Bruce (26 page)

“We had a lot of meetings about the artist roster,” A&R executive Michael Pillot says of that winter. “And there was a lot of talk about dropping Bruce.” Not everyone from the company remembers the moment as being that dire. “His sales certainly weren’t up to expectations,” says Clive Davis’s successor, Bruce Lundvall, who goes on to say that the first show he watched Bruce play that winter convinced him that the kid would become a star. “And I reported that back, too.”

Bruce’s most devoted supporters at Columbia remained on high alert. When whispers about the campaign to drop Bruce got to chief publicist Ron Oberman, he pounded out a fierce letter, cosigned by a half dozen other staff converts, pleading with Koppelman to give Bruce one more chance. The declaration of belief bought a little more time, but that still didn’t make Bruce a popular face in the Columbia offices. When newly appointed CBS president Walter Yetnikoff noticed how much time Bruce spent slouching in the office of his buddy Peter Philbin, the top exec instructed his employee to cut it out immediately.

“That kid’s not selling any records for us!” Yetnikoff railed. “He’s not going anywhere. Now he’s distracting you, and I want it to stop.”

As Philbin recalls it, he shot right back.

“Fuck you!” he said. “Don’t you know who that kid’s gonna
be
?”

Yetnikoff gaped for a second and then stormed off without another word. But he didn’t fire Philbin for his impudence, and he didn’t drop Bruce from the label, either. Instead Yetnikoff approved a compromise
strategy in which Columbia/CBS would advance Bruce and Appel just enough money to produce a single. “We gave him the assignment of making a good record,” Lundvall says. “If it turned out to be good, the company would fork over the money to produce the rest of the album. But if it didn’t, well, they’d all have to try again.”

Bruce accepted the challenge (he had no choice), but not without some resentment. “They want to stick their fingers in my pie,” he told J. Garrett Andrews of Brown University’s
Daily Herald
in the spring of 1974. “I don’t need it. Just let me make my music and leave me alone. They’re bugging me for a single. I don’t know, maybe they mean well, but I doubt it.”

What he thought of their motivations didn’t matter. As Bruce entered 1974, his future—professional, personal, emotional—came down to one final play. A make-or-break single that would either keep them moving forward or herald the end of the line.

S
TEPPING ONSTAGE BENEATH THE CRUMBLING,
water-stained acoustic tiles of the Nassau Community College’s student union on December 15, 1973, Bruce nodded to the scattered applause and sat on a stool. Danny Federici, sitting just behind and to the right, waited silently while Bruce, teasing the strings of his acoustic guitar, made a short introduction. “Goin’ back to that fateful summer of ’73. Girls all walkin’ up and down the boardwalk, kids playin’ on the pinball machine.” Whispering now: “It’s just around the fourth of July . . .” After a hushed duet of “Sandy,” the band members came up, strapping on their instruments and then turning their attention to Davy Sancious, stirring up the piano keys for his largely improvised intro to “New York City Serenade.”

Maybe fifty or sixty students sat in front of them. Bruce, wispy-bearded but close-cropped in his tight shirt and jeans, directed the band with typical precision, moving from the unhinged “Spirit in the Night” to a lockstep version of Rufus Thomas’s “Walking the Dog” built around
abrupt stops, silent moments ended by a whistle blast or Clemons’s muttered “What it is!” signaling the band to flip the switch back to full blast. The game went back and forth, gaining momentum until a stop came with no whistle or sound, just Bruce gazing blankly into the crowd. He held the pose for ten, fifteen . . . 
twenty
seconds, then swiveled his head owlishly, upping the tension as he regarded the crowd. Then a small shrug of his shoulders, capped by a light
Huh!
that snapped the band instantly into the song’s next verse, to the cheers of the crowd. The last song, the whipsawing “Thundercrack,” gave all the players spotlight turns, leading up to Bruce’s climactic guitar solo, most notable for his Chaplin-esque mugging during the slow, near-silent part, his face twisting to mime the effort of the bending of a string and the growl of a low note. When Clemons honked a sour note on his instrument, Bruce stopped everything, his face rent by comic exasperation. “Why do I pay these guys fifty dollars a week? For that?”

