Bruce (33 page)

Coming out in his usual jeans and leather jacket, with a long,
multicolored scarf draped around his neck, Bruce gaped for a moment at his band, who had surprised him by dressing in matching white tuxedos, and then launched into a searing, full-tilt “Night.” After a quick nod to the band’s fancy dress—“These guys look so sharp”—he counted off a starry-eyed, slow-dance arrangement of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” before diving back into the charmed swamps of “Spirit in the Night.” Next, Bruce indulged in a quick between-song nod to recent glories (“Seasons come, seasons go, ya get your picture on the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek
, but the bus never stops”) and then led into an even more juiced than usual “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?,” ending with an exultant capper to the image of the girl throwing a rose to the lucky young matador: “and that’s
me!
”

Then came something unfamiliar: an extended piano intro, a series of dark chords accompanied by ghostly wails from the sax and guitar, emphasized on occasion with a slithering cymbal roll. Bruce stepped to the microphone and spoke, his voice flat and grim.

I used to live in this, uh, two-family house on the main street in town. And at night my father, he’d lock up the front door so the kids had to come through the back door, y’know. And he’d be sittin’, he’d sit all the time in the kitchen. He’d turn out all the lights in the house, and he’d just sit there. He did that for as long as I can remember, y’know, until they moved away . . .

From there he described the late-night talks with his father. Finding Doug sitting alone at the kitchen table, the room lit only by the glow of his cigarette and the alcohol-and-burnt-tobacco haze in his breath, his asking Bruce to sit down and talk, and then his awkward attempt to gird his stymied paternal love with something useful: a peek into the cruelty of his own adult life, the need for mature men to put away their fantasies and brace for the worst life had to offer.

Then he’d start screamin’ at me, and I’d start . . . I’d start screaming back at him, and he’d be tellin’ me all the time what a bad world it was. And I’d be tellin’ him that it was my life.

Then he started to sing the opening lines of the Animals’ “It’s My Life,” slowed down to draw out the tension in the verses before bursting into explosive full-band choruses. “I’m gonna make it for certain,” he sang through gritted teeth. “I’m breakin’ loose!”

The story of his father, his family, and his childhood, all the old terrors now tangled in his devolving relationship with Appel, in the consuming fear that everything he’d worked for, everything he’d achieved despite Doug’s insistence that it could never come true, all of it was now vanishing before his eyes. Except for that he wouldn’t let that happen, and so now he screamed it at the top of his lungs, with the entire theater riveted to his every word.

It’s my life, and I’ll do what I want!

He slashed at his guitar, his muscles coiled and tense, the veins in his neck taut and unyielding as he bellowed one last thing.

Don’t . . . push me!

W
ITH A COUPLE OF MONTHS
off and an album climbing to the one million sales mark, Bruce granted himself a few indulgences. He relished driving his eye-popping ’57 Chevrolet and had orange flames painted on its bright yellow chassis—Elvis’s pink Cadillac, only stripped down, bulked up, and trembling with symbolic horsepower. He got the car earlier in 1975, when “Born to Run” was still aborning and he felt drawn to the physical manifestation of the songs he’d written. “Rock ’n’ roll is a fetishist’s dream,” Bruce said on Steve Van Zandt’s satellite radio show in 2011. “The physical totems, the jackets or the shoes, they hold such unusual power in your imagination. There’s a spirit power to it.”

But once Bruce’s face and his automotive iconography became so well known across the country his Chevy functioned like a bullhorn:
Bruce is here.
Fans on the street screamed and waved as he drove past. Others ran into traffic to knock on his windows when he waited at a red light. He’d pass cars going the opposite direction, only to see their drivers pull abrupt
U-turns in order to follow him. “He couldn’t drive it anywhere because suddenly he was a target,” Peter Philbin says. Bruce hid the car in his garage, and when he learned that Philbin was moving back to Los Angeles to take an A&R post at CBS’s West Coast offices,
¹
he offered to sell his pal the flaming Chevy for $1,000. A fraction of what it cost him, but that was still too rich for Philbin’s blood, so the car stayed in Bruce’s garage, where it remained until he sold it years later.
²

