Bruce (56 page)

Still, to observers, and to the cameras of Ernie Fritz, the filmmaker Jon Landau Management had hired to shoot the first day of recording for publicity and historical purposes,
⁵
it looked like it could have been a scene from the
River
sessions. With Landau, Plotkin, and Scott at their usual stations in the control room and Bruce at the center of the studio floor describing a new song to the E Street Band,
⁶
all of whom sat scribbling chord changes, riffs, and feels, it could have been a return to the source of modern American rock ’n’ roll.

So then they took up their instruments, waited for Bruce to count to four and then tiptoed into “Blood Brothers” ’s first verse, led by acoustic guitar and piano. They picked it up a notch when the organ and brushed drums came in to greet the light guitar stings Lofgren added, and then leaned hard into the final verse to hurl the song across the finish line. And maybe it was all a little
too
hard. When the next takes still didn’t work, Bruce came back with a completely different version of the song, rewritten into an electric, minor-key rocker with a shouted backwoods melody and lyrics that spent more time on hard, dirty roads than in the blood oaths of young rock ’n’ rollers. When that didn’t work, they moved on. As ever, Bruce had more than a few new songs to try out.

Next came the semi-apocalyptic love song “Waiting on the End of the World” and the spookily erotic “Secret Garden.” Then came a heart-wringing soul crooner called “Back in Your Arms,” a nearly note-for-note cover of the Los Angeles folk-punk band the Havalinas’ “High Hopes”; a weak-kneed party song called “Without You”; and a fresh go at the wonderful 1982 outtake “This Hard Land.” As filmmaker Ernie Fritz recorded it all for posterity, he noticed how carefully all these long-bonded friends addressed one another. “If these guys were pissed, they weren’t showing it,” he says. “Everyone was on their best behavior. It was more like, ‘Hey! It’s nice to see ya!’ Period. They were all walking on eggshells but happy to be doing so.”

Eventually Bruce came up with an arrangement of “Blood Brothers” that suited both him and Landau; a return to the original structure,
only hushed to the point where, except for Clemon’s gentle sax licks, the band’s contributions barely peek from behind Bruce’s own guitar, harmonica, and whispery voice. With the recording sessions completed by mid-January, the gang returned to their lives until February 21, when they reconvened in New York to shoot a live video (for the cameras of
Philadelphia
director Jonathan Demme) for the hits package’s lead single, “Murder Incorporated.”
⁷
Set up on the cozy stage at the Tramps nightclub in New York, the band crowded together to run through a half dozen live takes for the cameras and then rewarded the crowd’s patience by playing a rough but spirited miniset of thirteen E Street favorites, including “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “Prove It All Night,” “Thunder Road,” and “Badlands,” all worked out in the space of a short break between Demme’s video shoots.

Although the
Greatest Hits
album came out at the end of February 1995, the not-quite-reunited band went on hiatus for the month of March. Bruce celebrated the start of the break by winning three Grammy Awards (Best Rock Song, Best Male Rock Vocal Performance, and Song of the Year) for “Streets of Philadelphia.” Then he returned to New York to reunite with the E Streeters to prepare for a long day of work on the fifth, which began with a group performance of “Murder Incorporated” on David Letterman’s
Late Show
, followed by a move to the Sony Music Studios soundstage, where they prepared to tape the E Street Band’s first rehearsed concert since the end of the Amnesty International tour in October 1988. It would also be the last engagement planned for the minireunion, and with no hints that anything else might come in the future backstage nerves ran more raw than usual. No one mentioned it, of course. Not until Bruce and the band started their walk from the dressing rooms to the stage and the already cheering mob on the other side.

Somewhere in midstroll, Bruce noticed the pattern on Federici’s shirt and concluded that he didn’t like it. So like any bandleader would do, he turned to his keyboardist and asked him to run back and grab
a new one. Federici’s face went abruptly red. “No!” he barked. “I love this shirt! I’m
wearing
this shirt! So what are you gonna do:
fire
me?” Bruce stiffened and snarled right back, which was when everyone else, including Nils Lofgren, figured the time had come to be somewhere else, anywhere else, and right away. “Look, there was justifiable tension,” Lofgren says. “But no one had a gun, no one’s throwing fists. It was a philosophical argument.” Which, as they all knew, had nearly nothing to do with Federici’s shirt. “It
was
a silly shirt,” Tallent says. “We all knew the parameters of what to wear. So I think he changed, but everyone was on edge.”