The inside joke was that Clemons, Lopez, Sancious, Federici, and Tallent, now dubbed the E Street Band, had become a central part of Bruce’s performances and reputation. Everyone got multiple solos during the shows, and a perpetual invitation to play whatever he felt, no matter how long it took. “I don’t believe in having a band where they’re just scraping away behind me,” Bruce told an interviewer in 1974. “I want ’em to be happening . . . I got a bunch of guys who play great, let ’em out there. Let ’em play. It’s just,
take
it, and when you’re done, let me know, and we’ll
all
do something.”

Like on the new speed-jazz arrangement of “Blinded by the Light,” in which Bruce’s guitar commented on virtually every line of lyrics, answered by Federici’s organ swoops, Clemons’s best King Curtis honk-and-scream, Sancious’s spider-finger blues, and Lopez’s speed-freak fills. Goaded onward by the velocity of the band and the flashiness of his brethren, the drummer would somersault so far beyond the tempo that bassist Tallent began to doubt his own ability to count to four. “Vini would go into a fill, and when it came time for us to come down on the one, he wouldn’t be there. He’d give me a nasty look, and I’d think, ‘Uh-oh, I’m in trouble here.’” But danger and speed go hand in hand, and the only thing more exciting than racing toward destruction came when
everything snapped back into place, only to careen off in another direction. “Hyperactivity,” Bruce said many years later, “was our business.”

Mike Appel pursued his end of the business with the same manic energy. Hearing that the CBS sales team would be convening in Nashville in February, Appel booked a show just down the street from the executives’ hotel as a guerilla attempt to woo the force back into Bruce’s corner. So, okay, the scheme turned out to be a bust: even after Appel papered the place with fliers, nobody on the CBS team showed up. The repudiation only made Appel that much more determined to make the company, the music industry, the
entire world
, fall under Bruce’s spell. And so he became even more outlandish.

Appel celebrated the holidays by hand packaging and then sending lumps of coal (charcoal briquettes, actually) to the radio programmers who refused to give Bruce a chance on their airwaves. He also infamously dialed a big-desk honcho at the NBC television network to talk him into prefacing the Super Bowl—
the Super Bowl!
—with Bruce standing alone on the 50-yard stripe, performing an antiwar song called “Balboa vs. the Earth Slayer.” All that, and the written, telephoned, telegrammed, buttonholed-on-the-sidewalk hard-sell pitches to all and sundry. Often followed up by letters, calls, and so forth that could turn hostile if he sensed resistance. “Was I too aggressive or outlandish?” Appel asks. “That’s what some people say. But that crazy, reaching-for-the-stars attitude permeated the early years. And look where it led.”

And wasn’t it a reflection of what Bruce and his hurricane-grade band were doing onstage? “Sure, Mike’s abrasive. He’s got that New York thing,” says born-and-bred Angeleno Peter Philbin. “But I never saw a manager who believed more than Mike. He had total belief.” So much, in fact, that Appel could no longer express his quest in the terms of mere rock ’n’ roll or show business. “Bruce Springsteen isn’t a rock ’n’ roll act,” he swore to friends, colleagues, and especially producers, bookers, program directors, and anyone else who would listen, “He’s a
religion
.”

Like any true apostle, Appel would sacrifice whatever it took to push Bruce another step up the mountain. If saving money meant halving original employee Bob Spitz’s salary and then eliminating his position because little brother Stephen Appel had graduated high school and would
work for free, then bye-bye Bob Spitz. Then coproducer-comanager Jimmy Cretecos vaporized, either because he could no longer identify a glimmer of hope in Bruce’s financial future or as a result of some far more shadowy internecine tussle that no one will talk about in detail. Particularly the soft-spoken Cretecos, who sounds pained as he explains that he’s suffered enough for his short role in Bruce’s career and won’t say a word about any of it, no matter how much there is to tell.

Still, Appel endured his own crisis of faith that winter. Worn down by two years of struggle, unpaid debt, and frustration, he found himself considering the benefits of tearing up Bruce’s contract, steering him toward another manager, and letting that guy do whatever Appel couldn’t to catapult Bruce to where he deserved to be. But then he’d listen to one of the albums or catch a show, and hope swelled, faith ran fresh, and the crusade went on. Something, Appel knew, had to change. They just had to keep pushing. And in early 1974, that meant precisely one thing: isolating the true essence of Bruce Springsteen, his music, his band, his voice, his vision, and distilling it into no more than four minutes of uncompromising yet radio-friendly rock ’n’ roll music.

