(David Remnick, New Yorker, reprinted without permission)
Nearly half a century ago, when Elvis Presley was filming “Harum Scarum” and “Help!” was on the charts, a moody, father-haunted, yet uncannily charismatic Shore rat named Bruce Springsteen was building a small reputation around central Jersey as a guitar player in a band called the Castiles. The band was named for the lead singer’s favorite brand of soap. Its members were from Freehold, an industrial town half an hour inland from the boardwalk carnies and the sea. The Castiles performed at sweet sixteens and Elks-club dances, at drive-in movie theatres and ShopRite ribbon cuttings, at a mobile-home park in Farmingdale, at the Matawan-Keyport Rollerdrome. Once, they played for the patients at a psychiatric hospital, in Marlboro. A gentleman dressed in a suit came to the stage and, in an introductory speech that ran some twenty minutes, declared the Castiles “greater than the Beatles.” At which point a doctor intervened and escorted him back to his room.
Many musicians in their grizzled late maturity have an uncertain grasp on their earliest days on the bandstand. (Not a few have an uncertain grasp on last week.) But Springsteen, who is sixty-two and among the most durable musicians since B. B. King and Om Kalthoum, seems to remember every gaudy night, from the moment, in 1957, when he and his mother watched Elvis on “The Ed Sullivan Show”—“I looked at her and I said, ‘I wanna be just . . . like . . . that’ ”—to his most recent exploits as a multimillionaire populist rock star crowd-surfing the adoring masses. These days, he is the subject of historical exhibitions; at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum, in Cleveland, and at the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, his lyric sheets, old cars, and faded performing duds have been displayed like the snippets of the Shroud. But, unlike the Rolling Stones, say, Springsteen refuses to be a mercenary curator of his past. He continues to evolve as an artist, filling one spiral notebook after another with ideas, quotations, questions, clippings, and, ultimately, new songs. His latest album, “Wrecking Ball,” is a melodic indictment of the recessionary moment, of income disparity, emasculated workers, and what he calls “the distance between the American reality and the American dream.” The work is remote from his early operettas of humid summer interludes and abandon out on the Turnpike. In his desire to extend a counter-tradition of political progressivism, Springsteen quotes from Irish rebel songs, Dust Bowl ballads, Civil War tunes, and chain-gang chants.
Springsteen came to glory in the age of Letterman, but he is anti-ironical. Keith Richards works at seeming not to give a shit. Springsteen is the opposite. He is all about flagrant exertion. There always comes a moment in a Springsteen concert, as there always did with James Brown, when he plays out a dumb show of the conflict between exhaustion and the urge to go on. Brown enacted it by dropping to his knees, awash in sweat, unable to dance another step, yet shooing away his cape bearer, the aide who would enrobe him and hustle him offstage. Springsteen slumps against the mike stand, spent and still, then, regaining consciousness, shakes off the sweat—No! It can’t be!—and calls on the band for another verse, another song. He leaves the stage soaked, as if he had swum around the arena in his clothes while being chased by barracudas. “I want an extreme experience,” he says. He wants his audience to leave the arena, as he commands them, “with your hands hurting, your feet hurting, your back hurting, your voice sore, and your sexual organs stimulated!”
So the display of exuberance is critical. “For an adult, the world is constantly trying to clamp down on itself,” he says. “Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in. Music, when it’s really great, pries that shit back open and lets people back in, it lets light in, and air in, and energy in, and sends people home with that and sends me back to the hotel with it. People carry that with them sometimes for a very long period of time.”
When Springsteen was touring behind the “Born to Run” album, in the mid-seventies, he would stand at the lip of the stage in a spotlight, vamping on a chord, and tell the story of growing up in a dingy two-family house next to a gas station in a working-class section of Freehold known as Texas, because it was first populated by hillbilly migrants from the South. I was in the balcony at a show, in November, 1976, at the Palladium, on Fourteenth Street, when Springsteen laid things out in the starkest terms:
My mom, she was a secretary, and she worked downtown. . . . And my father, he worked a lot of different places. He worked in a rug mill for a while, he drove a cab for a while, and he was a guard down at the jail for a while. I can remember when he worked down there, he used to always come home real pissed off, drunk, sit in the kitchen. At night, nine o’clock, he used to shut off all the lights, every light in the house, and he used to get real pissed off if me or my sister turned any of them on. And he’d sit in the kitchen with a six- pack, a cigarette. . . . He’d make me sit down at that table in the dark. In the wintertime, he used to turn on the gas stove and close all the doors, so it got real hot in there. And I remember just sitting in the dark. . . . No matter how long I sat there, I could never ever see his face. We’d start talking about nothing much, how I was doing. Pretty soon, he asked me what I thought I was doing with myself. And we’d always end up screaming at each other. My mother, she’d always end up running in from the front room crying, and trying to pull him off me, try to keep us from fighting with each other. . . . I’d always end up running out the back door and pulling away from him. Pulling away from him, running down the driveway screaming at him, telling him, telling him, telling him, how it was my life and I was going to do what I wanted to do.
