Born to Run (32 page)

Case in point: When I signed to Columbia, Mike wanted to immediately insure me for one million dollars. He told me he’d made a huge investment in me, and what would
become of him if I died? I said no. At twenty-two I was not comfortable with someone standing to make a quick mil off of my demise. As usual, Mike kept hammering at it. He tried to sweeten the deal by having some of the money go to my parents. “Look, your poor mother and father will stand to make all this cash and they won’t have to pay me a dime. I’M FOOTING THE BILL!” No. “Don’t you think you
owe it to me?” No. Finally, Mike brought in a closer, some insurance company hotshot who guaranteed Mike he’d seal the deal, and together we were shut up in a small room at Columbia Records. I listened to this guy dressed in his suit and tie lay out their pitch for hours as Mike stood waiting outside. He had nothing new. It was the same old con: Mike’s investment, Mom and Pop, free money, no cost
to me . . . I just had to die! I told him I was superstitious and I didn’t want a million-dollar bounty hanging over my head. After a long afternoon of the hard sell, his jacket off, sleeves rolled, tie undone, sweat on his brow, he looked me in the eye and said, “Kid, I’ve got a wife and family. If I make this sale, it’s going to mean a huge commission for me. How about it?” M-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ke!

Mike came in; looked at his hit man, whom he’d just set loose on me for hours; sussed out where all this was going; realized he’d taken his swings, struck out, spun on a dime; and said, “Hey, asshole, leave the kid alone. Get the fuck outta here!” That’s my guy.

Here at the bar, Mike was starting over again . . . the accomplishments, John Hammond,
Time
,
Newsweek
, a million-selling record . .
 . I loved Mike—I still do—and despite the recent contract revelations, I wanted us to continue to work together. It’d been crazy but fun and we’d made it to the top. Toward the end of a very drunken evening, I stopped Mike in the middle of his po-faced soliloquy. “ENOUGH, GIVE ME THE PEN!” I downed another shot of Jack Daniel’s and with five more years of my life spread out before me on the table,
I moved to sign on the first dotted line.
I wasn’t joking. I was going to sign . . . again. Maybe it was just to get the whole fucking business thing, where I was extremely uncomfortable with my ignorance, off my back. I told myself I didn’t really give a fuck about the money anyway. I already had what I needed: a band, a roof over my head, food, a car, a guitar, music, a record deal, the beginnings
of an audience. Hell, I was alone, only twenty-five, way out of my league in this area, and I was sick of the complicated, confusing adult world of these FUCKING PAPERS! Let’s get this shit out of the way and JUST LET ME PLAY!

High on many shots of whiskey, I pressed pen to paper. I felt a hand grab mine. A voice said, “No, not like this.” It was Mike. Those papers would never be signed and Mike’s
and my relationship would soon be in ruins.

The Last Meet

One final morning Mike and I got together again at my house in Atlantic Highlands. Tension was starting to rise over our unfinished business. As the light from Sandy Hook Bay streamed in through my scenic front window, we sat down to straighten it all out for the last time. It was just him and me. By now I knew the full extent of our early
contracts, but what were they compared to us? . . . The music, the audience, what we’d been through, our feelings for each other . . . I started, “Mike, I know the contracts are bad but that’s all right. We can fix it, they’re just paper. We can tear ’em up and start something new. We have X amount of dollars for five years of work. Let’s split it and move on. Just tell me how much is mine and
how much is yours.” I was looking for a fair and rational answer. Instead, Mike replied, “Well . . . that depends. If you sign with me for five more years, a significant amount of it will be yours. If you don’t . . . probably very little.” I knew when Mike uttered the words, “that depends,” we were in real trouble. Five more years of my life against a fair shake for the five previous years of work
was not an equation I’d picked up the guitar, built a life and forged a future, no matter how insignificant, to make. Mike left.

