Walk like a Man (3 page)

After graduating, barely, from Freehold High in 1967, Springsteen was declared 4-F—ineligible to serve—and thus managed to avoid being sent to Vietnam.
⁵
He dropped out of community college in 1968 to focus exclusively on his music. He was a key member of several bands in those years, including Earth, a guitar-centered power trio in the Clapton-Cream, proto-heavy-metal mode. It was during this time that he earned the nickname “The Boss,” since he— usually sober and not stoned—made sure the band got paid at the end of the night and distributed the earnings.
⁶

His family moved to California in 1969, leaving Springsteen to find his own way in the world. He took up residence above a surfboard factory in Asbury Park, a fading vacation town on the Jersey Shore, spending summer days sleeping on the beach and nights on stage in the bars. He became something of a local hero during this time, a guitar slinger well known on the Jersey Shore scene. Attempts to break out nationally, however, were less successful. Steel Mill, a Springsteen-led band that featured the talents of, among others, Vini Lopez, Steven Van Zandt, and Danny Federici, received good reviews during a short tour of California and auditioned for legendary rock impresario Bill Graham in 1970, but nothing came of it. Springsteen broke up the band shortly thereafter.

After the deliberate excessiveness of his next band, Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom, Springsteen got serious with The Bruce Springsteen Band, a proto–E Street Band with a horn section and female back-up singers, which caught the attention of Mike Appel in late 1971.

Appel was a scrapper, a former songwriter, and low-level music manager. He'd been alerted to Springsteen by Carl “Tinker” West, who managed Steel Mill and The Bruce Springsteen Band. Springsteen flopped in his first audition for Appel, who advised him to write more of his own material. Less than a year later, Springsteen auditioned again. This time Appel agreed to manage the singer, and Springsteen signed management, publishing, and production contracts with him. They would prove to be among the most problematic signatures of his career.

Mike Appel doesn't usually come off too well in the Bruce Springsteen story, but you can't deny the effect the outlandish and usually offensive manager had on the singer's development. Springsteen owes perhaps the most significant moment in his career entirely to Appel: an audition for the legendary John Hammond at Columbia Records in early 1972. Hammond signed Springsteen, and he's been on the Columbia roster ever since.

Although Springsteen was signed as a solo artist, he recruited former bandmates and Jersey Shore hotshots to back him on the record and on tour. With “Miami Steve” Van Zandt on guitar, Gary Tallent on bass, David Sancious and Danny Federici on keyboards, “Mad Dog” Vini Lopez on drums, and Clarence Clemons on saxophone, he created the first iteration of The E Street Band, though it wasn't referred to as such for almost a year.

Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.,
was recorded at 914 Sound Studios in Blauvelt, New York, over the summer of 1972. The studio was a leaky, low-fi, antiquated shithole, and the record suffered as a result. The sound of
Greetings
is thin and tinny, the band barely noticeable. Despite significant record company hype and generally positive reviews, the record was a non-starter, selling only eleven thousand copies in the U.S. in its first year.

Springsteen toured incessantly, however, building up a following the old-fashioned way: one audience a night, one new fan at a time.

The band returned to problematic 914 Sound Studios in the summer of 1973, and Springsteen's second album,
The Wild, the Innocent
& the E Street Shuffle,
was released in early September.

Despite including such powerhouses as“Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),” “Kitty's Back,” and “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” the more mature, more complex second album fared even more poorly than the debut. Sales were meager, but critics were rhapsodic. Springsteen and the band stayed on the road, night after night, working their magic one venue at a time.

Rock writer and manager Jon Landau was in the audience for the late show at the Harvard Square Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in May 1974. Shortly thereafter, he wrote an epochal, exultant review of the show for Harvard's
The Real Paper
that included these key lines: “I saw rock'n'roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.”

“Growing Young with Rock and Roll” was a brilliant piece of music writing, melancholy and breathless. Springsteen invited the twenty-seven-year-old Landau (who had, according to Sandford, commented of
Wild & Innocent,
“Loved the album. Not the production.”) into the fold.

