Born to Run

by Bruce Springsteen

  Way at the top of the music business food chain in that big conference room in the sky (or in my case, somewhere in Japan), at the end of the day they don’t ask the man on top, “How many good records have we made this year?” They ask him, “HOW MANY RECORDS HAVE WE SOLD?!” His fate and often yours will depend upon his answer. Don’t get me wrong; record companies, including big corporate ones, are filled with people who love music, who are fans, who want to be a part of it all and whose talents led them to the business side. They will be your invaluable collaborators and most musicians I know don’t have any problem with someone helping sell their records. But if you don’t negotiate the terms of an agreed-upon partnership, your talents will be harnessed and guided in the direction others feel is best. No harm intended, though great harm . . . or stardom! . . . or both! . . . may occur. These days the Internet has changed much of the playing field, but not all of it. The dynamic between creativity and commerce remains a convoluted waltz. If you want to fly by your own lights, reach the audience you feel your talents deserve and build a work life on what you’ve learned, value and can do, be wary. In the early days, my record company harbored no ill intentions. They were a victim of their own jolly business planning and excitement, working at the mercy of the mighty gods of commerce, just doing their job, while I was learning mine . . . real fast.

  With London behind us, things calmed down a bit. We went to Sweden, where it was dead winter and permanent midnight. Crushed together on tiny cots in minuscule hotel rooms, we hit the streets, where, in a Stockholm nightclub, we saw a live sex show, stark-naked Scandinavians on a tiny stage bringing their all. We sat, cackling schoolboys in the back row. It was funny, weird and kind of scary. Come morning, sophisticates and international gourmets, we found what I think was the only McDonald’s then in Europe, and it was on to Amsterdam, where we played a beautiful opera house and stared, slack-jawed rubes, into the windows of the red-light district (“I ain’t going in . . . !”). Then it was back to London for another crack at the Odeon, this time with the boogeymen in my head held at bay. There we played a blaze of a show that left us feeling there might be a place for us there amongst our hallowed young forefathers after all. It was freeing and left a sweet taste in our mouths as we headed back home.

  Home . . . for a real cheeseburger. “I’m so glad I’m livin’ in the USA.” Thank you, Chuck Berry. We left feeling a little less than triumphant and a good deal better than washouts. We were a bit like the wagon train that’d come under assault but had made it through the incomprehensible West, losing only a few scalps along the rutted trail. Still, it shook me. Those four shows were our 1975 European tour. We wouldn’t return for five years, until I was sure we’d grown up a little, carried more confidence, had a couple more albums’ worth of strong material under our belts and felt ready to conquer the language/cultural barrier and our European brethren once and for all.

  Born to Run lifted us into another league. We were a new young force to be reckoned with and were removed financially from the red column and placed firmly in the black (hypothetically). We’d landed, a success, for now. It had taken four of the five years of my original Laurel Canyon agreements to get us there. Ironically, just as we hit the big time, I had only one year left in my contractual obligations to Laurel Canyon and Mike Appel. I hadn’t even thought about it, but Mike had.

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE E STREET BAND

  With your first success, an image you’ll be shadowboxing with for the rest of your life embeds itself in the consciousness of your fans. You’ve left your fingerprints on your audience’s imagination . . . and they stick. That first moment, along with its freedoms and confinements, will remain indelible. That “you,” that distinct creative identity you’ve been searching for? Your audience has just told you you’ve found it. I suddenly slipped from being “the new Dylan” into being . . . “Bruce Springsteen.” And my musicians grew from well-appointed sidemen into the E Street Band.

  In the beginning I knew I wanted something more than a solo act and less than a one-man-one-vote democratic band. I’d been there and it didn’t fit me. Democracy in rock bands, with very few exceptions, is often a ticking time bomb. The examples are many, beginning and ending with the Beatles. Still, I wanted good musicians, friends and personalities I could bounce off of. I wanted the neighborhood, the block. That’s where all the great rock bands came from and there’s something about that common blood or even just the image, the dream of it, that stirs emotion and camaraderie amongst your audience. You’re not looking for the best players. You’re looking for the right players who click into something unique. The Beatles, the Stones, the Sex Pistols, the New York Dolls, the Clash and U2 are all groups whose limitations became the seed for spectacular style and musical frontiersmanship.

