Bruce (82 page)
3
“It was perfectly obvious that I was granted a great deal of access,” Marsh writes. “It was, or should be, perfectly obvious that any writer given that access is a ‘friend’ of the person being written about, or perceived as one.” Still, in later books and articles, Marsh was careful to acknowledge his connections to Bruce and company.
4
According to CBS promotions man Paul Rappaport, Landau set up the club show to stir up buzz that the Forum shows had failed to ignite. “We need to do something to blow this town apart,” he told Rappaport. “We didn’t
dent
anything.” Once Landau booked the Roxy for the July 7 show, Rappaport helped set up a live broadcast on then dominant KMET-FM, and performed a variety of other tasks that did indeed give Bruce’s Los Angeles visit the electricity a single Forum show didn’t. Sitting in a bar chair just before dawn the morning after the show, Rappaport was approached by Bruce, who said he’d heard how much work the publicist had done to make the show happen. “You have no idea how hard I’m trying to make this go,” he said, talking about his career. “I can’t thank you enough for helping us do this.” At which point, Rappaport recalls, the musician took his left hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed it.
5
Unreleased by Bruce, “Because the Night” was familiar to audiences due to the Patti Smith Group’s hit (#13) version, released that same spring.
6
Which seems pretty luxe until you realize that the vehicle’s large and not particularly quiet engine rumbled and roared scant inches beneath the bedroom’s floor. The place vibrated when the driver switched on the engine, and when he shifted into high gear, the noise was overwhelming. How Bruce managed to sleep in there is anyone’s guess. And attempting anything like thoughtful contemplation, let alone relaxation, seems even more far fetched. But after playing high volume rock ’n’ roll for three-plus hours night after night, maybe he didn’t even notice the sound.
7
Clemons also swore that at a stop in Atlanta that year Bruce responded to the sight of fans streaming down the aisles by bolting outside and sprinting to the theater’s front door to order them back to their seats. “We ain’t done yet!” Which sounded apocryphal even as he said it, but Clemons insisted it was true.
8
Many of which are collected in her book,
Springsteen Access All Areas
, Universe/St. Martin’s, 2000.
9
Then winning enormous praise for his breakthrough performance as the titular character in
The Buddy Holly Story
, and thus years away from his latter-day career as a cheerful, if occasionally dangerous, Hollywood weirdo.
1
Who had to leave in order to fulfill previously made obligations, although he would later return to help mix some songs.
2
Kicking off a career that would include engineering and production work with Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Sting, Dire Straits, and many others.
3
The board members themselves, plus Nash’s partners David Crosby and Stephen Stills, the Doobie Brothers, Carly Simon, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Chaka Khan, Raydio, Gil Scott-Heron, Jesse Colin Young, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and others.
4
Referring to the 1960s mantra that no young person should trust anyone over thirty.
5
Browne says he remembers consoling Hyser, but not the part about having his arms around her. “But she was
fine
. Anyone would want to put their arms around her. She was
ridiculously
fine.”
6
Performed with Browne, who had a hit with his 1977 cover of Maurice and the Zodiacs’ 1960 chart topper.
7
The Lynn Goldsmith incident had been edited out of “Quarter to Three” long before Bruce saw a frame of the film, for obvious length, discretion, and nobody-wants-to-see-
that
-again issues.
8
See also the lyric sheet photo that traces the song’s inspiration to the real Cadillac Ranch, a long line of half-buried Cadillacs made by the conceptual art group known as Ant Farm (Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez, and Doug Michels) installed just outside Amarillo, Texas, in 1974.
1
“I don’t know what you thought about what happened last night,” he told the audience at Arizona State University’s arena the next night. “But I thought it was pretty frightening.”
2
Bruce would end the River tour with all the profits he hadn’t seen after Born to Run and the mammoth Darkness tours.
3
Later adapted into a hit movie starring Tom Cruise.
4
A lot of the Asbury Park musicians took their draft-beating instructions from Billy Chinnock, who turned his own successful strategy into an easy-to-follow formula for friends facing the same ordeal.
5
As Jon Landau recalls, the River shows grew even longer than the Darkness shows had been. Eventually Bruce realized he was losing control of himself. “I remember there was one night in LA when it was 1:20 a.m. when he came off the stage,” Landau says. “I remember him reflecting, ‘I’m going too far.’ We didn’t break one o’clock much after that.”
6
In 1957 Starkweather, with Fugate in tow, went on a bloody rampage from Nebraska to Wyoming, killing eleven people he happened to come across.
7
Why Bruce would choose to store a drenched tape player on his
living room sofa
is anyone’s guess. He was a young guy living alone, and it’s too absurd a detail to not be true.
8
It actually took a few years from
Nebraska
’s release for Morello to absorb the album. But his experience is still emblematic, particularly among fans who didn’t connect with the more commercial work Bruce would take on in the mid-1980s.
9
A man whose many careers include motorcycle shop owner, equipment parts rental shop owner, something that seems to involve booking and/or producing rock shows at nightclubs, and who knows what all else. Bruce and Delia have been fast friends for decades.
10
Glory Days
, Pantheon, 1987.
1
Bruce shakes off direct questions about his achievements in the weight room, but when a visitor volunteers his own maximum bench press from the same era, Bruce chuckles happily. “Ah, I had ya beat! Not by much, though.”
2
Written originally for the R&B singer Donna Summer, who specialized in disco hits that sounded a lot like rock ’n’ roll songs.
3
Although Landau’s feeling for the music was also bone deep, just as Van Zandt could be a canny manager. If anything, their skills matched too closely.
