Bruce (57 page)

With more than two and a half years gone since the last show of the
’92–’93 Human Touch–Lucky Town tour, Bruce geared up for another world tour, this time as a solo act. Just himself, a few guitars, harmonicas, possibly a piano, and maybe a nice rug on the floor. As new experiences went, this one wasn’t entirely unprecedented. The pair of solo sets he’d performed at the Christic Institute benefits in 1990 set a model for how he could present his work, including the stadium-shaking anthems, in arrangements that drew power from the empty space once inhabited by the roar of a rock ’n’ roll band.

And as with the album that launched it, the Joad tour came with an entirely new set of aesthetics and expectations. Booked into theaters seating two thousand to five thousand—tiny halls compared to the arenas and stadiums he had played for most of the previous twenty years—Bruce stepped onto the stage in loose-fitting trousers and earth-toned work shirts, his goatee and long, tightly swept-back hair describing the profile of a passionate, if stern, academic. Unconcerned with showmanship, he came out each night bearing orders for the audience to respect his, and the music’s, need for peace and quiet. No singing along, in other words. No clapping along, either. If anyone felt moved by what they heard, they should keep their appreciation to themselves until the song’s final notes had rung. Which sounds a lot more off-putting than it actually was, since Bruce’s appeals tended to be funny and self-deprecating, begging the audience to not make him wreck his good-guy image as he’d been forced to do in Los Angeles when a chatty crowd required him to speak harshly to supermodels, confiscate cell phones, and so on.

The unsmiling image Bruce presented for
Joad
could never quite eclipse the joy he felt performing to the fans he saw gazing up at him every night. No matter the seriousness of his new material—and the older songs that told different versions of the same stories (“Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” among others)—he also found room for the likes of “No Surrender,” “This Hard Land,” and even rarities such as “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?” and “Blinded by the Light.” As the tour went on, Bruce also made a point of lightening the mood with one or two of his new, darkly comic tunes, such as the sleazy pickup
ballad “It’s the Little Things That Count” and the infomercial satire “Sell It and They Will Come.”

• • •

The Tom Joad solo tour ran from late 1995 into the spring of 1997, stretching through two American and European legs and jaunts through Japan and Australia. Bruce collected a Grammy in the Best Contemporary Folk Album category along the way, but no other show was quite as emotionally charged as the evening he spent playing in the gymnasium at the St. Rose of Lima elementary school in Freehold. He had few pleasant memories of the place—mostly from the CYO dances the Castiles played on Friday nights in 1965. Even so, he’d been singing about the school, one way or another, for his entire adult life. Now the institution was celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary with an increasingly Hispanic population, and when its administration asked him to play a show to benefit the school’s scholarship fund, Bruce couldn’t refuse.

Set for November 8, 1996, the show created a bigger buzz in Freehold than President Bill Clinton’s visit had done two months earlier. Anticipating a rush of out-of-towners, the organizers set strict guidelines for ticket sales, requiring every attendee to present some form of identification or other proof of Freehold residency to pass the school’s door. When the night arrived, the crowd jammed inside the auditorium greeted Bruce just like they used to when they saw him walking down the street to the park. Even the
“Brooooce!”
calls sounded familiar enough to ignite a boyish smile. And the feeling was mutual. So many of Bruce’s old friends and neighbors had long ago come to see him in the bars, or made the trek to catch the big shows up at the Meadowlands Arena or Giants Stadium and marvel at the hero he’d become. But here in the old neighborhood, he went right back to being one of them: an overgrown kid who managed to get out for the night.

After opening with “The River,” Bruce paused to absorb his unlikely setting. “I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I wasn’t standing here now,” he said with a chuckle. “Right under the cross, too.” Everyone laughed, and he described a friend’s reaction to hearing that he’d be playing his old Catholic school. “He said, ‘Oh! Revenge, eh?’ But I said no, no, no.” He paused for a beat. “Well, maybe just a
little.
”

Bruce wasn’t kidding, as St. Rose’s Father Gerald McCarron would soon learn. But Bruce also had serious—and often quite moving—memories and observations to share, including a tender dedication of “The Ghost of Tom Joad” to a nun, Sister Charles Marie, whom he remembered teaching him about empathy and kindness. He spoke at length about the Vinyards, remembering Tex (who had died in 1988) and the crucial help he and Marion gave to the Castiles, and dedicating “This Hard Land” to her. He also talked lovingly to Adele, capping it with a rare airing of what he liked to call his “mother lover’s song,” “The Wish.”

