Bruce (29 page)

More tries at “Jungleland,” more breakdowns. Between takes, Bittan sat at the piano looking confused, searching for new chord inversions that might sound better in the song. But why did these ones suddenly sound so wrong? In the control room, a gloomy Appel muttered the obvious: “It’s out of tune again. Should we tell Bruce?” Still in the isolation of his vocal booth, Bruce opened his eyes and saw Rebo’s camera just on the other side of the glass. “Barry, uh,” he said in a friendly but firm voice, “you can’t be doing this when I’m doing this.” Then he called for another take.

“That was murder,” says Jon Landau, whom Bruce had invited to come in and see what they were up to. “I was there for some of that, it was just murder. Terrible.” Already familiar with the ways and means of modern recording studios, Landau felt scandalized. Every professional facility he’d worked in or visited had its own piano tuners, electricians, and audio experts poised for action whenever sessions were going on. If something broke midsession, the trained techs could either fix it in moments or get one of the replacements the management had stockpiled in storage.
“What I saw in these sessions is that he could not get any momentum going because of these interruptions,” Landau says. Speaking to Roy Bittan, also no stranger to recording sessions, he discovered they shared the same frustrations. “I remember [Bittan] saying, ‘What the fuck are we
doing
in this place?’”

The scene played like a joke about a perfectionist being driven mad. Only none of it seemed remotely funny. Except, at some distance, to Bruce’s pal, ex-bandmate, and then manager-producer of Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. “Anytime it takes six months to make a single, something’s obviously going wrong,” Steve Van Zandt said thirty years later. “Who can tolerate that? How anyone had the patience for it is beyond me. You should be able to knock that out in about three hours.”

Something needed to change. And so Bruce picked up the telephone and made another call to the man whose words had already changed his career for the better. Bruce had seen his new album’s future, and its name was Jon Landau.

• • •

A month after his
cri de coeur
ran in the
Real Paper
, Landau had surgery to help remedy his Crohn’s disease, a degenerative intestinal condition. After a long recovery that included an extended stay in the hospital and months of bed rest, Landau emerged at the end of the summer feeling better than he had in years, even though his marriage to the film critic Janet Maslin had recently ended. He relocated to New York City in late autumn and received an invitation from Bruce to spend an evening in Long Branch. But when a blizzard choked off the highways that morning, Landau called to suggest they try again another day. “But I sensed as we were talking that he really wanted to get together that day,” Landau says. Bundling up, he took a train from Pennsylvania Station, weathering delays and snail-like progress to arrive in Long Branch five hours later. At Bruce’s place that evening, the host spread his album collection across the floor, and the two music obsessives started spinning their favorites, digging into the songs on every conceivable level: the architecture of the music, the narrative structure of the lyrics, the singer’s tone and feeling, the interplay of drummer and bassist, and on
and on. When they got hungry after midnight, they drove down to the open-all-night Inkwell in Long Branch for dinner. Back at Bruce’s an hour later they kept going until dawn and then went back to the Inkwell for breakfast. At nine in the morning, Landau caught a bus back to the city.

“He was just an interesting person, and I was curious,” Bruce says. “I’d missed out on the world of ideas that comes with a real college education, but I was really drawn to people who knew how to use words or knew how to express their ideas. I thought, ‘There’s a connection there with what I’m doing.’ The life of the mind is just as important as the life of the body.” For Landau, the experience had just as much personal significance. “That stays in my mind as a bonding moment that took things to another level for me. I think for him too,” Landau says. “I think making that choice to go down there in the snowstorm was a significant statement to myself and to him. And this was at the time when things began to coalesce with
Born to Run.
”