4
As of the summer of 2011, Van Zandt says that Bruce still hasn’t said a word to him about the inspiration for “Bobby Jean.” “People say it’s about me; I don’t know that it is,” the guitarist says. “If it is, it’s nice, y’know. But we’ve never talked about it, to this day.”
5
The first home Bruce managed to buy in his home state, purchased with some of his proceeds from the River tour.
6
According to pop music historian Stephen Pitalo’s Golden Age of Music Video website, a large part of the problem with Stein’s video came from a disagreement Bruce had with cinematographer Daniel Pearl about whether he should be in a gauzy light or the sheer white beams Pearl thought would accentuate the star’s new musculature. Pearl talked Bruce into trying the harder light for a take or two, but Bruce didn’t feel comfortable, so after just a few takes, he went back to the green room for a break, and then kept going to the parking lot, his car, and then home. “He didn’t say a word to anybody,” Pearl told Pitalo. “He’s just out the door.” They tried to make do with what they had.
7
Heavy on the synth drums and looped vocal tracks, and also with a new background chorus and other added elements.
8
Full disclosure: also the professional home of the author from 1996 until 2000.
9
Best known for his work as a staff writer and editor for
Rolling Stone
during its peak in the 1970s, and then for his series of well-received books on country music.
10
Dressed in his customary bow tie and a double-breasted blazer.
11
Unlike that prancing, heavily rouged, and tongue-lolling Prince, for instance.
12
That feel-good war movie whose three main characters end up (a) crippled for life, (b) dead by suicide, and (c) leading a chorus of “God Bless America” in a bar.
13
Given Will’s observation that Bruce “is called the ‘blue-collar troubadour’ ” referred directly, if without attribution, to
People
magazine’s just-published story, it seems probable that Will lifted his interpretation of “Born in the U.S.A.”-as-grand-affirmation from Chet Flippo, too.
1
By this point, it wasn’t surprising that Bruce’s wedding would be such enormous news—grist for another
People
magazine cover story and hundreds of front-page stories in newspapers all over the world. The
Chicago Tribune
thought it so significant that it devoted an editorial to praising the rocker’s nuptials as yet another sign of his steadfast American values.
2
Literally the same car driven by the goddess-like Suzanne Somers in the 1973 film
American Graffiti.
3
Despite Jones’s famous warning that all performers attending the session must “check your egos at the door,” it proved breathtaking to most that Bruce had piloted his own (rented) car to the studio, found his own parking space, and then walked into the event without an entourage in attendance. Richie, on the other hand, took the opportunity to observe loudly that if the A&M Studios exploded with so many fabulous stars inside, 1970s icon John Denver would be back on top of the charts, ha-ha. The jape became all the more amusing when you knew that Denver had actually asked to be included in the USA for Africa project, only to be turned away because he was no longer “cool.” That line of reasoning doesn’t explain the presence of Kenny Rogers or the guy from Huey Lewis and the News who wasn’t Huey Lewis. Arguably, Denver had never been cool, even when he was a chart-topper in the seventies. But Denver’s charitable works exceeded Richie’s by a vast degree, which made the snickering all the more odious.
4
No fewer than eight of
U.S.A.
’s twelve songs—which struck some listeners as overkill, particularly given the wealth of older and more offbeat songs that didn’t make the cut.
5
Although not heard on the album, this declaration of communal integration can be heard on the video made for the live “Born to Run” track.
6
And yet there was plenty of room for fan discussion and dissent: along with the songs that didn’t make the cut (“Incident on 57th Street”! “Jungleland”!), you could grumble about the editing choices (What happened to the entire middle part of the “Backstreets” they used [the Roxy, July 7, 1978]? Why did they censor Bruce’s midsong rap during “Raise Your Hand” when he urged radio listeners to grab their volume knobs and “turn the motherfucker up as loud as it’ll go”?) A big rap in the middle of “Fire,” also taken from that same Roxy show, vanished as well. And so on and so forth.
7
As of early 2012,
Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Live/1975–85
was credited with sales of more than thirteen million units. Whether that number is based on the mideighties calibration of one box = five vinyl albums is unclear, given the CD format’s primacy. Decisions of this nature come out of the murky realm where accounting merges with shamanism. Or perhaps magical realism.
8
Which did not include the fanatics who snapped up the single to play the live “Incident on 57th Street” on its B-side.
9
Duncan, who hadn’t seen Bruce in a decade or more, was getting the stern please-leave-Bruce-alone talk from gym owner Tony Dunphy, Bruce’s trainer, when the star came running up, wrapped his old pal in a hug, and took him off to the locker room to reminisce for an hour.
10
First written and recorded as a high-stepping rockabilly number.
11
An image adapted from the 1955 film
The Night of the Hunter
, starring Robert Mit-chum as a self-designated preacher who moonlights as a serial killer.
1
Recorded by Scott and an assistant, who spent the majority of a summer’s day recruiting and coaching the park’s customers to please direct their reactions to the microphones they’d see jutting up from the ground at the coaster’s final turn. The Schiffer family named in the song’s credits were the park’s owners and operators. This didn’t mark the first use of ambient sound effects in Bruce’s recording career. When the sound of crickets drifted through an open window into the basic track of “County Fair” several years earlier, Bruce asked Scott to take a recorder into the brush to capture the sound at closer range. The released version of the song (which emerged on the bonus disc of
The Essential Bruce Springsteen
in 2003) mixes the accidental crickets with the painstakingly recorded ones.
2
They’re most famous now for serving in the Max Weinberg 7 on NBC’s
Late Night with Conan O’Brien
from 1993 until the group became the
Tonight Show
band during O’Brien’s brief 2009 tenure in the eleven thirty slot. Weinberg left the outfit when O’Brien moved to cable TV in 2010; the horns stayed with the show.
