Bruce (61 page)

When the sessions started in O’Brien’s Atlanta studio, Bruce kept his focus on being the artist while his new producer handled everything else. Starting with the band’s four-piece rhythm section—Bruce, Garry Tallent, Max Weinberg, and Roy Bittan—O’Brien led them quickly through the recording of a basic track for “Into the Fire.” Leaving so many other parts for overdubs certainly marked a departure in the band’s recording style. But it also allowed O’Brien, Bruce, and the core band to produce a dense foundation upon which the soloists and vocalists could later overdub their parts. If the overdub process lost some of the excitement of the live, in-studio feel that Bruce and the band had used for so long, it would also gain clarity and precision. “There were a lot of guys, and a lot of personalities,” O’Brien says. “I wasn’t sure how close they were anymore; it was all very hush-hush.” Nevertheless, the sessions ran quickly and productively. Clemons, Federici, Lofgren, and Patti came down to put on their parts while O’Brien brought in a string section, and when they listened to the playbacks, Bruce marveled at how different yet perfectly right the re-formed E Street Band sounded in O’Brien’s studio. “The band sounded like the band, but not like I’d heard them before, and that was what I was looking for,” Bruce told
Uncut
magazine’s Adam Sweeting. “I wanted it to be like,
this
is the way we sound right
now
.”

The band members liked what they heard too. Mostly. “The tracks sounded cool immediately and were experimental. We spent time trying to get different sounds,” Tallent says. “People came in to do their parts individually, so there wasn’t a lot of camaraderie. But it was all efficient. The record’s a bit murkier than something I’d have produced, and it’s a
departure. But it’s still Bruce and the E Street Band.” Van Zandt, Bittan, Weinberg, and Clemons felt the same way. “Brendan’s style has a sensibility that’s a bit different,” says Van Zandt. “The tracks are good. They really are. And Bruce was a lot more relaxed than he used to be. But he was very involved.”

“I don’t remember ever talking to Bruce about giving the album a 9/11 theme,” O’Brien says. “When he was around, we just worked and figured it out as we went on.” Indeed, only a few songs addressed the September 11 terrorist attacks in specific terms. “Into the Fire” and “The Rising” evoked the crumbling World Trade Center—witnessing the horror of the moment and finding inspiration, even transcendence, in the courage of the fire fighters, rescue workers, and the many who risked everything to help other victims. “Nothing Man,” “You’re Missing,” “Mary’s Place,” and “Empty Sky” gave voice to the survivors trying to build new lives or maintain a connection to what they lost beyond the poison-belching wreckage. The identity of the attackers and any analysis of their motives and morals are unexplored. Instead the songs stay in the personal realm, sketching a modern variation of
Romeo and Juliet
in the divide between the Western world and the Middle East in “Worlds Apart,” and the deadly temptations encountered by a suicide bomber and a grief-stricken spouse in “Paradise.” Other songs—“Lonesome Day,” “Further On (Up the Road),” “Countin’ On a Miracle,” “The Fuse”—underscored the personal connections that make life worth living, and how their absence can push someone to believe that a particular ideology or conflict can reduce the value of another human life until it seems worthless.

• • •

With the album, titled
The Rising
, finished and ready for a late-July 2002 release, Bruce and Landau set to laying the groundwork to make sure it got the attention they felt it deserved. That it was Bruce’s first record with the E Street Band since
Born in the U.S.A.
would have been big enough news on its own. But as Bruce’s response to 9/11—and arguably the first major work of popular art to address the meaning and ongoing impact of the terrorist attacks—
The Rising
carried even more cultural
significance. It certainly had intense meaning for Bruce. Speaking at an advance listening party with the Columbia/Sony executives, he made certain they knew how far he was willing to go to get the new record across to the largest possible audience. “It ain’t business,” he said. “It’s personal.” As Columbia president Don Ienner recalls, the phrase became a rallying cry for the company. “The next day we had T-shirts printed up with ‘The Rising’ on it, and his quote ‘It Ain’t Business, It’s Personal,’” he says. “It was one of those galvanizing moments of Bruce with the company. We didn’t give a shit about radio, or anything. We just went out on it.”

