Bruce (54 page)

The move came with more than a few intangibles. Bruce was now a forty-two-year-old husband and father as distant from the dance-oriented pop of Paula Abdul as he was from the pop rock of Bryan Adams and the hardcore rock of Guns n’ Roses. Even the great Seattle grunge bands—Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and so on—seemed to come from another, far more jaundiced, world. Meanwhile, Bruce had distanced himself from the diehard fans who would never quite forgive him for abandoning his homeland and the faithful band that had helped him fight his way from the Asbury Park boardwalk to the uppermost reaches of fame, wealth, and power. But no matter how many times the cultural wheels had spun since 1987, Bruce and Landau cast away their usual caution and told Columbia Records’
¹
newish president Don Ienner that they wanted to release both albums. What’s more, they wanted both of the records to be released on the same day. And not as a double album or with any discernible link. Simply two free-standing albums.

The strategy had immediate precedent: Only months earlier, Guns n’ Roses had issued two albums,
Use Your Illusion I
and
Use Your Illusion II
on the same day, and spurred eye-opening sales for both. In this spirit, Landau told Ienner, the finely honed
Human Touch
and rough-hewn
Lucky Town
would emerge together in the spring of 1992. While Ienner could identify the relative commercial positions the bands occupied (G n’ R still approaching its commercial peak, while Bruce had purposefully stepped back from his mideighties height), his mind was less on potential sales than the significance of Bruce’s work and respecting one of his leading artists’ vision. “It would have been tough, and not right, to try to combine them into one,” Ienner says. “They were so different from one another. And scrapping one, yet again in Bruce’s life, was obviously not the answer, either. So the sense was, Guns n’ Roses had just done it, so let’s give it a shot.”

Released on March 31, 1992,
Human Touch
and
Lucky Town
presented Bruce as two distinct visions of himself. On
Human Touch
he shimmered in gauzy light, the mature rocker as a Hollywood pirate, draped in silver jewelry, silky shirts, and, in less formal shots, a funkily perfect fedora. Meanwhile, the guy on
Lucky Town
boasted a half-week beard and a shirt blown apart by the velocity of the fat motorcycle parked in the dirt just yonder. So while both albums addressed the same up-and-down-and-up-again stretch of life, they reflected very different perspectives on the journey.

Led off by the title track and lead single,
Human Touch
came across like the studied work of a songwriter as fluent in swampy rock ’n’ roll as he is in old-school soul and the beat-and-bass funk of urban spoken word. But the heart of the piece, the struggle to achieve an emotionally evolved adult life, is more talked about than experienced. The rocking “Gloria’s Eyes” loses its punch in the production haze, while the lyrics step neatly around the hearts of the characters in the song. The same set of problems presents itself repeatedly on the album, although the better tunes still summon a charge. The ambitious boy’s cautionary tale, “With Every Wish,” floats gracefully over hand percussion and Mark Isham’s muted trumpet riffs; “Cross My Heart” throws sparks into the sultry night; and “Roll of the Dice,” for all its self-consciously Bruce-like swagger, still stirs
the blood. And yet, both of the Christic show stand-outs, “Soul Driver” and “Real World,” get steamrolled beneath a hurtling pace and perfectly aligned layers of drums and computerized percussion. Digital perfection, but not even a touch of the gospel, let alone rock ’n’ roll.

Lucky Town
, on the other hand, tears toward the listener on a plume of dirt and pebbles, its carburetor snarling like a can of wasps. From the leather-lunged declaration of independence in “Better Days” to the roar of life in “Living Proof” to the glimpses of hell in “Souls of the Departed,” the music bristles with nerve endings, sparks of joy, geysers of contempt, whispers of love, and bald admissions of fear. Absent virtually all of the professional entertainer’s mediating skills, the songs grab for the listener’s lapels and refuse to unlock their grip: Listen to this
now.
But was the eruption of feeling too unfiltered, too rich in the murk of life, death, and misery, for listeners to absorb?

