Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  No matter whose decision, Van Zandt didn’t get a chance to take his guitar out of its case. His sole contribution to the album came when he punched the reverb tank on the back of his amp to create the blast of thunder that kicks off “Lost in the Flood.” He got the news just after that session. “I can’t remember if Mike told me or if it was Bruce. I think it had to be Bruce. And yeah, it was a downer. Very depressing.”

  For Bruce it came down to professional survival. “Don’t forget, here was a guy making his first record. And they didn’t want no band!” he says. “John Hammond wanted what he’d kind of seen from across his desk.” And while he had only just managed to convince Appel and Hammond (but mostly Clive Davis) to let him use a rhythm section on some of the songs, their appetite for layered guitars—or even one halfway noisy electric guitar—had already reached its limit. “I felt like I came in undercover,” Bruce says. “I always knew that some point when I got rolling, for me rolling was full-out [electric band music]. But there was no interest in that at the moment.”

  And what of the talk of static between Van Zandt and coproducers Appel and Cretecos? “They didn’t know Steve. Really, there just wasn’t interest in moving in an electric guitar. They were like, ‘We’ll go here, but we’re not moving there.’ I accepted it as a compromise between John Hammond and the record company and the record that I was trying to get Mike to make as producer. And I think I was also very caught up in the one-man, one-guitar, your-song thing. I was in the middle of that reinvention of myself. And that’s what we ended up with.”

  Van Zandt went back to New Jersey, laid his guitar aside, and didn’t pick it up again, he says, for almost two years. Hearing this, Bruce furrows his brow. “Is that true? I don’t know, he may be being dramatic, but maybe not.” Van Zandt: “I was working construction, running a jackhammer, and played football on the weekends.” Bruce, recalling the incident now, laughs: “Oh, he did! He got a real job! What got into him?” When a football-related incident snapped one of Van Zandt’s digits, he started playing a lot of piano to strengthen the finger. Feeling the itch to play in public again, he formed a bar band that included a drummer whose cousin had scored a job playing in the stage band for the early-sixties singing group the Dovells, famous for “Bristol Stomp” among others. They recruited Van Zandt to be the bandleader for the group’s tours, and the musician put down his jackhammer for good. “We were on one of those oldies package extravaganzas. And it was fun for me. I got to meet all my heroes.”

  • • •

  The recording of Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. began in early July with full-band sessions held at 914 Sound Studios, located in the out-of-the-way (and thus inexpensive) town of Blauvelt, New York, located about forty-five minutes northwest of Manhattan. Appel and Cretecos ran the control room, with deference to their artist, who directed the band from the studio floor. The sessions were crisp and businesslike; closer to a gathering of music professionals than the kind of all-for-one, one-for-all vibe that had knit together Steel Mill and the Bruce Springsteen Band. With so many padded walls and glassed-in booths separating Bruce, Appel, and the Asbury Park crew, it was easier for everyone to focus on his own licks than on what this new twist in their leader’s career meant to their own futures. Instead Bruce led the musicians, minus Van Zandt, through “For You,” “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City,” “Lost in the Flood,” and “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?” Recording the basic tracks took two days, Tallent recalls. When they were done, the farewells in the 914 parking lot were as casual as they were indistinct. As far as anyone knew, it could well be the last time they would ever play together. Tallent and Sancious headed back to their lives in Richmond. Lopez went back to his boatyard. “And as far as any of us knew,” Tallent says, “that was it.”

  Bruce, Appel, and Cretecos spent another week or so perfecting the full-band tracks and then turned their attention to the acoustic songs Bruce would perform on his own. Working with a sense that the album should be divided evenly between acoustic and electric songs, they recorded five songs with Bruce accompanying himself on guitar and, in one case, piano: a nearly eight-minute morality tale about war called “Visitation at Fort Horn,” the impressionistic biker ballad “The Angel,” a late-night noir tale called “Jazz Musician,” the non–Middle Eastern ballad “Arabian Nights,” and a dreamy circus performer lament called “Mary Queen of Arkansas.” The relatively speedy sessions ended in early August, with the tapes handed over to Columbia within a few days. When Clive Davis turned his ear to the tapes, he liked what he heard. The songs were just as well constructed and beautifully observed as they had been on Bruce’s studio demo. The band arrangements added zest without obscuring the all-important lyrics. They were, in short, great album tracks. But would any of these deeply felt, wildly imagined songs find their way onto the nation’s radio airwaves? After a day or two, Davis picked up the phone and dialed Bruce directly.