  I wanted the singular creative and decision-making power of a solo artist but I also wanted the live, rambunctious gang feeling only a real rock ’n’ roll band can deliver. I felt there was no reason you couldn’t have the best of both worlds, so I signed as a solo artist and hired my longtime neighborhood running pack as my band. Not my backing band, not a band, my band. There was a difference. They wouldn’t be a group of anonymous sidemen but central characters and personalities in their own right, each a featured performer. James Brown had Maceo and Bo Diddley had his right-hand man, Jerome, accompanied by the Duchess and Lady Bo (two guitar-slinging women!). These musicians gave my heroes a backstory and made them more interesting. (I always imagined these are the folks James and Bo hung with, sang about, who came from the world they came from and were filled with the mystery of the overpowering music I was hearing. Bo had decided that Jerome, shaking the maracas, was more essential to his world, his sound, than a bass player—of which he had NONE. Understand, on 99.9 percent of all the records you’ve heard for the past fifty years, there’s a BASS! But Bo said, “Fuck that, I got all the bass I want here in my right, thunder-makin’, guitar-strummin’ hand. But what I really need is my man JEROME to shake his maracas!” Ergo: Jerome was important.) That’s what I wanted.

  I was signed to Columbia Records as a solo artist, so the band performed on Bruce Springsteen records. But live, I wanted the collective identity and living representations of the characters who populated my songs. It was James Brown and His Famous Flames, Buddy Holly and the Crickets—that “and” was really important. It said there was a party going on, a meeting taking place, a congregation being called forth, YOU WERE BRINGING YOUR GANG! So, live we would be Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. That sounded exciting; that was a world I’d want to see. I always felt the audience should look at the stage and see a reflection of themselves, their town, and their friends. That takes a band.

  E Street

  We don’t hide our cards. We don’t play it cool. We lay ourselves out in clear view. While I love a hidden quality in other performers, as a group we aren’t figures unduly shrouded in mystery or mystique. We aspire to be understood and accessible, a little of your local bar band blown up to big-time scale. A real rock ’n’ roll band evolves out of a common place and time. It’s all about what occurs when musicians of similar background come together in a local gumbo that mixes into something greater than the sum of its parts.

  1 + 1 = 3

  The primary math of the real world is one and one equals two. The layman (as, often, do I) swings that every day. He goes to the job, does his work, pays his bills and comes home. One plus one equals two. It keeps the world spinning. But artists, musicians, con men, poets, mystics and such are paid to turn that math on its head, to rub two sticks together and bring forth fire. Everybody performs this alchemy somewhere in their life, but it’s hard to hold on to and easy to forget. People don’t come to rock shows to learn something. They come to be reminded of something they already know and feel deep down in their gut. That when the world is at its best, when we are at our best, when life feels fullest, one and one equals three. It’s the essential equation of love, art, rock ’n’ roll and rock �
��n’ roll bands. It’s the reason the universe will never be fully comprehensible, love will continue to be ecstatic, confounding, and true rock ’n’ roll will never die.

  It’s also the equation you’re searching for a trace of while you’re putting your band together.

  Roll Call

  When the E Street Band initially gathered I had no idea, personally, who my members were. Many of us had just met. It’s only after the bandleader utters the incantation “One, two, three, four!” that it begins, the gris-gris is summoned and all is revealed. In Asbury Park our garden wasn’t seeded. The bounty of musicians grew wild and you picked ’em where you found ’em. There was no master plan guiding band selection beyond instinct, geography and the power of the music once we began to play. If you’re lucky and have chosen well, in the end, that’s all it takes.

