Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  With one ear trained on Hammond’s front-porch tastes and the other on Cat Stevens’s hugely successful records, Appel and Cretecos use the guitars and keyboards as a less-heard-than-felt musical foundation. Lopez’s playing (on the studio’s standard kit rather than his own instrument) is mixed with an emphasis on the low end (all toms, bass drum, and no snare), while even Bruce’s guitar, capable of soaring and screaming onstage, has all the punch of a rumor about a guitar. Maybe this had as much to do with Bruce’s musical preferences as anything else. “The music I’d been writing on my own was more individual than the material I’d been working up with my bands,” he wrote in the Greetings essay in his 2001 lyrics compendium, Songs. “The independence of being a solo performer was important to me.”

  • • •

  Now in a romantic relationship that felt more substantial, and necessary, than any of his previous attachments, Bruce decided to cross two emotional barriers at once: he put his name on an apartment lease and asked Diane Lozito to move in with him. She accepted his offer instantly. But Bruce insisted chivalrously that he get the opportunity to face both of her parents and ask for their permission first. Thinking strategically, they started with Diane’s mother, Rita.

  “He came to dinner, and Mom loved him. She thought he was charming,” Lozito says. Charmed, yes. But Rita Lozito still wasn’t quite convinced that Bruce represented the future she hoped for Diane. “She still told me to stay with [previous boyfriend] Kale because he was in law school and would have a real job.”

  Stung but not entirely defeated, Bruce called Diane’s father, Mike Lozito, in New York and impressed him too. Although not enough for the old man to forget his own wanton ways, which he traced back to the part of his upbringing that took place among other jazz musicians in New York’s nightclubs. “They were so similar,” Lozito says of her father and her boyfriend. “But he still said, ‘Nope. Musicians will always fool around.’”

  If Bruce and Lozito were disappointed by her parents’ disapproval, neither of them was going to let it stop them from living their lives. Bruce bought a pair of cheap wedding rings to fool the property owners (most of whom rejected unmarried couples), and eventually found a one-bedroom apartment in the seaside neighborhood of Bradley Beach, about five minutes south of Asbury Park. Asked for a recent pay slip or some other proof that he would be able to manage the monthly rent, Bruce came back to the landlord toting a recent copy of Newsweek that noted his being signed to Columbia Records. “Then they figured he was legit, even if he was such a shabby guy,” Lozito says.

  In the confines of his own home, Bruce’s public facade eased, revealing the tender, and sometimes explosive, heart of an emotionally vulnerable young man. “There was a lot of physical closeness, a lot of hugging and holding each other,” Lozito says. “It was perfect, because I’m five five and he was five nine, and so we fit like a glove. He had a hard time sleeping at night, so I’d sit up watching TV with him while he wolfed down all this junk food: sodas, cakes, all this horrible stuff. We were so similar—both moody, both with tempers. But he was also controlling, and paranoid about people from outside our immediate circle. I could never tell my friends where we lived, and if I was going to see them, I had to meet them somewhere else.”

  And yet Lozito could not be taken lightly, as Bruce would relearn whenever one of their discussions got heated. “Diane was an aggressive Italian girl, and they’d have these big arguments,” Albee Tellone says. “I heard rumblings about physical stuff. Like, she’d come after him, and he’d have to fight her off.” Clarence Clemons, soon to become a regular visitor, shared the same memories. “Diane was such a ball of fire! She didn’t take any shit from him, but she loved him and stayed with him. They were like two kids, so in love with each other. And they were exciting to be around. Always.” Bruce, for his part, smiles and shakes his head. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “She was a real scrapper.”

