Keep in mind this was the first and only stadium show I’d ever performed or attended. I had nothing but this night to judge my decisions upon. Jon wisely counseled we postpone our decision until we had at least a few more concerts to judge by. (We’d already committed to, and sold out, the entire tour.) He was frightened also, and said if it was a recurring situation, he’d honor my feelings; we’d cancel and take the heat. It never happened again. The crowd settled during the second half of the Slane show and I observed there was a sketchy but ritual orderliness to what appeared from the stage to be pure chaos. The crowd protected one another. If you fell, the nearest person to your left or right reached down, grabbed an arm and pulled you upright. It wasn’t pretty (or, to my eye, safe), but it worked. The other ninety-three thousand gatherers were clueless about the soul-searching minidrama being played out right before their eyes. To them, it was just a beautiful day with a rocking band. In the end, Slane joined a rising number of our other performances to attain “legendary” status and, despite my distraction, turned out to be a solid show. On the streets of Dublin, it is often mentioned to me. If you were there, you were there. I was certainly there.
Newcastle, England
At our second stadium show, it was all sunshine and smiles. The band, already growing more confident in the bigger venues, played spiritedly, and a safe, festive atmosphere prevailed. Question dismissed. We could play stadiums, but I never forgot my experience at Slane. Short note: When a crowd of that size gathers, particularly a young crowd, danger is always in the air. It’s simply a matter of the math. An unexpected mishap, a little hysteria, and the day can shift hard and very quickly. Over the years, we’ve been careful and lucky at our stadium concerts. Some very well-intentioned and serious-hearted musicians, who carry a deep commitment to their fans, haven’t been as fortunate. Today’s stadium concerts are thoroughly organized but still, in those numbers, the potential for danger always lurks.
Headaches and Headlines
We traveled on. The tour became complicated by several issues. Since my marriage, I’d suddenly become tabloid news fodder. In a Scandinavian newspaper, the day after we checked out of our local digs, I was shown a picture of Julie’s and my bed. We weren’t in it. It was just a picture of a freshly made bed. It was new, unsettling and a pain in the ass. Photographers were everywhere.
In Gothenburg, Sweden, things got broke. We were either confined in our hotel or followed by a pack of paparazzi wherever we went. This was not what I’d signed up for. I was a private person and not comfortable with my personal life in the spotlight. What I wanted most, when I didn’t have a hundred thousand eyes on me, was all eyes off me. In the second half of the twentieth century, in the public arena, this was not a deal you could cut. Fuggeddaboutit! So you took your blessings and accepted the fact that this nuisance was the price you’d paid for . . . getting everything you ever wanted! In ’84, beneath the white-hot spotlight, during the whitest-hot moment of my career, this sanity-inducing knowledge was not yet in my possession . . . so.
A shiny, new, black Takamine acoustic guitar was whizzing within inches of the thinning hair on my trusted amigo Jon Landau’s pate. As it skimmed over his few remaining hairs, he startled but remained impressively calm. Then the atonal twang of rock ’n’ roll bells ringing, the splintering crack of dead midnight in the house of a thousand guitars, filled the backstage halls as my Takamine burst into a million pieces on the wall of my Gothenburg dressing room. Unless you’re Pete Townshend, I do not generally counsel or condone the demolishing of perfectly good musical instruments. I would go so far as to say wrecking the righteous tools of Mr. Gibson, Mr. Fender or any other craftsman of fine guitars is near sacrilege. But when a healthy insanity calls, you do what you must. I’d had it just about up to here with the whole merry-go-round I’d just jumped on. Plus, I had no way of knowing if this was going to be my life, my whole life, everywhere I’d go, day after day, country after country, bed after bed, in a Groundhog Day of stultifying, inane attention, brought on by my own sacred ambitions crossed by the normal human longing for life and love. Would there eventually be one thousand pictures of freshly made beds my wife and I had slept in, printed, published and preyed on? There would not. But at that moment, on that day, who could guess?
Mr. Landau, who’d simply been trying to bring a little perspective to my predicament, quietly moved back from his friend, the guitar smasher, and out into the hall. There he joined many others, who at that moment were glad they did not have his job.
