Born to Run

by Bruce Springsteen

  Still, I aimed everywhere on Magic for the political and the personal to meld together. You can listen to the whole thing without ever thinking of the politics of the day or you can hear them ticking deadly through the internal thread of the music.

  • • •

  Like many before, our Magic tour started in Asbury Park’s Convention Hall. There, as a young aspiring musician, I’d seen the Doors with Jim Morrison, whose live presence and command of the stage completely engulfed you, and in 1966 I somehow managed to miss the Rolling Stones as they passed through. I’d seen the Who demolish their equipment in a cloud of smoke in front of wide-eyed teenyboppers with Mom and Dad in tow, who were waiting to see the headlining act, Herman’s Hermits. The Who’s show sent me running in a fever out to pick up a strobe light and smoke bomb for my upcoming CYO gig with the Castiles. There, at the end of our last set, in the basement of St. Rose of Lima on a Saturday night, I switched on the strobe, set off the smoke bomb, climbed on a chair and smashed a vase of flowers I’d lifted from a first-grade classroom onto the floor. This didn’t quite pack the nihilistic punch of Pete Townshend bashing his guitar to bits against his smoky Vox amplifier, but limited funds and one good guitar could only take you so far.

  Convention Hall was the first mansion of my rock ’n’ roll dreams. There under its roof a wider world awaited, real magicians appeared and anything could happen. Midget wrestling, boat shows with yachts the size of your backyard, hot-rod exhibitions, roller derby and rock ’n’ roll baptisms all coursed through the veins of this modest concert hall that seemed to me the size of Madison Square Garden. Its front doors opened onto the interior of the Convention Hall promenade. There stands of cotton candy, cheap T-shirts, seashells, pinball arcades and an endless amount of shore tchotchkes lined your walk to the hall’s brass doors, which promised absurdity and transcendence. It’s still pretty much the same.

  For me now, it’s just a home. A home of my own, the Asbury boardwalk, where I bring my band to reconnect with where we come from and to tighten up and get ready for battle on our newest adventure. Here on the boardwalk I now play the role of the ghost of Christmas past as the city and its exciting new development passes me by. There is even a ridiculous bust of me somewhere in town primed and ready for seagull shit. Still, on any summer night, I feel comfortably at home walking the boards wearing my ninja cloak of invisibility, a baseball hat, all while going almost as unrecognized as I did in 1969. I still feel amongst friends and my people. It’s still my place and I still feed off and love it. So on a fresh September morning, we packed our gear and left Asbury for Hartford, Connecticut. We were off.

  • • •

  This was the first tour where an illness would sideline a band member into missing shows. Danny Federici had contracted melanoma and now needed serious medical treatment. Danny had been misdiagnosed early on and the cancer was now moving through his system. He had been quietly receiving care for a while but could no longer keep it from the band, and so began a long and difficult journey. Charlie Giordano from the Sessions Band was tutored for a few shows by Dan, then quietly stepped in to take over the organ duties while Danny was treated.

  One evening on one of Danny’s short returns to the band, he stepped into my dressing room before the show and sat in the chair opposite me. He basically explained things weren’t looking so good. At one point he seemed to run out of words and, gesturing silently, moved one palm over the other, trying to tell me what I already knew. His eyes filled and finally we sat there looking at each other . . . it’d been thirty-five years. I gave him what assurances I could that might ease his mind. We stood up, held each other for a long moment and went out and played. Not long thereafter, Danny appeared with us for the last time, at Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis on March 20, 2008. In the band we all knew this was it. We wouldn’t see Danny onstage again.

  Danny was a believer in the world as it stands. We never spoke a single word about a single lyric or idea that was in the many hundreds of songs I wrote. The same songs that his fingers and heart magically and instinctively knew how to color perfectly. Danny and I were closest on evenings when he found me in my lowest self. He never judged. He just observed and breathed a sigh. I always felt it was a bad way to bridge the gap between the two of us. It was. But when I tried it the other way, to bring Danny to personal accountability, I felt like his taskmaster or his old man with a pole so far up my ass it embarrassed me.

