Born to Run (35 page)

I’d had it down. I’d routinely and roughly failed perfectly fine women over and over again. I’d wrapped my arms around
that great big “nothing” for a long time and it’d been good. I suppose after my grandmother’s death when I was sixteen, my dad’s daily emotional bailout, and both parents leaving for California, I figured needing people too much might not provide the best payoff; better off playing defense. But it was getting harder and harder to pretend nothing was amiss. Two years inside of any relationship and
it would all simply stop. As soon as I got close to exploring my frailties, I was gone. You were gone. One pull of the pin, it’d be over and I’d be down the road, tucking another sad ending in my pack. It was rarely the women themselves I was trying to get away from. I had many lovely girlfriends I
cared for and who really cared for me. It was what they triggered, the emotional exposure, the implications
of a life of commitments and family burdens. At work, though I may have occasionally blown it, I could take on all of the responsibility you could load on my shoulders. But in life all I could find was a present I could take no comfort in, a future with harsh limits, a past I was struggling to come to terms with in my writing but also running from, and time . . . tick . . . tick . . .
tick . . . time. I had no time for time. Better off in that lovely timeless world inside my head, inside . . . the studio! Or onstage, where I master time, stretching it, shortening it, advancing forward, moving you back, speeding it up, slowing it down, all with the twitch of a shoulder and the drop of a snare beat.

With the end of each affair, I’d feel a sad relief from the suffocating claustrophobia
love had brought me. And I’d be free to be . . .
nothing
 . . . again. I’d switch partners, hit rewind and take it from the top, telling myself this time it’d be different. Then it’d be all high times and laughs until fate and that unbearable anxiety came knocking and it’d be one more for the road. I “loved” as best as I could, but I hurt some people I really cared about along the way. I didn’t
have a clue as to how to do anything else.

Now, the less I traveled, the more the truth of what I was doing pressed in on me. It became inescapable. In the past I’d always had one surefire answer: get writing, get recording and get out. The road was my trusty shield against the truth. You can’t hit a moving target and you can’t catch lightning. Lightning strikes, leaves a scar and then is gone,
baby, gone. The road was always a perfect cover; transient detachment was the nature of the game. You play; the evening culminates in merry psychosexual carnage, laughs, ecstasy and sweaty bliss; then it’s on to new faces and new towns. That, my friends, is why they call ’em . . . ONE-NIGHT STANDS! The show provided me the illusion of intimacy without risk or consequences. During the show, as good
as it is, as real as the emotions called upon are, as physically moving and as hopefully inspirational as I work to make it, it’s fiction, theater, a creation; it isn’t reality . . . And at the end of the day, life trumps art . . . always.

Robert De Niro once said he loved acting because you got to live other lives without the consequences. I lived a new life every night. Each evening you’re
a new man in a new town with all of life and all of life’s possibilities spread out before you. For much of my life I’d vainly sought to re-create this feeling every . . . single . . . day. Perhaps it’s the curse of the imaginative mind. Or perhaps it’s just the “running” in you. You simply can’t stop imagining other worlds, other loves, other places than the one you are comfortably settled in at
any given moment, the one holding all your treasures. Those treasures can seem so easily made gray by the vast, open and barren spaces of the creative mind. Of course, there is but one life. Nobody likes that . . . but there’s just one. And we’re lucky to have it. God bless us and have mercy on us that we may have the understanding and the abilities to live it . . . and know that “possibility of everything”
 . . . is just “nothing” dressed up in a monkey suit . . . and I’d had the best monkey suit in town.

FORTY

THE RIVER

The River
would be my first album where love, marriage and family would cautiously move to center stage. “Roulette,” a portrait of a family man caught in the shadow of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, was the first song we cut. The MUSE (Musicians United for Safe Energy) concerts at Madison Square Garden had been our entrance into the public political arena and “Roulette”
was written and recorded shortly after those shows. Next a road-tested “The Ties That Bind” got the Bob Clearmountain treatment. We were in a new studio, the Power Station, where Studio A had a beautiful high-ceilinged wooden room that was going to let the noise of our band free. Bob was a new part of our team, knew how to capture the room’s best, and though we’d soon realize we weren’t quite
ready for him, he engineered and mixed
The River
’s early incarnation. “Ties” was another rocker focused on “real world” commitments. “You walk cool but darlin’ can you walk the line . . .” I held my doubts.

