Bruce (43 page)

A transformative event for the VVA and a significant step for the Vietnam vets movement in general (Muller later said, “Without Bruce Springsteen, there would be no Vietnam veterans movement”), the show also allowed Bruce to address the memory of Bart Haynes, the “swingin’ little drummer” the Castiles lost to the war in 1967, and Joe Curcio, a
Freehold Regional classmate who had gone into the service with all the fire and energy of an eighteen-year-old kid and then returned two years later as a shattered spirit, his shoulders stooped beneath the weight of what he’d seen and done. As Curcio recalls, Bruce had always gone out of his way to be kind to him during his dark years, even when he found him in a barroom or on a sidewalk collapsed beneath his burden and whatever he had consumed to numb his distress. “I was kinda screwed up, but he was always nice,” Curcio says. “Bruce is special like that.”

Special enough to realize that his own onstage tales of avoiding the war (throughout the seventies, Bruce spun wild tales about his attempts to convince the US Army he was crazy) might strike some veterans, or their survivors, as less than funny. All of those tactics were common in the late-1960s,
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but that still didn’t seem to justify Bruce’s celebrating a scheme that resulted in other Americans serving in his stead. Particularly given the crowning irony that Bruce needed only to submit his medical file—and its notes about the concussion and knee injury he’d suffered in his 1968 motorcycle accident—to be shooed out with 4-F stamped on his forehead. By the time he told the same story to introduce “The River” in the early eighties, all traces of slapstick were gone. When the audience cheered his failing the army’s physical exam, he cut them short: “It ain’t nothin’ to applaud about.”

• • •

On a night off from the River tour in Denver, Bruce went out to see Woody Allen’s film
Stardust Memories.
As he described it later to Dave Marsh, his solitary evening took a turn at the popcorn counter when a teenage fan came up to shake his hand. Noticing that Bruce had come alone, the guy invited the musician to watch the movie with him and his sister. Bruce said sure, and the three watched Allen’s acidic take on fame together. When the lights came up afterward, the teenager looked stricken. “Jesus, I don’t know what to say to ya,” he said. “Is this the way it is? Is this how you feel?’” Bruce reassured him he never felt besieged
by fans, which relieved the guy enough to invite the musician to come back to the family’s house and meet their parents. Bruce didn’t hesitate to say yes, and after a brief you’ve-gotta-be-kidding-us scene at the door (resolved when the guy ran into his room and returned with his copy of
The River
, holding the cover portrait next to the real Bruce’s face), they welcomed Bruce like long-lost family, cooking up a late dinner for them all to share, and then sitting at the table for hours telling him all about their lives, ambitions, and all the rest. Talking to Marsh, Bruce was nearly breathless as he described the scene. “You get somebody’s whole life in three hours,” he said. “You get their parents, you get their sister, you get their family life, in three hours. And I went back to that hotel, and I felt really good because I thought, ‘Wow.’” As he’d already said, it was one of fame’s most rarified privileges. “That is something that can happen to me that can’t happen to most people.”

And it wasn’t an isolated experience. As Bruce told Fred Schruers in his
Rolling Stone
cover story published in January 1981, another fan had recently come up to tell him he had just spent ten hours on a bus in order to celebrate his twenty-first birthday at that night’s concert. What’s more, being able to tell that to Bruce face-to-face was the most important thing that had ever happened to him. “In ten minutes I’ll know more about him than his mother and father do, and maybe his best friend,” Bruce told Schruers. “It’s just a real raw, emotional thing; it’s like the cleanest thing you ever felt. You gotta love the guy. If you don’t, there’s something the matter with you.”

But there’s also something the matter with a thirty-one-year-old man who feels most comfortable engaging in such brief, fan-to-star encounters. And while Bruce invested the largest part of his energy in giving his audiences a night of music thrilling and genuine enough to be personally transformative,
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he came away each night feeling less like a man reveling in the company of his twenty thousand new friends
than like a seduction artist creeping out of a lover’s bedroom with his shoes in his hand. “I’d rather go on the bus to another city than stay [after a show],” he told the
Los Angeles Times
’ Robert Hilburn. “I don’t like staying. It’s funny. It makes me feel uncomfortable.” As did the thought of having a permanent home of his own rather than the crash pads and the lightly decorated rental houses he had cycled through for more than a decade. Even when he bought a three-bedroom house in Los Angeles where girlfriend Joyce Hyser stayed when she was working in town—often with Bruce’s sister Pam as a housemate—when Bruce came to town, he usually avoided his own house in favor of the ease and anonymity of the Sunset Marquis hotel. “Bruce really loved the hotel life,” says Hyser. “He loved being on the road.”

