Bruce (35 page)

“Oh yeah, we were broke before, but now we were even broker,” says Garry Tallent. “We’d made this big record, and we had nothing to show for it. Nothing. We were basically destitute.” Out on the road, the inescapable metaphor for their situation was the bargain basement tour bus they’d started using: a rumbling beast with an engine that couldn’t quite muster forty-five miles an hour in the flats, and then gave out completely when attempting to scale a hill with the weight of a full load. Passengers had to hoof it uphill until they caught up to where the bus idled at the summit, waiting to take them down the far side of the hill. Bruce made a few concessions to his and the band’s financial straits, even allowing Seguso to talk him into playing basketball arena shows in Phoenix and Philadelphia albeit with a custom-made black curtain intended to improve the acoustics while also blocking off the sections with the worst sight lines in order to maintain a semblance of intimacy. “He was dead against it,” Seguso says. “But otherwise we couldn’t afford to pay people what they were worth, or keep the show on the road.”

Back home, the band members faced even more complicated challenges. No longer guaranteed a steady paycheck—with so much money getting sucked into the legal black hole, they had to take IOUs many weeks—domestic life grew harsh. Particularly given the ghosts of the bonuses and base-pay raises they had expected in the wake of
Born to Run.
When Tallent checked out a Springsteen/E Street tribute band playing in a bar near his apartment in Sea Bright, he learned that the tribute bassist made three times more for playing Tallent’s parts than Tallent earned for creating, recording, and then playing them around the country.

The winter grew frigid. Heating oil cost more than ever, and worldwide acclaim did nothing to keep the icy Atlantic breeze from slipping through the cracks in their window frames. In the past, the band members could earn some extra cash during breaks by taking side gigs or playing sessions for other artists’ records. But now that Bruce could sense the entertainment media itching to write his professional obituary—the kid-hits-it-big-only-to-tumble-back-to-earth narrative having such obvious commercial possibilities—a strict, if unstated, policy took effect: no breaking ranks. No gabbing to reporters about how dismal things had become. More than ever, loyalty ruled. Take
it for the team, suck up the suffering, and everything else will come together in its own time.

But they’d been hearing that same speech for more than four years. At least half of the E Street Band stumbled into the first days of 1977 thinking they could glimpse the end of the line with Bruce. Nearly eighteen months since
Born to Run
, and still unable to start recording a follow-up, it seemed safe to assume that they had already lost all of the momentum the hit record brought them. And it wasn’t like the making of
Born to Run
, or even the months of acclaim they earned for it, had been carefree. “Playing in a band is fun, by definition,” says Roy Bittan. “But in the background, it was always like the Grim Reaper was just around the corner waiting to end Bruce’s career.”

Did they all have to go down with him? Bruce wasn’t the only one who had dedicated his life to music. They’d all been playing just as long as he had, often in the same swim clubs, Hullabaloos, boardwalk bars, and all-night clubs. They’d all contributed to his success, and even if Bruce was the sole author and spirit behind
Born to Run
, the band’s work hadn’t gone ignored. They’d all fielded calls to work on other artists’ sessions; some even had invitations to join other successful bands. Both Bittan and Weinberg, for instance, had been offered work playing on the sessions for Meat Loaf’s
Bat Out of Hell
project.
⁴
Bruce didn’t like the idea, but he liked it even less when a couple of band members applied for unemployment benefits to help tide them over. But as the money dwindled further and no legal resolution seemed in sight, the intraband situation festered. When Bruce left a rehearsal early one day, the other musicians began to talk about packing their things and going their own ways.
⁵
As Van Zandt remembers it, the situation seemed close to a breaking point.

“That was a real crisis,” he says. “So I left the rehearsal and thought, ‘Oh no, this is the end! I gotta do something to keep the band together!’” Working in consigliere mode, Van Zandt kept the discouraging words away from Bruce and went straight to Steve Popovich, the former Columbia executive and perpetual Bruce fan who had recently jumped to CBS’s other label, Epic, where he’d signed Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. Popovich and Van Zandt kept in such constant contact that the guitarist didn’t try to be cagey about how close the E Street Band had come to imploding. “We gotta find some money!” Van Zandt reported. Either that, or the band wouldn’t last another week. Popovich responded immediately: “Don’t panic. Sit tight. Let me figure something out.”