  And yet Diane still couldn’t bluster her way past his guitar and writer’s notebook. Feeling drawn back to the piano, he bought a battered spinet and moved it onto the apartment’s enclosed sunporch, where he spent hours musing on the characters passing by on their way to the beach. Whatever he couldn’t see from his sunporch Bruce would discover during his own boardwalk strolls, absorbing the maneuvers of the bikers, the drunken shouts of teenage partiers, and the boardwalk waitresses—the same hot rods-and-pinball scene he’d lived in for five years, only now he could see it in new shades of romance and poignance, sensing the chill in the shadow of the neon and the sadness haunting the waitress’s exhausted smile. In his imagination, the scene had all the romance of the cowboys, outlaws, angels, and devils filling the books, movies, and songs that reflected the nation’s real and imagined history. And once it all wove into his fantasies, the songs that emerged were so richly detailed and so full of feeling that they had the power to cause domestic unrest. “When he wrote ‘Sandy,’ Diane got pissed,” Tellone says. “She thought he was cheating on her: ‘He’s writing about some damn waitress on the boardwalk!’ But he was writing about her, and she just didn’t get it.”

  • • •

  Sam McKeith got it the moment he first heard Bruce playing with his band.

  An ambitious young booking agent at the vast William Morris Agency, McKeith had already carved himself a niche booking soul acts all over New England. But as his company mentor had cautioned him, McKeith’s success with black acts made it too easy for the company’s (entirely white) elders to pigeonhole him as a token black guy who would never see beyond the beer-and-chitlins circuit. But that would be too limiting to build a major career, so McKeith came into the fall of 1972 determined to extend his reach into the rock ’n’ roll mainstream. He had already peeked into one of Bruce’s solo shows at New York’s Max’s Kansas City that summer and came away liking the stark visions in his songs. So when Bob Spitz (whom McKeith had worked with when Spitz produced student shows at Pennsylvania’s Albright College during his undergrad days) called a few weeks later, all it took was a listen to a live tape featuring the same songs being performed live by Bruce and his band. Now McKeith felt electrified. “I was determined to put everything I had into making this guy happen,” he says. McKeith got things rolling in the last days of 1972 with opening slots at a pair of Sha Na Na shows in Ohio. Back home by December 31, Bruce celebrated the New Year with Diane and then greeted 1973 with bags packed and his determination in overdrive.

  With Greetings set to come out on the fifth, they hit the new year running, starting with a four-night stand opening for the comedy-rock team Travis, Shook, and the Club Wow at Bryn Mawr’s Main Point club in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. After that, they had a day to rest, then hit the road for Boston and an eight-night gig opening for the folk-blues guitarist David Bromberg at Paul’s Mall. From there it was on to weeks and then months on the rock ’n’ roll circuit in the upper-right corner of the United States. At times this new life as a major label artist, complete with publicity and financial support from Columbia, felt thrilling.

  Ushered into the studios of Boston’s influential progressive rock station WBCN-FM for an interview with popular host Maxanne Sartori, Bruce was tickled to the point of silliness. Opening with the band’s Salvation Army arrangement of “Satin Doll” (sax, accordion, tuba, and guitar), he quickly noted that this right here was his very first radio interview, and so he needed to say hi to his mom, which he did to much in-studio laughter. From there Bruce alternated stumbly, good-humored interview segments with acoustic performances of Greetings songs, including a spirited take on “Blinded by the Light” featuring Jimmy Cretecos, chief roadie Albee Tellone, and a Columbia publicist named Ed Hynes on backing vocals. “This is my new single, kids!” Bruce told the audience. “If you come down to the store to buy it, I’ll autograph the 45 label!” Interviewed by the Asbury Park Press’s Barbara Schoeneweis a few days later, Bruce showed up in a beat-up green leather jacket, a wrinkled shirt, jeans, and weathered boots. Worn down and freaked out by the prospect of
sounding like he’d cashed in his roots for glam-rock stardom, Bruce mumbled in “a characteristically sullen manner” about his life as a major-label recording artist. “It’s weird working for a big company,” he told Schoeneweis, adding that “it was like pulling teeth to get me to sign” Columbia’s recording contract.4 Looking back to his Asbury Park era, he spun more myths, claiming that he’d had a habit of breaking up bands in midset if he didn’t like what he heard. “The world does not need another four-piece rock ’n’ roll band, and the market needs less to be flooded with more junk,” he said. Bruce refused to answer any questions about his new music, his family background, or his professional future, telling Schoeneweis that everything she needed to know could be heard on his album. But when she asked what had made his new songs so irresistible to John Hammond, Columbia, and the nation’s critics, Bruce couldn’t help betraying a glimmer of pride.

