Bruce (83 page)

³
Unprinted answer to its own question: not yet, but keep reading.

¹
By then part of Japan’s media behemoth Sony.

²
No offense to that guy, but the years have sapped a lot of memories.

³
Particularly relevant after the April 29 rehearsal had been stopped by the rioting that tore through Los Angeles in the wake of the not-guilty verdicts handed down to the LA police officers who had been videotaped kicking and beating an unarmed African-American motorist named Rodney King.

⁴
Note to wiseguys: yes, the actual show began with “Better Days.” But we’re talking about the
broadcast.

¹
On the tumbledown streets of south Philadelphia, singing live (amid the ambient sounds of the city, barking dogs and all) to the camera-and-microphone rig driving alongside him.

²
Actually the temporary home studio Toby Scott put together in a rented home in Bel Air, made necessary when the powerful January 17, 1994, Northridge earthquake did enough structural damage to the Springsteen home to send the family to the guest house Bruce had been using for the Thrill Hill West studios.

³
The industry standard for greatest-hits packages in the 1990s, largely to inspire serious fans who already owned the original albums to buy the compilation too.

⁴
He says this in the fall of 2011, more than a dozen years after Bruce reconvened the band for good (albeit in his off-and-on-when-it-feels-right-to-me way) and months before the start of the long touring cycle Bruce had all but guaranteed would begin in 2012.

⁵
Landau soon decided to keep Fritz and his crew around through the end of the sessions.

⁶
Minus Scialfa, who wasn’t scheduled to turn up until the vocal sessions later.

⁷
Another also-ran from the 1982
Born in the U.S.A.
sessions, finally released as Bruce’s tribute to the nameless fan who had attended dozens of shows during the eighties holding up the same “Murder, Inc.” sign.

⁸
Which seems odd, considering the amount of adoration so many of the same writers had larded upon the work in its original release. But the critics had their reasons. Some complained that the absence of pre–“Born to Run” songs distorted the collection’s use as a historical overview, while it didn’t quite work as a greatest hits either, given that some of Bruce’s biggest
Born in the U.S.A.
–era hits had been rejected too.

⁹
Particularly the title track and “Youngstown,” both of which became showstoppers in subsequent full-band arrangements.

¹⁰
Joad
peaked at number 11 on the Top 200, his first album to miss the Top 5 since
The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle
in 1973.

¹
The song would turn up as a bonus track on the single-disc boildown of the box set
18 Tracks.

²
With one callback to the 1977
Darkness
sessions and a preview of the 1982
Born in the U.S.A.
sessions, for some thematic reason I can’t figure out.

³
Given his full-time job as Conan O’Brien’s
Late Night
bandleader.

⁴
Exactly twenty-five years since the 1973 release of
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.
, since the ’99 festivities marked the induction of the 1998 class.

⁵
A particularly striking detail, the
New York Times
pointed out, given that 90-plus percent of all NYPD officers serve entire careers without unholstering their guns, let alone shooting at anyone.

⁶
Speaking now, Noah hastens to say that the piece was a blog entry, and thus closer to a random thought than the carefully researched and considered analyses he publishes in other venues. Noah also notes that he’s a longtime Springsteen fan and hadn’t intended to condemn him. “I don’t see anything wrong with achieving a political end with a song,” Noah says. “I think political engagement is a good thing.”

⁷
Lucente apologized almost instantly when his words hit the media, although he never explained the meaning or derivation of the term
floating fag
.

¹
Iovine founded Interscope Records in the early 1990s; by 2001, he was the chairman of Interscope-Geffen-A+M.

²
Consisting of Steve Van Zandt, Clarence Clemons, Patti, and longtime friends Lisa Lowell and Soozie Tyrell, and original Bruce Springsteen Band singer Delores Holmes and her daughter Layonne.

³
Prop 187 won handily at the voting box but never took effect due to a series of appeals, restraining orders, a lower-court ruling that the law was unconstitutional, and then the election of a Democratic governor, Gray Davis, who in 1999 dropped the state’s appeal of the lower court’s ruling.

