Bruce (64 page)

“Queen of the Supermarket” imagined a pure form of beauty in the aisles of the neighborhood Whole Foods.
²
Elsewhere, the gnarly blues heart of “Good Eye” vanishes beneath layers of studio silk. The midtempo “Working on a Dream”
³
trudges the same path trod by all those other determined Springsteenian laborers, only this time it doesn’t lead anywhere beyond the formless dream cited in the title.

Still, the Danny Federici tribute, “The Last Carnival,”
⁴
brimmed with enough love and sorrow to sting the eyes. And the real masterpiece in the collection, recorded by Bruce alone in his home studio, turned out to
be “The Wrestler,” the elegiac theme he wrote for the low-budget film of the same name. Starring the brilliant but mercurial Mickey Rourke, the portrait of a broken-down professional wrestler risking his life to reclaim former glories felt remarkably familiar. Following its character through the same crumbling East Coast towns Bruce had always known, the film played in his eyes as a kind of nightmare vision of who he might have become if the anger had consumed him and left him alone and fuming in a barely rented mobile home, broke and deaf, the Telecaster long lost to the pawn shop. That wasn’t Bruce’s fate. But he knew what might have led him there, and how easy it would have been to slam that aluminum door and feel right at home. Another variation on the archetype portrayed by John Wayne in the emotionally fraught western
The Searchers
. The story of the young rocker so determined to make a home and family through his music that he couldn’t sit still long enough to make those things part of his real life. “These things that have comforted me I drive away / This place that is my home I cannot stay / My only faith’s in the broken bones and bruises I display . . .”

• • •

Titled
Working on a Dream
, and wrapped in a gauzy, airbrushed painting of Bruce standing with the ocean behind and heavenly sky (half scattered stars, half summery clouds, all dreamy) above, the new album floated into the marketplace on January 27, 2009. Released just sixteen months since
Magic
in September 2007,
Working
set an instant mark as the quickest follow-up album Bruce had made with the E Streeters since
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
emerged in November 1973, ten months after the January release of
Greetings from Asbury Park.
While the album was greeted with respectful, if muted, reviews,
⁵
the weeks surrounding its release featured some of Bruce’s most spectacular promotional appearances.

He started with the Golden Globes, where “The Wrestler” won the Best Original Song–Motion Picture Award. Next, Bruce made his
star-spangled appearance at Barack Obama’s inauguration festivities on January 18, then pivoted immediately into rehearsals for his appearance at another unimaginably huge, nation-binding event. Which is to say, the halftime show of Super Bowl XLIII. “I wasn’t sure I expected it to mean something,” Bruce says. “I thought it would be just, okay, we’ve got a record coming out. You’re looking for new ways to have your music heard. Also, they’d been asking me to do it for ten years.”

Why wouldn’t Bruce play the Super Bowl for all those years? Pop stars (from Michael Jackson to Britney Spears to Shania Twain) had in recent years turned the halftime shows into gigantic promotional stunts for their next albums and tours. Serious-minded rock ’n’ rollers, on the other hand, took it to the people over the radio and in the concert halls. At least, that’s how it worked until the radio industry collapsed into tiny, computer-programmed shards. For most of the mainstream rock stations in the United States, even the most worshiped artists had been reduced to the sum of their original hits. No matter how prolific you were, or how celebrated your new work, you had little chance of introducing listeners to anything new. By the mid-’00s the terrain had shifted enough to push Paul McCartney to make the pilgrimage to the big game in 2005. The Rolling Stones followed in 2006, then came Prince in 2007. And when Jon Landau saw fellow stripped-down rockers Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers playing the halftime of the 2008 Super Bowl, he had a small revelation. “I just thought, ‘That could be
us
,’ ” Landau says. He picked up his telephone and dialed Bruce, who also happened to be sitting in front of his living room TV. “He had the same reaction.” Landau called the National Football League executives charged with planning the Super Bowl broadcast, and it wasn’t long before they had a deal. Bruce and the E Street Band would star in the 2009 halftime show.

