• • •
With my eldest son our relationship held its own complications. Over the years, I’d subtly sent signals of my unavailability, of my internal resistance to incursions upon my time by family members. As a young child he astutely picked these up and to “release” me he learned to say, “Thanks, Dad, but I’m busy right now, maybe later, tomorrow.” I’d often breathe a sigh of relief and run back to my fortress of solitude, where as usual I felt at home, safe, until, like a bear in need of blood and meat, I’d wake from my hibernation and travel through the house for my drink from the cup of human love and companionship. But I always felt I needed to be able to shut it all off like a spigot. Patti saw all this and called me on it. For a long time I’d felt the greatest sin a family member could commit was interrupting me while I was working on a song. I felt music was fleeting and once you let it slip through your hands, it was gone. Through Patti, I learned that their requests came first and how to stop what I was doing and listen to them. I came to understand that music, a song, will always be there for me. But your children are here and gone.
While I may never lay claim to the title “father of the year,” I worked hard to get straight with those who depended on my nearness to nurture and guide them. Patti made sure I had good strong relationships with our kids, free of much of the turmoil I experienced as a child.
Cool Rockin’ Daddy
I was always afraid my kids might steer away from music due to the fact that it was the family business. So I was pleased one day when I poked my head into Evan’s room and saw him entranced in front of his computer, ears locked on some vicious-sounding punk music. He invited me in and played me some Against Me! The band sounded hard and soulful. He said they’d soon be coming to a local club, the Starland Ballroom, and asked if I would like to attend the show with him. I accepted immediately. The night came and we drove up Route 9 to Sayreville and the Starland. We were going to hear his heroes.
We parked in the lot and headed in to find the floor in front of the bandstand awash with teenagers. Evan and a pal headed into the swirl of bodies as I took my place at the side bar with a scattering of parents.
Two fine bands opened the show, Fake Problems and the Riverboat Gamblers. Then during the break a young man with a yellow Mohawk who was standing to my left said, “The bass player in Against Me! is a big fan of yours.” I said, “Really?” I was shortly introduced to Andrew Seward, a sturdily built, bearded, auburn-haired young man who warmly greeted me and invited us backstage after the show to meet the band. Home run!
Against Me! took the stage and played a ferocious set, turning the crowd into a sweating soup of flailing bodies. Every word of every song was shouted back to the band at full volume. After an hour and with the roof firmly raised, Evan and his friend returned from the mosh pit soaked and spent. Would they like to meet the band?
“Yes!”
We made our way up some back stairs into the kind of cramped club dressing room I’d spent a good part of my young life in and we said hello to four wrung-out young musicians. Some small talk was made, photos were taken, and as we were about to leave the bass player stepped forward to my son, rolled up his sleeve and showed Evan a verse of “Badlands” he had tattooed on his forearm. Pointing to it, he said, “Look, it’s your dad.” Evan just stared. When our kids were young, we never pushed our music at home. With the exception of some guitars and a piano, our house was free of gold albums, Grammys or any other musical mementos. My kids didn’t know “Badlands” from matzoh ball soup. When they were children, when I was approached on the street for autographs, I’d explain to them that in my job I was Barney (the then-famous purple dinosaur) for adults.
That night, moments before we left, the bass player rolled up another sleeve to show us a tat of myself stretching from shoulder to elbow. For one brief moment I took a silent pride in seeing my influence passed on and feeling like the coolest dad in the room.
After I promptly promised E Street tickets to all in sight for life, we said our good-byes and left. On the way home, Ev said, “Dad, that guy has you tattooed on his arm.”
I said, “Yeah, what do you think?”
“It’s funny.”
Toward the end of that week I stopped in his bedroom and probed a little more. “Did you have fun the other night?” Without turning away from his computer or even looking at me, he responded, “Greatest night of my life.”
