Bruce (42 page)

Eventually convinced that “Hungry Heart” did fit on the new album and would serve nicely as the project’s lead-off single, Bruce gave up worrying about the corrosive effect of the Top 10. Then he began to look forward to seeing what a hot single might do for his career—particularly when CBS publicist Paul Rappaport pulled him aside in October to tell him how strong the response from radio programmers and other industry factota had become. “I told Bruce, ‘Hey,
ka-ching!
That song’s gonna be a hit!’” Bruce beamed. “Great!” he said, “I’ve been wanting to get some new tires for my ’Vette!” Rappaport laughed. “I said, ‘You can probably buy a whole Corvette
factory
when this is over.’ He just looked at me like I was crazy and walked away.”

Bruce had no idea. Released on October 17, 1980,
The River
bolted for the top of the
Billboard
album chart, selling more than 1.5 million copies in the run-up to Christmas. “Hungry Heart,” released four days after the album, was ubiquitous on Top 40 radio throughout the fall, climbing to number 5 of the singles chart. None of Bruce’s previous singles had even come close to the Top 10. By the time the band got to the Rosemont Horizon arena in northern Illinois on November 20, the chiming sound of the hit song’s intro so excited the crowd that Bruce couldn’t get the first line of the first verse out of his mouth before the fans drowned him out, shouting every word in perfect unison. “Bruce’s eyes
were popping out, like ‘
Holy shit!
’” Rappaport remembers. “He’s always let the crowd do the first verse ever since, but that was the moment. The shock on his face, the pure delight. That was priceless.”

• • •

Set adrift on opposing currents of ecstasy and dread,
The River
reveals as much about Bruce’s internal life as he’d ever displayed in public. The mostly live performances (the basic band tracks were often enhanced with overdubbed vocals and/or guitar and saxophone solos) emphasize the big studio’s ambient blend, giving the songs a barroom feel that trades the precision of “Born to Run” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town” with the power of the full band’s instrumental wallop. “I wanted to cut some music that felt very explosive,” Bruce says. “I wanted to combine the fun aspect of what the band did along with the story I was telling. Find a way to combine those things and create a bigger picture of what we did out in front of the people.”

Thus the legion of new fans who would push
The River
to quintuple-platinum status were introduced to a performer and band whose approach was defined by what Bruce describes as “desperate fun”: a joyful noise meant to keep the encroaching gloom at bay, if only for the moment. Singing with the raw voice of an embattled ordinary guy, Bruce narrated his stories as directly and unromantically as possible. “I was interested in what adulthood meant,” he says. “That was a life that I was not living, but seeing from the outside looking in, I admired it in a lot of ways. I thought it was certainly the roots of the place that I grew up in and the people that I knew.” People who lived and worked hard, and who celebrated their glories and assuaged their wounds to the sound of barroom rock ’n’ roll.

From a distance, the simple joys of rock ’n’ roll are all over the album, from the Delta House rock of “Sherry Darling” (with cheers and chorus singing concocted in the studio), to the taut drums and guitars on “The Ties That Bind,” “Two Hearts,” and “Out in the Street.” But just as “Hungry Heart” ’s joyous music belies its uneasy core, “Cadillac Ranch” ’s celebration of America’s most luxurious gas-guzzler, complete with its shout-outs to famous hot-rodders Junior Johnson, James Dean, and Burt Reynolds, lead to the long black Cadillac that takes all its passengers on a
one-way trip.
⁸
The narrator of “Ramrod” also has death on his mind, even as he pushes his automotive slang into the red zone of sexual metaphor. “This guy . . . he’s there, but he’s really not there anymore,” Bruce told Dave Marsh in 1981. The song’s last line, “Give me the word now, sugar, we’ll go ramroddin’ forevermore,” made the shadow of death inescapable, at least to its author. “I don’t know,” he told Marsh. “That’s a real sad line to me sometimes.” Thirty years later it’s easier for Bruce to put his finger on why: “When you make your big choices in life—who you’re going to be with, where you’re going to live, what you’re going to work at—there’s a very natural clock that starts ticking. And that’s your time clock, my friend.”