• • •

Recently broken up with Diane Lozito, Bruce reclined on the bed in the small house he’d rented in the West End region of Long Branch, New Jersey. Notebook folded open, guitar in hand, he strummed idly, his line cast into the depths of consciousness, waiting for an idea to present itself. A chord progression, a snatch of melody, some kind of visual image, whatever. Then three words fell onto his tongue:
born to run.

The title of a half-remembered b-movie? Airbrushed words blazing across the flank of a ’64 Chevy he spied on the Ocean-Kingsley circuit in Asbury? Bruce had no idea. It didn’t really matter anyway. “I liked it because it suggested a cinematic drama I thought would work with the music I was hearing in my head,” he wrote in the late nineties. He came up with chords, the verse reminiscent of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson–composed love/lust/car drama “Don’t Worry Baby,” and tried to imagine where the song would go from there. Like Wilson (working with lyricist Roger Christian), Bruce’s highways led to bigger ideas and more urgent feelings: “The cars only interested me as vehicles for writing my songs.”

In Bruce’s consciousness, the street racing scene defied the social and economic strictures that kept the underprivileged, the young, and the outsiders from becoming who they were meant to be. “Jersey’s a dumpy joint,” he told writer Jerry Gilbert of the British music paper
Sounds
that same winter. “I mean, it’s okay, it’s home. But every place is a dump.” This realization, despite (or arguably, because of) its adolescent simplicity, had become entwined with his passion for rock ’n’ roll. “Escape was the idea,” he said to Eve Zibart in 1978. It connected everything, from Chuck Berry’s “School Days” to Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” “The song is a release. It’s an expression of the humdrum, the daily existence that you break out of.”

Drawn to a brighter, more urgent version of the drama that had fueled his music for more than a decade, Bruce dismissed his alter egos and stood alone at the center of the screen, climbing into the car and feeling the wheel vibrating in his own palms.

In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream / At night we stop and tremble in heat / With murder in our dreams . . .”

From there it all came pouring out: the surfers shivering in the breakers; the cars rumbling down Highway 9 to identical towns farther down the Shore, the metal-flake hot rods turning slow circles on the Asbury Park circuit. “Like animals pacing in a black, dark cage, senses on overload,” he wrote. “They’re gonna end this night in a senseless fight / and then watch the world explode.”

Everyone, everywhere, all souped up with no place to go.

It’s a death trap! A suicide rap! We gotta get out while we’re young / ’Cause tramps like us, baby . . .

Then it all comes back to the three words, and the governing realization that spurred the composition of the song and everything that would follow.

. . . we were born to run.

It would take him months to get the words just so and even longer to capture the gleaming sound already playing in his ears. But he’d found the heart of the song, the chords and melody ringing so true that he could already sense that he’d tapped into something powerful. A song with the energy of “Thundercrack” and “Rosalita,” only condensed to its most vital essence. “This was the turning point,” he wrote later. “It proved to be the key to my songwriting for the rest of the record.”

• • •

Bruce, the band, and Appel got back to work at the 914 Sound Studios on January 8, 1974, spending a couple of days fiddling with rudimentary versions of both “Born to Run” and “Jungleland.” The latter song, also new, had a setting, characters, and an omniscient perspective that flowed from previous urban epics “Incident on 57th Street” and “New York City Serenade.” They went back to the road for a week or so, made another brief stop at 914, then off again, then back to the studio for thirty-six or forty-eight hours, then back to Boston, Ohio, or Virginia—wherever a crowd waited for another go-round of the E Street shuffle. For the moment, the here-and-gone schedule worked in Bruce’s favor. The songs weren’t there yet, and he still hadn’t quite figured out how to evoke the glossy yet serious as death sound he knew the album had to have. So no hurry, particularly with the shows picking up so much steam. Every return visit to a club or a city brought in bigger audiences than the previous one, and as the crowds got larger, so did the money. The band’s nightly quote from agent Sam McKeith had tripled from the previous year’s bargain-basement rate of $750. And every so often, promoters in an established hot spot would put together a bigger show, and they’d score a small jackpot: for example, netting a sky-high $4,200 for one night in Richmond, in late January.