Bruce (51 page)

The sun was bright, the skies deep blue, and the hotel room’s balcony all but irresistible when Bruce and Patti woke up on the morning of June
15 and stepped outside to take in the view. With the sun on their shoulders and new love in the air, they held each other as they gazed across the rooftops—not suspecting that an observant photographer, a professional in the land that invented the term
paparazzi
, was peering at them through his viewfinder.
Click-click-click.
Then they were lying together, drinks in hand, on a single patio recliner.
Clickity-click.
Those photos made headlines all across Europe and then in the United States, and on June 17 Jon Landau Management released a statement acknowledging that Bruce and Julianne had separated. A day after that, Bruce and Patti sealed the deal by strolling arm in arm through Paris, in full view of a procession of French reporters and photographers.

At the moment, and with memories of Bruce and Julianne’s wedding still fresh in the public mind, photographic evidence of his marital two-timing struck at the roots of the moral righteousness he seemed to carry onto the stage. That his wholesome image was only the latest iteration in more than two decades of growth, change, and shape-shifting did not seem to matter. The vast majority of the popular culture media had come to know Bruce since he’d taken on his clean-cut working-class hero image. Having been branded as such, he was expected to behave accordingly. The first wave of headlines were as jagged as you might expect. Phillips’s friends stood up for their justifiably wounded friend. But given Phillips’s dignified response (essentially saying nothing in public, except for a career-focused interview in
Us
magazine in August, followed by more than twenty years of silence), and perhaps the foreshadowing in virtually all of the key songs on
Tunnel of Love
, the story fizzled quickly. As David Hinckley reported in the New York
Daily News
, many fans accepted Bruce’s affair as a sign not of perfidy or hypocrisy but of mortality. And if the “It humanizes him” argument might have exuded the aroma of fan-boy rationalization, a closer look at the artist’s work—going all the way back to the Castiles’ Theiss-Springsteen B side “That’s What You Get”—made clear that the conflicting calls to sin and grace had never relaxed their grip on his soul.

None of this justifies ill behavior, no matter toward whom it’s directed. But it was (and remains) impossible to accuse Bruce of violating some code of ethics he’d prescribed for others in the text of his work,
since the real struggle his characters waged almost always took place within themselves. Virtually every male character on
Tunnel of Love
and the B sides and outtakes recorded during the sessions has some kind of ungodly hound baying at his door. “When I look at my face I don’t see / The man I wanted to be,” he sang in the self-lacerating “One Step Up,” in which the confused, unhappy husband makes eyes with a woman sitting across the bar. Like Bill Horton, whose marked hands labored to reconcile the divided forces of love and fear, Bruce could only raise his fists and hope that he wouldn’t hurt anyone else as badly as himself.

“But of course I did,” he says. “I didn’t protect Juli. Some sort of public announcement would have been fair, but I felt over concerned about my own privacy. I handled it badly, and I still feel badly about it. It was cruel for people to find out the way they did.”

• • •

Away from home, cut loose from whatever chains of anger or guilt he’d carried through the last months of his marriage, Bruce hit the stages of Europe with a renewed appetite for unrestrained rock ’n’ roll. The last few weeks of the American tour had already traded out the romantic “Be True” for the man’s-man blues “Boom Boom,” with Clemons’s saxophone blasts kicking down the doors that Bruce’s guitar attacks hadn’t already splintered. A steamy “Because the Night” brought the passion to the second set in the European tour’s opening night in Turin, while U.S.A. tour highlights “Bobby Jean,” “The River,” and “Downbound Train” pounced back into the set during the next week or two. In Munich on July 17, Bruce called out for “Badlands” as an onstage audible, and was so thrilled by the arms-aloft response that he made it the opener for the band’s next performance, with “Out in the Street” following in the second slot and another previously exiled favorite, “The Promised Land,” turning up a few songs later. Which would seem like a conceptual retreat of sorts, but for the fact that the July 19 show was taking place in East Berlin, just beyond the wall that compelled so many nations to view one another as combatants.

