Bruce (81 page)

⁴
Then an up-and-coming hard rock band signed to Elektra Records whose structure and sound would soon become a significant influence on Bruce’s writing and performing.

⁵
Burke and Graham recall that the labels were Columbia and Elektra.

⁶
How Bruce could continue to be ridiculed by a student body that had so many opportunities to see him playing lead guitar and singing with an increasingly popular rock band is anyone’s guess.

¹
He’s talking about Charles Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
’s Tiny Tim, not the ukulele-playing, late-sixties curiosity.

¹
Bruce speaks often about watching his father struggle to get his car moving in the mornings. One Springsteen car wouldn’t shift into reverse, so if Doug had left the car in the driveway, it had to be pushed into the street before he could go anywhere else.

²
Although certain melodies, chord progressions, and a few phrases of lyrics would be recycled over the years.

³
Lofgren also joined the Young-less iteration of Crazy Horse for a short stint, and played on the drug-fueled sessions for Young’s
Tonight’s the Night
album and accompanying tour.

¹
Details on Anthony’s postprison work and life are a bit murky, due both to his estrangement from the rest of the family and to the fact that no one in the younger generations is quite sure exactly what he was up to.

²
After decades of being divorced and distant from each other, the couple reconnected at a family wedding in the late 1960s. Anthony had just buried his third wife (the secretary for whom he had left Adela in the late 1930s had also died), and once they started talking again, the couple reestablished their bond. They never remarried but did live together in the House on the Hill for the final ten years of Anthony’s life.

³
Bruce: “That doesn’t sound completely plausible to me. If they offered us an opening slot we would have jumped at it.”

¹
He celebrated his birthday on September 23.

²
The Highlands is distinguished from nearby Atlantic Highlands by actually being on the Atlantic, and significantly lower than the AH.

³
Despite the popular assumption that Appel and Cretecos were hoping to piggyback on the then-overwhelming popularity of the artists based in Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon (Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Carole King, and so on), Appel swears that his inspiration came from a weekend visit to a rural house that was surrounded by the most beautiful laurel bushes he’d ever seen.

¹
Also known as the Riot House, which gives you an idea as to the general vibe of the place, which was loud, rowdy, and, for many guests of the era, fogged over in Tequila Sunrises, appealingly slinky women, and narcotics.

¹
A bright green liqueur distilled by Carthusian monks in France, who use 132 plants to flavor the stuff, which gets its color from the plants’ chlorophyll.

²
Not according to Clarence: “It was so powerful, we were like—Holy
shit!
That guy shoulda stopped us from drinking this! So then we stopped drinking for a little while.”

³
Apparently confusing Bruce with Australian musician factor Rick Springfield, whose first hit song “Speak to the Sky” had just been released.

⁴
An exaggeration, to put it mildly.

⁵
In search of a new look and sound to launch his career as a recording musician in late 1972/early 1973, Bruce paid a visit to Petillo’s music store in Ocean Township, New Jersey, in search of a new instrument. He came away with a rebuilt 1953 Fender Telecaster, its original neck replaced with one from a ’50s-era Fender Esquire. He’d seen, and heard, the guitar played by other Asbury Park musicians before. “It just made its way round the local music scene ’til it ended up at Petillo’s,” he says. “That’s where I found it, for a hundred and eighty five bucks.” The very legible “Esquire” on the tuning peg head has long led fans to believe the guitar is a full-blooded Esquire. “I say it’s a Telecaster, though that’s a little incorrect,” he continues. “It’s a mutt, if you will.”

¹
Who, it bears mentioning, was only thirty-one at the time, quite productive, and nowhere near needing an inheritor.

²
Named for the quiet, residential Belmar street where Sancious lived with his mother.

³
Whose literary antecedents are made clear in the second verse, as Johnny acts the “cool Romeo” while Jane follows her heart like “a late Juliet.”

¹
Both Albee Tellone and Big Danny Gallagher had moved on by the end of 1973.

