Walk like a Man

by Robert J. Wiersema

  Given that there hadn’t been a Springsteen tour since 1988, it was crucial for him to go back on the road. With no E Street Band, Springsteen held auditions, and relied on Bittan’s input to assemble a group of young players; Bittan would take on the role of onstage coach, which Van Zandt had held so long in The E Street Band. After much rehearsal and several preview gigs, the new band headed to Europe to open the tour.

  Before they left, though, the fate of the two albums was already in motion. They both debuted near the top of the charts, but they didn’t linger there long, falling off the top forty almost as soon as they had reached it. In addition to the poor sales, the albums also received something else which Springsteen hadn’t faced in several decades: decidedly mixed reviews.

  Despite the poor reception accorded the new albums, and the general scorn of the fan community for Springsteen choosing to tour with a new band (especially behind material which would—to their ears—have been a comfortable fit for The E Street Band21), the tour was, generally speaking, a commercial success, and included such benchmarks as eleven shows at New Jersey’s Meadowlands Arena selling out in little more than two hours.

  Early in 1993, Springsteen was approached by director Jonathan Demme about the possibility of his contributing a song to the soundtrack of a film he was making about a lawyer, played by Tom Hanks, who contracts aids and sues his firm for wrongful dismissal. Philadelphia would go on to become one of the first mainstream film treatments of the disease, and earned Hanks his first Academy Award for Best Actor.

  Springsteen wrote and recorded his contribution to the soundtrack in the summer of 1993. “Streets of Philadelphia” was a top ten single upon its release in early 1994,22 and became something of an anthem for the gay community despite the fact that, lyrically, there is nothing in the song even implicitly about aids, gay rights, or homophobia. Indeed, it lyrically and thematically resembles some of the sadder songs on Human Touch. It is, however, tremendously moving, a plangent prayer set against a heavy rhythm track.

  And in March of 1994, it won Bruce Springsteen the Academy Award for Best Original Song (he had won the Golden Globe too, earlier).

  Aside from the flurry around “Streets of Philadelphia,” and his new role as a Hollywood celebrity, 1994 was a quiet year for Springsteen. He and Scialfa’s youngest child, Sam Ryan, was born in January, and Springsteen was largely out of public view.

  Rumor has it that Springsteen was suffering from writer’s block over the course of 1994, which shines light on his decision, in early 1995, to re-form The E Street Band for a week of studio sessions to record several new songs for a planned Greatest Hits album. Three of the four “new” songs released on the album were written years before, although “Secret Garden” was a new work (and had a labored quality one might expect from a writer working his way through a block). The sessions were filmed for a documentary, which is illuminating in that it demonstrates just how conscientious Springsteen was with the image he wanted to present to the world. One would never know, from Blood Brothers, the level of anger many of the E Street Band members were still carrying over their sacking. An abbreviated performance with the band at the end of the week at a New York bar provided footage for the video for “Murder Incorporated,” and served as a reminder for those in the audience23 just how much had been lost when Springsteen parted ways with the E Streeters.

  Springsteen apparently didn’t see it that way. Following the February release of Greatest Hits,24 he once again turned his back on The E Street Band and began working on the songs that would be released in the fall as The Ghost of Tom Joad.25 These songs demonstrate a different approach to songwriting for Springsteen.

  Perhaps as a way of circumventing the rumored writer’s block, Springsteen begin building his songs based on external influences, rather than internal inspiration. It’s a more journalistic approach, with the song “The Ghost of Tom Joad” updating the classic character from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath26 into the poverty-stricken, contemporary southwest, while “Balboa Park” and “Sinaloa Cowboys” were drawn from newspaper coverage of illegal Mexican immigrants drawn into child prostitution and the crystal meth trade, respectively.

  The Ghost of Tom Joad is seen as the spiritual heir to Nebraska, more than a decade later. Certainly the approach is similar, rooted in acoustic instrumentation, but Joad had very much a deliberate album-making process, lacking the accidental wonder that was Nebraska. It’s a comfortable album, its warm textures and rich tonalities at odds with the starkness of its material.