Bruce led the charge, diving headlong into the highest-profile sales campaign he’d ever signed on for, prefacing his new album’s release with a series of in-depth interviews in major magazines and newspapers around the world. Then he sat for a multipart interview with ABC-TV’s Ted Koppel which aired several times on his late-night news show,
Nightline
, during the week the new album came out.
The Rising
’s actual release date, Tuesday, July 30, kicked off like a kind of national holiday, starting with NBC’s
Today
show broadcasting from Asbury Park. With hosts Matt Lauer and Katie Couric stationed on the boardwalk and reporters filing reports from other locations in town, the two-hour news program revolved around Convention Hall, where Bruce and the band performed a handful of
Rising
songs, along with an oldie or two, for an audience of 2,500 contest winners. The publicity tour continued the next day when Bruce and the band performed two songs on David Letterman’s
Late Show
.
⁶
The Rising concert tour opened with a single show at the Continental Airlines Arena on August 7. An instant sellout—as any single show would be, given that they had sold out a fifteen-date run at the same venue in 1999—the crazed atmosphere around the arena served as the exclamation point to weeks of album publicity that were now paying off handsomely. First-week sales of
The Rising
rose above a half million copies, propelling it instantly to the top slot on
Billboard
’s Top 200 albums list. It stayed there for three weeks, fast on its way to selling better than any of Bruce’s albums since
Tunnel of Love
in 1987.

Weighing in at fifteen songs and nearly seventy-five minutes long,
The Rising
hit the ground with the weight of a monument. Back on the cover of
Time
, an unshaven Bruce peered past a red, white, and blue headline, “Reborn in the USA: How Bruce Springsteen Reached Out to 9/11 Survivors and Turned America’s Anguish Into Art.” Writing in
USA Today
, Edna Gundersen dismissed the post-9/11 anthems produced by country musician Toby Keith and Paul McCartney as “flag-waving bombast,” before asserting that “it took populist rocker Bruce Springsteen to get it right.” So right, in fact, that
New York Times
film critic A. O. Scott, writing in the online magazine
Slate
, declared him “the poet laureate of 9/11.” Traditionally conservative publications, including the
National Review
and the
New York Post
(the latter of which played a lead role in sparking the “American Skin” controversy) published rave reviews.
⁷
Not every critic fell head over heels, particularly when they stepped past the album’s emotional ballast to point out that it might have gained power by losing a song or two—“Let’s Be Friends (Skin to Skin)” and “Further On (Up the Road)” being prime candidates—and what the
Village Voice
’s Keith Harris called the “eternal vagueness” of the lyrics.
⁸
Nevertheless, the album and its creator had already been cast in triumph. And as the rocket-fast first legs of the 2002 Rising tour (forty-six shows in forty-six American cities, and then seven shows in seven European cities, leaving many markets sorely underserved) led into a long march through 2003 that concluded with thirty-three stadium shows, including ten nights at Giants Stadium and ending with three nights at Shea Stadium in Queens. While the E Street reunion tour of 1999–2000 succeeded in part due to
the nostalgia of fans eager to hear the old songs, the 2002–2003 shows drew their power from Bruce’s most recent work. A segment of the crowd came to hear
The Rising
songs in the same way that
Born in the U.S.A.
drew so many unfamiliar faces in the mid-1980s. By the end of the final encore at Shea Stadium on October 4, 2003, the Rising tour was even more successful than the reunion tour had been, grossing more than $221 million in 120 concerts.

• • •

When Bruce sat in front of his TV and saw the bombs pounding the streets of Baghdad, Iraq, in March 2003, when the troops flooded over the border and the United States of America was at war, one thought echoed. “I knew that after we invaded Iraq I was going to be involved in the [2004] election,” he told
Rolling Stone
publisher Jann Wenner. “I felt we had been misled. I felt [the George W. Bush administration] had been fundamentally dishonest and had frightened and manipulated the American people into war . . . And I don’t think it has made America safer.”

Once Bruce would have spun his anger into music, perhaps into a small-scale narrative such as “Seeds,” which deconstructed and then reconstructed Reagan-era economics into the story of an unemployed itinerant oil worker forced to spend a frigid night with his family in the cramped shelter of his car. But as 2003 marched into the presidential election of 2004, he felt compelled to expand his influence beyond the limits of rock ’n’ roll music. “Sitting on the sidelines would be a betrayal of the ideas I’d written about for a long time,” he told Wenner. “Not getting involved, just sort of maintaining my silence or being coy about it in some way . . . wasn’t going to work this time out. I felt that it was a very clear historical moment.”

