Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Bittan had seen Bruce and the band at a club earlier that year and came away swooning. “I could tell where they were going,” Bittan says. “I could sense they needed to be more of a rock ’n’ roll band.” Called in to audition, Bittan sat quietly while Bruce played the chords to “She’s the One,” and when invited to play whatever he felt, the pianist responded immediately. “I heard the Bo Diddley beat and reacted to it, just came up with a part, thinking, ‘I don’t know if this is gonna go over.’” But Bruce nodded, the rest of the band fell in, and off they went. “New York City Serenade” came next, minus the introduction, and then Fats Domino’s “Let the Four Winds Blow.” It seemed to go well, Bittan thought.

  Weinberg, by contrast, had never seen or heard Bruce play. But he’d heard good things about him, and then the “No Jr. Ginger Baker’s” line caught his eye. He can’t say why, exactly, since he already had a full-time gig in the musical Godspell and took classes at Seton Hall University during the day. “And I already knew that bands always break your heart,” Weinberg says. And yet he called for an audition. Curious enough to go but ambivalent enough to not make a fuss about it, Weinberg showed up at SIR, the gear rental and rehearsal space in midtown Manhattan, with nothing more than a snare drum, a hi-hat, and a kick drum. Given that the drummer right before him had come equipped with a miniature skyline of shimmering cymbals and sparkly tom-toms, Weinberg’s three-piece set made, as he puts it, “quite the minimalist statement.” They played for three hours, working through rock rhythms, shuffles from Chicago and New Orleans, and more.

  But the real litmus test came when Bruce abruptly turned around and waved his arms. No warning, no explanation, but Weinberg still did exactly the right thing and stopped on a dime. Bruce smiled and relaunched the tune. Then waiting another half hour, in midsong and without even a backward glance, throwing his right hand into the air. This proved pivotal. “You were the only guy who hit the rim shot,” Bruce told Max many years later. “That’s when I knew I’d found my drummer.”

  With Bittan on board too, the new conglomeration rehearsed for ten days, and then warmed up with a pair of unannounced (and yet quickly sold out) sets at the Main Point club in Bryn Mawr. And then the E Street Band got back on the road.

  • • •

  Bittan and Weinberg blended well into the ensemble, both contributing new musical possibilities and easygoing personalities that softened a lot of the tension that had built among the others over the years, shows, and miles. “There was a lot of adjustment, because we were family, and suddenly they were a part of it,” Clemons told me. “But we got used to them pretty quick because they were so good. And then it was like the band grew up overnight.”

  But when the road led back home, the twenty-four-year-old Bruce felt anything but grown up. By early 1974, his relationship with Diane Lozito had fractured into a montage of arguments, fights, breakups, and fraught reunions and would inevitably lead back to the same conflicts that had broken them up before. Lozito was impetuous and pugnacious, Bruce was controlling and stubborn. Lozito liked her share of public attention, but Bruce required all of it for himself. What they shared was a fierce passion that drove them mad in the worst possible ways, especially when the relationship began to shatter. When Lozito tried to leave, Bruce chased her down and brought her home, even when she begged him to leave her alone. When she moved secretly to Nantucket, thereby avoiding his informal network of spies (fans on the Jersey Shore can be so helpful), he stewed alone until he spied Lozito’s friend Debbie Schwartz one day in Central Park. The fact that she was standing on the side of a stage upon which he was currently performing for several thousand concertgoers (at the Schaefer Festival show back in July), did nothing to contain his bitter curiosity.

  “He walked right up to me and said, ‘Where’s Diane?’” Schwartz (now Debbie Colligan) says. “You’re in the middle of a show!” she shouted back. Bruce didn’t care. In fact, he needed to know right now. Feeling pressed, Colligan admitted that Lozito had been with her in Nantucket but had just moved to Boston. “I could only live with her for two weeks!” Colligan shouted. “She’s crazy!” Edging back to center stage, Bruce nodded and shouted back, “I know!”

