Bruce (47 page)

Bruce entered the 1984 cultural mainstream with unexpected force. In a decade of popular music increasingly dominated by women (Stevie Nicks, Debbie Harry, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, among others) and men pushing the edges of male sexual identity (Michael Jackson, Prince, Boy George), Bruce’s jeans and T-shirt, along with the old-school rock ’n’ roll framework of his songs, shifted music back to familiar territory. When the celebrity-entertainment mags dropped by to kick Bruce’s tires and take the aspiring idol out for a spin around the block, they came back as impressed by his offstage humility as they were by his onstage heroics. “The trappings of rock superstardom were astonishingly absent backstage,” wrote
People
’s Chet Flippo in a cover story titled “Blue-Collar Troubadour.” “No stretch limos for the rock stars; just unobtrusive
vans . . . there were no drugs and nothing stronger to drink than beer.” Certainly not where Flippo could see them, at any rate. Still, Bruce’s commitment to keeping his boots on the ground stayed firm. As he told
Rolling Stone
’s Kurt Loder (also the central face in MTV’s thriving music news broadcasts), the superstar treatment achieved nothing more than separating the artist from the people he most needed to understand, and vice versa. “The life of a rock band will last as long as you look down into the audience and can see yourself, and [they] can look up at you and see themselves,” he said. “If the price of fame is that you have to be isolated from the people you write for, then that’s too fuckin’ high a price to pay.”

And yet Bruce’s all-star physique, along with his ability to elevate his concerts into something like the First Church of Rock (to quote
People
’s Flippo) gave him the aura of a superhero: a larger-than-life figure keeping the world safe for truth, beauty, and the cleansing tide of rock ’n’ roll. Factor in the red, white, and blue imagery all over
Born in the U.S.A.
and its songs about work, home, and family, and here rose the profile of an American hero. Or, as Flippo put it to
People
’s forty million weekly readers, “He’s a folk hero in his biker boots, tight jeans, kerchief headband, and short-sleeved sport shirt with the sleeves rolled up to display his newly pumped-up biceps.”

In a presidential election year defined by the gauzy “Morning in America” ads promoting the reelection of Ronald Reagan, the star-spangled subtext to Bruce’s popular image made him an irresistible target for political maneuvering and manipulation. The first wavelet came in
People
magazine’s profile when Flippo described
Born in the U.S.A.
’s title track as a proud anthem sung in the voice of a war-ravaged Vietnam veteran who suffers “every raw deal imaginable but remains a ‘cool rocking Daddy in the U.S.A.’” How a sophisticated music journalist like Flippo
⁹
could hear the rage written into that song and come away thinking that the brutalized narrator’s final roar amounted to anything other than bitter irony is difficult to comprehend. But the worst was yet to come.

It began with a well-intentioned invitation from Max Weinberg. The drummer and his wife, Becky, were regular watchers of ABC-TV’s weekly political talk show
This Week with David Brinkley
, mostly for the panel discussion segments that included ABC’s liberal-ish newsman Sam Donaldson and the conservative pundit George Will. Curious to see what the hardcore pols would make of a rock ’n’ roll concert, the drummer invited the show’s entire panel to see Bruce and the band when the tour came to Largo, Maryland, a thirty-minute drive east of the capital. Will was the only panelist who showed up,
¹⁰
so when Weinberg took his guest backstage to see the show’s inner workings, the conservative writer alone got to meet Bruce and take in the atmosphere. Will left the concert after the intermission but was still moved to devote his September 13 nationally syndicated column to Bruce and the event. The piece, titled “Bruce Springsteen, U.S.A.,” dragooned the band in general—and Bruce in particular—into a political fantasy that said more about the author’s electoral agenda than it did about his subject’s beliefs and message. Starting with an approving nod to the absence of androgyny in Bruce’s image,
¹¹
Will compared his macho look to Robert De Niro’s in the battle sequences of
The Deer Hunter
.
¹²
All of which clarified Will’s vision of Bruce as a “wholesome cultural portent” whose own rags-to-riches story proved the conservative belief that no amount of socioeconomic privation could stand in the way of hard, honest, nonunionized work. That Bruce’s extraordinary success was a result of otherworldly talents unavailable to virtually everyone else on the planet did not occur to Will. What did occur to him, however, was that uttering and repeating the words “Born in the U.S.A.” amounted to an affirmation of patriotism and, thus, of Ronald Reagan and his administration. Will was so enamored of the idea that he repurposed it for the column’s kicker: “There still is nothing quite like being born in the U.S.A.”
¹³