After the tightly controlled recorded sound of
Darkness
, I wanted this record to have the roughness and spontaneity of our live show. I wanted more trash in our sound. This was right in Steve
Van Zandt’s wheelhouse and he joined me in the production along with Jon and Chuck Plotkin. With Steve’s encouragement, I began to steer the record into a rawer direction. This was the album where the E Street Band hit its stride, striking the perfect balance between a garage band and the professionalism required to make good records.

It was 1979 and state-of-the-art production values were still
heavily influenced by the late-seventies mainstream sounds of Southern California. Their techniques consisted of an enormous amount of separation between the instruments, an often stultifying attention to detail and very little echo or live room resonance. Most studios, in those days, were completely padded to give the engineer the utmost control over each individual instrument. The Eagles, Linda
Ronstadt and many other groups had a lot of success with this sound, and it had its merits, but it just didn’t suit our East Coast sensibilities. We wanted open room mikes, smashing drums (the snare sound on Elvis’s “Hound Dog” was my Holy Grail), crashing cymbals, instruments bleeding into one another and a voice sounding like it was fighting out from the middle of a brawling house party. We
wanted the sound of
less
control. This was how many of our favorite records from the early days of rock ’n’ roll had been recorded. You miked the band
and
the room. You
heard
the band and the room. The sonic characteristics of the room were essential in the quality and personality of your recording. The room brought the messiness, the realness, the can’t-get-out-of-each-other’s-way togetherness
of musicians in search of “that sound.”

We’d stumbled upon this by accident at the end of
Darkness
. The Record Plant had been tearing apart Studio A to rebuild it. We went in to cut the song “Darkness on the Edge of Town” when the room was still four bare concrete walls. That’s it! That resonance, that aggression from the drums, was exactly what we’d been searching for during all our early days
of “Stiiiiiiiiiiiick” mania. At the Power Station, we set mikes high above the
band to capture as much ambient sound as we could, and we hoped to be able to dial in or out as much of it as we liked. We’d be half successful.

Now, after the unrelenting seriousness of
Darkness
, I wanted more flexibility in the emotional range of the songs I chose. Along with “gravitas,” our shows were always filled
with fun, and I wanted to make sure, this time around, that didn’t get lost. After some time recording, we prepared a single album and handed it in to the record company. It consisted of side one: “The Ties That Bind,” “Cindy,” “Hungry Heart,” “Stolen Car,” “Be True.” Side two: “The River,” “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch),” “The Price You Pay,” “I Wanna Marry You” and “Loose Ends.” Everything,
in one form or another, with the exception of “Cindy,” appeared on the final version of
The River
or later on
Tracks
, our collection of “outtakes” released in November of 1998. That first version of
The River
was completely engineered and mixed by Bob Clearmountain. It sounded beautiful, but as I spent time listening to it, I felt that it just wasn’t enough. Our records were infrequent and by
now I’d set up my audience to expect more than business as usual. Each record was a statement of purpose. I wanted playfulness, good times, but also an underlying philosophical seriousness, a code of living, fusing it all together and making it more than just a collection of my ten latest songs. (Though, that worked out pretty well for the Beatles.)

I wouldn’t suggest this approach for everyone.
Needless to say, it has its pretensions, but I was still defining myself and was inspired by artists who created self-aware, self-contained worlds on their albums, and then invited their fans to discover them. Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, the Band, Marvin Gaye, Hank Williams, Frank Sinatra—all made records that had collective power. I wanted a record thematically coherent enough to hold together as
a body of work while not so single-minded as to be damned by the term “concept album.” I wanted something that could come only from my voice, that was informed by the internal and external geography of my own experience. The single album of
The River
I’d just turned in didn’t quite get us there, so, back into the studio we went.

