Bruce (60 page)

“That’s what we ran into: willful distortion,” he says. “You don’t want to be naive and say it’s shocking, because it’s not shocking. I understand how the world works. But still, I don’t get it. It’s not that somebody got the story wrong. It’s the willful distortion of what you’re trying to say. That was the problem I had, not just with ‘American Skin,’ but you can take that all the way back to Reagan and ‘Born in the U.S.A.’
The willful distortion of what you’re trying to say
.”

F
OR BRUCE, THAT TUESDAY BEGAN
much like it did for every other American lucky enough not to be in the buildings or on one of the doomed airplanes. He was at the kitchen table, ploughing through a bowl of cereal and berries when someone ran in and told him to turn on the TV. An airplane had just crashed into the World Trade Center’s north tower. The second airplane hit the south tower a few moments later. By the end of the afternoon, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had toppled the skyscrapers, smashed through a wing of the Pentagon, sent another jet hurtling into a Pennsylvania field, and sent the nation hurtling into something approaching chaos. Bruce drove to the Rumson–Sea Bright Bridge, which crosses the Shrewsbury River near the edge of the ocean, and gazed at the Manhattan skyline in the northern distance. “It all didn’t really hit home ’til I took a ride across the bridge, and there was nothing where the towers used to be,” he told writer Robert Hilburn.

Taking another look from the Sea Bright beach a few days later, Bruce was just pulling out of a parking space when a man cruising by unrolled his window. “We need you, man!” he called.

“I knew what he was talking about,” Bruce said to NBC’s Matt Lauer a year later. “I think one of the things folks wanted to see in those early days was . . . the faces of people who were familiar to them, and people who mattered to them . . . We’ve worked hard for my music to play a very central and . . . purposeful place in my audience’s life. [So] it was a small wake-up call.”

When the leaders of the nation’s four major television networks joined forces with director Joel Gallen and actor George Clooney to plan a national telethon to aid the families of the attack’s victims, Jon Landau got a call from Jimmy Iovine, the engineer-turned-industry powerhouse,
¹
then helping to recruit music acts. When Landau mentioned that Bruce already had a song on hand that addressed the grief and determination they hoped to tap, Gallen gave him the opening slot on the telecast that would be viewed on all four American networks and the majority of major US cable channels, along with cable outlets from all over the world.

The September 21 broadcast began with a live glimpse of New York Harbor, a tugboat moving with the Statue of Liberty in the foreground and the emptiness marking the missing towers in the rear. The image darkened and then faded up on the candle-bedecked soundstage where Bruce stood, guitar in hand, harmonica rack around his neck, and a seven-member chorale
²
standing behind. There was no spoken introduction, no name written across the bottom of the screen. Bruce strummed a chord progression, issued a quick dedication—“This is a prayer for our fallen brothers and sisters”—and then leaned into the opening verse of “My City of Ruins,” a melancholy gospel-style ballad he’d written a year earlier, thinking about the fall of Asbury Park. But in the days after
the attacks on New York City, when the nation felt as bereft as the forsaken town Bruce describes, where the church pews are as empty as the storefronts, its residents as lost as their own sense of hope. When the song’s narrator speaks to a missing lover, his description of the emptiness in their bed sounded far too familiar to those left to mourn a loved one. “Tell me how to begin again,” he sang. “My city’s in ruins.”

But as with the gospel and (not coincidentally) so many of his own songs, the darkest moments of night foreshadow the dawn. “Now, with these hands, with these hands, with these hands . . .” The choir joined in softly and then with growing urgency as Bruce’s voice and guitar gained power. Then he lifted his voice even higher, imploring the skies for some sign of hope.

I pray for the strength, Lord; I pray for the faith, Lord; We pray for the lost, Lord; We pray for the strength, Lord . . .

The singers swayed to the music, their raised hands locked together, their voices expressing the grief in the air and the most American of ideals: that no tragedy can undo a person, or a community, determined to climb back to their feet, roll up their sleeves, and rebuild. And with that vision, proffered in a rare moment of posttraumatic national solidarity, Bruce’s voice set the tone for the evening and, for many viewers, nodded toward the path from devastation to redemption.

