Bruce (32 page)

Bruce stalked Los Angeles like Hamlet-in-reverse, fretting endlessly over the wisdom of actions he had already taken, another, less public part of himself confronted the fact that he had not surrendered to all the publicity as much as he’d actively fueled it. “I could not have been on those covers if I didn’t want to,” Bruce told the writer Bill Flanagan in 1992. “I didn’t have to do those interviews. I remember sitting in a room saying, ‘Gee, do I want to do this? It seems scary.’ But I [didn’t] want to be sitting on my porch when I’m sixty saying, ‘
Oh, I shoulda, I coulda, I woulda!
’ Hey! You got one ride. So I said, ‘Let’s go!’”

• • •

The first thing the
Time
and
Newsweek
covers achieved was to force Bruce out of the bungalow he’d been renting in Long Branch since the spring of 1974. A tiny, foundationless structure tucked between the large
family homes on the block, the once easily overlooked house was now a magnet for the new crowd of fans whose determination to find their quarry overwhelmed whatever respect they might have for an ordinary person’s privacy. Flushed out of that house—so quickly, in fact, that he abandoned the spinet piano upon which he’d composed so much of
Born to Run
³
—Bruce rented a more remote house on a wooded hill in Atlantic Highlands. Quite a bit less glamourous than what you’d imagine a rock star’s house might be, but it did offer a nice view of Sandy Hook Bay, and an extra bedroom for newly hired road manager Rick Seguso to stay in when the band took a few nights or weeks off.

The record itself sold remarkably well, even accounting for the hype, eventually reaching number 3 on the
Billboard
album chart, en route to selling more than seven hundred thousand copies by the end of a year (a significant achievement in 1975), and far more than that as the months and years passed. And though the “Born to Run” single stalled at #23 on the singles chart, the song served as a hugely effective calling card to record store owners and radio programmers, and became a guaranteed crowd killer in concert.

Beyond that, the success of
Born to Run
did little to alter the day-to-day existences of anyone in or working for Bruce and the E Street Band. Yes, the touring vehicles evolved from cramped Ford club vans, to a surplus Red Bank city bus retrofitted with rickety metal-framed bunks, to an actual touring bus. But the entourage still slept in cheap hotels (when they didn’t sleep on the moving bus), subsisted largely on truck stop food, and received no happy surprises in their weekly paychecks. “It’s nice to have a hit record,” Tallent says. “But we were thinking, ‘It doesn’t
feel
like we have a hit record. It still feels like we’re destitute.’”

It also didn’t feel like the entire nation had been swept up in Springsteen mania. For while CBS’s publicity department had grown quite generous with its financial support for tour advertising, radio outreach,
and so on, Bruce remained a stranger in most of the American South, Midwest, and the West coast. In some corners of the nation, the promoters could pay little more than the $2,500 the band had commanded for shows in early 1974. But no matter where he played, or to how many people, his shows had grown even more explosive than before, due both to the excitement generated by the new album and Bruce’s overwhelming fear that he’d wind up being a one-hit wonder.

Most nights he absorbed all of his fears and anxieties and transformed them into the rocket fuel he needed to catapult himself over the footlights and into the empty air above the crowd. Sometimes the pressure curdled his blood and left Bruce seething. Occasional defects in the sound system, particularly high-decibel blasts of feedback, inspired amp-kicking fits of outrage. Food could also become a serious point of contention, as in the New Orleans visit where road manager Rick Seguso shook up the menu at the postshow family-style dinners they all shared by replacing the usual order for fried chicken with chicken cordon bleu, one of the local caterer’s specialties. Most of the gang cheered having something new on the menu. But when a feedback-frazzled Bruce sat down for his meal, he gazed dubiously at the sauce-drizzled, ham-and-cheese stuffed chicken breast on his plate, took a tiny bite, and then dropped his plastic utensils on his paper plate. “What’s
this
shit?” he hissed. Seguso explained about the caterer, the culinary joys of New Orleans, and so on, but the musician glared back. “Well,
I
hate it!” At this, the road manager gestured around the table. “Nobody else is complaining.” Bruce reached down, picked up his chicken, and hurled it at Seguso. “Then
you
eat it!” he roared, storming out of the room, down the hall, and, presumably, to the nearest Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet.

