Born to Run (36 page)

Jimmy was subtly telling me you couldn’t hear a fucking thing. The
vocals were all but buried beneath what we thought was our masterwork of garage noise and were nearly unintelligible. Sitting there hearing them anew through Jimmy’s unbiased ears, I had to admit most of the mixes sucked. I cried . . . really. Mixmaster Chuck Plotkin was doing his mightiest around the clock but once again, WE DID NOT KNOW HOW TO MIX WHAT WE’D RECORDED! Charlie was one of the sickest
men I’d ever met when it came to obsessive-compulsive work habits. Some of our mixes remained on the board for three, four days, even a week, as we fussed, mussed and murdered one another in a vain attempt to capture all worlds. We had mixes with three-digit take numbers. We were violently frustrated and puzzled, cursing our brethren, releasing records and touring like normal folk and finally beseeching
God himself. Why us, Lord, why? In the end, Charlie’s second or third pass through our carousel of twenty tunes brought victory of sorts. We’d done it. Of course, I recollected that Bob Clearmountain had mixed “Hungry Heart,” our soon-to-be top five (and only) smash, in thirty seconds, but we could never have worked with Bob. HE WAS TOO FUCKING FAST! We needed to ruminate, contemplate, intellectualize
and mentally masturbate ourselves into a paralytic frenzy. We had to punish ourselves until we’d done it . . . OUR WAY! And in those days, on E Street, our way was only one way . . . THE HARD WAY! Like Smith Barney, we made our money the old-fashioned way, we
earned
it, and then we burned it, throwing it away on countless upon countless fruitless hours in a huge, wandering technical circle jerk.

I later realized we weren’t making a record, we were on an odyssey, toiling in the vineyards of pop, searching for complicated answers to
mystifying questions. Pop may not have been the best place for me to look for those answers, or it may have been perfect. It had long ago become the way I channeled just about any and all information I received from living on planet Earth. Either way, that’s
how I used my music and my talents from the very beginning. As a salve, a balm, a tool to tease out the clues to the unknowable in my life. It was the fundamental why and wherefore of my picking up the guitar. Yes, the girls. Yes, the success. But answers, or rather those clues, that’s what kept waking me in the middle of the night to roll over and disappear into the sound hole of my six-string cipher
(kept at the foot of my bed) while the rest of the world slept. I’m glad I’ve been handsomely paid for my efforts but I truly would’ve done it for free. Because I had to. It was the only way I found momentary release and the purpose I was looking for. So, for me, there weren’t going to be any shortcuts. It’s a lot to lay on a piece of wood with six steel strings and a couple of cheap pickups
attached, but such was the “sword” of my deliverance.

Bob’s near-mystical talents would come in very handy, very shortly, as we lumbered toward
Born in the USA
. But for the time being, I’d need to content myself sunning away my studio tan by the pool at the Sunset Marquis, as other bands recorded, hit the road and came back to record anew. I watched jaws drop when I told my fellow travelers I
was still working on the same record as a year previous, no end in sight. Oh, the road, the road. How I longed for anything but another night in the studio. From Clover’s small lounge, I’d stare out onto the traffic cruising Santa Monica Boulevard and dream of a life where one might actually live. I wanted to be free, unburdened of my obsession with writing and recording my dreams of people seizing
life while refraining from doing so myself.

Finally, I surrendered to the inevitability of doing it the slow way, sort of. The road, its freedoms and life itself would have to wait. I was a studio mole, squinting in the dawn’s sunlight after another night’s fruitless or fruitful search. It was all right. I realized for now I needed to work like the tortoise, not the hare. Bob’s shiny, beautiful
glassy spaces and compressed
power would’ve cut off some of the record’s amateurish rough edges.
The River
wanted and needed them. It wasn’t supposed to sound too good, just ragged and right. Our process was both perversely disciplined and indulgent. It broke me financially and almost spiritually, but in the end, and as I hear it today, we got the right sound for that record.

For an album cover,
of course, after many false starts, not-quite-right photo sessions (too slick, too studied, too flattering, too . . . ?) I chose another Frank Stefanko portrait from our
Darkness
shoot, scrawled some B-movie title type on top, and miraculously, we were done . . . just in time. In the last weeks of recording, Jon informed me that almost a decade after being signed to Columbia, several million-selling
albums and extensive touring, I had but twenty thousand dollars to my name. The clock had run out. Time to make some money.