The
Greatest Hits
album, a single disc collection featuring fourteen songs that were either hit singles (such as “Hungry Heart” and “Dancing in the Dark”) or nonhits that had taken on the career-defining weight of a hit (“Thunder Road,” “The River”), plus one outtake (“Murder Incorporated”), a rerecorded outtake (“This Hard Land”), and the two new E Street songs (“Blood Brothers” and “Secret Garden”), received only middling reviews.
⁸
Yet it topped album charts in a dozen countries, selling more than ten million copies. Invited to play a significant role in the opening festivities of the Cleveland-based Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in September, Bruce gathered the band (with Steve Van Zandt on board) to perform a few of their own songs while also serving as the backup band to Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. They gathered at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, where the problems began when Lewis heard that the show would open with Bruce and the band playing with Berry, whom “the Killer” considered a bitter rival. “So Jerry Lee Lewis was in a very bad mood,” Landau says. “He had taken offense to something and was very tense.” For whatever reasons, the sour energy took root in the E Street Band. “That was one of the only bad shows I’ve ever done with anybody, let alone the E Street Band,” Van Zandt says. “Nobody was into it, and it was just so weird. I didn’t get the feeling Bruce wanted to be there, and
it was all uncomfortable. Everyone felt like ‘What am I doing here?’ And even now I’m not sure why. Too soon, I guess.”

• • •

Back home in Los Angeles, Bruce pulled out his motorcycle and headed off for one of his regular trips into the desert. “It takes about thirty minutes to get to the foothills of the San Gabriels. Once you’re there, you go up the hills, and the views are incredible,” he says. “If you have a couple of days, you can go over them and down the eastern side of the foothills and ride all those roads down through there, which are still relatively empty. I got to know people just in different little rest stops and restaurants, and would occasionally go to visit.”

When longtime pal and motorcycle buddy Matty Delia came to visit with his brother Tony, they all mounted up and took off together. “We were at some old motel, some four-corner desert town on the California border, just sitting around and met some guy. We ended up talking about his brother, who died in a motorcycle accident.” That tragedy, like so many of the similar stories Bruce heard or intuited, was far from random. At night came the dusty armadas of migrant workers on the hunt for jobs, and not so far in the distance, the nickel-and-dime drug runners. An entire sub-rosa economy whirring away on the wrong end of the law, powered largely by people compelled to do whatever it took to get by. “The stories were just floating around, just in the air,” recalls Bruce. “Clashing cultures and people trying to fit in, accommodating and conforming to these norms.”

In Los Angeles the culture of desperation became all too visible. In the jerry-rigged camps beneath the bridges and in the faces of Hispanic families lined up for day labor. As if nothing had changed since John Steinbeck walked among the Dust Bowl migrants in the 1930s. Something about the Mexican immigrants pursuing their lives in the face of racial, cultural, and economic discrimination touched Bruce the deepest. “He talked about stuff he’d read and people he’d met,” says producer Chuck Plotkin. Once again, the stories of outsiders resonated with those awful memories of childhood isolation. “The main thing he said was, ‘They’re all me. It’s all me.’”

The first tendrils of the new work emerged in January, when Bruce sat
down to write some songs for the E Street Band to record for the
Greatest Hits
project. Combining his own experiences with stories gleaned from the pages of the
Los Angeles Times
and from a book about the history of the American underclass, Bruce located “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” a portrait of modern poverty that transformed Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath
character into a guiding spirit for all displaced and ill-treated people. The ex-con turned laboring family man in “Straight Time” lives on eggshells, only just resisting the pull of easy money. The narrator of “Highway 29” falls to temptation until his existence shatters, while the drifter in “The New Timer” grieves the murder of a friend until his own blood grows poisonous.

As with the songs that became
Nebraska
, a sense of gloom infuses everything. But given the thirteen years of home, family, and professional psychiatry, the darkness couldn’t keep hope entirely at bay. With a small acoustic band (Gary Mallaber on drums, Marty Rifkin on pedal steel guitar, Federici manning the keyboards, and Tallent on bass) adding color, and an implicit sense of community, the glimmers of humanity never quite fade away. Murderous hands are stilled; love defies the least humane strictures of the law; even a battered dream of the promised land carries on. “For what are we / Without hope in our hearts.”

