Bruce (37 page)

If Bruce felt like going out, the three of them piled into the truck or one of his other cars and made for the Stone Pony. Bruce usually tossed back a beer or two, maybe with a shot of Jack Daniel’s. But while Chirmside and Larson got swept up onto the dance floor, Bruce stuck close to the bar, chatting with friends or just watching the band, feeling the buzz of another party at full, booze-fueled throttle. “He’s very into himself, is the thing,” Larson says. “We’d say, ‘Oh great, he’s comin’ to watch us have experiences, and then he’s gonna write about ’em!’ So it was like, ‘Hey, Bruce, you need some more songs? Come on!’”

Women edged up to say hi, old friends were always on hand, and when the music got going, Bruce pulled a woman into the crowd and worked up a glow. If midnight stretched to two or three and he’d been dancing with the same girl for a few hours, he would slip out quietly, helping his friend up into the cab of his truck and drift away down the block. And just when Chirmside and Larson started to think he wouldn’t be back, Bruce reappeared. “He treated them like they were his sisters,” Larson says. “He dropped ’em off, then came back to pick us up.” As his buddies knew, Bruce’s love life now revolved around Lynn Goldsmith, a well-known music photographer who also happened to be a striking, long-haired brunette possessed of the same operatic passions that had drawn Bruce to Diane Lozito just a few years earlier.

• • •

Recording sessions for the do-or-die fourth album began at the Atlantic Studios in midtown Manhattan a week after the legal settlement separated him, once and for all, from Appel. With Bruce and Landau coproducing, and Van Zandt assisting with arrangements, the gang settled in for the long haul.

The problems began with Max Weinberg’s drums, and the seemingly impossible pursuit of a miking setup that would make his instrument sound like a drum rather than a drumstick hitting a drum. Only later would they realize that the flaw they could never quite fix was a result of faulty rigging in the studios. But for Bittan, the unrelenting quest for God’s own drum sound also registered as foot-dragging: an anxious artist’s subconscious attempt to avoid the soul-abrading struggle he required to draw out his best work.

The sessions crawled through the summer. Then in September everyone moved to the Record Plant, where work continued through January 1978. Unlike the
Born to Run
sessions, this nine-month process moved quickly from song to song, with Bruce leading the band through the enormous catalog of songs they had started working on at his Holmdel house over the last year, along with the new songs that continued to come to him. By the end of the recording sessions, they committed something like seventy new songs to tape, knowing that at least 80 percent of them would end up on the reject shelf or be given away to another artist.
Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes ended up with “Talk to Me” and “Hearts of Stone,” which suited Van Zandt’s purposes. But when Bruce showed up with the Elvis-inspired fifties rocker “Fire”
⁵
and the torrid love song “Because the Night” only to reject them both, Van Zandt could only walk away grumbling. “Bruce was constantly giving away his best stuff or not releasing it. It’s all part of his thing.” Landau, even with one eye on industrial matters—publicity, radio, retail outlets, and sales—still understood Bruce’s creative purpose. “I think he may have suspected that if ‘Fire’ had been on the album, that would’ve been the hit, and that would’ve defined [the entire album],” Landau explains. “He couldn’t put ‘Fire’ on there and tell the record company that it
can’t
be the single. He would have lost control of that.” So, Bruce figured, better to be proactive and keep the song out of sight.

With so much top-shelf material written and recorded, Bruce entered a new frontier in his lost-in-the-wastelands style of production. Rather than spending months obsessing over the intricate dynamics of each song, he’d deliver a landslide of raw material and then spend months sifting through the heap, choosing, sorting, polishing, and dumping. Then he’d start all over again until some larger narrative revealed itself. So for all that Bruce thrived on the simple joy of rock ’n’ roll, he was even more determined to give his music an intellectual and emotional gravitas. He wanted the music to be powerful enough to reflect his life and times while also redefining the possibilities of American rock ’n’ roll.

