Bruce (46 page)

Generally not the sort of thing Bruce would, or could, say to someone’s face. But “Bobby Jean” was directed to one distinct person to address one very specific fact: Steve Van Zandt had left the E Street Band. And maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise, given that the guitarist had been muttering about leaving ever since the start of the
River
sessions in 1979. Bruce’s insistence that Van Zandt become a full-fledged member of the production team had kept his childhood pal on board for the time being, but Steve’s frustration had mounted again during the 1982 sessions for
Born in the U.S.A.
Van Zandt formed his own band, the Disciples of Soul, to clear his palate during the break and quickly produced a debut
album of biting, overtly political music called
Men Without Women
(1982), which he followed with a lengthy tour of Europe. A second album, 1984’s
Voice of America
, followed, along with another tour. But while Bruce went out of his way to be supportive of his pal’s solo work—contributing parts to the first album, although he’s uncredited—the distance opening between them grew increasingly obvious, even if Bruce refused to acknowledge it.

Also unacknowledged, and far more upsetting to Van Zandt, was the deflation of his influence in the production team—and on Bruce’s ear. For a long time, the balance between Landau and Van Zandt had been tense, but productively so. “Jon on his right and me on his left. Jon representing the career, the business, the narrative end,” the guitarist says. “Me representing rock ’n’ roll, the street, where it was coming from. A healthy balance, and it proved to be quite successful.”
³
Van Zandt had been a central influence on the wildly fruitful January 1982 sessions that produced the majority of the songs that ended up on the finished
U.S.A.
album in 1984. Between that and the massive success of “Hungry Heart,” which Van Zandt had helped rescue from Bruce’s indifference, he felt like claiming what he considered his due.

“At a certain point, I needed my role to expand,” he explains. “I knew exactly what he sounded like, exactly what the band sounded like, exactly what he heard in his head, and how he needed the next album to sound. That’s what I thought, anyway.” Instead the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. “All of a sudden I could tell he wasn’t hearing me. I’m not getting through. That was new to me, and I wasn’t comfortable with it.” Hearing this in 2011, Bruce looks puzzled, then shrugs. “Steve’s very particular about the things he likes,” he says. “And sometimes my buddy feels a little underappreciated.”

As Van Zandt recalls, his relationship with Bruce grew tense, then chilly, then edged toward the spiky. “I felt our relationship was in a little bit of jeopardy. And I thought the way to preserve the friendship was to leave. I knew if I stayed, the rather civilized disagreements were about to
take a turn for the less civilized.” Van Zandt made fleeting appearances at the full-band sessions during the spring of 1983 and then didn’t turn up at all for the fall 1983–February 1984 recording work. Still, neither Bruce nor Van Zandt spoke publicly about their split, both referring to the Disciples of Soul as a side project. And as far as Bruce was concerned, Van Zandt was still on board for the world tour he and the E Street Band had planned to start in the summer of 1984.

In February 1984 Bruce recoiled visibly when he saw a news report on MTV announcing that Van Zandt had split from the E Street Band. “That’s a bunch of bull!” he sputtered to his weekend guest, fellow guitarist Nils Lofgren.

“I was shocked,” Lofgren says. “I know Bruce is very private, and God knows the aggravation he’s learned to live with, with rumors and all that.” Bruce first met Lofgren in 1970 at the Avalon Ballroom audition on which Steel Mill had pinned its hopes during its brief San Francisco residency. Lofgren burst out of the gate earlier than Bruce, first as Neil Young’s sideman and then as the leader of a trio called Grin, which gained a cult audience in the early seventies. They bumped into each other from time to time on the club circuit after Lofgren went solo in 1973 and when he got dropped by his record company in 1984, Bruce made a point of reaching out.

“I was down in the dumps. Then he said, ‘Why don’t ya come up for a weekend?’” They hung out for a few days, lighting up their evenings by checking out a couple of local clubs and stepping up to jam with whoever was playing. “That was his thing,” Lofgren says. “The band would find a couple of guitars, Bruce would lead us, and everyone fell in line.” The weekend was a tonic for Lofgren’s spirits. “It always helps to go to a couple of bars and hold your own with Springsteen next to you. But mostly we listened to
Born in the U.S.A.
, and I thought it was a great, great record.” So when they saw the MTV news break, Lofgren didn’t resist the temptation to offer his assistance. “I said, ‘Well, if you do need a guitar player, I’d love an audition.’ He looked up and said, ‘Really?’” Then they went back to watching videos.