Although primed by weeks of speculation about the albums and how they would, or wouldn’t, launch Bruce into his post–E Street, post–New Jersey, post-forty era, the dual albums made the lightest of waves. Critical reaction was generally upbeat, but many came pocked with mitigating points and complaints. Writing in
Rolling Stone,
Anthony DeCurtis noted the many similarities between Bruce’s traditional sound and his supposedly relaunched LA-based sensibility. Worse, “Real Man” had a “slick, annoying repetitive keyboard riff” that put the critic in mind of Phil Collins. But while
Entertainment Weekly
’s David Browne took sour measure of the albums’ “unfocused blur of clattering guitars and faceless rhythm sections,” and dismissed most of the songs as “shockingly generic,”
Time
’s Jay Cocks led by calling the records “wonderful,” and concluded by saying “Springsteen’s reborn and running again,” more or less harmonizing with British rock magazine
Q
’s David Hepworth and the
Chicago Sun-Times
’ Lloyd Sachs.

Commercially the albums started strongly, with
Human Touch
debuting at number 2 and
Lucky Town
just behind at number 3. But the spectacle of Bruce being batted about by the pop-metal Def Leppard (whose
Adrenalize
held the album chart’s top spot the first week) and then by the kiddie rap act Kris Kross (who took the crown the next week)—along with both Bruce albums’ relatively swift descent toward
the floor of the Top 100—did not add up to the triumphant comeback Bruce, Landau, and Columbia hoped to achieve. “Sure, there were some disappointing sales,” says Ienner. “But you did have two competing records out there. Some people were upset that the E Street Band wasn’t there, and some people were upset that he’d left New Jersey. Music was changing dramatically at the time. But the thing is, if you added the sales of both albums together, you’d get exactly what you’d expect to sell on an album at that time.” And, as Ienner points out, even with the other release as a direct competitor, both albums sold enough copies to each go platinum.

No matter, Bruce’s campaign was to launch his new music, along with his post–E Street identity, as high into the firmament as possible. Obviously that meant hitting the road. And with the first leg of a multi-stage, perhaps multiyear, world tour set to start in Europe in June, he worked through the winter and spring, often in consort with Bittan, to pull together an eleven-piece band with the strength to play the old E Street songs and the versatility to find the pocket in all the soul, funk, gospel, folk, and rock ’n’ roll he could throw in its direction. Just as, or perhaps even more important, the new musicians had to come at the music with the right feel: their own unique version of the tuned-in, turned-on, play-it-all-night spirit he discovered at the Upstage in Asbury Park nearly twenty-five years earlier.

Already certain that Bittan would serve as the band’s sole keyboard player, requiring him to play both his and Danny Federici’s parts at the same time, Bruce auditioned an array of drummers and bassists. He settled eventually on Zach Alford, a young New York drummer best known for his work with the B-52’s on their smash 1989 Cosmic Thing tour, and bassist Tommy Sims, who at twenty-six had emerged as one of the most talented young pop musicians in the industry. He had an easier time finding a guitarist. Channel surfing sometime around the holidays, he’d come across a repeat of a 1986
Saturday Night Live
episode that featured the alt-country band Lone Justice as the musical guest. The Maria McKee–fronted group included a British guitarist named Shane Fontayne, and his rough but melodic style rang in Bruce’s ears. Fontayne had left McKee’s
band, but Lone Justice’s manager, onetime
Darkness
engineer Jimmy Iovine, called Fontayne to relay Bruce’s message.

“He said a friend of his wanted to know if I might want to go on the road with him,” Fontayne says. “I said, ‘Who’s your friend?’ And he said, ‘Springsteen.’” Fontayne flew out to Los Angeles a few days later and reported to Bittan’s Hollywood studio to audition. The guitarist found all the equipment he’d requested set up in a tight circle on the studio floor. Bruce came in with Bittan at his side, and with Alford on drums and another player on bass,
²
Bruce counted off a blues groove, and they started to play. During a break a couple of hours later, Bruce looked over at Bittan. “A lot of twang out there,” he said, gesturing to Fontayne. The guitarist piped up, “Too much?” Bruce and Bittan answered in unison: “Nope.”

They played the next night with another bassist, and then Fontayne went home to the East Coast. Fontayne was called back in late April for another go-round, this time with Sims on bass and Alford still on drums, after which Bruce came out of a control room conference with Landau and Bittan and waved for the players to gather round. “This is it, boys,” he said, gesturing around the circle. “Welcome to the big show!”

“Bruce had an extreme consideration for everyone else,” Alford says. “He treated everyone with respect and was way more down to earth than I expected anyone that famous to be.”