Another year went by as I watched the seasons change from my
New York City hotel room overlooking Central Park South. Down in the Wollman Rink I saw people ice-skate, stop, sun themselves on the Great Lawn of Central Park and start ice-skating again. In the studio, not sure of where the record was going, I took out my shotgun again. I’d simply record everything I was writing. When our recording budget ran dry, I took the Francis Ford Coppola route, busting
the piggy bank and spending everything I had. The results were I went broke while recording a lot of good music, the two records of
The River
being only a slice (check out disc two of
Tracks
, and there’s more still waiting in the vault). Finally, it became obvious I was working on at least a double record. It would be the only way I could reconcile the two worlds I wanted to present to my fans.
The River
got its emotional depth from its ballads—“Point Blank,” “Independence Day,” “The River” and “Stolen Car” were all narrative-driven story songs—but the album got its energy from its bar band music, songs like “Cadillac Ranch,” “Out in the Street” and “Ramrod.” Then there was the music that bled across the lines: “Ties That Bind,” “Two Hearts” and “Hungry Heart.” All of this blended together
into a logical extension of the characters I’d studied on
Darkness on the Edge of Town
.

Finally, the commitments of home, blood and marriage ran through the album as I tried to understand where these things might fit in my own life. My records are always the sound of someone trying to understand where to place his mind and heart. I imagine a life, I try it on, then see how it fits. I walk in
someone else’s shoes, down the sunny and dark roads I’m compelled to follow but may not want to end up living on. It’s one foot in the light, one foot in the darkness, in pursuit of the next day.

The song “The River” was a breakthrough for my writing. The influence of country music proved prescient as one night in my hotel room I started singing Hank Williams’s “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in
It,” and “Well, I went upon the mountain, I looked down in the sea” somehow led to “I’m going down to the river . . .” I drove home to New Jersey and sat at a small
oak table in my bedroom watching the dawn sky draw blue out of black and I imagined my story. It was just a guy in a bar talking to the stranger on the next stool. I based the song on the crash of the construction industry in late-seventies
New Jersey, the recession and hard times that fell on my sister Virginia and her family. I watched my brother-in-law lose his good-paying job and work hard to survive without complaint. When my sister first heard it, she came backstage, gave me a hug and said, “That’s my life.” That’s still the best review I ever got. My beautiful sister, tough and unbowed, K-Mart employee, wife and mother
of three, holding fast and living the life that I ran away from with everything I had.

The River
crystallized my concerns and committed me to a style of writing I’d further explore in greater depth and detail on
Nebraska
. The album closes with a title stolen from a Roy Acuff song. In “Wreck on the Highway,” my character confronts death and an adult life where time is finite. On a rainy night
he witnesses a fatal accident. He drives home, and lying awake next to his lover, he realizes you have a limited number of opportunities to love someone, to do your work, to be a part of something, to parent your children, to do something good.

We finished recording and went to Los Angeles to mix the record at Chuck Plotkin’s Clover Studios. We mixed and we mixed and we mixed, and then we mixed
some more. We’d wanted to create a sound that was less controlled and we’d had, as ex-president George W. would say, catastrophic success! It was a mess. Bob Clearmountain, with neither the time nor the patience to endure our navel-gazing, had gracefully bowed out . . . years ago. Now everything we’d recorded was bleeding into everything else (those ceiling mikes worked!) and our team, including
the steadfast and talented Neil Dorfsman, who’d recorded and engineered everything but “Ties That Bind” and “Drive All Night,” didn’t quite have a clue about how to rein it all in to achieve a reasonable-sounding mix. As usual, I wanted everything, intelligibility and blazing noise. We spent months mixing the twenty songs we’d chosen and then one night, I invited my old partner Jimmy Iovine,
now a successful producer working at A&M Studios, to check it out and give his approval. Jimmy sat expressionless for the eighty minutes of the record. Then, as the final notes of “Wreck on the Highway” drifted out the window onto Santa Monica Boulevard, he looked at me and deadpanned, “When’re you going to record the vocals?”