With my son Sam, it was classic rock: Dylan, Bob Marley and Creedence Clearwater, whom he picked up from his “Battlefield Vietnam” video game. He wandered into our bedroom one night and saw Dylan at Newport on our TV. “Who’s that guy?” He was interested, so I bought him some of the early Dylan folk albums. Sam was in middle school and probably only ten or eleven when I entered his bedroom to hear “Chimes of Freedom” from Dylan’s Another Side of Bob Dylan album playing on vinyl in a dimly lit distant corner. As he lay in bed, he reminded me of the many nights I lay in darkness with Spector, Orbison and Dylan playing at my bedside. I sat on the edge of his bed and I asked him what he thought of the young Bob. Out of the dark, his voice still containing the rising sweetness of a child . . .
“Epic.”
Jessie is the keeper of the keys to all things Top 40, blasting out hip-hop and pop at full volume, taking me to see Taylor Swift and Justin Timberlake and singing at the top of her lungs in the car with her girlfriends. She is my guide to and interpreter of what’s happening now over the airwaves. In the past I have spent many a holiday evening at Z100’s Jingle Ball, meeting Shakira, Rihanna, Fall Out Boy and Paramore, along with many other hit makers. In Madison Square Garden, at peace, I’d sit surrounded by squealing teens and stout-hearted parents. I once sat next to a lovely woman who pointed to Jess and asked, “Is that your daughter?” I said, “Yes.” She then pointed to the stage, where an on-the-cusp-of-fame Lady Gaga, dressed in a white tutu, was singing her first hit and said, “That’s mine.”
When my kids first came to our shows, they were small. And after some early shock and awe, they usually fell promptly asleep or drifted back to their video games, happy to leave Mom and Pop to do their work and come home. At the end of the day, as parents, you are their audience. They are not meant to be yours. I always figured young kids wouldn’t mind seeing fifty thousand people boo their parents, but what kid wants to see fifty thousand people cheer their folks? None.
When they got older, things changed somewhat and the knowledge of Mom and Dad’s work life slowly seeped into our home. I enjoy hearing my kids critique my records and seeing them have fun at our shows. But I’m happy in the knowledge they were baptized in the holy river of rock and pop by their own heroes, in their own way, at their own time.
FIFTY-NINE
“STREETS OF PHILADELPHIA”
In 1994, I received a phone call from Jonathan Demme asking if I’d consider writing a song for a film he was directing called Philadelphia. The film was about a gay man’s battle with AIDS and his fight to retain his position with a prestigious Philadelphia law firm. I had my studio set up at home in Rumson and for a few afternoons, I went in with some lyrics I had partially written dealing with the death of a close friend. Jonathan requested a rock song to open the film. I spent a day or so trying to accommodate, but the lyrics I had seemed to resist being put to rock music. I began to fiddle with the synthesizer, playing over a light hip-hop beat I programmed on the drum machine. As soon as I slowed the rhythm down over some basic minor chords, the lyrics fell into place and the voice I was looking for came forward. I finished the song in a few hours and sent the tape off to Jonathan, feeling like I hadn’t gotten it. He phoned me in a few days saying he loved it and placed it over the images of Philadelphia at the top of the film.
“Streets of Philadelphia” was a top ten hit because of the film and because it addressed something the country was attempting to come to grips with at that moment. How do we treat our sons and daughters confronting AIDS? Jonathan’s film came at an important moment and did its work.
It was good to be a small part of it. Oh . . . and I won an Oscar. When I traveled north from LA to show it to my folks, it showed up on the airport x-ray and I had to drag it out of my bag. Upon reaching San Mateo, I walked into the kitchen, where my father was still sitting and smoking like a blue-collar Buddha, and plopped it down on the table in front of him. He looked at it, looked at me and said, “I’ll never tell anybody what to do ever again.”
• • •
After “Streets of Philadelphia” I spent the better part of the year in Los Angeles trying to come up with an album in that vein. It was an album centering on men and women and it was dark. I’d just made three of those records, varying in tone, in a row. The last two had been met with not indifference, but something like it. I was feeling a faint disconnect with my audience.
