Born to Run (33 page)

So, my first day of being deposed under the tutelage of the two Peters, I did not play nice. My answers were profane, part theater, part truly felt anger bordering on
the violent. I wasn’t mad about the money; it was not owning or controlling any of the music I’d written that infuriated me. That was the fuel I used to set myself on fire. I let it fly and it went on for days, shouting, banging on the table, pushing back my chair and planting my fist into a file cabinet. I worked hard for the Oscar. Finally the depositions were called for misbehavior by Leonard
Marx, Mike’s attorney. We all had to take the subway downtown to court, where I was politely spanked and ordered by the judge to tone down my act. The deposition transcripts make for fun and fascinating bedtime reading and appear verbatim along with Mike’s side of the story in Mike’s book
Down Thunder Road
.

Like Dickens said, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .” Mostly,
the worst of times . . . and it went on for years. I was renting a 160-acre farm on Telegraph Hill Road in Holmdel, New Jersey, for $700 a month. I’d hop in my white C10 pickup, which my girl had christened “Super Truck,” and head on down to the Stone Pony to sit in, play for the locals, flirt with the waitresses and drown my sorrows in too much blackberry brandy. I had a lot of fun in that C10.
I stuffed a half couch, a cooler filled with ice and a small hibachi grill in its bed. I’d take my date and we’d head to the last of the drive-ins. I’d pull in backward, and we’d hop on
the couch, drink beer and grill burgers during a late-night double feature. That summer I saw Warren Oates in the fabulous
Born to Kill
at that drive-in, had time on my hands and did a little more than a reasonable
amount of drinking and bar-hopping just to relieve the stress. There were some nights when I left my tire tracks on more than a few lawns in Deal on my way home from the Pony.

It all became tiring and depressing, but I took comfort in knowing I could lose all but one thing: myself. No lawsuit, no court decision, no judge, no legal outcome could take what I treasured most. That was the craft and
inner life I’d built since I was a teenager, founded on the music I could make with my heart, head and hands. That was mine forever and could not be won from me. I’d think, “If I lose and have nothing when this is over, you can still drop me with my guitar by parachute anywhere in America; I’ll walk to the nearest roadhouse, find a pickup band and light up your night. Just because I can.”

Settlement

All good things must come to an end. Slowly, sadly, Mike became convinced it was all over. A settlement was reached, separation papers were drawn up and one quiet night in a dimmed midtown office building, Mike and I finalized our divorce. At the end of a long conference table I sat there, doing what you will do, should you ever be lucky enough to wander into a profession where you have even minor
success at your passion. I was doing the very thing that got me into the whole fucking mess in the first place . . . signing more papers I hadn’t, and would never, read, in order to get to do the thing I desired most, the thing I needed to do,
make music and play
. The money was gone but the music was primarily mine and I could choose my career path unobstructed.

That done, I walked to the elevator
and into a negative image of the ride Mike and I took down from the top floor of Black Rock on the day we
were discovered. With my head slowly clearing of the sludge the lawsuit and its troubles had brought, I walked out into the New York night. I would have some dealings with Mike in the future, some good, some cheesy, but once the war was over and time—a good deal of it—passed, the fondness
and connection remained. We had been someplace special together, someplace unique, a place where we had to depend upon each other and nothing else, where things that meant something were at stake. We had come to cross purposes—this is the world—but I could never hate Mike; I can only love him. His motor mouth walked me into John Hammond’s office. From Asbury Park to New York City and Columbia Records,
that’s a long walk. When it was toughest, he made it work. He was a hard guy, straight out of the New York/New Jersey mold. It couldn’t get tough enough for him. He drew energy from it and reveled in it. He had trouble when it got easier. Some people are just that way; they don’t know how to stop fighting.

Along with Jon and Steve, Mike was my musical brother in arms. He knew everything about
the great groups, the fabulous hit records, every important nuance of the great singers’ voices, the great guitarists’ riffs, the heart and soul that were in our favorite music. When we talked, he could finish my sentences. He was a
fan
, with all the beauty and import that word carries for me. Mike was funny, cynical, dreamy and profane, and when you were with him, you were always laughing.

