang the
Los Angeles Times
’ Robert Hilburn. Which sounded pretty good until you read the thoughts of the
New York Times
’ chief music critic, John Rockwell: “Mr. Springsteen’s gifts are so powerful and so diverse that it’s difficult even to try to describe them in a short space . . . you owe it to yourself to buy this record.” Pick up
Rolling Stone
, and there came Greil Marcus, one rock critic who could score a few points against Landau in an intellectual knife fight, declaring
Born to Run
“a magnificent album that pays off on every bet ever placed on [Springsteen].” At
Creem
the review came from the nicotine-yellow fingers of Lester Bangs, the gonzo critic whose acidic pen could reduce overblown music and musicians into a foul-smelling puddle. But while Bangs acknowledged the whiff of Barnum in Columbia’s publicity campaign (“one of the biggest hypes in recent memory”),
his enthusiasm for the music itself overwhelmed everything else. “Bruce Springsteen is an American archetype, and
Born to Run
will probably be the finest record released this year,” Bangs wrote. And there was more: “In a time of squalor and belittled desire, Springsteen’s music is majestic and passionate with no apologies . . . [and] we can soar with him, enjoying the heady rush of another gifted urchin cruising at the peak of his powers and feeling his oats as he gets it right, that chord, and the last word ever on a hoodlum’s nirvana.”

As the momentum behind
Born to Run
strengthened, so did the tidal conclusion that the album, like Bruce himself, was nothing short of heroic: God’s gift to the culturally blighted 1970s. Which put the New Dylan business to shame and added that much more momentum to the skepticism of writers and critics who didn’t have an ear for Bruce’s music but did have an eye for the magical blend of hype and herd mentality. And what could anyone make of the many connections between the über-critic circuit and Springsteen’s already incestuous inner circle? Any observant reader of rock magazines and other youth culture journals would recognize Landau’s name from his many reviews and columns, and from his record review editor title at
Rolling Stone
. And while the reader might not guess that Marcus and Landau were longtime friends—and that the former had in fact recommended the latter for his editorship—she could undoubtedly entertain herself wondering if Marcus’s personal and professional bonds to Landau (his titular editor at
Rolling Stone
) might have influenced his enthusiasm for
Born to Run
.

And, of course, Landau was also a close friend of the writer Dave Marsh, who had escorted Landau to his first Bruce show in the spring of 1974, introduced the two men, and then encouraged Landau to publish the “I Saw Rock and Roll Future” column at Boston’s
Real Paper
. It would be more of a leap to suggest that Marsh, who came up through the Detroit-based offices of
Creem
, had somehow bedazzled Bangs into writing his rave review. But Marsh had also written a glowing profile of Bruce that
Creem
published the month before Bangs’s review ran, which reintroduced the thought of insider groupthink. Either that, or the canniness on the part of a lightly educated New Jersey guitarist who had intuited that any artist who could fuse Bob Dylan’s subterranean braininess with Elvis
Presley’s sexual outrageousness would be the very image of the brainy rock critic’s fondest imaginings. So maybe it wasn’t difficult to understand what the
New York Times
’ Henry Edwards meant when he proposed, just after the first wave of
Born to Run
reviews flooded the media, that “if Bruce Springsteen didn’t already exist, the critics would have had to invent him.”
¹

And there was more to come.

Months after issuing the edict that Bruce would give no print interviews that weren’t guaranteed to be a part of a cover story (a bluff move that grew into a necessity when the wave of attention swelled to tidal proportions), Appel got a call from an editor at
Newsweek
saying that the magazine was ready to commit to putting Bruce on its cover. Both of the nation’s leading newsweeklies had already devoted column inches to Bruce, starting with
Time
magazine’s generous coverage of both
Greetings
and
The Wild, the Innocent
, while
Newsweek
ran a midsized, interview-free but largely upbeat
²
feature pegged to
Born to Run
’s release in late August. This time, however,
Newsweek
wanted to publish a deeply reported piece. “In those days having an entertainer on the cover was a hallowed bit of ground,” says Maureen Orth, the
Newsweek
writer assigned to write and lead the reporting for the piece. “But [the editors] loved him, and when I saw him perform in Asbury Park I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s a great, great performer.’”

Still, the buzz coming from sources who had spoken either with Orth or the staff reporters also working the story indicated that
Newsweek
planned to focus on Bruce less as a dynamic new artist but as the latest in a series of industrially created pop idols.

When
Time
magazine culture writer Jay Cocks got wind of the
Newsweek
story-in-progress, what he heard made him think that his competitors were out to trash their subject. A fan of Bruce’s first two albums who heard
Born to Run
as a significant addition to the American rock ’n’ roll catalog, Cocks took
Newsweek
’s plans with two kinds of umbrage: he hated letting the crosstown rivals run away with the Springsteen story, and he especially hated the snide package they were, by all indications, wrapping him in. “I thought it would have been a killing representation of an important American artist,” Cocks says. “I thought
Time
magazine should make a countermove. And I’d always wanted to write about him. Plain and simple.” Marching into the office of his editor, Martha Duffy, Cocks explained what
Newsweek
was up to and pitched his idea of taking them on head-to-head. Duffy got it all immediately and convinced the magazine’s top editors to let them go after their own Springsteen cover story.