One evening as Roy and I took a drive, he suggested that perhaps it was the lyrical content that was distancing some of our fans. You can get away with a one-off of anything—Tunnel of Love and Nebraska are excellent examples—but it has to be finely crafted and fully realized. I’d made my meat and potatoes writing about the broader lives of people, often working people particularly, and while at the time I told Roy he didn’t know what he was talking about, I think he actually was onto something. I don’t write strictly for my audience’s desires but we are, at this point, engaged in a lifelong dialogue, so I take into consideration their voices. You need to be adventurous, to listen to your heart and write what it’s telling you, but your creative instinct isn’t infallible. The need to look for direction, input and some guidance, outside of yourself, can be healthy and fruitful. This would’ve been my fourth record in a row about relationships. If I could’ve felt its fullness, I wouldn’t have hesitated to put it out. But a not-fully-realized record around the same topic felt like one too many. I had to come to terms with the fact that after my year of work writing, recording, mixing, it was going on the shelf. That’s where she sits.
Greatest Hits
I was again at loose ends. Where am I going? Who am I now? What do I have to give to my audience? If these questions were in my head, I knew they were in my audience’s as well, so, when in doubt . . . retreat! It was 1995, seven years since the E Street Band had played together. That’s a generation in rock ’n’ roll. We’d never made a greatest hits record and we decided it was time to remind people a little of what we’d done.
It’d been ten years since the band had stood side by side in a recording studio together but I picked up the phone, called the guys, explained what I wanted to do and that it was a one-shot. On January 12, 1995, we gathered in Studio A at the Hit Factory, scene of many of our USA sessions; exchanged hugs and warm greetings; then set to work. After a session or two, I received a phone call from Steve, who said he’d heard we were recording. I was a little gun-shy. It had been fifteen years but a few nights later Steve sat on a stool in the studio with the same Groucho Marx–like, big-eyed, soft grin I’d loved and missed, plucking the mandolin for “This Hard Land.”
Later we filmed a short promo set of the band playing live at Sony Studios. I showed the film to Jimmy Iovine in my LA den one night and as we slipped into “Thunder Road,” he said, “You should jump on this now. Time is funny and this just feels right.” I heard what he was saying but I wasn’t ready to go there. Greatest Hits did nicely, gave my midnineties drift a little focus and a kick, then we once again went our separate ways.
I had one song left over from the project. It was a rock song I’d been writing for the band but couldn’t complete. “Streets of Philadelphia” and Jonathan Demme had gotten me thinking about writing on social issues again. This was something I’d steered away from for the past decade. As my success increased, there was something about that “rich man in a poor man’s shirt” that left an uneasy taste in my mouth surrounding this type of writing. But drawing on my own young history and what I’d seen, I’d written about these things very well and over the years I’d refined a voice that was identifiably mine on these subjects. It was a story, a part of my story that I had to tell. You lay claim to your stories; you honor, with your hard work and the best of your talent, their inspirations, and you fight to tell them well from a sense of indebtedness and thankfulness. The ambiguities, the contradictions, the complexities of your choices are always with you in your writing as they are in your life. You learn to live with them. You trust your need to have a dialogue about what you deem important. After twenty-five years of writing, the song that helped me crystallize these issues and their currency for the second half of my work life was “The Ghost of Tom Joad.”
SIXTY
THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD
We were now bicoastal, spending July to December in New Jersey and January to June in California. It was during our California stay that I began to think about my new record. Working once again on my home equipment in our guesthouse, I began to record a variety of acoustic and country rock songs I had recently written. The Ghost of Tom Joad was the result of a decade-long inner debate I’d been having with myself after the success of Born in the USA. That debate centered on a single question: Where does a rich man belong? If it was true that it’s “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” I wouldn’t be walking through those pearly gates any time soon, but that was okay; there was still plenty of work to be done down here on Earth. That was the premise of The Ghost of Tom Joad. What is the work for us to do in our short time here?