“I just said, ‘Holy shit!’” Seguso remembers. “And everybody else was looking at me and going. ‘
Oooooohhhh
!’”

“I think Bruce was under a lot of pressure,” Tallent says. “But he sure does have a hell of a right hand for a chicken cordon bleu.”

• • •

The pressure became even more pronounced in mid-November when Bruce and the band—all making their first journeys outside North America—jetted to England for a weeklong microtour to prime the pump
for the full European tour set tentatively for the first half of 1976. The first stop, at London’s Hammersmith Odeon theater, would obviously be the most important show of the week. As Bruce’s official London premiere, it would be his chance to break through to the city’s cultural establishment: a prickly circle of critics and tastemakers who reserved their greatest scorn for Americans who buzzed into town thinking they had something to offer that the city of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and David Bowie somehow lacked. That Bruce and the E Street Band had such a distinctly American look and sound only added to the challenge. And when Bruce arrived at the venue, only to find the marquee aglow with a sign reading, “Finally, London Is Ready for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band,” the publicity-singed musician flipped. The thick papering of “I Have Seen Rock and Roll Future . . .” signs and stickers on London walls upped his frustration all the more, and when he got to the theater and found the lobby and seats festooned with miniature “Finally, London Is Ready for . . .” signs, he erupted. Bruce ran from sign to sign, ripping them down, reducing them to shreds, and scattering the evidence like so much confetti.

The memory of the show traveled across the next three decades as a story about a disaster; the collision of a rattled artist with an aggressively unimpressed audience. It certainly didn’t help that Bruce spent much of the show with a thick wool cap pulled down tight over his forehead and sometimes over his eyes. But as a much-subsequently released video and live album made clear, the first Hammersmith show wasn’t anything close to a disaster. When the lights dimmed, Bruce stepped out to an excited ovation that became a rapt hush when he performed the voice, piano, and glockenspiel arrangement of “Thunder Road.” From there, “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” electrified the room with its playful funk, while the unadorned piano intro for the less-known
Greetings
album track “Lost in the Flood” earned an excited burst of applause.

So maybe the crowd didn’t have the electric charge of the ones Bruce had been facing in the United States. And yes, the quiet moments just before “The E Street Shuffle” invited one angry Cockney to cry out “
Oi! Turn the guitar up!
” Obviously, some observers enjoyed it more than others. Vivien Goldman, writing for the British paper
Sounds
, clocked the show as somewhere between “very, very good” and “so-so,” concluding:
“the burden of being ordered to take London by storm proved too much for his slender shoulders.” Somewhere else in the crowd, Monty Python’s Flying Circus member Michael Palin agreed with a friend that “We came expecting the Messiah but got Billy Graham instead.” Still, the shows in Stockholm and Amsterdam came off well, and the week-concluding return to the Hammersmith Odeon rocked harder and to greater acclaim than the opener a few days earlier. Still, Bruce and the band came home feeling beaten up.

“We had four shows, got sandblasted, and scooted home,” Bruce says. But maybe he and everyone else had been too unsettled by their surroundings to see straight. “You’re dealing with men who had never been anywhere,” he says. “We couldn’t find any cheeseburgers! Europe in 1975 was very European. So we ran back and didn’t go back for six years. That wasn’t by mistake.”

Back in the USA, Bruce and the band celebrated the end of the Born to Run tour, and everything else they had achieved in 1975, with five nights of shows at the 3,119-capacity Tower Theater just outside Philadelphia. All of the performances sold out quickly, with the heaviest demand tilting toward the final show on New Year’s Eve. With more than 90,000 requests flooding in for the 15,000 available tickets, an obvious question loomed: Why not admit that the band had grown too big for the city’s theaters and start booking Bruce in to Philadelphia’s Spectrum arena? The building could hold more than 18,000 for a rock concert, and given the size of the demand, Bruce could fill the basketball arena four, probably five times. And with cash flow still a perpetual problem, when they went begging for crowds in at least half the country (the Born to Run tour had actually lost money), why resist the opportunity for a big score when it came up?

Because Bruce wouldn’t even consider it. Especially not at the end of 1975.