When Orth learned that her crosstown competitors were also on the case she went back to Appel and Bruce to argue that they were making a big mistake. “Bruce wasn’t big enough to sustain both covers, given what they meant,” she says. “I said, ‘You’re going to live to regret this.’ ”

For the editors of the magazines, the dueling stories became a game of chicken. While both recognized the absurdity of putting the same somewhat obscure pop star on their covers in the same week, neither could imagine backing down, particularly when gossip about the dueling stories swept across the media filled canyons of midtown Manhattan. “Pretty outlandish, eh?” Appel says, blue eyes sparkling with glee. But even as Bruce seemed on track to appear on both of America’s leading newsweeklies, the never-ending avalanche of publicity, reviews, and coverage made him feel increasingly queasy. “I used to feel I was always in control,” he grumbled to the UK
New Musical Express
’s Andrew Tyler. “Now I’m not so sure.” Talking to Cocks, Bruce said he had no idea what the “commotion” could be about. “I feel like I’m on the outside of all this, even though I know I’m on the inside.” When
Newsweek
’s Orth got her interview, Bruce called his new notoriety a nuisance. “
What
phenomenon?” he asked. “We’re driving around, and we ain’t no phenomenon. The hype just gets in the way.” And if Bruce thought the
Born to Run
publicity had already grown to absurd proportions, he was kidding himself.

Dated October 27, but available a week earlier, the
Time
and
Newsweek
covers hit the country on the same day. Unsurprisingly, the double-barreled magazine coverage created its own moment in the media culture. Cocks’s story in
Time
, titled “Rock’s New Sensation,” celebrated his subject’s achievements while also sketching his past (in the terms that Bruce chose to reveal it) and the outlines of his daily life. Orth’s piece (reported in part by Janet Huck and Peter S. Greenberg), led with a “Making of a Pop Star” headline on the magazine’s cover, while the story itself veered between favorable accounts of Bruce’s shows and music, and at times caustic analyses provided by
New York Times
critic Henry Edwards (whose anti-Springsteen essay served as the first critical take in the piece) and by Joe Smith, the president of Columbia’s main competitor, Warner Bros. Records. Smith compared Bruce to Elton John and Warners’s own James Taylor and found him wanting.

Speaking now, Orth says her only intent was to write an accurate portrayal. “I felt like I needed to report the story out,” she says. “It’s balanced, just not worshipful.” If she was blowing the lid off of anything, Orth continues, it was the star-making machinery—from Columbia’s publicity offices to Mike Appel—that she saw as manipulating and twisting a young musician whose work she really did believe in. “I was finding out stuff that made me think that this kid was getting batted around. An innocent kid who was shy and maybe not so sophisticated at that point. Who was thinking of Bruce?” Still, the
Newsweek
story ended by comparing Bruce to Coca-Cola as another heavily advertised product his customers called the Real Thing—Coke’s central advertising slogan at the time. Cocks and
Time
focused on “Thunder Road” ’s notion that there really was magic in the night, and for a lot of fans, no matter their reasons, Bruce was it.

If other people worried about what the stories said, Bruce was too busy fretting that their existence would mark the precise point where his music, reputation, and soul would be consumed by the spotlight. At first he kicked himself, furious that he’d let himself become just another celebrity. “He was worried fame was evil,” Stephen Appel says. “He saw it ruin peoples’ lives. People lost themselves in their own caricatures.” So while Mike Appel savored his promotional triumph, and the E Street Band
guys reveled in what all the attention could mean for their group’s future, Bruce simmered in his hotel room in Los Angeles. “That was beyond anything anyone could have wished for,” Steve Van Zandt says. “And he was
pissed!
But I was laughing. I thought it was fun.” So did Garry Tallent, who first glimpsed the magazines while dashing through the Dallas airport to make a flight to the band’s next show. But the bassist had another thought too: “It was a classic case of
be careful what you wish for
.”

Bruce passed the magazines’ publication day playing pinball with Columbia promotions man Ron Oberman in an American Legion bowling alley and then shooting pool at the home of former CBS executive Frank Shargo. Back in New York, some members of the publicity team at his record company were beginning to think their new star might not be wrong about the caustic risks of overexposure. “When we first had the record in our hands, I remember saying, “It’s time to step up! We gotta break down walls!’” says label publicist Ron McCarrell. “So we got a little carried away.” That realization came a few weeks after some of Bruce’s most fervent supporters sensed the possibility of a backlash. A&R man Michael Pillot had tried to slow things down somewhere between the Bottom Line shows and the record’s release, only to learn that publicity campaigns work like rocket ships. Once they launch there’s no going back. “The answer was, ‘Nope,’” Pillot recalls. “They said, ‘You wanted it to move, right? Now it’s moving.’”