Bruce (16 page)
By the start of the fall, Bruce and Tinker found a compromise: they’d play smaller shows with the five-piece core band, and then bring back the horns and singers for the more important gigs. But Tinker still didn’t see the wisdom in saturating the market with a lot of small club dates, so when Bruce decided to take a long-term residency at the Student Prince, they reached an impasse. Tinker would stay on as the band’s technical manager and sound designer. But his management days were over.
The five-piece Bruce Springsteen Band (Bruce, Van Zandt, Tallent, Sancious, and Lopez) held down the tiny Student Prince stage every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night from the start of September through the middle of October, and then called in the horns and singers to take the full band to a headlining show at the University of Richmond. But the good cheer of the reunion soon collapsed beneath the weight of mini-disasters that began moments after the band got into town. Lopez, Cherlin, and a few other band members got menaced by a knife-wielding drug addict. When the trumpet player bitched too much about West, who had promised to get the band more ordinary (and less treacherous) digs, the
superloyal Lopez socked the trumpet player in the lip, causing another abrupt resignation. Meanwhile, Delores Holmes got beaten up by her boyfriend, and when Bruce took her to the emergency room he wound up staying with her so long that they had to delay the show by hours.
So marked the beginning of the end of the big band. The five-piece Bruce Springsteen Band played regularly at the Student Prince through the middle of December, often airing out new Springsteen compositions. As ever, his songwriting pace seemed astonishing. But now the caliber of his work hit a new course, too. “I just started to drift back toward soul music, which was always very popular on the shore,” he says. “I kind of had run through my guitar phase and was now interested in ensemble playing and interested in grooves and things that swung more. I’d studied all those soul band leaders, and for me it was a natural sort of progression. From that you can see where the E Street Band came out of.”
Just give a listen to the songs that came to dominate the setlists of the Bruce Springsteen Band’s shows during the last weeks of 1971 and early months of 1972. “Down to Mexico” rides a tide of Sancious’s organ into a joyous groove that moves as smooth and fast as a car speeding southward on a cloud of dust. “All I Wanna Do Is Dance” rolls on chiming power chords, while other songs display Bruce’s expanding range as a lyricist. “Look Toward the Land” describes a dream world of gypsies, sailors, and Mississippi boatmen imagined by an outsider determined to find his way to the center of the circle. “I wanna be / stealing diamonds from the rich men to throw in the sea,” he sings. “Ballad of Jesse James,” alternately known as “Don’t You Want to Be an Outlaw,” sounds even more striking, given its place among the first of the many songs that Bruce (still dreaming of Brave Cowboy Bill) would set in the mythic Western frontier.
Bruce built a stunning performance piece out of a mostly improvised two-chord vamp that came to be known as “I Remember.” As captured in a club performance that winter, the tune comes off like an old-fashioned soul burner, rising from a whisper to a roar, only to fall back and then rise even higher as Bruce explores all the facets of passion, guilt, and hope. The song’s climax comes in the midst of a recitation by an increasingly ardent Bruce, describing a chance encounter with an ex-girlfriend, as the band keeps pace with the swelling fire in his voice: “And I said, ‘Darlin’
I
want
ya, I’m feelin’ so
bad.
’ An’ she said, ‘No, honey, I just can’t make it’ . . . But I
love
ya! ‘I just can’t make it!’
‘I love ya!!’ ‘Won’t you come on home?’
And she said, she said, ‘Baby, I’m comin’ home, I’m comin’ home, I’m comin’ home!’ ” Then he shouts it himself, his voice equal parts surprise and triumph.
“Baby’s coming home!”
The music rockets skyward again, Bruce’s own guitar going off like fireworks across a murky summer night.
• • •
As Bruce strained toward some kind of glorious future, his life still took place in a dying city. Long segregated along racial lines—the African-American community and other nonwhites lived almost exclusively on the town’s tumbledown west side—Asbury Park’s beachside businesses were notorious for keeping African-Americans from all but the lowest-echelon jobs. Tensions had been on a low boil for years, but the combination of a heat wave, cutbacks in social programs, and a jobs shortage touched off days of on-and-off rioting that burned significant pieces of the west side before turning on the city’s business district. The wave of destruction, and the racial and social conflicts that remained unresolved, reduced Asbury Park to a scorched shadow of its once-prosperous self. With retail businesses decamping for suburban malls and tourists content to stay on the turnpike until they found less troubled vacation spots, the town took on a scary, nihilistic chill.
