Bruce (59 page)

An avalanche of drums resolving into a soul-shaking gospel stomp. A chiming, two-chord guitar riff and then an airy organ line, joined quickly by an entirely different piano melody and then an even sharper melodic riff from Van Zandt’s mandolin. Then Bruce, his voice taut with conviction: “Grab your ticket and your suitcase / Thunder’s rolling down this track / Well, you don’t know where you’re going now, but you know you won’t be back . . .” Then a prime Clarence Clemons saxophone solo and a chorus that describes both the essence of faith and the heart of the place Bruce’s songs had yearned for, questioned the existence of, and kept right on chasing. Written for the tour and adapted in part from Woody Guthrie’s “This Train Is Bound for Glory” with a touch of “Mystery Train” and the DNA of too many gospel songs to count, “Hope and Dreams” takes up the theme of faith as a force as sure and mighty as a steam engine. Only, in direct contrast to Guthrie’s vision, Bruce’s train opens its doors to everyone in sight: saints, sinners, losers, winners, whores, and gamblers, the powerful and the forsaken, the good, the bad, and the truly egregious. All welcome where “Dreams will not be thwarted / [and] faith is rewarded.”

To launch the American tour in mid-July, Bruce and the band started with an unprecedented fifteen-night stand in the Meadowlands basketball arena, then called Continental Airlines Arena. All 308,000 tickets had sold out within twenty-four hours, and the homeland fans flooded the arena like pilgrims returning to a Mecca that had been barred for more
than a decade. From the moment the houselights snapped off each night, the emotional energy in the air made Bruce’s comic proselytizing seem something less than ridiculous. Because even when he put his full Jimmy Swaggart into claiming that he’d come “to
resuscitate
you,
regenerate
you,
reconfiscate
you,
reindoctrinate
you,
resexualate
you,
rededicate
you,
reliberate
you with the power and the
promise
 . . . with the
majesty
, the
mystery
, and the
ministry
of rock ’n’ roll!” the twenty thousand faces turned up to see him let loose a roar from so deep in their chests it didn’t seem anything like a joke.

The tour rumbled through sixteen cities in the next four months, playing multiple shows in most of them (including six nights in Philadelphia, five in Boston, and four in Los Angeles) until taking a break from the end of November until the end of February 2000. Then they launched another four-month run, climaxing in ten sold-out shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden. And as Bruce swooned over how far the individual band members’ musicianship had come in ten years, the years had also worked a treat in the musicians’ abilities to withstand, and even enjoy, the quirks they each brought into the group. “The respect for one another and ability to appreciate the uniqueness of each player was better than it ever was,” says Tallent. “I’d look around the stage and be in awe. Everyone had grown up, everyone was playing great, everyone was a complete professional.”

As the tour completed its first year and kept rolling, Bruce began coming in to the afternoon sound check with new songs to work through. “American Skin,” sometimes known as “41 Shots,” turned up first at the preshow warmup at the Raleigh Arena in North Carolina, went through one rough runthrough, then vanished until April 29, when Bruce reintroduced it along with “Further On (Up the Road),” a raw-throated highway song he’d worked out that winter. “Another Thin Line” and “Code of Silence,” written with Joe Grushecky, came next. Bruce held them back until they got to the tour’s penultimate stop in Atlanta in early June. On the stand’s second night, June 4, they opened the show with “Further On,” shifted back to more familiar terrain for the next five songs, and then without introduction launched into the quiet but insistent keyboard opening to the song now called “American Skin (41 Shots).”

It started in darkness, with the frontline players—Clemons, Lofgren, Bruce, Van Zandt, and Patti—standing still with feet planted, staring out into the hall. When the descending chord sequence cycled back to its beginning, Clemons leaned forward. “Forty-one shots,” he sang. Lofgren repeated the words, followed by Van Zandt and Patti. When Bruce stepped forward, they sang it together four times, leading into an opening verse that traced the outlines of a shooting. The bullets in the air, the victim bleeding on the floor, someone kneeling above the body, praying he’ll survive. The lyrics in the chorus made clear which shooting Bruce had in mind.