Weinberg, to put it gently, felt chagrined. He hadn’t known that Will intended to write about the concert, let alone transform Bruce into a character in Ayn Rand’s libertarian
Atlas Shrugged
. And while Bruce never mentioned it to him one way or another, the drummer felt a distinct chill backstage when he got to the next show. “I was practically excommunicated by certain factions in our touring party,” he says. “Blacklisted. Akin to being a traitor to some ideology. And while [Becky and I] did invite him to the show, it would be a stretch to say George Will was a friend of mine. I mean, I met him
that night
.”

The situation grew even more complicated a week later, when Reagan made a campaign stop in Hammonton, New Jersey, and ingratiated himself to the southern Jersey crowd by declaring that “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts; it rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.” Cue the balloons, cue the cheers, cue the presidential motorcade for the ride back to Air Force One and the next campaign stop. “He got his picture taken with the red, white, and blue balloons, and he mentioned me,” Bruce says. “It was part of a shopping list of things that needed to be done for the six o’clock news. And I didn’t want to be part of the shopping list, y’know?”

Heading to the next tour stop in Pittsburgh, Bruce and Landau agreed that he had to say something to deflect Reagan’s attempt to claim spiritual kin. Five songs into the first set, Bruce stepped up to the microphone, acoustic guitar in hand, and noted that the president had mentioned him the other day. “I kind of got to wondering what his favorite album of mine must’ve been, you know,” he said. “I don’t think it was the
Nebraska
album. I don’t think he’s been listening to this one.” Then came an intense reading of “Johnny 99,” the tale of the unemployed auto plant worker who spirals into a bloody crime spree. Talking about the war memorials he’d seen in Washington and grown up among in Freehold, Bruce stopped short of mentioning Reagan by name but still drew a sharp
line between the president’s laissez-faire policies and his own progressive ideals. “It’s a long walk from the government that’s supposed to represent all the people to where it seems like . . . there’s a lot of stuff being taken away from a lot of people that shouldn’t have it taken away,” he said. “Sometimes it’s hard to remember that this place [the nation] belongs to us. That this is our hometown.”

The Democratic nominee for president, former vice president Walter Mondale, took advantage of Reagan’s political overstep by declaring that Bruce “may have been born to run, but he wasn’t born yesterday.” But when the Mondale campaign claimed falsely that Bruce had agreed to endorse its candidate, his handlers had to issue an official retraction. Bruce, for all his eagerness to impact American culture, still had no interest in diving into the partisan electoral fray. “I don’t think people come to music for political advice,” he says. “They come to be touched and moved and inspired, and if you’ve written about [political] things as a part of what you’re doing—and you do it well—then you’re moving and inspiring them with those things. But people aren’t coming on an informational basis. I was attracted to Dylan because he sounded like he was telling the truth. I didn’t sit there with a lyric sheet. It was just in the way it sounded.”

B
Y THE END OF 1984,
Bruce’s image—the close-cropped curls, strong jaw, concrete shoulders, and wood-hewn Fender Telecaster—had ascended into the international register of American icons. In the wake of all the magazine covers, the TV news stories, the endless loop of “Dancing in the Dark” and “Born in the U.S.A.” videos on MTV, newspaper stories, and more, you didn’t have to be able to identify a note of his music to grasp exactly who he was and what his profile signified. But most sensate people
had
heard the music, which was just as unavoidable as all the media coverage. So now Bruce was a brand, and when the Born in the U.S.A. tour reached Australia in late March 1985 for a monthlong swing—Bruce’s first shows Down Under—the fame he had chased for the previous year turned to face him.

“The genie was out of the bottle,” Garry Tallent says. When the band’s plane arrived in Sydney, reporters from what seemed like every
newspaper, television station, and radio outlet in the antipodes were waiting at the airport with notebooks, cameras, and skepticism in tow. “We arrived, and it was front-page news,” Tallent continues. “And the photo captions were all glib: ‘Bruce Springsteen and his burly minders.’ And there was maybe one security guy with us. Suddenly you’re at the position where someone wants to shoot you out of the sky.”