Despite the many, many thousands of concerts Bruce had performed over the years, the twelve-minute Super Bowl appearance was the first to be scripted with graphic storyboards. Still, Bruce’s shows had long included light cues and even skits that required particular performers to be in particular places at precise times, so it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for him or anyone in the band. The one requirement Landau had lain down to the producers, in consideration for his man’s oft-stated
standards, was this: no fireworks. Looking over the storyboards a few months later, only one detail furrowed Bruce’s forehead. “Where’s the fireworks?” he demanded. Told that Landau had ruled them out, Bruce gazed at his partner incredulously. “How are you gonna do the Super Bowl without any fireworks? Are you
crazy
?” When game time approached in Tampa, Bruce fired up the E Streeters by telling them to think about the one hundred million pairs of eyes that would be locked on them during the show. “I said, ‘Look, today’s a day when we get to do what we’ve always wanted to do. We’re gonna play for
everybody
.’”

Designed as a kind of comic book version of the history and spirit of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, the halftime show began with Bruce and Clemons evoking the
Born to Run
cover by standing back to back against a sheer white backdrop, their instantly recognizable profiles augmented by the outlines of their lofted saxophone and Telecaster guitar. They separated with the opening chords of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” Bruce jogging to center stage and hurling his Tele to hardworking guitar tech Kevin Buell,
⁶
then bolting to the front to lead the band’s best-known creation myth. A quick four-count announced the start of “Born to Run,” minus its second verse, but with its “everlasting . . . kiss” emphasized with a burst of rocket fire. The berobed Joyce Garrett Singers jogged out to bring some gospel to a sliver of “Working on a Dream,” which gave way to a goofier than usual “Glory Days,” with lyrics adjusted for the occasion
(“I had a friend who’s a big football player . . . He could throw that Hail Mary right by ya . . .”), and a zebra-striped referee sprinting out to throw a delay of game flag when the show threatened to run long. Another hail of rockets swept the band off the stage, and a private plane carried Bruce back to New Jersey in time for him to light a bonfire in his backyard and contemplate the stars until close to dawn, the pulse of the one hundred million viewers still tingling in his fingertips. “It wasn’t what I expected,” he says. “I wasn’t sure I expected it to mean something. But it had a little strange sacrament to it. For weeks afterward, everybody came up and told me what they thought. The guy handling the baggage on the airlines, this person, that person, the nine-year-old kid on the street. ‘Hey, didn’t you . . . ’ You know? It was quite wonderful and meant quite a bit to all of us.”

• • •

Clemons nearly didn’t make it to the game. In early October 2008 he entered a New York City hospital and in two weeks weathered two knee replacement surgeries. The recovery process was excruciating. The pain, Clemons told Don Reo, his close friend and cowriter of his memoir,
Big Man
, was beyond anything he’d ever known. “They haven’t made a drug that can touch this pain,” he said. “I feel like I’m made of pain.” Almost entirely convinced that he could never be in shape for the halftime show, Clemons worked with trainers through the holidays and then into January. And when the lights came on in Tampa that evening, one hundred million Americans, and God only knows how many other viewers around the world, saw him standing tall, moving with the music as he blasted his trademark solos, and moving easily to punctuate Bruce’s “Tenth Avenue” proclamation that Scooter and the Big Man were about to tear the Super Bowl in half with a mighty high five. “There’s something about being onstage,” Clemons said. “I call it the healing floor. I do all this shit, then I sit back later and wonder, how the hell did I do that? It revives you.”

Clemons made it onto the Working on a Dream tour, albeit with the golf cart and elevator, and a stool to lean on when he didn’t have an active role in the song at hand. As on the Magic tour, Clemons’s hobbled condition altered his presence. No longer able to stalk and then rush into the spotlight, he hung back in his shades, fedora, and floor-length black duster, dark and inscrutable until the moment the spotlight put the
gleam on his sax and he pinned his shoulders back. “I’ll be seventy years old soon,” Clemons said that afternoon on his balcony. “So you have to find different parts of your body to make it happen.”