By the fall of 1971, the gloom had taken root at the Upstage. “There were so many needles around, so much speed and heroin, that everyone I knew, except the guys with Bruce, had hepatitis C,” says Upstage staffer Bobby Spillane. “We’d shoot anything we could get into a needle. Beer, wine, meth.” The incursion of hard drugs, says Sonny Kenn, drained the club’s once-electric atmosphere until it felt positively woozy. “People used to come and dance, or at least focus on the music,” Kenn says. “But by the end, they were crashed out in front of the stage. The music was just a background to their own hallucinations.”
Meanwhile, Tom Potter’s drinking, and all the erratic behavior it inspired, had grown so corrosive that he lost interest in reining in staff weirdos such as Eddie Luraschi, who delighted in replacing the vintage cartoons Potter projected onto the wall between sets with a hardcore
porn movie that centered around a helpless woman being raped by an escaped convict. “It was sick, and there were girls in the crowd,” Albee Tellone says. “Guys would be going up to him, saying, ‘Dude, what the fuck’s wrong with you?’ But he’d be laughing, running it backward and forward. That wasn’t normal behavior, and Potter wasn’t sober enough to stop him.”
Potter let the Upstage’s lease expire at the end of October, with enough warning to plan a few closing shows. Bruce and his band showed up to jam the night away on October 29, but they couldn’t make it to the actual closing night on October 30: the Bruce Springsteen Band had already booked a show at Virginia Commonwealth University that night. Both of the band’s backing singers (Delores Holmes and newcomer Francine Daniels) performed, but the horns were history, and the singers wouldn’t return. Bruce’s dream of leading his own R&B-style rock ’n’ roll orchestra crumbled. “We had a lot of pretty good music,” he reflects. “It was just something where I built up a big audience playing heavier riff rock, prog rock. And I realized that’s what people like, and they didn’t like rhythm and blues. So that was what
I
liked, but it tore my audience to pieces, and that was the end of that.”
No one knew that Bruce had already established contact with a producer in New York who would soon devote himself, at the cost of virtually every other aspect of his life, to making this spindly guitar player from the most misbegotten stretch of New Jersey shoreline into the biggest rock ’n’ roll star on the planet. Which is the sort of thing a lot of big-city hustlers say to a lot of starry-eyed small-town kids. But there was a big difference between all those guys and Mike Appel. Because Mike Appel meant every syllable of what he said.
• • •
Tinker West may have washed his hands of his management duties, but that didn’t end his belief in his twenty-two-year-old ex-client, or his sense of responsibility for his well-being. Chatting with Pat Karwan, a music industry friend who played guitar with the critically reviled but popular bubblegum band the 1910 Fruitgum Company, West started talking about this incredible kid he’d been managing who needed to find a good, professional manager. Karwan mentioned a couple of industry pals
who were, in fact, looking for a talented kid to take on. Mike Appel and Jimmy Cretecos were young contract songwriters at Wes Farrell’s Pocketful of Tunes publishing company, he said. They had written a bunch of songs for Farrell’s central project, the imaginary band at the center of ABC’s popular
The Partridge Family
sitcom, and were looking to expand into production and management. It would certainly be worth setting up an introduction.
Given Karwan’s endorsement, and then a call from West, Appel agreed to meet with the unknown songwriter in the early evening of November 4, 1971. Tinker collected Bruce in his pickup truck and drove him up the Garden State Parkway to the midtown Manhattan corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Madison Avenue, where Appel (Cretecos wasn’t present for the first meeting) ushered the pair to the writer’s room in Farrell’s offices. They perched on chairs and talked while the ragamuffin musician propped an acoustic guitar across the thighs of his shredded jeans. West made his pitch to Appel, assuring Appel that Bruce wrote incredible songs, played a sizzling guitar, had a great voice, and exerted this kind of magical hold on audiences. And not just in his hometown; he’d seen it in cities all over the East Coast and in California too. Bruce, meanwhile, sat silently in his chair with West’s acoustic Martin D-45 clutched to his chest. Baby faced but every bit as astringent as Tinker, Appel asked the guitar player what had brought him to his office in particular. Bruce shrugged. These days he felt like a big fish in a small pond, he said. Now he had to get himself into the ocean, or else he’d never earn a shot at the bigtime.