In the following days we negotiated a little further and were almost successful. Many of the new contract’s terms would be retroactively applied to the early contracts and the old agreements would be invalid. I was proud, relieved, and thought we’d worked out something
reasonable. Shortly thereafter I received a phone call from Mike explaining his father had counseled him that he’d be giving up the candy store (the half mil in the bank) with no guarantee of future success. I tried to explain to Mike that he’d be giving up the Tootsie Roll jar and
keeping
the candy store, but it was a no go. Dad had spoken and it seemed like that was that. I hung up the phone,
redialed, and said, “Send in the lawyers.”

It later dawned on me that I might have stumbled upon a crack in Mike’s faith in me. What timing! It would’ve gone against everything I’d known and felt about him since the day we met. There was no truer believer than Mike Appel, but we were in a very fickle business where one-hit wonders abound and half a million dollars is the kind of money guys like
us may never see again. I knew Mike’s mind, and the control of that sum would be a lot for him to give up.
Nothing
is pretty easy to share, but
something
 . . . that’s tricky, particularly your first and possibly only
something
.

Many nights I lay awake wondering, what did the money and the contracts mean? What did they quantify, symbolize? It seemed, for Mike and me, they meant something bigger
than our relationship, all we’d done and might do together. More than our past, present and future. Mike’s grasping insecurity and intemperance, perhaps along with my own willful ignorance, my private insistence on the meaninglessness of all those
papers
, had let them come between us. We’d destroyed the joy, affection and promise we’d taken and had felt in each other.

What were the contracts
for me? . . . Control? Power? Self-determination? “Sandy, he ain’t my boss no more”? An insistence on
business
conforming to my personal worldview? Maybe so. For Mike, was it the same? . . . Power, control, validation in his father’s eyes, ownership of our success and personal confirmation of how
he
saw our relationship? Many, if not most,
sharp old-school managers had a Machiavellian streak.
Mike’s idol was Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker. I loved Elvis and it was a fun conceit for the two of us, but I wasn’t going to
be
Elvis. Those days were gone.
I
was intentionally trying to
not
be Elvis. I was motivated by powerful, internal forces to determine the arc of my work and the life I was going to lead. I’d let you help me, I’d need your help, but I needed the certainty of being
firmly in control. That was the point, beyond the exhilaration, the thrill of feeling my own talents rise up inside of me; that’s what all the years of struggle were for and that was the mountain Mike’s “that depends” had just pushed up against. On this, I was primally unmovable.

I’d bowed to power in ways significant and trivial throughout my life. We all have. I’d been bullied. It had often
shamed me and made me angry, but okay, in any other field, on any other day, I’d eat it, make my peace, do my best and move on. But in music, I’d promised myself that if I could, I’d try to make things a little different. I’d try to lead my life as I chose, and over the past half decade, without parents, much real support or financial reward, I’d done that. I belonged to me. That’s the way it was
going to be.

Mike’s mistake was he fundamentally misunderstood me. He’d voiced what he believed my options to be in the language of
power
. Now, one of negotiation’s dance partners is always power, but civility and compromise must have their place on the dance floor also. At that moment, Mike’s words went beyond negotiation and became a not-too-thinly-veiled threat. Amongst friends, that’s not
nice. We would fight, hard.

In the end, it wasn’t all about the contracts. During our previous tour, something began to be clear to me. Mike’s ability to “represent” me the way I wished, to be my public voice, was rough at best. Mike was a fighter. That was his temperament. It was what he was good at: raw survival, “by any means necessary.” We’d reached a point with
Born to Run
where there was
no one left to fight. We’d won! Everyone just wanted to play on our team.