  Max Weinberg, Garry Tallent, Steve Van Zandt, Danny Federici, Roy Bittan, Clarence Clemons. This was the core of the group that over the next forty years would evolve into the hard-rockin’, history-makin’, earth-shakin’, booty-quakin’, lovemakin’ and, yes, eventually, Viagra-takin’ legendary E Street Band.

  ON BASS: Garry Tallent, Southern man, rock ’n’ roll aficionado. Garry was one of the guys I met my first night at the Upstage Club. He was the club’s go-to bass man and a creature of rare stability amongst the woolly outsiders who patronized our Asbury hideaway. His quiet dignity and low-maintenance personality have graced my life and my band from the beginning. Garry’s playing shares a little common ground with Bill Wyman, the Stones’ original bassist. His playing can seem invisible, transparent, rising up out of your dreams, creating a bed for them to lie on rather than intruding upon them. Then, when you go to the bottom, he’s always there. No show pony, he’s in the great tradition of silent men drawn to the bass guitar.

  ON ORGAN: Danny “the Phantom” Federici, another “first nighter” at Upstage. We went through it all. Danny sought trouble and usually found it. For a long while it was drugs, bills, booze and a soft-spoken gentleness covering a heart and soul of confusion. But the playing, the playing made up for a lot. The personal burdens Danny carried disappeared once he was behind the organ. When you listened to Danny play you heard . . . freedom. Most musicians are constrained by what they know. They may play beautifully but somewhere down in their core you hear the shade of what they know, studied, learned, and it just slightly, naggingly, dines on the elegance of what they do. Such is the way for us mortals. Danny didn’t know what he knew. He didn’t know your songs, the chord sequences, the arrangement, the key, the lyrics, the what-the-fuck-you-were-ass-in-over-your-head trying to talk about. He just knew how to play! If you questioned him about a piece of music before you played it, he often couldn’t answer your most basic queries. (“Danny, how does this start?” A shrug.) But once you counted off, he was more than fine. He accessed whatever remote part of his brain he kept the essential information in and lit up. He was free behind that organ . . . but just behind that organ. The real world doesn’t cotton much to freedom but the artist’s world breathes and bleeds it. This was the world where Danny’s beauty flowed forth, where he flew, and like a lot of us he struggled in the other world that waited at the bottom of those stage steps. My departed friend remains to me a barrel of puzzlement and human frailty that was presided over by a mystical, intuitive musicianship like no other.

  ON GUITAR: Steve “Little Steven” Van Zandt, my Soul Brother No. 1, Mr. All-or-Nothing-at-All, Dr. Ninety-Nine-and-a-Half-Won’t-Do, my absolutist, my comedic foil, my devil’s advocate and my A-class rock ’n’ roll conspirator. We battled it out together, dueling Telecasters in the teen clubs of the Jersey Shore. Steve’s a great bandleader, songwriter and arranger in his own right, and a fierce, slashing guitarist. If I want to raise the rock ’n’ roll, I hand Steve his guitar, point him toward the studio and leave. It’ll be there when I come back. He’s my onstage right-hand man, my great friend, without whom my band and my life would be—and were, in his absence—never the same.

  ON DRUMS: Max “the Mighty Max” Weinberg. A bundle of drive, neurosis and wily suburban street smarts, and source of great humor, Max found a place where Bernard Purdie, Buddy Rich and Keith Moon intersected and made it his own. The soul of dedication and commitment, each night in the midst of the continuous hurricane our sets are designed to be, the sheer physical pressure of three hours of nonstop, steamrolling rock music lies upon his shoulders more heavily than anyone else’s. Onstage, Max goes beyond listening to what I’m saying, signaling; he “hears” what I’m thinking, feeling. He anticipates my thoughts as they come rolling full bore toward the drum riser. It’s a near telepathy that comes from years of playing and living together. It’s a real-world miracle and it’s why people love musicians. They show us how deeply we can experience one another’s minds and hearts, and how perfectly we can work in congress. With Max at my back, the questions are answered before they’re asked.

