Bruce (24 page)

“If I didn’t know [the music] was good, I never would have stuck with it,” Garry Tallent reflects. But his wife had a job, and so they had some money coming in. And after so many years of rehearsing, playing, and dreaming, finally something seemed to be happening. He could see it most clearly during the multinight gigs they played in Boston, Bryn
Mawr, or in any town where Bruce had either never played or never made much of an impact. But now things seemed to be swinging, slowly but surely, in their direction. Starting in midweek, they usually played the first show to sparse crowds. “Then we’d play, maybe do a little radio,” and as the word spread, the crowds thickened, and the response became more electric. “By the weekend, the place was packed and rockin’.”

When the audience included a critic from a major metropolitan newspaper, such as Neal Vitale from the
Boston Globe
, the buzz became even buzzier. “The show was a delight,” he wrote after seeing the band at Oliver’s nightclub. “It became obvious, as Wednesday night faded into Thursday morning, that this had been the sort of gig to be long remembered: the feeling was that of having seen a totally brilliant, unique, soon-to-be-giant artist in his early days before he becomes a star.”

A
LL PUBLICITY, UPBEAT-TO-RAVE REVIEWS, AND
executive belief aside, those freshly pressed copies of
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.
stayed on the shelves. An internal Columbia sales sheet from March 19, 1973, showed that seventy-four thousand copies had shipped to record stores, but with weekly sales at a trickle, most of those albums would be coming back as returns—liabilities on CBS’s quarterly docket. Meanwhile, Loudon Wainwright III, another singer-songwriter declared an inheritor to Dylan,
¹
sold three times as many records with his
Album III
, thanks largely to his novelty hit “Dead Skunk.” Six days earlier, in a memo dated March 13, CBS publicity executive Sal Ingeme urged his staff to double down on promoting Bruce’s neglected single, “Blinded by
the Light”: “I’m sure that you all know how important it is for us to exert a
major effort
in busting both the single and the album by this artist.”

When the group’s first West Coast tour, supporting blues singer-harpist Paul Butterfield’s new band, Better Days, got cancelled at the last moment (just after Bruce and band had made the marathon drive west), Columbia and Sam McKeith worked quickly to book enough replacement gigs to make the trip worthwhile. A Columbia-sponsored showcase at the Troubadour club on LA’s Santa Monica Boulevard had been planned to feature the newly signed rock-folk-harmony band Pan, which played the evening’s opening set. But even as the late-night undercard with only thirty minutes to play, and hobbled by a blown guitar amp that compelled him to switch to piano for most of the set, Bruce and the band turned a room full of chattering industry regulars into a rapt audience. To Peter Philbin, a young rock critic for the
Los Angeles Free Press
, the half hour with the New Jersey folk rocker felt like a revelation. When the set ended, Philbin trailed the band to the alley behind the club and introduced himself to the still-sweating Bruce. They talked for a few minutes, and when Philbin got home he pounded out an ecstatic review. “Never have I been more impressed with a debuting singer,” he wrote. And while noting the new artist’s similarities to Dylan, Philbin went on to declare Bruce “a total original” with “the remarkable ability to take his audience anywhere he wanted to go.”

Bruce and the band made a quick jaunt to Berkeley, then returned to LA to open for Blood, Sweat and Tears at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. When Philbin went backstage, Bruce and Appel both recognized him and beelined over to shake his hand and thank him for his review. Noticeably more relaxed than he’d been in the alley behind the Troubadour, Bruce got Philbin going on his favorite records and bands, and when it emerged that the writer was a Van Morrison aficionado with a serious passion for the ethereal
Astral Weeks,
Bruce’s eyes lit up: that was one of his favorite albums too! “Call me when you get to New York,” he rasped.

Swept up in the music and the prospect of becoming a part of such a talented musician’s blossoming scene, Philbin quit his job at the
Free Press
, packed up his stuff, and moved to New York. “I wanted to see more
of what this guy was about,” he says. “And once he lets you in, you’re in.” Philbin found a job with CBS Records’ international publicity offices, where he soon became one of Bruce’s most impassioned advocates in the company. A lucky break for Bruce, since he would soon need all the friends he could get.