Then in the midst of her four-year romance with Bruce, Hyser had plenty of opportunities to feel the tension between her boyfriend’s sensitivity and his reflexive need to hide behind the barrier he’d erected to keep his inner self from other people. So while Bruce was happy to include his girlfriend in Springsteen family events, and went on to bond with her father, he never seemed all that upset when she shrugged off his occasional musings about getting married. “One reason why we stayed together as long as we did was that we both always had one foot out the door,” she says. “Everyone had an escape route.” Bruce traced the limits of his own commitment to Hyser by comparing his life to a totem pole, upon which one force would always rule above all others. “Honestly, there was nothing more important than his career,” Hyser reflects. “That’s what it came down to at the end of the day.” That, and the understanding that their relationship had to bow to his need for privacy. “His whole thing in those days was, ‘When I want to see you, you need to be here, and when I don’t, you need to be gone.’”

• • •

The River tour ended with two shows in Cincinnati in mid-September 1981, after which the entire band, plus wives, girlfriends, management, and key E Street staffers traveled to Hawaii to celebrate Clarence Clemons’s wedding to Christina Sandgren, whom he’d met in Scandinavia during the group’s European swing that spring. Bruce served as the sax player’s best man and led the entire band in a long set of oldies and
originals during the reception. Returning to his latest rental house in New Jersey, he contemplated the posttour silence with mixed feelings. Finally flush with the long-delayed rewards of rock stardom, he had the financial freedom to do virtually anything he could imagine. Except for that he couldn’t imagine anything he wanted to do other than to write and record a new album, or be on the road, or jam at the Stone Pony or in Clemons’s new club, Big Man’s West, a few klicks up the Jersey Shore in Red Bank.

“It was definitely a closing to a certain earlier section of my life, the initial section of the traveling and touring and those early records,” Bruce says. “There was more contemplation. I was thirty or thirty-one, and something turned me back around toward my early childhood. That moved me into
Nebraska
, so that was pretty telling. I’m not sure what brought that music around, really.”

Probably the same thing that compelled him, night after night, to climb into his car and drive the streets of Freehold, visiting the empty space on Randolph Street, where he had once lived with his grandparents; the duplex on Institute Street where he had been a schoolboy; and then the duplex on South Street where he’d lived as a teenager. He had no idea what he was looking for, Bruce admitted later. But that didn’t stop him from going back. No matter where he was, memories of the Randolph Street house, and the shattered remnants of the life his grandparents had lost when their daughter died, fell over him. When he saw
Badlands
, the 1973 Terrence Malick film based on the exploits of teenage mass murderer Charlie Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old lover, Caril Ann Fugate,
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the disconnection in the characters’ eyes, the sense of living so far beyond meaningful social engagement that the rest of the world spins into a blur, brought him back into the house’s chilly living room. “I was trying to capture the mood of what the house was like when I was a child,” he says. “Austere, haunted . . . just this incredible inner turmoil.”

The song Bruce first called “Starkweather” took shape quickly, the transposition of his childhood memories into the Midwestern murder
saga made easier by his reading of Ninette Beaver’s book-length description of the killings and a vintage state map of Nebraska he’d turned up somewhere. Pairing it with another freshly written song, “Mansion on the Hill,” set the emotional terrain firmly in his Freehold youth, so while the stories ranged from undisguised autobiography (“Used Cars,” “My Father’s House,” “Mansion on the Hill”), to bleak accounts of criminals, cops, and gangster wars (“Johnny 99,” “Highway Patrolman,” “Atlantic City”), to “Born in the U.S.A.,” a bitter account of the life of a small-town Vietnam veteran, the same mood of desolation wove the songs into a unified whole. From song to song, story to story, and character to character, the same images and thoughts repeat, often word for word: “I got debts no honest man can pay,” declares the last-chance narrator in “Atlantic City.” The same phrase appears in “Johnny 99,” this time from the mouth of a just-convicted criminal begging the judge to send him to death row.