Already aware that the people of Eastern Europe were shaking off the grip of the Soviet empire, Bruce and Landau imagined the impact that
a big rock ’n’ roll show might have on the freedom-starved Easterners. Landau asked the tour’s promoter to see if the East German government would allow a free concert on its side of the Berlin Wall. The officials loved the idea, particularly given Bruce’s proletarian, seemingly anticapitalism reputation. With the show set for the Radrennbahn Wessensee park, the Communist politicians borrowed a play from Ronald Reagan by sweeping Bruce into their own political narrative. As the war between the socialist government of Nicaragua and American-funded rebels (the Contras) simmered, the East Germans dubbed the nationally broadcast show the Concert for Nicaragua. And while Bruce was no fan of the Reagan administration’s covert war against the government of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega, he also wasn’t going to sit still long enough to let the Soviets drape a red flag over his shoulders.

Set loose in front of 250,000 Berliners and far more East German TV viewers, Bruce and band marched onstage with something beyond the intricacies of romance on their mind. From “Badlands” to “Out in the Street” to “The Promised Land,” “War,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” and the first full-band “Born to Run” since 1985, the show served as a testament to the basic right of freedom. To make his point—and refute the government’s attempt to co-opt him—Bruce wrote (and then worked with his German driver to translate) a statement separating himself from any government or political system: “[I’m here] to play rock ’n’ roll for East Berliners, in the hope that one day all walls will be torn down.” Or that was the plan until word about Bruce’s statement leaked and the panicked West German promoter begged him to change “walls” to the less offensive “barriers.” Bruce made the change, but if he pulled that punch, the performance of Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom” (in the Byrds’ arrangement, with harmonies and jangling guitar leads) that came next made his liberation ideology entirely clear.

“I think it was recorded as the largest concert ever in Europe,” Landau says. The show also underscored Bruce’s just-announced commitment to share the stage with Sting, Peter Gabriel, rising folk star Tracy Chapman, and Nigerian singer Youssou N’Dour, among others, on the globe-trotting twenty-date Human Rights Now! tour designed to help
raise money and attention for Amnesty International. Bruce’s endorsement of the international rights organization came with a distinct political charge, given its connections to the world’s left-leaning groups and governments. The far-flung stops on the six-week tour—which visited Africa, Europe, Asia, India, and South, Central, and North Americas—stirred less controversy around the world than it did at the headquarters of CBS, where company president Walter Yetnikoff flew into a rage when he heard that Bruce had signed on with Amnesty.

Now Yetnikoff admits that his reaction had more to do with the extremes of his newly sober consciousness than anything else, but the strong supporter of the Israeli government harbored (and still harbors) a beef with Amnesty over its denunciations of the Jewish state’s human rights record. “So I called Landau and told him I was fucking pissed off, and he said, ‘You better not start this political stuff with Bruce.’” Landau offered to bring Amnesty chief Jack Healey to CBS headquarters so that they could all talk it over, but by then Yetnikoff stopped taking the manager’s calls. “Did I say I was right?” Yetnikoff says. “I was on my own
farkakta
ego trip. I wasn’t right, and I probably picked the wrong fight. But I had a lot of problems then.” Already on notice from CBS’s board of directors, the hot-wired executive lost even more support when Bruce and Landau publicly distanced themselves from him. Yetnikoff was finally escorted down the CBS execu-plank in 1990.

For Bruce and the E Street Band, the Amnesty tour made for an invigorating change of pace. The musicians liked the spirit of comradeship that bonded all the performers and their bands—in distinct contrast to the distance Bruce kept from the group throughout the Tunnel tour—and the visits to cities, nations, and continents they had never seen before, let alone performed in, were peak experiences for everyone. “That was my favorite tour,” Clarence Clemons said to me. “When we went to Africa, the whole audience was black. It was the first time I ever saw more than one black person at Bruce’s concerts. The people were all dressed up in bright yellows and reds, the jacaranda trees were blooming in purple, and I was like,
Wow!
Purple trees and no white people! This must be heaven!”

Bruce was having his own set of revelations too, and not all of them came from his own new sense of the globe and its people. Given the opportunity to spend quality time with similarly creative and successful stars, Bruce grew particularly close to Sting, with whom he shared a working-class background and a similarly troubled relationship with his father. “Bruce and I figured a way out,” Sting says. “But no matter how successful . . . you’re always hungry, which is a good thing too. To be complacent or even happy, that’s kind of a bovine concept, really. What’s interesting is that we both strive to understand what this fucking thing is.” Sting had cut his ties with the Police and scored back-to-back solo triumphs with
The Dream of the Blue Turtles
and
. . . Nothing Like the Sun
. Peter Gabriel had also scaled new creative and commercial heights since leaving Genesis in 1975. As the tour went on, and Bruce had a chance to watch Sting and his new band in action, the British musician could sense a growing fascination beaming his way. “Bruce would watch our band—Branford Marsalis and the amazing group of musicians—and it was obvious that Bruce was interested in doing that too, working with a different set of musicians.”

