FM (23 page)

In addition to the music, Bruce told stories. I don’t know to this day where that came from, but he presented his songs like an FM jock, explaining and embellishing their meanings. The sets lasted just over two hours. I found it impossible to leave after the early show and begged Allan Pepper for standing room for the eleven-thirty performances. I was psyched that this would be like Muni and the Beatles at Idlewild—that’s how exciting the shows were.

That’s why I was destroyed when Mel Karmazin awakened me that Friday morning with the terse message that the show was off. I groggily tried to make sense of it. It seems that Appel was reneging on his agreement to let David Vanderheyden, the Bottom Line’s regular broadcast engineer, mix the concert for radio. He was demanding a professional mobile recording studio (a truck costing thousands of dollars) with himself at the controls. Of course, no one was willing to pick up that expense and, therefore, the broadcast was canceled.

I was livid as I hastily drove into the city. I tried to figure out if there was a hidden agenda behind Appel’s demand. Did he think that Bruce wouldn’t deliver the goods? That was hard to believe after having seen the show. Was there a possibility that Bruce had gotten cold feet? I recalled my conversations with him and how he’d always felt ambivalent about being a rock star. On one hand, he wanted to be recognized as a great artist and have all the attendant fame and riches, and on the other, he saw himself as just an average kid from Jersey and didn’t want to be changed by the experience. He didn’t want to be isolated from his fans, playing only cavernous halls where he couldn’t see their faces. He wanted to be able to go out in public and do the things he normally did—hang out at the beach or go to a ball game, without an entourage. He hated the mansions and trappings of fame that would cloister him away from the average people that he cared and wrote about. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life writing songs about how tough life was on the road. He wanted success, but he also feared it. He felt the star-making machinery itself was corrupting; he’d had a taste of it in the hype surrounding his first record and he didn’t like it. I hoped that if he were revisiting these doubts I could give him a pep talk that would assuage his uncertainties.

The first person I encountered upon entering the club was Appel and after talking to him for only a minute, I knew that Bruce wasn’t the problem. Dawson and I corralled him in a quiet corner of the room and played good cop/bad cop. He told us his fears were grounded in the fact that the Bottom Line’s mixing console was in a very noisy location near the stage. You couldn’t get an accurate mix from there.

“Right,” said Dawson. “All the more reason to let David do it. He’s mixed dozens of shows from there.”

“Why should I trust my artist’s future to some kid from NYU I just met?” Appel asked.

“Mike, we gave you tapes. Did you listen?” I wanted to know. “David even did some tapes of Bruce last Fourth of July.”

We could tell that he hadn’t heard the tapes as he responded by changing the subject. “Have you seen that rinky-dink board he uses?”

Vanderheyden’s console was far from state of the art but he was very proud of how he’d cobbled together a system that turned out sound rivaling that of the quarter-million-dollar trucks. His system had quirks, but he had them under control and his tapes were grand.

“Mike, you almost blew it for Bruce last year. I don’t have to remind you about the postcards. You want to hazard a guess at what your airplay at Metromedia stations will be in the future if you blow us off now?” Pat said ominously.

“Is that a threat?”

I tried to be conciliatory while Pat played the tough guy, a role he relished and came by naturally. “Mike, look. We’re all fans of Bruce. We want the best for him. We don’t want a crappy-sounding broadcast on our airwaves. You’ve got to trust David.”

“For you, it’s one bad show. For me, it’s a man’s career. How do I explain it to him if the shows sound bad and I tell him that some college kid mixed it? I need to be in control.”

He had a point. “Let’s try this. Let’s go up to David’s booth. Listen to the tapes he made from the first two nights.”

We climbed the rickety ladder behind the stage and David slapped on his tapes. They sounded as good as I’d remembered. But Appel was too stubborn to back down now. “All right, the equipment works. But this show is going live to New York and Philly.” Sure enough, WMMR had hastily petitioned Columbia for a simulcast, and Ed Schaiky had driven up to represent them. Could Kid Leo be far behind? “This is a tough mix. I’ve got to be at the board. That’s it. Take it or leave it.”