Bruce, on the other hand, made like Peter Pan with his gym-solid shoulders and chest, his impressively trim waistline, and the jumping, strutting, piano-dancing performances that seemed every bit as electric as they had been in the nineties, the eighties, and the seventies too. This time out, however, his new material didn’t light up the arenas like the tunes from
Magic
and especially
The Rising
had done. So while Bruce had long built his shows around his newest songs,
⁷
mixing in the older stuff to underscore certain themes or to allow the new material to reveal new dimensions in songs whose meanings had once seemed chained to other eras or messages. True to form, the Working on a Dream tour’s April 1 opener in San Jose, California, featured half a dozen songs from the new album, with a nearly ten-minute “Outlaw Pete” tapped as the night’s second song and each of the show’s five-to-six-song minisets built around
Working
tracks. When the tour got to Philadelphia on April 28, the set was down to four new songs, which ebbed to two when they opened the European swing on May 30. When the tour ended in Buffalo six months later, only the album’s title song remained in the set. “It was a record that just wasn’t as popular as a lot of our other records,” Landau says. “On the Magic tour, he was doing seven or eight
Magic
songs a night. And on the Working tour [the new songs] weren’t making a connection to the live audience that we would like them to make. Not for a lack of trying, though.”

Sensing the lag in his audience’s enthusiasm, Bruce went back to his catalog for rarely played songs, many inspired by the handmade signs audience members brought to inspire a last-second call for “New York City Serenade,” “I’m on Fire,” and so on. That Bruce even acknowledged the signs represented a philosophical shift. The signs had first appeared nine
years earlier during the reunion tour, when a concerted effort by hard-line fans (rallied for the first time by Internet fan sites) tried to compel Bruce to play “Rosalita,” the one beloved classic he had made a point of not performing on the tour.

Back then the “fuckin’ signs,” as he called them, aggravated him so much that the one time he did play “Rosalita,” at the end of the fifteen-night stand in the Continental Airlines Arena, it was because he
didn’t
see any “Rosalita” signs in the crowd. Bruce did a 180 on the signs during the Magic tour in 2008, and made a ritual of calling for them to be passed forward to the stage, where he could sift through the requests and pull out the ones he liked. He became particularly fond of the requests for obscure and/or just plain odd non–E Street oldies, which led to a recurring feature he called Stump the Band. Anything could happen, given the right sign. One night, ZZ Top’s “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide.” The next, ? and the Mysterians’ “96 Tears.” Or maybe the Troggs’ “Wild Thing,” the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.” Or how about a “Hava Nagila”–“Blinded by the Light” medley?

When the tour went into its final leg in the fall of 2009, Bruce began a series of full-album shows, during which he and the band would perform one of his most beloved albums from start to finish. Starting with a complete
Born to Run
in Chicago, they repeated the performance at Giants Stadium, following at the same venue with shows featuring
Darkness on the Edge of Town
and
Born in the U.S.A.
When they got back to New York after a short sweep of Midwestern and East Coast arenas (which included several
Born to Run
shows), they lit up their Madison Square Garden shows with song-by-song re-creations of
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
(with Richard Blackwell playing his original conga part from “New York City Serenade”) and then a full playing of the two-disc
The River
. A few more
Born to Run
shows followed, but Bruce saved the tour’s last concert—an arena show in Buffalo—for the full performance of his debut record,
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.
With Mike Appel along in the airplane and then backstage, Bruce pulled his ex-manager into the preshow band circle and called out to every person in the ring—Clemons, Tallent, Appel, and Van Zandt, and the absent Federici and Vini Lopez—who had helped him get into that first recording studio and
then so far beyond. Onstage Bruce dedicated the show to his ex-manager. “
This
is the miracle,” he said. “This is the record that took everything from
waaay
below zero to, uh, to
one
.” He reminisced about John Hammond and the audition he’d earned thanks only to Appel’s insistence. “So tonight I’d like to dedicate this to the man who got me through the door. Mike Appel’s here tonight. Mike, this is for you.” That tumbling guitar riff kicked off “Blinded by the Light,” and off they went, back to his tentative first steps in the big-time music industry and on the road that had led them so far.