• • •

Bruce’s journey from rock star to cultural symbol had been increasingly vivid since the start of the reunion tour. On the posters promoting the tour-ending Madison Square Garden concerts, and then on the cover of the
Live in New York City
CD drawn from the final two shows (released in 2001), the central image captures a silhouette of Bruce and Clarence Clemons onstage: Bruce holding his Fender Telecaster; Clemons, his saxophone. Something about the red sky behind them lends an industrial look; rock ’n’ roll machinery powered by molten hearts. Bruce’s name marches across the top, with the E Street Band just below, more for design than informational purposes. The cover image alone, Bruce’s wide
stance, the hunch over his guitar, and Clemons’s shoulders thrown back, had become a recognized symbol. For a certain kind of barroom-sprouted rock ’n’ roll, to be sure. But also for a set of ideas and beliefs. You didn’t have to like his music to respect Bruce’s commitment to his craft or admire the egalitarian ideals he had both pursued and written songs about for so many years. That so many of those songs described, celebrated, or mourned the absence of basic American values gave Bruce another kind of gravitas. More than any other contemporary artist, he had made himself synonymous with the cause of the common man; a fellow traveler on the same path trod by Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, and Pete Seeger.

Still, Bruce had resisted the lure of explicit partisanship. Apart from occasional onstage comments (for instance, telling his Tempe, Arizona, audience on November 5, 1980, that the election of Ronald Reagan the previous night struck him as “pretty frightening”) and his obvious dismay at Reagan’s 1984 attempt to claim spiritual kinship, his public activism during that decade was limited largely to supporting the causes of Vietnam veterans and community food banks. But while Bruce’s role in Steve Van Zandt’s “Sun City” showed his willingness to take on hotly controversial issues, he’d downplayed partisanship in favor of a populist, vaguely anticorporate, proworker message that could come as easily from political conservatives with an ear for the common man. “I think Bruce was presenting and inhabiting an alternate patriotic vein than the one that was dominant in the country at the time,” says Eric Alterman, a political analyst and author of many books and articles for the
Nation
, MSNBC, and the
Jewish Daily Forward
, among others. “He became sort of the president of an imaginary America—the
other
America, so the rest of the world could admire the country the way they wanted to, without having to accept the fact that Reagan or George Bush spoke for America.”

Bruce became increasingly explicit about his politics in the 1990s, appearing at the fund-raisers for the left-wing Christic Institute in 1990, and then serving as a central face for the opposition to California’s Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot measure intended to bar illegal immigrants from
hospitals, schools, and other social services.
³
His biggest hit single of the decade, “Streets of Philadelphia,” made Bruce the first heterosexual rock star to give voice to a gay person’s inner feelings. The “American Skin” brouhaha, meanwhile, didn’t make much of a ripple outside New York City, where most citizens who didn’t have an immediate connection to the NYPD or City Hall saw it more as another chapter in the psychodrama of the Giuliani administration than an indication that one of New York’s and New Jersey’s most long-standing local heroes had revealed himself as a cop-hating radical.

So while Bruce’s sensibility flowed largely from New Deal liberalism, his working-class idealism came with bedrock principles on the virtues of work, family, faith, and community. None of which would be considered partisan had the collapse of American liberalism in the late 1970s and 1980s not included a large-scale redefinition of mainstream values as being conservative. That Bruce neither accepted nor acknowledged the politicization of traditional values could be seen in his own work ethic and the symbolic communities he formed with the E Street Band and the fans who bought his records and attended his shows. And even when his songs decried ruling-class greed and the fraying of the social safety net, they still came bristling with flags, work, veterans, faith, and the rock-solid foundation of home and family. “He does not attempt to hide his politics,” Christopher Borick and David Rosenwasser wrote in “Springsteen’s Right Side: A Liberal Icon’s Conservatism,” a paper presented at Monmouth University’s Bruce Springsteen symposium in 2009. “He’s got a Democratic ideology, a Republican vocabulary, and a Populist delivery system.”

Just as he’d synthesized gospel, rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, folk, jazz, and carnival music into a sound that echoed the clamor of the nation, Bruce’s particular magic came from his ability to trace the
connections that hold the world together, even when it seems on the verge of flying apart.