At the end of the story, an entirely accurate one, Springsteen would segue into “It’s My Life,” by the Animals, a spine-jangling declaration of independence. In Springsteen’s voice, it was a declaration of independence from a household in which threats were shouted, telephones were ripped off the wall, and the police were summoned.
Doug Springsteen was an Army driver in Europe during the Second World War who came home and seethed at his crabbed circumstances. Van Zandt told me that Springsteen’s father was “scary” and best avoided. In those days, “all fathers were scary,” Van Zandt said. “The torture we put these poor guys through, when you think of it now. My father, Bruce’s father—these poor guys, they never had a chance. There was no precedent for us, none, in history, for their sons to become these long-haired freaks who didn’t want to participate in the world they built for them. Can you imagine? It was the World War Two generation. They built the suburbs. What gratitude did we have? We’re, like, ‘Fuck you! We’re gonna look like girls, and we’re gonna do drugs, and we’re gonna play crazy rock and roll!’ And they’re, like, ‘What the fuck did we do wrong?’ They were scared of what we were becoming, so they felt they had to be more authoritarian. They hated us, you know?”
Doug Springsteen grew up shadowed by the death of his five-year-old sister, Virginia, who was hit by a truck while riding a tricycle, in Freehold in 1927. His parents, according to a forthcoming biography of Springsteen by Peter Ames Carlin, were ravaged by grief. Doug dropped out of school after ninth grade. In 1948, he married Adele Zerilli. Bruce was born the next year. For long stretches of Bruce’s childhood, his grandparents lived with his family, and, as Springsteen told Carlin, he always sensed that much of the affection he received from them was a way “to replace the lost child,” which was confusing: “The dead daughter was a big presence. Her portrait was on the wall, always front and center.” Decades after the event, the whole family––the grandparents, Doug and Adele, Bruce and his sister Ginny––went to the cemetery every weekend to visit Virginia’s grave.
In biographies and clippings, Doug Springsteen is described with adjectives like “taciturn” and “disappointed.” In fact, he seems to have been bipolar, and he was capable of terrible rages, often aimed at his son. Doctors prescribed drugs for his illness, but Doug didn’t always take them. The mediator in the house, the source of optimism and survival, and the steadiest earner, was Bruce’s mother, Adele, who worked as a legal secretary. Still, Bruce was deeply affected by his father’s paralyzing depressions, and worried that he would not escape the thread of mental instability that ran through his family. That fear, he says, is why he never did drugs. Doug Springsteen lives in his son’s songs. In “Independence Day,” the son must escape his father’s house because “we were just too much of the same kind.” In the ferocious “Adam Raised a Cain,” the father “walks these empty rooms / looking for something to blame / You inherit the sins / You inherit the flames.” The songs were a way of talking to the silent father. “My dad was very nonverbal—you couldn’t really have a conversation with him,” Springsteen told me. “I had to make my peace with that, but I had to have a conversation with him, because I needed to have one. It ain’t the best way to go about it, but that was the only way I could, so I did, and eventually he did respond. He might not have liked the songs, but I think he liked that they existed. It meant that he mattered. He’d get asked, ‘What are your favorite songs?’ And he’d say, ‘The ones that are about me.’ ”
The past, though, is anything but past. “My parents’ struggles, it’s the subject of my life,” Springsteen told me at rehearsal. “It’s the thing that eats at me and always will. My life took a very different course, but my life is an anomaly. Those wounds stay with you, and you turn them into a language and a purpose.” Gesturing toward the band onstage, he said, “We’re repairmen—repairmen with a toolbox. If I repair a little of myself, I’ll repair a little of you. That’s the job.” The songs of escape on “Born to Run,” the portrait of post-industrial struggle on “Darkness on the Edge of Town” were part of that job of early repair.
Doug and Adele Springsteen left Freehold for northern California when Bruce was nineteen, and they were puzzled when, several years later, their son, a long-haired misfit in their eyes, came visiting, as he puts it, “lugging a treasure chest behind” and telling them to buy the biggest house around. “The one satisfaction you get is that you do get your ‘See, I told you so’ moment,” Springsteen said. “Of course, all the deeper things go unsaid, that it all could have been a little different.”
