Bruce (34 page)

Still hoping that there might be a way to construct a situation where Appel and Landau could both work with him, Bruce went to his manager with an offer that could define their futures and resolve their contractual problems in one blow. Appel would have to agree to tear up the old contracts and work by the more equitable terms they had already ironed out. Plus, Bruce wanted complete control over his songs. And if Appel agreed to that, then they could keep rolling just as they had been. With only one more condition: from here on out, every aspect of their business relationship would be guaranteed by a handshake. Nothing more, and nothing less. “I was about contracted out,” Bruce says. “Just very, very gun shy of whatever was going to happen next. But Mike and I had gotten to a place where I thought we had it all sorted out. It was between the two of us. But we did have an arrangement that we had settled on.” Bruce went away feeling relieved. But then Appel talked it over with his dad. And when Appel Sr. told his son that he’d be a fool to tear up his very
favorable contracts, Appel changed his mind. “The next day it was off,” Bruce says with a small shrug. “I knew it had something to do with the influence of his pop, and that was the end of that.”

Now it’s easy for Bruce to shrug it off. But in the heat of 1976, Appel’s abrupt change of heart was an affront. “He can’t accept my word!” Bruce seethed to Landau. “Mike knows my word is worth a thousand percent, and he knows if I say I am going to stand by this stuff, I intend to stand by it. And
still
he’s walking away from it!”

From there the conflict spiraled toward the civil courts. Bruce hired Mayer to carry his standard while Appel worked with Leonard Marks. The attorneys came with small armies of partners, associates, investigators, and paralegals, all poised to attack the variety of contracts and agreements that tied Bruce to Appel, and the both of them to CBS Records, the William Morris Agency, and so on. The two principals kept their distance from each other during the spring and early summer, playing close to the vest while their respective brigades girded for battle. Nothing much happened until mid-June, when Bruce’s representatives informed CBS that the artist planned to start recording his fourth album in August, with Landau joining him in the production booth. Two weeks later Appel’s troops shot back with a letter informing all and sundry that no such recording sessions would take place: given that Bruce’s relationship with his label was as a subcontractor to Laurel Canyon Ltd., the actual signatory on the CBS contract, the agreement obligated the musician to work in accordance with Appel’s directions and then deliver his recordings to the production company. And in early July Appel’s lawyers made it clear that their client would not allow Landau to participate in any recording sessions with Bruce Springsteen.

Now that Appel had, in effect, taken his career out of his hands, Bruce had no option but to fight back as hard as he could. His lawyers filed the lawsuit on July 27, accusing Appel of multiple counts of fraud, breach of trust, and more. Appel countersued two days later, alleging a variety of sins committed by Bruce against his manager and the legally binding agreements by which they had agreed to live.

The most significant recording Bruce made that summer turned out to be the depositions he gave to Appel’s lawyer, Leonard Marks, in the
company of his own attorneys, the legal representatives for CBS Records, even more attorneys representing Jon Landau (who had also been named in Appel’s suit), and Bernard Jacobs, a notary public of the state of New York. Thoroughly unschooled in every aspect of civil litigation (a fact that the lawyer Mayer and company should have anticipated), Bruce had no idea what to expect or how to function in what would be an antagonistic procedure.

Appel’s attorney certainly brought the antagonism. Pushed repeatedly to answer questions that were either flummoxing (for instance, the endless series of questions about the precise job titles, duties, and salaries of his road crew) or designed to reveal Bruce’s bratty rock star ways (“Did you stay in good hotels on your tours in 1975?”; “Is it a fact that you generally had a suite of rooms yourself?”), Bruce flipped. He shouted. He swore, referring scornfully to Mr. Marks, Esq., as “Lenny.” At one point, Bruce climbed onto the conference table and jumped up and down in outrage. Then he leaped down, kicked open the door, and burst down the hall and into the women’s bathroom.