  There are twenty thousand people, all about to take a breath; we’re moving in for the kill, the band, all steel wheels on iron track, and that snare shot, the one I’m just thinking about but haven’t told or signaled anyone outside of this on-fire little corner of my mind about, the one I want right . . . and there it is! Rumble, young man, rumble!

  ON PIANO: “Professor” Roy Bittan. The only member of the E Street Band with a college education! (Actually, now there’s one more; Max finished in 1989!) I’ve long counted on my good friend Roy when I need something very specific, something exactly as I’m hearing it, to bring whatever I’m imagining on the keyboards to life. Roy’s ten fingers do the work of thirty. Eighty-eight keys for the Professor are just not enough. His playing forms the signature sound of my greatest records. His piano arpeggios and music box voicings are as identifiably E Street as Clarence’s sax. His performance ability spans jazz, classical, rock and all musics known to man! The joke in the band was that if we tracked with piano, bass and drums, we’d be dead in the water because once Roy was on, you were fully orchestrated. Nothing else needed. Roy brought so much music with him, Steve and I would be scratching to find room for our guitars. We had to make him stop that. If Liberace and Jerry Lee Lewis had a baby, and that baby was born in Rockaway Beach, Long Island, its name would be “Professor” Roy Bittan.

  This was the group, the powerhouse, I would make my initial mark with. No member, however, captured my audience’s imagination, the idealism and deeply felt comradeship associated with our band, more than the big black man playing the saxophone.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  CLARENCE CLEMONS

  And the change was made uptown . . .

  Clarence was a figure out of a rock ’n’ roll storybook, one perhaps I’ve partially authored, but you can’t be the Big Man unless you are the Big Man. If I was some embodiment of Jon’s rock ’n’ roll dream, Clarence was an embodiment of mine. I’d searched high and low for years for a true rock ’n’ roll saxophonist. Not a jazzer who’d slum with us, but somebody who felt the music and the style we played in their bones.

  Previous to Born to Run, Clarence was just the very large, gifted black saxophonist in my band. There were only five of us and we had a nice little R & B–flavored outfit. After the cover of Born to Run, he was the Big Man in the E Street Band. We used that cover, designed by in-house Columbia art director John Berg, to invent ourselves, our friendship, our partnership on an epic scale. Our adventure began with that double-wide photo, taken by Eric Meola, in the window of every record store in America. That double spread on the front and back of the cover was John Berg’s idea. When the cover is closed, the album front is a very charming photo of a young, white, punk rock ’n’ roller. But when it opens, a band is born and a tall tale begins. I brought Clarence to the Eric Meola session because I wanted to be photographed with him. Instinctively, I knew there was something about the two of us standing side by side that I wanted to say. It was dramatic, exciting and a little bit more. It captured what I’d felt the first night Clarence stepped on the
stage to jam at the Student Prince. That night a real story, one you can’t contrive, only discover, was born. It’s a story that can be nurtured and brought forth, but first, it has to be there in the dirt, the beer, the bands and the bars that give it birth. When you saw that cover, it was filled with the resonance, the mythology, of rock’s past, and a freshness calling toward its future. Eric Meola’s image of C and me, like a hit record, was familiar, yet you’d never seen anything exactly like it before. We were unique. There were only two of us.

  The cover was filled with the subtle mystery of race and a mischievous sense of fun and power promising to be unleashed. It’s a photo that makes you wonder, “Who are these guys, what’s the joke they’re sharing, what’s their story?” That image grew naturally out of the strength and deep feeling between the two of us.

  After Born to Run, our stage show changed also. Previous to 1975, Clarence often hung at his microphone, playing the gig like a club saxophonist, cool and low. One night I walked up to him and said that would no longer be enough. We could use our musical and visual presence to spin a tale, tell a story only hinted at in my songs. We could live it. I think my actual words were something like, “Tomorrow night, let’s get off the mikes and get busy,” but Clarence instinctively knew what to do. The next night “the Big Man” showed and the crowd lit up when we simply walked toward each other and planted ourselves center stage. The crowd was right. They were big steps then and they continued to be, because we felt they were, carried ourselves as if they were, and then we backed it up.