Along with helping Bruce fend off the tabloid media, Jon Landau and friends had to scramble to keep up with an unprecedented ticket demand. In Brisbane a show scheduled for the eight-thousand-seat Chandler Velodrome had to be moved to the fifty-thousand-capacity QEII Sports Centre stadium. What would be Bruce’s first stadium show flirted with disaster from the start. Rain poured from the sky, the sound system wasn’t loud enough to fill the space, and the police’s campaign to enforce a new no-alcohol policy slowed long lines to a crawl. Even Bruce seemed off his game in the cavernous setting, but by then things were spinning so fast they could only live, learn, and get onto the jet because the first-ever Japanese tour was about to begin, and now that country had erupted in ardor for America’s rock ’n’ roll laureate.

Everywhere they went in Japan, Bruce and the band were greeted by an eighties version of Beatlemania: fans waiting at the airport, paparazzi leaping out of doorways and hanging from balconies, mobs outside the hotel hoping to catch a glimpse through the upper-floor windows. Similar scenes would play out during much of the European tour that spring and then during a late-summer run through America’s biggest stadiums (including six sold-out nights at Giants Stadium, just across the Hudson River from New York City, and a tour-concluding four nights at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, from September 27 through October 2).

Even if it was a thrill to be on the receiving end of the sort of frenzy once directed at Elvis and the Beatles, Bruce was sophisticated enough to comprehend the dangers it posed. “Success at that level is a tricky business because a lot of distortion creeps in,” he told Steve Pond in 1988. “There’s the songs you’re writing and things you’re telling, and then there’s what’s happening to you, and that’s another story . . . your
success story is a bigger story than whatever you’re trying to say onstage.”

For some critics, Bruce’s reputation as rock ’n’ roll’s real working-class hero chafed against everything they knew about the verities of superstardom. He’d already been famous for a decade; surely he indulged the same appetites for champagne and deference that turned once-humble stars into cloistered divas. Apart from his globe-trotting, living-hero image, he worked with a vengeance to seem like a regular guy. At least one person on the Born in the U.S.A. tour recalls running into everyone’s boss walking out of the hotel laundry room clutching a basket full of shirts and underpants to his chest. Which sounds positively heroic until you hear how Bruce’s obsession with his Freehold street cred could turn ugly when he suspected that someone on his staff was subverting the regular-guy strictures.

Case in point: the night when a van driver strike forced the crew members charged with shepherding the touring party’s luggage to the hotel to hire limos to transport the bags. It seemed like genius at the time: the price was almost exactly what it had been for the bus, and the bags got to the hotel only slightly late. Call it a win for the enterprising crew guys. Right up until a sleepless Bruce stepped out of the hotel lobby, caught sight of his guys unloading the tour’s suitcases from shimmering limousines, and was moved to wonder, aloud, which fucking asshole had decided to use
his
money to haul luggage like that. Bruce stomped off, and when Landau came out to talk it over the next day, he simply asked the guys to try really hard not to do it again.

Then it wasn’t long before another high-ranking member of the touring party observed to Bruce that it was maybe a little ironic for him to be such a diva about his just-plain-folks edict. Bruce didn’t disagree, exactly. But as Landau and a few others had already figured out, his obsession with staying true to his roots flowed from the Randolph Street days of social isolation. “What occurs to me is that to Bruce, [being an average guy] is not a step down from being celebrated,” Landau observes. “In his experience, it’s a step
up
to be a part of the community. Rather than being isolated from it.”

•  •  •

Throughout the tour, Bruce’s song introductions and midshow stories focused on a subject he had rarely mentioned in a specific way: sex and romance. Mostly sex, though. Almost entirely sex, now that you mention it. Introducing “Glory Days,” he reminisced about teenage encounters in the bedroom of his parents’ house, conducted under the aural cover of balls banging around his pool table. (The occasional sweep of an arm did the trick.) Various tales setting up “Pink Cadillac” made its horndog lyrics all the more vivid, while the introduction to “I’m Goin’ Down” traced the arc of a relationship in terms of a couple’s sexual patterns. “[First] you’re making love to ’em all the time, three or four times a day. Then you come back a little bit later, and, uh-oh . . . it’s like ‘Are you gonna make love to me tonight, or are we gonna wait for the full moon again,’ y’know?” The giggly sex talk got started a few weeks after the tour’s start in late June 1984 but took an abrupt leap in late October after a seven-night stand at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. It was not a coincidence.