Bruce
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At the same time, Landau started writing record reviews for Paul Williams’s Crawdaddy magazine, then in its earliest iteration as a photocopied journal featuring serious critical writing about rock, rhythm and blues, and other forms of pop music.4 Crawdaddy developed a small national following, and a year or so later another aspiring young publisher from California named Jann Wenner sent Landau a dummy copy of the music-and-youth-culture magazine he planned to launch in the fall of 1967. Impressed by the prototype for Rolling Stone, Landau signed on as a critic and columnist, and his reputation and influence rose along with the magazine’s. When Jerry Wexler, the great A&R man and producer at Atlantic Records, called to pay his respects, Landau took the opportunity to meet the man and learn as much as he could about the inner workings of the music industry and the intricacies of record production. Asked by another industry friend, Elektra Records publicist Danny Fields, to write a critical analysis of the MC5, a politically radical protopunk band the label had just signed, Landau produced a detailed twenty-page report. When the label dropped the MC5 six months later,5 Landau recommended the band to Wexler, who said he’d bring the group to Atlantic but only if Landau promised to produce its next album.
Landau took the job, and the partnership worked surprisingly well. “He’d done his homework and knew everything about records, which earned him a lot of points with me,” says MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer. Landau helped the chaotic band clarify its musical vision, advised Kramer on how to organize its business structure (which until that point had been run through manager John Sinclair’s commune), and improve intraband communications. “Jon got us talking honestly, like in a therapy situation,” Kramer says. “We’d have these meetings where he’d be saying, like, ‘Well, Wayne, how do you feel about this?’ ‘And Fred [Smith, the quintet’s other guitarist], how do you feel about what Wayne just said?’ It raised us to a new level of consciousness.”
The resulting album, 1970’s Back in the USA, got ripped by critics and fans for sounding way more restrained than any band of fire-breathing revolutionaries ever should, but the months Landau spent working with them struck Kramer, at least, as one of the MC5’s most happy and productive periods. “I pressed him hard to be our manager,” the guitarist says. “But he was adamant that he didn’t want to be a manager, he just wanted to produce records.” Landau did go on to produce albums for Livingston Taylor, James’s younger brother, and a talented songwriter on his own account, and to attempt one with the J. Geils Band, a Boston blues-rock band he brought to Wexler and Atlantic Records. But the J. Geils album didn’t get off the ground,6 and when Landau’s digestive system grew increasingly knotted with Crohn’s disease, he rededicated himself to the quieter life of writing criticism. Widely acknowledged as one of the nation’s best practitioners of the still-young practice of serious rock criticism, Landau told friends that he’d like to be known as the King of the Rock Critics. He was kind of joking. But also kind of not.
• • •
Landau’s first contribution to Born to Run had been on his mind for more than a year: get the hell out of 914 Sound Studios. “Do something about this!” Landau beseeched his friend. “You’re a world-class artist, you deserve a world-class studio!” Finally convinced, Bruce went to Appel and told him to find a new studio. When the recording sessions picked up again in March, the operation moved to the Record Plant in midtown Manhattan. And although Appel still wasn’t convinced they needed another expert in the studio, Bruce’s word still reigned, and Appel slid over to make room for the album’s third coproducer: Jon Landau.
“Jon loved Bruce,” Appel says. “He wanted any part he could play. There would have to be room for both of us.” Landau agreed. “Mike was pretty practical, and he saw what Bruce wanted, and he did his best to adjust,” he says. The resulting tension appealed to Bruce, who had learned the benefit of being the pivot point between two opposing forces as a boy living with two sets of parents at his grandparents’ house. So while Landau and Appel struggled for his ear, Bruce could take rich advantage of his partners’ strengths, turning to Landau for structural and narrative advice, while relying on Appel’s mastery of detail to make certain every note sounded exactly right. “We got along,” Landau says of Appel. “I was in the lead on a great amount of the stuff, but Mike’s endurance is tremendous. When you got into the real fine detail that I might lose patience with, Mike was a slogger.” It also helped that they were all too focused on the album to fuss over personality and turf conflicts. “There was nothing duplicitous about Jon,” Appel says. “We just never really got to know each other.”
