Bruce (41 page)

Still, Bruce was one of the younger artists on the stage, and given his enormous following in and around New York, he was the hottest draw: sales for the last two shows had lagged until Bruce signed on, at which
point they sold out instantly. Thus he was afforded a level of deference the other artists either couldn’t, or didn’t want to, claim for themselves. So while the other performers shared team-sized dressing rooms, Bruce and the E Streeters camped out in a private area accessible only to holders of official Springsteen credentials. Later, Goldberg had no problem finding footage of the other stars chatting and cavorting together backstage; the only glimpse of Bruce, he discovered, was a ten-second snippet of him greeting Jackson Browne’s little son.

Certainly, the twelve-song set Bruce and band played on the twenty-first became precisely the slam-bang finish everyone in the hall had hoped to witness. A combination of Springsteen anthems (“Born to Run,” “Thunder Road,” “Rosalita”), unreleased new songs (“Sherry Darling” and “The River,” much to Ginny Springsteen’s surprise), and high-intensity performances of oldies (“Detroit Medley,” “Rave On”), the performance left Bruce drenched, wrung out, and predictably ecstatic.

Things took a less appealing turn the next night when the birthday greetings started coming over the footlights. When one fan handed up a cake, Bruce hurled it back onto the heads of the crowd packed tight around the stage. He finally acknowledged the roll of his internal odometer in his usually jokey introduction to the as-yet-unreleased frat-rock song “Sherry Darling.” “Okay, this is my big birthday party tonight,” he said. “I’m officially over the fucking hill. Can’t trust myself anymore.
⁴
So let me hear some party noises!” Which he did, delivered with enough gusto to propel him through the second half of the set and right into the encores, which ended with a particularly crazed performance of Gary “U.S.” Bonds’s “Quarter to Three,” extended to nearly ten minutes of throat-tearing screams, razor-wire guitar solos, dancing, guitar swinging, amp jumping, and more. And they were still blasting away at full, joyous power when Bruce glimpsed a too-familiar face in the crowd and felt something snap.

According to Lynn Goldsmith, he shouldn’t have been surprised, let alone aggravated. She had been a key MUSE volunteer for months, serving as the event’s head of photography. Charged with shooting her own
pictures and coordinating the other photographers working for the event, Goldsmith had responsibilities backstage and on the camera riser eleven rows back from the front of the stage. Though generally cordial in their postromance relationship, things remained awkward enough for Bruce to request that Goldsmith make herself scarce from his part of the backstage area when he was preparing to go on.

“He came over to my house, and we made a plan, just he and I,” the photographer says. In her telling, Goldsmith described where she had to be during the evening, and said she’d get another photographer, Joel Bernstein, to shoot Bruce’s backstage area once he arrived. “He’d come at a certain time, I’d go to the front [of the stage]. And I wouldn’t go backstage after that. I thought the whole thing was fine after that.”

It wasn’t. So while Goldsmith shot the first of Bruce’s two shows without incident, the second show, with its unhappily received birthday celebrations, turned sour before Bruce saw his ex-girlfriend with other photographers clustered on a platform above the eleventh row. “She was real close right in front, and that’s in Bruce’s field of vision,” road manager Bobby Chirmside says. First Bruce started to pace the stage; then he glared up at Goldsmith until they made eye contact. “He gets down on one knee, and kind of bent his finger at me like, ‘
C’mere
,’” Goldsmith says. “I knew that look in his eye, and I wasn’t going there.” When Bruce saw Goldsmith packing up her gear, he leaned over to Clemons and shouted “
Watch this!
” Then he leapt off the stage and into the aisle. Goldsmith tried to vanish into the crowd, but it took only a moment for him to grab her arm. “I was saying, ‘Please stop, you’re hurting me,’” Goldsmith recalls. But Bruce could not stop. He twisted her arm so hard she thought it would snap. Surrounded by rows of stunned and unhappy faces, he pulled Goldsmith down the aisle and then up the stairs to his microphone at center stage.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” he shouted. “This is my ex-girlfriend!” Goldsmith tried to laugh it off in front of the crowd, but then he marched her to the edge of the stage and pushed her into the arms of Chirmside, ordering him to throw her out of the building. Chirmside put his arm around Goldsmith and held her more gently than Bruce had done. But he still escorted her down to the arena’s inner tunnels, where
she realized he was following his boss’s orders. “She said, ‘Bobby, you’re not really going to throw me out, are you?’” Chirmside says. “I said, ‘I’m not. But I’ve got to hand you over to security, and then
they’re
going to have to throw you out.’”

