Bruce (48 page)

“I knew people who knew a lot of actors, so I got to know Julianne,” says Bruce’s tour agent, Barry Bell. “I brought her to a show, introduced her to Bruce. I figured she’d be right for him because she was very down to earth. And the rest is history.” A shadowy sort of history, considering what the future held in store. But given Bruce’s steep arc into global fame, his blossoming romance with an up-and-coming model-turned-actress from the Pacific Northwest inevitably became the subject of intense interest for the world’s media/celebrity industrial complex.

Born in Chicago in 1960 and raised in the waterfront suburb of Lake Oswego, Oregon, about ten minutes up the Willamette River from Portland, Julianne Phillips grew up with the tree-shaded comfort the Springsteens never enjoyed when Bruce was young. The sixth and final child born to Bill, a prosperous insurance executive, and his homemaker wife, Ann, Julianne went through school with the casual grace of a young woman thoroughly comfortable in her own skin. Fair skinned and blue eyed, with a lissome figure and classic schoolgirl features, Julianne floated through Lake Oswego High School, waving the pom-poms with the cheerleaders on Saturday night and cutting a fine figure in her dad’s MG
roadster on Macadam Boulevard to downtown Portland. A quick run through the two-year Brooks College in Long Beach, California, prefaced an early-eighties move to New York, where she joined the Elite modeling agency, soon earning top rates as a vision of fresh-scrubbed sensuality. Back in LA in 1983, Julianne rose quickly through the actress ranks, starting with a featured role in a video by Southern rockers .38 Special, which led to roles in TV movies.

All of which proved entirely beguiling to Bruce, who could also sense Julianne’s warmth and lack of Hollywood pretense. That she also knew her way around his favorite rock ’n’ roll classics was another bonus. After chatting for a while backstage, Bruce asked to see Julianne again, and when that date went well, they grew closer, then inseparable. “I knew they liked each other, but I didn’t know how fast he was moving,” Bell says. Very fast, as it turned out. Bruce took his new girlfriend home to meet his family and friends in New Jersey during his winter break, followed her back to Los Angeles and then went with her to meet the Phillipses when they visited Palm Springs, California, in February 1985. Bruce went to Australia alone in March, but Julianne met him in Japan when the tour got there three weeks later. It was all true love and lollipops in the land of the rising sun, and the short holiday they spent in Hawaii on the way back to the United States seemed to seal the deal. “She was just tough,” he told Dave Marsh at the time. “She had confidence and resilience, and she wasn’t afraid to face facts or their implications.”

A day or two after they got home from Hawaii, Julianne called her mother in Lake Oswego and told her they’d better plan a wedding, and soon. And secretly, too. Because if the word leaked to the Bruce-frenzied press, the deluge would be immediate, intense, and unyielding. Both of Phillips’s parents were thrilled, as one of Ann’s bowling friends told a
People
magazine reporter a few weeks later. “Bruce was very quiet and subdued, didn’t smoke or drink.” But word did get out—the only thing that abhors a vacuum more than nature is an aroused celebrity media—and within hours, the Phillipses’ suburban driveway became an encampment for the flocks of reporters who flooded Lake Oswego in hopes of getting a glimpse at the happy couple. Helicopter-borne photographers mounted
aerial attacks, and it quickly got to the point where the absence of real news and photographs became a story all its own.
¹

The ceremony itself was miraculously untouched by the media’s fanatic attention, although that feat required a level of cloak-and-daggery (decoy cars, fake schedules, back alley escapes, and more) unseen outside of a James Bond movie. When Bruce and Julianne stepped to the altar at Our Lady of the Lake Roman Catholic church a few ticks after midnight on May 13, they came with both sets of parents at their side, the E Street Band in the pews, and news reporters nowhere in sight. Bruce was attended by three best men, Clemons, Van Zandt, and Landau. The formal reception was held two days later in exurban Tualatin, Oregon, with helicopters churning the air, reporters pacing the road, and photographers hanging out of the trees down the lane. When it was all over, Bruce had a ring on his finger, a wife by his side, and a commitment to the domestic life he had avoided so assiduously for so long. It had taken him a long time to get there, but now he was determined to make it work.

