Bruce (40 page)

B
RUCE AND THE BAND ENDED
the 115-stop Darkness tour with a pair of New Year’s shows at the Richfield Coliseum, just outside Cleveland. From there he had three months to catch his breath and write songs for his next album, which they planned to start recording in New York City. Absent the lights, noise, and cheers, Bruce’s thoughts turned back to the faces he’d known in his childhood and the daily routines that kept them marching from one day to the next, even as it cut the lines around their eyes. That world didn’t seem to exist anywhere on the road he had been traveling for half of his life, but he could see it all around him. In the eyes of his sister Ginny and her husband, Mickey, already celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary with their kids running at her feet. Bruce could blame his job, the road, and the extreme focus he brought to work. But most of the other members of the band and their crew still managed to have real lives at home. Bruce saw it all, from a distance.

“When you’re thirty years old or twenty-nine, those are things that
start to drift across your landscape,” he says. “Those were just things I became interested in writing about. Because I hadn’t written about them previously, although it was certainly the roots of the place that I grew up in and the people that I knew.”

But no matter how much time he spent with Joyce Hyser, no matter how simply he tried to live, Bruce couldn’t resist clinging to his isolated ways. By happenstance or design, he’d constructed a life built for one. And so he took up his pen and sketched what he imagined he was missing. “
The River
was me moving into an area where I just thought about those things or I started to try them on,” Bruce says. “So you’re trying on that identity for a few minutes and what it feels like to sing this out. It moves you closer to where you’re moving in your personal life sometimes.”

Picking up where
Darkness
left off, the new songs sprouted from the fundamental sounds and voices heard in early rock ’n’ roll and country records. Three, maybe four chords, simple verse-chorus-verse construction, and stories described in the language of regular people. No omniscient commentary, no poetic revelations, no anthemic declarations of purpose. Just snapshots of the real world as viewed through the hopes, labors, fears, joys, and struggles of the unheralded many. The people, Bruce said, who might not shake up the world but kept it spinning from day to day.

The sessions started in March 1979 at the Power Station, a New York recording facility that included a gym-sized, hardwood-lined (and uncarpeted) room designed to capture the clamor of a rock band playing on the stage. Neither Bruce nor Landau had thought of recording there until Weinberg, Tallent, and Bittan came back from recording Ian Hunter’s
You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic
album. Their raves about the space’s live atmosphere spurred a change of recording plans. “We figured we’d throw up the room mikes, get the snare crashing, make a lot of rock ’n’ roll noise, and cut some music that felt very explosive,” Bruce says. “I wanted a record that combined the fun aspect of what the band did along with the story I was telling.”

The words of the moment became
live
and
immediate
. Which would have signaled a more relaxed style of business if they had any effect on Bruce’s single-minded pursuit of rock ’n’ roll perfection. It didn’t, so
what had once been endless overdubs and replaying of individual parts morphed into endless full-band takes, all of them grinding through the same song for hours and hours, waiting until Bruce and/or Landau finally decided that the second run-through from a day and a half ago had been the best of them all. Other times Bruce trashed the first twenty or thirty takes because he’d thought of a better melody, different words for the chorus, or an entirely new song built from the first’s broken-up parts. Then he had to put all that together, sing it with heart,
and
play exactly the right guitar solo while every member of the band played their parts flawlessly. By the end of the first day, Van Zandt had already had enough. He called Bruce aside and told him he was done. “I said, ‘Listen, I’m sorry, but I can’t do this again,’” Van Zandt recalls. “ ‘You carry on, but I quit. I’m splitting.’ And he said, ‘No, no, it’s going to be different this time!’”

Van Zandt was having none of it. The real problem, he told Bruce, was that his production team—Landau, engineer Jimmy Iovine, and Chuck Plotkin—“didn’t have a fucking idea about what they’re doing.” Speaking thirty-one years later, he reins in his critique of everyone except Bruce and his pathological work habits. “They all had their talents, I knew that. But contemplating the whole fucking
years
it was gonna take to make a record, I couldn’t do it. Didn’t have the patience. And that’s when he said, ‘No, no, I want you to produce it with me.’ And that’s a direct quote.”

