Bruce (19 page)

Born into the social and economic privilege reserved for descendants of the Vanderbilt family, the prep-school-and-Yale-educated Hammond re-created himself as a stalwart advocate of civil rights and every other form of populism. A rail-thin, tremulous fellow—the toll of a childhood bout with scarlet fever that had weakened his heart—Hammond had been a jazz obsessive since the 1920s when he scaled the walls of the exclusive Hotchkiss School to take a commuter train to Harlem’s jazz and blues clubs. His fixation led to an early career as a music critic, which ultimately landed him his dream job as a talent scout and artists-and-repertoire executive, the artists’ in-house advocate, advisor, and controller, for Columbia Records.

Unfailingly polite, particularly to musicians and their ilk, Hammond still spoke his mind when he smelled mediocrity or cynicism. “I’d sit next to him [at company meetings], and when they played a record he didn’t like, he’d whisper to me, loudly, ‘
What a piece of fuckin’ shit
that
is
!’” says then junior executive (later Columbia president) Al Teller. “But he was truly democratic, a music junkie, and he’d listen to anything that was presented to him.” And if what he heard appealed to him, Hammond wouldn’t hesitate to take it on as his next crusade.

But he still hadn’t quite encountered a force as relentless as Appel, who led his client into Hammond’s cluttered realm at precisely eleven
o’clock on the chosen day. They all shook hands, and Hammond gestured to the album-stacked chairs in his office. When they were seated, Appel launched into his blistering sales spiel. “So you’re the man who is supposed to have discovered Bob Dylan,” he said by way of hello. “Now, I wanna see if you’ve got any ears, ’cause I’ve got somebody better than Dylan.”

“This,” Hammond wrote in his 1977 autobiography, “was rather more belligerent than the situation seemed to call for.” Bruce, while thoroughly aghast, could only listen. “I went into a state of shock,” he told writer, biographer, and friend Dave Marsh a few years later. “I’m shrivelin’ up and thinkin’, ‘Mike, please give me a break. Let me play a damn song!’” When Appel paused for a breath, Hammond shot back. “I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, but you’re succeeding in making me dislike you,” he said. Then he turned to Bruce and asked him to play a song. Bruce snatched his guitar and launched into the opening bars of “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City.” Instantly, Hammond took note of the young man’s powerful way with a guitar. Then he tuned into the lyrics. “I heard immediately that he was a born poet,” he wrote. “I kept a lid on my excitement.”

Bruce played a few others—“Growin’ Up,” “Mary Queen of Arkansas,” and “If I Was the Priest”—and Hammond’s enthusiasm surged. “I didn’t want Appel to see how impressed I was,” he wrote, recalling how he nodded at the young guitarist and asked him to keep playing. The listening session went on for what Hammond recalled as two full hours. Afterward, Hammond nodded and asked Bruce if he’d be interested in playing a showcase set in a New York club that night, to show how he worked with an audience. Mike and Bruce said that wouldn’t be a problem, so Hammond picked up his phone and booked an early-evening slot at the Gaslight AuGoGo club in Greenwich Village, somewhere in the dead time between Happy Hour and blues singer Charlie Musselwhite’s show set to start at nine o’clock.

Bruce and Appel floated back to the producer’s temporary office on West Fifty-fifth, where Appel, Cretecos, and Spitz worked their phones to spread the news of the evening’s show, hoping to attract as many friends, fans, and sympathizers as possible. Meanwhile, Bruce went to Spitz’s
Greenwich Village pad to catch a nap in the living room hammock. When Spitz got home at five o’clock he loaned Bruce his handmade Martin D-35 acoustic and escorted him to the Gaslight, where a small crowd watched the unknown singer-songwriter climb onto the stage and crack a few jokes while he tuned up.

Playing solo on the same stage that helped propel Bob Dylan a decade earlier, he went back to the songs that had lit up Hammond’s eyes that morning—“It’s Hard to Be a Saint” and “If I Was the Priest,” to name a couple—only now invested with the energy and charisma that always flowed through him on the stage. Even without his electric guitar and the forum for the lightning-fingered riffs with which he filigreed his band songs, Bruce’s instrumental skill shone through. After a half hour, Hammond gave Appel the signal. “Get him off,” he said, “and let’s go.”