  Also very different from the Nebraska experience was that Springsteen chose to tour in support of the album. The Joad tour was a staid affair: solo, acoustic shows performed in concert halls and theatres around the world over the period of a year and a half.

  The shows mixed new songs from Joad with radically re-envisioned versions of some of his classics (including an intense version of “Born in the U.S.A.” that clarified once and for all the actual meaning of the song, for anyone still unclear). Springsteen definitely had a vision in mind for the concerts, and it shows in his performance style. For once, he’s not loose. He downplays and under-sings at every opportunity, and this, combined with often simplistic arrangements, forces the lyrics into stark relief. These are stories he is telling, and he wants his listeners to focus on every word. To this end, he began almost every show by admonishing the audience not to sing or clap along, and generally to “shut the fuck up.”27 Springsteen, the reluctant student, had become something of a stern teacher.

  As the tour progressed, Springsteen gained something that had, thus far in his career, eluded him: credibility. He had long been loved and admired, cheered and fawned over, but in a way, he had never been respected. With the Joad tour, Springsteen became the thinking man’s rock star, which was perhaps an odd role for a community college dropout. The Joad album and tour, with its central literary allusion and its journalistic rootedness, placed him in the American literary continuum in the footsteps of Steinbeck himself.

  Springsteen’s nomination for a second Academy Award, for “Dead Man Walkin’,” the title song to the Sean Penn film about the awakening of anti–death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean, only added to his credibility.

  The tour stop on the night of November 8, 1996, was, in many ways, a typical Joad show. All of the elements were the same—a small hall, the twang in Springsteen’s voice (which he adopted when he started writing about the American southwest), the often-pinched vocals—and the setlist included most of the usual numbers. What set the show apart was the venue itself.

  On the night of November 8, 1996, Bruce Springsteen went home.

  The show at St. Rose of Lima school was a benefit for the school and a community center, and it was the first time Springsteen had stood on the stage of his primary school since the mid-sixties when, as a member of The Castiles, he had played covers for youth dances there. This time, he was one of the world’s most famous men, a multi-millionaire in his mid-forties who managed to still be the voice of the people; a man who had spent the better part of the last decade coming to terms with his life and his psyche and addressing his demons, many of which could trace their roots back to Freehold, if not to that very school.

  In Freehold, with the substitution and addition of a few songs, the basic Joad setlist is28 transformed—to my mind, at least—into something of a summation of Springsteen’s life and concerns. In many ways, the performance at St. Rose of Lima brings everything full circle.

  Springsteen certainly seems to have been aware of this, even in the moment. That night, Springsteen opened the show with “The River,” rather than “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” While the familiar opening lines, about growing up in the area, elicited a cheer from the crowd, the song as a whole shifted the meaning of the night: this wasn’t going to be an outward-looking show, focusing on the tragedies of others. It was going to be personal.

  From the stage of his former parochial school, he sang about his mother and her strug
gles and her inspiration to him (“The Wish”). In front of a hometown crowd, perhaps including some of the very people who had ostracized him and called him weird, he spoke about how he used to skulk around to avoid getting beaten up. In front of the nuns, the spiritual descendants of the women of God who had tormented him and called him trash, he sang one of the defiant anthems of his youth (“Growin’ Up”). In the very place where his faith was shattered, he performed songs drawing on the shards of that faith (“Adam Raised a Cain,” “The Promised Land”). He dedicated “This Hard Land” to Marion Vinyard, widow of Tex Vinyard, the manager of The Castiles, who had opened her home to the teenage band.

  And over the course of the evening, in the very town where his father grew angry and bitter under the weight of poverty and intermittent work, he sang a number of songs about Douglas, and their relationship. From the stark filial despair of “Adam Raised a Cain” to the simple, touching “Used Cars,” from the haunting “Mansion on the Hill” to a conciliatory “My Hometown,”29 Springsteen put his relationship with his father into the forefront that night.