⁴
He still shies away from discussing the calls seemingly out of respect for the survivors and his desire to not be portrayed as a saint or, conversely, a kind of pop-culture carrion.

⁵
Monmouth County lost more than 150 citizens on September 11.

⁶
“The Rising” was broadcast on July 31, while “Lonesome Day” turned up on the show the next night.

⁷
Although the
NR
’s critic, Stanley Kurtz, wagged a finger at the absence of stars and stripes, explicitly patriotic statements, or support of the war in Afghanistan. “Something fundamental is missing,” he complained.

⁸
“You can wander through
The Rising
for countless stanzas without tripping over a single concrete object,” Harris wrote. And he’s got a point, although stripping away details in favor of a universality was a considered decision on Bruce’s part.

⁹
Despite strong Bush administration assurances to the contrary, which turned out to be just as accurate as the administration’s guarantees that Saddam Hussein’s government possessed weapons of mass destruction, which is to say, not at all.

¹⁰
The album was completed without the help of the decade’s regular producer, Brendan O’Brien, largely because off-the-cuff recordings of folk songs were something other than his thing. “He knew I wasn’t going to like it, and he didn’t want to hear about it from me,” O’Brien says. “He was absolutely correct. I just said, ‘Dude, thumbs up to you. Don’t worry about me.’”

¹¹
Based in part on Obama’s connection to a fairly radical African-American minister named Jeremiah Wright.

¹
His first run-in with Bruce came in 1972, when Bruce, playing with Van Zandt’s Sundance Blues Band, played Magovern’s Captain’s Garter club in Neptune, New Jersey. They drew a decent crowd, earned a great response, and went to the club owner thinking he’d be delighted to book them regularly. Instead Magovern fired them. For all the crowd’s size and enthusiasm, they didn’t buy enough drinks. And, Magovern said, in case they hadn’t noticed, selling drinks was what he did for a living.

²
Despite being one of the most underappreciated, even hated, songs in Bruce’s catalog, “Queen” is actually really cool, particularly when you consider the creative process Bruce described to Mark Hagen: “I hadn’t been in one in a while, and I thought this place is spectacular . . . it’s a fantasy land! . . . The subtext in here is so heavy! It’s like, ‘Do people really want to shop in this store or do they just want to screw on the floor!?’ They’re sort of shameless; the bounty in them is overflowing.” And thus the vision of loveliness stacking cans in the aisle, “something wonderful and rare,” and the smile powerful enough that it “blows this whole fuckin’ thing apart.” Love ballads don’t get much quirkier than that, but set to an airy piano riff, with the glockenspiel ringing, a light scrim of strings, and Bruce’s Big Voice sailing at the top of its range, the whole thing feels delightfully alive and real.

³
Premiered at the rallies for Barack Obama during the fall of 2008.

⁴
Featuring Danny’s son Jason on his old man’s accordion.

⁵
Ann Powers, writing in the
Los Angeles Times
, summed it up nicely: “Only a great artist could make an album that’s at once so stirring and slight. This is the Boss, after all; he can wring meaning out of a dish towel.”

⁶
Bruce took up the practice of tossing his guitars at Buell during the 1999–2000 reunion tour. What began as gentle heaves from not far away grew eventually into long-distance, often sky-high hurls, some better thrown than others. Long since resigned to do his part in a now beloved bit of stage theater, Buell is still not fond of the ritual. Electric guitars are both heavy and unwieldy, with a lot of sharp edges and moving parts. If they come at you neck first, you’re in trouble. If the tosser doesn’t take care in aiming, or if he’s the kind of guy who might occasionally
try
to catch you off guard, you’re also in trouble: snapped fingers, forearm bruises, and so forth. If you look carefully at the Super Bowl video, you’ll see Buell, who came into the show with a broken finger, trip on an uneven seam in the stage and nearly crash into the percussion setup before coming up with the guitar. Later, Bruce called it the best catch of the entire game. “I don’t try to screw him up,” he says. “I try to make it
exciting
.” Asked if he’s ever let a guitar crash to the ground, Buell shakes his head. “I’d say there were a few wild pitches, but no passed balls.” Bruce responds by changing the terms of the discussion. “There may have been a few that glanced off of him, y’know. But he’s pretty good with it.”