Is it a gun? Is it a knife? / Is it a wallet? / This is your life . . .

Anyone familiar with contemporary New York controversies knew what was on Bruce’s mind. In early February 1999 four New York Police Department officers, all dressed in plain clothes and searching for a rapist said to be wandering the Bronx, called out to a twenty-two-year-old African immigrant named Amadou Diallo as he stepped into the doorway of his apartment building. A recent immigrant still learning the nation’s language, Diallo responded to the officers’ shouts as he’d been trained to do in Guinea, by reaching into his pocket for his identification cards. One or more of the officers mistook the wallet for a gun, and all four opened fire with their automatic pistols. In a split second, they got off forty-one rounds. Nineteen of the bullets hit Diallo, wounding him mortally.

The outrage began immediately. Diallo, an observant Muslim, possessed neither a gun nor a criminal record. Meanwhile, the police officers who had killed him had colorful pasts. All members of the NYPD’s aggressive Street Crimes Unit, three had already been involved in shootings while on duty,
⁵
and one of them was still being investigated for his role in a fatal shooting. In the wake of other police shootings, and pretty
much exactly at the point where many citizens had lost their enthusiasm for Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s campaign to hose street crime, civil disobedience, and decadence in general into the East River, a broad consortium of neighborhood and political activists flew into action. Protests began in New York and then spread to Washington, DC, where the US Attorneys’ Office launched a federal investigation of the Diallo shooting. At the same time, voices from the Giuliani administration and the police force (and the officers’ union representatives) shot back vehemently.

Working against this backdrop, Bruce wrote “American Skin.” The song’s first verse describes the Diallo shooting from the perspective of a police officer praying for the innocent man’s life and recalling the stab of panic that caused him to mistake the leather wallet for a deadly weapon. The next verse visits a mother reminding her young son how to walk the streets so the police won’t mistake him for a threat: “. . . never, ever run away / And promise Mama you’ll keep your hands in sight.” If there’s an indictment in the song, it’s aimed at the racial, social, and political divisions that feed into the fear, confusion, and violence that overwhelms the forces of humanity and community. The most striking line in its chorus—“You can get killed just for living / In your American skin”—addresses society in all its racial, political, and class-based divisions. At which point the forty-one shots and the Diallo case recede into a metaphor for the social disconnection that spawns so much of the world’s violence. No one is spared, including the song’s author. “Got my boots caked in this mud,” Bruce sings. “We’re baptized in these waters / And in each other’s blood.”

Premiered with no advance notice and no immediate follow-through from Landau Management (such as a statement of purpose or a printed set of lyrics), word of Bruce’s fiery new song moved onto the newswires (“New Springsteen Song Laments Bronx Shooting”), to the nascent Internet sites and chat boards, where off-the-cuff analyses, criticisms, and defenses of the song soon blew up into a mainstream media storm. Less than four days after the song’s debut, Microsoft’s online journal,
Slate
, published a blog entry by political writer Timothy Noah, proposing that Bruce had written the song intending to help Hillary Clinton defeat Rudy Giuliani in the 2000 US Senate race. That Giuliani had
withdrawn from the race in mid-May struck Noah as a minor point, since he guessed (correctly, as it turns out) that Bruce had written the song months earlier. If Noah’s speculation about Bruce’s Hillarymania was a bit far-fetched,
⁶
he did grasp one important fact: with the exception of the Three Mile Island–inspired “Roulette” from 1979, “American Skin” was the first Springsteen song to refer to specific events still playing out in the headlines. In this, Bruce crossed a bridge he’d avoided in the twenty years since he began to explore the larger socioeconomic factors that control the fates of the working class and the poor. That he tended to pursue larger issues through character-driven stories made it easy to avoid specific controversies. “When you deal with politics and pop music, they’re always going to be thrown together, and they’re always going to be uncomfortable bedfellows,” Bruce says. “Popular music is always going to be something people take home, don’t read the instructions, and just use. That’s the way it is; that’s okay.” He shrugs. “Maybe you
should
have to read the instructions.”

