Bruce (39 page)

When Bruce and the band hit the stage, they all came dressed in variations of the trim-cut, monochromatic blazers, trousers, and button-up shirts Bruce now favored. Often he set off his look with a thin tie, usually knotted loosely around an unbuttoned collar. Together with his clean-shaven face and shorter (if perpetually mussed) hair, the look he exuded was somewhere between urban poet and hassled salary man, although the sharp-toed boots emerging from his cuffs added rock ’n’ roll spark, particularly when he was up on his toes, guitar at the ready, leaping to “Badlands” ’s opening chords. The first hour of the show focused on the new songs, with “Spirit in the Night,” and its traditional leap into the arms of the crowd, holding a key spot during the opening sequence.

Digging deep into the fabric of the
Darkness
songs, Bruce worked with Bittan to craft original piano-and-organ intros for the tunes he liked to introduce with the new, often haunting stories he’d composed. He added new or revised lyrics to “Streets of Fire” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” and rearranged “Factory” ’s opening verse into an atonal drum-and-organ-drone funeral march. The rockers also gained intensity, none more spectacularly than “Prove It All Night,” which rode a Bruce–Van Zandt guitar duel into becoming a twelve-plus-minute showstopper. Van Zandt’s arrangement of the unreleased “Because the Night”
doubled down on the guitar fusillade, while renditions of new or largely unknown
⁵
songs such as “Point Blank,” “The Ties That Bind,” “Independence Day,” and the vintage but rarely heard “The Fever” churned with the same friction between dread and hope. As a visual performer, Bruce prowled the stage like a warrior, hoisting his Fender like a sword in one moment, wielding it machine gun–style in the next. In the climactic sprint through “Rosalita,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” and then into the oldies-dominated encores, Bruce’s face ignited, and his dancing grew frantic. When the crowd surged to the stage, his boot heels seemed to leave the ground altogether.
Zoom
, he leaped onto the piano, standing up to boogie in the spotlight.
Whoosh
, he sprang down to the stage, only to clamber to the top of the tall speaker stack, where he struck a hero’s pose and then danced to the chorus before hopping back down to his microphone to hit the final verse of the last song. By the end, he was bathed in sweat and bent over, hanging onto the mike stand as he bellowed, raw voice and all, his final confession: “
I’m just a prisonerrr! . . .
[long pause for breath] . . . 
of rock ’n’ roll!
”

In the heat of the moment, washed in the light and noise of another triumphant performance, it rang like a promise. Then the stage lights dimmed, the audience streamed for the exits, and the crew dismantled the lights, drums, amplifiers, and keyboards, lugging them all back to the trucks. From there it was back on the bus, back to the highway that led to the next hall in the next city where the next crowd of fans and potential converts were waiting to see him do it all again.

• • •

The tour stretched through the summer, barnstorming back through the South, turning north at the East Coast, where Bruce and company played back-to-back sellouts at Philadelphia’s Spectrum arena. Following a night off, they played three straight sellouts at New York’s Madison Square Garden before taking another run around the eastern hot zone and then heading back to the Midwest.

The traveling and backstage setups both reflected and amplified the
pressures of the tour. Bruce, the band, production crew, management team, and their various assistants rode to gigs on a pair of buses defined by their top-ranking passengers. The Bruce-led bus, also known as the Quiet Bus, had a few rows of seats, a dozen small bunk beds, and a separate chamber at the back where the front man could sleep or relax in privacy.
⁶
The other bus, captained by Clemons, was the Party Bus, populated most heavily by crew members, hangers-on, and anyone else in the touring party (such as Federici) eager for a night of beer, booze, music, laughter, and many not-quite-legal substances.

You didn’t want to do any of this in Bruce’s sight, however, or screw up something bad enough to make him suspect that your personal indulgences were affecting your commitment to the show. So when Bruce made an unexpected visit to the band’s dressing room just before a show at Boston’s Music Hall, things turned explosive once he walked through the door.

“I was with him,” road manager Bobby Chirmside remembers. “And when we walked in, one member of the band was holding a cocaine spoon up to the nose of another member of the band. And they got caught. And it was like time froze.” Watching from a few feet away, Clemons could only stare: “I just thought,
‘Oh, shit!’
And then all the first guy could say was, ‘Oh, hi. Do you want some?’ And Bruce said, ‘Uh, no.’” As Chirmside recalls, the color flooded into the bandleader’s cheeks, and his muscles tensed with fury.