I began recording with just myself, my acoustic guitar and the remnant of “Tom Joad” I’d tried to write for the band. Once I cut that song in the version that appears on the album, I had a feeling for the record that I wanted to make. I’d pick up where I’d left off with Nebraska, set the stories in the midnineties and in the land of my current residence, California. The music was minimal, the melodies uncomplicated; the austere rhythms and arrangements defined who these people were and how they expressed themselves. They traveled light; they were lean, direct in their expression, yet with most of what they had to say left in the silence between words. They were transient and led hard, complicated lives, half of which had been left behind in another world, in another country.
The precision of the storytelling in these types of songs is very important. The correct detail can speak volumes about who your character is, while the wrong one can shred the credibility of your story. When you get the music and lyrics right, your voice disappears into the voices you’ve chosen to write about. Basically, with these songs, I find the characters and listen to them. That always leads to a series of questions about their behavior. What would they do? What would they never do? You need to locate the rhythm of their speech and the nature of their expression. But all the telling detail in the world doesn’t matter if the song lacks an emotional center. That’s something you have to pull out of yourself from the commonality you feel with the man or woman you’re writing about. By pulling these elements together as well as you can, you shed light on their lives and honor their experiences.
I’d been through the Central Valley of California many times on the way to visiting my parents. I’d often stop and spend some time in the small farm towns off the interstate. But it still took a good amount of research to get the details of the region correct. I traced the stories out slowly and carefully. I thought hard about who these people were and the choices they were presented with. In California, there was a sense of a new country being formed on the edge of the old. You could feel the America of the next century taking shape in the deserts, fields, towns and cities there first. That vision has come to fruition and all you need to do is take a walk down the main street of my own three-thousand-mile-away Northeastern hometown, Freehold, on any summer evening to see the influx of Hispanic life, the face of the nation changing as it’s changed so many times before, along with the hard greeting most of those who bring that change face upon arrival.
The old stories of race and exclusion continue to be played out. I tried to catch a s
mall piece of this on the songs I wrote for Tom Joad. “Sinaloa Cowboys,” “The Line,” “Balboa Park” and “Across the Border” were songs that traced the lineage of my earlier characters to the Mexican migrant experience in the new West. These songs completed the circle, bringing me back to 1978 and the inspiration I’d taken from John Ford’s film adaptation of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Their skin was darker and their language had changed, but these were people trapped by the same brutal circumstances.
“Youngstown” and “The New Timer” were two songs inspired by a book called Journey to Nowhere by my friends Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson. Both songs chronicled the effects of post-industrialization in the United States and the weight of lost jobs, outsourced labor and the disappearance of our manufacturing base on the citizens whose hard work built America. I’d seen it firsthand when the Karagheusian Rug Mill, based in Freehold, rather than settle a labor dispute with its workers, closed up shop and shipped south for cheaper, nonunionized labor. The jobs were gone. My dad had worked on the floor there when I was a kid; my musical life and the Castiles had been born not fifty yards from its belching smokestacks and clacking looms. (It closed in 1964 after sixty years of operation.)
By the end of Tom Joad I’d written about the death and destruction that accompany the lives of many of the people who inspired these songs. I was working on “Galveston Bay,” a song that originally had a more violent ending, but it began to feel false. If I was going to find some small window of light, I had to do it with this man in this song. I’d already written “Across the Border,” a song that was like a prayer or a dream you have the night before you’re going to take a dangerous journey. The singer seeks a home where his love will be rewarded, his faith restored, where a tenuous peace and hope may exist. With “Galveston Bay” I had to make these ideas feel attainable. The song asks the question: Is the most political act an individual one, something that happens in the dark, in the quiet, when someone makes a particular decision that affects his immediate world? I wanted a character who is driven to do the wrong thing but does not. He instinctively refuses to add to the violence in the world around him. With great difficulty and against his own grain, he transcends his circumstances. He finds the strength and grace to save himself and the part of the world he touches.
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