  “Well, it’s me.”

  • • •

  Bruce’s live shows were dominated increasingly by his work with the band. He’d start with one of his solo acoustic songs or he’d come out with Tallent and his tuba and a sax-bearing Clemons to make the warped calliope sound for “Circus Song” (soon to evolve into “Wild Billy’s Circus Story”). Then Bruce called for the rest of the band, traded his acoustic guitar for his just-purchased Fender5 and counted off the new instrumental opening to “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?” And this was where the hushed, sepia-toned poet-musician heard on Greetings burst into full, electric color. Reimagined as a kind of Van Morrison R&B workout (think “Domino”), only faster and grittier, the new “82nd” opened at full blast and then rose higher. By the end, the concluding image of the matador catching the falling rose, now set to blazing sax runs and a band on overdrive, sounded joyous. An invitation to a party already in full swing.

  Swing they did, into the swampy funk of “Spirit in the Night,” and then an express-line version of “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City,” now all raunchy guitar, pulsing bass runs, and drums shaking the floor. Bruce rarely played the album’s all-important single, “Blinded by the Light” (“It’s got too many words,” he explained in a radio interview), preferring to either reach back a couple of years for “You Mean So Much to Me” or to the growing list of new songs that he’d written with both ears tuned to how they would sound in the hands of his guys on the stage. “Thundercrack,” about the Bronx-raised Diane and her beguiling way on the dance floor, grew into a showstopper, thanks to the instrumental dramatics created by its reeling stop-start structure. That song became an early add to the playlist, and a standard show closer from January onward. And that tune arrived in the company of “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),” another Diane tribute that wove a south-of-the-border lilt into its triumphant tale of love, rock ’n’ roll, and liberation. Particularly when the singer grabs his girl, hits the highway, and pledges to never look back: “’Cause the record company, Rosie, just gave me a big advance!”

  “All people have to do is see the band,” Bruce said in another interview. “It doesn’t matter if the place is empty or full . . . the guys in the band play right from the heart every time. They’re a great bunch of guys, and they put out every night, all the time.” Even at the beginning of the year, when most of the shows were booked in the Northeast, the pace and rhythm of a traveling band required immense amounts of stamina. The group’s original asking price of $750 per gig rarely covered the weekly bills for the gas, oil, food, and salaries that kept it on the road—to say nothing of what it cost Appel and Cretecos to keep the lights and phones on at the management office. “We actually had to borrow a van to move the gear in,” says Albee Tellone, the folk musician from the Upstage who joined up as a roadie (and soon became road manager). Tellone joined another Upstage regular, the golem-sized, Celtic bluesman Big Danny Gallagher, in a bare-bones crew often rounded out by Cretecos, who pulled triple duty as tour manager, soundman, and lights operator. Most often they traveled in two cars: the borrowed Dodge Maxivan, the rear seats of which had been taken out to make room for guitars, keyboards, and amps, and a station wagon for the band and staff. Sleeping space was nearly nonexistent, although you could squeeze in between the amps and guitars to catch a few hours in the van. When the band’s gear expanded enough to require a U-Haul trailer, it became another haven for the band’s exhausted and/or infirm.

  Perpetually broke and forced to cadge sleeping space in dorms, locker rooms, or with friends and shirttail family members, Bruce, the band, and the two-man crew knuckled down and rarely complained. The $35 weekly salaries weren’t always on time and sometimes never showed up at all. Tellone charged thousands of dollars’ worth of gas on his own credit card and rarely found himself at the top of Appel’s reimbursement list. No matter, there was always another gig to play, another load-in, another crowd to convert. Then everybody hauled the gear back into the van, grabbed a burger (if they could find one), and piled back into the cars for the three-hundred-mile drive to the next club, where they’d do it all over again. On and on they went, squirming for room in the smoky car, with Bruce entranced by the radio and Clemons right there with him, declaiming on the great songs and arguing bitterly when Bruce’s tastes conflicted with his.