• • •

If the video for “Dancing in the Dark” was the apotheosis of the airbrushed-for-your-safety Bruce, the video for
Born in the U.S.A.
’s title track went just as far in the opposite direction. Directed by independent filmmaker and writer John Sayles, the clip mixed concert footage (featuring a much more grizzled and steely Bruce) with lingering shots of factories, workers, and vintage home movies from what appeared to be working-class homes from the sixties and early seventies. The Sayles-directed video for the taut ballad “I’m on Fire” moved back toward the classically cinematic, ditching all visual references to Bruce the musician by casting him as a humble (but undeniably handsome) mechanic who has gained the flirtatious attention of a mostly unseen rich woman (voiced by Sayles’s wife, the actress and coproducer Maggie Renzi) who
can entrust her shimmering white Thunderbird
²
to only one wrench jockey. Given a few simple lines of dialogue, Bruce looked surprisingly at ease. Which was no surprise to Sayles, who often casts nonprofessional actors in his films. “What you find is people who are storytellers have a feel for who the person is,” he says. “If you give them things to do, and they understand the character, they can usually pull it off fairly comfortably.” Bruce also played a character in Sayles’s clip for “Glory Days,” which wove together barroom performance scenes with sequences about a heavy equipment operator’s nostalgia for his days on the baseball diamond, even as he revels in the comforts of his wife (portrayed by Julianne) and their pair of handsome sons. The final video for the album, “My Hometown,” was a live concert performance.

The videos leaped into MTV’s ceaseless rotation. All seven of the singles drawn from
Born in the U.S.A.
hit the
Billboard
Top 10, while the album was in the Top 10 for eighty-four straight weeks, moving enough copies to be the bestselling album of 1985, by which point it had gone platinum ten times over. At the same time, Bruce saw his ambition to be the voice of his moment become an inarguable fact. Certainly within the music community, where his agreement to participate in the multi-artist fund-raiser single being constructed by Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, and Quincy Jones inspired a legion of reluctant rockers and/or serious-minded songwriters (who feared being roped in among a group of featherweight pop stars) to sign on too.
³
He’d raised
attention and money through his nightly appeals for (and his own donations to) food banks, veterans’ centers, and other local charities in the cities the tour visited. And through his songs and words, Bruce had focused attention on the plight of ordinary working people. He had stood on the biggest stages and made an even bigger noise than he had set out to make.

Along the way, he had also become an international icon: a one-man symbol of the United States of America, in all its spectacle, noise, and supersized reach. And if the vast audiences all around the world hadn’t made that clear, Landau had also fielded a multimillion-dollar offer from the Chrysler automobile company for Bruce to serve as the face of a massive new ad campaign. Not that Bruce would seriously consider that sort of thing—he certainly didn’t need the money, and now that he had the world’s attention, selling trucks was the last thing he had in mind. The members of the E Street Band had certainly enjoyed their run at the top of the mountain too. But even as they ran through the victory lap of sold-out stadiums and noted the additional zeroes in their paychecks, success came with a sense of unease.

“I felt that the end of the Born in the U.S.A. tour was the end of the cohesion,” Max Weinberg reflects. “I could tell things were changing. I felt tremendous solidarity with the concept of the group pushing Bruce’s vision forward. But from January of ’85 to October of ’85, the end of the Born in the U.S.A. tour, that’s when I felt the dissolution happening. I can remember being very depressed after the last concert we did at the LA Coliseum on October 2 and saying to my wife, ‘It’s over.’”

It was a common feeling. “Me being a star, I didn’t care that much about it,” Clarence Clemons said in 2011. “The one thing that mattered the most to me was my relationship with Bruce. I felt there was some distance happening between Bruce and the band, and that Jon wanted it to happen. Things were changing. Bruce was changing.”

How could his installation in the grandest pantheon of celebrity artists not alter Bruce’s sense of himself and his place in the world? “He
had the president of the USA quoting him. He had every form of recognition that you could have here and in Europe, Japan, and Australia,” Landau says. “And when it was over, I think it was such a monumental, life-changing event that he just wanted something different. I felt, at the end of day, that [the
U.S.A.
era] was a great experience for both of us. But I totally understood that we needed to settle into a mode that we could now sustain for the rest of his life.” And if that meant creating an entirely new setting and sound for his music, that’s just what had to happen. Bruce had already broken up every band he’d been in. No surprise, then, that his commitment to the E Street Band had its limits. Now that they’d all seen their years of common struggle reach the astonishing heights of
Born in the U.S.A.
, what else could they do?