⁷
Including the 1999–2000 reunion tour shows, which often kicked off with the just-released
Tracks
song “My Love Will Not Let You Down,” and made set pieces from songs never played by the E Street Band, including “Youngstown,” “Murder Incorporated,” “If I Should Fall Behind,” and the instant classic “Land of Hope and Dreams.”

⁸
Van Zandt continues: “My favorite song ever is ‘The Little Things (My Baby Does).’ Why? Because it’s
perfect.
Everything is right about it. You hear how the guitar and piano answer the vocals, and the level for once is pretty close to right. And the whole arrangement, the sensibility, is the greatest thing ever.”

⁹
Including a visit to Jimmy Fallon’s iteration of NBC’s
Late Night
, where Bruce performed “Save My Love” with Bittan, Van Zandt, and the show’s house band, the Roots, and also participated in a remarkable skit during which he donned his old
Born to Run
– era clothes (and curly brown wig) to perform Willow Smith’s lighter-than-fairy-floss hit “Whip My Hair” with ace Neil Young impersonator Fallon accompanying him on acoustic guitar and yearning high tenor vocals.

¹
Bruce had rhapsodized over Burdon and the Animals at his keynote speech, only to learn that Burdon himself was in Austin that very day. Invited to perform at the show, Burdon popped by the sound check, spent fifteen minutes with the band, and then nailed the song during the encore. “He’s still got that hard-ass sound,” Bruce told me the next day.

²
Bruce had spent the previous evening watching the St. Louis Cardinals pull out an improbable eleventh-inning win over the favored Texas Rangers in the World Series. Too thrilled to sleep, Bruce had been up for hours afterward, toasting the underdogs. Asked if some portion of his joy came from watching a team so closely allied to (former owner) George W. Bush crumble, Bruce grinned. “Exactly,” he said.

³
For a guy whose life has revolved around guitars, Bruce has almost no interest in collectible or exotic instruments. “I was never a guitar aficionado,” he says. “I’m not an audio freak. I don’t pay much attention to equipment. My goal is very simple: to play something that worked and to hear something that I liked.” Beyond the one legendary Telecaster-Esquire mutt, all of his guitars are interchangeable. Most of his electrics come in as stock reissues of 1950s era Telecasters (with some Mustangs and other models thrown in), only to be stripped apart and rebuilt by guitar tech Kevin Buell, who does God only knows what to the wiring and electronics, and then goes at the body and neck to make it look and feel like a lovingly worn-in axe. If there’s one exception beyond the Esquire/Telecaster to the interchangeable-guitars rule, it’s the acoustic sunburst Gibson J-45 Toby Scott gave him for Christmas in 1987.

⁴
“Long Walk Home,” from
Magic
, 2007.

⁵
Manion led trombonist Clark Gayton, trumpeters Curt Ramm and Barry Danielian, and another young saxophonist whose last name seemed oddly familiar.

⁶
As Jake described it a few weeks later, the story is nearly as fairy tale–like as his uncle’s door-smashing entrance into the band. Born into a musical family (his father was also a performing musician, his chops honed as a Marine Corps band director), Jake traced his obsession for the sax to the night he saw his uncle perform on the Tunnel of Love tour in 1988. A fine guitarist and songwriter in his own right, Jake came with years of experience as a bandleader and journeyman saxophonist. Nearly as imposing as Clarence, with his own kind of magnetism, Jake filled his uncle’s place in the band by being his own soft-spoken self.

⁷
A surprising number of the bad reviews, particularly those of Jon Caramanica in the
New York Times
and Jesse Cataldo in
Slant
magazine, asserted that “We Take Care of Our Own” was intended as a “jingoistic” (as both Cataldo and Caramanica called it) celebration of the American spirit rather than the bitter criticism of those who had violated it that it actually was. Given the fury in the song’s verses, and the striking references to the botched rescue of post-Katrina New Orleans, the critics may have benefited from giving the songs a closer listen.