Springsteen needed help.

Following the dismal sales of his first two albums, Springsteen was in a do-or-die position with his third: if it too failed, his Columbia contract would be little more than paper. He had spent months fumbling with the first single, alternating hours at 914 Sound Studios with nights of performing. The song was “Born to Run,” and it was finished only with Landau's assistance.

Work on the remainder of the
Born to Run
album moved relatively quickly, and it was released in the summer of 1975 to waves of hype, engineered by Appel and loathed by Springsteen. The record, which included instant classic songs like the title track, “Jungleland,” and “
Thunder Road
,” exploded into the public awareness.

Despite his mixed feelings about fame and hype, by the end of the tour in late 1975 —which took the band overseas for the first time—Springsteen was a bona fide international star. Any sense that he could now take it easy, however, was scuttled by a series of lawsuits, which would keep him out of the studio for almost two years and had the potential to cripple his burgeoning career.

Mike Appel and Jon Landau were never close, and their work together on
Born to Run
served to foster a deep resentment if not an outright hatred between the two men. When Springsteen expressed interest in making Landau part of the team permanently, Appel balked, and Springsteen went back to his contracts to see if he had any leverage. Consultation with Landau and the record company verified his gut feeling: he was being screwed. Springsteen sued Appel to be released from the onerous contracts he had naively signed (which, among other things, saw him receiving a pittance of his earnings and owning none of his songwriting rights), and Appel responded by countersuing to keep Landau and Springsteen out of the studio. “It wasn't a lawsuit about money,” Springsteen says in the documentary
The Promise.
“It was a lawsuit about control. Who was going to be in control of my work, and my work life. Early on, I decided that was going to be me.”

It was ugly, and got uglier still.

While the lawyers worked, Springsteen split his time between touring and woodshedding with the band at his farm in Holmdel, New Jersey. The shows on the 1976 and 1977 tours are wonders of looseness and spontaneity, with the band roadtesting material they had worked up during the long sessions at Casa Springsteen.
⁷
Among the songs written and performed during that period
⁸
was “
The Promise
,” a spiritual successor and counterpoint to
Born to
Run
's “Thunder Road,” which many believe to have been written about the lawsuit and Springsteen's relationship with Appel. Springsteen denies that to this day,
⁹
but “The Promise” remains one of his greatest songs.

It was a brutal, psychologically damaging time, but when the dust settled in 1977, Springsteen had regained control of his songwriting and his career, and Landau stepped in as both producer and manager. The changes didn't end there, however.

Springsteen's fourth studio album,
Darkness on the Edge of Town,
is, as the title suggests, a dark album, graced with moments of hard redemption and faint hopes—a far cry from the passionate urgency of
Born to Run.
In the notes accompanying
The Promise: The Darkness
on the Edge of Town Story
in 2010, Springsteen wrote, “‘Darkness' was my ‘samurai' record, stripped to the frame and ready to rumble.”

Live, the songs did indeed rumble. The 1978 tour showed Springsteen at his peak as a performing artist in the E Street Band mode. Shows ran between three and four hours and left audiences in dizzy heaps by their conclusion. On stage, Springsteen was a dynamo: definitely a polished showman, but able to dig deep for emotional truth, night after night.
¹⁰
The shows were wild explosions of energy and intensity. “There was a ferocity in the band,” recalls E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg in the documentary
The Promise.
“when we finally went out and started playing again, that perhaps wasn't there earlier. It was just an absolutely take no prisoners approach.” The tour, which crisscrossed the United States before wrapping late in December 1978, was a triumph, and Springsteen was recognized as part of the mainstream rock pantheon.

Late in the summer of 1979, a few months into the recording sessions for
The River,
Springsteen was invited to headline two nights of the No Nukes concert series at Madison Square Garden in New York, organized in response to the Three Mile Island disaster. It was an opportunity to premiere the title song “The River,”
¹¹
and for Springsteen to embrace his nascent activism.