From that moment, keeping the band together became Popovich’s crusade too. “I
lived
in Freehold, man,” he told me a few months before his death in 2011. “My family was there. When I fought with my wife, I’d figure out where Bruce and the band were playing and go there. That was my healing thing.” Unwilling to sit back and watch his favorite band fall apart, Popovich dialed Van Zandt with just the right offer: he’d signed ex-Ronettes singer Ronnie Spector to Epic. Billy Joel had written a Ronettes-style song called “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” to be the lead single for her comeback album. Now they needed a great rock ’n’ roll band to help her cut the song. Who would be more perfect than the E Street Band? And given the reputation they’d built with Bruce, he had no problem paying everyone double the union scale for their services. “He was talking like five hundred, six hundred dollars; about three weeks’ salary for everyone,” Van Zandt says. Bruce, who was both a Ronnie Spector fan and acutely aware of his band’s financial straits, not only okayed the side gig but also showed up to play guitar. Everyone took home his check, and the storm ended. “We never discussed breaking up again,” Van Zandt says.

When Bruce hears a boiled-down recounting of all of the above, he shakes his head. “I don’t know, everybody has a different version of it. The band might have had those discussions amongst themselves, but I don’t think anybody discussed it with me. The only thing I remember was that times were tough. There was a Ronnie Spector session that Steve
produced. I went in and played guitar on it or something, but I don’t remember a connection between any of those things.”

• • •

Still needing cash to fuel the next tour, Bruce’s booking agent, Sam McKeith, asked his William Morris Agency bosses to grant his client a loan secured by future receipts. When they counteroffered a much smaller loan, secured in part by Bruce’s signing a new contract with the agency, Bruce found himself in a bind. From 1973 to 1975, McKeith’s strategic bookings had proved so instrumental in building Bruce’s popularity in the East, and those odd little pockets in the Southwest (Austin, Phoenix, Houston) that the agent was one of just three people thanked by name on
Born to Run
’s inside cover. As he’d acknowledged, Bruce owed a piece of his success to McKeith’s labors and thus owed him some loyalty. “I liked Sam a lot,” Bruce says. “If there had been anything to keep me there, it would have been him.”

But then Frank Barsalona, president of the Premier Talent booking agency, came down to New Jersey and offered a no-strings loan for $100,000, big enough to finance the last leg of the lawsuit tour in early 1977, and also the kind of good-faith-and-a-handshake deal that could win Bruce’s heart forever. “He came down and said, ‘Hey, you need some help? I’m your man,’” Bruce recalls. “And that was the beginning of a beautiful relationship, you know?” Barsalona didn’t even suggest that Bruce sign a deal with him, although Bruce did eventually sign with Premier. His touring career is still managed by agent Barry Bell.
⁶

At the same time, Mike Tannen worked out an agreement with Yetnikoff to sign Bruce directly to CBS once the Appel situation got resolved—and this time with superstar-caliber royalties of $1 per album sold. In the wake of some damaging information that had come to light in the last few months (including a deposition from Bob Spitz that recalled Appel admitting that any sensible judge would find his contracts “unconscionable”), Bruce’s and Appel’s lawyers negotiated through the spring, and in May 1977 they reached an agreement: Appel would receive $800,000 in cash and keep 50 percent of the publishing rights to the twenty-seven songs Bruce had published through Laurel Canyon. Everything else, including the rights to all his future songs, belonged to Bruce.

With Appel no longer a threat, the demonic image he had taken on in Bruce’s eyes faded to reveal the man he had always been: the two-fisted, tough-talking warrior with the golden heart; well intended but tragically flawed. Another in the line of men who had helped raise Bruce, who had carried his amps, played their hearts out on his stage, sometimes got caught double billing him for their telephone calls, and peered back at him from the other side of the bathroom mirror. So when his lawyers informed Bruce that Appel’s current standing in the courts had become sketchy enough to strip him of far more—perhaps everything—Bruce shook his head. “I don’t want to hurt this guy,” he told Tannen. “I want to get away from him, but he was there when I needed him. Whatever he gets, he deserves.”