  “What was really ironic,” she says, “is that they were playing ‘Spirit in the Night,’ which he had written about her.”

  Now the love songs he wrote were more haunted than spirited. A no-longer-quite-so-young lover’s tales of romance, obsession, and promises broken by time, circumstance, and worse. The early, longer version of “She’s the One”—much of its lyrics later repurposed for “Backstreets”—begins in erotic fixation (the woman with the killer graces and secret places), and then spins through memories of broken myths, lost challenges, abandonments, and a love “just like the sun.” The lyrics are scattershot, overstuffed with clashing images, situations, and narrative threads. But “She’s the One” was a work in progress. And just like the barely started album for which it was intended, it would be done, Bruce insisted, when it was done.

  TWELVE

  THEN AGAIN, LET’S JUST LET IT RIDE

  WHEN THEY HAD A FINISHED mix of the “Born to Run” single in the early summer of 1974, Mike Appel invited Columbia president Bruce Lundvall to the studio. Lundvall sat quietly as the tape rolled. When the final notes faded, he looked over at Bruce. “You just made a hit record,” he said. To Lundvall’s surprise, Bruce shrugged it off. “He didn’t believe me,” the executive says. “But I told him it was a smash and sent him back to make the rest of the album.”

  You might think that sweeping praise from the top executive in his record company would have eased the make-or-break burden that Bruce lugged with him. You would be wrong. Because whenever he listened to the first two albums, all Bruce could hear were the things he wished he’d done differently. The overstuffed lyrics, the stilted sound, the distance between what he needed to say and what came out of the speakers. “He wanted to write as directly as the great songwriters did,” Appel says. “We kept talking about it: balance, balance, balance.”

  Which sounded a lot easier than it turned out to be for Bruce, who spent hours laboring over every syllable in his notebook, along with every note that came from every instrument and every nuance of every sonic texture. Everything, he decreed, had to serve a distinct purpose. “He kept coming back with different sets of lyrics,” Appel says. “Something like five versions of ‘Born to Run’ alone. ‘How’s this one, Mike? What do you think of these ones now?’ Finally, I told him to go and pick out his favorites himself—I was done.”

  Bruce was just getting started. Still convinced that this might be his last shot at making a record, he couldn’t allow for any compromises. This record had to say it all. Nothing could ever be more important. Partly because the songs he wrote were drawn from his deepest, most primal experiences. But also because Bruce’s travels and his deepening grasp of the political and cultural flailing of the era1 had convinced him that his sense of spiritual abandonment resonated on levels far beyond his own experience.

  “People were contemplating a country that was finite,” Bruce recalled of the post-Nixon America of 1975. In a culture awash in irony and disbelief, he needed to create a work that reestablished rock ’n’ roll as a cultural force with the power to inspire and even create change in your life, in your town, in the world around you. Which meant making an album that both carried the spirit of rock ’n’ roll tradition and stood as a vital testament to its own times. Would it be the greatest rock ’n’ roll album ever made? Possibly not. But that didn’t mean he shouldn’t put everything he had into giving it a shot.

  Appel, nothing if not a cheerful megalomaniac, was right there with him, no matter how excruciating the process. And Bruce seemed determined to make every step a pitched struggle against the limits of philosophical debate and physical endurance. “You think there’s a right way, which is a fallacy,” Bruce said to Rolling Stone’s Joe Levy three decades later. But, he continued, if you’re young and screwed up enough
, losing yourself in work can be far more appealing than being aware of, and directly confronting, your own dysfunction. “It was the only way I knew how to work,” Bruce said. “It was fun, but it was exhausting. I think intentionally exhausting.”