Doug Springsteen died in 1998, at seventy-three, after years of illness, including a stroke and heart disease. “I was lucky that modern medicine gave him another ten years of life,” Springsteen said. “T-Bone Burnett said that rock and roll is all about ‘Daaaaddy!’ It’s one embarrassing scream of ‘Daaaaddy!’ It’s just fathers and sons, and you’re out there proving something to somebody in the most intense way possible. It’s, like, ‘Hey, I was worth a little more attention than I got! You blew that one, big guy!’ ”
The redemptive moments in Springsteen’s youth were musical: the songs coming out of the transistor radio and the television set; his mother taking out a bank loan for sixty dollars to buy him a Kent guitar when he was fifteen. Springsteen became one of those kids who escape into an obsession. He believed, as he sings in “No Surrender,” “We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school.” At St. Rose of Lima, the Catholic school in Freehold, he was a screwup, disdained by the nuns. The hip, literary kids were far away. (“I didn’t hang around with no crowd that was talking about William Burroughs,” he told Dave Marsh, an early biographer.) After graduating from high school, Springsteen attended classes at Ocean County Community College, where he started reading novels and writing poems, but he quit after a nervous administrator, on the lookout for hippies and other undesirables, made it plain to Springsteen that there had been “complaints” that he was strange. “Remember, we didn’t go into this life because we were courageous or brilliant,” Van Zandt said. “We were the last guys standing. Anyone with a choice to do something else—be a dentist, get a real job, whatever—took it!”
The place where Springsteen went looking for his future was just a short drive east of Freehold—the Asbury Park music scene. In the sixties and seventies, there were dozens of bands that played in the bars along the boardwalk. Asbury Park became Springsteen’s Liverpool, his Tupelo, his Hibbing.
On a spring afternoon, I stood out in front of the best-known club in Asbury Park, the Stone Pony, and waited for an aging drummer named Vini (Mad Dog) Lopez, the unluckiest man in the E Street saga. Lopez was thrown out of the Springsteen band just before they hit it big. Springsteen’s bandmates may be employees, but they have been handsomely paid and are worth many millions of dollars each. The drummer who made it for the long haul, Max Weinberg, owns houses in the New Jersey countryside and Tuscany. Lopez works as a caddy. On weekends, he plays in a band called License to Chill. The band’s mascot is Tippy the Banana. “We’re at the bottom of the food chain,” Lopez told me. “We like to say that we’re exclusive but inexpensive.”
In 1969, Lopez invited Springsteen to jam at an after-hours loft, called the Upstage, above a Thom McAn shoe store in Asbury Park. Eventually, Springsteen and Lopez formed a band called Child, which they soon renamed Steel Mill. It featured Lopez on drums, Danny Federici on organ and accordion, and Steve Van Zandt on bass. The boys lived for a while in a surfboard factory run by their manager. “Bruce lived in the front office, and Danny and I had daybeds in the bathrooms,” Lopez said. They made around fifty dollars a week. Some of the band members held manual jobs to make ends meet: Van Zandt worked construction, Lopez put in time at a boatyard and on commercial fishing boats. Springsteen declined. The future working-class clarion never really worked.
Asbury Park, for all its brassy bar bands and boardwalk barkers, was not immune to the times. On the July 4th weekend in 1970, race riots broke out. Young blacks in town were especially angry that most of the summer jobs in the restaurants and stores along the boardwalk were going to white kids. Springsteen and his bandmates watched the flames on Springwood Avenue from a water tower near their surfboard-factory home. Nevertheless, Bruce’s crowd remained almost completely apolitical. “The riots just meant that certain clubs didn’t open and certain ones did,” Van Zandt said.
As Steel Mill dissolved, Springsteen dreamed up a temporary lark: Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom, a kind of Noah’s-ark carnival act, with two of everything—guitarists, drummers, singers—plus Garry Tallent on tuba, a baton twirler, and two guys from the Upstage who played Monopoly onstage. Then Springsteen got serious. He formed his own band. He called it the Bruce Springsteen Band.
By 1972, Springsteen was fronting a band and writing songs to be performed solo. He wasn’t a big reader at the time, but he was so consumed by Bob Dylan’s songs that he read Anthony Scaduto’s biography. He was impressed by Dylan’s coming-to-New York saga: the snowstorm arrival, in 1961, from the Midwest; the pilgrimages to Woody Guthrie’s bedside at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital; the first appearances at Café Wha? and Gerde’s Folk City; and then the audition for John Hammond, the legendary Columbia Records executive. This was what he wanted, some version of it.
Columbia signed Springsteen to a record contract and tried to promote him as “the new Dylan.” He was not the only one. John Prine, Elliot Murphy, Loudon Wainwright III, and other singer-songwriter sensitivos were also getting the “new Dylan” label. (“The old Dylan was only thirty, so I don’t even know why they needed a fucking new Dylan,” Springsteen says.) To Hammond’s disappointment, Springsteen recorded his first two albums—“Greetings from Asbury Park” and “The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle”—with a band made up of his Jersey Shore mates, including Vini Lopez, on drums, and Clarence Clemons, on tenor sax. Hammond was convinced that the solo demos were better. Despite boosts from a few critics and d.j.s, the albums hardly sold at all. Springsteen was, at best, a gifted obscurity, a provincial who was running out of chances.