Eventually, for seed money for more kite dreams, Mike sold me back every piece of my music he ever owned. It was another one of his big mistakes, good for me, bad for my pal. Those songs were going to be money in the bank for a long time. Mike, to a fault, was always about . . . now! next! I’m one of the few artists from those days who owns everything he ever created. All my records are mine. All my
songs are mine. It’s rare and it’s a good feeling.

Mike was a cross of Willy Loman and Starbuck. He was a salesman in the classic and most tragic sense. He was a rainmaker. And despite all the hurt and pain of our last years together . . . he’d made it rain.

I thought of my grandfather, Sing Sing alumnus Anthony Zerilli (“You will risk and you will pay”). I risked and I paid, but I won too.
I’d tried anonymity and it did not please me. My talents, my ego, my desires were too great. As I walked along, the excited, exhausted chatter of my partners in battle, Jon, Peter and Peter, floated somewhere behind me. I was filled with the light, the exhilaration of being set free, the power of having fought hard for something I felt was rightly mine. I felt a sadness at the decimation of a good
friendship, but Mike and I would see each other again. Right now, I felt the shadow of a future, two years postponed, upon me. The time was here to finally turn all this into something.

THIRTY-SEVEN

DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN

Scene one: The grinding, deafening sound of plastic being cut on an open factory floor. I am standing inches behind my dad, holding a brown paper bag containing his night-shift lunch, an egg salad sandwich. I call to him in the din, feel my mouth move, my vocal cords strain, but nothing . . . no sound. He eventually turns, sees me, mouths a few unheard
words and takes the bag.

Scene two: I am riding shotgun in my dad’s delivery truck. It is one of the great days of my childhood. We are traversing New Jersey on what mission I do not know, but its importance, to me, cannot be debated. We reach our destination, we deliver I don’t remember what. All I recollect is the sliding rear door of the truck, rolling up with a metallic roar into
its tracks
embedded beneath the truck’s roof. My father and other men unload large boxes from its enclosed bed, have a smoke, briefly banter amongst themselves, mission accomplished. I remember the bouncing springs of the truck’s suspension on the way home, my open window on a beautiful skippin’-school fall day, the black gearshift between my father and me, the smell of 1950s metal and leather in the truck’s
interior and my heart beating with admiration, accomplishment and the pride of being claimed. I’m riding with the king. My dad has taken me to work. Oh, what a world it could’ve been.

Taxi driver, assembly line worker, autoworker, jail guard, bus driver, truck driver—these are just a few of the many jobs my pop worked to hold during his life. My sisters and I grew up in blue-collar neighborhoods,
somewhat integrated, filled with factory workers, cops, firemen, long-distance truck drivers. I never saw a man leave a house in a jacket and tie unless it was Sunday or he was in trouble. If you came knocking at our door with a suit on, you were immediately under suspicion. You wanted something. There were good neighbors, filled with eccentricity and kindness and basically decent. There were
creeps just like anywhere else, and you had your houses where you could tell something bad was going on. From my sixth to twelfth years, we lived at 39
¹
/
₂
Institute Street, in the small half of a very small, cold-water-only house. We only bathed a few times a week because the ritual of my mother heating up pots of water on the gas stove, then carrying them up, one by one, to slowly fill the upstairs
bath was too much. My sister and I flipped a coin to see who’d get to go in first. Our walls were thin, really thin. The screaming, yelling and worse of our neighbors couldn’t be hidden or ignored. I remember my mother in her pink curlers sitting on the steps, her ear pressed to the wall of the half house adjoining ours, listening to the couple next door scrap it out. He was a big burly guy.
He beat his wife and you could hear it happening at night. The next day you’d see her bruises. Nobody called the cops, nobody said anything, nobody did anything. One day the husband came home and tied some small glass wind chimes with
faux Chinese decoration upon them to the eaves of the porch. This came to disgust me. When the slightest wind would blow they’d make this tinkling sound. These peaceful-sounding
wind chimes and the frequent night hell of the house was a grotesque mixture. I can’t stomach the sound of wind chimes to this day. They sound like lies.

