Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  As image creation goes, it worked on every level. The visual union of Elvis, Dylan, and Marlon Brando, with a touch of Stagger Lee looming over his shoulder for bad-ass measure. And if that bit off a big chunk of cultural iconography, the songs themselves dug even deeper with their visions of young love, small towns, rumbling highways, and the wicked fast streets of the city. And thrumming beneath the entire tableau, the spark of hope, and the promise—shaky, but still—that an American road can take you anywhere you had the imagination, courage, and luck to find. But in the midst of the Gerald Ford administration, after a dozen-plus years defined by assassinations, war, political corruption, and the collapse of the flower child/hippie/Woodstock culture, the sound of such belief—particularly from a veteran of the same cultural conflicts—was stunning.

  But there it is, right from the rusty music-box opening of “Thunder Road,” as Bruce’s voice, sounding younger and clearer than on his earlier records, greets a girl as she steps into a twilight breeze. He’s a social reject, and she’s an outsider, both left to pray for chances that never come. So the singer holds out the only thing he has left to offer: the engine in his car and the highway leading out of town. “Hey, the night’s bustin’ open / These two lanes will take us anywhere!” The band detonates, but Bruce, singing in a strikingly rich and powerful croon, crowns everything. “That must have come straight out of [the Orbison] records,” Bruce says of his new vocal technique. “That big, round operatic tone. I just loved the sound of [Orbison’s] voice, and I gave it a shot. Just said, ‘Well, here I go.’ And I didn’t get there. But I got someplace.” Indeed, the stereo speakers boil over with romantic urgency. Even when the lyrics glow purple (the killer in the sun, the talking guitar, the screaming ghosts), the belief in Bruce’s voice keeps it riveting. Bruised, burned, and somehow unbowed, he’s taking the American ideal at its word, betting it all on the open road and his own stubborn will. “It’s a town full of losers, I’m pulling outta here to win!” On a hero’s journey that flows as much from The Iliad as it does from The Wild One.

  Every song plays for the heart; every piano intro, organ line, drum fill, and bent guitar note is meant to revive a memory, trace a scar, point to the future. The light-footed “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” serves as the E Street Band’s creation myth and a meditation on the transformative power of friendship. The squealing guitars in “Night” paints the Ocean Avenue–Kingsley Street circuit as a last-ditch arena for working-class glory, while the alternately brooding and explosive “Backstreets” casts its broken teen romance against a dying, spiritless city. Flip the album, and a blast of drums erupts into the bombast of the album’s title track. Faster, harder, and more deliriously phrased than the companion piece at the start of the first side, “Born to Run” plays like a meld of Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” As in the former, the imagist lyrics of “Born to Run” (the cages, the suicide machines, the velvet rims, the hemipowered drones) define a strikingly new vocabulary. And like the latter, the layered music is powerful enough to make lyrics all but unnecessary. Woven together, it all comes at hurricane force, blowing houses apart, ripping trees from the earth, hurling cows into the next county.

  “She’s the One” cuts back to musical basics, stringing its tale of obsessive love to a Bo Diddley beat played with the subtlety of an approaching tank. But such is the pain of lust; such are the pleasures of a powerfully fucked-up romance. The corner-bar jazz of “Meeting Across the River” casts its doomed hero in a 1950s cinema noir, only to send him into shadowy streets already buzzing with the action described in the album’s climactic piece, the 9:23 epic “Jungleland.”

  Here a violin prelude gives way to piano and Bruce’s elegiac tale of the renegade Magic Rat, who joins forces with a barefoot girl only to be chased off by the “maximum lawmen,” antagonists to the city’s street gangs, rock bands, empty-hearted lovers, and every other character tramping the streets. And on this night, they’re dressing like visionaries, waving guitars “just like switchblades” and then wielding their knives with balletic grace. The Magic Rat and the barefoot girl slip off together, and their connection stops the city in its tracks. A lone saxophone blares across the night, and when the ineffably sad melody concludes, everything has changed. Singing in a somber monotone, Bruce recounts the death of the Magic Rat, gunned down not by the cops or a rival but by his own tender heart. Just that quickly, the streets burn, battles rage, dreams vaporize. When the smoke clears, the devastation is so complete that even the poets have been struck dumb. “They just stand back and let it all be.”