And yet the warm memories took him only so far. For no journey back to the cradle of his youth would be complete without a glimpse back into the cauldron of “Adam Raised a Cain” or the gleeful rebellion fueling “Growin’ Up.” Back in the seat of his Catholic education, hoisted up onto a stage with a large wooden cross over his head, Bruce couldn’t resist pushing the church’s boundaries of acceptability until he could hear them splinter. He made a brief gesture while introducing “Highway 29,” noting that the sort of insight reflected in its final verse “usually comes after you fuck up pretty badly.” He’d glanced apologetically at St. Rose’s head priest just then, but he wasn’t all that sorry, as Father McCarron, and some unsuspecting congregants learned when Bruce got around to his tribute to Patti, “Red Headed Woman.”

“I’m gonna move on now, to a great song about a great subject,” he announced. “
Cunny-lingus.
” He let that hang in the air for a beat. “I know, I know. You’re sayin’, ‘Bruce, how can you stand up in your Catholic school and sing a song about
cunny-lingus?
’ But I talked to Father McCarron, and I said, ‘Father, can I sing a song about cunny-lingus in your school?’ He said [
speaking stonily
], ‘I’m not sure.’ So I took that for a yes.”

“That’s when the priest walked out, I’m pretty sure,” says Freehold native Kevin Coyne. “I don’t know if he stormed out or stalked out. But he definitely left. That’s for sure.”

If Bruce saw, he didn’t care. “Because I’m talking about
marital sex
here. That’s right,
marital
sex. And as we know, the doctrine on that is that the Pope says, ‘I can’t, but you go right ahead.’ So anyway, as we speak, there’s probably some folks practicing cunny-lingus right here in
my hometown. Well, uh, I hope so. You
do
need practicing because it takes a while to get that, uh, down. Pun intended.”

Lest anyone get the idea that he had come to ridicule the church, humiliate its leader, and leave his neighbors in the ashes, Bruce had written an original song for the evening; an alternately sharp and loving ballad for the town and people he could never bring himself to abandon completely. Titled “In Freehold,” the song recalled his youth, from Randolph Street to St. Rose of Lima, from escorting Doug home from the pool hall to picking up his first guitar, his first kiss, the Vinyards, the tragedy of his father’s life, and the small-mindedness that made Freehold “a bit of a redneck town” to outsiders and outcasts. “He nailed it with that one,” says former musician-turned-mayor Mike Wilson. He also offered more recent memories: walking the streets with his kids, taking them on a fire engine ride (he didn’t mention that he had single-handedly paid for the city’s new rescue vehicle), and, he had to confess, being happy to be on the streets that raised him. “Well, I left and swore I’d never walk these streets again, Jack / Tonight all I can say is, ‘Holy shit, I’m back.’”

It was true. After eight years of living in Los Angeles, Bruce and Patti had packed up their kids, including their youngest, Sam Ryan, born in 1994, and made a family home in Colts Neck, a quiet, partly rural town about ten minutes from the Monmouth County court building at the center of downtown Freehold.

B
RUCE AND PATTI MOVED THEIR
family back to New Jersey in 1996, setting up in a farmhouse on a pastoral spread of land just east of Freehold. Moving so close to his hometown had not been an accident, Bruce told me. “My oldest boy was going into first grade, and we just decided we didn’t want to raise the kids in LA. Patti and I wanted the children to have more of a normal upbringing.” In Colts Neck, he says, “We lived in a nice neighborhood, and [the kids] went to good schools, but outside of that they grew up around dry cleaners, hunters, people who did all sorts of things. So, really, the intent was to create as regular a life for the kids as possible, and we liked it. We have a family that is huge, and everybody really gets along. It’s truly a miracle, you know.”

Back on his home turf, Bruce took on the paradoxical roles of ordinary neighbor, dad, old friend, and local legend. Stranger still, his easygoing commitment to being the former only added more of an otherworldly
glow to the latter. The more normal he behaved, the more extraordinary it seemed.