• • •

Back on their home turf in mid-March, Bruce and company got back to the nightclub and college circuit, bouncing from the seven-night headline gig at Oliver’s in Boston to a variety of opening slots with the touring bands of the day. Sha Na Na here, Lou Reed there, then Stevie Wonder, then the Beach Boys. Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Connecticut, and then the occasional headline show at the Main Point and so on. The grind was relentless, the road ahead endless, so you had to be a believer. Not just in Bruce’s abilities, although that was obviously the point of entry. But more importantly, in the core beliefs that propelled him forward: that no matter how corrupt the world may seem, certain things remained pure; that these things deserved to be respected; and that rock ’n’ roll was the most important of these things. “There was no separation,” Tallent says. “We traveled together, we lived together; it was still kind of like all for one and one for all.”

The road, and the sacrifices that life required, drew them close enough to recognize, and see into, one another’s flaws and foibles. And make no mistake, the band didn’t just
look
like long-haired, largely unshaven eccentrics. They acted like it too. Consider the seraphim-cheeked Federici, with his endless schemes and Danny-centric perspective on personal responsibility. Tallent kept his thoughts to himself until something tripped his scarily detailed memory for virtually all historical facts regarding pop, rock, soul, and country music of the past seventy-five years. Meanwhile, Lopez’s volcanic approach to problem resolution only intensified with the pressure, exhaustion, and poverty of touring. The drummer never shied away from meting out two-fisted justice, and his reputation as a rough-and-ready brawler only got worse, Lopez says, when Bruce started calling him “Mad Dog” on stage. As he says, Lopez wouldn’t back down for anyone. Including Clemons, who figured that he had become Bruce’s go-to protector and foil, and bitterly resented anyone
who threatened his sense of being the first among equals in this musical enterprise. If they managed to keep it relatively cool for the time being, the air between the big men crackled.

Bruce’s own conflicts generally played out in the confines of his own thoughts. Already torn between his loyalty to his bandmates and his own creative independence, he also had to consider his commitment to the machine that had sprouted around him. If he could keep all that out of his mind, then came the visions, memories, and haunted spirits that played across his mind’s eye; the internal disturbance that had compelled him to cling to his guitar in the first place. So everyone else in the band knew to give the guy some breathing room. Until he went out to buy himself something for dinner. Because that absolutely, positively, required a physical intervention.

“Bruce was still eating like a teenager, buying all his food at the convenience store,” Albee Tellone says. “His idea of a meal was Ring Dings, Devil Dogs, and a Pepsi. We’d finally have to say, ‘Man, put that shit down. You need to have real food: A steak! Some fish! A salad!’” If Bruce put up an argument, they’d simply hijack him, with Clemons grabbing one elbow, Big Danny Gallagher gripping the other, and Tellone leading the way to a restaurant with real, human sustenance on the menu.

Appel, in his guise as stern but loving authority figure, wielded his power with such whip-cracking exuberance that he seemed determined to aggravate everyone he encountered. So while the manager spent most of his time in New York, agitating for publicity, gigs, and the greater good of Bruce Springsteen, his jaunts with the band were always memorable. Something about that drill sergeant’s hat put an extra edge in his rounds of the facility, barking orders and raining intimidation on everyone who stumbled into his path. “He just went into character with that hat,” Tallent says. “Marching around like a little Hitler. I may have called him that, even.” But Appel was also a charming, charismatic guy with a consuming devotion to his client. “It’s all true,” Tallent says. “And it was classic music biz stuff because he really believed in Bruce. He took out a second mortgage to keep the band on the road, all those things. So I don’t care what anyone says about Mike. He made it work.”