Break Time

And hopefully have some fun. There was a short breather after the record was finished and I hung around in LA for a while trying to relax and come down from what had been another torturous, mind-bending experience. I casually saw a few local women, lightly slipping
around on my gal from back home. My pal Jimmy Iovine was living a life surrounded by Playboy Bunnies and would soon marry the wonderful Miss Vicki, lawyer, author, entrepreneur and to this day Patti’s and my beloved friend. A few of the girls, all of them quite sweet, invited me to the Playboy Mansion, but I didn’t like the trade-off. I had something that I thought meant something and I wanted
to protect it. For me, it wasn’t the sex, it wasn’t the drugs . . . it was the ROCK ’N’ ROLL! I’d stayed in New Jersey, I didn’t hang out, I wasn’t a get-your-picture-taken-coming-out-of-the-hippest-nightclub scenester. That other shit was all the stuff I thought ruined it for my old heroes! It made you feel distant from them. It took you out of it. I didn’t really think I was that different from
my fans except for some hard work, luck and natural ability
at my gig. They didn’t get to go to the Playboy Mansion, so why should I? Those I mentioned it to, however, said, “You could’ve gone to the Playboy Mansion and you didn’t? What the fuck is wrong with you?” My attitude was, who cares what’s going on at the Playboy Mansion?! That’s not where the shit’s going down. That’s not
real
 . . .
I deemed it all too frivolous for the stakes I was playing for. And so, I talked myself out of a perfectly good time, as over the long course of my life it has been my wont to do. I had my principles, I wasn’t wrong and I knew just what I was doing, but still, a part of me always wished on occasion I hadn’t followed them so severely! Oh, the road not taken.

In truth, offstage I never really had
the ease or ability to enjoy myself very freely. Don’t get me wrong. I had high spirits for days and a happiness, the bright brother of my depression, that was straight out of the Zerilli fountain of youth, but abandon . . . not so much. Sobriety became a religion of sorts to me and I mistrusted those who treated the lack thereof as something to rally around and celebrate. For whatever reason,
I carried the short stick up my ass with a certain amount of pride. Maybe I’d worked too hard for stability and needed it more than free license. The dumb and destructive shit I saw done in the name of people trying to “let it all hang out,” to be “free,” was legion. I remember my pals and me chasing a friend down a mountainside one ten-degree Virginia morning as he ran half-naked and screaming underneath
the spell of some bad acid he’d taken during our night camping out. I was embarrassed by his exposure. I was much too reserved and secretive to throw it all out there like that. I was never gonna get a first-class ticket to see God the easy way on the Tim Leary clown train.

Still, I have to admit I looked at oblivion with an untrustworthy but longing eye. I half admired what I perceived to be
my friend’s foolish courage. I was always proud but also embarrassed by being so in control. Somewhere I intuited that if I crossed that line it would bring more pain than relief. This was just the shape of my soul. I never cared for any kind of out-of-control “stonedness” around me. It brought back too many memories
of unpredictable and quietly volatile evenings at home. Evenings of never knowing
where I stood. I could never be completely at ease, or relaxed, as a young man in my own home. Later I promised myself, never again. As I ventured into the world, if that was going on and it wasn’t my scene, I’d leave, and if it was my scene, I was understanding, but beyond a point, you’d leave.

I set boundaries within the band. I didn’t get in your business unless I saw it was damaging what
we were trying to accomplish or hurting you. I believe those boundaries are one of the reasons that forty-four years later, most of us are alive, standing shoulder to shoulder onstage, content and happy to be there.

Still, my overweening need for control limited the amount of simple pleasure I’d allow myself. It was just an unfortunate part of my DNA. Work? Give me a shovel and I’ll dig straight
through to China before the sun comes up. That was the upside of being a control freak, a bottomless well of anxious energy that, when channeled correctly, was a mighty force. It served me well. When the crowd files back out of the theater, you, my friend, will be exhausted, hop in your Rolls, drive over to the Playboy “manse” and have a late-night toot and psych session with Dr. Leary, Hef and
Misses June, July and August. I’ll be digging my hole under a bloody moon. But, come the morning, that fucking hole is DUG! . . . And I’m sleeping like a baby—a troubled baby, but a baby.

