Bruce (25 page)

Demoralized and angry, Bruce cornered Appel and told him he would never again play an extra in some other band’s superstar tour. “From now on, we’re a club act, and we’ll work our way up from there.” As Peter Philbin says, Bruce’s stand was both gutsy and foolish. “Chicago was as big as they came,” he says. “When a new act that isn’t in favor with anyone just walks off their tour—well, that doesn’t go down well with the label. And Bruce had a number of those incidents.”

Worse, he had just lost his most important supporter at the company. Despite the golden reputation that Clive Davis enjoyed in the rest of the music industry, the years of internecine struggle with former president Goddard Lieberson, among others on the Columbia/CBS executive floors, caught up with him in the final days of May 1973, when Davis got fired amid allegations that he had misused company money to pay for his son’s bar mitzvah. A lot of accusations, most involving crimes much more sinister than the cost of a boy’s bar mitzvah reception, had torn through CBS offices that spring. But for Bruce, the threat was more simple. Without Davis backing him up in the top office, his position at Columbia had started to crumble.

• • •

When they had a long drive to the next gig, Bruce liked to ride with Albee Tellone in the equipment van. Perched on the passenger seat, he had the space to open his notebook and let his imagination wander through the world that flashed past the windshield.

Everywhere, fragments of stories jumped out from the storefronts, the street signs, and the faces walking the sidewalk, chatting on the corner, and carrying a wading pool out of a small town Woolworth’s. When they passed a roadside strip club announcing the return of a popular dancer, Bruce wrote “Kitty’s Back” on the page, building a door to an urban noir of dealers, schemers, and faithless, irresistible women.

Eyes open wide mile after mile, Bruce traced a vision of modern American life as viewed by the perpetual passerby. All of it reminded him of his own life. “We spent hours talking about everything,” Tellone says. “My ex-wife, his ex-girlfriends, music, and songwriting.” When he focused on the words he’d scratched onto the page, Bruce often collided with the disengaged student he had been in high school. “He needed the basics,” Tellone recalls. “He was catching up, he had his thesaurus and rhyming dictionary with him, and he’d find words and ask if they worked in this or that context.”

Bruce didn’t read a lot of books, so he used movies as tutorials on narrative writing, dramatic pacing, and the significance of the characters’ voices and relationships. He looked to the directors’ visual imagery to see how one well-shot scene could reveal ideas and themes that the dialogue could never carry. Bruce found a rich conceptual vein in a 1959 Audie Murphy Western about a pair of frontier teenagers whose first journey to the big city nearly corrupts them both. Glimpsing himself in their story, Bruce wrote the film’s title into his book:
The Wild and the Innocent
. Which became all the more vibrant when he saw the same story reflected in the faces of the musicians who accompanied him from town to town. “There were just a lot of characters around; everybody had nicknames. A lot of street life, and the boardwalk,” Bruce says. “I was drawing a lot from where I came from. I’m going to make this gumbo, and what’s my life?” Bruce already knew the answer to that question. “Well, New Jersey. New Jersey is interesting. I thought that my little town was interesting, the people in it were interesting people. And everyone was involved in the E Street shuffle: the dance you do every day just to stay alive. That’s a pretty interesting dance, I think. So how do I write about that? I found it very compelling, and I also wanted to tell my story, not somebody else’s story.”

Recording sessions for Bruce’s second album began at the 914 Sound Studios in mid-May. Given how crucial touring was to the group’s week-to-week income, the sessions were squeezed into dayslong increments through late September. The postmidnight recording (so aggravating to Hammond, who figured Appel was trying to keep him away) was actually part of a scheme hatched with chief engineer Louis Lahav to record for
free while studio owner Brooks Arthur was home in bed. The arrangement worked perfectly until Arthur arrived unexpectedly one night and realized what was going on. “He wasn’t happy,” Tallent says. “Let’s put it that way.”