All the same, I’d paid my four dollars, and I was going to see whatever I could glimpse from our seats. Out trundled the opening act: someone named Bruce Springsteen. The conditions were abysmal, as they often are for opening acts: the houselights were up, the crowd was alternately inattentive and hostile. What I remember was a bandleader as frenetic as Mick Jagger or James Brown, a singer bursting with almost self-destructive urgency, trying to bust through the buzzy indifference of the crowd. After that show, Springsteen swore to Appel that he would never open or play big venues again. “I couldn’t stand it—everybody was so far away and the band couldn’t hear,” he told Dave Marsh. It was time to woodshed, time to build an audience through constant, intense performance in clubs, small theatres, and university gyms.
“Born to Run,” which was released in August, 1975, transformed Springsteen’s career, and the ten-show stand at the Bottom Line early in the tour remains a rock date to rival James Brown at the Apollo or Dylan at Newport. At the Bottom Line, Springsteen became himself. By adding Van Zandt as a second guitar player, he was liberated from some of his musical duties, and he became a full-throttle front man, leaping off amps and pianos, frog-hopping from one tabletop to the next.
Landau quit his job as a critic and became, in essence, Springsteen’s adjutant: his friend, his adviser in all things, his producer, and, by 1978, his manager. After a prolonged legal battle that kept Springsteen out of the studio for two years, Appel was bought off and cast out.
Landau fed Springsteen’s curiosity about the world beyond music. He gave Springsteen books to read—Steinbeck, Flannery O’Connor—and movies to see, particularly John Ford and Howard Hawks Westerns. Springsteen started to think in larger terms than cars and highways; he began to look at his own story, his family’s story, in terms of class and American archetypes. The imagery, the storytelling, and the sense of place in those novels and films helped fuel his songs. Landau was also a catalyst in making Springsteen into a big business, pressing him to play bigger halls, overcoming his nightmarish early performances at Madison Square Garden. And he pressed him to think of himself the way Otis Redding did—as both an artist and an entertainer on a large stage.
Some critics have depicted Landau as an avaricious Svengali, a Colonel Parker, or worse. But the people I’ve talked to in the music business dismiss any idea of malign or overweening influence on Springsteen. “The idea that he’d be manipulated is so preposterous,” Danny Goldberg, who has known Springsteen for more than thirty years, says. As Goldberg, who has managed Nirvana and Sonic Youth, puts it, “It’s Bruce who uses Jon, to achieve complete artistic control.” Landau is sensitive to any claim that he is somehow controlling his client or responsible for his trajectory. “The first principle of being a manager is being a fiduciary for the artist—his interests come first,” he says. “So when you are working with him, no matter what the issue is, the first question is, What’s the best thing for Bruce?” Springsteen, he went on, “is the smartest person I’ve ever known—not the most informed or the most educated—but the smartest. If you are ever confronted with a situation—a practical matter, an artistic problem—his read of the people involved is exquisite. He is way ahead.”
At one point a decade ago, Springsteen rewarded Landau, who had once dreamed of becoming a rock star himself, by calling him onstage. “Bruce told me one night I should strap on a guitar when we got to ‘Dancing in the Dark,’ and for five or six nights I came out,” Landau told me one night backstage. “It’s just a tremendous high. But then on the seventh night he said, ‘You know, it’s great you comin’ out onstage. But I was thinking that maybe we should give that a rest tonight.’ ”
“You mean I’m fired?” Landau said.
Springsteen smiled and said, “Well, yeah. That’s about the size of it.”
As Springsteen grew more worldly, he became far more political. He did not start out that way. In 1972, he played a small benefit for George McGovern, at a movie theatre in Red Bank, but, as a young man, his interest in the music was almost completely as a source of personal liberation. He had not made the connection between his father’s drift and the politics of unemployment, the depression of Freehold and the wave of deindustrialization.
Some detected in all this the stink of sanctimony. In 1985, James Wolcott, a punk and New Wave enthusiast, found himself weary of Springsteen’s “cornball” sincerity and the level of praise accorded him by the “city-slick Establishment.” “Piety has begun to collect around Springsteen’s curly head like mist around a mountaintop,” Wolcott wrote in Vanity Fair. “The mountain can’t be blamed for the mist, but still—the reverence is getting awfully thick.” For Tom Carson, the problem was insufficient radicalism—the fact that Springsteen remained, at heart, conventionally liberal. Springsteen “thought rock and roll was basically wholesome,” Carson wrote in L.A. Weekly. “It was an alternative, an escape—but not a rebellion, either as a route to forbidden sexual or social fruit, or, by extension, as a rejection of conventional society. To him, rock redeemed conventional society.”
