E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (21 page)

Things didn’t look so clear when waist-high in the black muddy river of commerce. And from now on everything Appel suggested, Landau recommended the opposite. If Appel thought they should issue a live album, Landau thought they should hang fire. If Appel suggested they start work on the next album, Landau felt it was premature. Springsteen himself just wanted to be calling the shots. So when his manager and label began to ask about the next album, he demurred. Only in 1978 would he explain his then-reasoning: “I didn’t want to do another album right away. The whole system is based on the corruption of your ideals, on the watering down
of things that are real. If you start worrying about putting out a follow-up album, you get caught up in the machine of the industry.” Nuttin’ to do with writer’s block, then.

Landau, who had not been there in London, had supposedly “called Bruce up on the road and told him that Appel’s inflexibility toward the press was making Bruce a lot of enemies he didn’t need.” There were now two constituencies, the governing party and the loyal opposition, the latter hoping for an election soon. These days, Appel thinks “Jon was so enamoured with Bruce he just couldn’t live without him, and whatever it took to get him ‘married’ to Bruce he would be willing to do.” He certainly didn’t play Mr. Impartial the day Springsteen called around to his place in LA, when he was working with Jackson Browne on another laborious production,
The Pretender
.

Springsteen told him, “[Mike] wants me to sign this new contract, and he made it clear to me that if I sign these new contracts, he will give me a new deal that will be much better for me, and he will distribute this money according to the new deal. But if I don’t sign these new contracts, he is going to hold me to the letter of the old contracts.” He would subsequently claim, “I was very wary of signing [another contract] with him because of the first one that I signed, y’know, which I had taken around and found was real bad.” Yet he expected Appel to take him at
his
word, the word of a man who had been turned. And Appel knew by whom.

Landau suggested he speak to Myron Mayer, the attorney he used himself. In his own deposition, Appel implied there was some grand plan behind the critic’s recommendation: “Mayer was Bruce’s, Landau’s, Dave Marsh’s, and Atlantic Records’ attorney, and he was, I guess, telling them he could get Bruce out of all the contracts, which might then free Bruce from Columbia also, since he was really only signed to Laurel Canyon and not directly to the label. Once free, Bruce could sign for a bundle to Atlantic Records and wholly own all the new songs.” It was a strategy that had almost netted Dylan for Atlantic back in 1972. But Appel’s hard-nosed reputation was well deserved, and once he realized that the trust, and therefore the thrill, was gone, there was only ever going to be one way out of this bloody stalemate:

Mayer was ill-equipped for such hand-to-hand combat. He was an entertainment lawyer who expected Appel to roll over because he assumed that, like every manager, he would be found to have been dipping his hand in the till. In the end, a thorough examination by a forensic accountant found that he owed Springsteen a few thousand bucks—chicken-feed—and the worst he could say about the Laurel Canyon set-up was that it was “a very unprofessional way of doing things.”

Appel had another edge. He had previously got CBS to advance them (i.e. him) a quarter of a million dollars against future royalties, to keep the whole thing afloat for as long as it took Springsteen to realize that a live album was the way to go, the occasional arena show was not a betrayal, and the bills would keep coming until he decided it was time to record again. In deposition, Springsteen described their conversation about said
advance thus: “I said, ‘Michael, how much of that [$250,000] is mine and how much of that is yours? How much do you think I should get?’ He said, ‘Man, you should get at least seventy-five percent.’ And I said, ‘How much, man, am I going to get?’ And he said that depended.”

With Springsteen the one holding the gun, it was Appel at the sharp end. He did not blink. As he said in
his
deposition: “He couldn’t [seriously] expect on one hand to throw me out the door, and on the other for me to give him a quarter of a million dollars in advance money from Columbia, recoupable against any and all future royalties, of which, by all right, I had a significant share.” But, of course, he did. Because the one thing the boy from Freehold was not, was reasonable.

Integrity, a word Springsteen bandied around a lot at this time, did not include honoring contracts, or recognizing the key role another had played in his success. Without Appel there would never have been
any
pot of gold, just summer nights on the shore as an oldies act, like his friend Southside Johnny. But every time the manager offered a compromise solution, he was sent away with a flea in his ear: “I told Mayer that I was still willing to give Bruce half the publishing back, retroactive from the first album, but Mayer…said in response, ‘We want Bruce to have
all
of his publishing.’”

Mayer, negotiating from a position of profound weakness, overplayed his hand at every turn, contesting a contract that made it impossible for Springsteen to record for CBS without Appel’s say-so, or to nominate a producer without his approval. And it was all there in black and white, if Springsteen had taken the time to read legally-binding documents to which he put his name. But for the bull-headed Bruce it was all a matter of “integrity,” and he expected Appel to take him at his word when he told him that he would see him right.

Meanwhile, he trusted Landau to explain legal matters to him. But if Landau gave Springsteen the impression he understood these contractual nuances, he was blowing smoke. As Marc Elliot noted, after thoroughly examining all the legal paperwork from the suit, “Landau was obviously telling the truth when he said he didn’t know what the contracts really meant. The 50% Landau found so unfair was actually an incentive offer by Appel to reduce his 100% of the publishing to a 50–50 split, which would in effect have given Springsteen 75% to Appel’s 25% on all mechanical income, another 50% split of the publisher’s share of all performance income,
retroactive
to 1972 (in spite of the fact that the publishing contract had an
automatic
extension clause); [and] half the stock of Laurel Canyon, the production company and the management company.”