As ever, Van Zandt pursued truth and beauty through the rough edges of garage rock and the bejeweled chime of sixties pop. Leading off with “Roulette,” a hurtling rocker inspired by the recent near-catastrophic failure of safety systems at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, Van Zandt pushed the band to attack its parts with the savage intensity of punk rockers. Weinberg, encouraged to play like the Who’s explosive too-wild-to-live drummer Keith Moon, slammed his tom-toms with seismic force. The song came out sounding so overpowering that Van Zandt told the drummer to play the same way for the rest of the sessions. “The songs Bruce was writing then were pretty thrashing and wild,” Weinberg says. “He and especially Steve kept referencing Keith Moon. But I think that was one of the instances when Steve was at odds with Jon, because Jon really preferred the Stax style, which was far more economical.”

Weinberg nearly lost his job during the
River
sessions, due in part to the stylistic drift that started during the early weeks of recording. Combined with a sense of time set askew by speeding up and slowing down with the emotional peaks and valleys of Bruce’s live shows, the drummer found himself out of favor with Landau, who made a strong enough case about Weinberg’s unreliable playing to convince Bruce to take his drummer aside and tell him to get help, and fast. Hearing that Landau had already mentioned subbing Los Angeles’s ace session man Russ Kunkel (Jackson Browne, James Taylor, and so on), Weinberg hired a teacher, stripped away everything he thought he knew about timekeeping, and rebuilt his precision in short order.

Settling in for what they thought would be five weeks of recording (it eventually stretched to eighteen months), the group worked according to Bruce’s favored schedule, laboring from seven in the evening straight through until nine in the morning. After a few sessions with star engineer Bob Clearmountain,
¹
they settled in with Neil Dorfsman, a junior engineer who was so excited to work with Bruce that he told his Power Station bosses he’d do Bruce’s sessions for free.
²
As the days turned to weeks, crawled into months, and then stretched to a year and then even longer than that, Dorfsman took note of the intricate balance Bruce maintained between his mismatched coproducers. “Steve was the vibe-meister,” Dorfsman says. “He was almost like a liaison: the guy who would round up the band, get everyone in the room, get them psyched to play.” Landau, on the other hand, struck the engineer as “extremely smart and perceptive. And like most artists, Bruce needed a sounding board; someone to reflect back what was happening in a semi-objective way. Jon didn’t say much, but his presence was calming. Many months later Bruce said, ‘You must wonder what Jon does,’ but I already figured it out. He could get things moving with just a couple of words.”

Night after night, the band members set up in their stage positions,
girding for the next deluge of new songs Bruce would surely bring in. Some were more fragmentary than others, but when one felt close to acceptable he’d add it to his list. When they finished one song, Bruce flipped through the notebook he kept on a music stand until he found a song that fit the moment. “Ah, here’s somethin’,” he’d say, fingering the chords on his guitar as the other guys listened. If the tune was relatively complex—more than three or four changes, with a chorus and a bridge—he taught it to the band in sections, running through the chords and melody and sometimes calling for a particular feel or riff he wanted to hear from individual players. Bruce tracked the sections alphabetically in the order of their unveiling. But this was a trick. The actual structure of the song, which he would reveal just before they started playing, had nothing to do with the alphabetical order. The “C” piece might well be the opening figure, while the “E” section aligned with the first verse, the “B” was the bridge that led to the concluding vamp (“D”), and so on. Kind of a weird way of doing business, but as Garry Tallent recalls, Bruce wanted to keep his players on their toes. “He didn’t want us too confident with it,” Tallent says. “He was trying to keep Roy and myself and maybe some others from overplaying.”

If a new song came with a basic, three-chord rock ’n’ roll foundation, Bruce kept the spontaneity alive by counting off the first take without telling anyone how it went or even what key they should play in. “He’d just say, ‘Follow me!’ and we’d go,” Tallent says. “We’d hear the song for the first time while we were recording it.”