  “I asked him if he’d consider writing some additional material,” Davis says. Specifically, he added, at least one or two tracks that he could imagine being played on the radio. “That’s always a touchy subject with artists. But part of what made Bruce so special was that he didn’t take offense.”

  Not even close, in fact. “I said, ‘Well, that’s probably true,’” Bruce said. “So I went down to the beach and wrote ‘Blinded by the Light’ and ‘Spirit in the Night.’ So that was a good call. They became the two best songs on the record.”

  Adding the new songs meant calling for another day or two of band sessions. But with three-fifths of his musicians down in Virginia and the clock running down, Bruce came up with another plan: Lopez would play the drums, but they’d hire well-known session pianist Harold Wheeler to handle the keyboards, and Bruce would, through the miracle of overdubbing, handle both the guitar and the bass. And he had one more card to play too: another Asbury Park musician he’d gotten to know a bit over the previous year. Bruce could already hear the recorded songs in his head and knew that the key musical element could be played only by Asbury-based saxophone player Clarence Clemons. The sax player, then the front man for Norman Seldin and the Joyful Noyze, was happy to come up and record, and as Bruce suspected, his Junior Walker–inspired riffs gave the songs just the right rhythm and blues feel. Clemons and Lopez hung around to overdub backing vocals and hand claps, and once the new songs replaced “Arabian Nights” and “Jazz Musician” on the master tape, the final lineup for Bruce’s debut album was complete.

  Job done and final test pressings stamped, Bruce returned to Bradley Beach while Appel and Bob Spitz took an acetate of the new album to Los Angeles to build excitement and new connections in the West Coast’s entertainment capital. They took a room at the notorious Hyatt House hotel/rock ’n’ roll star hangout on Sunset Boulevard1 and made the rounds of music executives, Appel’s well-placed friends, and record company machers. Everyone got a preview of the new album, along with the usual dose of Appel-style bonhomie and braggadocio. He’d picked himself a winner, he wanted LA’s musical core to understand. No one had wanted to believe him, but now the whole world would know that Bruce Springsteen, and the man who had discovered him, were the real thing.

  All that got thrown aside when Bruce called their hotel room at ten o’clock one night and told Appel that he had decided that the abstruse, seven-minute “Visitation at Fort Horn,” had to be stripped off of the second side of Greetings. It was too long, Bruce insisted. It dominated the end of the album and stole focus from “Spirit in the Night” and “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City.” It simply had to go, Bruce said.

  Appel took the news badly. Didn’t Bruce know that Columbia had already accepted the finished record, had mastered the entire thing, and pressed dozens of test copies? Changing anything now would force the label to junk everything, remaster the entire album, print new tests, and more and more. “Mike was going nuts,” Spitz says. “We were sure Columbia would pull the plug; he’d already pushed them to the limit.” Appel steel
ed himself for outrage when he phoned the news to Hammond the next morning. Instead the A&R man took up Bruce’s cause immediately. “Whatever Bruce wants,” he said, “is how it’s going to be.”

  Indeed, when Bruce appeared one day carrying an old-fashioned “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” postcard (with illustrated beach and boardwalk scenes incorporated into the letters), he told Appel that this picture was as perfect for the album cover as its message was for the album’s title. As far as he was concerned, that was the end of the discussion. Except for that Columbia had a rock-solid policy for new artists: every debut album cover had to feature a large photograph of the artist(s), the better to create an indelible image for the record-buying public to latch onto. When he left the room, Appel turned to Spitz. “This’ll be a disaster,” he said. “No one’s gonna know who he is!” But then, Columbia already knew that, which was why it had its hard-and-fast rule.