  As the critics would say, Born to Run lived up to every promise ever made about Bruce Springsteen. From the breezy opening moments of “Thunder Road” through the blood-borne passion of “She’s the One” and “Night,” the restless ambition fueling the title track, and the tragedies in “Backstreets” and “Jungleland,” the album stood as a summary of the previous twenty years of rock ’n’ roll, a portrait of the moment, and the cornerstone of a career that would reflect and shape the culture for the next twenty years, and the twenty to follow. Like the Beatles’ American debut, Meet the Beatles, Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, Elvis Presley’s first album, and Nirvana’s Nevermind, Born to Run established a sound and identity powerful enough to permanently alter the perceptions of those who heard it, whether they liked what they heard or not. “It was the album where I left behind my adolescent definitions of love and freedom,” Bruce wrote. “Born to Run was the dividing line.” Nearly four decades later, it still is.

  THIRTEEN

  A CLASSIC CASE OF BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

  THE CRITICAL APPRAISALS GREETING BORN TO RUN read like news accounts of the second coming. “The purest glimpse of the passion and power of rock ’n’ roll in nearly a decade,” sang the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Hilburn. Which sounded pretty good until you read the thoughts of the New York Times’ chief music critic, John Rockwell: “Mr. Springsteen’s gifts are so powerful and so diverse that it’s difficult even to try to describe them in a short space . . . you owe it to yourself to buy this record.” Pick up Rolling Stone, and there came Greil Marcus, one rock critic who could score a few points against Landau in an intellectual knife fight, declaring Born to Run “a magnificent album that pays off on every bet ever placed on [Springsteen].” At Creem the review came from the nicotine-yellow fingers of Lester Bangs, the gonzo critic whose acidic pen could reduce overblown music and musicians into a foul-smelling puddle. But while Bangs acknowledged the whiff of Barnum in Columbia’s publicity campaign (“one of the biggest hypes in recent memory”), his enthusiasm for the music itself overwhelmed everything else. “Bruce Springsteen is an American archetype, and Born to Run will probably be the finest record released this year,” Bangs wrote. And there was more: “In a time of squalor and belittled desire, Springsteen’s music is majestic and passionate with no apologies . . . [and] we can soar with him, enjoying the heady rush of another gifted urchin cruising at the peak of his powers and feeling his oats as he gets it right, that chord, and the last word ever on a hoodlum’s nirvana.”

  As the momentum behind Born to Run strengthened, so did the tidal conclusion that the album, like Bruce himself, was nothing short of heroic: God’s gift to the culturally blighted 1970s. Which put the New Dylan business to shame and added that much more momentum to the skepticism of writers and critics who didn’t have an ear for Bruce’s music but did have an eye for the magical blend of hype and herd mentality. And what could anyone make of the many connections between the über-critic circuit and Springsteen’s already incestuous inner circle? Any observant reader of rock magazines and other youth culture journals would recognize Landau’s name from his many reviews and columns, and from his record review editor title at Rolling Stone. And while the reader might not guess that Marcus and Landau were longtime friends—and that the former had in fact recommended the latter for his editorship—she could undoubtedly entertain herself wondering if Marc
us’s personal and professional bonds to Landau (his titular editor at Rolling Stone) might have influenced his enthusiasm for Born to Run.

  And, of course, Landau was also a close friend of the writer Dave Marsh, who had escorted Landau to his first Bruce show in the spring of 1974, introduced the two men, and then encouraged Landau to publish the “I Saw Rock and Roll Future” column at Boston’s Real Paper. It would be more of a leap to suggest that Marsh, who came up through the Detroit-based offices of Creem, had somehow bedazzled Bangs into writing his rave review. But Marsh had also written a glowing profile of Bruce that Creem published the month before Bangs’s review ran, which reintroduced the thought of insider groupthink. Either that, or the canniness on the part of a lightly educated New Jersey guitarist who had intuited that any artist who could fuse Bob Dylan’s subterranean braininess with Elvis Presley’s sexual outrageousness would be the very image of the brainy rock critic’s fondest imaginings. So maybe it wasn’t difficult to understand what the New York Times’ Henry Edwards meant when he proposed, just after the first wave of Born to Run reviews flooded the media, that “if Bruce Springsteen didn’t already exist, the critics would have had to invent him.”1

  And there was more to come.