In the marketplace of arena rock, that measure of conventionality was a strength, not a limitation. By the mid-eighties, Springsteen was the biggest rock star in the world, capable of selling out Giants Stadium ten shows in a row. He was so unthreatening to American values that, in 1984, George Will went to see him. Wearing a bow tie, a double-breasted blazer, and earplugs, Will watched Springsteen perform in Washington and wrote a column called “A Yankee Doodle Springsteen”: “I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics. . . . He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.!’ ” A week later, Ronald Reagan went to New Jersey to give a campaign speech. Taking his cue from Will, Reagan said, “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts; it rests in the message of hope in songs so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen.”
Someone once said to Paul McCartney that the Beatles were “anti-materialistic.” McCartney had to laugh.
“That’s a huge myth,” he replied. “John and I literally used to sit down and say, ‘Now, let’s write a swimming pool.’ ”
With the “Born in the U.S.A.” album, Springsteen combined political virtue and popular appeal, protest and party time. When he was writing the songs for the album that became “Born in the U.S.A.,” Landau told him that they had a great record, but they still didn’t have a swimming pool. They needed a hit.
“Look, I’ve written seventy songs,” Springsteen replied. “You want another one, you write it!” Then he sulkily retreated to his hotel suite and wrote “Dancing in the Dark.” The lyrics reflected the played-out frustration of an artist who “ain’t got nothing to say,” but the music—a pop confection buttressed by a hummable synthesizer line—went down easy. “It went as far in the direction of pop music as I wanted to go—and probably a little farther,” Springsteen recalled in a text for his book of lyrics, “Songs.” “My heroes, from Hank Williams to Frank Sinatra to Bob Dylan, were popular musicians. They had hits. There was value in trying to connect with a large audience.” “Born in the U.S.A.” went platinum and became the best-selling record of 1985 and of Springsteen’s career.
When Springsteen and Van Zandt were young, they had “pink Cadillac” dreams, fantasies of wealth and rock-and-roll glory. “I knew I was never going to be Woody Guthrie,” Springsteen recalled, in Austin. “I liked Elvis, I liked the pink Cadillac too much, I like the simplicity and the tossed-off temporary feeling of pop hits, I like a big fuckin’ noise, and, in my own way, I like the luxuries, and the comforts, of being a star.” He bought a fourteen-million-dollar estate in Beverly Hills. He remained friends with his old running mates from Jersey, but he also made new friends, famous friends. When he married an actress named Julianne Phillips, in 1985, they honeymooned at Gianni Versace’s villa on Lake Como. Later, there were vintage cars and motorcycles, a state-of-the-art home recording studio, horses, and, the ultimate sign of class ascent, organic farming. Tours grew to corporate scale: private jets, five-star hotels, elaborate catering, massage therapists, efficient management.
Springsteen was aware of the comical contradiction: the multimillionaire who, in his theatrical self-presentation, is the voice of the dispossessed. Very occasionally, twinges of discomfort about this have leaked into his lyrics. In the late eighties, Springsteen played “Ain’t Got You,” which appeared on his album “Tunnel of Love,” for Van Zandt. The lyrics tell of a fellow who gets “paid a king’s ransom for doin’ what comes naturally”—who’s got “the fortunes of heaven” and a “house full of Rembrandt and priceless art”—but lacks the affections of his beloved. Van Zandt recognized the self-mockery but didn’t care. He was aghast.
“We had one of our biggest fights of our lives,” Van Zandt recalled. “I’m, like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ And he’s, like, ‘Well, what do you mean, it’s the truth. It’s just who I am, it’s my life.’ And I’m, like, ‘This is bullshit. People don’t need you talking about your life. Nobody gives a shit about your life. They need you for their lives. That’s your thing. Giving some logic and reason and sympathy and passion to this cold, fragmented, confusing world—that’s your gift. Explaining their lives to them. Their lives, not yours.’ And we fought and fought and fought and fought. He says ‘Fuck you,’ I say ‘Fuck you.’ I think something in what I said probably resonated.”
Springsteen was also experiencing intervals of depression that were far more serious than the occasional guilt trip about being “a rich man in a poor man’s shirt,” as he sings in “Better Days.” A cloud of crisis hovered as Springsteen was finishing his acoustic masterpiece “Nebraska,” in 1982. He drove from the East Coast to California and then drove straight back. “He was feeling suicidal,” Springsteen’s friend and biographer Dave Marsh said. “The depression wasn’t shocking, per se. He was on a rocket ride, from nothing to something, and now you are getting your ass kissed day and night. You might start to have some inner conflicts about your real self-worth.”