Where poverty doesn’t loom, spiritual emptiness does. “Deliver me from nowhere” declares the incipient psychopath talking himself in and out of a murderous rage in “State Trooper.” Less threatening, and yet similarly lost, the narrator of “Open All Night” pins his hopes on the radio dial: “Hey ho, rock ’n’ roll, deliver me from nowhere.” And if the explicitly autobiographical songs lose the criminal element, the air of anguish is just as thick. Recollections of a summertime party in “Mansion on the Hill” (the name clearly reminiscent of Anthony Zerilli’s House on the Hill) filter through the stalks of corn where the uninvited young narrator hides with his sister to take in the music and lights. Memories of accompanying his father on trips to an auto dealership play as exercises in humiliation in “Used Cars,” while “Reason to Believe,” which in any other setting would be the title of a rousing anthem, unspools as existentialism. “Still, at the end of every hard-earned day, people find some reason to believe,” he concludes. It’s that
some
that makes all the difference. Put your faith in this, put your faith in that. For all the good it does, it might as well be nothing at all.

The already-performed “Bye Bye Johnny” turned up on the same list of songs, along with another crime spree drama, “Losin’ Kind”; the lovers-on-the-run ballad “Child Bride”; a pent-up lust song, “Pink
Cadillac”; and another portrait of economic and personal impoverishment called “Downbound Train.” Throughout, the same spiritual void yawned beneath the characters’ feet. “It’s the thin line between stability and that moment when time stops and everything goes to black,” Bruce wrote of the album in his 1998 collection of lyrics,
Songs.
“When the things that connect you to your world—your job, your family, friends, your faith, the love and grace in your heart—fail you.”

• • •

Accustomed to recording home demos of his songs on an off-the-shelf boom box, Bruce decided to trade up to a professional-grade home taping setup. He sent his guitar tech, Mike Batlan, to get a Teac four-track recorder, figuring the extra tracks would allow him to add an extra guitar part, overdub a harmony vocal, add percussion, or whatever flavoring he thought might help the band get a sense of how he wanted the finished tracks to sound. Whatever mixing he needed to do could be performed on a high-grade but still off-the-shelf Panasonic beat box, which was just good enough to handle the at-home demo work he had in mind.

A technically demanding songwriter would have sprung for a more reliable mixing unit, especially since this particular beat box had been through some rough months. Earlier that fall Bruce had brought it along on a boat journey that he and Garry Tallent were taking on the Navesink River. They were rocking and rolling their way up the river until the water turned rough. “This wave came over the bow, hit the beat box, and shut it down,” Bruce says. He hauled the dead machine back to Colts Neck, put it on his couch,
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and forgot all about it until a week or so later, when he was watching television in the middle of the night. “Suddenly,
pchhhk-chhhk-kapow!
I hear this sound, and it scared me, man.
What the hell is that!?!
Then a few more explosions, and bang! The thing came blasting back on.” When it worked again the next morning, Bruce put the box back into his pile of active electronic gear, and when he called in Batlan to help him record his new batch of songs, they both assumed that the resurrected Panasonic was ready to work.

Batlan reported for duty early on the afternoon of January 3, 1982, and followed Bruce up to his bedroom, where he’d set up the Teac and a couple of microphones on a desk. Neither of them knew exactly how the equipment worked. But with the factory instruction booklets at hand, Bruce took up his guitar, waited for Batlan to point the microphones in the right direction, and performed the vocal and guitar tracks for “Nebraska.” When Batlan rewound the tape and played it back, they were both pleasantly surprised to hear the song sounding just as Bruce had played it moments before. “We were like, ‘Hey! It works!’” Bruce says. “It was completely haphazard and spur of the moment. But it was a nice thing, you know.”

Working deep into the night, Bruce and Batlan recorded fifteen songs, with most of the basic tracking finished within four or six takes each. Overdubs were minimal, and after two or three days of mixing (“The sunken beatbox mix,” Bruce calls it), they dubbed it down onto a cassette tape Bruce had picked up at a drugstore. With the process complete, Bruce slipped the cassette into his jacket pocket and carried it off to deliver it, along with a pages-long memo describing the songs’ content and inspirations, to Landau’s New York office.