• • •

For weeks the church bells in central New Jersey rang steadily, each heralding another funeral. Firefighters and police officers, bankers, stockbrokers, insurance executives. Also secretaries, support staff, the passengers on the airplanes bound for San Francisco and Los Angeles. The local newspapers ran thick with obituaries. Intent on acknowledging the lives of all three thousand–plus victims, the
New York Times
launched “Portraits of Grief,” a series of mini-profiles describing each person as their family and friends knew them. The rabid Giants fan, the committed gardener, the prize-winning tango dancer, and so on. Bruce read them all and found it stunning when his name started turning up. The memorial service for Jeremy Glick, one of the passengers who attempted to liberate United Flight 93 from the hijackers, ended with a high-volume sing-along to “Born in the U.S.A.” New Jersey native Thomas Bowden was remembered as being “deeply, openly, and emotionally loyal to Bruce Springsteen.” The profile of insurance executive Jim Berger came under the heading “A Fan of the Boss,” noting, along with his love for his sons and the New York Yankees, a penchant for singing “Thunder Road” to anyone who would, or couldn’t avoid being made to, listen. “Every time you rode in Jim’s car, Bruce was on, whether you liked it or not,” his wife, Suzanne, said.

Bruce wrote down the names of his fans’ survivors and often reached out to them. He called on the telephone, usually unannounced, to pay his respects and, if it seemed appropriate, learn more about the lives of the lost. Whether he considered the calls a tribute to the dead, a generosity to their survivors, or part of his method to create an even larger tribute seemed unclear, even to Bruce.
⁴
But for Stacey Farrelly, whose husband, Joe, served as a New York Fire Department captain, hearing the voice, and the concern, of a man her husband had admired felt like a small blessing. “After I got off the phone with him, the world just felt a little
smaller,” she told
Time
’s Josh Tyrangiel a few months later. “I got through Joe’s memorial and a good month and a half on that call.”

Looking back a few months later, Bruce was careful to point out that he hadn’t set out to make an album about September 11. He’d been working on new songs for several months before the tragedy, already thinking of making a new record with the band. When the writing came more slowly than he’d hoped (he suffered a crisis of confidence, having not made a real rock ’n’ roll album since
Lucky Town
in late 1991), Bruce teamed up again with Pittsburgh bar rocker Joe Grushecky, cowriting “Another Thin Line,” “Code of Silence,” and another half dozen songs before the horrors of 9/11 consumed his thoughts. With the ruins of the World Trade Center still smoldering in New York, mourning banners strung across so many New Jersey streets,
⁵
and President George W. Bush already setting the stage for a war with Afghanistan’s terrorist-supporting Taliban government, Bruce’s muse clicked back into gear. “Into the Fire,” a blues-and-gospel tune that evoked both the sadness of the rescue workers’ deaths and the spiritual beauty of their sacrifice, came just after the attacks and had been his first choice for the
America: A Tribute to Heroes
telethon until he realized it needed more work and adapted “My City of Ruins” instead. “You’re Missing,” a metronomic ballad adapted from the 1994 outtake “Missing,” arrived soon after.

Other songs came on their heels, and after laying down a few demos with Toby Scott, Bruce moved into the recording process. After nearly thirty years of coproducing his own albums, twenty-five years with various combinations of Landau, Scott, Chuck Plotkin, and Steve Van Zandt, it seemed like a good time for him to both find a new producer and step back from his own position in the control room. A series of recommendations led to Brendan O’Brien, an Atlanta-based producer-mixer-multi-instrumentalist known for his work with Pearl Jam, Paul Westerberg, Stone Temple Pilots, and many others. Bruce invited O’Brien up to listen to demos in his own New Jersey studio, and they got to work immediately.

“He played ‘You’re Missing,’” O’Brien says, “and I remember saying,
‘Your bridge is actually your chorus; you should top the chorus and rearrange it. I can play it for you on the piano right now.’” Bruce listened to O’Brien’s revisions and then picked up his guitar to record a new demo of the song. He seemed impressed at the time. But as O’Brien found out later, in an interview that Bruce gave to
Rolling Stone
, his prospective client was less than thrilled. “I’d immediately set to messing with his songs, and he didn’t like it. In fact, he was pissed off.” No matter, Bruce liked what he heard enough to offer O’Brien the job.