This is why drinking was good for me. I never drank for the pleasures of alcohol. As the great singer and my road buddy Bobby King once said to me upon my request for his choice of poison at a tour stop hotel
bar, “I don’t like none of it, so I’ll drink any of it.” My feelings exactly, and as a lightweight, four or five shots in me and I’d be the life of the party, groping and flirting with anyone in sight before coming to my senses, filled with the morning’s regrets and a guilt I so single-mindedly pursued. Once high, I couldn’t do something to embarrass myself quick enough. Still, being able to go
there after so many young years of caution meant something to me. It
gave me an ass-backward confidence that I could handle it and not turn into my dad. I could be foolish and embarrassing but never intentionally punishing or cruel, and I had a lot of fun. Those who suffered my boorish behavior were usually my close compadres, so I was amongst friends. It unleashed a certain happiness in me: the
furniture went out the door, the rug got rolled up, the music was blasted and there was dancing, dancing, dancing.

The one thing I did learn was that we all need a little of our madness. Man cannot live by sobriety alone. We all need help somewhere along the way to relieve us of our daily burdens. It’s why intoxicants have been pursued since the beginning of time. Today I’d simply advise you
to choose your methods and materials carefully or not at all, depending upon one’s tolerance, and watch the body parts!

I used to see my rock heroes enjoying their great fortunes and say, “Damn, I can’t wait ’til I get there.” Then, when I got there, the shoe only occasionally fit. So much of the raw, dangerous but beautiful hedonism, the exultant materialism, of rock ’n’ roll felt naked and
without purpose for me. I have since come a long way, live high on the hog, yacht around the Mediterranean (who doesn’t?) and private-plane myself between dental appointments. But I’ve still never regularly quite had the mojo to freely let the “
bon temps rouler
.” Except . . . onstage. There, strangely enough, exposed in front of thousands, I’ve always felt perfectly safe, to just let it all go.
That’s why at our shows you can’t get rid of me. My pal Bonnie Raitt, upon visiting me backstage, used to smilingly shake her head at me and say, “The boy has it in him, and it’s got to come out.” So there, with you, I’m near free and it’s party ’til the lights go out. I don’t know why, but I’ve never gotten anywhere near as far or as high as when I count the band in and feel what seems like all
life itself and a small flash of eternity pulsing through me. It’s the way I’m built. I’ve long ago resigned myself to the fact that all of us can’t be the Rolling Stones, God bless ’em . . . even if we can.

FORTY-ONE

HITSVILLE

We had a hit. A real one. “Hungry Heart” went top ten, doubled our album sales and brought to our live shows . . . women. Thank you, Jesus! Up ’til now, I’d had a hard-core following of young men who made up a high percentage of our live audience, but “Hungry Heart” brought in the girls and proved Top 40 radio’s power to transform your audience. Even more than going coed,
the
River
tour was most significant for our return to Europe after a five-year absence. We were nervous, with the bitter taste of previous battles still in our mouths, but Frank Barsalona, legendary head of Premier Talent, our touring agency, convinced us there was an audience waiting there if we would go over and win it.

First stop, Hamburg! That’s where the Beatles became made men, at the Star-Club!
I ran into Pete Townshend a few days before we were to ship out and he added to my pre-tour jitters by telling me the Germans were the worst audience in the world. A few days later we landed in Germany and were lodged in a hotel just blocks away from a midcity carnival that looked
straight off the boardwalk. I wandered over to calm myself and steady my legs on foreign soil and follow it up with
an evening on the Reeperbahn, training grounds and classroom of the Fab Four. I think the Star-Club was still there, but this part of town was now mainly known as the center of the sex market in Hamburg. Our “virgin” eyes were once again treated to the wide-open sexual bartering taking place, all completely legal. I found myself wandering with my cohorts through an underground garage lit only by
black light, where hundreds of women of all shapes, colors, nationalities and sizes stood, waiting to make a fool out of you. I observed patrons make brief “conversation,” strike a deal and be led to the rear, where small closetlike rooms were lined up side by side. I found the women provocative but intimidating and at the tender age of thirty (!) I couldn’t quite get myself to make believe it was
all right. I returned to the hotel for some beer and bratwurst.