“If. I. Ever. Fucking. See. This. Again.” Chirmside heard him snarl. “I don’t care who it is. They’re
gone
. On the
spot
. I’ll fire them.” He spun on his boot heel and clomped back to where he’d come from. When Chirmside got to Bruce’s dressing room, he gave the still-furious bandleader a few moments to calm down. “Then I said, ‘Boss, are you serious? You’d fire them on the spot?’”

Bruce didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely,” he shot back. “I could replace
any
of those guys in twenty-four hours.” Then he thought for a moment. “Except for Clarence. Replacing Clarence would take some time.”

Indeed, the Scooter and Big Man legend was a crucial part of the band’s onstage chemistry. So even as Bruce’s new music tilted away from sax-laced rhythm and blues, Clemons’s hulking profile, so often cloaked in silk suits and carried with an elegant blend of sweetness, artistry, and urban menace, remained Bruce’s key foil. He was the shoulder to lean on in midsolo, the glowering vision of Stagger Lee, the golden sax gleaming as heroically as Bruce’s own six-stringed Excalibur. So even if Bruce was also likely to call to Van Zandt for onstage musical and theatrical support, his bond with Clemons—and the enactment of racial harmony, mutual admiration, and the power of fraternal love—gave the concerts their mystical glow. “The spontaneity between us was so amazing,” Clemons told me a few weeks before his death. “I’d start each show wondering, ‘Where is he gonna take me today? Where’s the music going to take us? What can we do today to really fuck ’em up?’”

When they got deep into the encores, well past the point where an ordinary band would be back on the bus, and it would have been perfectly okay to give one last wave and call it a night, Bruce turned to Clemons to read the crowd for him. “He’d say, ‘Big Man! Are they still standing?’” the saxophonist remembered. And if Clemons peeked out from behind the curtain and saw the crowd crushed against the stage and screaming for more, he’d give the nod, and Bruce would holler to the rest of the band, “Boys! Let’s go back out there!”
⁷

If only because Bruce had nothing else to do that night. Nor anything the next day besides waiting for the next show to start. And according to Clemons, the rest of the band felt exactly the same way. “Man, the other bands back then, they always wanted to get back to the party,” he says. “But for us, the party
was
onstage. That was our joy. Not what might
happen afterward. We left it all onstage, all the time.” Except for whatever he brought onto his own personal party bus, of course—but given the Big Man’s shamanic sense of music and life, that was all part of romancing the spirits and letting them shoot right through you.

• • •

As a tour-credentialed photographer and Bruce’s girlfriend, Lynn Goldsmith saw it all unfold from the inside. Her black-and-white photographs from the Darkness tour
⁸
reveal the rock ’n’ roll road as a daily grind of jarring contrasts, from the dust-wreathed buses to the truck stop breakfasts, to the cramped and often tumbledown dressing rooms. Suitcases erupt in tangles of unfolded shirts and loose socks. Meals come from steam trays and are served up on plates stamped from Styrofoam, with plastic utensils on the side. The scene pivots 180 degrees when the house lights go down and Bruce and the band step onto the stage. Elevated by the lights, noise, and his music, Bruce strides like a rock ’n’ roll superhero. He strikes poses with his battered Fender, towers over his followers, sweeps his fingers over their heads, stands among them in the aisle, cuddles into a lap here, rests his head on a shoulder there. Then comes Clemons, a vision in white and gold, blowing his horn like a much larger and cooler Gabriel.

Then they’re backstage again, Bruce collapsed but elated on a folding metal chair, and then glaring into Goldsmith’s lens as she finds him scrubbing off the sweat in a locker room shower. She’s careful to keep the perspective above the waist, but the hardness in his eyes describes the tension in their personal/professional relationship. Goldsmith is welcome into his most private space, but her camera, and the power it affords her, is not.