He was holding the cards. We were bluffing with our threat at pulling the record. We’d only be hurting ourselves and we weren’t in a position to speak for Metromedia. “Give us a minute,” Pat said.

He went down the ladder into the club and we explained the situation to David. “He’s been in my booth the last two nights,” he told us. “He doesn’t have a clue. If he mixes this, it will sound like crap. I don’t want him touching my equipment.”

Now we were surrounded. I didn’t fancy explaining to Karmazin that my grandiose idea was now dead, especially since he’d since found a sponsor. We brought David down to see Appel. I ventured a middle ground. “How about this? David will be hands-on. You direct him. He’ll do anything you want.”

“I’m hands-on. He can help.”

No point arguing further. We had the show back, and even though we knew that it wouldn’t sound as good as it could have, the raw power of the E Street Band should shine through any technical limitations. We shook hands and called the station to tell everybody that the show was on.

It was one of the least enjoyable Springsteen shows I’ve ever attended. Not because of Bruce, he was superb. It started with the onstage introduction by Dave Herman, who had been to one of the earlier performances and had been converted into a rabid Springsteen fan. “And now everybody, please welcome Bruce Springstreet and the E Steen Band.”

Yeeesh. Dave still laughs about that intro. Pat and I retreated to Pat’s car to hear what the broadcast sounded like. It began very badly. There was some clicking noise underneath the whole thing that was noticeable during soft passages. Clarence Clemons’s sax was not miked, and the whole thing did not sound properly balanced. But after a few songs things fell into place and it was vintage Bruce. We could finally sit back and enjoy the rest of the show.

As it ended, I made my way backstage and interviewed a heavily perspiring Springsteen. He sounded like a boxer as he described how he “felt real good out there.” He was doing his best Muhammad Ali, and I couldn’t help laughing as the tensions of the night came spilling out. I wished him luck and he retreated to his dressing room.

A sweaty Mike Appel came down from the booth and mopped his brow. Pat and I gave him a wry thumbs up, and then climbed the ladder to see David. “It sounded pretty bad at first but it got better,” I said. “How was it for you?”

He then told us what had happened. Appel had originally taken the mixing console, but after struggling through the first notes, frantically motioned for David to take over. Vanderheyden mixed the lion’s share of the show, with Appel prodding him occasionally to boost the audience mics. Much ado about nothing.

Almost twenty years later, when Mel Karmazin was well on his way to controlling a broadcasting empire, he must have been cleaning out his files when he came upon a copy of the memo I’d written to him, pleading to do the Springsteen broadcast. He sent me a copy, with a note stating, “That’s why I never liked working with you. You had no foresight.”

Bruce was to me what the Beatles were to Dennis Elsas. A proper interview became my Holy Grail, but his management team, now headed by Jon Landau, comes from a print background and shields him from radio people. Initially, I could understand Landau’s need to protect Bruce, since he was not a great wordsmith while not onstage. But whether it was on Bruce’s own instruction or overly conservative management, our contact has been limited. Management continues to hold him at arm’s length from radio, and as a result, many stations don’t play his new records. Today, he is such an articulate voice on so many diverse issues, one would think that an extensive radio interview would benefit all concerned, even if it had to be conducted on a talk station. It’s a shame that so many artists who have nothing valuable to say are frequently accorded open forums on radio, and one whose words would be esteemed is strangely silent.

Mike Pillotte at Columbia helped put Springsteen and me together a few times. Mike and I rode up to West Point to catch one of the best shows I’ve ever seen Bruce do. After the concert, a man came out to the front of the stage and paged me. When I identified myself, he said, “Follow me,” and led me through the backstage catacombs to a small room where Bruce stood alone, toweling off after a typical three-and-a-half-hour show. We had a ten-minute chat before we both had to catch our rides back to the city.

In the summer of 1976, Springsteen and I went to a baseball game with a group of mutual friends. Amazingly, here was a man who months before had been on the cover of both
Time
and
Newsweek,
but as we walked through hundreds of young people on the way to our seats at Yankee Stadium, not a soul recognized him. Of course, Bruce was always changing his appearance then: His hair was long, short; he had a beard, a mustache, he was clean-shaven; he was skinny, he was muscular—he always looked a little different.