Bruce also assigned Rick Seguso, the first of a chain of road managers who would serve as his off-road housemate, life assistant, and companion, to find the next place for them to live. This time Bruce wanted to rent a bigger house in a more remote area—a family-sized home where he could live comfortably, with enough room for the band to rehearse, possibly all night long if Bruce felt like it. A week or two later Seguso took Bruce to Telegraph Hill Road in Holmdel, New Jersey, to see a large house on a horse farm that had once been a cavalry outpost. The sprawling, slatted-wood structure had plenty of space for the band, its various instruments, amplifiers, and other gear. The deck out back looked out over a steel-bottomed, baking soda–cleaned pool—a refashioned horse wash—and to the rolling, grassy hills beyond. Bruce took one look and signed the lease so they could move in, although he still wasn’t making enough money to cover the rent without Seguso’s contribution. So even if the real money hadn’t started rolling in, Bruce could glimpse the fruit of his hard work every time he walked through the door of his rented house, or caught sight of the hills rolling away from his living room windows. It was, at least, a momentary distraction from the gloom that had slipped behind his guitar and lodged in his chest.

Bruce’s moodiness started early on the Born to Run tour, in the hours before the October 4 date at Detroit’s four-thousand seat Michigan Palace theater. “I didn’t want to go onstage,” Bruce told Robert Hilburn a few
years later. No matter how many good reviews
Born to Run
had received, no matter the ecstatic energy he felt flowing through the concert halls, the avalanche of publicity made him feel he’d become a cartoon. “I was being perceived as an invention, like a ship passing by.” Sitting backstage, trying to focus on the performance to come, Bruce felt only detachment. He had nothing left to say, nothing more to reveal. It was already out there, being picked apart by ink-stained carrion who assumed that every note he played had been concocted by someone else. “But I knew where I came from,” he told Hilburn. “Every inch of the way. I knew what I believed and what I wanted.” That thought was enough to propel him back onto the stage with a need as deep as vengeance. And it worked. He went back at it again, the starry-eyed rocker making his stand in the same jeans, black T-shirt, and leather bomber that animated so much about where he came from and where he was going.

So no one would imagine the doubt in his heart, not even when the comic creation myth rap at the start of “The E Street Shuffle” came out like a rock ’n’ roller’s interpretation of
Waiting for Godot
: “Somewhere, there’s someplace, somehow . . .” he began. “Even though it gets harder to come by. And, uh, somewhere, somehow, someplace. Maybe it ain’t here now. But somewhere, somewhere tonight, Clarence, hit me! Sparks fly on E Street . . .”

• • •

With the $500,000 advance Appel took from Columbia/CBS on the line and tension rising, Bruce demanded new copies of all his contracts and sought counsel with the one person he was beginning to trust above all others. Bruce flew to Los Angeles, where Jon Landau had relocated temporarily in order to produce Jackson Browne’s
The Pretender
album. Landau retrieved Bruce at the airport, and they ended up in a restaurant. The rift with Appel, Bruce said, was getting worse. He needed a lawyer to help him but had no idea how to find a good one. Landau made an appointment for him with his own attorney, Mike Mayer, whose quick read of the contracts made him cringe. Virtually every clause and subclause, he said, was a nightmare version of the current industry standards; they were so tilted against Bruce, in fact, that when entertainment lawyer David Benjamin,
who worked with the team of Peter Parcher and Mike Tannen, who would soon take over Bruce’s legal work, read them a few months later, he gasped. “[The contracts] had every trick in the book.” So tricky, Benjamin says, it was hard to imagine that Appel would have, or could have, imagined them for himself. “Appel hadn’t ever managed anyone before. He didn’t
know
what every trick was.” More likely, Benjamin says, the real author of the contracts had been Appel’s lawyer Jules Kurz, “an old-time guy from the year
gimmel
,” Benjamin says. The three-layer management-production-publishing contracts; the full ownership of Bruce’s songs; the disparity in publishing income; the contractual distance between Bruce and Columbia Records. “He was full of those old-time tricks.”

Back in New York and edging toward panic, Bruce paid a surprise visit to the apartment of Bob Spitz, Appel’s former assistant, then working with Elton John’s American management. When the doorman called up to announce the guest, the man seemed taken aback. Mr. Bruce, as the doorman called him, was “not in good shape.” Assuming that his guest had boozed himself into a stupor, Spitz realized quickly that Bruce was sober but extremely freaked out. They hadn’t seen each other since Spitz left his job at Laurel Canyon in 1974, but Bruce launched almost immediately into his anguished tirade about Appel. “That’s when he told me the whole story,” Spitz says. “That he thought Mike had fucked him and it was all over, so now he was working with Jon.” But, of course, nothing could be quite that simple.