With the band’s five-piece core in place, Bruce fleshed out the R&B-gospel sound with a chorus of a half dozen singers, including Bobby King, a fixture in folk/blues revivalist Ry Cooder’s band. The others were Cleopatra Kennedy, Gia Ciambotti, Carol Dennis, Angel Rogers, and Crystal Taliefero, a young singer-guitarist who would soon add saxophone to her arsenal. Patti, who took most of the tour off to tend to Evan and Jessie, guested on “Human Touch” and other songs when she could get out.

Rehearsals started on a soundstage at Hollywood Center Studios in late April, rolling through the first week of May. The operation shifted
to the Bottom Line in New York, where they gave a private show for two hundred Columbia/Sony executives and then headed uptown to the NBC studios in Rockefeller Center for Bruce’s first-ever appearance on
Saturday Night Live.
Back at the Hollywood soundstage two weeks later, they worked through the first week of June to prepare for an open rehearsal to be held for a small invited audience and, more significantly, a live radio broadcast beamed across the country. Along with the usual questions and quandaries facing the start of every previous tour, now Bruce had to find a way to balance this new stage in his career with the twenty years of work that had propelled him to this point. Needing perspective, Bruce called Steve Van Zandt and asked him to come out to Los Angeles and lend his ear and wisdom.

After overseeing a single remix of “57 Channels”—adding new layers of percussion, music, voices, and looped sounds that gave the song a harder political edge
³
—Van Zandt played alongside the band for a few days. For a time, some members assumed that Bruce’s old buddy was joining the group. “It looked like Bruce was thinking about bringing him out on the road with us,” Fontayne says. “He was wondering, ‘Should I? Shouldn’t I?’”

Van Zandt doesn’t remember it quite like that. “It was just kinda helping them understand the songs,” he says. Still, Van Zandt does remember Bruce asking what he was up to for the next year or so. Bruce recalls the same thing, after a fashion. “Yeah, ya know, I might have played with the idea of bringing him along,” he says. “Like, he was in the E Street Band, and now he can be in
this
band! But for some reason, it just didn’t happen.” Van Zandt left, but not before urging his friend to play more of the older songs his audience obviously wanted to hear. As ever, Van Zandt’s words mattered: the first notes heard at the start of the widely broadcast open rehearsal were the opening bars of “Born in the U.S.A.”
⁴

Launching the world tour with a monthlong swing through Europe gave Bruce some breathing room, given how many of his most fervent fans could now be found outside the United States. Indeed, the European shows were well attended and riotously received, particularly when they played one of the six or so
Born in the U.S.A.
songs he got into the habit of tossing in to juice things up between the newer songs. The American leg kicked off with a record-breaking eleven-night stand at the Brendan Byrne Arena (also know as Meadowlands Arena) in the Meadowlands complex in East Rutherford, New Jersey. A chorus of boos greeted Bruce’s reference to living in Los Angeles. “Get the hostility out now, I can take it,” he responded, spurring a new wave of boos and cheers. “C’mon, you can do better than that!” As the mix turned more to cheers, he grinned. “Okay. Where was I?”

Triumphant homecoming aside, the five-month American tour didn’t develop the momentum that Bruce and the E Streeters had taken for granted since the River tour in 1980. “Booking it was no problem,” says Barry Bell, the Premier Talent agent who had booked literally every show Bruce had put on since 1977. “Selling it was something else.” Now the tide ran in reverse. Cities that once required multiple shows to satisfy demand got by with one-nighters, not all of which sold out. “Most of the shows sold fine,” Bell says. “But it was fast in some places and slower in markets where he was weaker.” Hearing one of Bell’s ticket sales reports that fall, Bruce shook his head. “Wow, it’s just like 1978 all over again!”

He had it exactly right. Only this time the general audience’s disinterest seemed less disturbing than the disapproval coming from so close to, and sometimes within, Bruce’s inner circle. For Columbia president Ienner—who had danced to “Thunder Road” with his wife at their wedding—the new band’s look got under his skin, particularly the guitarist with his pointy shoes, skin-tight pants, and thick mane of dark curls. “Shane just didn’t look like he belonged on stage with Bruce,” Ienner says. “He was a great player but looked a little strange up there, with his Beatle boots and hair. Steve [Van Zandt] was odd too. But that was
family
strange. I certainly got used to it after a few shows. But if you’re used to seeing something, it’s tough to get past it.” Some members of Bruce’s road crew felt like interlopers had swarmed their stage. They referred to
the group as the Other Band, and when they could find a chink in a particular musician’s performances, they made sure everyone else knew about it too.