In November of that year, he played the Academy of Music and he and Pillotte popped into my Saturday afternoon show unannounced. He hung out for two hours, selecting his favorite records and playing disc jockey. I had no chance to prepare for the impromptu interview. My natural affinity and knowledge of his career enabled me to ask good questions, but as I listen to the tape now, there are so many more I would have liked to have addressed. But other than a telephone interview a decade later and a brief dressing room conversation before a Meadowlands show I did along with my brother in the early nineties, I have yet to do the definitive Bruce interview.

Kid Leo’s friendship with the Boss deepened throughout the seventies as well. In fact, E Street guitarist Steven Van Zandt’s protégé, Southside Johnny Lyons, had been so grateful to Leo for his support that he played the Kid’s wedding. On the Darkness tour, Leo was asked to emcee Springsteen’s performance at the Agora, which was coupled with a live radio broadcast. He contemplated his introduction for days, memorizing a dozen ideas that were eventually discarded. Leo was a big sports fan and he knew that Bruce had used boxing metaphors coming offstage in the past, so he crafted a Michael Buffer–type opening.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned. “Round for round, pound for pound, there ain’t no fighter this world around, who can stand toe-to-toe with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band!” The crowd went wild and the broadcast soared from that point onward. After intermission, as the band came out, Max Weinberg hit the cymbals and Bruce yelled, “Round TWO!”

That show was part of a trilogy of dates in smaller venues that were regional live broadcasts. The other two originated from the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey, and the Roxy in Los Angeles, and were designed to build excitement for the first arena tour, which was beginning in Cleveland three weeks later. Now in a twenty-thousand-seat hall, Leo was again called upon to bring out the band. He began his boxing litany, and this time he was carried away by the power of his amplified voice filling the cavernous space. The crowd was screaming as the band entered, but Bruce held up his hand for silence, turned to Leo, and asked, “What’s the matter Leo, can’t you think of nothing new?”

I do recall a more peculiar encounter. New Year’s Eve live broadcasts of concerts from the Capitol with Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes had become a tradition in the late seventies, and whenever Johnny played, there was always the hope that Springsteen might join him onstage. We ushered in 1980 with “Havin’ a Party,” a Southside staple, and signed off forty minutes later. But the Jukes’ manager was acting skittish all night, and when Johnny Lyons finished his last encore, came back to our broadcast location and asked pointedly if we had signed off. We assured him that we had, but by then it was obvious that something else was up. We called the station and told them to keep the line open, since we’d seen members of the E Street Band around, and we figured they might be gearing up to play. Bruce had gone over three years before releasing another album after his breakthrough
Born to Run
as he disengaged from Mike Appel’s management and signed on with Landau. Legal problems caused him to keep a low touring profile as well, so any chance we might get to air even a few songs was a huge scoop.

As we suspected, about twenty minutes after the Jukes finished, John Scher took the stage and announced a special surprise—a live set from the E Street Band. Over half the audience had left the theater, but those still in the street outside rushed back in to catch their hero. We hastily reactivated the lines and broadcast the first couple of songs, causing ticket holders who were already in their cars to turn around and come back.

Johnny Lyons was livid. He called me every name in the book, and his manager accused me of lying when I told him we were off the air. I replied that we indeed had been off when he asked, but that such a major event was big news and nobody officially told us we couldn’t air it. Lyons lunged as if to hit me, but was held back. He swore that he’d kill me if we didn’t end the broadcast immediately. Somehow, I found the fortitude to tell him that unless I heard it directly from Bruce, we’d continue.

As the next song ended, the irate manager snuck onto the stage and whispered into Springsteen’s ear. The Boss shook his head violently, and I could tell that he was denying us permission to broadcast further. We had to respect his wishes, and told our radio audience that we regretfully had to sign off due to contractual reasons.

Johnny calmed down after that—we talked and shook hands and both of us said there were no hard feelings. I was morose though, because we had potentially damaged our relationship with two artists we had supported and believed in from the beginning. I had hosted the first nationwide Asbury Jukes concert from the Stone Pony in Asbury Park several years before, and saw Lyons not just as a satellite of Springsteen, but a man with considerable talent of his own.