Not that the job was entirely finished. As with all of Bruce’s marathon shows, Born in the U.S.A. came with an encore: the long-dreamed-of live album. Ten years and tens of millions of albums later, the stakes had changed. Now the live collection would serve as a monument to the sweep of Bruce’s thirteen-year career as a recording artist, and the twenty-plus years he’d spent onstage with the core of musicians he’d played and lived with since they were all teenagers. Given the grandiosity of that story and the wild intensity of popular demand, the set took on monumental proportions. More than a single, a double, or even a triple album, this package stretched into a boxed set of five vinyl discs, or, for the latest audio technology, three compact discs. The five-disc/three-CD box wasn’t entirely unprecedented in rock ’n’ roll: Bob Dylan had pioneered the form with
Biograph
, the career-spanning collection released in the fall of 1985. But this would be the first live rock ’n’ roll album to get such gilded treatment.

Given a collection of professional-quality live tapes dating back to the Born to Run tour, Bruce, Landau, Chuck Plotkin, and engineer Toby Scott sorted through the performances in search of a collection that represented the arc of Bruce’s musical and philosophical vision, while also telling the story of the band’s journey from bars to baseball stadiums. They decided to limit themselves to the decade between the intimate Born to Run shows in 1975 to the stadium leg of the Born in the U.S.A. tour in 1985. With one ear tuned to the quality and
historical significance of the individual performances and the other to forming a cohesive narrative, the forty-track album they created journeyed from the hushed voice-and-piano reading of “Thunder Road” that opened his 1975 shows at Los Angeles’s Roxy club to stadium-sized performances of “Born to Run” and a variety of
Born in the U.S.A.
songs
⁴
with one hundred thousand voices singing along. If “Thunder Road” set a dream in motion, the massive versions of “Born to Run” and “The Promised Land” made clear that the young man’s fantasy of where he might go hadn’t even come close to where life would actually take him. But a decade later, the man’s own triumph was no longer big enough to sustain him. As Bruce called to the city-sized mobs of fans drawn to his shows night after night: “Remember that in the end, nobody wins unless everybody wins.
A-one-two
!”
⁵
And with that benediction came “Born to Run,” the tale of one couple’s bid for glory transformed into an anthem for the common man.

Readied for a November 1986 release,
Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Live/1975–85
presented a conundrum to industry analysts and the Columbia/CBS leadership alike. Dylan’s
Biograph
had sold about 250,000 copies within a year of its release—which seemed like a bigger win when computed on a per-album basis, in which the sale of one box counted as the sale of five single albums (for example, 250,000 = 1.25 million = platinum-plus). So while CBS planned for Bruce’s live box set to be a hot commodity in virtually every country in the world, initial estimations called for global sales of about 2 million (or, in industryspeak, 10 million) copies. Instead record store preorders in the United States alone added up to 1.5 million, with warnings that the retailers expected to have to restock their supplies within a week. International orders followed suit, and when the album hit the shelves on November 10, 1986, record buyers, store owners, and the Springsteen-hungry media approached the unveiling as a cultural event. Blocklong lines stretching
to the shops’ doors; mob scenes inside; joyous consumers carting their quarry home by the armload. Retailers and industrial observers supplied the superlatives:
Live/1975–85
was akin to a new Beatles album; it could be the album of the decade; it was a money-printing machine for everyone and anyone with a hand in its production, printing, distribution, and/or sale.
⁶

How could any five-disc box of what was now classified as “heartland rock” live up to such superlatives? Debuting on the
Billboard
album chart at number one made for a nice start, and holding on to the top position through the holiday shopping season and well into January also helped reality transcend the hyperbole.
⁷
Sales were also enhanced by the success of the box’s first single, a furious cover of Edwin Starr’s Vietnam-era protest song “War,” which peaked at number 8 on
Billboard
’s singles chart, stretching Bruce’s streak of Top 10 singles to eight. The next single, “Fire,” ended the streak in decisive form by stalling at number 46.