Bruce gazed at the guitar’s fret board, hit a chord, and sang the first verse of “Baby Doll,” a surreal ballad about a girl so isolated from society that everyone assumed she couldn’t see, hear, or speak. “But I knew they were wrong,” Bruce sang. “You were just a silent one.” The next tune, “Song to the Orphans,” offered a bit more verve, but neither song struck Appel’s ears as anything close to a popular or critical hit. “There was no magic in them,” he says now. “I think it was hard work for him to write those songs. He knew he had to get some kind of direction.”
Bruce didn’t play anything else for Appel, which seems surprising, given the vast catalog of tunes he had already composed for Steel Mill and
the Bruce Springsteen Band. Still, Bruce kept all that to himself when Appel scolded him for not having more to share. “You’re gonna need a lot more than two songs to get an album deal,” he said. Still, Appel sensed something glimmering just beneath the skinny musician’s hoodie sweatshirt.
“That line about the deaf girl where they’re dancing to a silent band, that hit me,” he says. “And that other one [“Orphans”] had this line, ‘The axis needs a stronger arm / Can’t you feel your muscles play?’ Those words stuck in my craw. I remember I asked Bruce what it was about, and he said, ‘Hope! It’s about hope!’”
Appel hadn’t heard what he was after. But something in the things he didn’t say—and Appel’s suspicion that Bruce was holding back—intrigued him. And though he hated to drop his guard, Appel leavened his advice with a pep talk. “You’ve gotta keep writing,” he told Bruce as he packed up Tinker’s guitar and prepared to head home. Having a hot band would be fine if he wanted to stay on the New Jersey bar circuit. But in the big city, great bands were a dime a dozen. “If you want to break through,” Appel decreed, “you’ve gotta make it as a singer-songwriter. Write great songs, and then you’ll have yourself a real career.”
Everyone shook hands. Bruce said he’d be in California for the holidays and would concentrate on writing some songs during his break, then check back when he got back. “Terrific!” Appel said. “I’ll be here.”
Back on the Garden State Parkway, Tinker had one more piece of advice for his younger friend to consider. “The only thing I told him,” Tinker says, “was that if he was gonna sign with them, or anyone, he needed to get his own accountant. Just make sure every piece of paper they send you goes into your accountant’s file. But, of course, that wasn’t how he was working back then.”
• • •
In Asbury Park, the other members of the Bruce Springsteen Band wondered if they still belonged to a functioning group. After investing the first half of 1971 in building the new band’s sound and identity, the response had been underwhelming, to say the least. “Nothing was happening at the shore,” bassist Garry Tallent says. And maybe it had nothing to do with the group. The moribund, post-riot Asbury Park had killed off
the club circuit for everyone, most of all for groups that played original material. The group booked another six-weekend residency at the Student Prince—a boon just in time for the Christmas gift season. But the band members had been scuffing their shoes on the Prince’s stage since they were in high school. And now that they were adult professionals, the club paid them less than before. “Actually, the club owner didn’t pay us anything—he just let us set up and play,” Tallent says. “We had to put someone at the door and get a dollar apiece from the walk-ins. And that was the pay.”
Heading into the depths of winter, the situation felt too dire to face. And that’s when they decided to move, more or less in unison, to Richmond. The winter would be warmer there, and the town overflowed with music-loving college students, many of whom still remembered Steel Mill and its magnetic leader. The idea took root immediately, and the packing began within a few days.
At least that’s what Tallent, Van Zandt, and Sancious thought. Lopez stayed north in order to work in a boatyard. And Bruce, still the linchpin in everyone else’s career, had other things to do. “I don’t remember ever planning to move to Richmond,” he says. Not when he had this potential opportunity in New York. Though that wasn’t his only option. With the holidays coming up, he would soon make his annual pilgrimage to his family’s home in California. This time Bruce wasn’t sure if he would come back. With no lease to an apartment or house, and no more clothes and books than he could fit into a rucksack, Bruce had grown accustomed to having a wide-open life. Which suited his own indecisive nature perfectly. “I was always ambivalent about whatever I was doing,” he says. “Which is kind of funny to say because simultaneously I was the most committed person I’d ever run up against. But in the middle of that there was always this next thing. Always, if I’m
here
, I can’t be
there
. If I’m making
this
music, I can’t make
that
, you know.”