Springsteen began questioning why his relationships were a series of drive-bys. And he could not let go of the past, either—a sense that he had inherited his father’s depressive self-isolation. For years, he would drive at night past his parents’ old house in Freehold, sometimes three or four times a week. In 1982, he started seeing a psychotherapist. At a concert years later, Springsteen introduced his song “My Father’s House” by recalling what the therapist had told him about those nighttime trips to Freehold: “He said, ‘What you’re doing is that something bad happened, and you’re going back, thinking that you can make it right again. Something went wrong, and you keep going back to see if you can fix it or somehow make it right.’ And I sat there and I said, ‘That is what I’m doing.’ And he said, ‘Well, you can’t.’ ”
Extreme wealth may have satisfied every pink-Cadillac dream, but it did little to chase off the black dog. Springsteen was playing concerts that went nearly four hours, driven, he has said, by “pure fear and self-loathing and self-hatred.” He played that long not just to thrill the audience but also to burn himself out. Onstage, he held real life at bay.
“My issues weren’t as obvious as drugs,” Springsteen said. “Mine were different, they were quieter—just as problematic, but quieter. With all artists, because of the undertow of history and self-loathing, there is a tremendous push toward self-obliteration that occurs onstage. It’s both things: there’s a tremendous finding of the self while also an abandonment of the self at the same time. You are free of yourself for those hours; all the voices in your head are gone. Just gone. There’s no room for them. There’s one voice, the voice you’re speaking in.”
Springsteen’s life in the past two decades has been, from all appearances, notably stable. In 1991, he married Patti Scialfa, a denizen of the Asbury Park music scene who had joined the band as a singer. Scialfa’s father was a real-estate developer, and she had studied music at N.Y.U.
While Springsteen was on the road, I drove to Colts Neck, where he and Patti live on a three-hundred-and-eighty-acre farm. They have three children, two sons and a daughter, and when the kids were small the family lived closer to the shore, in Rumson, New Jersey. Rumson is wealthy in a suburban way. Colts Neck looks more like Middleburg, Virginia. Horsey people live there. So does Queen Latifah. The Springsteens also own houses in Beverly Hills and in Wellington, Florida.
On the last couple of tours, Scialfa has been an intermittent presence. She skips concerts to be with the children: the eldest, Evan, just graduated from Boston College; their daughter, Jessica, is at Duke and rides on an international equestrian circuit; and the youngest, Sam, will be a freshman this fall at Bard College. Being around for the kids has been a priority. “When I was young, I felt really, really vulnerable,” Scialfa said. “So I wanted things to be relaxed and stable and have somebody in the house and make sure they felt supported when they went off to school.” She added, “The hardest part is splitting yourself, the feeling that you’re never doing any one job really well.”
It took some doing to get Springsteen, an “isolationist” by nature, to settle into a real marriage, and resist the urge to dwell only in his music and onstage. “Now I see that two of the best days of my life,” he once told a reporter for Rolling Stone, “were the day I picked up the guitar and the day that I learned how to put it down.”
One night, I asked Springsteen what he hoped his political songs would do for people who come to concerts for a good time. He shook his head and said, “They function at the very edges of politics at best, though they try to administer to its center. You have to be satisfied with that. You have to understand it’s a long road, and there have been people doing some version of what we’re doing on this tour going all the way back, and there will be people doing it after us. I think one thing this record tries to do is to remind people that there is a continuity that is passed on from generation to generation, a set of ideas expressed in myriad different ways: books, protests, essays, songs, around the kitchen table. So these ideas are ever-present. And you are a raindrop.”
Springsteen has been faulted for taking himself too seriously, and the microworld around him takes him so seriously that to an outsider it can occasionally seem like a cocoon of piety. But Springsteen can also be funny about himself. Two years ago, on Jimmy Fallon’s show, he agreed to dress up as himself circa “Born to Run”—beard, aviator shades, floppy pimp cap, leather jacket—and went on with Fallon, who was dressed as Neil Young, to sing a mock-serious version of the Willow Smith ditty “Whip My Hair.” It’s hard to imagine, say, Bob Dylan putting on a Bob Dylan work shirt circa “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” and sending up his younger self. In a more recent show, Fallon, again dressed as Neil Young, again brought out Springsteen, this time dressed in his muscled-up eighties regular-Jersey-guy regalia—complete with sleeveless denim shirt. They sang a duet of the party-song pop duo LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It”: “I’m in a Speedo tryin’ t’ tan my cheeks. . . . I’m sexy and I know it!”
As a writer and as a performer, Springsteen is in command of a variety of themes and moods: comic and grandiose, political and mindless. As the tour developed, he altered the set lists so that each show felt specific to the occasion. At the Apollo, he declared that soul music had been the band’s education: “We studied all our subjects. Geography? We learned the exact location of ‘Funky Broadway.’ History? ‘A Change Is Gonna Come.’ Math? ‘99 and a Half Won’t Fucking Do.’ ” In Austin, Springsteen celebrated the centenary of Woody Guthrie’s birth by opening the show with Woody’s itinerant worker’s lament “I Ain’t Got No Home” and closed it with “This Land Is Your Land.”