Bruce was far more careful about recording “The River,” a terse acoustic ballad that told the story of a young couple bound—by an accident of teenage conception, social expectations, and the absence of opportunity—to the same working-class grind that had consumed the lives of their parents, and their parents’ parents. Another sacrifice on the twin altars of organized religion and America’s class system. “The River” also happened to be a word-for-word description of the life that Bruce’s sister Ginny had lived since her accidental pregnancy, at eighteen, and early marriage to Mickey Shave. Written in the first person, “The River” is shot through with empathy and no small amount of anger. By the final verse, the narrator thinks back to those youthful moments of love and
promise as a setup for the life that has claimed them. In the end, he’s left with the most dispiriting of riddles: “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true / Or is it something worse?”

For Ginny, who hadn’t known that her brother had written a song about her, hearing its live premiere at Madison Square Garden was unnerving, to say the least. “It was wonderful that he wrote it and all, but every bit of it was true,” she says. “And here I am [in the audience], completely exposed. I didn’t like it at first—though now it’s my favorite song.”

• • •

“The River” ’s premiere took place on September 21, 1979, in the midst of the shortened set that Bruce and the band played during the Musicians United for Safe Energy “No Nukes” fund-raisers, a series of five concerts organized by an all-star consortium of politically active pop artists. Hoping to build a global protest against nuclear energy—and the specter of deadly accidents that could sicken or kill hundreds of thousands, as the Three Mile Island incident nearly did—chief organizers Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Graham Nash, and John Hall appealed to dozens of the era’s top performers.
³

Bruce, as a critically acclaimed up-and-comer with a notoriously fanatic local following, seemed an obvious choice for the lineup, but even given his longtime friendships with Browne, Raitt, and Hall (the latter of whom he’d met at the Cafe Wha? in 1967), the Jersey icon seemed a long shot for the bill. After all, Bruce had avoided lending his name to political events since the George McGovern fund-raiser in 1972. “I felt my music carried its own power,” he says. “When something works [on its own artistic terms], there’s a sense of the world.” Trying to mix in a specific political agenda, on the other hand, too often reduced what should have been art into dogma. But by the summer of 1979, Bruce had started to think again about using his music to fuel the causes that rang his conscience’s chimes. “I was searching around for some way to connect
what I was doing musically with some tangible action,” he says. Climbing aboard a movement started by friends he respected seemed like a good way to start, so while Bruce stopped short of contributing a statement to the shows’ concert program, as all the other artists had done, he felt entirely committed. “I felt I would make whatever statement I needed to make from the stage,” he says. “And also by just being there—[because] what I wouldn’t have done is offer the power of my band casually. Because that was something I believed in and was very serious about.”

As Jackson Browne recalls, Bruce’s commitment to appear had the desired effect. “He was kind of an icon, with a sense of rebellion and honesty,” he says. “Having someone like Bruce on the show gave us a validity and legitimacy among people in the street.” Booked to headline the final two shows at Madison Square Garden (the MUSE organization also put on a massive free concert in Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park on September 23, which Bruce skipped), Bruce came to his shows with more than the usual performance anxiety clinging to his back. Six months into recording, the new album had yet to take shape in his mind. And if a pair of gigs could be a momentary distraction, he also had to confront the pressure of such high-profile shows, along with the fact that he hadn’t been onstage with the band since the end of the Darkness tour nine months earlier. He would also have to edit his usual three-hour set to ninety minutes, tops, to make room for all the other artists on the bill. Worst of all, Bruce would turn thirty on September 23, meaning that he would almost inevitably have to acknowledge his landmark birthday during his set on the night of the twenty-second.

That last one freaked him out the most. When Danny Goldberg, the producer of the concert movie documenting the shows, asked Bruce how it felt to hit his thirties, the musician made it clear that he wasn’t the least bit happy about it. “He said, ‘Oh man, it feels really different,’” says Goldberg, speaking in the robotic voice of someone only just holding himself together. “It probably doesn’t seem like that big a deal to him now.”