  As a leader, even of a rock ’n’ roll band, there is always a little of the padrone in your job description, but it’s a fine line. And the members for whom I played that role too fully usually fared the worst.

  But Danny tried hard. He beat alcoholism, stayed pretty true to his AA program and worked to put a life together. But in the end, for Dan Federici it would never be easy.

  One spring afternoon a few of us gathered in a Manhattan hospital around Danny’s bed. We circled the bed holding hands and said our individual prayers and farewells.

  • • •

  Danny died on April 17, 2008. He left behind a son, Jason; two daughters, Harley and Madison; and his wife, Maya. There was a lovely, light-filled service held for Danny at the United Methodist Church in Red Bank on April 21. To an overflow crowd, music was played, remembrances given, good-byes said.

  I had watched Danny fight and conquer some tough addictions. I watched him struggle to put his life together and, in the last decade, when the band reunited, thrive on sitting in his seat behind that big B3. I watched him fight his cancer without complaint and with great courage and spirit. He was a sunny-side-up fatalist. He never gave up, right to the end.

  Before we went on for that last night in Indiana, I asked him what he wanted to play and he said “Sandy.” He wanted to strap on the accordion and revisit the boardwalk of our youth during the summer nights when we’d walk along the boards with all the time in the world.

  He wanted to play once more the song that is of course about the end of something wonderful and the beginning of something unknown and new.

  Pete Townshend once said, “A rock ’n’ roll band is a crazy thing. You meet some people when you’re a kid, and unlike any occupation in the whole world, you’re stuck with them for the rest of your life no matter who they are or what crazy things they do.”

  If we didn’t play together, the E Street Band would probably not know one another. We wouldn’t be in a room together. But we do . . . we do play together and every night at eight we walk out onstage together, and that, my friends, is a place where miracles occur . . . old and new miracles. And those you are with in the presence of miracles, you never forget. Life does not separate you. Death does not separate you. Those you are with who create miracles for you, like Danny did for me every night, you are honored to be amongst.

  Of course, we all grow up, and we know “it’s only rock ’n’ roll” . . . but it’s not. After a lifetime of watching a man perform his miracle for you, night after night, it feels an awful lot like love.

  SEVENTY

  SUPER BOWL SUNDAY

  Six air force Thunderbirds have just roared overhead at what felt like inches above our backstage area, giving myself and the entire E Street Band a brush cut. With twenty minutes to go, I’m sitting in my trailer trying to decide which boots to wear. I’ve got a nice pair of cowboy boots my feet look really good in, but I’m concerned about their stability. There is no canopy overhead at the Super Bowl and two days ago we rehearsed in full rain on the field. We all got soaked and the stage became as slick as a frozen pond. It was so slippery I crashed into Mike Colucci, our cameraman, coming off my knee slide, his camera the only thing that kept me from launching out onto the soggy turf. Then our “referee” for “Glory Days” came running out, couldn’t stop himself and executed one of the most painfully perfect “man slips on a banana peel” falls I’ve ever seen. This sent Steve, myself and the entire band into one of the biggest stress-induced laughs of our lives that lasted all the way back to our trailers.

 
; I better go with the combat boots I always carry. The round toes will give me better braking power than the pointy-toed cowboy boots when I hit the deck. I stuff my boots with two innersoles to make them as fitted as possible, zip them up snugly around my ankles, stomp around in my trailer a bit and feel pretty grounded. Fifteen minutes . . . I’m nervous. It’s not the usual preshow jitters or “butterflies” I’ve had before. I’m talking about a “five minutes to beach landing,” Right Stuff, “Lord, don’t let me screw the pooch in front of a hundred million people” kind of semiterror. It only lasts for a minute . . . I check my hair, spray it with something that turns it into concrete, and I’m out the door.