As Appel told biographer Marc Eliot in 1989, “the most important thing [Landau] did was to kick-start the album and get Bruce off his butt.” Indeed, Landau’s fresh ears helped Bruce locate some obvious cuts and fixes. “Jungleland,” for instance, lost a melodramatic Spanish-style intro with drums, maracas, and passionate violin runs, in favor of an elegant prelude that featured violinist Suki Lahav’s7 skills to much better effect. Landau also helped streamline the arrangement of “Thunder Road.” But for all the clarity he brought, Landau also encouraged Bruce’s tendency to overthink every note, strum, and organ stop. As Landau admitted later, it often took Appel’s late-night wails—“Guys! We’re makin’ a rekkid heah!”—to get them back into gear.
Appel also recalls fighting to convince Bruce and Landau to back down in their struggle to include “Linda Let Me Be the One” and “Lonely Night in the Park” on the finished album. “I said, ‘You really think those shitty songs can stand next to ‘Backstreets’ and ‘Thunder Road’? That’s what you think? Fuck that!’” Appel proved just as stubborn, and correct, when he fought to keep “The Heist,” subsequently renamed “Meeting Across the River,” on the finished album. Musically, the song’s piano, standup bass, and muted trumpet seem closer to the romantic street poetry on “New York City Serenade” and “Incident on 57th Street” than to the chrome-detailed rock ’n’ roll they were crafting for the new record. But this time the music and lyrics had been honed to the barest essentials, all crafted to underscore one man’s last, desperate shot at redemption.
They had so many other details to tangle with, so many hours, days, weeks, and months to adjust the precise tone of this guitar solo, or the fingertip glissando in that piano intro, or the best way to mix the multitrack recordings down into the shimmering but emotionally powerful sound Bruce needed to hear. He began to think of the album as a musical novel, the individual songs fitting into a larger, unified story. And like a novel, the chapters—or songs, in this case—had to dovetail, contrast, and ultimately enhance one another. So while “Thunder Road” might sound perfect in its full-band arrangement, it might better suit the album in a completely different context, with a completely different sound and message. At one point, Bruce tore the fully-wrought song down to its foundation, rebuilding it as a brooding acoustic guitar piece with a completely new melody, stripped-down chord changes, some different words, and the climactic “I’m pullin’ out of here to win” exhaled like a sigh of defeat.
The process felt slow, grim, and tortuous. When Tallent’s wife visited a session one evening, she wound up spending eight hours watching Bruce try to coach the band through an eight-bar instrumental passage in one song. “When she left, she said, ‘Don’t ever take me to a recording session again!’” Tallent remembers. The guys in the band, of course, had no options. “All we could do was hold on. Smoke a lot of pot and try to stay calm,” said Clemons, who spent sixteen hours playing and replaying every note of his “Jungleland” solo in order to satisfy Bruce’s bat-eared attention to sonic detail.
When the sessions finally ended, Bruce described the era as an endless loop of unplayable parts, unfixable mistakes, and unmixable recordings. The experience, he told the New York Times’ John Rockwell in late 1975, was “like a total wipeout. It was a devastating thing, the hardest thing I ever did.” The fact that Bruce actively resisted help from more experienced hands, particularly when it came
to mixing final versions of the songs, only made it more difficult. For all that he required absolute control over every aspect of the album, holding that much authority also multiplied his psychic burden. The closer he clutched the thing to his chest, the less of it he could see, or comprehend.
Steve Van Zandt dropped in one day to see how things were going, and found Bruce, Landau, and Appel trying to coach a handful of high-dollar session horn players8 through their parts on “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” an old-school R&B romp that celebrated Bruce’s spiritual connection to the band. As always, the process dragged on for hours. Increasingly frustrated and burned out, Bruce approached his old friend, then lying on his back on the control room floor. “Whaddaya think?” he asked. Van Zandt looked up from the carpet. “Me? I think it sucks.” Bruce recoiled and then issued a sharp snort. “Well, then fix it!” he snapped and plopped down hard into a chair.
