They have their small Fender amps, set side by side, in the exact positions in which any band at the Fort Monmouth Teen Club would’ve set up on any empty sixties Saturday night. There are no fancy pedals, no mountain of speakers, just the barebones equipment for making rock music, pure and unchanged. There are few handlers, no entourage, and I am suddenly transported back to the little dining room I rehearsed in daily with the Castiles, except . . . these are the guys who INVENTED my job! They have been stamped on my heart since the chunking chords of “Not Fade Away” came ripping off the little 45 I bought at Britt’s Department Store in the first strip mall in our area.
After some pleasantries, there are two mike stands alongside one another, a few feet in front of the band. Mick, still all sharp edges and pragmatism, moves to the mike on the left. I take the right as he counts off and Keith, the man whose recorded playing taught me my first guitar solo, slithers into the opening riff of “Tumbling Dice.” I’ve come across many spirit-filled folk in my travels but no one as spectrally beautiful as Keith Richards. Some years ago Patti sang backup for the Stones and on Keith’s first solo record. One night we visited him in the studio. He took Patti’s hand, looked me in the eye and, with great regard for her, said, “Oh . . . oh . . . this one.”
From my left, in the voice that’s wet millions of knickers comes “Women think I’m tasty, but they’re always trying to waste me” . . . I’m pretending to be a peer but it’s not easy. Inside I’m reeling as Mick motions to me to take the second verse. It feels good. It’s within the meat of my voice, and if I can’t swing “Tumbling Dice” I should go back to my broom handle and my mirror.
A great group is always about chemistry. Up close the chemistry amongst these players is unique. Keith’s guitar plays off of Charlie’s drums, creating a swing that puts the roll back into the rock. This is the last of the rock ’n’ roll bands. Combine that with the most underrated songbook in rock history and the Stones have always stood heads above their competition. Still do.
I’m having so much fun and I can’t let anyone know! “You got to roll me . . . You got to roll me . . .” Mick and I are trading lines in the coda back and forth like a couple of white Sam and Daves, then it’s over. Mick says, “That was great.”
We played it exactly one time.
I went home. On the way home I kept thinking, “I GOTTA CALL STEVE! He will completely, one hundred percent, full-tilt, rock ’n’ roll crazy understand.” He did.
The next night we did it for twenty thousand thunderstruck New Jerseyans in Newark. It was a thrill but it didn’t have the mystic kick of the night before, when I got to sit in, in that little room with just those four guys, the GREATEST GARAGE BAND IN THE WORLD, in my small piece of rock ’n’ roll heaven.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
HIGH HOPES
When I’m on tour, I’ll often carry with me a collection of my unfinished music. I’ll bring a few unfinished projects along that I’ll pop on in the wee wee hours after the show and listen to. I’m looking to see if there’s something there whispering in my ear. I still had a nice set of songs from my production work with Brendan and night after night, they’d call to me, looking for a home. This coincided with Tom Morello’s joining the band and suggesting we dust off “High Hopes,” a song by LA group the Havalinas that we’d covered in the nineties. “I could really jam on that,” he said. As we gathered in Australia at our first rehearsal for the Wrecking Ball tour’s resumption, I had an arrangement that I thought might work. This was going to be Tom’s first stint subbing for Steve, who was busy with his acting commitments, so I wanted him to be able to put his imprint on the show. He did that. The arrangement caught fire live and we decided to cut it in a Sydney studio along with a favorite song of mine by the Australian group the Saints, “Just Like Fire Would.” With the inclusion of these songs and studio recordings we made of “American Skin” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” a real album began to take shape. I then recorded Tom onto some of our Brendan O’Brien tracks and things really began to spark. Tom proved to be a fabulous and fascinating substitute for Steve, melding into the band seamlessly while greatly increasing our sonic palette.
