Bruce (55 page)

If Bruce knew about any of that, he never let it get back to his musicians. He liked what he heard, for one thing. And if he felt things weren’t working out—if technical bugs had dulled the band’s punch, or the crowd simply wasn’t connecting—he’d grit his teeth and dig deeper. “Nothing stood in his way,” Alford says. “He just gave more and more of himself until the crowd were on their feet at the end. I never saw another artist do that. I’m not sure any other artist
could
do that. In the end he always gets them where he wants them to be: in a state of bliss.”

Heading back for another run through Europe in the spring of 1993, the new machine had the smooth power of every seasoned band. Fontayne’s slinky guitar solos contrasted nicely with Bruce’s two-fisted attack, while Tommy Sims’s bass had a pop that clicked together with Zach Alford’s light-footed drumming. The back line of singers gilded everything they touched, while singer-multi-instrumentalist Crystal Taliefero became such an engaging onstage foil for Bruce it almost, if not quite, wasn’t a shock to see her at center stage at the end of the set, blowing the saxophone solo in “Born to Run.” But as the various E Street Band members came to visit their old boss’s new stage, they spurred eruptions of cheers that revealed the distinction between an ordinary concert and the rock ’n’ roll communions that Bruce and the E Streeters once held. Clarence Clemons kept his distance until the tour’s penultimate stop, a benefit for hunger relief at the Brendan Byrne Arena. When he finally did show up in the midst of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” striding out of the shadows just as Bruce got to the part about the Big Man joining the band, the ovation nearly blew Fontayne out of his boots. “I’ve never heard a reaction that intense before,” he says.

Bruce certainly had. He’d been at the center of it for most of his adult life. And while the band members left their year on the road with assurances that they’d almost certainly be heading to Japan for another leg of the tour, with more to come after that, Fontayne hoped for the best while resolving to be satisfied with what he’d already experienced. “Everything
that happened was top drawer. You didn’t have to negotiate a contract, and no one had a chance to get unhappy because everything they did was so organized, and so sympathetic, and so perfectly done. You learned quickly that this was the organization you were working for, and there was nothing to worry about.”

T
AKING UP JONATHAN DEMME’S REQUEST
for a song to go with his film about an AIDS-stricken gay man confronted with institutionalized prejudice, Bruce need only think back to his childhood. Everything he needed to know already resided in his memory. The kids who giggled at his clothes. The distance between the schoolyard games and his solitary place against the fence. He knew that contempt, and its ashen taste never left his tongue. “That’s all anybody’s asking for: basically some acceptance and to not be left alone,” he said to the gay community magazine the
Advocate
in 1996. The words and the music had always been in the back of his mind. And he had other, more immediate feelings to draw from too. A gay friend falling to a cancerous sarcoma. The daughter of close friends, an effervescent woman just moving into adulthood, losing her hair, her health, and then her life in a fight against another deadly strain of cancer.

So came “Streets of Philadelphia,” and with Toby Scott in his new
studio next door to the Rumson house, Bruce experimented with a hard-rock arrangement. Then he slowed it down into a slower rock rhythm. Shifting back toward the contemporary feel Bruce tried to achieve during the
Human Touch
sessions, the piece evolved into a spare urban ballad. Built on a gently funky drum loop, with synthesizer and organ chords and a background chorus of “lah-lah-lah-lahs,” the mournful lyric is as simply stated as the few notes that comprise the melody. If the chords rise for the song’s bridge, neither they, nor the song’s narrator, are headed anywhere heavenly: “Ain’t no angel gonna greet me,” he sings blankly. “It’s just you and I, my friend.”