In a lot of ways, it all went back to Elvis Presley, whose naive brilliance had fused white culture with black music. The accidental big bang that had blasted popular culture into Technicolor ignited a revolution and, as quickly, became the basis of a rapacious cottage industry that sapped Presley of his magic until he was too sad and weak to dance. For years the King of Rock ’n’ Roll’s steady devolution served as the leading example of American capitalism’s most sharklike impulses. All of which became clear in the insider tell-all
Elvis: What Happened
, which Bruce (along with Van Zandt and several other guys in the band) had been
reading. Still, Bruce felt Elvis’s charge strongly enough to turn the story of his 1975 attempt to visit the King by jumping his Graceland manse’s gates into a fine piece of self-deprecating, hero-worshiping stage banter. More recently, Bruce had bought tickets for the concert Presley had scheduled at Madison Square Garden in September 1977. When news of Presley’s death radiated across the TV networks on August 16, Bruce took the news hard. “He was really upset; just incredibly pissed off,” says Chirmside.

Two days later Bruce, Van Zandt, and photographer Eric Meola flew together to Salt Lake City, threw their bags into the back of a red, 1965 Ford Galaxie 500XL convertible, and drove into the heat warp of the desert, making for the sandy, one-lane roads that skirt the mesas, connecting the ranches and Indian reservations to the towns, to the cactus raising its arms toward the distance. With Meola scoping the terrain for photogenic remnants of the twentieth-century frontier, Bruce and Van Zandt charted Presley’s decline, and how his cocoon of oldest, closest friends had coddled their magisterial pal all the way into his grave. Elvis had considered the Memphis Mafia guys to be his best friends in the world. But when his head began to slip beneath the surface, they didn’t say a word. “All those guys, all his friends, abandoned him,” Van Zandt said. They collected their salaries and left the King to drown in pills, silence, and a book about Jesus he would never finish.

They drove straight through for the first thirty hours, chasing Bruce’s curiosity down every dirt road, following the ruts until they forked into another road or simply vanished into the rocky desert floor. When they came across a little general store, they parked by the gas pump, bought some Cokes, and gave Meola enough time to take out his camera and squeeze off a few shots. Bruce and the car, Bruce and the frontier, Bruce and the cannonball clouds that ribboned the sunlight. Set loose in the fly speck desert towns, Meola hoped to evoke the same melancholy that Robert Frank achieved in
The Americans
, a seminal collection of portraits that revealed the underclass of the 1950s and 1960s in their desolate towns and broken neighborhoods. Bruce connected with Frank’s work at first sight; like John Ford’s
The Grapes of Wrath, The Americans
depicted the world he saw when he shut his eyes. Meola, who had introduced
Bruce to Frank’s photography, edged into his terrain by shooting in black-and-white, which also helped draw out the texture of the desert and the magnitude of the mesas jutting from the desert floor. An enormous thundercloud grumbled over the peaks one hot afternoon, packing thunder, lightning, and winds that swept the dust until it merged with the clouds. “It was like a Biblical storm, like something I’d never seen before,” Meola says.

They watched the storm come and go, and then went back to driving, moving until well after midnight, when they found a dusty street that had once been a central road in a small town. Only a few houses remained, along with a pack of dogs that chased around in the blackness, howling after the creatures in the brush. Pausing for a few hours’ sleep, Bruce stretched out on the front seat, while Van Zandt took the back, leaving Meola with the big, flat hood of the car. “It was hot as hell, with those dogs howling down the street,” the photographer says. When dawn came, they woke up, shook the cobwebs from between their ears, fired up the engine, and took off again, heading back to Salt Lake City for the flight home.

Meola came home with his desert portraits and the series of shots showing Bruce with the car as the storm rises above the peaks behind him. Bruce had his own way of internalizing the trip across the arid Southwest, spinning the harsh beauty of the desert together with the ghost of Elvis, the heat-bedazzled dogs, and the lightning storm into another testament to the spirit he recognized in the untamed land. “Gonna be a twister to blow everything down / That ain’t got the strength to stand its ground,” he wrote in the final verse, going on to describe a storm devastating enough to strip away the tender dreams and follies that make a person too vulnerable to stand a chance in the raw frontier: “Mister, I ain’t a boy, no, I’m a man,” he declares. “And I believe in the promised land.”