  When Barry Rebo, the videographer who had been tracking Bruce’s career since the Steel Mill days, drove up to Blauvelt to shoot some recording sessions in January 1975, he found Bruce, Appel, and the band looking as sad and translucent as ghosts. A year since they started work on the “Born to Run” single and first attempted a skeletal version of “Jungleland,” they had a total of one song finished. Bruce had composed a handful of new songs, including “She’s the One” and “Wings for Wheels,”2 both of which they had added to the band’s live set.3 With trained professionals Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg on board, Rebo expected the recording to flow more smoothly than before. Instead the overnight session became an endless series of false starts, faltering equipment, off-kilter takes, and increasingly dispirited attempts to rally for another try.

  Even the ten o’clock dinner in the control room, full of stories, jokes, and bouncing balloons, crackled with tension. Anyone glancing up to the studio window could spy a piano tuner working frantically to adjust the studio’s perpetually out-of-key piano. When the tuner warned Appel that the instrument had structural problems and would never hold a tuning for more than thirty minutes or so, Appel nodded but shook off the man’s $10-an-hour offer to be present and ready to work all night. They simply did not have the cash to pay for it.

  Back in the studio at eleven, Bruce, the band, and their production team knuckled down for another run at “Jungleland.” With Bruce clad in a T-shirt and bomber jacket in the vocal booth, he counted off the song and then closed his eyes to sing the first verse. They got only halfway into the second verse before Appel called a halt through the control room intercom, explaining that the instruments had fallen out of sync in one verse. A moment later they began again, tripped, and then started again. When they got through an entire take, Appel punched the button on his microphone. “All right, that was a great take as far as we’re concerned!” he crowed. “What do you wanna do, Bruce?” Springsteen shrugged. “Do another one,” he said. “Do it this time with—”

  Appel, back on his microphone, didn’t seem to hear. “What a great take. Isn’t it great to have one under the belt?”

  Another try. Bruce in his booth, eyes shut, dancing and swinging his arms as he sang, swept up in the music. Then the skronk of the control room intercom button. “Bad take!” engineer Louis Lahav barked. “Why?” Appel asked. “Rushed.” Bruce sighed, and they started again, getting all the way through to the end. Everyone agreed that one came out near perfectly—except for Bruce, whose forehead puckered as he contemplated a four-beat piano transition from the first section into the sax solo in the middle. “You think them chords are making it in the middle?” he asked. As Appel contemplated the need to revise the design of the song yet again, Bruce led the band in a sloppy but cheerful attempt at Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes.”

  More tries at “Jungleland,” more breakdowns. Between takes, Bittan sat at the piano looking confused, searching for new chord inversions that might sound better in the song. But why did these ones suddenly sound so wrong? In the control room, a gloomy Appel muttered the obvious: “It’s out of tune again. Should we tell Bruce?” Still in the isolation of his vocal booth, Bruce opened his eyes and saw Rebo’s camera just on the other side of the glass. “Barry, uh,” he said in a friendly but firm voice, “you can’t be doing this when I’m doing this.” Then he called for another take.

  “That was murder,” says Jon Landau, whom Bruce had invited to come in and see what they were up to. “I was there for some of that, it was just murder. Terrible.” Already familiar with the ways and means of modern recording studios, Landau felt scandalized. Every professional facility he’d worked in or visited had its own piano tuners, electricians, and audio experts poised for action whenever sessions were going on. If something broke midsession, the trained techs could either fix it in moments or get one of the replacements the management had stockpiled in storage. “What I saw in these sessions is that he could not get any momentum going because of these interruptions,” Landau says. Speaking to Roy Bittan, also no stranger to recording sessions, he discovered they shared the same frustrations. “I remember [Bittan] saying, ‘What the fuck are we doing in this place?’”

  The scene played like a joke about a perfectionist being driven mad. Only none of it seemed remotely funny. Except, at some distance, to Bruce’s pal, ex-bandmate, and then manager-producer of Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. “Anytime it takes six months to make a single, something’s obviously going wrong,” Steve Van Zandt said thirty years later. “Who can tolerate that? How anyone had the patience for it is beyond me. You should be able to knock that out in about three hours.”