²
Stemming either from Clemons’s unwillingness to clean up the kitchen after a marathon session of marijuana smoking or because, in the sax player’s words, “Vini finally just pissed me off.”

³
Intracompany rumor and anecdotal accounts from shop owners indicated that someone high in Columbia/CBS’s power structure had ordered the sales reps to compel retailers to trade their copies of
Greetings
and
Wild
for Billy Joel’s first Columbia album,
Piano Man
, released the same week as Springsteen’s second LP.

⁴
And also created a big opportunity for local entrepreneurs to retail their own Springsteen/E Street Band T-shirts, stickers, and so on to the fans, often at a nice profit.

⁵
Revised to “Then She Kissed Me.”

¹
The criminality of the Nixon administration, the inglorious end of the Vietnam War, the gnawing economic and environmental crises, the Watergate scandal, and Nixon’s humiliating resignation in 1974.

²
An early title for “Thunder Road,” with sloppier lyrics and a “Rosalita”-like dance party ending.

³
Both of which featured verses and digressions that would eventually be repurposed into entirely different songs, such as the middle section of the early “She’s the One,” which led to “Backstreets.”

⁴
Williams, also a student, was almost certainly the first American writer-editor-publisher to even attempt such a thing.

⁵
Not for lack of sales of the band’s debut album,
Kick Out the Jams,
but because its title song, and the album version of its cleaned-up lead single, included the prominent use of the word
motherfucker
, which at the time made them too hot to handle.

⁶
Though they would soon become an acclaimed and then top-selling band.

⁷
Louis Lahav’s wife, who had been playing shows with the band since the fall of 1974, most strikingly on a lovely piano-violin-voice arrangement of “Incident on 57th Street.”

⁸
Including brothers Michael and Randy Brecker (trumpet and saxophone, respectively), sax player Dave Sanborn, and trombonist Wayne Andre.

⁹
Already installed as president of Arista Records.

¹
Arguably unfair and yet interesting aside: Edwards’s next major project was writing the screenplay for the Bee Gees/Peter Frampton movie adaptation of
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
, the most reviled rock ’n’ roll–based movie ever. Completely unexpected punchline: Edwards was a friend of, and continues to be spoken of generously by, Dave Marsh. Go figure.

²
Save for the suggestion that
Born to Run
would benefit from the sort of ironic detachment Bette Midler put into her act. Which is akin to criticizing Midler for not having Neil Young’s jagged way with a guitar solo.

³
The interior lid of which had been signed by Bruce and every member of the E Street Band to mark the completion of
Born to Run
, according to house owner Marilyn Rocky. The piano stayed there for years until one departing tenant took it out to the street with the trash. It may or may not survive somewhere on the Jersey Shore.

¹
An appointment made by CBS president Walter Yetnikoff as a reward for Philbin’s pre-science and fierce dedication to Columbia’s new smash artist. “You were right, and I was wrong,” Yetnikoff said. “I want you signing bands for this label.”

²
The Chevy is now owned by a private collector, and tours as part of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 2009 (and now traveling) exhibit, “From Asbury Park to the Promised Land: The Life and Music of Bruce Springsteen.”

³
Bruce shook up the legal team soon after his disastrous deposition, taking up with a more litigation-savvy team that included Benjamin, seasoned litigator Peter Parcher, and Mike Tannen, the latter of whom worked closely with Paul Simon during the 1970s.

⁴
Which eventually rode its
Born to Run
–esque sound to septuple-platinum status.

⁵
Whether all of this talk was limited to this informal conversation or if it led to another, more organized band meeting, is unclear—memories differ. Van Zandt, who has the most precise version of events, says that there was a real meeting, with Bruce not in attendance, and then a straw poll kind of vote that resulted in an even 3–3 split, with Clemons, Bittan, and Federici thinking it was time to go, and Weinberg, Tallent, and Van Zandt voting to hold things together. But Tallent and Weinberg have zero recollection of being at any kind of meeting and dismiss the entire notion that there would even be anything for anyone to vote about, since they were individual players working for Bruce.