The feeling was mutual. Already a well-respected photographer in the rock ’n’ roll world, Goldsmith spent much of her time with Bruce worrying about what the relationship would do to her professional reputation. “I didn’t want to be known as anything but Lynn Goldsmith,” she says. “I didn’t like the idea of working like I did while being Bruce’s girlfriend.
It was not a positive thing to me.” Other pictures show the tenderness between them: Bruce dancing goofily to the music in his dressing room; slouched in front of his living room television, the week’s
TV Guide
flopped open next to him on the sofa. But it was always an on-again, off-again relationship, Goldsmith says, for which she takes as much blame as her ex might place on himself. “At that period, I always did a kind of come here/go away [with boyfriends],” she says. “I wasn’t capable of loving someone in the way I would have liked to have been loved at that time. As his girlfriend, I really wasn’t there for him.”

So onward. During the same Los Angeles visit that included the Roxy show, Bruce met Joyce Hyser, an effervescent young actress. Raised in Philadelphia, Hyser graduated high school at sixteen and moved west to try to work as an actress. When the tour settled at the Sunset Marquis hotel on Sunset Boulevard, Hyser came to say hello to a friend who was married to a crew member. When Bruce saw the sparkle-eyed brunette by the pool, he was smitten enough to ask the actor Gary Busey
⁹
to introduce him. They talked for hours, Hyser recalls, and she liked him instantly. But she hadn’t come to Los Angeles to become another star’s girlfriend. “I wanted to make it on my own and be an artist in my own right,” she says. “But he was so incredibly sweet.” Bonnie Raitt, who also happened to be at the hotel that afternoon, felt the sizzle between them too, and wrote “
This is where Joyce and Bruce met
” on the wall just above where they had been sitting.

When Bruce invited her to come with him to San Diego for the next night’s show, Hyser agreed, on the condition that she stay with a friend rather than in his hotel room. He thought that was a fine idea. “He was getting out of his relationship with Lynn, and he said to me that he had never in his life had a one-night stand, and I thought, ‘How is that even possible?’” she says. “He was a huge star. But he had also never smoked a cigarette and never smoked a joint, and I’m like, ‘
Shut up!
Is this the beginning of the bullshit?’”

Well, yes and no. “I meant in the context of musicians, not actual
people,” Bruce says. “Particularly in the early days you were always dependent on the kindness of strangers. I think I had a general sense that it was bad karma to fuck with the citizens. But rules were always made to be broken, and if someone rang my bell, or if a circumstance presented itself . . .” You can imagine why he didn’t bother completing the sentence.

Whatever, the couple bonded, and by the fall they were constant companions. When Bruce moved from Holmdel to a rented ranch house on the edge of a reservoir in Colts Neck, an exurban area ten minutes east of Freehold, Hyser helped him to furnish the place by cruising the neighborhoods around Monmouth County on garbage day in search of cast-off chairs and tables others had left by the curb.

Whatever they couldn’t get for free they bought at the warehouse-sized ABC Carpet & Home in Lower Manhattan or dug out of one of the tiny antique shops Bruce favored in Long Branch. Bruce also rented a small apartment in Los Angeles’s middle-class Miracle Mile neighborhood to use when Hyser worked in Hollywood. And when they drove north to visit his parents in San Mateo, the couple either slept in the tiny guest room or, if other relatives were around, on the living room floor. “We barely ever saw other celebrities, and we didn’t hang out with other rock ’n’ rollers,” Hyser says. “We’d go to movies or go out for dinner. Our life was small, and mostly revolved around family.”

He preferred to keep his personal life as uncomplicated as possible, but something about his relationship with Lynn Goldsmith made it impossible to negotiate a clean breakup. Having traveled to New York to see his Madison Square Garden shows in late August, Hyser had only just arrived at Bruce’s room in the Navarro Hotel when Goldsmith rapped at the door. Infuriated to find Hyser and her suitcases in the room, Goldsmith spoke some angry words before Bruce steered her into the hallway to talk it over. When he came back inside, Hyser says, he looked mortified by his own inability to control his personal life. “She was angry, I was upset, and he felt horrible for so many reasons.” Three-plus hours spent wringing himself out in front of twenty thousand fans in Madison Square Garden restored Bruce’s spirits for the evening. But when his mood descended between tours, Bruce often sought refuge in a desert hotel in
Arizona, where he’d spend days or weeks by himself strumming his guitar, scribbling in his ever-present notebooks, and contemplating the emptiness on the horizon.

“I think Bruce was afraid of being happy, because it would screw up his creative force,” Hyser says. “At least at that time, he created from a place of anger, not from a place of happiness. I think he was extremely analytical, but pain scared him, too. And at that point, he had never been to therapy.”