Released the day before Christmas 1993, Demme’s film
Philadelphia
, which starred Tom Hanks as an AIDS-infected lawyer who sues his firm after being fired for suffering from such a stigmatized illness, became a critical and commercial smash—and, in the eyes of gay activists, a crucial step in the campaign to combat prejudice. Although the voting members of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences bypassed the film in its Best Picture and Best Director categories,
Philadelphia
earned nominations for five Academy Awards, including two separate nods for Best Original Song: both “Streets of Philadelphia” and Neil Young’s contribution to the film, the equally moving “Philadelphia.” The film eventually won Hanks his first Best Actor trophy. And when they opened the Original Song envelope, the winner was . . . Bruce Springsteen. The lifelong movie buff accepted his trophy with a brief speech, thanked the movie people for “inviting me to your party,” and then carted it home to his parents. When he placed the Oscar on the kitchen table in front of Doug Springsteen, his father wept with pride. Then he repeated the phrase he’d first said when his son called to say he’d signed a contract with Columbia Records: “I’m never going to tell anybody what to do ever again.”

Columbia president Don Ienner, on the other hand, got paid for telling people what to do. Or, in the case of Jon Landau and Bruce Springsteen, convincing them to cooperate when his instincts told him he had a product that could live up to the company’s full-court promotion treatment. So when the airplay for “Streets of Philadelphia” spiked after the Academy Awards, he met with Landau to talk about releasing Bruce’s
Oscar-winning song as a single. Ten years earlier, the answer would have been obvious. By the mid-nineties, however, the structure of the pop music industry had fractured into subcategories that rarely overlapped with one another. “[The song] didn’t fit anything on the radio at the time,” Ienner says. “That video of Bruce walking down the street
¹
wasn’t exactly like anything on MTV then.” When Landau worried about the single falling through the cracks (“This record can’t come and go to number ninety-nine on the charts!”), Ienner admitted that he had no guarantees. “But wouldn’t it be a horrible shame if we didn’t try?” he countered. “If we just made it
not
get to where it needed to get because we’re scared it won’t chart?” That argument made an impact on Landau.

The manager gave his go-ahead, and though the category-defying song waded against the currents of radio formats, beats-per-minute restrictions, and the offbeat look of its video, Ienner and his sales force kept working. “It was up, it was down, it was going to be a hit, it wasn’t going to be a hit,” he says. “It was just
wild
.” Their work paid off: upon its February 1994 release, “Streets of Philadelphia” blew up into a worldwide smash, crowning the charts in eight countries, peaking at number 9 on
Billboard
’s Hot 100 singles list, and selling more than a half million copies in the United States alone.

With “Streets of Philadelphia” on the charts, Bruce returned to his studio in Los Angeles.
²
Armed with a stack of premade drum loop CDs, he passed most of the year working on a new collection of synthesizer-based songs. Working with occasional help from Zach Alford, Shane Fontayne, and especially Tommy Sims (who coproduced a few of the songs), Bruce’s burst of experimental work went much further than what he had done earlier in the decade. Much of what emerged, Toby Scott remembers, shared an undulating, trancelike sound unified by what he describes
as “a pulsating underbeat.” Most of the twenty or twenty-five songs they finished have never been heard or even named in public. The two exceptions, an early version of “Secret Garden” found on an extended CD single released in late 1995, and “Missing,” which became a part of the soundtrack to the 1995 Sean Penn–directed movie
The Crossing Guard
, allow for a fragment of insight: the insistent percussion, drifting veils of synthesizer, a
chukka-chukka
rhythm guitar filtered through a wah-wah effect, and, as the song builds to a close, a metallic guitar solo spidering up through the layers.

The 1994 sessions ran into the week before Christmas, when Bruce, Patti, and the kids went back to New Jersey to spend the holidays with their families. Scott went back to his place in Whitefish, Montana, where he was still musing on the snow-heavy mountains on January 5 when a ringing telephone produced Landau’s voice. “Tobe!” he crowed. “Y’know all that stuff we were working on? Well, we’re done. We’re moving on to something else.” That’s when Scott started taking notes. “Look, I’ve got the E Street Band coming to New York on Monday. The guys are all ready, so I need you to find a studio, get us in there, and get back here to record.”

When Landau rang off, Scott looked at the calendar on his desk. It was Thursday. He had until Monday. Four days. He got out his book of New York recording studios and started dialing.