⁶
Bell first met Bruce, and got to know Appel and the rest of the organization, while working with Sam McKeith at William Morris, and so the story of his jump to Premier and into what had been McKeith’s chief agent status is a bit complex. Bell had first agreed to join forces with Appel to form an independent booking agency with a roster headlined by, but not limited to, Bruce. Those plans crumbled when Appel refused Bruce’s offer of a handshake contract. Meanwhile, Bell socialized with Bruce (their respective girlfriends were neighbors), quit his job at William Morris, and accepted a better job at Premier. McKeith’s defenestration, according to Bell, was a result of Bruce’s disenchantment with the Morris agency and for his being too close to Appel. McKeith, on the other hand, believes that Bell, like many junior agents before and since, simply built his own personal bond with Bruce and used it to leverage him away from McKeith and William Morris, and into Premier, where he would serve as Bruce’s chief agent. That said, other factors were also in play, and McKeith still seems peeved by how it all went down. And given the personal/professional travails he was on the verge of encountering, the whole episode is one of the less cheerful in Bruce’s long career. But, as Mike Tannen says, such is life in the entertainment industry.

¹
The best non-Springsteen example of Landau’s signature sound can be found on Jackson Browne’s
The Pretender,
produced by Landau in 1976. As compared to Browne’s more rustic albums,
The Pretender
fleshed out his usual acoustic guitar, piano, fiddle, and lap-steel-guitar blend with enough strings, horns, gospel, and cross-cultural exotica to give the artist’s self-revelatory lyrics a global sweep.

²
“Adam Raised a Cain” being the obvious exception to this rule, but even here, Bruce’s screaming evocation of emotional chaos serves a distinct purpose in the song’s narrative.

³
Bruce didn’t get around to reading John Steinbeck’s original 1939 novel until he met the author’s widow many years later.

⁴
Seguso admits that he was also drinking more than usual that winter, and thus landing in some regrettable situations, none of which helped his case around Holmdel.

⁵
Which Bruce had written thinking he might pitch the song to his boyhood hero as a possible new single.

⁶
Coaching mixer Chuck Plotkin on how the song should sound, Bruce described a movie scene showing two young lovers sharing a picnic in a sunlit park. The sun would be shining, the grass would be emerald, the ducks paddled across the pond before them. Then the camera would zoom out to reveal, just behind them, a human corpse lying in the bushes behind them.
Aiieee!
“This song,” Bruce told Plotkin, “is the dead body.”

¹
Following a monthslong mixing session that again cycled through confidence, frustration, gloom, anguish, and then surrender, before a nearly panicked Landau called Los Angeles–based producer Chuck Plotkin and told him “The album won’t mix!” Sitting at the panel a day or two later, Plotkin queued up “Prove It All Night,” listened to Bruce chatter about how screwed up the song was, and how maybe only a new guitar solo could fix it, and then waved him aside. “Look, we’ll push some buttons and move some levers, and it’s not gonna be hard.” Two hours later Bruce and Landau were so happy with what they heard that Plotkin became a pillar of a Springsteen-Landau-Plotkin-Toby Scott (Bruce’s chief engineer) team that remained more or less in place until 2001.

²
The album went through a variety of alternate titles, including (jokingly)
Viva Las Vegas
, an idea that got started when Bruce led the band on a jammed version of the old Elvis tune and Landau imagined a cover illustration showing Bruce’s name on the old International Hotel’s marquee, with the rest of the Vegas strip reduced to a ghost town. A more serious option,
Badlands
, bit the dust when former Asbury musician Billy Chinnock (by then relocated in Maine) turned up with an album and single called
Badlands
too. Knowing that Chinnock was close to Garry Tallent, Bruce blamed his bass player for tipping the name to the other musician. Tallent swears he did no such thing. “I said, ‘Maybe he saw the same Martin Sheen movie
you
did!’” Tallent says. Bruce didn’t, and apparently still doesn’t, buy it. Tallent: “He says, ‘Say what you will, but I know that you did it.’ And I say, ‘Believe what you want, but I still didn’t do it.’”