After my guitar Armageddon, we went out and proceeded to literally destroy the Ullevi stadium. The jumping up and down and synchronized twisting of so many gonzo Swedes during “Twist and Shout” cracked its concrete foundation. That’ll teach ’em.
FORTY-NINE
GOING HOME
The European leg of our tour spun on without a hitch, the seats full, the crowds rapturous. We’d grown comfortable in the expanded environs of the stadiums that had become our workplace. Our anthems were built to fill and communicate in places of this size, so from Timbuktu to New Jersey, crowds dropped one by one to the powerhouse show we’d started developing overseas. Some cities stood out: three shows, centered around the Fourth of July, drew seventy thousand fans a night (with Steve dropping by to sit in) to London’s Wembley Stadium. Our debut in Italy, the motherland, brought us to Milan’s eighty-thousand-seat stadium. We walked down its damp, dim, gladiatorial tunnels with the distant ear-shredding sound of eighty thousand Italians rising, louder and louder, until we broke onto the sunlit field. A cheer rose that sounded like we’d just returned from the Crusades with our vanquished enemies’ heads held high on the necks of our guitars (or perhaps we were just about to be fed to the lions).
Walking amid the thunder toward the ramp leading to stage front, I noticed an entire section of empty seats. Our promoter at my side, I said, “I thought the show was sold out.” He answered, “It is. Those seats are for the people who are going to break in!” Got it. And so they did. We hung huge video screens on the outside of the stadium to satisfy those unable to attend, but that only held them for a little while. Gates were rushed, security was breached and soon all “seats” were full, and then some. I stood in front of the mind-bending hysteria I’d come to realize passes for a normal reaction from an Italian audience as women blew kisses and cried, men cried and blew kisses, and all pledged undying love and beat their hearts with their fists. Some grew faint. We hadn’t even started playing yet! When the band crashed into “Born in the USA,” world’s end seemed near; the stadium shook and swayed as we played for our lives. Marone!
Back in the USA, our show at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium proved unique. A crowd of sixty thousand Steelers fans got to watch me count off “Born in the USA” while several key members of the E Street Band, Roy and Nils, were cluelessly locked in deadly battle on our backstage Ping-Pong table! My testosterone-drenched “One, two, three, four” and the sound of Max’s crushing snare were met not by Roy’s massive synth riff but by Danny Federici’s tinkling glockenspiel! New records were set in the quarter mile by Nils and Roy as they listened to the most heart-sinking syllables of their lives, the distant stadium-echoing, “Your ass is in a sling and I’m going to burn that fucking Ping-Pong table DOWN!,” incredulous “One, two, three, four” of their front man. I watched sixty thousand faces go from awe to aw-shit as I stood, not too happy, pants metaphorically around my ankles, experiencing one of the greatest weenie-shrinkers of all time. Ping-Pong tables were banned for years. Heads rolled.
Giants Stadium: six sold-out shows to three hundred thousand of our New Jersey faithful brought the tour’s size and significance home. My people. Never the hottest audience on our tours (it’s hard to beat those Europeans!), but damn, they show up and they are my life-giving, loving homies.
In Texas, an infestation of locusts the size of your thumb swooped like World War II dogfighters around and over our heads during the show. On a cool night, they’d been drawn to t
he warmth of the stage lights and gathered in congregation on every available inch of our bandstand. Nils (a bug-o-phobe) ran skittering to Danny’s organ riser. One went eye-to-eye with me perched on my microphone stand, popped to my hair and, during “My Hometown,” slowly crawled down the neck of my shirt to sit in the center of my back. Thousands littered the stage, to be swept away by long brooms at intermission time. It was biblical.
A short while later we were greeted by snow and thirty-degree temperatures at our show in Denver, Colorado’s Mile High Stadium. The audience, in ski jackets, carrying blankets, came dressed for a winter football game. We cut off the fingers of our gloves to play our guitars through, did what we could to stay warm and froze our asses off. Steam rose in plumes from our shoulders as hot sweat met freezing air. About three-quarters of the way through our three hours, you could feel the cold coming in for the kill, settling in your bones. Once I put my guitar down, my fingers went numb and couldn’t be revived; every syllable I sang left a cloud of visible breath streaming from my lungs. On to sunny, warm Los Angeles!