Before resuming the tour, however, I had some business to take care of. For at least the past five years I had noticed the fingers in my left hand growing successively weaker with each tour. On a long solo my hand and fingers could fatigue almost to failure. I’d found a variety of ways to get around this so the audience wouldn’t notice and my playing didn’t suffer, but by the start of our Wrecking Ball tour it was becoming a problem I could no longer ignore.
Probably since my forties, some physical problem had come along with every tour. One tour it’s your knee, then it’s your back, then it’s tendinitis in your elbows from all the hard strumming. These maladies appear and disappear quite frequently over the latter part of your work life and are rarely critical. I’d just find a way to manage them and continue on. However, the paralysis of my guitar-playing hand was something else. That was accompanied by a numbness and tingling down my left arm, and I noticed in the weight room that I was now significantly weaker on the left side of my body.
I consulted a variety of physicians, had the MRIs done and found out I had some cervical disc problems on the left side of my neck, pinching and numbing the nerves that controlled my left side from the shoulder down. I found a great surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York and we set a date. The surgery went like this: they knock you out; cut an incision into your throat; tie your vocal cords off to one side; get in there with a wrench, screwdriver and some titanium; they take a chunk of bone out of your hip and go about building you a few new disks. It worked! Because all of this takes place around the vocal cords your voice is gone for a couple of nerve-racking months. Also you get to wear one of those whiplash collars for about two months. But sure enough, right on the doc’s timeline, three months in I was ready to work again. With my new discs and rehabilitated voice, we headed Down Under with just one instruction: no crowd surfing! But there is no fool like an old fool, so the first night I dove right on in. Everything was fine.
• • •
About my voice. First of all, I don’t have much of one. I have a bar-man’s power, range and durability, but I don’t have a lot of tonal beauty or finesse. Five sets a night, no problem. Three and a half full-on hours, can do. Need for warm-up, light to none. My voice gets the job done. But it’s a journeyman’s instrument and on its own, it’s never going to take you to higher ground. I need all my skills to get by and to communicate deeply. For me to sell you what you’re buying, I’ve got to write, arrange, play, perform and, yes, sing to the best of my ability. I am a sum of all my parts. I learned early this is not something to fret about. Every performer has his or her weak link. Part of getting there is knowing what to do with what you have and knowing what to do with what you DON’T have. As Clint Eastwood said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Then forget about them and walk on.
I was teased endlessly in the Castiles and dismissed as a vocalist. For a long time that was fine with me. George Theiss was a great singer and I was perfectly content to work on my guitar skills. I always saw myself primarily as a lead guitarist anyway.
Then I got to where I could carry a melody and, to my ear, sound half decent. At some point in the Castiles, George and I began to share more of the vocal duties. Once that band folded and I moved onto my next band, Earth, I became a full-fledged playing-and-singing front man. I was still earning my keep as one of the few guitarists in the area who could half-ass Clapton and Hendrix, but I was singing everything too. Then I began to write acoustically and I would spend my off nights singing solo, accompanied by just my twelve-string Ovation guitar, in the local coffee houses. I wrote a lot and got used to depending on my voice, along with the quality of my songs and playing, to carry the show. I thought I was getting pretty good. Then when George, my short-lived New York producer, invited me to his apartment, he had that two-track tape recor
der. One afternoon he said, “Let’s record some of your songs.” As I was performing for the tape, I was thinking, “Damn, I’m good!” Then I heard it back. It sounded like a cat with its tail on fire. It was out of tune, amateurish, dumb and unknowing. The sound that came back off that tape killed what little confidence I had in myself and my vocals. It was truly demoralizing.
But what could I do? It was the only voice I had. And I decided after the Castiles I would never depend on another lead singer again. It was not independent enough for me. So I learned as I’ve mentioned that the sound in your head has little to do with how you actually sound. Just the way you think you look better than you do, until the iPhone photo your Auntie Jane takes cold-slaps you in the face. Tape performs this same function for your voice. It’s a dead-on bullshit detector. You can’t kid yourself once you’ve heard yourself on tape. That, my friend, IS the way you sound. You can only live with it.