He’d compromised something with the packaging and selling of
Born to Run.
That had been a survival move—recall the desperation of the post
Wild, the Innocent
era. But here’s the thing:
it hadn’t required him to alter a note of his music.
He’d even held firm when Columbia tried to insist on having a pop radio–friendly short edit of the “Born to Run” single. And
when it came to his actual connection to the world—the precious moments when he could look into the eyes of the people, expose his deepest feelings, and feel their energy flowing back into him—there could be no compromise. No echo-chamber sound, no fans stuck out on the upper decks miles away from the heart of the moment. That, Bruce assured anyone who asked, was not going to happen. Ever.

A brave stand. And yet it also put Bruce at odds with himself. Having worked so hard to project his art and vision to as wide an audience as possible, refusing to play bigger halls meant that he was also putting himself beyond the reach of a significant percentage of his fans. And if he really wanted to put on the most powerful shows in rock ’n’ roll, that meant having the best band, sound, lights, and crew in the industry. All of whom deserved to be paid for their work, just as Bruce would be paid for his when the royalties from
Born to Run
rolled in. None of that could happen unless they opened the tent wide enough to welcome the crowds Bruce had invited in by making his breakthrough album.

“It’s a problem,” Appel admitted to the writer John Rockwell that fall. So maybe they could find a way to play Madison Square Garden without surrendering completely to its concrete-and-steel ambiance. They could, perhaps, hang a curtain to both eliminate the echo and block off the most far-flung sections. That was an option, anyway; something they’d work out in 1976, once they figured out what to do with the live recordings Appel had commissioned on the fall tour, thinking that the best way to leverage
Born to Run
’s success would be to release a multidisc live album showcasing Bruce’s exalted performances while also exposing his new fans to the wonders they’d missed on the first two albums. Bruce still hadn’t decided whether he was up for that, but he wanted to listen to the tapes before he made up his mind. Landau, while not an official member of the organization, wasn’t shy about telling Bruce that he thought it was a terrible idea. But the competing opinions on the live album mattered far less than who had them, and why, and what they would do to assert their authority over what happened next.

• • •

In the end, it always comes down to the contracts. Appel’s three agreements with Bruce, all five-year commitments, were headed into their
fifth year. The manager-producer had long ago promised to reduce his percentages once Bruce broke through to the mainstream, and obviously that time had arrived. But Landau had arrived first. And once Bruce told him that neither he nor a lawyer in his employ had ever taken a serious look at Appel’s contracts, Landau urged him to get it done as soon as possible. Bruce did, and emerged from the process rent by surprise, confusion, and anger. Appel, he now realized, had taken control of everything that mattered: his money, his songs, his recording career, everything.

And despite the promises his manager had made about fixing their contracts when Bruce became successful, that hadn’t happened yet and wouldn’t, it seemed, until Bruce agreed to extend Appel’s contracts into the future. When a still-unhappy Bruce said that he was no longer entirely certain that he’d be renewing any of their contracts, Appel came forth with another surprise: he had, in his role as publisher, negotiated with Columbia/CBS to receive a $500,000 advance on the coming
Born to Run
royalties.

The company had approved the loan instantly, and now all the money was secured in one of Laurel Canyon Ltd.’s corporate accounts. Appel assured Bruce that he would get his contractually guaranteed fifty percent of the money even if he didn’t extend his contracts. But if he agreed to sign the new contracts, he’d get 75 percent of the money. If he didn’t, Appel, and Bruce, would be forced to live by the far more tight-fisted terms of the contract they both signed back in 1972.

Call it pop music business as usual. But that made it a sharp kick in the ribs for Bruce, because it had
never
been business as usual between Bruce and Appel. From the moment they had shaken hands in the winter of 1972, they had been crusaders, soldiers on a march to glory. Contracts say whatever contracts say, but as far as Bruce knew, or cared, handshakes and the promises they symbolized meant more. Or so he had believed. But as the spotlight followed him onto the stage of the Tower Theater on the night of December 31, Bruce didn’t know what to believe in anymore. Except for the one thing that had always worked for him: plugging in his guitar, turning it up loud, and hurling himself into the music.