• • •

When the sessions moved to the Record Plant, Bruce and Landau made straight for the studio floor, where they went over the songs still left to record, talking it all over in the stuttering shorthand of like minds. Bruce took up his Fender and played an early version of “Come On (Let’s
Go Tonight),” while Landau snapped his fingers, bobbed his head, and pitched in a little harmony. When Bruce looked up, Landau nodded excitedly. “That’s great. Really great. What else you got cookin’?” Bruce put down his guitar and led the way to the piano, where he opened his notebook and went back to playing the “Come On” verse, focusing on the passing references to Elvis Presley’s death. “The power of the images,” he said, “was that they weren’t the central part of the song, but sorta, you know—”

LANDAU:
—tangential. It’s good. It’s very good. It’s sophisticated.

BRUCE:
It kinda states it [Presley’s death] as a fact, but . . . I don’t know, it’s sort of strange.

LANDAU:
[quoting from lyrics] “Some came to witness, some came to weep.” That’s a great line. A very important distinction there, like, the curious and the . . . it’s great. Really great.

Bruce flipped a few pages, put his hands back on the keys, and laid out the first chords of what would become “Candy’s Room.” In this iteration of the song, the central image is a mysterious house; a walled-in mansion that draws the narrator to its gates, where he peers across rolling lawns to see a woman’s face gazing back through the glass.

LANDAU:
That’s great. That’s really great. It’s got such detail, so sharp . . .

BRUCE:
I’m trying to work simpler, clearer images, really.

LANDAU:
You got it, you really got it. This is just as vivid as in the past, only . . .

Bruce nodded happily and went back to singing.

LANDAU:
This is great, the way she comes in here—

BRUCE:
Yeah, it kind of gives it a sexual thing, like—

LANDAU:
—the inside of the house is the female thing, and the outside of the house is the male thing.

BRUCE:
Exactly.

LANDAU:
The formal construction is unbelievable.

BRUCE:
It’s a real cinematic thing. But the words aren’t really together; I can’t figure it out . . .

LANDAU:
It’s very together.

When Bruce stopped playing, Landau smiled and nodded his head.

LANDAU:
That’s great. It’s scary. It’s blowing my mind to hear all this stuff after so much time. And to hear it sound so together . . . The combination of the first set you show me for “Come On,” and the first set you show me for this . . .

BRUCE:
“I think this is real. This is real. We got good stuff.”

Landau went back to the control room, and when Van Zandt wandered in, Bruce seemed practically giddy when he told his aide-de-camp that more new songs were on the way.

BRUCE:
We’re gonna be rehearsin’ this week.

VAN ZANDT:
Are you crazy?

BRUCE:
Nope, I’m serious.

VAN ZANDT:
What are you gonna throw out?

BRUCE:
I can’t think of somethin’. But I’ll think of somethin’.

He spun on his heel and hunched to play, pounding out chords while Van Zandt grimaced and shook his head.

Bruce, from over his shoulder: “Remember, there’s always room to throw something out!”

• • •

Musically austere, lyrics stripped down to sepia portraiture,
Darkness on the Edge of Town
sets out to describe the underbelly of America’s everything-all-the-time culture. The backdrops shift from song to song, moving from Asbury Park to the Dakotas to the Freehold of the 1950s to the Southwest to the industrial flats to the highway and beyond. But the real setting is that same forgotten America that Frank had captured in the backwaters of the nation’s cities, towns, and wilderness. “Lights
out tonight, trouble in the heartland,” runs the first line of “Badlands,” the martial rocker that opens the album. “Adam Raised a Cain,” the next song, turns the focus in the opposite direction, confronting his own demons in the form of his sad, angry father.
⁶
A tense, heavy-footed blues, “Adam” rides Federici’s church-gone-wrong organ, call-and-response vocals, and Bruce’s own slashing guitar into the sinful heart of the father, the son, and the world around them: “Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain,” he howls at the song’s conclusion. “You inherit the sins, you inherit the flames.”