What Bruce saw affirmed his realization that the time had come for him to reestablish his own independence. From the shadows of the past, from the relationships that had always defined him, from the sights, sounds, and riffs that had shored up his existence since he was a boy.

• • •

Even with the Amnesty shows in the fall, the 1988 Tunnel touring cycle was the shortest post-album run Bruce had taken since the five-month Born to Run tour in 1975. Back home in mid-October, the weather turned chilly. The December issue of
Esquire
magazine featured an essay designed to deconstruct Bruce’s reputation on every conceivable level. Starting with a sardonic cover illustration portraying Bruce as a Catholic saint, anchored by a “Saint Boss” headline (subhead: “Has Fame Crucified Bruce Springsteen?”),
³
the seven-thousand-plus-word story meandered through author John Lombardi’s lengthy disquisition on a
new-to-him phenomenon he called “mass hip”—for example, popular culture—and then turned to an ill-reported account of Bruce’s life and career, culminating in his recounting of a concert marred by the fact that Lombardi’s backstage pass wasn’t powerful enough to get him into the band’s bathroom facilities. Redirected to the public bathrooms on the concourse by a pair of security guards, the author gained his revenge by gathering quotes from fans sitting in what seems to be the least articulate section of the arena. The story ended, inexplicably, with the thoughts of celebrity sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer. “Bruce is a national monument,” she proclaimed. “This is what America’s about!”

The story itself is less interesting than the vein of hostility it taps. The years of presenting himself as rock ’n’ roll’s last true believer, and being portrayed by the media as a paragon of moral and musical virtue, had elevated Bruce onto a platform too lofty to stand on. Love it or hate it, the music was beside the point. These were stories about image and public narrative. And while Bruce certainly contributed to, and benefited from, his superheroic aura, he also knew it was a trap. The food bank donations, the fund-raising for veterans, and the many tales of the dispossessed he’d written set a standard he couldn’t meet. If he’d given
x
amount of money to the cause, why did he stop there? How could he criticize any other tycoon’s selfishness when the size of Bruce’s own fortune could make the Monopoly man’s mustache droop? All this talk of faith and virtue from a guy caught on an Italian balcony not only without his pants but with a woman not his wife? And worse, how could Bruce stand up for the rights of working people when people who worked for Bruce said
he’d
violated their rights?

Wait. What?

In the midst of Lombardi’s polemic came actual news. Two of Bruce’s ex-employees, Doug Sutphin and Mike Batlan, had filed a lawsuit alleging, among other things, that Springsteen Inc. had violated federal labor laws governing the payment of overtime wages. Still, the actionable parts of the filing were less eye opening than the allegations about Bruce’s penchant for fining employees who disappointed him—such as when Sutphin was dunned $100 for touching Nils Lofgren’s guitar, while Batlan claimed he was docked more than $300 when a storm swept away one of
Bruce’s canoes. Also, the litigants noted, house manager Obie Dziedzic had to cough up her own hard-earned cash for arriving late with Bruce’s preshow soup and sandwich.
The withholding of the royal soup!
Not an actionable offense, to be sure, but Bruce’s most precious fine would be exacted in the court of public opinion.

Batlan had resigned and Sutphin was shown the door after the U.S.A. tour, both walking out with six-figure severance packages that added up to about two years of their $50,000-plus salaries. Still, both departures had seemed friendly at the time, with, as Bruce recalled, “hugs and handshakes all around.” Everyone went on with his life for the next two years, until Batlan and Sutphin filed their complaint in Monmouth County civil court. Whether they intended the case to go to court or hoped to compel Bruce to buy his way out of a publicity nightmare is unclear. Either way, it was difficult to ignore the emotional undergirding to the complaint, which dated back to Batlan’s joining the crew in 1973, when Bruce and the band still earned $35 a week, and Mike Appel had to bounce checks to keep their vans running. The twenty-four-year-old Bruce talked in grand terms in those days, often declaring that everyone in his organization was part of the family, and that once he hit it big, he would make sure everyone else got dealt into his good fortune too. Whether such talk can or should be taken as legally binding fifteen years later is an interesting question.