  The show is remarkable to listen to, knowing what we know of Springsteen and his life. It’s a low-key and careful performance, every song performed deeply and intently, as if ensuring that none of his meaning is overlooked. Over the course of twenty-four songs, Springsteen takes a look back, and a look out, reconciling himself not only to his past, but to the town itself. It’s exorcism by music.

  The extent to which this is true is demonstrated by the final song Springsteen performed that night, a new song he said from the stage he would perform only once30: “In Freehold.”

  The song itself is something of a throwaway. It’s virtually a spoken folk track, with clunky rhymes and awkward meter, clearly composed for the occasion. It hardly panders, though. In fact, in one song, Springsteen seems to address the concerns of his entire adult life. With a metronomic refrain of “In Freehold,” Springsteen talk-sings about his childhood, including how his sister got pregnant as a teen, how the town broke his father, how he learned his love for music, how he had his first kiss on a Friday night, and his heart broken many times, how it was a redneck town, cruel to those who didn’t fit in, and about his education in that very school.

  It’s one of the keys to therapy: you need someone to listen, someone to whom you can tell your stories. For one night, Springsteen was able to tell his stories to the people in them. He was able to finish the circle, to come home again, not as a conquering hero—though he was certainly treated as one—but as a kid from the neighborhood, grown up and at peace with the course of his life, reconciled to his past, comfortable in the present, and looking to the future.

  After he finished the song, Springsteen posed on stage for photos, as he had promised he would. Later that night, he left town, and headed home.

  FIFTEEN YEARS later, it’s possible to see that night as something of a turning point in Springsteen’s career.

  The time since has seen an almost unprecedented level of productivity from the singer, and a daring that wasn’t there early in his career. What’s missing in the years since is the palpable sense of conflict that was so apparent31 earlier on.

  The Joad tour continued well into 1997, and after that Springsteen turned himself to a project that surprised many people: combing his vaults and compiling a box set of outtakes and alternate versions. Tracks, upon its 1998 release, was something akin to the Holy Grail for fans, something for which they had desperately wished and had largely, given Springsteen’s long history of perfectionism, given up on ever seeing.

  Tracks was a treasure trove, covering from Springsteen’s earliest days as a recording artist (the set begins with John Hammond’s voice, from Springsteen’s audition tape), through his over-prolific days from 1976 to 1984. A lot of fan bootleg favorites were present and accounted for, including “Thundercrack,” “Iceman,” and the original solo acoustic recording of “Born in the U.S.A.,” and a handful of missing B-sides, including “Roulette,” “Pink Cadillac,” and “Be True.” The real revelation, though, were the songs from the Tunnel of Love sessions, and almost a disc worth of tracks from the missing years, 1989–93.

  The past was clearly on Springsteen’s mind through 1998, and for a good, non-musical reason: late in May, his father Douglas died, at age seventy-three. The relationship between the Springsteen men had warmed somewhat, starting in the early 1980s,32 reaching a final, loving rapprochement around the time of the birth of Bruce’s first son. He would visit his parents in California often, and the two men would take off on road trips,33 driving without a destination, just spending time together. “I feel lucky to have been so close to my dad as I became a man and a father myself,” Springsteen said in a carefully worded statement.

  This sense of conciliation with and openness to his past extended to his former cohorts. Shortly after he completed the media rounds to promote the Tracks set, Springsteen began calling the former members of The E Street Band, asking them if they would be interested in touring. Despite the circumstances of their firing, and some lingering hard feelings, everyone said yes, including Miami Steve Van Zandt, who had left the band in 1984 and was by then appearing on The Sopranos. Springsteen also added violinist Soozie Tyrell, who had appeared on The Ghost of Tom Joad, to the band.