  Months after issuing the edict that Bruce would give no print interviews that weren’t guaranteed to be a part of a cover story (a bluff move that grew into a necessity when the wave of attention swelled to tidal proportions), Appel got a call from an editor at Newsweek saying that the magazine was ready to commit to putting Bruce on its cover. Both of the nation’s leading newsweeklies had already devoted column inches to Bruce, starting with Time magazine’s generous coverage of both Greetings and The Wild, the Innocent, while Newsweek ran a midsized, interview-free but largely upbeat2 feature pegged to Born to Run’s release in late August. This time, however, Newsweek wanted to publish a deeply reported piece. “In those days having an entertainer on the cover was a hallowed bit of ground,” says Maureen Orth, the Newsweek writer assigned to write and lead the reporting for the piece. “But [the editors] loved him, and when I saw him perform in Asbury Park I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s a great, great performer.’”

  Still, the buzz coming from sources who had spoken either with Orth or the staff reporters also working the story indicated that Newsweek planned to focus on Bruce less as a dynamic new artist but as the latest in a series of industrially created pop idols.

  When Time magazine culture writer Jay Cocks got wind of the Newsweek story-in-progress, what he heard made him think that his competitors were out to trash their subject. A fan of Bruce’s first two albums who heard Born to Run as a significant addition to the American rock ’n’ roll catalog, Cocks took Newsweek’s plans with two kinds of umbrage: he hated letting the crosstown rivals run away with the Springsteen story, and he especially hated the snide package they were, by all indications, wrapping him in. “I thought it would have been a killing representation of an important American artist,” Cocks says. “I thought Time magazine should make a countermove. And I’d always wanted to write about him. Plain and simple.” Marching into the office of his editor, Martha Duffy, Cocks explained what Newsweek was up to and pitched his idea of taking them on head-to-head. Duffy got it all immediately and convinced the magazine’s top editors to let them go after their own Springsteen cover story.

  When Orth learned that her crosstown competitors were also on the case she went back to Appel and Bruce to argue that they were making a big mistake. “Bruce wasn’t big enough to sustain both covers, given what they meant,” she says. “I said, ‘You’re going to live to regret this.’ ”

  For the editors of the magazines, the dueling stories became a game of chicken. While both recognized the absurdity of putting the same somewhat obscure pop star on their covers in the same week, neither could imagine backing down, particularly when gossip about the dueling stories swept across the media filled canyons of midtown Manhattan. “Pretty outlandish, eh?” Appel says, blue eyes sparkling with glee. But even as Bruce seemed on track to appear on both of America’s leading newsweeklies, the never-ending avalanche of publicity, reviews, and coverage made him feel increasingly queasy. “I used to feel I was always in control,” he grumbled to the UK New Musical Express’s Andrew Tyler. “Now I’m not so sure.” Talking to Cocks, Bruce said he had no idea what the “commotion” could be about. “I feel like I’m on the outside of all this, even though I know I’m on the inside.” When Newsweek’s Orth got her interview, Bruce called his new notoriety a nuisance. “What phenomenon?” he asked. “We’re driving around, and we ain’t no phenomenon. The hype just gets in the way.” And if Bruce thought the Born to Run publicity had already grown to absurd proportions, he was kidding himself.

  Dated October 27, but available a week earlier, the Time and Newsweek covers hit the country on the same day. Unsurprisingly, the double-barreled magazine coverage created its own moment in the media culture. Cocks’s story in Time, titled “Rock’s New Sensation,” celebrated his subject’s achievements while also sketching his past (in the terms that Bruce chose to reveal it) and the outlines of his daily life. Orth’s piece (reported in part by Janet Huck and Peter S. Greenberg), led with a “Making of a Pop Star” headline on the magazine’s cover, while the story itself veered between favorable accounts of Bruce’s shows and music, and at times caustic analyses provided by New York Times critic Henry Edwards (whose anti-Springsteen essay served as the first critical take in the piece) and by Joe Smith, the president of Columbia’s main competitor, Warner Bros. Records. Smith compared Bruce to Elton John and Warners’s own James Taylor and found him wanting.