  Then Appel, Spitz, and Bruce met with Columbia’s chief art designer John Berg. Entirely confident that the taciturn, no-nonsense Berg would shoot down the postcard instantly, Appel let his client present his idea, figuring they’d all move on to more realistic options after that. Instead Berg gave the “Greetings” postcard a long look and nodded thoughtfully. Reaching into his drawer, he pulled out a thick stack of similarly vintage postcards. “I gotta tell ya, I’m a huge postcard fan,” Berg said, handing his collection over to Bruce, who dove in excitedly while Berg went back to examining the Asbury Park card. “This is absolutely what we’re going to do,” the designer said. “This is brilliant. It’s perfect.” Appel was speechless. “We thought it would kill us,” Bob Spitz says. “But we were so wrong.”

  Borne up by the enthusiasm of both Davis and Hammond, Bruce and his gang were as protected in the Columbia empire as any unknown, unproven act could be—at least for the moment, as power and loyalties in record companies shift all the time, usually without warning. The sales reports that would come in after the album’s January 1973 release would be crucial. And although they didn’t know it at the time, the acetate copies of the record were already winning Bruce friends around the company’s sales, publicity, and A&R offices. Al Teller, then working in the company’s sales department, made a habit of listening to all the advance acetates that came his way. Mostly he played them as background music, but if something made him look up from his work, he says, he’d give it a closer examination. So while Teller had never heard of Bruce Springsteen when he lowered the needle on Greetings’ opening side, it only took about eight bars for Teller to drop his pen. “I listened to the whole thing straight through,” he says. “Then I called in some product managers and said, ‘You gotta hear this!’”

  Acetate discs were too fragile to withstand more than fifteen or twenty plays; generally a week’s worth of repeated listening. But it took only a day of listening parties for Teller to wear the disc’s grooves down to nothing. Heading home that evening, he focused on the task at hand: selling the product. But who the hell is Bruce Springsteen? How could Teller drum up interest in an artist whose street rat poet’s sensibility ran so counter to every popular radio format? Fortunately, his daylong in-house sales campaign—and the other execs who got the same charge from their own acetates—seemed to be sparking an intra-office movement. “Everyone liked it,” Teller says. “But some of us really loved it.” Particularly a young promotions man named Paul Rappaport, a sharp-eared A&R executive named Steve Popovich, and, in the label’s Texas outpost, a promotions man named Michael Pillot.

  All of them in the thrall of a thirty-five-minute album of songs written and performed by an obscure twenty-three-year-old from the Jersey Shore. Most of them could barely describe what they had fallen for, let alone why they had all been so enraptured so quickly. But in the midst of the river of music running through Columbia’s offices and hallways—at the very home of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Miles Davis, and the Byrds—this unknown new artist had swept them up in his own current. And just that quickly, they were converts on their way to becoming evangelists. And it wouldn’t be long before others spoke of them—sometimes derisively, sometimes as the highest possible compliment—as Bruce Springsteen’s apostles. “We all got affected by his aura,” Popovich said a few months before his death in 2011. “Some things have that draw. You believe so deeply, you have such a focus on it. That’s what happened for Bruce. To us he was an underdog, from nowhere, and people picked up on that.”

  NINE

  I AM FINALLY, FINALLY, WHERE I’M SUPPOSED TO BE

  CLARENCE CLEMONS INSISTED THE STORY was true.

  The thunder, the lightning, the gale-force winds blowing across the Jersey Shore. Just another late-summer Nor’easter. Except that this storm became part of a rock ’n’ roll legend in which the karmic explosion triggered by the meeting of two musicians nearly reduced Asbury Park’s Student Prince club to rubble right there on Kingsley Street. Or something. Whatever, the incident took place in September 1971, months before Appel, Hammond, Columbia, and all the rest. But it set the tone for what was about to happen, so . . .

  “I swear on a stack of Bibles that that door blew off its hinges,” Clemons told me a few weeks before his death in June 2011. “I swear on two stacks of Bibles. And it was a sturdy door. The front door. The wood one with the lock, so when you close that door the place is closed, okay? A big, heavy fucking door. And when I opened it, it blew down Kingsley. Tumbling north, toward the Wonder Bar. That really happened.”