The president of the NYPD’s union, Patrick Lynch, followed one bombast with another, by calling for officers to not work security at any of the Madison Square Garden shows, even if they needed the extra money. “I consider it an outrage that [Springsteen] would be trying to fatten his wallet by reopening the wounds of this tragic case,” Lynch said. Both Mayor Giuliani and his police commissioner, Howard Safir, also released statements criticizing Bruce and “American Skin,” with Giuliani complaining about the “people trying to create the impression that the police officers are guilty,” while Safir asserted that the city’s officers had a right to dislike Bruce Springsteen if they so chose. “I personally don’t particularly care for [his] music or his songs,” Safir added. Never mind that “American Skin” made no such assertion about the police, just as no one had ordered NYPD officers to purchase Bruce Springsteen albums. But neither Giuliani nor Safir could hold a roman candle to Bob
Lucente, leader of the New York chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, who dismissed Bruce as a “floating fag” and a “dirtbag” for criticizing the NYPD.
⁷

“I think Stevie ran in with a newspaper—Steve is always the bearer of news—saying, ‘Hey man, did you see this? Look at what they’re calling you on the front page!’” Bruce says. Van Zandt handed him the day’s
New York Post
, its front page filled with a headline, “10th Avenue Cop-Out,” about the controversy. “I said, ‘
What?
’ It was kind of, ‘Wait a minute! This guy hasn’t even
heard
this song!’” That “American Skin” didn’t criticize the NYPD or anyone in the force didn’t matter.

When Bruce and company rolled into Madison Square Garden on June 12 to start their two-and-a-half-week residency, Bruce opened the show by premiering another song, “Code of Silence,” that seemed to throw down another gauntlet. For while the lyrics never specify if the conflict at hand looms between lovers, family members, or civic institutions, controversy enthusiasts couldn’t help but interpret it as another layer of protest or contempt. “American Skin” found a spot with the show’s heaviest songs at the heart of the set, and with Diallo’s family looking on (when they called Landau’s office, Bruce made sure they got preferential treatment), the song became the gravitational center of the performance, a pivot between the gloom of “Point Blank” and the resolute optimism of “The Promised Land.” The crowd reaction sounded more like acclaim than disapproval, although as the
New York Times
’ Jon Pareles wrote, it would have been difficult to hear the difference between boos and the perpetual rain of “
Bruuuuuce!
” cheers called out by fans. At least one observer shared his thoughts by planting himself at the foot of the stage with both middle fingers extended toward the man at the center microphone.

Pareles published his review of “American Skin” and the rest of the first Madison Square Garden show two days later, including the song’s full lyrics. Meanwhile, on the day’s editorial pages, a piece by the
Times
’ libertarian columnist John Tierney attacked the song, and Bruce, repeating
the inaccurate charge that the song was a slam against New York’s police. To establish his contempt, Tierney began by ridiculing the repetition of the words “Forty-one shots” at the start of the song (“he is firmly on record against the extra bullets”). Next, he unspooled the traitor-to-his-class argument (“Springsteen . . . doesn’t have to hitchhike on Route 9 anymore”) on the way to asserting that the onetime spokesman for the American working class had become a “limousine liberal” fixated on “conventional liberal causes, like homelessness and AIDS.” While it was surprising to think that Tierney considered the destitute and certain terminally ill people as abstract symbols in political clichés, the writer says he figured that the anti-NYPD outcry spurred by protesters was doing exactly that to Diallo. “To me, the [song’s] emphasis on the forty-one shots did play to the antipolice mob mentality that existed at the time,” Tierney writes in an e-mail. “That was the rallying cry of those trying to exploit the tragedy for their own political reasons. And Springsteen’s choice of those lyrics . . . struck me as another example of Springsteen pleasing the Central Park West audience instead of the Asbury Park one.”

Tierney, who carries no brief for authoritarian police or mayors, is welcome to his opinions on the herding instincts of New York liberals. But his disquisition on “American Skin” takes enough liberties with Bruce’s lyrical intent to make his analysis seem questionable, while his assertions that Bruce’s wealth somehow disqualified him from publicly empathizing with the less powerful seemed more like a political tactic than anything else. What bothered Bruce about it, along with the bitter protests of Giuliani, Safir, and others, was how detached from reality they were.