“It sounds like a myth, but that’s one story that’s actually true,” Van Zandt says now. So as his dispirited friend watched from the control room, Van Zandt climbed to his feet, pushed through the studio door, and walked to the center of the studio floor. “Okay, boys!” he called. “You can toss those charts away now.” Working on his feet, Van Zandt pointed to each horn player in turn and sang him his new part. After a quick horns-only run-through, Van Zandt gestured to the engineer to roll tape. And when the track played again, it knit perfectly with the bouncy Stax-style groove they’d been chasing all evening. At which point Bruce turned to Appel. “Let’s get this boy on the payroll,” he said. Van Zandt accepted his old friend’s offer, but, he says, mostly because he didn’t think he was making that much of a commitment.
“As far as I knew, Bruce’s thing was over,” he says. “They had seven gigs booked, and that was it. So the offer I got was really, ‘Hey, come out and play these last seven shows with us.’” Which felt exactly right, since Van Zandt’s central project—managing, producing, and writing for the Asbury Jukes—was starting to pay dividends now that they had become the most popular bar band on the East Coast. Even so, and no matter what had happened between them in the last few years, Van Zandt still considered himself to be Bruce’s true consigliere. When his buddy beckoned, Steve would be there, no questions asked. “And then I ended up staying seven years.”
• • •
Mixing the tracks—the process of filtering, enhancing, and then blending together the many individual performances that make up a multitrack recording—quickly bogged down into another tortuous process that dragged until the dawn of July 20, just hours before Bruce and company were due to launch their summer-fall tour in Providence, Rhode Island. Finally escaping the Record Plant struck the entire band as an enormous relief, but the emotional respite didn’t last long.
Five days later Appel showed up at the band’s hotel in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, with an acetate pressing of the master recording of Born to Run. With Bruce, his new girlfriend, Karen Darvin, and the entire band gathered to listen, Appel placed the disc on the inexpensive portable record player Bruce took on the road and let it spin. When the last notes of “Jungleland” faded out, the band whooped, applauded, and reached out to slap hands. Stephen Appel, still serving as road manager, noticed that his big brother’s eyes glistened with tears. Relief seemed to blow in through the open window, except for Bruce, who sat with his face clenched, staring into the carpet. “I dunno,” he said darkly. “I’d do things differently.” Beard abristle, he jumped to his feet, snatched the acetate from the turntable, and stalked out to the hotel courtyard, where he flung it into the swimming pool.
What was wrong? How about everything. The sax parts sounded like a bad Bruce Springsteen imitation. (That’s when Clemons stalked out of the room.) The piano drowned out the guitars. The mix had the clarity of a shit storm. All this time, all that work, and this was the best they could do? And in conclusion: “Fuck!” No longer quite so happy, the rest of the band drifted out of the room, bound either for their rooms or (more likely) the bar. Alone with the brothers Appel, Bruce swan dived into the gloom. Did he understand that an acetate never sounds as good as the finished album? Did he take a moment to consider that the portable stereo he’d just been listening to, with its plastic speakers, tin tonearm, and Easy-Bake Oven design, might not even be capable of reproducing the dense, intricate recordings they had made? Apparently not.
Bruce was too busy declaring the entire project a waste of time. A cruel satire of rock ’n’ roll. Overheated dogshit. Appel dialed Landau, who had gone to California to check in with his colleagues at Rolling Stone, told him what had happened, and handed the phone to Bruce. Thus began, as Landau recalls, a “combative” conversation. “My point was . . . part of the job is finishing,” Landau says. “I was saying, look, you can’t and will not be able to put every thought, every idea, and every creative impulse onto one record.” From this point forward, Landau insisted, Bruce should take all of his new ideas and put them in his notebook for the next record. “There is going to be a next record, believe me,” he swore.
Bruce remained unconvinced. He hung up the phone and looked over at Appel, now reclining in a chair and shaking his head. “Fuck it,” Appel said. “Let’s scrap the whole thing. I mean, obviously. Just fuck it.” He kept going, talking about how he’d break the news to Columbia’s Bruce Lundvall the next morning. Sure, he’d be pissed. But that’s showbiz, right? And maybe, Appel continued, they could let the label release the “Born to Run” single as a stopgap, and then rerecord the songs live in the studio without any overdubs or Phil Spectorian witchcraft? That’d work. Or better yet, they could record some shows and use the live performances of the new songs as album tracks. Anything was possible, right?