  Something needed to change. And so Bruce picked up the telephone and made another call to the man whose words had already changed his career for the better. Bruce had seen his new album’s future, and its name was Jon Landau.

  • • •

  A month after his cri de coeur ran in the Real Paper, Landau had surgery to help remedy his Crohn’s disease, a degenerative intestinal condition. After a long recovery that included an extended stay in the hospital and months of bed rest, Landau emerged at the end of the summer feeling better than he had in years, even though his marriage to the film critic Janet Maslin had recently ended. He relocated to New York City in late autumn and received an invitation from Bruce to spend an evening in Long Branch. But when a blizzard choked off the highways that morning, Landau called to suggest they try again another day. “But I sensed as we were talking that he really wanted to get together that day,” Landau says. Bundling up, he took a train from Pennsylvania Station, weathering delays and snail-like progress to arrive in Long Branch five hours later. At Bruce’s place that evening, the host spread his album collection across the floor, and the two music obsessives started spinning their favorites, digging into the songs on every conceivable level: the architecture of the music, the narrative structure of the lyrics, the singer’s tone and feeling, the interplay of drummer and bassist, and on and on. When they got hungry after midnight, they drove down to the open-all-night Inkwell in Long Branch for dinner. Back at Bruce’s an hour later they kept going until dawn and then went back to the Inkwell for breakfast. At nine in the morning, Landau caught a bus back to the city.

  “He was just an interesting person, and I was curious,” Bruce says. “I’d missed out on the world of ideas that comes with a real college education, but I was really drawn to people who knew how to use words or knew how to express their ideas. I thought, ‘There’s a connection there with what I’m doing.’ The life of the mind is just as important as the life of the body.” For Landau, the experience had just as much personal significance. “That stays in my mind as a bonding moment that took things to another level for me. I think for him too,” Landau says. “I think making that choice to go down there in the snowstorm was a significant statement to myself and to him. And this was at the time when things began to coalesce with Born to Run.”

  On the surface, they could not have been more different. Landau, raised in an intellectual family that moved from Queens to Lexington, Massachusetts, when he was a junior high student, usually glided a step or two beneath his school’s top students but still acquitted himself well enough to land in Brandeis University, where he majored in history while also pursuing avid interests in philosophy and American cultural history. But Landau’s real passion kept him focused on music. Turned on to Pete Seeger and the Weavers as a five-year-old (one of the benefits of being raised by leftist intellectuals), Landau started guitar lessons in second grade, working through his Mel Bay instruction books right up until the dawn of rock ’n’ roll in the mid-1950s. “It was that bang, bang, bang of ‘That’ll Be the Day,’ ‘Johnny B. Goode,’ ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly,’ the whole ser
ies of records,” he says. “ ‘Rock and Roll Shoes,’ ‘Sweet Little Sixteen.’ God, did I love that record. I just dove into the whole thing. I loved them all.” At eleven, Landau took solo subway trips from Queens to Brooklyn in order to see Alan Freed’s rock spectacular at the Paramount Theater on Saturday afternoons. He listened to the Top 40 on New York’s WMGM-AM every night, tracking the list’s fluctuations with a yellow pad and a pencil. “ ‘Sweet Little Sixteen,’ I remember, got up to number two, and some song like ‘The Purple People Eater’ kept it out of number one,” he says, shaking his head at the injustice of it all.

  Landau fell hard for the rhythm and blues artists of the mid-1960s (Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, among many others), and pored over their records too. He played guitar in a high school band, and when he got to Brandeis, Landau joined his friend Tom O’Connell, a student at Tufts University, in a Simon and Garfunkel–esque duo they called Jelly Roll. The two worked up their own songs, which they performed to some measure of local acclaim. Offered a small recording contract and an opportunity to travel to Nashville to make demos with professional musicians, Landau chose instead to abandon his career as a performer. “I was afraid,” he says. “I’m not sure if I fully realized it or not, but I did not want to be out front. I wasn’t built for that.”