A disastrous performance by any measure, and it eventually fell to the judge to take Bruce aside and explain exactly how his own testimony might be used to destroy his case. But when Bruce replaced Mayer with a team of attorneys led by Peter Parcher, his legal strategy shifted to take advantage of the raw anger behind Bruce’s outbursts. According to Springsteen, attorney Mike Tannen, Landau, and others, the team realized that Appel would never settle until he came to understand that his relationship with Bruce was beyond fixing. When the deposition picked up again Bruce still spoke heatedly, but with a distinct strategy behind what he was saying and how wrathful he seemed when he said it. “I never looked at Mike Appel, and I found out that I don’t own a fucking thing that I wrote . . . He told me I had half my publishing, and he lied to me . . . I have been cheated . . . every line of [“Born to Run”] is me, and no line of that [expletive deleted] song is his. I don’t own it. I can’t print it on a piece of paper if I wanted to. I have been cheated.” Bruce repeated the phrases like a chorus. “He lied to me!” “He was dishonest with me!” “He betrayed my trust!”

If that didn’t make Bruce’s feelings about Appel clear, he had also written a mournful new ballad called “The Promise.” Set on the highways
of the Jersey Shore, the lyrics told Bruce’s story in the words of a street racer whose hand-built speedster, the Challenger, shared the name of the surfboards that Tinker West made in the factory where Bruce had lived and worked with Steel Mill. Throughout, the song weaves the icons of Bruce’s own life—the familiar roads and factories, the hardworking rock band “lookin’ for that million-dollar sound,” Highway 9, and even Thunder Road, the glittering highway that leads to everything that happens on
Born to Run
. But in “The Promise,” all of those youthful visions have been stolen, battered, and left for dead on the side of the road. In the end the racer sees himself as a ghost, drifting across a desert as empty as his spirit has become. “When the promise is broken you go on living, though it steals something from down in your soul,” he sang. “Like when the truth is spoken, and it don’t make no difference / Something in your heart grows cold.”

Bruce performed an early version of “The Promise” at the Monmouth Arts Center in Red Bank on August 3, and then played it consistently as he tweaked the song through the nine-month streak of shows they dubbed “the lawsuit tour.” An instant fan favorite, “The Promise” joined “Something in the Night”—another dark ballad featuring dreamers who realize, too late, that making it all come true can be the worst thing that can happen—as a clear harbinger of where he was headed. Still, the emotional core of the evening came most often in “Backstreets” and the heated spoken-word passages that dominated the transition from the song’s final verse to its howling close. As heard in a particularly fiery performance at the Palladium theater in New York City on November 4, the band faded to Bittan’s piano and the light chiming of Federici’s glockenspiel. Bruce stood alone in the spotlight, speak-singing softly at first.

It was me and you, baby. It was me and you, baby. I remember the night when you promised. I remember, I remember, the night. The night you promised . . . You swore that it was me and you, you promised it was me and you. You promised it was me and you.

He stopped for a moment, his voice becoming a harsh, descending wail in the microphone. Federici’s chimes became the sound of church bells.

We swore. I remember, I remember . . . we promised, we promised. You said that when the kids rang the bells . . . you said that when it was midnight, that when it was midnight and it rang, when the kids rang the bells, when the kids rang the bells, we both promised. That when the kids rang the bells . . . we swore. We swore. We swore. We swore. We said we’d go!

Then the piano and the bells chimed together, gaining volume just as Bruce’s voice climbed into a frenzy.

You said . . . you said we’d go! . . . When the bells were ringing! When the kids ring the bells! When the kids rang the bells, you said. You promised. You promised. And you lied. You lied! You lied! You lied! You lied!

Then a sweaty hand reached into the air, Weinberg hit a rim shot, and just like that, they all switched back into the climactic recitation: “Hidin’ in the backstreets, hidin’ in the backstreets . . .”

Every word, every incantatory phrase, every scream of outrage confirmed what the lawyers and record executives had already concluded about the battle between Bruce and Appel: that the money was the least of it; that the accusations of fraud and contractual violations were actually a veneer above a much more emotional struggle. “These were two people who were essentially married, who had broken down walls for each other and together,” reflects David Benjamin.
³
“And it was a great partnership when it worked.” But as in so many early marriages, one of the partners fell under the influence of someone else. “Look, I’ve been divorced; I’ve been there,” Benjamin says. “So just as important as Mike was, he was the starter marriage. Jon took Bruce to places Mike probably couldn’t. And when one of the partners falls in love with someone else, the hurt in the old marriage becomes magnified.”