  I catch sight of Patti smiling. She’s been my rock all week. I put my arm around her and away we go. They take us by golf cart to a holding tunnel right off the field. The problem is there are a thousand people there: TV cameras, media of all kinds and general chaos. Suddenly, hundreds of people rush by us in a column shouting, cheering . . . our fans! And tonight also our stage builders. These are “the volunteers.” They’ve been here for two weeks on their own dime in a field day after day, putting together and pulling apart pieces of our stage over and over again, theoretically achieving military precision. Now it’s for real. I hope they’ve got it down because as we’re escorted onto the field, lights in the stadium fully up, the banshee wail of seventy thousand screaming football fanatics rising in our ears, there’s nothing there. Nothing . . . no sound, no lights, no instruments, no stage, nothing but brightly lit unwelcoming green turf. Suddenly an army of ants comes from all sides of what seems like nowhere, each rolling a piece of our lifeline, our Earth, onto the field. The cavalry has arrived. What takes us on a concert day eight hours to do is done in five minutes. Unbelievable. Everything in our world is there . . . we hope. We gather a few feet off the stage, form a circle of hands; I say a few words drowned out by the crowd and it’s smiles all around. I’ve been in a lot of high-stakes situations like this—though not exactly like this—with these people before. It’s stressful, but our band is made for it . . . and it’s about to begin . . . so, happy warriors, we bound up onto the stage.

  The NFL stage manager gives me the three-minutes sign . . . two minutes . . . one . . . there’s a guy jumping up and down on sections of the stage to get them to sit evenly on the grass field . . . thirty seconds . . . white noise screams from our monitors . . . they’re still testing all the speakers and equipment . . . that’s cutting it close! The lights in the stadium go down. The crowd erupts and Max’s drumbeat opens “Tenth Avenue.” I feel a white light silhouette . . . Clarence and I share a moment. I hear Roy’s piano. I give C’s hand a pat. I’m on the move, tossing my guitar in a high arc for Kevin, my guitar tech, to catch, and it’s . . . “Ladies and gentlemen, for the next twelve minutes we will be bringing the righteous and mighty power of the E Street Band into your beautiful home. I want you to step back from the guacamole dip. I want you to put the chicken fingers down! And turn the television ALL THE WAY UP!” Because, of course, there is just ONE thing I’ve got to know: “IS THERE ANYBODY ALIVE OUT THERE?!” I feel like I’ve just taken a syringe of adrenaline straight to the heart. Then I’m on top of the piano (good old boots). I’m down. One . . . two . . . three, knee drop in front of the microphone and I’m bending back almost flat on the stage. I close my eyes for a moment and when I open them, I see nothing but blue night sky. No band, no crowd, no stadium. I hear and feel all of it in the form of a great sirenlike din surrounding me, but with my back nearly flat against the stage I see nothing but beautiful night sky with a halo of a thousand stadium suns at its edges.

  I take several deep breaths and a calm comes over me. Since the inception of our band it’s been our ambition to play for everyone. We’ve achieved a lot but we haven’t achieved that. Our audience remains tribal . . . that is, predominantly white. On occasion—the Obama inaugural concert; touring through Africa in ’88; during a political campaign, particularly in Cleveland with President Obama—I looked out and sang “Promised Land” to the audience I intended it for, young people, old people, black, white, brown, cutting across religious and class lines. That’s who I’m singing to today. Today we play for everyone. For free! I pull myself upright with the mike stand, back into the world, this world, my world, the one with everybody in it, and the stadium, the crowd, my band, my best friends, my wife, come rushing into view and it’s “Teardrops on the city . . .”

  During “Tenth Avenue” I tell the story of my band—and other things—“when the change was made uptown” . . . It goes rushing by, then the knee slide. Too much adrenaline, a late drop, too much speed, here I come, Mike . . . BOOM! And I’m onto his camera, the lens implanted into my crotch with one leg off the stage. I use his camera to push myself back up and . . . say it, say it, say it, say it . . . BLAM! “BORN TO RUN” . . . my story . . . Something bright and hot blows up behind me. Later I’ll hear there were fireworks. I never see any. Just the ones going off in my head. I’m out of breath. I try to slow it down. That ain’t gonna happen. I already hear the crowd singing the last eight bars of “Born to Run,” oh, oh, oh, oh . . . then it’s straight into “Working on a Dream” . . . your story . . . and mine I hope. Steve is on my right, Patti on my left. I catch a smile and the wonderful choir, the Joyce Garrett Singers, that backed me in Washington during the inaugural concert is behind us. I turn to see their faces and listen to the sound of their voices . . . “working on a dream.” Done. Moments later, we’re ripping straight into “Glory Days” . . . the end of the story. A last party steeped in happy fatalism and some laughs with my old pal Steve. The Ump doesn’t fall on his ass tonight. He just throws the yellow penalty flag for the precious forty-five seconds we’ve gone overtime . . . home stretch. Everyone is out front now, forming that great line. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch the horns raising their instruments high; my guitar is wheeling around my neck and on the seventh beat, I’m going to Disneyland. I’m already someplace a lot farther away and more fun than that. I look around: we’re alive, it’s over, we link arms and take a bow as the stage comes apart beneath our feet. It’s chaos again all the way back to the trailer.