Considering the contracts he already had, Appel was being generous to a fault in his attempts to broker a deal. Whereas Landau was focused solely on the prize proffered by Bruce himself, who had already told the ex-critic, “Look, this is definitely the last record I am doing with Mike.” According to Landau, “What was on [Springsteen]’s mind was his failure to get his ideas on tape,” for which he blamed the man who had recorded his first album in one week and his second in two;
not
the man whose presence helped turn the Record Plant sessions into a three-month slog.

Fixated on a misdirected sense of betrayal, Springsteen showed himself to be a lousy strategist. The management contract with Appel had a year to run, and the production deal had only two albums to run. And it would have been the easiest thing in the world to OK a live album that counted as one of these. So, all he needed to do to extract himself from Appel’s loving grip was record a single studio album with a producer of Appel’s choosing—and he had been offered a list of other potential producers, every one of whom had a track record which made Landau’s slim credits look risible—while seeing out the management deal. Yes, Appel would continue to get his share of the publishing but, as he had already indicated, that was itself open to negotiation. But Bruce remained the same arrested adolescent his parents once despaired of; and what the suit became about was a truculent teenager getting his way. As his next girlfriend told one biographer, “Bruce had rules of behavior and everyone was afraid to cross him.” Appel, though, was not.

The opposition’s initial strategy, based on the erroneous belief that Springsteen had been ripped off by Appel, was abandoned the minute he brought in new counsel, in the form of Michael Tannen. As Appel’s own counsel, Leonard Marks, informed
Rolling Stone
, “Springsteen’s new lawyers saw that [the accountant’s report] was useless because it was so biased and full of holes that you could drive a truck through it.” So Tannen went with “conflict of interest” instead. Surely, Appel acting as producer-publisher-manager was “unconscionable,” whatever the careers of Andrew Loog Oldham or Joe Boyd might suggest? But, as Appel points out, “They had forgotten…I was not his manager for months after he signed the publishing-production contract. That was a fatal mistake. They didn’t look at the dates on the contract.”

In fact, he had only become manager at Springsteen’s insistence, and against his better judgment. In his countersuit, Appel also challenged the notion that Springsteen was the only artist here. He rightly resented the painting of himself as a mere businessman. He asked the court to recognize that the “plaintiff’s exclusive right to Springsteen’s services as a recording artist, and its right to produce each of Springsteen’s albums is of great artistic value, as well as commercial value, to plaintiff.”

But what really did for Springsteen was a particular clause in the original Laurel Canyon contract, signed before he ever “specifically assented” to the CBS-Laurel Canyon production agreement, or had browbeat Appel into managing him. It read: “If the fulfilling of this Agreement shall become impossible by reason of ‘force majore’ or any other cause outside the control of the parties hereto, then either party shall be entitled…to suspend the operation of this Agreement until such time as such fulfillment shall again be possible…During said suspension, Artist shall not be able to record for any other person, firm or corporation in violation of the terms of this Agreement.”

Michael Tannen, who certainly knew how to litigate, still remained confident of ultimate victory, even if the self-assured lawyer felt obliged to inform Springsteen “I think we should fight this, but it’s your life.” His response was never in doubt: “I’m fighting this to the end. If it takes another ten years, I don’t care.” [MOTH] One doubts he’d have given the same answer if he had bothered to ask an older, wiser John Fogerty, who would indeed have to surrender a decade of his career to get away from Fantasy Records. In 2010, Bruce could still believe, “It wasn’t a lawsuit about money, it was about control. Who was going to be in control of my work and my work-life…If I don’t go in the studio, I don’t go in the studio, but I don’t go in the studio under somebody else’s rules.”

His inability to surrender the slightest element of control—all in the name of art—would ultimately bring his career as an abidingly creative artist to a juddering halt. As for the lawsuit, it merely ensured he paid off one devil he once trusted with the largesse of a devil he never trusted (CBS), all the while forsaking the opportunity to record at a time when he had songs which needed to be caught in the moment. He himself made this point to the court, albeit in an act of craven self-justification: “I have started countless numbers of songs which I have been unable to develop to their potential for lack of a proper recording opportunity…Many of these songs will never be finished.”

And the first of these was “Frankie,” a song he would still be trying to capture at the
Born In The USA
sessions, unwilling to accept he had already caught it in all its transcendent glory at a handful of April 1976 shows. After suffering another nine-month gap waiting on his errant muse, the disillusioned “future of rock ’n’ roll” found a way to move forward that suggested a natural progression from the “search” songs on
Born To Run
, while taking one step back from the existential angst of
Darkness
. There is still magic in the night, a belief that “in the darkness there’ll be hidden worlds that shine.” In performance that spring he even gave the song its very own Morrisonesque coda, seeking to exorcise the girl’s abiding sadness by whispering (to her) over and over the single mantra, “Walk softly tonight little angel, into the shadows where the lovers go/ Talk softly to me tonight angel, whisper your secrets so soft and low,” a couplet that could have walked all the way from Cypress Avenue. When words finally failed him, the Big Man stepped in to lead the song gently into the night. Magnificent.