“I was being crazier than him, see?” Appel says. “Now he had to be the voice of reason.” Bruce, Karen Darvin, and the two Appels all piled into Mike’s car and headed for the turnpike back to the city. They were maybe halfway home when Bruce started to laugh. Quietly at first, then uproariously. “He thought it was hilarious that Mike was so crazy,” Stephen Appel says. “Suddenly he was in a great place. Both Mike and Jon had said exactly the right things to him. I never saw Bruce happier than on that car ride.” By the time they got back to New York, Bruce shrugged off the last six torturous hours with a wave of the hand. “Then again,” he said, “let’s just let it ride.”
Born to Run would be released in exactly a month.
• • •
The band swung through a few of its more reliable cities in early August, girding for a five-night, ten-show stand at the Bottom Line in the West Village. The shows sold out instantly—not a major feat given the club’s four-hundred-seat capacity—but once again, the crucial factor had less to do with the paying fans than with the CBS-comped tastemakers, critics, and industry machers who would decide exactly how the much-anticipated album by the so-called future of rock ’n’ roll would be received. “The whole world came to those shows,” Van Zandt says. “And not in a supportive way, either. It was more like, ‘Okay, show me something!’ ”
So Bruce did, with eight compact but intense ninety-minute performances that mixed selections from his first two albums with songs from the new record and sixties covers (the Beach Boys’ arrangement of “Then I Kissed Her,” the Searchers’ “When You Walk in the Room,” and Ike and Tina Turner’s “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”) that shed light on Bruce’s connection to rock’s foundations. And while the band played with its usual fire and discipline, Bruce performed like a man possessed. He waved his arms, broke into a strange herky-jerky dance (imagine a marionette with fifty thousand watts of AC running through its strings), and then leapt off the stage to dash across the lines of tables as enthralled clubgoers tried to slap his hand and grab their drinks at the same time. Back onstage he flirted with the girls in the front, shouted out to his relatives sitting in the back, and told elaborate shaggy-dog stories about his childhood and his days with the Castiles and Steel Mill.
Celebrities came in flocks, including
actor Robert De Niro, who took special note of Bruce’s pre-encore “Are you talkin’ to me?” routine (which the actor later transmuted into a creepy highlight of his performance as a psychotic in 1976’s Taxi Driver), along with director Martin Scorsese, who came away eager to cast the rocker in one of his movies. When Clive Davis showed up with Lou Reed in tow, the former Columbia president9 could barely believe how far the shy folkie he’d met in 1972 had come. “I was stunned, actually,” he says. “He was the best live performer I’d ever seen in my life.” When Davis came backstage to say hello afterward, Bruce wrapped him in a hug and whispered slyly into his ear, “Am I moving around enough for ya now?”
The publicists at Columbia/CBS were making plenty of moves of their own. Directed by label president Bruce Lundvall to spend $250,000 to get the word out as far, wide, and as inescapably as possible, Glen Brunman designed the Born to Run sales campaign like a D-day invasion, with multiple forces poised to attack in calibrated waves. Starting with posters and stand-up displays for retail stores, they rode the reviews and features stirred up by the star-packed run of shows at the Bottom Line, all setting the stage for the scores of ads placed in newspapers to herald the album’s release at the end of August. An endless barrage of Bruce this and Bruce that, all of it illustrated by striking portraits of the bearded, curly-haired artist looking like a poet biker in his black leather and jeans, an Elvis Presley button on his chest (or sleeve, depending on the shot), clutching his now weathered Fender and a pair of Converse sneakers hanging from the guitar’s tuning pegs. And right there you could see the whole album in front of you: the essence of fifties rock ’n’ roll and the beatnik poetry of sixties folk-rock, projected onto the battered spirit of mid-seventies America.
And if that didn’t seem iconic enough, take a long look at the album itself: the black-and-white shot of Bruce—cloaked in black leather, guitar in hand, Elvis button on his strap—leaning hard on the mighty shoulder of Clemons, whose white shirt is set off by a broad-brimmed black hat and, of course, his radiant black skin. For in this picture, Bruce knew, resided the heart of the band: unity, brotherhood, a small fulfillment of the American ideals of strength, equality, and community. The essence of e pluribus unum, as filtered through the unity of rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues. “A friendship and a narrative steeped in the complicated history of America begin to form, and there is music already in the air,” Bruce wrote thirty-five years later, describing the picture in the foreword to Clemons’s whimsical memoir, Big Man. “The album begins to work its magic.”