Working on the cheap had become second nature. While Bruce and the rest of the band made the daily two-hour drives to and from Blauvelt for the sessions, Lopez and Federici set up a tent in the studio’s parking lot and camped out. When David Sancious got tired of Richmond and moved back into his mother’s house in Belmar, New Jersey, Bruce invited him to rejoin the band on piano, thus relegating Federici to the organ, accordion, and other incidental keyboards. None of which pleased the Phantom, particularly when his younger colleague came on like a section leader. “He’d get up and come over to me and say, ‘You shouldn’t play that, you should play this,’” Federici told writer Robert Santelli in 1990. “That really disturbed me. So we didn’t have a good rapport.” What they both shared, however, was a dedication to the band and its leader.

Bruce walked into the studio with a thick stack of songs, many of them well polished from months of live performances. But as the album found its voice, it resisted some of Bruce’s most reliable showstoppers. Crowd favorite “Thundercrack” fell out of consideration early, along with “Zero and Blind Terry,” “Seaside Bar Song,” “Santa Ana,” and the one song everyone agreed sounded like a killer single: Bruce’s smoldering R&B ballad, “The Fever.” All sacrificed for the same all-important yet perfectly ambiguous reason: they didn’t fit into the movie Bruce imagined himself writing and directing. Set partly on the Jersey Shore and partly in the New York City he’d discovered—and then reimagined as the setting for his own variations on
West Side Story
—the album became a series of stories about liberation: through music, through friends, through lovers, through the realization that even a junkman like Fred Springsteen can walk with his head held high and a song on his lips.

Given Bruce’s renewed passion for full-band rock ’n’ roll, it’s fitting that the first moments of the album’s opening song, the not-quite-title track “The E Street Shuffle,” feature a horn section tuning up to play. Quickly organized, they play a brief intro to a high-spirited R&B guitar riff (lifted from 1963’s “The Monkey Time,” by Chicago soul singer Major Lance) establishing the groove for the horn-fortified band to leap
into. From there, Bruce describes a typical night in the lives of the street kids and hustlers populating this mythical E Street
²
on party night. Nothing all that significant happens. But everyone finds his or her way to the party, and when the band kicks into gear, the revelers whoop, converge on themselves, and dance. Horns blaring, rhythm section gliding at top speed while the clavinet bops and that guitar riff slinks and slides, the building lifts off its foundations, and the entire enterprise floats skyward.

By the end, the tune’s main characters, Power Thirteen and Little Angel, slip away from the dance floor, “and they move on out down to the scene.” Perhaps to the quieter end of the boardwalk, where the acoustic guitar-wielding narrator of “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” looks past the carnival lights and corn dog haze for something more substantial. He’s already tasted the forbidden love of his boss’s daughter, but whether escape is a real option or just another illusion remains a mystery.

From there the adventure abandons the shore for downtown New York City for “Kitty’s Back,” which strings its Tom Waits–meets–
The Aristocats
lyrics across sprawling instrumental jams highlighted by the first and last epic guitar solo Bruce captured in the recording studio.

Flip to the album’s second side, and the opening piano chimes of “Incident on 57th Street,” in which Spanish Johnny and Puerto Rican Jane
³
find a lovers’ respite in the midst of gang warfare, police incursions, and a noirish heat wave. Here liberation comes in the vague promise of another part of town “where paradise ain’t so crowded.” But as in Shakespeare’s original, paradise doesn’t last: Johnny vanishes in search of easy money, leaving Jane with the shakiest of promises: “We may walk until the daylight, maybe.”

The album’s closing song, the nearly ten-minute ballad “New York City Serenade,” brings the album back to the big city, where even the street hustlers teeter between grandeur and nonexistence. David Sancious’s Tchaikovsky-meets-Mingus piano intro sets the dramatic tone
of the piece before dissolving into a pattern of simple chords joined by Bruce’s acoustic guitar and the slap and swoon of congas, played by Bruce’s boyhood neighbor, Richard Blackwell. Singing in a near whisper, Bruce describes his own version of
West Side Story
, where the rumble is for dignity and the small pleasures that come with being alive. So while a vibes player in a jazz club might indulge his own glorious melancholy onstage, he can’t rival the grace of the trash collector patrolling the street with satin on his back and a song on his lips. “Listen to your junk man, listen to your junk man,” Bruce whispers. “He’s singing, he’s singing, he’s singing . . .”