You didn’t hear about it so much if you didn’t live in central New Jersey. But from the Springsteen epicenters around Freehold and Asbury Park, the stories have the ring of folk legends. There he is on Main Street on Freehold’s weekly Cruise Night, his son perched on his shoulders as they watch the vintage hot rods parade past. See that guy in the Range Rover with the car seats in back? That’s Bruce Springsteen dropping his kids off at school. An hour later he’s in sweats in the Gold’s Gym at the mall, straining through his weight room regimen while his trainer barks encouragement. By midafternoon, he’d be back at school, arriving early enough to sit on the hill above the playground to watch the kids running and swinging through recess. “That’s my boy down there,” he boasted, pointing out his eldest to a friend. He’d never seemed more proud. Possibly because the boy wasn’t lost on the outskirts of the games; he was right there in the middle, laughing and playing with everyone else.

Bruce also couldn’t resist an invitation to take a seat at the center of a party. So when he pulled over on Route 97 to check out a Harley-Davidson with a For Sale sign on it, Bruce introduced himself to the owner when he came out, talked about the bike, spent a little while trading road trip stories, and when the guy mentioned that he and his buddies were grilling and drinking beers out back, Bruce came right back to have a few. He shook hands all around and ended up staying for two hours, working through a few Budweisers and a plate of ribs before he realized how late it had become. In the summers you’d find him stretched out on the sand at Manasquan Beach or standing on the Asbury Park boardwalk—just outside Madam Marie’s little fortune-reading shack. He didn’t wear disguises or come with a posse or even a single bodyguard. He simply lived the adult version of the life he always led on the streets and boardwalks.

• • •

Since the mid-1980s, Bruce’s chief recording engineer, Toby Scott, had spent his out-of-the-studio periods listening to, cataloging, and converting to digital files the enormity of recorded music his boss had compiled over the years. Rehearsal tapes, live tapes, the teetering skyscrapers of
studio outtakes, rejects, and early versions of subsequently rewritten tunes. A Herculean job, given the wildly prolific habits Bruce had lived by for so long. “We had at least three hundred fifty unused songs by the time we got to 1997,” Scott says. And not all of them had been judged substandard. More than a few, in fact, had been dismissed in favor of songs whose main strengths derived from what they added to their albums’ narratives rather than their own singular charms. “Listen to ‘Roulette,’ that’s a great little piece,” Jon Landau says of the early
River
outtake. “Bruce and I would hear that and look at each other in shock, both of us saying, ‘It wasn’t
my
idea to leave that off the album!’ We had our reasons at the time, and every decision represented a choice.”

With so many songs in the backlog, and so many of them at least as good as the tunes that had already found their way onto his albums, Bruce took a long listen to his musical history, hearing the sound of his own development: from the solitary folksinger following John Hammond’s instructions in mid-1972 to the grandiose visions of
Born to Run
up through
Born in the U.S.A.
and beyond—right up through the early-nineties sessions, the cast-off 1994 album, and more. Bruce was particularly struck by the
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
outtakes, from the songs’ many cantilevered sections to the hell-bent way that Vini Lopez, Clarence Clemons, David Sancious, Garry Tallent, and Danny Federici played them. When an instrumental studio take of “Thundercrack” came up, his jaw dropped. “Oh geez,
listen
to that!” he said to Scott.

The original plan for the compilation album was to stick with the original rough mixes of the songs. But as Bruce’s enthusiasm for the project grew in 1998, so did his ambitions for how the material should be presented. What began as a simple collection of old roughs became a full-on production effort, with three sets of engineers and mixers working in three separate studios. Scott worked in the semipermanent studio Bruce had set up in the eighteenth-century farmhouse that stood on the edge of his land, a mobile recording unit parked nearby; and they had Bob Clearmountain’s Mix This! studios in Los Angeles, which could send and receive files via an ISDN telephone line. Bruce oversaw all of the operations, checking in every afternoon to hear the day’s work and either
approve it or tell them how he wanted the songs revised. And when he heard a tune’s original take lacking a certain something—a horn section, a background vocal, or even a lead vocal—he took the tape into a recording studio and opened the tracks for improvements.