  Garry Tallent is less sure. And he was there with everyone else, taking a break from his bass duties partway through the Bruce Springsteen Band’s nightlong show at the club. When it comes to the dramatic entrance of Clemons, and the dramatic departure of the front door, he shrugs. “I don’t remember the stormy night,” he says. “And people came in to jam all the time, so I don’t recall. Look, it could well be. But you think it would be memorable, though.”

  Asked directly, and only a few months after Clemons’s death, about the Student Prince door question, Bruce turns solemn. “It did. That’s for certain.” And what of the people—the band members—who insist it didn’t? “They would be wrong.”

  Bruce and Clemons were thinking back to late September 1971, a few days after Bruce had caught part of the Joyful Noyze’s set at the Wonder Bar. The band was led by keyboardist Norman Seldin, but Bruce’s ex-girlfriend Karen Cassidy sang lead vocals for the group, and she had been telling Bruce about this charismatic sax player who shared the front of the stage with her. When the set ended, Cassidy went over to greet Bruce. “I asked him what was going on, and he had this gleam in his eyes,” she says. “He asked about Clarence, and I just laughed. ‘I knew it! You’re gonna steal him!’” No matter. Cassidy walked over to the sax player and pointed out Bruce, nursing a Pepsi at the bar. “I told him I had a friend who I knew was gonna be a really big star, and he needed to come meet him,” she says. When the Bruce Springsteen Band settled into the Student Prince, just a flew blocks down Kingsley Street, she took Clemons to check out Bruce’s band. It meant walking through a rainstorm, but Clemons didn’t care. He packed his saxophone into its case, and off they went.

  When Clemons stepped into the Student Prince, the ripped-off door tumbling away behind him, his eyes fixed on the skinny white boy he’d met a few nights earlier. Bruce and the band were taking a break, but Bruce saw him coming and, he said many years later, felt transfixed. “Here comes my brother, here comes my sax man, my inspiration, my partner, my lifelong friend.”

  Some kind of vibe hung in the air, to be sure. And when Cassidy pulled Clarence over to say hi, the horn player pointed to the saxophone he had carried through the rain. Would it be okay to sit in during the next set? Well, of course it was okay. A few minutes later Clemons stepped onstage with the rest of the band and listened for the count-off. They began, he recalled, an unnamed instrumental.

  “I will never, ever forget the feeling I got when we hit that first note,” he said. “It was so urgent, so real, so exciting to me. It was lik
e I’d been searching for so long, and now, thank God, I am finally, finally, where I’m supposed to be.”

  Bruce felt it too. Even in the midst of an impromptu jam session, held in a dingy bar with half of a half-capacity crowd paying half of its attention to the music, the onstage chemistry crackled. “Standing next to Clarence was like standing next to the baddest ass on the planet,” Bruce wrote later. “You were proud, you were strong, you were excited and laughing with what might happen, with what together you might be able to do.”

  “And that,” Cassidy says, “was it.”

  Actually, it would take nine months for Bruce to track down Clemons at another gig. But when he showed up at the Shipbottom Lounge in Point Pleasant that night in June 1972, Clemons insisted that Bruce come up to jam with his band. Bruce had to borrow a guitar, but they all knew the same rock and soul oldies, and the groove they found at the Student Prince came right back. The two musicians traded telephone numbers when the set was over—Bruce misspelling his new friend’s last name as “Clemens”—and pledged to stay in touch. This time it took only a couple of weeks for Bruce to track down the Joyful Noyze and jam alongside Clemons one more time. The feeling between the two musicians grew even more that night, and when the sets ended, they went off together to get a drink (Bruce, at twenty-two, had started having a sip every now and again) and talk for a while. The early-morning drink stretched into a dayslong spiritual adventure. “We went down South and went to bars, talking and listening to music nonstop for two or three days,” Clemons told me. “It’s all a blur now, but I get tingles when I think about it.”