On the surface, they could not have been more different. Landau, raised in an intellectual family that moved from Queens to Lexington, Massachusetts, when he was a junior high student, usually glided a step or two beneath his school’s top students but still acquitted himself well enough to land in Brandeis University, where he majored in history while also pursuing avid interests in philosophy and American cultural history. But Landau’s real passion kept him focused on music. Turned on to Pete Seeger and the Weavers as a five-year-old (one of the benefits of being raised by leftist intellectuals), Landau started guitar lessons in second grade, working through his Mel Bay instruction books right up until the dawn of rock ’n’ roll in the mid-1950s. “It was that bang, bang, bang of ‘That’ll Be the Day,’ ‘Johnny B. Goode,’ ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly,’ the whole series of records,” he says. “ ‘Rock and Roll Shoes,’ ‘Sweet Little Sixteen.’ God, did I love
that
record. I just dove into the whole thing. I loved them all.” At eleven, Landau took solo subway trips from Queens to Brooklyn in order to see Alan Freed’s rock spectacular at the Paramount Theater on Saturday afternoons. He listened to the Top 40 on New York’s WMGM-AM every night, tracking the list’s fluctuations with a yellow pad and a pencil. “ ‘Sweet Little Sixteen,’ I remember, got up to number
two, and some song like ‘The Purple People Eater’ kept it out of number one,” he says, shaking his head at the injustice of it all.

Landau fell hard for the rhythm and blues artists of the mid-1960s (Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, among many others), and pored over their records too. He played guitar in a high school band, and when he got to Brandeis, Landau joined his friend Tom O’Connell, a student at Tufts University, in a Simon and Garfunkel–esque duo they called Jelly Roll. The two worked up their own songs, which they performed to some measure of local acclaim. Offered a small recording contract and an opportunity to travel to Nashville to make demos with professional musicians, Landau chose instead to abandon his career as a performer. “I was afraid,” he says. “I’m not sure if I fully realized it or not, but I did not want to be out front. I wasn’t built for that.”

At the same time, Landau started writing record reviews for Paul Williams’s
Crawdaddy
magazine, then in its earliest iteration as a photocopied journal featuring serious critical writing about rock, rhythm and blues, and other forms of pop music.
⁴
Crawdaddy
developed a small national following, and a year or so later another aspiring young publisher from California named Jann Wenner sent Landau a dummy copy of the music-and-youth-culture magazine he planned to launch in the fall of 1967. Impressed by the prototype for
Rolling Stone
, Landau signed on as a critic and columnist, and his reputation and influence rose along with the magazine’s. When Jerry Wexler, the great A&R man and producer at Atlantic Records, called to pay his respects, Landau took the opportunity to meet the man and learn as much as he could about the inner workings of the music industry and the intricacies of record production. Asked by another industry friend, Elektra Records publicist Danny Fields, to write a critical analysis of the MC5, a politically radical protopunk band the label had just signed, Landau produced a detailed twenty-page report. When the label dropped the MC5 six months later,
⁵
Landau recommended the
band to Wexler, who said he’d bring the group to Atlantic but only if Landau promised to produce its next album.

Landau took the job, and the partnership worked surprisingly well. “He’d done his homework and knew everything about records, which earned him a lot of points with me,” says MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer. Landau helped the chaotic band clarify its musical vision, advised Kramer on how to organize its business structure (which until that point had been run through manager John Sinclair’s commune), and improve intraband communications. “Jon got us talking honestly, like in a therapy situation,” Kramer says. “We’d have these meetings where he’d be saying, like, ‘Well, Wayne, how do you feel about this?’ ‘And Fred [Smith, the quintet’s other guitarist], how do you feel about what Wayne just said?’ It raised us to a new level of consciousness.”

The resulting album, 1970’s
Back in the USA
, got ripped by critics and fans for sounding way more restrained than any band of fire-breathing revolutionaries ever should, but the months Landau spent working with them struck Kramer, at least, as one of the MC5’s most happy and productive periods. “I pressed him hard to be our manager,” the guitarist says. “But he was adamant that he didn’t want to be a manager, he just wanted to produce records.” Landau did go on to produce albums for Livingston Taylor, James’s younger brother, and a talented songwriter on his own account, and to attempt one with the J. Geils Band, a Boston blues-rock band he brought to Wexler and Atlantic Records. But the J. Geils album didn’t get off the ground,
⁶
and when Landau’s digestive system grew increasingly knotted with Crohn’s disease, he rededicated himself to the quieter life of writing criticism. Widely acknowledged as one of the nation’s best practitioners of the still-young practice of serious rock criticism, Landau told friends that he’d like to be known as the King of the Rock Critics. He was kind of joking. But also kind of not.