  Everyone came with his quirks, although none could compete with crewman Big Danny Gallagher, who often became enraged when anyone tried to tell him what to do, as when Lopez asked the roadie to help set up his drums onstage. “Big Danny literally told Vini, ‘Who the fuck do you think I am, your slave?’” Tellone says. “And I said, ‘Technically, you are. A roadie’s supposed to be an indentured servant.’” Gallagher didn’t care. He shook his head, snorted, and stomped off to grab a smoke and a beer.

  “If I didn’t know [the music] was good, I never would have stuck with it,” Garry Tallent reflects. But his wife had a job, and so they had some money coming in. And after so many years of rehearsing, playing, and dreaming, finally something seemed to be happening. He could see it most clearly during the multinight gigs they played in Boston, Bryn Mawr, or in any town where Bruce had either never played or never made much of an impact. But now things seemed to be swinging, slowly but surely, in their direction. Starting in midweek, they usually played the first show to sparse crowds. “Then we’d play, maybe do a little radio,” and as the word spread, the crowds thickened, and the response became more electric. “By the weekend, the place was packed and rockin’.”

  When the audience included a critic from a major metropolitan newspaper, such as Neal Vitale from the Boston Globe, the buzz became even buzzier. “The show was a delight,” he wrote after seeing the band at Oliver’s nightclub. “It became obvious, as Wednesday night faded into Thursday morning, that this had been the sort of gig to be long remembered: the feeling was that of having seen a totally brilliant, unique, soon-to-be-giant artist in his early days before he becomes a star.”

  TEN

  LISTEN TO YOUR JUNK MAN—HE’S SINGING

  ALL PUBLICITY, UPBEAT-TO-RAVE REVIEWS, AND executive belief aside, those freshly pressed copies of Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. stayed on the shelves. An internal Columbia sales sheet from March 19, 1973, showed that seventy-four thousand copies had shipped to record stores, but with weekly sales at a trickle, most of those albums would be coming back as returns—liabilities on CBS’s quarterly docket. Meanwhile, Loudon Wainwright III, another singer-songwriter declared an inheritor to Dylan,1 sold three times as many records with his Album III, thanks largely to his novelty hit “Dead Skunk.” Six days earlier, in a memo dated March 13, CBS publicity executive Sal Ingeme urged his staff to double down on promoting Bruce’s neglected single, “Blinded by the Light”: “I’m sure that you all know how important it is for us to exert a major effort in busting both the single and the album by this artist.”

  When the group’s first West Coast tour, supporting blues singer-harpist Paul Butterfield’s new band, Better Days, got cancelled at the last moment (just after Bruce and band had made the marathon drive west), Columbia
and Sam McKeith worked quickly to book enough replacement gigs to make the trip worthwhile. A Columbia-sponsored showcase at the Troubadour club on LA’s Santa Monica Boulevard had been planned to feature the newly signed rock-folk-harmony band Pan, which played the evening’s opening set. But even as the late-night undercard with only thirty minutes to play, and hobbled by a blown guitar amp that compelled him to switch to piano for most of the set, Bruce and the band turned a room full of chattering industry regulars into a rapt audience. To Peter Philbin, a young rock critic for the Los Angeles Free Press, the half hour with the New Jersey folk rocker felt like a revelation. When the set ended, Philbin trailed the band to the alley behind the club and introduced himself to the still-sweating Bruce. They talked for a few minutes, and when Philbin got home he pounded out an ecstatic review. “Never have I been more impressed with a debuting singer,” he wrote. And while noting the new artist’s similarities to Dylan, Philbin went on to declare Bruce “a total original” with “the remarkable ability to take his audience anywhere he wanted to go.”

  Bruce and the band made a quick jaunt to Berkeley, then returned to LA to open for Blood, Sweat and Tears at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. When Philbin went backstage, Bruce and Appel both recognized him and beelined over to shake his hand and thank him for his review. Noticeably more relaxed than he’d been in the alley behind the Troubadour, Bruce got Philbin going on his favorite records and bands, and when it emerged that the writer was a Van Morrison aficionado with a serious passion for the ethereal Astral Weeks, Bruce’s eyes lit up: that was one of his favorite albums too! “Call me when you get to New York,” he rasped.