  The reunion tour stretched over 1999 and 2000, and took Springsteen and the reconstituted band around the world yet again. Unlike previous tours, there was no “new” music to play—instead, the band drew on Tracks and the wealth of Springsteen’s now sizable catalogue. The shows were, on many levels, stunningly successful. Financially, they were an unparalleled success, selling out almost every night, with Springsteen taking an unprecedentedly high cut from the venues. Musically, they were as powerful as ever, with The E Street Band performing at very near the top of their game every night (though nothing comes close to the 1978 tour in terms of sheer headlong rush). There was, however, something a bit too professional about the shows, especially as the tour continued. It’s not that the performances became hidebound, but they began to lack the spontaneity of Springsteen at his best.

  Springsteen seemed to have no plans following the conclusion of the reunion tour in July 2001. However, the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, galvanized Springsteen into artistic action. He immersed himself in his community, and began writing songs.

  Less than a year after the attacks, Springsteen released The Rising, the first new album from Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in eighteen years. The Rising was released on a massive wave of hype, which exceeded in its directness even Born in the U.S.A.–mania at its peak, and the album and tour conferred a new status on Springsteen: national healer. The album, which drew from the stories of the victim’s families and chronicled acts of faith and heroism, was Springsteen’s best-selling album since Tunnel of Love, and with the blast of public exposure Springsteen regained whatever position of pre-eminence he had lost in the early 1990s.

  The band toured for more than a year.

  In 2004, Springsteen entered the political fray, throwing the full force of his celebrity behind presidential candidate John Kerry, who was running against incumbent George W. Bush. Springsteen not only endorsed the Vietnam veteran and protestor turned senator, he and The E Street Band also headlined one of several traveling rock and roll caravans under the banner of the Vote for Change tour. While the tours were very effective in raising money and awareness, they didn’t succeed in getting Kerry elected.

  Despite this failure, Springsteen’s position as a member of the rock and roll aristocracy carried him through the rest of the decade, and allowed him to take substantial artistic risks. When touring behind 2005’s largely acoustic Devils & Dust, for example, Springsteen played arenas,34 rather than the theatres of the Joad tour, relying only on his guitar, piano, and talents (and a deep look back into the catalogue for rarities and one-offs) to conquer the at-times cavernous spaces.

  Less well-received was
his 2006 foray into the world of traditional folk and roots music with We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. Performing with an ad hoc band of local performers, as well as Soozie Tyrell, The Miami Horns, and Patti Scialfa, Springsteen recorded an album’s worth of songs affiliated with folk icon and firebrand Pete Seeger, including “Eyes on the Prize,” “Shenandoah,” “Froggie Went a-Courtin’,” and the title track. It’s a joyous and enthusiastic album, and was met with considerable critical acclaim upon its release. The public response was much more muted. Not only did the album fail to sell at Springsteen’s usual level, but tickets for the ensuing tour were readily available, even in traditionally strong Springsteen markets.35

  Scarcely pausing to take a breath, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band released a new album, Magic, in October of 2007, less than a year after the conclusion of the Sessions tour. The bulk of the songs were written in late 2006, and many reflect a deep unease with the state of American politics and society in the waning years of the Bush administration. Spiritually, Magic is close kin to Darkness on the Edge of Town, though sharply topical, with songs like “Gypsy Biker,” “Last to Die,” and “Long Walk Home” capturing the zeitgeist as cannily as The Rising had, though with much less fanfare.

  Propelled by the intense lead-off single, “Radio Nowhere” (as close as Springsteen has ever come to writing a punk song), Magic returned Springsteen to the charts, and resulted in a run of near-sellout arenas for the ensuing tour.

  All was not rosy, however. In November 2007, on the eve of the European tour, Danny Federici was forced to withdraw from the band, unable to travel while seeking treatment for aggressive melanoma; he died in 2008. The band was still on the road, and the shows following Federici’s death all opened with a photo tribute to the organist, set to “Blood Brothers,” which had become a band theme since the finale of the reunion tour. Springsteen also delivered a eulogy at Federici’s funeral, and “The Last Carnival,” from 2009’s Working on a Dream, is a tribute to his fallen friend.36