And so even as
The River
traces the human toll of economic and social inequity (particularly in the title track, “Jackson Cage,” and “The Price You Pay”), the real-life verities of adult romance (“I Wanna Marry You”), and the chill of emotional isolation (“Stolen Car”), the entire journey is geared to end, with the richest possible symbolism, with the bloodied wreckage and shattered body we find in “Wreck on the Highway.” “So at the end of the record, that’s what gets introduced,” Bruce says. “The highway’s closed at a certain point. You have a certain amount of miles that you can make. It’s a recognition of mortality.”

T
HE 140-STOP RIVER TOUR KICKED
off in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on October 3, 1980, hauling through virtually every major city in the United States before playing a final stateside show in Indianapolis on March 5, 1981. A first-ever full-length European tour was scheduled to start in Brighton, England, on March 17. But when the cold he’d been fending off at the end of the stateside tour floored him for more than a week, Bruce came to understand how much the US tour had drained from his tank. Leery of venturing back to the United Kingdom with something less than all cylinders wide open and roaring—particularly to London, from which he still felt he’d been spanked and sent home in 1975, Bruce and Landau rescheduled the twelve British shows to be the last stops on the European itinerary.

Heading into the opening concert in Hamburg, Germany, on April 7,
Bruce’s pretour nerves frazzled a bit more when the local promoter warned that Hamburg audiences were notoriously undemonstrative. Just because they’re sitting there silently with blank looks on their faces, Bruce heard, didn’t mean they weren’t having fun per se. Just don’t expect an American-style eruption of energy. “So the audience sat through the first set, just
nothing
, until we came back and opened the second set with ‘Badlands,’” Bruce recalls. “Then they rushed the stage, and that was it for the rest of the tour. Just mayhem every place we went.”

The wild reception chased them across Europe and into Britain, running particularly hot at London’s 12,500-seat Wembley Arena, which Bruce and band filled completely each night of their six-night stand in late May and early June. “It was startling,” Bruce says. “If I were to list some of the high points of being out there working, that tour was one of them.”

Van Zandt was just as stunned. “We break Europe, and we’ve made it. We are a success. And it’s like, wow! We really did it! Fifteen years in the making, y’know.” As Premier Talent’s Frank Barsalona had promised, Europe was, and remains, a lucrative market for Bruce.

Even more important, the tour allowed Bruce and everyone else in the E Street touring party to look at the world from somewhere beyond American soil. Starting out as provincial Americans protected by the insularity of the rock ’n’ roll tour bubble, the journey through other lands, cities, and communities presented an entirely new perspective. So many of the people they met, particularly the young adults they found in the coffee shops and pubs, had come to see America as a forbidding imperial presence. “This kid accused me of putting missiles in his country, and I was like, ‘What are ya talking about? There’s a guitar in that case, not a missile,’” Van Zandt says. “But it wouldn’t leave my head until I realized that when you leave this country, you’re an American. It’s not Democrat or Republican, taxi driver or rocker. It’s just
American
. And we’re supposedly a democracy, so you are responsible for what your country does.”

Bruce had already voiced his fears of the incoming Ronald Reagan administration onstage the night after the deeply conservative politician’s
election on November 4, 1980.
¹
His anxieties, particularly when it came to the new president’s bellicose stance against the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc of nations, had already been realized in western Europe, where an influx of American missiles and personnel evoked forty-year-old memories of marching soldiers and rampaging tanks, along with fears of the modern chemical warfare that could reduce their lives into so many clouds of poisonous dust. Soon the narrative of the shows confronted the idea of America itself, in all its beauty and failings. Bruce had already introduced a striking cover of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” in late December, noting sharply that the folk tune so many people considered a fireside sing-along was intended as a rebuttal to the starry-eyed triumphalism in Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” Adding John Fogerty’s Vietnam-era “Who’ll Stop the Rain” and “Run Through the Jungle” drew out the social commentary already girding “Thunder Road,” “The Promised Land,” and especially “Badlands.”

