Bruce (52 page)

Still, some members of Bruce’s staff sympathized with Batlan’s sense of injustice. For while Bruce had come home from the Born in the U.S.A. tour toting an astronomical sum of money, twelve-year veteran Batlan didn’t have enough cash to make a down payment for a simple family home. When he went directly to Bruce to remind him of his age-old promise, the once openhanded boss shrugged him off. Or so Batlan said. But when ex-drummer Vini Lopez, who got the sack years before any serious money rolled in, was called to give a deposition about his own memories of Bruce’s verbal assurances, he quickly refuted Batlan’s claim. “Give me a fuckin’ break,” he says. “And don’t ask me any questions [in court] ’cause I’ll tell you the damn answers.”

Settled eventually for an undisclosed amount rumored to be in the neighborhood of $325,000, the lawsuit left a bitter taste in Bruce’s
mouth. “I worked with these two people for a long time, and I thought I’d really done the right thing,” he told David Hepworth in 1992. “Then about a year later, bang!” Continuing the thought with
Rolling Stone
’s Jim Henke that same year, Bruce noted that the majority of his crew members tended to stay with the organization for years, even decades. “But it only takes one disgruntled or unhappy person, and that’s what everyone wants to hear. The drum starts getting beat . . . but outside of all that . . . if you spend a long time with someone and there’s a very fundamental misunderstanding, well, you feel bad about it.”

Sutphin’s and Batlan’s postlawsuit thoughts, feelings, and/or regrets were (and remain) impossible to know: as part of their $325,000 payoff, they signed away their right to ever utter a public syllable about the case, Bruce, or his related enterprises “
until the end of time
,” as the legal documents were rumored to say.

• • •

With the rush of 1987’s album, 1988’s tour, and the supercharged early days of his romance with Patti behind him, Bruce once again found himself adrift. Once again, the day-to-day pleasures of ordinary life didn’t register in his consciousness. And yet again, the same bony fingers tugged him back into the netherworld. “I’d made a lot of plans, but when we got home, I just kind of spun off for a while,” Bruce told Henke. An attempt to settle into the Rumson house dissolved in the spectral presence of Julianne and other figments of the recent past. Bruce and Patti tried an apartment in New York, but the close quarters made the small-town boy feel cramped: not enough room to move, no car at his doorstep, and way too much traffic to navigate even if he did keep a car in the city. “I just got lost. That lasted for about a year,” he said. “Somewhere between realization and actualization, I slipped between the cracks. I was in a lot of fear. And I was just holding out. I made life generally unpleasant. So at some point, Patti and I just said, ‘Hell, let’s go out to LA.’”

Settling into a new house near the top of the Hollywood Hills, Bruce girded himself for another shot at domestic life. “I knew it was going to be challenging for me because I had so much personal license,” he says. “I didn’t even know the language of a partnership. I didn’t know basic behaviors, of, like, if you’re out and gone, it’s nice to call. I hadn’t called
anyone for twenty years. So a million little things were hard to adjust to. I’m sure it’s like that for a lot of people. But I pursued it, so I suppose I was ready, as ready as you can be. I had pursued it since my early thirties, really.” One thing that made it easier, he continues, was that Patti had also spent her entire adult life in the rock ’n’ roll world. “She was an outsider also; the domestic thing was unusual for her too. So maybe that’s why it worked. It was a little strange for the two of us, and we thought, ‘How are we going to invent this for the two of us?’”

Eventually Bruce felt the southland breeze softening his impenetrable core. Perched above the city of illusion and reinvention, the bonds of the past no longer seemed quite so constricting.

“People always came west to re-find themselves or to re-create themselves in some fashion,” he told David Hepworth. “Mostly in some distorted way, but the raw material is here.” But when it became apparent to Bruce—and, perhaps more importantly, to Patti—that his psychic scars were not going to be burned off by the Southern California sun, he rededicated himself to psychotherapy. “I knew I’d had to spend eight hours a day with a guitar to learn how to play it,” he told Jim Henke. “And now I had to put in that kind of time just to find my place again.” Moving beyond the symptoms of his discomfort, Bruce dove in as deep as he could go. “I crashed into myself and saw a lot of myself as I really was. I questioned all my motivations. Why am I writing what I’m writing? Why am I saying what I’m saying? Am I bullshitting? Am I just trying to be the most popular guy in town? I questioned everything I’d ever done, and it was good.”