• • •

When Bruce felt uncomfortable playing at a certain venue or for a particular audience, he couldn’t resist the urge to follow his most subversive impulses. At one executive-packed show in New York City, he spent his entire set playing slide guitar with his microphone stand riding the strings. The squeal ricocheting around the room sounded more like a wounded cat than the eloquent solos he could play with two hands. “I brought about ten executives with me that night, and it was so awful he cleared the room,” Peter Philbin says. Flown to Los Angeles to play one of the A Week to Remember shows that Clive Davis produced to celebrate Columbia Records’ most important artists, Bruce started strong with a tight, bluesy “Spirit in the Night.” But given a muted reaction from the industry-heavy crowd, the famously electric performer became so subdued onstage that Davis cornered him later to give him the most basic of pointers: “You might want to consider using the vastness of the stage,” he said. “Because . . . you’re just
standing
there.”

Bruce never liked playing for people whose enthusiasms could be traced to the bottom line of their paychecks. That his own thirst for success had steered him to the point of performing at CBS’s annual sales convention in San Francisco curdled the artist’s blood. Hustled onstage in the smoky wake of the fireworks-and-lasers spectacle put on by the Edgar Winter Group, Bruce came out seething. Given a fifteen-minute limit for his set, he played more than a half hour, ending with the mini-epic “Thundercrack,” made even longer by a comic rap in the middle and a series of meandering solos that would have tried the patience of his most dedicated fans. Such as John Hammond, who glowed with frustration when he confronted his wayward artist backstage. “What are you doing, Bruce?” he cried. “You can’t follow bombast with something like
that
!” Bruce shrugged and left it at that.

It had less to do with Hammond than with the mix of ambition, appetite, and self-control roiling in Bruce’s stomach. What part of himself would he have to give up to be successful? And how would he feel later if the virtues he grasped so stubbornly turned out to be nothing more than animations of his own fears? “When you’re young and vulnerable, you listen to people whose ideas and direction may not be what you want,” Bruce told writer Robert Hilburn of the
Los Angeles Times
a few
years later. “If anyone ever told me I was going to make [my first] record [almost entirely] without guitars, I would have flipped out. I would not have believed him. But I did make an album like that.” And now the only thing worse than failing his new patrons was realizing he had surrendered so much of himself to become what they wanted him to be.

In the spring of 1973, Appel called Bruce with big news: Columbia’s smash pop/jazz group Chicago (for whom the Bruce Springsteen Band had opened in 1971 when they were still known as the Chicago Transit Authority) had offered them a slot as the featured opener on their summer tour of basketball arenas. Riding its first number one album and a three-year string of hit singles, Chicago stood solidly at the height of its career. And once the group’s manager-producer Jim Guercio saw Bruce play Max’s Kansas City during the summer of 1972, he had been eager to help however he could. “I thought he was fucking great,” Guercio says. When the time came to plan his group’s next national tour, Guercio made sure that Bruce got a shot at the opening slot. “I thought they’d all get along,” Guercio says.

Even if the pay ($1,000 a night) took them a step down from the $1,500 they’d been averaging since mid-February—and they were rarely invited to ride on the headliners’ private jet—Bruce and the band did share the higher grade of hotels, food, and drink accorded to chart-topping bands in the early seventies. “And the best part was the guys in the other band,” Bruce said in 1974. “They were great guys, just really, really real.” Hanging out together at night, the bands’ parties took place to the sound of Chicago bassist-singer Peter Cetera playing Polish music on Federici’s accordion. On one particularly rowdy night in Hartford, Connecticut, a group of Chicago guys took Lopez and one or two other band members on a trek to find some friendly women that the Chicago guys knew from a previous visit to the city. The whole mob, plus Bruce and the rest of his guys, spent the rest of the night having a giggly, wee-hours party in the hotel pool.

The shows themselves weren’t always as convivial. Given the constraints of union rules and the crowd’s patience, Bruce had to boil his usual ninety-minute set down to a tight forty, with no time for encores. Bruce started the tour with full access to Chicago’s sound and video systems, but after a night or two, Chicago’s crew reined in the volume. They switched off
the video screens a night or two after that, reducing the impact of Bruce’s performance to a dull ripple off in the distance. “I did that tour because I’d never played big places before,” he told writer Paul Williams in 1974. But the nightly displays of audience lassitude rattled Bruce’s confidence. “I went insane during that tour,” he said. “The worst state of mind I’ve ever been in, I think, and just because of the playing conditions for our band.”