Humiliated and furious, Goldsmith marched out into the night. The other MUSE stars had no idea what had happened, or why. “I just kind of stood there with my mouth hanging open,” Browne says. The understanding backstage was that Goldsmith—despite her leadership role among the MUSE photographers—had violated an agreement to stay away from Bruce’s performance. And yet this didn’t make Bruce’s behavior any less ugly or shocking. “It was kind of Bruce’s personal thing hanging out there.” Browne says. “And I know Lynn; she’s a great gal. It sounds like a misunderstanding that played out in a very dramatic way.”

The drama only got more intense when Joyce Hyser, who had been seated in the arena, burst through the dressing area’s door, cheeks burning with outrage. Bruce hadn’t told her about the brewing conflict with Goldsmith, so when she saw her boyfriend plucking his ex out of the crowd and announcing her as his girlfriend, Hyser—who obviously had missed the “ex” part of his rant—could assume only that she had been had. Storming in Bruce’s direction, Hyser was intercepted by Browne, who guided her into a dressing room and put his arms around her shoulders to calm her down.
⁵
They were still standing like that when an elated Bruce came skipping down the stage stairs, followed by his band, singing the chorus to the Village People’s “Macho Man” in his wake. “He’s all pumped up, then he finds Jackson with his arms around me, and I’m a sniveling
mess
,” Hyser says. Seeing his current girlfriend in the California singer’s arm refired his temper. “
What the hell is going on here?
” he snarled, prompting frantic explanations from both Browne and Hyser. Bruce ended the evening begging Hyser’s forgiveness, but even when he and Goldsmith bumped into each other at the Sunset Marquis hotel in Los Angeles a year later, he refused to apologize for anything. Instead,
Goldsmith recalls, Bruce blamed her for his public tantrum. “He said, ‘Why did you do that?’ and I just laughed. ‘Why did
I
do that? Why did
you
do that?’ Then we both started laughing.”

• • •

Bruce felt much more in control when the time came to oversee his part of the
No Nukes
movie set to premiere in theaters during the summer of 1980. Although Goldberg recalls Bruce as being uniquely warm and charming throughout, the musician still put the production through his own kind of wringer, starting with the songs the filmmakers wanted to use in the film and on the album. The original cut that Goldberg and codirector Anthony Potenza made included four songs from Bruce’s sets: “The River,” “Thunder Road,” “Stay,”
⁶
and “Quarter to Three.” But when Bruce came in to look at his segments and weigh in on their look, feel, and sound, he had a problem. Given the gravity of the concerts, and his own desire to be taken seriously, he didn’t want his party music to dominate his appearance in the film. So “The River” and “Thunder Road” could stay, but “Stay” and “Quarter to Three” had to go.

He was never rude or peremptory, Goldberg says. Mostly, Bruce responded to the producer-director’s entreaties by not saying anything. And when Goldberg came up with the right explanation about how the narrative of the film, which already included more segments about energy technology than the majority of concert movie attendees would tolerate, required the climactic rush of a Bruce Springsteen encore, Bruce nodded. “He gave me a hug and said, ‘Okay, I get it. You can use these songs,’” Goldberg says. “It was one of the great moments of my life.”

From there Bruce took residence in the editing bay, watching his scenes with the precise eyes of an auteur, calling for different shots or angles.
⁷
And when Bruce got into the sound editing studio, he fussed with the mix at such microlevels and macro length that Goldberg had to beseech Toby Scott (Bruce’s trusty engineer, called in to oversee the
music mixing in Bruce’s segments) sometime between midnight and dawn that union rules governing payment for film industry engineers had just put them in an overtime pay bracket (“It was like double-double-golden-overtime-overtime, I think,” Scott says) that could bring the production to its knees. “We wrapped it up a couple of hours later,” says Scott.

• • •

Work on Bruce’s new album continued through the end of 1979 and into the winter of 1980. Attempts to edit the new material into a single album came to nothing. They kept recording, and when the boxes of session tapes hit three hundred and kept growing, they sent a crew member to buy a gigantic 10 foot x 10 foot x 10 foot road case to use as an in-studio storage locker. When they ended a session and loaded the new tapes into their storage container, they secured it with several chains and locks. Soon the box—called the Bruce Springsteen Memorial Couch or the Houdini Box—became a visual metaphor for the seemingly endless project.