The River,
which was released the following year, was a sprawling two-record set that balanced the existential dread of
Darkness on the
Edge of Town
with seemingly throwaway frat-rock songs. Songs like “Independence Day” (perhaps the apotheosis of Springsteen's writing about his father, and something of a rapprochement between the two men), “Point Blank,” “Wreck on the Highway,” and “Drive All Night” were unremittingly sad, while the title song, a tale of teenage love and adult consequences, is Springsteen near his most existential.

Critics loved
The River,
and it graced many albums of the year lists. Fans snapped it up, and the seemingly constant radio play of the lead single “Hungry Heart” (perhaps the most popular song about a deadbeat dad ever) gained Springsteen even more adherents. It also made tickets a lot harder to come by.

The tour for
The River
was highlighted, in 1981, by Springsteen's first return to Europe since 1975. And in the U.S., the bigger halls and multi-night stands at such venerable venues as Madison Square Garden could have sold out several times over.

The Springsteen story, to this point, is all about incremental increases—publicly, his career kept growing and his social awareness kept deepening. After the conclusion of the tour for
The River,
though, Springsteen's world seemed to shrink.

On a personal level, Springsteen's life had been characterized until then by medium-term relationships and casual liaisons. By Christmas of 1981, though, Springsteen was on his own. He had spent the three months since the end of the tour reading, watching movies, and writing new songs.

Shortly after the turn of the year, Springsteen sat down in his bedroom with a tape recorder, a primitive mixing board, his guitar, and harmonica, and recorded a set of new songs—intended as demos for his next album—in a matter of hours. Those bedroom tracks were released the following September as
Nebraska.

The album is darkness incarnate, story-songs with elements of autobiography, overwhelming desperation, and fleeting, crumbling redemption. Today,
Nebraska
is widely praised as one of Springsteen's finest works, and is a fixture on most critics' lists of the best albums of all time. It certainly bears the hallmarks of his immersion in the world of American folk music, which was kick-started by his reading of Joe Klein's biography of Woody Guthrie, and of his reading of Howard Zinn's
A People's History of the
United States.

Rather than touring, Springsteen spent more than two years, on and off, in the studio with the band, and hopping on stage at Jersey Shore bars to join up-and-coming acts, usually late in their sets. He became a fixture on the bar scene of his youth, to the point that a surprise appearance became, well, less than surprising.

The recording sessions for the new album proceeded slowly but steadily, and with no small amount of turmoil for Springsteen himself. Part of the difficulty may have been due to Miami Steve Van Zandt announcing that he would be leaving the group upon the album's release to pursue a solo career. Nevertheless, by the time the sessions were finished, in the spring of 1984, Springsteen and the band had created, consciously and deliberately, a sleek, of-the-times hit machine, designed for maximum impact. With former Neil Young guitar slinger and solo artist Nils Lofgren brought in to take Van Zandt's place, and the addition of sassy, redheaded Jersey girl Patti Scialfa on background vocals, The E Street Band was ready to take on the world.

On the heels of its first single, “Dancing in the Dark,” the
Born
in the U.S.A.
album exploded into the public consciousness in the summer of 1984. Overnight, Springsteen was a household name. An ambitious world tour sold out stop after stop. Seven of the album's twelve songs were released as singles, and they all charted in the top ten.
¹²
Propelled by those singles, and driven by videos for five of those tracks, the album ended up selling more than fifteen million copies in the United States, and more than thirty million copies around the world.

It wasn't very far into
Born in the U.S.A.
's life, however, that Bossmania transcended the music world and infused the culture at large. It was significant enough that Ronald Reagan tried to co-opt what he perceived as Springsteen's patriotism in his run-up to re-election, while Reagan's opponent Walter Mondale also tried to claim Springsteen's endorsement. Adding to the effect was the sudden presence of Springsteen's supposed heartland values being used everywhere in advertising. (Springsteen refused to licence his music or image for any advertising. Madison Avenue went with sound-alikes and lots of flags.)