•  •  •

Given a stretch of free time between tours and legal procedures, Bruce spent time with his new girlfriend, a blessedly trouble-free college graduate from Little Silver, New Jersey, named Joy Hannan. They had met on the dance floor of the Stone Pony nightclub in Asbury Park. He invited her to see a movie with him a few nights later, and the couple spent the next year or two in what seemed like an extended summer romance.

“I was his best buddy,” Hannan says. “We’d go the beach, we’d hang out at the Pony, I took him sailing. He and I basically had fun.” Driving around central New Jersey in the rusty white pickup that Bruce called the Supertruck, they talked about everything but his career and legal battles. Still, Bruce’s ear for music dominated the air around them. Hannan’s memories of their time together all come with the sound of Tammy Wynette singing “Stand by Your Man.” “If he liked a song, we’d hear it over and over and over again,” she says. At one point, Bruce played the Wynette country classic for a solid month, straight. “He just loved country music, that twang. And he really appreciated a well-turned phrase.” Bruce belted along to the radio whenever he liked the song it played. And when a local station happened to spin a Frank Sinatra ballad while they were driving through a blizzard in Hannan’s Asbury Park neighborhood, Bruce pulled his truck to the curb, took his girlfriend by the hand, and pulled her gently onto the street, where he waltzed her around the street singing into her ear as the snow fell through the streetlights.

Bruce also liked to hang out with his boys, going to movies, hitting the clubs to grab a few beers, check out the bands, and, when invited, jump up and jam for a few numbers. He felt particularly comfortable at the Stone Pony, a relatively new club on Asbury Park’s Ocean Avenue. He’d become a favorite of Pony owner Jack Roig ever since the latter had glimpsed the star, fresh from his appearances on the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
, digging deep into his pockets in search of the $3 cover charge while standing at the end of a block-long line for admission. “I said, ‘Bruce! What the hell are you doing out here?’” Roig recalls. “And he
didn’t
have the money. No wallet, no ID, nothing.”

Bruce didn’t protest when Roig took his arm and led him through the door. From there Roig bought him a beer and sat down to talk, and soon
Bruce began to think of the Pony as an extension of his own living room. He came regularly, put away his share of cocktails, and when the bar was really jumping, he’d cross over to the bartenders’ side and do a little pro bono bartending. Something less than a seasoned mixologist, Bruce had no idea how to make proper drinks and even less interest in computing tabs and giving correct change. Instead he accepted the customers’ money without looking, then handed back fistfuls of change that might add up to significantly more than what the drinks had cost. “I’m sure he cost me a fortune those nights,” Roig said. “But he made it so much fun I couldn’t worry about it.”

Drunk or sober in the middle of the night, Bruce drove in an unorthodox style. No wonder Rick Seguso didn’t flinch when Bruce called in the middle of one night with a sheepish but urgent request. He’d been pulled over in the Supertruck and couldn’t produce his driver’s license or his vehicle’s registration. When he tried to tell the cops that he was Bruce Springsteen, they rolled their eyes, got out the cuffs, and hauled him off to the lockup. “They don’t believe who I am,” he whispered to Seguso. “Do we have any of those copies of
Born to Run
lying around?” The road manager grabbed a handful, along with Bruce’s ID and car registration, and went to retrieve his boss. A few signed albums later, they let Bruce go home with a slap on the back and a friendly suggestion that he drive more carefully next time.

• • •

By the end of 1976, Bruce’s rented house in Holmdel had become the center of his operations. So while the band rehearsed in the living room, an ad hoc managerial staff, spearheaded by road manager Rick Seguso, tended to business in offices set up in two unused bedrooms. Mike Tannen took care of the high-level negotiations and contracts up in New York, but the day-to-day strategy and planning came out of Holmdel, which had become particularly tricky, thanks to the cash that Appel still controlled, and his lawyer’s campaign to attach all of Bruce’s concert proceeds until the legal scrum could be resolved. As a result, Bruce, the band, and their crew found themselves in a terrible pinch. They no longer had enough money to propel the operation on the road, which was the only place they could earn the cash to pay the salaries that would keep the band, crew, roadies, and other employees working.