• • •

All the romance and heartbreak, the veil of spotlights, and the windblown highway. A nomadic existence held together by music, camaraderie, and duct tape. And also an image evolved to fit the dreamy-urban-poet persona that inhabited so many of the songs on the album. The photograph on the album’s back cover revealed Bruce as a street corner poet, wonderfully bedraggled in black Converse sneakers, a wrinkled green tank top, bracelet on his wrist, and leather belt tight around his whippet waist, surrounded by other scroungy but intriguing characters. The height and breadth of Clemons, barefoot in shorts, shirt open, floppy cap on his head, and kerchief knotted on his neck; Lopez, looming above everyone with Hawaiian shirt agape and stone-and-gristle midsection in clear view. Sancious, also barefoot, sports a black daishiki, while Tallent, all long hair and thick beard, stands next to the angelically tressed Federici, whose smile has the sparkle of a man who really, really wants you to buy his duck.

In the thrall of
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
, Bruce’s entire personality seemed to have shifted. Asbury guitar hero Sonny Kenn, still the senior man on the Jersey Shore circuit, recalls checking out a show in East Brunswick, after which he was surprised to discover that the fresh-faced rocker he remembered had become something else entirely. “He was doing his cool thing, crouched up in the corner of the dressing room going [
in a breathy hipster voice
] ‘
Heeeeey, maaan
’—this whole Tom Waits thing. Which was weird to me, because that wasn’t the guy I knew.” Kenn shrugs. “But I still think
The Wild and the Innocent
is
one of his greatest records. It’s so experimental, it’s damn everything. If he’d stopped there, that would be enough for anyone’s career.”

Still,
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
faced a less than ecstatic reception at Columbia, due both to
Greetings
’ commercial failure and the unclassifiable nature of the new album’s sound and structure. Even Hammond bristled when he realized that the lead single, “The E Street Shuffle,” clocked in at a Top 40–busting four minutes and twenty-six seconds—at least a minute longer than nearly every other song on pop radio. With Clive Davis gone from the corner office, Bruce’s star had been eclipsed by the just-signed Billy Joel, whose piano-based melodicism leaned much more mainstream than the New Jersey street poet could ever be. What’s more, Joel had come to the company through the just-elevated A&R chief Charles Koppelman, who had sworn to make him a success. And if the time and investment that required came at the expense of another young artist, well, welcome to the record industry.

Released on November 11,
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
sold a bit better than
Greetings
had done the previous winter, moving about two thousand copies a week during its run through the Christmas season. The initial critical reception reached the same heights as
Greetings
:
Rolling Stone
’s Ken Emerson called it one of the year’s best albums, while
Creem
’s Ed Ward pronounced it “great.” Other critics largely followed suit. As for radio, some FM stations on the East Coast and in the Midwest started spinning “Rosalita,” due largely to the evangelical ministrations of DJs such as Ed Sciaky in Philadelphia and Kid Leo in Cleveland, both of whom fought hard to convince their bosses to both play Bruce’s records and simulcast his shows when he came to town.

But like the characters in “New York City Serenade,” Bruce still splayed between triumph and collapse. On the one hand, each show created a new batch of converts, many of whom hauled a carful of buddies to the next show, and when those guys filled their cars, and then the clubs, with their increasingly enthusiastic friends, club owners took notice. As did Bruce’s fellow artists, whose managers sent letters to Appel declaring that they would rather
not
be on bills that featured an opening set by Springsteen, whose gentle backstage behavior secreted the heart of a far too loud, way too spellbinding, crowd-destroying lion. As Tallent
recalls, even solid compatriots Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt (or their booking agents) went through periods of avoiding having Bruce as an opener. “We were still friends and all,” says Tallent. “But I think there were a couple of times they felt they weren’t received as well as they were used to being.”

But even the slightly swifter pace of sales for
Wild
didn’t meet Columbia’s expectations for a truly up-and-coming artist’s second album. By the first weeks of 1974, the more dispassionate members of the company’s power structure—for example, the accountants tracking the numbers on the quarterly profits-and-loss statements—began to murmur. Where is this Springsteen guy headed, exactly? Wasn’t he the sulky freak who played such a bummer set at the convention in San Francisco?