This was a part of my past that I would draw on for the roots of
Darkness on the Edge of Town
.

By 1977, in true American fashion, I’d escaped the shackles of birth, personal history and, finally, place, but something wasn’t right. Rather than
exhilaration, I felt unease. I sensed there was a great difference between unfettered personal license and real freedom. Many of the groups that had come before us, many of my heroes, had mistaken one for the other and it’d ended in poor form. I felt personal license was to freedom as masturbation was to sex. It’s not bad, but it’s not the real deal. Such were the circumstances that led the lovers
I’d envisioned in “Born to Run,” so determined to head out and away, to turn their car around and head back to town. That’s where the deal was going down, amongst the brethren. I began to ask myself some new questions. I felt accountable to the people I’d grown up alongside of and I needed to address that feeling.

Along with the class-conscious pop of the Animals, early-sixties Beat groups and
the punks, I began to listen seriously to country music and I discovered Hank Williams. I liked that country dealt with adult topics; I didn’t believe you had to “age out” of rock music, so I wanted my new songs to resonate as I grew older. Film became a great influence, and my title
Darkness on the Edge of Town
was straight out of American noir. I’d settled on a sound that was leaner and less
grand than
Born to Run
, one I felt would better suit the voices I was trying to bring to life. I was on new ground and searching for a tone somewhere between
Born to Run
’s spiritual hopefulness and seventies cynicism. That cynicism was what my characters were battling against. I wanted them to feel older, weathered, wiser but not beaten. The sense of daily struggle increased; hope became a lot
harder to come by. That
was the feeling I wanted to sustain. I steered away from escapism and placed my people in a community under siege.

Born to Run
had earned me a Steinway baby grand piano and a 1960 Chevrolet Corvette with Cragar wheels I bought for six grand from a kid behind the counter at the West Long Branch Carvel ice-cream stand. There wouldn’t be much else but bills—studio bills,
instrument rental bills, bills from all the folks Mike (we?) had stiffed to keep us rolling; there would be lawyers’ fees, back taxes and tiresome fighting. Some enterprising young man at the IRS must have seen those
Time
and
Newsweek
covers and said, “Who is this guy?” The answer was, he was a guy who’d never paid a single penny in income taxes his whole life, and neither had most of his friends.
Bang! . . . Meet your uncle Sam. We were all so used to living financially off the grid, it never dawned on us that we might qualify as taxpayers. Even after the amount of money coming in would’ve brought us up to the bar, Mike had said he used it all for our survival. In a flash, I was hit for back taxes for all my “earnings” since in utero and had to pony up for all the band’s too, because
they were broke. It took a long time. The entire
Darkness
tour I played for someone else
every
night. Lawyers, creditors, Uncle Sam, sound companies, trucking companies—all came out of the woodwork to tap our meager earnings. That, along with piling up astronomical studio bills while we learned our craft, would keep me broke until 1982, ten years and millions of records after I’d signed with CBS.
If those records had bombed, I’d have ended up back in Asbury Park, with my only reward a drunken story to tell.

We cut forty, fifty, sixty songs of all genres. Maybe after our two-year shutdown I was just hungry to record, to get all the songs and ideas out of my head, to clear a space for the record I really wanted to make. Very slowly . . . that’s what happened. We were so rusty when we returned
to the studio, weeks went by before a note of music was played. As with
Born to Run
, our recording process was thwarted by our seeming inability to get the most basic acceptable sounds. Days went by with the only sound emanating from
Studio B at the Record Plant the dull, endless thwack of Max’s drumstick on a tom-tom. “Stiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick!” That was our frustrated mantra, shouted day and night,
over and over. It meant rather than the richness and tone of a true snare or tom-tom, one was hearing the unsatisfying slapping sound of slat wood on taut drum skin. We were literally hearing the drum
stick
. No thunder of the gods there. We trudged on, blind men in a black alley.