Progress came slowly, but it came. Back in New Jersey for the summer of 1989, Bruce made the rounds of clubs, sitting in with whatever friends, acquaintances, or just-made friends happened to be onstage. The summer hijinks came to a climax on September 23, when Bruce celebrated his fortieth birthday at his friend Tim McLoone’s Rum Runner bar just up the coast in Sea Bright. With a house full of friends and the entire E Street Band—including Steve Van Zandt—around him on the bandstand, Bruce faced his latest landmark birthday with far more aplomb than he had ten years earlier. He led the band through a long list of favorite oldies and rock ’n’ roll oddities, and then led into a wild
run at “Glory Days” by shaking his fist at the passing years. “I dedicate this song to, to, to
me!
I may be forty years old, but goddamn it, I’m still handsome!” Bruce hit the opening chords, Van Zandt and Lofgren followed, with Bittan and Federici joining in behind them, and they were all in lockstep, with Bruce leading the way back to the glories of the past and the natural yearning to re-create moments that can never be relived. “Oh, they’ll pass you by,” they all sang together. “In the wink of a young girl’s eye . . . glory days.”

O
N OCTOBER 18, 1989, BRUCE
sat down with his address book and a task he’d both feared and fantasized about for most of the decade: breaking up the E Street Band. “I think we got into a rut in our relationships, that had something to do with it also,” he says. “Relationships got a little muddy, through codependence, or whatever. Probably that aggravated everyone a little bit. I needed to take a break, do some other things, probably play with some other musicians, which I hadn’t done in a long time.

“So I called the guys up and talked to them as best I could. I never looked at it as the band being done or kaput or finished. But it was a call that said, ‘I’m gonna do something else, and you’re not gonna be a part of it for a while.’ And that was very difficult for the guys and me.” The suspicions that Max Weinberg and the others felt at that last show on the two-year, world-conquering Born in the U.S.A. tour turned out to be exactly right.

“I just didn’t know where to take the band next,” Bruce reflects. “It seemed like we’d reached an apex of what we were trying to do and say.”

Some found it easier to accept than others. Tallent, for one, noticed that absence of finality in what Bruce had to say. “He never said he was breaking up the band,” the bassist says. “He was like, ‘Just so you know, for the next little while I’ll be doing some other things, and you’re free to do other things.’ It was a courtesy call to let you know you were free to go down any pathways you found appealing. So it seemed like a very nice, gracious call.” Lofgren, who had started his sideman career working with the always unpredictable Neil Young, didn’t blink. “You gotta understand that this guy had spent his whole life playing with the same seven people,” he says. “No matter how good they are, you want to play with other people, try some different things.”

Weinberg had seen it coming. “You would have had to be completely blind not to notice there were major changes coming here,” he says. But the news was still “unrelentingly depressing,” if only because just a few weeks earlier Bruce had mentioned, in his usual offhand way, that he’d been writing new songs and expected to call the band together to start recording in January 1990. But then Weinberg opened
Rolling Stone
and learned that Bruce had already returned to the studio to record a rollicking “Viva Las Vegas” for an Elvis Presley tribute album with a studio full of high-end LA session players. On the phone, Bruce urged him not to take it personally. “It’s just something I feel I’ve got to do artistically.” Sensing the shock in the drummer’s voice, Bruce did what he could to put him more at ease. “I know it’s going to hurt,” he said. “But someday you’ll realize it was the right thing.”

Clarence Clemons got the call in Japan, where he, along with Lofgren, was touring with Ringo Starr’s first All Starr Band. As Clemons remembered, Bruce sounded so casual, he assumed he was being called back to E Street. “I picked up the phone and heard him say, ‘Hey, Big Man!’ I said, ‘Hey, Boss!’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s all over.’ I said, ‘Oh, uh, okay,’ because I thought he meant the Ringo tour was over, and I had to come back home to go into the studio or start another tour.” The sax player said he’d get home and check in as soon as possible, but then Bruce set him straight. “He said, ‘Naw, naw, naw. I’m breaking up the band.’”
Bruce recalls talking to Clemons for a while. “I had the kid gloves on delivering what I knew would be very bad news.” But Clemons was outside of himself by then, juggling his surprise and grief with a sudden urge to reduce his hotel room to ruins. So many years on the road, so much sacrifice, the thousands of hours spent waiting for Bruce to hear just the right sound from the recording studio speakers. “And I’m thinking, ‘It’s all for this? My whole life dedicated to this band, this situation, this man, and what he believes in, then I’m out of town and I get a fucking phone call?’” Fortunately, he was in the company of Ringo Starr, who had experienced his own traumatic breakup when the Beatles imploded in 1970. And it wasn’t long before Clemons simply accepted the change for what it was:

“Something in the back of my psyche said, ‘This is okay. He’ll come back. Because anything so great cannot be destroyed altogether. Anything the goddess created can’t be thrown away. It’ll come back.’”

• • •

Just before Thanksgiving 1989, Bruce and Patti learned that she was carrying their first child. A son, Evan James, was born on the evening of July 24. Watching from the side, a surge of feeling burst against a part of himself Bruce had kept locked down since he was old enough to know how to protect himself. “I got close to a feeling of a real, pure, unconditional love with all the walls down,” he told David Hepworth. “All of a sudden, what was happening was so immense that it just stomped all the fear away for a little while, and I remember feeling overwhelmed. But I also understood why you’re so frightened. When that world of love comes rushing in, a world of fear comes in with it.” It was a moment Bruce had imagined, described, and sang about for years. “My music over the last five years has dealt with those almost primitive issues. It’s about somebody walking through that world of fear so that he can live in the world of love.”

Bruce and Patti made their bond official at a backyard wedding the next spring, and their daughter, Jessica Rae, was born on December 30, 1991. “I had to change old attitudes and leave a lot of fears behind,” Bruce told
USA Today
’s Edna Gundersen in 1995. But he called having a family “the birth of my second life.”

Not that he could shake off every lingering shadow. Living in Los
Angeles, Bruce and Patti were about an hourlong commuter plane ride from the house he’d bought his parents in Belmont, a pleasant suburb about ten minutes down Highway 101 from San Mateo. Bruce always reveled in his mother’s company, but the prospect of seeing his father still set him on edge. “Doug was tough for him even when he was grown up,” says Shelley Lazar, a tour staff veteran who became a close friend to both Bruce and Patti. “He’d be a little more tense than when he was at home. I’m not sure if it was intimidation as much as the respect he had for his father.” In the early phases of a battle with emphysema, Doug’s breathing became labored and his health lagged. “Bruce knew [Doug] was his dad, and that he wasn’t feeling well.”

The anger between father and son had largely faded, due both to the passage of time and other less expected developments. A stroke Doug suffered in 1979 had somehow rewired the part of his personality that made it all but impossible for him to share his emotions. “Now he couldn’t hide anything,” Pam Springsteen says. “You could mention any of his kids’ names to him, and he’d burst into tears. You could see what meant the most to him. He was just a very real person. No pretense, no persona. And everyone loved him.”

Doug’s new openhearted countenance had a magnetic effect on the people who encountered him. “He was lovable,” Pam says. “He drew people to him, especially women. Put him on a plane, and within seconds the stewardess was standing over him. And he’d be doing
nothing
. He was just warm and kind, and had a warmth in his voice.” As Bruce once recounted to the writer Nick Dawidoff, he was settling in for a visit with his family backstage after a show in the late 1980s when his father held up his hand. He wanted his son to sit in his lap. Taken aback, Bruce stammered.
“Really?”
Doug nodded. So Bruce lowered himself, and all the years of hurt, anger, and misunderstanding, into his father’s lap. It couldn’t have been comfortable for either of them—physically, emotionally, and in every other conceivable way. But the awkwardness told its own story about an aging father and his grown son still struggling to express the love that had haunted them both for so long. Some scars never heal, and the strangeness of the scene hung thick in the room. But they still sat like that for quite some time.

The love between Springsteen men might come in unexpected ways, but to them, that only made it more meaningful. When Bruce held his own son in his lap a few years later, Patti noticed that her husband hadn’t read a word of the picture book he held. Instead he’d hold up the book so he and Evan could both see it, and then, after a minute or two of silence, turn the page so they could look at the next picture.