So I figured if I didn’t have a voice, I was going to really need to learn to write, perform and use what voice I had to its fullest ability. I was going to have to learn all the tricks, singing from your chest, singing from your abdomen, singing from your throat, great phrasing, timing and dynamics. I noted a lot of singers had a very limited instrument but could sound convincing. I studied everyone I loved who sounded real to me, whose voices excited me and touched my heart. Soul, blues, Motown, rock, folk; I listened and I learned. I learned the most important thing was how believable you could sound. How deeply you could inhabit your song. If it came from your heart, then there was some ineffable element “X” that made the way you technically sounded secondary. There are many good, even great, voices out there tied to people who will never sound convincing or exciting. They are all over TV talent shows and in lounges in Holiday Inns all across America. They can carry a tune, sound tonally impeccable, they can hit all the high notes, but they cannot capture the full emotional content of a song. They cannot sing deeply.
If you were lucky enough to be born with an instrument and the instinctive knowledge to know what to do with it, you are blessed indeed. Even after all my success I sit here in envy of Rod Stewart, Bob Seger, Sam Moore and many other greats who can sing magnificently and know what to do with it. My vocal imperfections made me work harder on my writing, my band leading, my performing and my singing. I learned to excel at those elements of my craft in a way I might otherwise never had if I had a more perfect instrument. My ability to power through three-hour-plus shows for forty years (itself a display of my manic insecurity that I’d never be enough) with a thoroughbred’s endurance came from realizing I had to bring it all to take you where I wanted us to go. Your blessings and your curses often come in the same package. Think of all the eccentric voices in rock who’ve made historic records and keep singing. Then build up your supportive skills because you never know what’s going to come out of your heart and find its way out of your mouth.
• • •
With the reconstituted E Street Band playing at its peak, we decided to take it to a few places we hadn’t toured. We did a ten-day run in South America, where we hadn’t visited since the Amnesty tour, then South Africa, where we had never played. We ended up with a return trip to Australia, building on the success we’d had the previous year Down Under. This time we had Steve and Tom along, kicking off each night’s show with our Aussie favorites, “Highway to Hell,” “Friday on My Mind,” and “Stayin’ Alive” complete with an all-female string section. Finally one last stop in New Zealand and we headed back home for a short US leg, then took down the tent on the most successful, well-attended and popular tour the E Street Band had ever done.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
HOME FRONT
At the end of the tour, rather than returning immediately home, I joined Patti and my daughter, Jessica, in Europe, where she was touring internationally as a professional show jumper. All my children had left school, were on their own, doing well and mostly out of the house. Twenty years of parenting had gone by and we now served them in an advisory capacity.
Evan graduated from Boston College. He had gone into the music business, living in the West Village only blocks away from my old Café’ Wha? stomping grounds. He works in radio as a program director and festival producer. He has become quite a good singer and songwriter in his own right. Independent, creative and bright, with a hard moral compass, he proudly makes his own way. Sam went to Bard College and studied to become a writer. He left after a year, feeling that he needed to do something with more immediate impact on people’s lives. He became a firefighter, reentering the blue-collar world I’d known so well. His graduation from the fire academy near my hometown of Freehold amid all my old friends and neighbors brought tears and made Dad and Mom very proud. He also set up a project to bring returning veterans to our shows on a nightly basis. There he hosts vets in a friendly environment where they can enjoy the show and a night on the town. Jessica graduated from Duke University and had gone on to some fame of her own, becoming a world-class athlete, winning the American Gold Cup in Old Salem, New York, in 2014 and riding for the US team as they won the Nations Cup in Dublin, Ireland, at RDS Arena, my and the E Street Band’s old stomping grounds. Patti manages our lives, plays in the band, makes her music and holds it all together. The success of our children is largely due to her strength, great compassion and deep interest in who they really are.