• • •

Landau’s first contribution to
Born to Run
had been on his mind for more than a year: get the hell out of 914 Sound Studios. “
Do
something about this!” Landau beseeched his friend. “You’re a world-class artist,
you deserve a world-class studio!” Finally convinced, Bruce went to Appel and told him to find a new studio. When the recording sessions picked up again in March, the operation moved to the Record Plant in midtown Manhattan. And although Appel still wasn’t convinced they needed another expert in the studio, Bruce’s word still reigned, and Appel slid over to make room for the album’s third coproducer: Jon Landau.

“Jon loved Bruce,” Appel says. “He wanted any part he could play. There would have to be room for both of us.” Landau agreed. “Mike was pretty practical, and he saw what Bruce wanted, and he did his best to adjust,” he says. The resulting tension appealed to Bruce, who had learned the benefit of being the pivot point between two opposing forces as a boy living with two sets of parents at his grandparents’ house. So while Landau and Appel struggled for his ear, Bruce could take rich advantage of his partners’ strengths, turning to Landau for structural and narrative advice, while relying on Appel’s mastery of detail to make certain every note sounded exactly right. “We got along,” Landau says of Appel. “I was in the lead on a great amount of the stuff, but Mike’s endurance is tremendous. When you got into the real fine detail that I might lose patience with, Mike was a slogger.” It also helped that they were all too focused on the album to fuss over personality and turf conflicts. “There was nothing duplicitous about Jon,” Appel says. “We just never really got to know each other.”

As Appel told biographer Marc Eliot in 1989, “the most important thing [Landau] did was to kick-start the album and get Bruce off his butt.” Indeed, Landau’s fresh ears helped Bruce locate some obvious cuts and fixes. “Jungleland,” for instance, lost a melodramatic Spanish-style intro with drums, maracas, and passionate violin runs, in favor of an elegant prelude that featured violinist Suki Lahav’s
⁷
skills to much better effect. Landau also helped streamline the arrangement of “Thunder Road.” But for all the clarity he brought, Landau also encouraged Bruce’s tendency to overthink every note, strum, and organ stop. As Landau
admitted later, it often took Appel’s late-night wails—“Guys! We’re makin’ a
rekkid
heah!”—to get them back into gear.

Appel also recalls fighting to convince Bruce and Landau to back down in their struggle to include “Linda Let Me Be the One” and “Lonely Night in the Park” on the finished album. “I said, ‘You really think those shitty songs can stand next to ‘Backstreets’ and ‘Thunder Road’? That’s what you think? Fuck that!’” Appel proved just as stubborn, and correct, when he fought to keep “The Heist,” subsequently renamed “Meeting Across the River,” on the finished album. Musically, the song’s piano, standup bass, and muted trumpet seem closer to the romantic street poetry on “New York City Serenade” and “Incident on 57th Street” than to the chrome-detailed rock ’n’ roll they were crafting for the new record. But this time the music and lyrics had been honed to the barest essentials, all crafted to underscore one man’s last, desperate shot at redemption.

They had so many other details to tangle with, so many hours, days, weeks, and months to adjust the precise tone of this guitar solo, or the fingertip glissando in that piano intro, or the best way to mix the multitrack recordings down into the shimmering but emotionally powerful sound Bruce needed to hear. He began to think of the album as a musical novel, the individual songs fitting into a larger, unified story. And like a novel, the chapters—or songs, in this case—had to dovetail, contrast, and ultimately enhance one another. So while “Thunder Road” might sound perfect in its full-band arrangement, it might better suit the album in a completely different context, with a completely different sound and message. At one point, Bruce tore the fully-wrought song down to its foundation, rebuilding it as a brooding acoustic guitar piece with a completely new melody, stripped-down chord changes, some different words, and the climactic “I’m pullin’ out of here to win” exhaled like a sigh of defeat.

The process felt slow, grim, and tortuous. When Tallent’s wife visited a session one evening, she wound up spending eight hours watching Bruce try to coach the band through an eight-bar instrumental passage in one song. “When she left, she said, ‘Don’t
ever
take me to a recording session again!’” Tallent remembers. The guys in the band, of course, had
no options. “All we could do was hold on. Smoke a lot of pot and try to stay calm,” said Clemons, who spent sixteen hours playing and replaying every note of his “Jungleland” solo in order to satisfy Bruce’s bat-eared attention to sonic detail.