At the same time, Bruce focused his reading on American history, in search of stories and analyses that gave new perspective to the accepted saga of pilgrims, patriots, great men, and Manifest Destiny. Joe Klein’s
Woody Guthrie: A Life
sketched a real-life portrait of the roads, work sites, and campsites visited by the Joad family in Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath
, while Henry Steele Commager and Allan Nevins’s
The Pocket History of the United States
described the nation’s development from a populist perspective that reflected his own experience as a child of the lower working class. “I never heard anyone talk about politics in my neighborhood,” Bruce says. “It might have come up once in school, because I came home one day and asked my mother if we were Republican or Democrats. She said we were Democrats, because they’re for the working people. And that was the extent of the political conversation in my entire childhood.”

Raised to view the American story through the eyes of the downtrodden, Bruce could connect his parents’ struggles with the larger dynamics
of a country prone to forget its most vulnerable citizens. To be a Springsteen in Freehold meant knowing all about vulnerability and the taste of the ashes scattered upon the people who couldn’t summon the power to fight for themselves. It was the same story he’d written about his father in “Adam Raised a Cain,” the flame-lit portrait of a man forced to work a lifetime “for nothin’ but the pain.” Only now he could recognize Doug Springsteen’s struggle in a larger context: as another glimpse of the underside of the American Dream. The story of the man whose perspective on American-style progress came from beneath its razor wheels.

So much of Bruce’s ambition, and the unrelenting energy he had focused on building his career, had been fueled by his determination to avoid his father’s fate. In the midst of his biggest success
²
the time had come to turn his attention, and more important, his audience’s attention, to the Americans whose nation had left them behind. After all, a significant percentage of his friends and fans were the people who suffered at the hands of a top-down socioeconomic structure. “We were at that very moment out and engaged with the people who were on the other end of the stick,” Bruce says. “So that became a regular part of the show. I still reserve a small part of the evening for a public service announcement. I do believe that there’s a section of my audience that’s involved with what I’m doing, so I address them, and it feels like a natural thing to do.”

Back in the United States in mid-June, Bruce took his first step into a cause that had been playing on his conscience since his late-seventies encounter with Ron Kovic, the maimed Vietnam vet, antiwar activist, and bestselling author of the politically charged memoir
Born on the Fourth of July
.
³
Bruce found a paperback edition of the book while on a road trip through the Southwest and read it in a desert motel somewhere between Phoenix and Los Angeles. Hanging out by the pool at the Sunset Marquis a few days later, he saw a wheelchair-bound man rolling over to say hi. Bruce spoke to the guy for a few minutes before he realized that
the man in front of him was the author of the book he had just finished. “It was really strange,” Bruce said to Will Percy for
Double Take
in 1998. “I said, ‘You wouldn’t believe this, but I bought your book in a drugstore in Arizona, and I just read it. It’s incredible.’” Kovic took him to a veterans’ center in the Venice neighborhood and later put him in touch with Bobby Muller, a wounded vet who had started a national organization for his and Kovic’s contemporaries, the Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA).

Hearing in 1981 that Muller’s organization had run out of money and would be forced to close its doors, Bruce invited him to a show at New Jersey’s newly opened Meadowlands Arena in July, and then asked him to stay late so they could talk. In the midst of that conversation, Bruce, Muller, and Landau hatched a plan: when the tour came back to Los Angeles in late August, they would make the opening concert at the Los Angeles Sports Arena into a benefit for the VVA.

With a legion of veterans, many severely wounded, watching from a specially built deck on the side of the stage, Bruce started the show with a brief but emotional speech. Describing America’s Vietnam era as a long walk through a dark alley where thugs attack some people while others walk past without looking up, he urged the audience to throw a lifeline to the war’s victims. “Unless we’re able to walk down those dark alleys and look into the eyes of the men and the women that are down there and the things that happened, we’re never gonna be able to get home,” he said. Muller spoke next, concluding his speech by observing that rock ’n’ roll had always been the one thing that bonded his generation of Americans. “So let’s not talk about it, let’s get down to it,
let’s rock ’n’ roll it!
” Bruce kicked the band into Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain” and let it rip for nearly four hours, straight through the long-lost Bob Dylan–Roger McGuinn anthem “Ballad of Easy Rider,” an extended “Detroit Medley,” and then back to the start of his own rock ’n’ roll life with a wild run at “Twist and Shout.”