In Tampa, Springsteen played “American Skin (41 Shots),” which was written in the wake of the police shooting of Amadou Diallo, but was now for Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teen-ager who was killed in Sanford, Florida. On the first of two nights in Philadelphia, Springsteen paid homage to his Shore roots by playing two semi-obscurities from his first years as a recording musician, “Seaside Bar Song” and “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?” On one foray into the audience, he found Max Weinberg’s ninety-seven-year-old mother and gave her a kiss. The next night, he pulled his eighty-seven-year-old mother, Adele, onto the stage and danced with her to “Dancing in the Dark.” In New Jersey, Springsteen heightened the tribute to Clarence Clemons. During the final song, “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out,” he stopped the music after the line “The Big Man joined the band,” and a film of Clemons rolled on the screens above the stage. (“Man, I could barely stand that,” the percussionist Everett Bradley told me later. “I was crying so bad!”)
At each show, the most striking musical difference between the old E Street Band and the new was the increasing prominence given to Jake Clemons. His playing grew stronger, his willingness to take center stage more pronounced. After a few performances, he was moon-walking across the stage. And yet every time Springsteen paid tribute to Clarence Clemons Jake seemed overcome, pounding his chest with a double tap of respect for his uncle and appreciation of the crowd’s response. “Everyone wants to be part of something bigger than themselves,” Jake said. “A Springsteen show is a lot of things, and it’s partly a religious experience. Maybe he comes from the line of David, a shepherd boy who could play beautiful music, so that the crazy become less crazy and Saul the king finally chills out. Religion is a system of rules and order and expectations, and it unites people in a purpose. There really is a component of Bruce that is supernatural. Bruce is Moses! He led the people out of the land of disco!”
One night, as Springsteen was waiting to perform, I asked how he thought his inner constitution led to his being the artist and performer he is. “I probably worked harder than anybody else I saw,” he said. But there was, he thought, a core psychological component as well: “I searched out something that I needed to do. It’s a job that’s filled with ego and vanity and narcissism, and you need all those things to do it well. But you can’t let those things completely swamp you, either. You need all those things but in relative check. And in relative check for me, if you ask some of my friends or some members of my family, might not be considered in check to them! It’s in relative check as far as people who do what I do. But you need those things, because you are driven by your needs out there—the raw hunger and the raw need of exciting people and exciting yourself into some higher state. People have pursued that throughout the history of civilization. It’s a strange job, and for a lot of people it’s a dangerous job. But those things are at the root of it.”
In May, the tour set off for a three-month run of stadium performances in Europe. In Barcelona, Springsteen was staying in a suite, with a private deck and a Jacuzzi, at the Florida, a glorious hillside hotel overlooking the city; the band and the crew stayed at the Hotel Arts, a five-star hotel on the beach. A caravan of black Mercedes vans whisked the musicians (some band members have their own travelling assistants) to the Olympic Stadium in the afternoon for sound check. Banish any images of rock legend: forget about dissipated drummers slumped in a junkie haze in some stadium locker room, forget roadies hurling televisions and empty bottles of Jack Daniels from hotel balconies into the pool. The Springsteen road show is about as decadent as the Ice Capades. Band members talk about missing their kids, jet lag, Wi-Fi reception at the hotel.
“To be a success these days, you are more likely to be an athlete than a drug addict,” Van Zandt told me. “You go through the phase of drugs and drinking, and if you get through it you see that all the rewards are in longevity. Longevity is more fun than the drugs. Then, there’s the business. For that you need a clean head.”
The upper echelon of the pop-music touring business is, like Silicon Valley, dominated by a small number of enterprises: Lady Gaga, Madonna, U2, Jon Bon Jovi, Jay-Z, and a very few others. The drop-off in scale from there is precipitous. Springsteen is no longer in the Beatlemania phase of the mid-eighties—a period of mini-riots around his hotels—but he is still able to sell out stadiums on the I-95 corridor and other cities in the United States. He is even more popular in Europe. The rhythmic stomping of his fans at Ullevi, a football venue in Gothenburg, in 1985, damaged the foundation, an episode known in Springsteen lore as “the time Bruce broke a stadium.” In Europe, that spirit persists.
The “Wrecking Ball” tour is likely to go on for a year. James Brown played many more shows a year, but he never played so long or with such absolute exertion. Some nights, Springsteen stays a little longer in his dressing room, ginning himself up for all the running, jumping, and screaming, but there is never the thought of taking a pass.