Standing outside the club, Hammond told Bruce that his life was about to change. “You’re going to be a Columbia recording artist,” Spitz remembers Hammond saying. There would be a few steps between here and there—an audition with Columbia president Clive Davis, for instance—but Hammond promised to guide Bruce through the entire process, employing all of his juice and experience into making sure that the entire company would be aware of who he was and what he could do. They’d take the next step at the CBS building the following afternoon, when Hammond, with Appel serving as coproducer, would record enough demos to fill an acetate demonstration record he could circulate around the company. When Bruce walked into the studio with his guitar around his neck, the session flowed easily. “I just stood up and sang the best songs I had,” Bruce recalled in 1998. “I felt very confident about what I was doing . . . and nervous at the same time.” When Davis returned to the office a day or two later, Hammond appeared at his door holding a freshly cut acetate disc of the audition, laid it on his office turntable, and dropped the needle. Impressed enough to ask Hammond to schedule a face-to-face audition, Davis greeted Bruce warmly a few days later and asked him to take out his guitar.

Davis sat up in his chair before the first song was over. “I thought he was very special,” he says. “I was very impressed with his writing and imagery.” For while he could hear parallels between the young
singer-songwriter and Dylan, Columbia’s president was even more excited to hear how Springsteen stood apart from the other songwriter. And as Bruce’s songs visited the gritty scenes from his real and imagined worlds in New Jersey and New York City, Davis felt drawn into a tableau that was as exciting as it was unexplored. “The subjects he was writing about, the poetry that made up his work, was very different from Dylan,” he says. When it was over, Davis told Hammond to sign young Mr. Springsteen to Columbia Records as quickly as possible.

The finished contract arrived at Appel’s office a few days later. Bruce took his copy back to Asbury Park to give it a thorough reading. Unable to parse the legalese on his own, he sat on the floor of his unfurnished apartment with Robin Nash, a friend from the Jersey Shore music circles, reading the vital document by candlelight, because he couldn’t afford to pay his electric bill. “We went through it word by word,” she wrote in a memoir published on a fan page. “I was looking up all of the big words in a dictionary.”

The next day, Bruce called his parents’ home in San Mateo and told his mother the good news. Pam Springsteen, just finishing fifth grade, recalls hearing the exchange from Adele’s perspective. “Mom was saying, ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh . . . really?
Really?
Well, what are you going to change your name to?’ Silence. Then: ‘You’re
not
changing your name?’

“My mom was very excited,” Pam says. “And I think my dad was pretty excited too.”

More than that, Bruce’s move into the big time (in Doug’s estimation) prompted the start of a gradual but distinct shift in his conception of the world and its possibilities. “That,” she remembers, “was when he began to say, ‘From now on, I’m never going to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t do with their lives.’”

• • •

Now Bruce had a new set of advisors and helpers, all of them full of their own expectations and rock-solid advice. They didn’t always agree, and it soon became clear that the brawl-ready Appel honed a growing rivalry with the courtly insider who had given them the break he and Bruce had craved so desperately. And not because he and Hammond had different ideas about Bruce’s work and career. Still stung by his experience with
Dee Anthony and Sir Lord Baltimore, Appel couldn’t help but be suspicious of anyone who might threaten his own primacy in Bruce’s career.

The contracts that Appel produced for Bruce to sign in the next weeks and months all established Appel and/or Laurel Canyon Ltd. as full partners in the artist’s creative and financial careers. The first set of papers outlined a recording contract that committed Bruce to work exclusively with the production team of Appel and Cretecos. So when the time came to sign with a record label, that deal would be between the record company and Laurel Canyon, in exchange for exclusive rights to Bruce’s recorded music. The next contract made Laurel Canyon and its music publishing branch, Sioux City Ltd., 100 percent owners of the songs Bruce wrote. Which sounds outrageous, particularly for that era in the recording industry. But statutes and industry standards funneled about half of a song’s proceeds back to its writer-performer, which would then divide Bruce’s and Appel’s share to something closer to fifty-fifty. Still, a generous percentage for Appel, who would also retain control over how and where the songs would be reprinted and reperformed.