September 27, 1985, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, site of the 1984 Olympics. Our finale was a four-night wrap party. Hard blue skies and balmy temperatures greeted the band and eighty thousand Los Angelenos. The band peaked amid an atmosphere of end-of-the-road celebration. We were now one of the biggest, if not the biggest, rock attractions in the world and to get there we hadn’t lost sight of what we were about. There were some close shaves, and in the future I’d have to be doubly vigilant about the way my music was used and interpreted, but all in all, we’d come through intact, united and ready to press on.
Where Do We Go from Here?
Julianne and I returned home to our cottage in LA and I felt great . . . for two whole days. On day three, I crashed. What do I do now? Jon visited and mentioned the tour had been very successful . . . economically successful, so successful, in fact, I would need to meet my accountant. My accountant? I’d never met him (or her) . . . ever! Fourteen years into my professional recording career, I’d never met those whose job it was to count my money . . . and watch it. Soon I would shake the hand of a Mr. Gerald Breslauer, who would tell me I had earned a figure that at the time sounded so outrageous I had to ban it from thought. Not that I wasn’t happy; I was—giddy, in fact. But I couldn’t contextualize it in any meaningful way. So I didn’t. My first luxury as a successful rock icon would be the luxury to not think about, to downright ignore, my luxuries (some of them). Worked for me!
The aftermath of the Born in the USA tour was a strange time. It was the peak of something. I would never be here, this high, in the mainstream pop firmament again. It was the end of something. For all intents and purposes, my work with the E Street Band was done (for now). We would tour together once more on my solo record Tunnel of Love, but I would intentionally use the band in such a way as to cloud its former identity. I didn’t know it then but soon we’d be finished for a long while. The tour also was the beginning of something, a final surge to try to determine my life as an adult, a family man, and to escape the road’s seductions and confinements. I longed to finally settle in, in a real home, with a real love. I wanted to lift upon my shoulders the weight and bounty of maturity, then try to carry it with some grace and humility. I’d worked to get married; now, would I have the skills, the ability . . . to be married?
FIFTY
REGRESAR A MÉXICO
Right before the Born in the USA tour, I bought a home in the Republican stronghold of Rumson, New Jersey, only minutes from the plot of sand that once held the old Surf and Sea Beach Club, where we “townies” had been spit on by the children of my new neighbors. The house was a rambling old Georgian-style “mansion” on the corner of Bellevue Avenue and Ridge Road. I went through my usual buyer’s remorse, but I held out, promising myself I’d fill the big old house with what I’d been searching for: family and a life. One morning I received a phone call from my father. This was unprecedented. The man who banned telephones from our home for nineteen years, if alive today, would never be in any danger of maxing out his minutes. I’d never received a phone call directly from my dad so I was apprehensive. I called California.
An unusual buoyancy was in his voice. “Hi, Bruce!” He wanted to go to Mexico on a fishing trip. My pop, who hadn’t had a line in the water for the past twenty-five years, dating back to the two of us moping (fishing, not catching) at the end of the Manasquan jetty, now wanted to Ernest Hemingway it and go marlin fishing. The only marlin the old man had ever been close to would’ve been the one hanging over the bar at his favorite watering hole, but with the exception of our previous Mexican run to Tijuana, my dad had never asked me to go anywhere. Amused by his enthusiasm, flattered and curious, I listened to his pitch. Somewhere inside still lingered my hunger for that second (third? fourth? fifth?) chance with the old man where all would go right. I said, “Sure.” I asked him if he needed me to make any arrangements and he proudly said he and his neighbor Tom (my pop’s only male friend of the past fifteen years) had “taken care of it all.” “This one’s on me,” he jauntily responded. What could I say?