As with his previous two albums, Bruce couldn’t stop thinking, and worrying, about the record. And the more he stewed, the more energy he had for writing even more songs. As Hyser remembers, his mind churned constantly, forever absorbing and analyzing the things he saw, heard, lived, and felt, channeling them through his guitar and then into scraps of verse he wrote into his notebook—or, if his binder wasn’t available, onto notepaper that piled up on the coffee tables, counters, and end tables where he sat when inspiration hit. “He always had his guitar,” Hyser says. “Bruce was very romantic but very single-minded about nothing getting in the way of his work, including relationships and friendships. That’s what sustained him at that time . . . and it was just constant.”

When the bill for recording time hit $1 million and kept climbing, CBS president Walter Yetnikoff visited the studio to make sure Bruce understood that it only
looked
like the company was footing the bill for all their work. All those charges would end up being paid for through Bruce’s own royalties. “His response was, ‘How better can I spend my money than on my art?’” Yetnikoff says. “What was I supposed to tell him?’
‘No! You should spend all your money on drugs!
’?” Bruce was just as convincing when he insisted that
The River
could only work as a double
album. Record company chiefs tend to hate that sort of thing (double albums cost more in the shops, thus selling in lower numbers), but when Bruce told him that a single album didn’t give him enough space to say what he needed to say, Yetnikoff says he was powerless to respond. “You can’t argue with that. You can’t respond except to say, ‘All right! You win!’” Still, Yetnikoff had little sympathy for Bruce’s fixation on achieving the most perfect of all perfect mixes. “I said, ‘You know what? Nobody gives a fuck about the snare drum sound,’” says Yetnikoff. “I said, ‘Let me mix your record. Just show me the voice button, and I’ll mix the fucking record. And don’t worry about the snare drum—nobody hears it. Another musician might, but everyone else is listening to your voice!’ ” Bruce passed on the offer.

At the start of the sessions in 1979, Bruce had brought in “Hungry Heart,” a cheery pop tune built around a piano riff he borrowed from the Four Seasons’ 1964 hit “Dawn (Go Away).” He ran the band through a handful of takes and then lost interest when he decided it sounded too airy for the hard-bitten album he’d envisioned. True enough, earlier drafts of “Hungry Heart” sketch a dark story, admitting “Sometimes I can’t explain the things I do / I guess I did it ’cause I wanted to.” The title phrase also appears in an earlier, even bleaker version of “Stolen Car,” in the narrator’s admission that the end of his marriage came because “I fell victim to a hungry heart.” Even “Hungry Heart” ’s recorded lyrics—which begin with the narrator deserting his family and then describe the start and end of another relationship in a single sentence (“We fell in love, I knew it had to end”)—seems out of step with its breezy music. Nevertheless, Bruce abandoned the song, deciding to give it to the Ramones for their next album. Landau, on the other hand, refused to let it go. In this he had an enthusiastic partner in Van Zandt. “It just had this groove,” Van Zandt says. “Something about this song. So I said, ‘Let’s get some extra high harmony on it.’” They called in Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, cofounders of the harmony-centric sixties band the Turtles (“Happy Together,” etc.) to add a touch of Beach Boys to the backing vocals. Thinking that Bruce’s Big Voice croon made the song sound a bit too
mature
for Top 40 radio, Plotkin sped up the tape to give the vocal a more boyish lilt. “We
got up to Mickey Mouse speed ’til we backed it down,” Landau says. Finished tinkering, Van Zandt handed the mixing duties over to Bob Clearmountain, already known for his ability to give potential hits just the right coat of gloss. Excitement all around.

Until they played the completed track to Bruce, who shook his head. He still didn’t like it. Too pop, too lightweight. So just hand it off, just like they’d done with “The Fever,” “Because the Night,” and “Fire,” the latter of which had climbed to number 2 on the
Billboard
Hot 100 for the Pointer Sisters in February 1979. So, conversation over. Except that it wasn’t. As both Van Zandt and Landau knew, the time had come for Bruce to have a real hit song on Top 40 radio. “It’s a complicated moment,” Van Zandt says. “You really need it to be the right hit single at the right time, or else your rock credibility goes away. But this is our fifth album. We’ve paid our dues. And this felt right.”