• • •

If Bruce wasn’t ready to lead his own band through a new rock ’n’ roll album and tour in 1995, he did find a way to air out his noisier impulses thanks to Joe Grushecky and his Pittsburgh-based band, the Iron City Houserockers. Friendly since Grushecky’s band had worked with ex-Columbia exec Steve Popovich and Steve Van Zandt in the late seventies and early 1980s, the two singer-songwriter-guitarist-bandleaders stayed in touch even after the Houserockers broke up in the mideighties and Grushecky worked his day job as a special education teacher in Pittsburgh. Grushecky spent the next decade raising his family, but he continued writing songs and playing the club circuit. The two musicians’ paths would cross occasionally, and when they did, Bruce always made sure to check in. Grushecky’s songs—with their East Coast bar band sound, girded with tough-minded observations on the day-to-day life of working
people—shared a lot of Bruce’s own impulses, and he enjoyed the other writer’s sensibility. Still, Grushecky’s career continued to ebb in the nineties, and by the early weeks of 1995, the now solo artist (playing several nights a week in an unpopular Mexican restaurant) figured he’d reached the end of his rope. Tempted to pack it in entirely, Grushecky instead followed his wife’s advice and reached out to his famous friend from New Jersey. Bruce returned the call a day or two later and invited Grushecky to come to Los Angeles and bang around some songs. “I borrowed some money from my dad to get out there,” Grushecky says.

After hearing a dozen of Grushecky’s new compositions, Bruce told him to try again. “He said, ‘Well, you can do a lot better,’” Grushecky recalls. But when Bruce heard a rough draft of “Homestead,” a song about the Pennsylvania mine that employed almost every man in Grushecky’s hometown, Bruce’s eyes lit up. He helped finish the lyrics, cowrote another song (the Native American story “Dark and Bloody Ground”), and then told Grushecky that he wanted to help make the album in his own New Jersey studio, starting as soon as possible. “That record became
American Babylon
, which he graciously produced for us,” Grushecky says. In fact, Bruce got so caught up in the project that he volunteered to join the revived Houserockers as a lead guitarist and backup singer for the six-stop tour Grushecky had booked to launch the album for its October release. “That’s pretty wild when you think about it,” Grushecky says. “He’s playing bars with these guys from Pittsburgh.”

• • •

Released on November 21, 1995,
The Ghost of Tom Joad
presented a tonic for critics unsettled by
Human Touch.
The album earned Bruce a renewed chorus of good reviews, many informed by their authors’ own expertise in cultural, literary, and political history. Which was entirely appropriate, since, as the bibliography in the album’s liner notes made clear, the songs on
Joad
came with specific sources and references ranging from Depression-era literature, movies, and news stories published in the
Los Angeles Times.
“At a time of increasing income disparity—when the right distracts with immigrant-bashing—Springsteen, rock and roll’s populist, offers an eloquent reminder of what economically dispossessed angry
white men and desperate brown border crossers share,” David Corn wrote in the political journal the
Nation.
“Where else in popular mega-culture are the nightmares of the American and immigrant poor recognized and granted sympathy?” Indeed,
The Ghost of Tom Joad
contains some of Bruce’s most gripping lyrics: slashing portrayals of economic injustice in “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and “Youngstown”; miniaturized portraits of racism in “Galveston Bay” and “The Line”; and the small but symbolic lives and deaths traced in “Sinaloa Cowboys,” “The New Timer,” and “Balboa Park.”

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that
The Ghost of Tom Joad
also stands as the least musical album Bruce had ever made. Even
Nebraska
, set entirely to Bruce’s guitar, harmonica, and percussion, built its desolate vision on songs with distinctive rhythms, chord changes, and melodies. On
Joad
, even the five (of twelve) tunes featuring the other musicians hardly register as musical constructions. The players brush their instruments lightly. Bruce half whispers most of the songs, accentuating their intimacy but at the same time raising a barrier for listeners. If you wanted to grasp these stories, you had to find a quiet place, shut the door, and
focus
. Preferably with the lyrics within reach. Certainly, Bruce can’t help but uncork a few memorable melodies when he’s got his guitar in hand. But the
Joad
songs that bear his musical touch
⁹
wield it as subtly as possible. In the context of the album, the approach makes sense. Drawn to a kind of postgrad version of Woody Guthrie’s folk journalism/commentary, Bruce focused his muse on socially charged storytelling. Anything that stood between the character’s voice and the listener’s ear was obviously in the way. And even if the album’s sales suffered as a result,
¹⁰
the risks made sense to an artist whose whims had mined so much gold in the past two decades.