• • •

The plan started with Bruce’s suspicion that the synth-driven album he’d spent most of 1994 creating could push his core audience beyond the brink of its connection to him. “I felt like I needed to reconnect around the basics, around our history,” he says in retrospect. Putting out a greatest-hits album—an ace that he and Landau had kept up their sleeves since the
Born in the U.S.A.
era—was an obvious plan. But the prospect of reuniting the E Street Band to record some new material
³
only took shape as the project launched. “Really, the band for me at that time was a way of restabilizing,” Bruce explains. “Of letting people know that I
honored their feelings, and these things that mattered a great deal to them also mattered to me. It was just a way of staying in touch.”

Which felt particularly important to a veteran artist who couldn’t abide the prospect of being dismissed as a figure from yesteryear. “You’re having a conversation with your audience,” he says. “If you lose the thread of that conversation, you lose your audience. And when people say so-and-so don’t make any good records anymore, or people talk about favorite bands from whom they haven’t bought any records of in the past fifteen years, I always feel that the reason is they lost the thread of that conversation and the desire to make that conversation keep growing.” With the success of “Streets of Philadelphia” shoring up his currency, the external timing seemed as good as it would ever be. So more than six years after the E Street Band’s last scheduled gig, and eleven years since they last entered a studio as a unit, Bruce sat down to write a song or two for the band to record.

When Clemons got the call at his house in San Francisco, he flew back to New York so quickly he didn’t have time to cancel the birthday party his friends had planned for one of the city’s largest, flashiest nightclubs. “I’m sure there are some people
still
walking around San Francisco looking for that party,” he said to me in 2011. More than fifteen years later, his face still lit up at the thought. “I was so ready to go.”

But while the other band members felt just as excited to play with Bruce, their enthusiasm came with equal amounts of confusion, hurt, and resentment. All had struggled to build their own careers in the post–E Street era. Some found it easier than others at first, but a half dozen years later, they had all adjusted to the new reality. Clemons recorded and played with his own band; Max Weinberg was leading the band on NBC’s
Late Night with Conan O’Brien
; Roy Bittan produced artists and played sessions in Los Angeles, while Garry Tallent did the same in Nashville. Danny Federici pursued a career in jazz, and Nils Lofgren went back to his own career, playing with Ringo Starr on two of his world tours and writing music for TV series. The fact that this invitation had come with such clearly stated limits—don’t expect it to stretch into a full-length new album or a tour or anything like that, they were told—didn’t help.

“The wound was still open,” Bittan says. “And so here you are: you get a call to come in. And like always, it’s abrupt.
‘Come tomorrow.’
Or maybe we had some notice. But the question was, well, what for? What are we doing? And as usual, our thing is that we don’t ask, we just do. And are happy to do it.” Only now the prospect of coming back together came with something like post-traumatic stress disorder. Even Weinberg, by then a fixture on network television, still reeled from the band’s dismissal. “I’ve never gotten over the breakup,” he says.
⁴
Still, he could sympathize with the emotional complexities Bruce faced. “I think it was a very distasteful thing for Bruce to have to do. And sometimes when you have to do things that are hard like that, it gets the better of you. So [the reunion] wasn’t a pleasant occurrence, just the whole way it was done.”

Watching from the control room, coproducer Chuck Plotkin knew exactly where, and how large, the unacknowledged elephant in the room stood. “They’re trying to figure out what happened here,” he says. “
‘Did we get bad all of the sudden?’
Everyone’s trying to figure out what Bruce is thinking. But the E Street Band is not the most socially comfortable group of people on the face of the earth. And I learned a tremendous amount from Bruce about the power of
not
talking.”

Bruce’s attempt to write a song that captured the essence of the E Street Band’s history had none of the lion-hearted fraternity he’d written into “No Surrender” a decade earlier. Instead “Blood Brothers” describes onetime Kings of the Mountain reduced by time and experience into ordinary stiffs, so consumed by daily tasks that long-ago proclamations of faith and friendship ring as hollow as “a fool’s joke.” Speaking directly about the series of telephone calls he’d just made to his erstwhile band and friends, Bruce sounds doubtful, at best, about what lay ahead. Why had he decided to reunite the band? Why did it even matter? Not exactly a stirring call to arms. What it was, he says, was honest. “It captured the feelings of the moment. I still had ambivalent feelings about the band at that time.”