• • •
Mild post-tour depression can usually be expected. Sometime in June I noticed I wasn’t feeling all that well. The shows are an insane high. The adulation, the touring company, the fact that it’s all about you. When you come off the road, that stops on a dime and you’re a father and husband, but now the kids are driving, so you’re an out-of-work chauffeur. The bump is natural but the crash that I experienced this time was something else altogether. It was hard to explain, bearing symptoms I’d never encountered before in my life. I had an attack of what was called an “agitated depression.” During this period, I was so profoundly uncomfortable in my own skin that I just wanted OUT. It feels dangerous and brings plenty of unwanted thoughts. I was uncomfortable doing anything. Standing . . . walking . . . sitting down . . . everything brought waves of an agitated anxiety that I’d spend every waking minute trying to dispel. Demise and foreboding were all that awaited and sleep was the only respite. During waking hours, I’d spend the day trying to find a position I would feel all right in for the next few minutes. I was not hyper. In fact, I was too depressed to concentrate on anything of substance.
I’d pace the room looking for the twelve square inches of carpet where I might find release. If I could get myself to work out, that might produce a short relief, but really all I wanted was the bed, the bed, the bed and unconsciousness. I spent good portions of the day with the covers up to my nose waiting for it to stop. Reading, or even watching television, felt beyond my ability. All my favorite things—listening to music, watching some film noir—caused such an unbearable anxiety in me because they were undoable. Once I was cut off from all my favorite things, the things that tell me who I am, I felt myself dangerously slipping away. I became a stranger in a borrowed and disagreeable body and mind.
This lasted for six weeks. All the while we were overseas. It affected me physically, sexually, emotionally, spiritually, you name it. It all went out the door. I was truly unsure if I could ever perform in this condition. The fire in me felt like it had gone out and I felt dark and hollow inside. Bad thoughts had a heyday. If I can’t work, how will I provide for my family? Will I be bedridden? Who the fuck am I? You feel the thinness of the veil of your identity and an accompanying panic that seems to be just around the corner.
I couldn’t live like this, not forever. For the first time, I felt I understood what drives people toward the abyss. The fact that I understood this, that I could feel this, emptied my heart out and left me in a cold fright. There was no life here, just an endless irritating existential angst embedded in my bones. It was demanding answers I did not have. And there
was no respite. If I was awake, it was happening. So . . . I’d try to sleep; twelve, fourteen hours weren’t enough. I hated the gray light of morning. It would mean the day was coming. The day, when people would be waking up, going to work, eating, drinking, laughing, fucking. The day when you’re supposed to rise and shine, be filled with purpose, with life. I couldn’t get out of bed. Hell, I couldn’t even get a hard-on. It was like all my notorious energy, something that had been mine to command for most of my life, had been cruelly stolen away. I was a walking husk.
Patti coaxed me out of bed and tried to get me moving. She steadied me, gave me the confidence to feel I’d be all right and that this was something that was just passing. Without her strength and calm, I don’t know what I would have done.
One night in Ireland Patti and I went out to dinner with a group of people. I was doing my best to fake that I was a sane citizen. Under these conditions that can be hard to do. I had to leave the table somewhat regularly to let my mind off its leash (or to keep it on). Finally, on the street, I phoned my pharmacologist. I explained to him things were condition red.
He asked, “Does anything make you feel better?”
“If I take a Klonopin,” I said.
“Take one,” he said.
I did and it stopped. Graciously, mercifully, thankfully, yes there is a God, it stopped. After a short period on Klonopin I was able to stop the medication and the agitation did not return. But it was a terrifying window into mental debilitation and I don’t think I could’ve gone on like that indefinitely. All of this brought back the ghost of my father’s mental illness and my family’s history, and taunted me with the possibility that even after all I’d done, all I’d accomplished, I could fall to the same path. The only thing that kept me right side up during this was Patti. Her love, compassion and assurance that I’d be all right were, during many dark hours, all I had to go on.
Born to Run Page 47