When Bruce made a final pitch to keep Van Zandt on board, he made sure that his friend knew how wild the buzz surrounding
U.S.A.
had
become. “He had a sense the record was going to be successful,” Van Zandt says. “I think he legitimately wanted me to share in what he felt I deserved, since I had coproduced the album and was a big part of it.” They talked for hours, briefly kicking around the prospect of the Disciples of Soul joining the tour as the opening act, with Van Zandt playing both ends of the show. But given that Bruce never had opening acts—and on this, of all tours, he couldn’t imagine limiting his own stage time—the idea didn’t stick. Van Zandt also wasn’t crazy about Bruce’s newly supersized commercial ambitions. When you can sell a million or two million albums and fill sports arenas while still having a generally normal offstage life, working to become a global superstar seemed ridiculous. Nevertheless, Van Zandt says the talk, and his decision to finalize his departure from Bruce’s band, marked a significant moment in their friendship. “It wasn’t a fight, but it was a very deeply emotional moment,” he says. “A kind of emotional reconciliation. An acceptance that we were going our separate ways. A separation of brothers going their own ways, for their own reasons. It was emotional, and disappointing. But not adversarial at all.”
⁴

• • •

In early May Bruce called Lofgren at his home in Maryland. “Hey, if ya feel like it, you can come back up and do a little jamming with the band.” Lofgren answered just as casually (“I said, ‘
Sure!
’”) but inside his head, lights flashed and alarm bells chimed. “I’m thinking, ‘What’s
that
mean? Jamming? Why?’” But, of course, he knew what it meant. Ever the A student, Lofgren went immediately to a bootleg-collecting friend, borrowed a few of Bruce’s shows, and wrote out the chord charts to every song he heard. Lofgren’s buddy also had a bootlegged tape of the still-unreleased
Born in the U.S.A.
, so he wrote down those charts too. Taking a commuter jet to a tiny airport in south New Jersey, Lofgren found Bruce waiting for him in the parking lot. As Lofgren had assumed, he had been summoned to audition for Van Zandt’s position in the band. But the guitarist still felt taken aback when they got to Bruce’s house in Rumson,
New Jersey,
⁵
and discovered the rest of the E Street Band sitting around the dining room table. Bruce slid into one empty chair and gestured toward the last chair, sitting alone at the foot of the table. “So I went, ‘
Damn!
’ But look: who else if not me?”

The band rehearsed in Red Bank, in the empty building that had once housed Clemons’s never quite profitable nightclub, Big Man’s West. Lofgren played with the band for a couple of days and packed up his guitars at the end of the second day feeling good about what had happened. No matter how it turned out, he’d given it his best shot, he figured. Bruce vanished into a side room in the moments after they’d quit playing, and when he came out, Lofgren went over to give him a thank-you hug. Bruce just smiled.

“He said, ‘Look, I talked to everybody. It feels good to us. So do you want to join the E Street Band?’ I said, ‘What? You mean now? Like a full member of the band? Not just a sideman?’ And he said, ‘Yeah. Join the band.’ So I said, ‘
Absolutely!
Count me in!’” Lofgren flew back to Maryland that night, packed up everything he’d need for a tour, threw it into his car, and drove back up to New Jersey.

He had five weeks before the opening date of the tour, set for Saint Paul, Minnesota, at the end of June. Lofgren took over the guitar parts without much sweat, but he had a tougher time doing all that while also summoning the grit and power for Van Zandt’s high vocal harmonies. Bruce, however, already had a solution on hand. He called Patti Scialfa, who had managed to do all the growing up that Bruce and Van Zandt had asked her to do when she tried out for Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom thirteen years earlier. Bruce had considered adding a female voice to the band even before Van Zandt left (Scialfa had auditioned months earlier, in fact), so when he offered her a backup singer job, she jumped at it and became the first woman to become a full-fledged member of the E Street Band. Scialfa, a willowy redhead with sparkling green eyes and a playfully sexy stage presence, had been a fixture on the Asbury Park scene for so long that her joining did little to disrupt the E Street boys’ club.
She also came with serious academic credentials, including a music degree from New York University and training from the jazz conservatory at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. Scialfa had spent years busking and playing club dates with her all-woman band Trickster (with Soozie Tyrell and Lisa Lowell), and toured and recorded as a vocalist for both David Johansen and Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. “Patti saved my ass,” Lofgren says. “She got thrown in even later than I did, but Patti can sing anything.”