“Once people have bought those tickets, I don’t have that option,” he told me. We were alone in a vast, makeshift dressing room in Barcelona. “Remember, we’re also running a business here, so there is a commercial exchange, and that ticket is my handshake. That ticket is me promising you that it’s gonna be all the way every chance I get. That’s my contract. And ever since I was a young guy I took that seriously.” Although there are nights when, in the dressing room, he feels tapped out, the stage always works its magic: “Suddenly the fatigue disappears. A transformation takes place. That’s what we’re selling. We’re selling that possibility. It’s half a joke: I go out onstage and—snap—‘Are you ready to be transformed?’ What? At a rock show? By a guy with a guitar? Part of it is a goof, and part of it is, Let’s do it, let’s see if we can.”
Thousands of fans, many of whom had been waiting outside since morning, were allowed to enter the stadium grounds at six o’clock for a show that would not begin until ten. I noticed a few young Spaniards carrying a sign, in English, reading, “Bruce, Thanks for Making Our Lives Better.” I tried to imagine a sign like that for—whom? Lou Reed? AC/DC? Bon Jovi? (“Richie Sambora, Thanks for making our lives better.” Doubtful.) The ultra-sincere interchange between Springsteen and his fans, which looks treacly to the uninitiated and the uninterested, is what distinguishes him and his performances. Forty years on, and an hour before going onstage yet again, he was trying to make sense of that transaction.
“You are isolated, yet you desire to talk to somebody,” Springsteen said. “You are very disempowered, so you seek impact, recognition that you are alive and that you exist. We hope to send people out of the building we play in with a slightly more enhanced sense of what their options might be, emotionally, maybe communally. You empower them a little bit, they empower you. It’s all a battle against the futility and the existential loneliness! It may be that we are all huddled together around the fire and trying to fight off that sense of the inevitable. That’s what we do for one another.
“I try to put on the kind of show that the kid in the front row is going to come to and never forget,” he went on. “Our effort is to stay with you, period, to have you join us and to allow us to join you for the ride—the whole ride. That’s what we’ve been working on the whole time, and this show is the latest installment, and, in many ways, it’s the most complicated installment, because in many ways it has to do with the end of that ride. There are kids who are coming to the show who will never have seen the band with Clarence Clemons in it or Danny Federici—people who were in the band for thirty years. So our job is to honor the people who stood on that stage by putting on the best show we’ve ever put on. To do that, you’ve got to acknowledge your losses and your defeats as well as your victories. There is a finiteness to it, though the end may be a long time away. We end the night with a party of sorts, but it’s not an uncomplicated party. It’s a life party—that’s what we try to deliver up.”
A little while later, having changed from his regular jeans to his stage jeans, Springsteen walked with the band through a stadium tunnel and toward the stage. The last thing he saw before heading to the mike and a blast of stage lights was a sign taped to the top step that read “Barcelona.” A few years ago, at an arena show in Auburn Hills, he kept greeting the crowd with shouts of “Hello, Ohio!” Finally, Van Zandt pulled him aside and told him they were in Michigan.
Springsteen glanced at the step and stepped into the spotlight.
“Hola, Barcelona!” he cried out to a sea of forty-five thousand people. “Hola, Catalunya!”
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Essential Listening
Springsteen isn't especially well served by anthologies, and many of his allegedly classic albums are spottier than the faithful will admit - though most are well worth hearing. Here's my favorites:
The River - the best roots-rock album since Creedence Clearwater Revival called it a day. His most disciplined album, before self-importance and the call of the Top 40 got to him.
Born To Run - the last of his great romantic albums, when he still indulged in what Dave Marsh called "wraparound lyrics to go with his wraparound shades." A certain amount of 70's-itis infects it, but its easy to see why this put him on the map.
Nebraska - frankly, a lot of its fairly monotonous - the longer songs are undone by a lack of interesting guitar playing or composition. But when it kicks in: "State Trooper," "Reason To Believe" - it's really something. And those songs are best heard in context. So...
Darkness On The Edge of Town - another one I find at times dull. These songs were correctly labelled as "dour" by critic Marc Dolan. But the best ones are still essential. Especially the title track.
Human Touch and Lucky Town - generally regarded as his nadir by fans, but I disagree. Although a certain amount of slickness affects them (especially the first), the songs are among his best, mainly because they're unassuming, and Springsteen's a lot better with the small aside than the Grand Statement, most often.
A good live set? I'm not that fond of the box 1975-1985 - it jumps around too much and in too many of the later cuts he just sounds overwrought. There are several forums dedicated to sharing Springsteen live shows ... hunt `em down. My own opinion is that he was at his peak c. 1978-1979-1980, so look for the best-sounding show you can find - they're out there.
Essential Reading
Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock and Roll by Marc Dolan quite decent bio/analysis, and much better than the enthusiastic but fawning books by Dave Marsh.
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