Landau, back in New York during a break in Browne’s sessions, lived just a few blocks from Spitz, and Bruce invited him over. “We sat at my dining room table, and Bruce said, ‘Please, anything you can remember; anything you can tell me to help me.’” When Spitz asked if he wanted to separate himself completely from Mike, Bruce shook his head. “I want Mike to produce me, but I don’t want Mike to manage me.” Landau seemed to agree, but Spitz was puzzled. “What’s the problem?” he asked. “He already produces you.” Bruce shook his head adamantly. “No. He gets too much money. He’s robbing me blind.”

If they needed firsthand testimony about Appel playing fast and loose with Bruce’s money, they had come to the right place. “When a [royalty]
check for Bruce came in, we used to take it to the Apple Bank on Fifty-fourth and Sixth and cash it,” Spitz says. “[Mike would] put the money in the pocket of his Levi’s jean jacket and pay for everything with it.” When Spitz voiced reservations about his boss’s idiosyncratic way of handling his client’s money, Appel shrugged it off. “He’d say, ‘We’re gonna get it all back!’” Spitz recalls. In the bad old days, the point was difficult to argue because, as Spitz knew, Appel used his own money in precisely the same way, taking as little salary as possible when the Laurel Canyon accounts ran low. That was the only way to feed the cars, hotels, and salaries that kept Bruce and the band moving and working their way to the acclaim Bruce deserved. Who had time to keep neat books when they had a world to conquer? Bruce certainly didn’t care about such niceties, and as long as the music stayed pure and their vision clear, everything else would take care of itself. And he knew Appel agreed with him. “I think Mike is the greatest, number one,” Bruce told John Rockwell just before
Born to Run
’s release. “I don’t go out there and do half. Mike understands this. He ended up takin’ the heat for a lot of decisions I made.”

And yet Appel was no longer the only man he’d met with the commitment, musical passion, and business expertise to complement his own strengths and shore up his weaknesses. And maybe Landau’s intellectual and emotional sophistication would make him a much better partner for the next part of Bruce’s journey. Nearly two years after Landau had pronounced him the incarnation of rock ’n’ roll’s future, Bruce remained convinced that the critic-turned-producer was the right man to get him there. Bruce took Landau’s word so seriously it often seemed like the writer had already set up shop in Appel’s management office. Once enthusiastic about the live album that Appel had already told CBS they would deliver as a follow-up to
Born to Run
, Bruce reversed himself abruptly when Landau argued that it was far too early in his career to produce such a summary document. Appel’s ambitious plan to mount a summer university tour with their own six-thousand-capacity circus tent as a portable venue also died a quick death once Bruce heard Landau raise a few potential logistical problems. “And he [Bruce] got vitriolic, and he said it [was] the dumbest thing that he ever heard of,” Landau said in a pretrial deposition. “He said, ‘I can’t believe that I ever thought of it for
ten minutes!’” Landau sounded surprised at how quickly and radically Bruce’s mind could change.

Other offers flowed in, some big enough to resolve Bruce’s financial problems in the course of one performance. NBC offered $500,000 for an hour of prime-time television that Bruce could fill however he pleased. No way, Bruce said. A Philadelphia promoter dreamed up a massive July 4, 1976, concert at JFK Stadium, making it a kind of dream opportunity by offering to let Bruce handpick a dozen unsigned New Jersey bands to fill the undercard. And depending on ticket sales, he stood to earn at least $500,000 and as much as $1 million for his work. Once again Bruce shook it off. A stadium concert, he insisted, was the last thing he’d ever do.

Bruce’s lawyers did work out a temporary truce allowing Appel to continue booking a two-month tour that would generate some income by hitting smaller markets they had never taken the time to play, such as Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and the Freedom Hall Civic Center in Johnson City, Tennessee. The project gained the not-so-elegant title of the Chicken Scratch tour, which would have seemed insulting to the towns themselves were Bruce and the band not so desperate for whatever dollars they could pull together in order to keep their houses heated and stomachs filled.