  Speaking now, Orth says her only intent was to write an accurate portrayal. “I felt like I needed to report the story out,” she says. “It’s balanced, just not worshipful.” If she was blowing the lid off of anything, Orth continues, it was the star-making machinery—from Columbia’s publicity offices to Mike Appel—that she saw as manipulating and twisting a young musician whose work she really did believe in. “I was finding out stuff that made me think that this kid was getting batted around. An innocent kid who was shy and maybe not so sophisticated at that point. Who was thinking of Bruce?” Still, the Newsweek story ended by comparing Bruce to Coca-Cola as another heavily advertised product his customers called the Real Thing—Coke’s central advertising slogan at the time. Cocks and Time focused on “Thunder Road” ’s notion that there really was magic in the night, and for a lot of fans, no matter their reasons, Bruce was it.

  If other people worried about what the stories said, Bruce was too busy fretting that their existence would mark the precise point where his music, reputation, and soul would be consumed by the spotlight. At first he kicked himself, furious that he’d let himself become just another celebrity. “He was worried fame was evil,” Stephen Appel says. “He saw it ruin peoples’ lives. People lost themselves in their own caricatures.” So while Mike Appel savored his promotional triumph, and the E Street Band guys reveled in what all the attention could mean for their group’s future, Bruce simmered in his hotel room in Los Angeles. “That was beyond anything anyone could have wished for,” Steve Van Zandt says. “And he was pissed! But I was laughing. I thought it was fun.” So did Garry Tallent, who first glimpsed the magazines while dashing through the Dallas airport to make a flight to the band’s next show. But the bassist had another thought too: “It was a classic case of be careful what you wish for.”

  Bruce passed the magazines’ publication day playing pinball with Columbia promotions man Ron Oberman in an American Legion bowling alley and then shooting pool at the home of former CBS executive Frank Shargo. Back in New York, some members of the publicity team at his record company were beginning to think their new star might not be wrong about the caustic risks of overexposure. “When we first had the record in our hands, I remember saying, “It’s time to step up! We gotta break down walls!’” says label publicist Ron McCarrell. “So we got a little carried away.” That realizati
on came a few weeks after some of Bruce’s most fervent supporters sensed the possibility of a backlash. A&R man Michael Pillot had tried to slow things down somewhere between the Bottom Line shows and the record’s release, only to learn that publicity campaigns work like rocket ships. Once they launch there’s no going back. “The answer was, ‘Nope,’” Pillot recalls. “They said, ‘You wanted it to move, right? Now it’s moving.’”

  Bruce stalked Los Angeles like Hamlet-in-reverse, fretting endlessly over the wisdom of actions he had already taken, another, less public part of himself confronted the fact that he had not surrendered to all the publicity as much as he’d actively fueled it. “I could not have been on those covers if I didn’t want to,” Bruce told the writer Bill Flanagan in 1992. “I didn’t have to do those interviews. I remember sitting in a room saying, ‘Gee, do I want to do this? It seems scary.’ But I [didn’t] want to be sitting on my porch when I’m sixty saying, ‘Oh, I shoulda, I coulda, I woulda!’ Hey! You got one ride. So I said, ‘Let’s go!’”

  • • •

  The first thing the Time and Newsweek covers achieved was to force Bruce out of the bungalow he’d been renting in Long Branch since the spring of 1974. A tiny, foundationless structure tucked between the large family homes on the block, the once easily overlooked house was now a magnet for the new crowd of fans whose determination to find their quarry overwhelmed whatever respect they might have for an ordinary person’s privacy. Flushed out of that house—so quickly, in fact, that he abandoned the spinet piano upon which he’d composed so much of Born to Run3—Bruce rented a more remote house on a wooded hill in Atlantic Highlands. Quite a bit less glamourous than what you’d imagine a rock star’s house might be, but it did offer a nice view of Sandy Hook Bay, and an extra bedroom for newly hired road manager Rick Seguso to stay in when the band took a few nights or weeks off.