• • •

First came the video. In 1984, with the three-year-old MTV established as the hub of the nation’s (and increasingly the world’s) pop music culture, any bid for mainstream success had to include a video that showcased the artist’s single, while also establishing his or her image and the mood of the new song and/or album. Bruce had resisted MTV’s gravitational pull in the bleak “Atlantic City” video in 1982, but his heady ambitions for
Born in the U.S.A.
required a much more industry-friendly campaign. Still, Bruce, who fell in love with music the old-fashioned, AM-radio-driven way, was wary. “I kind of agreed with him,” Teller says. “I knew that videos hampered people’s ability to comprehend the music in their own way.” But Columbia’s president also knew how the music business worked in 1984, and Landau said he’d try to make something happen.

When the manager came back to show what they came up with while working with director Jeff Stein (best known then for
The Kids Are Alright
, his spectacular 1979 documentary about the Who) for a day in the Kaufman Astoria film studios in Queens, New York, Teller was baffled. Rather than featuring the band or any kind of onstage setting, the video featured Bruce alone. Appearing on an all-black set and dressed in black pants, a white, sleeveless T-shirt, thin black suspenders, and a thick black bandanna tied across his forehead, Bruce looked mostly like a mime with ants in his pants. Set loose on the empty soundstage, Bruce lip-synced the lyrics while doing his best back-and-forth boogie, with occasional 360-degree spins for odd measure. And that was the whole production, until a white-suited Clemons popped in to simulate his saxophone solo at the end of the song. “No background, no band, that was it,” Teller says. “It really just showed you how uncomfortable he was with videos.” When
the executive caught Landau’s eye at the end of the clip, he shook his head. “Jon and I just looked at each other, and I said, ‘No way!’”
⁶
Landau, he says, nodded—almost as if he’d expected Teller to say that—and said he’d try to come up with something else.

Then a miracle occurred. Bruce agreed to not only shoot a real performance video but also cooperate with the Hollywood-style enhancements suggested by director Brian De Palma, who had helmed the bloody horror movie
Carrie
and the even bloodier gangster movie
Scarface.
Shot onstage on the first night of the Born in the U.S.A. tour in Saint Paul, DePalma’s video began with a boots-up pan of Bruce, dressed in new blue jeans and a short-sleeved white button-up. Dancing to the opening bars of the single, he came into view as a popcorn movie version of himself, shiny to the point of seeming premoistened, with a silly grin on his face. With artificial smoke floating behind him, Bruce and his similarly shiny band members pantomimed their parts while shots of the real crowd’s reaction moved to focus on one suspiciously gorgeous woman (who turns out to be future
Friends
star Courteney Cox) dancing excitedly in the front row. When the song moved into its final, instrumental bars, the still-grinning Bruce reached out for the woman, who just happened to be wearing the official
U.S.A.
tour T-shirt, thus inspiring a brief array of oh-my-God-this-can’t-really-be-happening expressions to flow across her own shiny face until she’s right there dancing with Bruce Springsteen in the Hollywood-enhanced spotlights.

And in 1984 that’s what you called a state-of-the-art MTV music video. “I winced at that, too,” Teller says. “It looked so goddamned stagey. I told Jon, ‘That’s so cheesy!’ I could never watch
Friends
as a result.” No matter, the clip was an immediate sensation. From July until
February 1985, the
Born in the U.S.A.
album traded the top spot on the album chart with Prince and
Purple Rain
. And the LP’s run, and Bruce’s leap to the apex of mainstream culture, had only just begun.

• • •

Through the first leg of the American tour that summer, everything felt like business as usual. Granted, business was especially good. Shows sold out with lightning speed, often leading to multiple appearances at venues they had once struggled to fill. Already the audience had grown beyond the usual core of Springsteen zealots, due both to the broad appeal of “Dancing in the Dark” in radio and video formats. Bruce and Landau had also hired the industry’s leading dance record remixer, Arthur Baker, to create an extended, heavily revised mix aimed at dance clubs
⁷
around the world. At the same time, Bruce acquiesced to requests for interviews with major celebrity media outlets including
People
magazine,
⁸
and the syndicated celebrity news TV program
Entertainment Tonight
, among others. They also worked with MTV to hatch the “Be a Roadie for Bruce” contest, the winner of which would be rewarded with a temporary job as a crew member (and thus be granted the opportunity to call the Boss “boss”).