The management contract, which Bruce stopped short of signing for several months, also entitled Appel to 50 percent of Bruce’s earnings. “I was under the impression that Elvis Presley and Colonel Tom Parker had a fifty-fifty management arrangement,” Appel explained later. When his lawyer, Jules Kurz, noted that Parker’s share of Presley’s career was actually closer to 25 percent, Appel revised the contract to give Bruce the heavier half of a 75-25 split.

Even given his foot-dragging, Bruce signed all of the contracts without even a glance from an independent lawyer. Which seems ridiculous, but from Bruce’s perspective, trusting Appel’s word that these were fair and equitable contracts was a matter of honor. They had already shaken hands, and Mike had been the first to leap, making his commitment in blood by quitting his job, going deeply into debt, and throwing his young family’s security into limbo. All because he believed in Bruce and his music. So as far as Bruce was concerned, he had to extend the same faith to Appel. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t deserve to be treated fairly.

For now they were all in it together: Appel, Bruce, and Cretecos. Brothers united to give Bruce and his music the audience, acclaim, and
rewards it, and they, deserved. Everyone had his own job to do and judgments to make, so Bruce didn’t raise an eyebrow when the first wave of record company money fueled Laurel Canyon’s move to its own suite of offices just around the corner on East Fifty-fifth—in the same building that housed Dylan’s eccentric but notoriously effective manager, Albert Grossman. And if Appel wanted to spend a chunk of the advance on an office-furniture-shopping jaunt to Macy’s, Bruce had no problem with that either. He also didn’t care (or notice) how much an office suite’s wall-to-wall carpeting, desks, chairs, sofas, and coffee tables might cost. And if his blood-oath manager felt like following Grossman’s bizarro example by installing a King Arthur–style throne in order to peer down at anyone who entered his personal sanctum, well, that just seemed cool.

More than cool. Closer to life-affirming. Because for Bruce, after so many years of playing to the same fans in the same small circuit of New Jersey and Virginia clubs and colleges—rarely trying to break into the more competitive New York market—Appel had swept him up like a showbiz superhero. He kicked down doors. He turned naysayers into fools and made the powerful lick his hand. When Bruce looked at Appel, he saw an alter ego: a relentless fighter with music in his soul and the whole world in his sights. The $35 a week in salary, rent, and money for a new guitar and other occasional indulgences seemed like more than enough. He was on his way.

Now everything Bruce did mattered. Directed to list all the songs he’d written, Cretecos and Spitz spent weeks helping Bruce record professional-caliber demos that they could use to copyright all of his work. Most of these songs were never released in original form, although some (such as “Circus Town” and “Vibes Man”) would lend components to, or evolve into, other completed songs. In the titles alone, Bruce’s fascination for outsized characters and gothic imagery fairly explodes from the page. From “Balboa vs. the Earthslayer” to “Calvin Jones & the 13th Apostle” to “Black Night in Babylon,” the allusions are as explosive as the daring of their author: a twenty-two-year-old already addressing the fundamental riddles of faith, war, God, life, and death.

And as Bruce confronted the darker currents guiding his artistry, the memories and visions felt just as piercing as when they had first abraded
his skin. The writing process afforded some comfort—the rush of catharsis and then a sense of mastery over the tumult. But the work was always harrowing, the pleasures fleeting. And still Bruce craved connection, needed the balm of the lights and the energy that flooded from beyond the rim of the stage.

In mid-April Freehold record store owner Victor “Igor” Wasylczenko hired Bruce to play an acoustic set at a concert he was staging at Freehold Township High School, a crosstown rival to the Freehold Regional High School Bruce had attended. Visiting with Wasylczenko a few days before the show, Bruce walked the streets of his old neighborhood for the first time in months. He’d already been gone for three years. A long stretch for such a young man. But back on those same sidewalks, stepping gingerly up Randolph Street, taking a moment to lay a hand on the rough bark of the beech tree that still marked the place of his first childhood home, it was like he’d never left. Like he never would, no matter where he was or how long he stayed away.

Appearing unannounced at the concert (Steel Mill’s regular opening act Sunny Jim had signed on as the headlining act, and he had no intention of stealing their glory), Bruce switched off between guitar and piano, working through an array of new songs, including several destined to become mainstays in his recording and performing career. But the one song that hit the audience the hardest—that left them with mouths hanging open and arms limp at their sides—would never be heard again.