What I needed now was a facilitator, someone who could represent my interests confidently, calmly, and then get things done. Offstage, I didn’t
like drama. Between the madhouse of the early E Street Band and the silent, unyielding intensity of my father’s emotional life, I’d had enough. I wanted people around me who would
do their best to create the conditions where I could work peacefully and do my best, uninterrupted by countless self-created tempests in a teapot. Meaningless distraction drains you of the energy you should be placing into more serious things or using to simply enjoy the rewards of your labor. Mike knew nothing about the “middle way.” Jon had a lighter, more sophisticated touch that brought with
it its own quiet authority. It was more in tune with the confidence with which I now saw myself and wanted to project. Jon wasn’t a businessman. He’d had no managerial experience and after Mike, I interviewed a variety of the best people in management for the position. They were all perfectly fine professional businessmen, but that was never going to be enough for me. I needed disciples. This would
prove an Achilles’ heel and in the future, after some costly enmeshments, I’d let it go. But not before it would end several longtime relationships, cost me dearly and come close to weakening our band. ’Til then, I needed to feel the deep emotional hold of sworn travelers to make me feel secure, safe, and prepared to do my job in the pop wilderness. I didn’t have normal nine-to-five relationships
with the people who worked for me or with my work. A moderate in most other aspects of my life, here I was extreme. At work you were on my time all the time. Jon was already too grown up for a lot of this, but his heart, dedication and love for what I did brought him into the realm. In return all that was expected of me by my apostles was everything I had. I could handle that . . . for a while.

THIRTY-SIX

LIVING WITH THE LAW

I wanted to return to the studio and I wanted Jon to produce. Once the deal went down, Mike, of course, wouldn’t have it. Standoff. Here come the judge.

We lost many of our early motions. Mike’s power, underwritten by the agreements, proved very effective in stopping my career in its tracks. I found out that
agreements
mean you
agreed
to something! Whether you read
it, ate it for breakfast or papered the walls of your rumpus room with it . . . you’d AGREED! Then came the depositions.

Discovery, or depositions, is the legal process in which the opposing sides of an argument get together in a little room with a court stenographer and their lawyers and each take turns trying to make spaghetti out of the
other guy’s story, in search of the answers
you
(or your
opponent) need to make your case. It is neither pleasant nor pretty. It is meant to be embarrassing, psychically unsettling and a small wake-up call as to how your ass is going to be filleted once you step into the witness stand and start spouting your bullshit, truth or not. Let us not forget, it is called the
adversarial
system, and anyone who’s been deposed for anything from mass financial
fraud to running a red light will tell you, it lives up to its name. By now, I’d already blown more than one hundred grand on a losing game plan and we were just getting started. In my first meeting with my new attorneys, Peter Parcher regaled me with the merits of my case: “No upstanding judge or jury in the land will hold up these slave papers . . . greed . . . for fucking Christ, you’re signed
as an employee! Greed . . . greed . . . ridiculous terms . . . egregious conflict of interest . . . ,” yadda, yadda, yadda. I’d heard it all before but it was still music to my ears. After forty minutes or so, I was feeling pretty good, so I excitedly asked, “Well hell then, Mr. Parcher, what kind of a case does Mike have?” He turned on a dime. “Mike? . . . He’s got a great case . . . HE’S GOT YOUR
NAME ON THE PAPER!” . . . Oh.

Peter Parcher and his colleague Peter Herbert determined that the biggest obstacle to getting Mike to settle the case was Mike’s disbelief that our relationship was truly over. It would be my job to convince him of that and it would take getting ugly. I’d been deposed previously with my last attorneys. Mr. Parcher had read the transcripts and told me it had been
a pathetic disaster. It was all ambivalence, gray area, indecision, fairness and NO FIGHT! Peter took me in a corner and told me, “
You
, my friend, are not the judge. The judge is the judge.
You
are not the jury; the jury is the jury. You will tell your story to the best of your ability, as he will tell his. The judge and jury will decide who favor shall fall upon. That is not your job.”

I’d always
had a problem with that. My father spoke so little, I had to provide all the voices, all the points of view of our non-conversations. As well as defending myself, I had to internally argue my old man’s case against me. I twisted and turned myself inside out trying to understand what I’d
done wrong and what I might do to right it. I didn’t know enough to realize the impossibility of what I was
wrestling with. Besides, it was the only way I could manage some control over the confounding emotional temper of our home. Consequently, as I moved on in life, this MO often left me with too much empathy for my opponents. No matter how far you took it, I was always trying to understand where you were coming from, see your point of view, walk in your shoes. I later told my children, compassion is
a wonderful virtue but don’t waste it on those undeserving. If someone has their boot on your neck, kick them in the balls, then discuss. My surfeit of empathy was great for songwriting but often very bad for living or lawsuits.