It had all been sown in the panicked weeks following September 11. And while the quick mobilization of American forces against Afghanistan’s Taliban government made sense in light of its cooperative relationship with the Al Qaeda terrorists, the creation and passage of the Patriot Act, which strengthened government powers (particularly regarding law enforcement) at the expense of civil liberties, infuriated Bruce. When the Bush administration’s military ambitions shifted away from Afghanistan,
which had aided America’s attackers, to Iraq, which had not,
⁹
the specter of the attacks all but silenced debate and made dissent seem akin to sedition. With his teenage son exactly the age Bruce had been when young men from Freehold were first being shipped to combat in Vietnam, his decision had already been made. If George W. Bush’s administration could leverage 9/11 into a wide array of unrelated points on the neoconservative’s to-do list, he could take whatever authority he’d earned with
The Rising
and push in the opposite direction. Most of the stadium shows in the summer of 2003 paused in mid-encore while Bruce made a speech (“my public service message,” he calls them) urging the audience to pay close attention to what their government might be doing in the name of national security. “Playing with the truth during wartime has been a part of both Democratic and Republican administrations in the past,” he said. “Demanding accountability from our leaders and taking our time to search out the truth . . . that’s the American way.”

• • •

When Senator John Kerry claimed the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in the summer of 2004, he’d already known Bruce for nearly twenty-five years, and known of him even longer than that. A richly decorated Vietnam veteran who had returned from duty a vehement opponent of the war, Kerry met Bruce when he played the Vietnam vets benefit in Los Angeles in 1981, and kept a framed, autographed copy of the concert poster in his offices as he ascended from lieutenant governor of Massachusetts to the US Senate. When Kerry got back in touch with Bruce during the summer of 2004, the musician didn’t hesitate to throw his support to the Democratic candidate. It was a bridge he hadn’t set out to cross, certainly not when his music and his career loomed over every other aspect of his life. But with three children at home, other priorities loomed. “Well, it’s your flesh-and-blood connection to the future; this is what’s going to matter when I’m gone,” he says. “Their presence sets off a whole series of new realizations that affect you all along the spectrum,
including political.” However Bruce had made his decision, the candidate was delighted to have him on board. “There’s an authenticity about Bruce that’s just incontrovertible,” Kerry says. “I think it’s because he is so true to who he is, and people know it.”

Bruce also signed up (with the E Street Band in tow) to headline the Vote for Change tour put together by the political group MoveOn.org. The series of large-scale benefits starred pop and rock stars (Bruce, R.E.M., John Legend, John Mellencamp, the Dixie Chicks, Pearl Jam, and others) equally determined to change the nation’s direction. As they all knew, or were soon to learn, celebrities shouldn’t expect to transition into political advocacy without taking fire from a variety of fronts. Even Ted Koppel, who had devoted so much time on
Nightline
to the release of
The Rising
, didn’t hold back his skepticism when Bruce came back two years later to talk about the presidential campaign. “Who the hell is Bruce Springsteen to tell anybody how to vote?” Koppel asked pointedly. Some fans, Bruce admitted, marched up to him on the street to explain why they wouldn’t be coming to see him this time around. But Bruce didn’t care. “It’s an emergency intervention,” he told
USA Today
’s Elysa Gardner. “We need to get an administration that is more attentive to the needs of all its citizens, that has a saner foreign policy, that is more attentive to environmental concerns.”

The Vote for Change tour ended in mid-October, and when the presidential campaign entered its final week at the end of the month, Bruce went out on the road again, playing warm-up for Kerry at a series of rallies heading into election day on November 2. He came out Woody Guthrie–Pete Seeger style, carrying an acoustic guitar and a pair of songs—“The Promised Land” and “No Surrender”—that spoke to the electoral battle to come and the visions that fueled it. When Kerry and Bruce came to Madison, Wisconsin, on October 28, the amassed crowd filled the Capitol Square and flowed down the streets. “The future is now, and it’s time to let your passions loose,” Bruce told the crowd. “The country we carry in our hearts is waiting.” When the candidate reached the stage, he was astonished. “It was huge,” Kerry recalls. “Just stunning, people lined the street, there must have been one hundred ten thousand people out there, and it was electric. A beautiful fall afternoon, near the
end of the campaign. There was just an energy and a magic to that particular rally and appearance.”