The day the money changed hands—when Appel gave over Bruce’s royalties for
Born to Run
and everything else, and when CBS issued the $800,000 advance for Bruce to give Appel—Bruce walked out of the CBS building onto Avenue of the Americas, looked at the checks in his hands, all payable to Mr. Bruce Springsteen, and laughed. “Look!” he said to Joy Hannan. “I’m a millionaire!” They both knew it was temporary: he’d be handing the $800k to Appel within a few hours, and a significant
percentage of the royalties would go straight to paying debts, back salaries, and such. But they still beelined to the nearest phone booth, crowding in together as he dialed his parents’ number in San Mateo. When Adele picked up, he shouted, “Hey, Ma!” and told her the news. “It was cute,” Hannan says. “His parents were so excited for him, and he was so happy the lawsuit was over.” They’d all come quite a distance since that snowy day in 1964 when he pointed out the Kent guitar on the other side of Caiazzo’s music store window and asked, “Please, ma,” for Santa to bring him that one.

W
HEN THEY TOOK A DINNER
break, you could see it in the way they arranged themselves at the long table in Bruce’s dining room. In the middle, you’d find most of the musicians—Max Weinberg, Roy Bittan, Garry Tallent, Danny Federici, Clarence Clemons—bunched together with Bruce’s road manager–chief assistant (Rick Seguso at first, and then Bob Chirmside) and whoever else happened to be around. Bruce reserved the head of the table for himself, with oldest pal, coguitarist, coarranger, strategist, and all-around co-conspirator Steve Van Zandt seated at his shoulder. “It was like this rolling conversation between Bruce and Steve,” Weinberg says. “And the way it worked went exactly like stories I’ve heard from Charlie Watts about how Keith [Richards] and Mick [Jagger] work together. They had this incredible partnership. Bruce was the visionary. He had the songs, though they weren’t always fleshed out. Steve was like this great mechanic—he was the guy who could turn the wrenches.”

And that’s how it ran for the year and a half after
Born to Run.
The
band members gathered at Bruce’s Holmdel house each day at two o’clock, went to his wood-paneled rec room, took up instruments, and got to work. Smoothing down the rough patches in the live arrangements, putting their stamp on cover songs, shaking up their own old songs, and learning the new compositions Bruce had in his notebook. Kicked into higher gear by the pressure of the lawsuit, impending financial disasters, and more, Bruce’s songwriting grew even more prolific than before. Put a guitar in his hand, sit him at the piano, or give him a quiet moment, and just wait: tunes came bubbling out, often in twos, threes, sixes, or more. He brought them all in, sometimes completely written, others little more than a verse, a riff, and a scrap of lyric. Or maybe just a word, as with one four-chord rocker first aired in the rehearsal room when its entire lyric was the word
badlands
, sung over the chorus. And always, more to consider. Bar band stompers about pretty girls and fast cars; smoldering love ballads; goofy, R&B-based plaints about mean girlfriends; pensive sketches of renegades, racers, helpless lovers, haunted highways strung between failure and hope.

To Steve’s ears, Bruce’s new songs rang like church bells. The pop tunes—“Ain’t Good Enough for You,” “Fire,” “Rendezvous,” and so on—had the verve of the late-fifties and early-sixties rockers that had electrified their transistor radios when they were teenagers, while “Talk to Me,” “It’s a Shame,” and “The Brokenhearted” had the majestic swing of classic soul music. Other songs evoked different but similarly crucial strains of rock, soul, and country, and as heard along with the emotionally intricate songs addressing Bruce’s legal, musical, and existential struggles (“The Promise,” “Something in the Night,” “Breakaway,” and “Racing in the Street,” to name a few), it amounted to the most vital, important music Bruce had ever made. “It’s this stuff that he completely ignores about himself that is, to me, his highest evolution,” Van Zandt says. “It’s
easy
to be personal. It’s
easy
to be original, believe it or not. Pink Floyd is easy. ‘Louie Louie’ is hard.
Sgt. Pepper
’s—yeah, great. But ‘Gloria’? Harder. Give me those three chords and make ’em work?
That
is the ultimate rock ’n’ roll craft/art/inspiration/motivation. That’s the whole thing!” Hearing this, Bruce shakes his head and laughs. “That’s my buddy, you know,” he says. “He’s very particular about the things he likes.”