A few weeks later, I flew to San Francisco and drove to Burlingame, California. There on a windy hill, bordering Silicon Valley, the Oakland Bay in the distance, was my folks’ new residence and answer to their “gold rush” of ’69. It was a modest place they’d breathlessly picked out, my mother informing me of its every architectural detail as I listened on the phone back in Jersey. I spent the night. Then Tom, my dad and I hopped on Aeroméxico to Cabo San Lucas. The flight down was raucous, filled with other fishermen and vacationers, high and excited to be going south of the border. My dad, now a huge man, struck up a friendship with some girls on the plane. (Something, considering his general immutability, he never failed to be able to do.) Once on the ground we all jammed, girls included, into a Ford Econoline van long past its warranty. We passed scenes of abject poverty, roadside shacks with rooftop TV antennas, a blue glow emanating from within, as our driver, dodging local livestock, recklessly drove us off the road ’til we settled in screams and a cloud of dust amid the roadside brush. Upon reaching our resort, I had to admit, Pops hadn’t done bad. No TVs, no telephones, but pretty cushy. Cabo at the time seemed caught between going upscale and a donkey-ramblin’ twilight zone. A phone at the local post office, placed on a lonely stool, presided over by an olive-skinned beauty, was our only connection to folks stateside.
The following morning, we rose in darkness, hopped into a cab, and were deposited at dawn on a remote beach several miles from our hotel. It was there in the morning’s blue twilight that something just didn’t feel copacetic. Long minutes passed, my father silent, Tom shuffling, until puffs of white smoke could be seen rising from behind the nearest rock outcropping. These were followed by the blub-blub-blub sound of an ancient overworked diesel. Slowly coming into view was a bright orange wooden crate of a boat that had to have Bluto (Popeye’s nemesis) himself at the wheel. Shit. My regrets on not having commandeered our arrangements were coming fast and hard. I was loaded! We could have been going out on Ted Turner’s Courageous if we wanted to! But instead, we were about to risk our lives in this rust bucket.
A small tender with a straw-hatted, parchment-skinned old man on the oars rowed toward us. There was no English to be had, so upon reaching shore, incoherent greetings were mumbled by both parties and he motioned for us to get in the boat. My father was outfitted for his encounter with Moby-Dick in his usual street attire: heavy, laced, brown brogan shoes; white socks; dress pants; a crumpled dress shirt; suspenders; and thinning, still-coal-black hair, slicked back. He looked great for a Polish picnic in Queens but was not prepared for the Mexican sea. Parkinson’s, body fluid buildup, diabetes, psoriasis and an array of ailments too numerous to mention, along with a life of nightly smokes and six-pack séances, had left him severely limited physically. We shuffled him over to the boat and with waves lapping on the sand, one leg at a time, we guided him in.
With a wood-on-wood ka-thunk, we bumped up against the side of our Titanic. There was no boarding ladder, so the three of us, without the benefit of a common dialect, had to lift 230 pounds of nickels in Sears slacks onto a rocking tugboat. Jesus Christ. The fulcrum reached its apex, weight shifted and with a resounding thud, the source of my presence on Earth rolled into the death trap he’d rented us. It was six thirty a.m. and I was already soaked in sweat. Our expressionless captain turned his “lady” around and headed silently out to sea. Not far beyond the cove, away from the sheltered waters of the coast, there were some serious seas stirring. We were a bobbing rubber duck in a five-year-old’s bathtub. When we were down in the trough of a wave, the following wave crested at wheelhouse height. Within fifteen minutes, Tom was blowing his all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast over the port side. My dad was in lockdown mode, gripping the armrests of the fishing chair with his usual couldn’t-give-a-shit calm.
I tried to communicate with our skipper using some of my high school Spanish, but “¿Cómo se llama?” got no response. I found if I kept my eyes on the horizon and rode it out, I might spare myself a retching over the stern. Our engine, in a wood box set square above deck in the boat’s center, was belching diesel fumes and adding to the vicious mix of elements that attacked our normally landlocked digestive systems. An hour passed, the sun burned, land receded and there was nothing but an endless chromatic panorama where sea and sky melded that was making me terrifically claustrophobic. Death at sea felt imminent. After a second hour had passed I commanded Tom to go on top and find out EXACTLY how much farther we had to go. Our skipper raised one finger, then turned back to his wheel. Good, one more mile . . . no . . . no . . . turns out, ONE MORE HOUR! About a half hour back, we’d come upon a Boston Whaler with two locals inside, miles out at sea. They were obviously sinking, for the boat was low in the sea, filled with water up to their shins. I motioned to the captain for us to go to their rescue. Then, as we moved closer, I saw . . . fish, many fish, swimming in circles inside the boat around their legs. They reached bare-handed, caught one and, smiling, lifted it up for our approval . . . bait . . . they were selling bait.
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