  The theory of relativity holds. Onstage your exhilaration is in direct proportion to the void you’re dancing over. A gig I always looked a little askance at and was a little wary of turned out to have surprising emotional power and resonance for me and my band. It was a high point, a marker of some sort, and went up with the biggest shows of our work life. The NFL threw us an anniversary party the likes of which we’d never have thrown for ourselves, with fireworks and everything! In the middle of their football game, they let us hammer out a little part of our story. I love playing long and hard but it was the thirty-five years in twelve minutes . . . that was the trick. You start here, you end there, that’s it. That’s the time you’ve got to give it everything you have . . . twelve minutes . . . give or take a few seconds.

  The Super Bowl helped me sell a few new records and probably put a few extra fannies in the seats that tour. But what it was really about was this: I felt my band remained one of the mightiest in the land and I wanted you to know it. We wanted to show you . . . just because we could.

  By three a.m., I was back home, everyone in the house fast asleep. I was sitting in the yard in front of an open fire, watching the sparks light, fly and vanish into the black evening sky, my ears ringing good and hard . . . “Oh yeah, it’s all right.”

  SEVENTY-ONE

  MOVING ON

  The rest of 2009 was taken up with the release of our Working on a Dream album and tour. Max’s son, Jay, stepped in for his dad, who was taking care of business with Conan O’Brien, and at age eighteen Jay became only the second man to sit on that drum stool in thirty-five years. After a few ragged starts, it was obvious Jay had the power, the precision, the ears, the discipline, his father’s work ethic and willingness to learn. Plus he brought his own brand of young punk energy that kicked the shit out of our playbook. Still, something
didn’t feel quite right. When Jay initially started playing with us, my skin wasn’t moving right. Then, I realized, with all his technique and power, he was playing “on top” of the band, riding over the surface of our arrangements. We took a break. I walked over to him and quietly explained that the drums are not part of the exoskeleton of these arrangements. The drums are the soul engine, buried down and breathing inside the band. You play not on top but immersed in the band. You power everything from within. I said, “Take a breath, take it back down and dig deep. When you hit that right position, when the beat is placed correctly, you’ll drop inside the band naturally.”

  That could be a pretty sophisticated idea for anyone to wrap their head around, much less an eighteen-year-old who up to this point had mostly played in front of approximately thirty people at a local club. But like father, like son.

  That afternoon, Jay Weinberg took out his shovel and dug himself a hole so deep inside the rhythm section that the question of who was going to do the job became moot. Jay brought fire, youth, intensity and his own brand of showmanship to the band. When we stepped on stage in front of 50,000 screaming fans, he blew the place apart.

  Later that year we played the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. We had a blast backing Darlene Love, Sam Moore and Billy Joel. I sang “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” with U2 and “Because the Night” with my second-favorite Jersey girl, Patti Smith.

  We had three weeks of touring left. My great concern was Clarence’s physical condition. This is something I had watched deteriorate for a long time. First, the knees, then the hips, then the back, then it got worse. C traveled with a trainer and someone who monitored his medical condition but he still had to sit through much of the Working on a Dream tour. Getting him on and off the stage became a small production. An elevator was built. We walked on together so he had some support. But his inner strength, heart and commitment to playing never wavered. He had mellowed greatly with age until he often felt like this half-sleeping lion. He was not the danger he once was but you still did not want to disturb him.