Bruce’s moodiness started early on the Born to Run tour, in the hours before the October 4 date at Detroit’s four-thousand seat Michigan Palace theater. “I didn’t want to go onstage,” Bruce told Robert Hilburn a few years later. No matter how many good reviews Born to Run had received, no matter the ecstatic energy he felt flowing through the concert halls, the avalanche of publicity made him feel he’d become a cartoon. “I was being perceived as an invention, like a ship passing by.” Sitting backstage, trying to focus on the performance to come, Bruce felt only detachment. He had nothing left to say, nothing more to reveal. It was already out there, being picked apart by ink-stained carrion who assumed that every note he played had been concocted by someone else. “But I knew where I came from,” he told Hilburn. “Every inch of the way. I knew what I believed and what I wanted.” That thought was enough to propel him back onto the stage with a need as deep as vengeance. And it worked. He went back at it again, the starry-eyed rocker making his stand in the same jeans, black T-shirt, and leather bomber that animated so much about where he came from and where he was going.
So no one would imagine the doubt in his heart, not even when the comic creation myth rap at the start of “The E Street Shuffle” came out like a rock ’n’ roller’s interpretation of Waiting for Godot: “Somewhere, there’s someplace, somehow . . .” he began. “Even though it gets harder to come by. And, uh, somewhere, somehow, someplace. Maybe it ain’t here now. But somewhere, somewhere tonight, Clarence, hit me! Sparks fly on E Street . . .”
• • •
With the $500,000 advance Appel took from Columbia/CBS on the line and tension rising, Bruce demanded new copies of all his contracts and sought counsel with the one person he was beginning to trust above all others. Bruce flew to Los Angeles, where Jon Landau had relocated temporarily in order to produce Jackson Browne’s The Pretender album. Landau retrieved Bruce at the airport, and they ended up in a restaurant. The rift with Appel, Bruce said, was getting worse. He needed a lawyer to help him but had no idea how to find a good one. Landau made an appointment for him with his own attorney, Mike Mayer, whose quick read of the contracts made him cringe. Virtually every clause and subclause, he said, was a nightmare version of the current industry standards; they were so tilted against Bruce, in fact, that when entertainment lawyer David Benjamin, who worked with the team of Peter Parcher and Mike Tannen, who would soon take over Bruce’s legal work, read them a few months later, he gasped. “[The contracts] had every trick in the book.” So tricky, Benjamin says, it was hard to imagine that Appel would have, or could have, imagined them for himself. “Appel hadn’t ever managed anyone before. He didn’t know what every trick was.” More likely, Benjamin says, the real author of the contracts had been Appel’s lawyer Jules Kurz, “an old-time guy from the year gimmel,” Benjamin says. The three-layer management-production-publishing contracts; the full ownership of Bruce’s songs; the disparity in publishing income; the contractual distance between Bruce and Columbia Records. “He was full of those old-time tricks.”
Back in New York and edging toward panic, Bruce paid a surprise visit to the apartment of Bob Spitz, Appel’s former assistant, then working with Elton John’s American management. When the doorman called up to announce the guest, the man seemed taken aback. Mr. Bruce, as the doorman called him, was “not in good shape.” Assuming that his guest had boozed himself into a stupor, Spitz realized quickly that Bruce was sober but extremely freaked out. They hadn’t seen each other since Spitz left his job at Laurel Canyon in 1974, but Bruce launched almost immediately into his anguished tirade about Appel. “That’s when he told me the whole story,” Spitz says. “That he thought Mike had fucked him and it was all over, so now he was working with Jon.” But, of course, nothing could be quite that simple.
Landau, back in New York during a break in Browne’s sessions, lived just a few blocks from Spitz, and Bruce invited him over. “We sat at my dining room table, and Bruce said, ‘Please, anything you can remember; anything you can tell me to help me.’” When Spitz asked if he wanted to separate himself completely from Mike, Bruce shook his head. “I want Mike to produce me, but I don’t want Mike to manage me.” Landau seemed to agree, but Spitz was puzzled. “What’s the problem?” he asked. “He already produces you.” Bruce shook his head adamantly. “No. He gets too much money. He’s robbing me blind.”
If they needed firsthand testimony about Appel playing fast and loose with Bruce’s money, they had come to the right place. “When a [royalty] check for Bruce came in, we used to take it to the Apple Bank on Fifty-fourth and Sixth and cash it,” Spitz says. “[Mike would] put the money in the pocket of his Levi’s jean jacket and pay for everything with it.” When Spitz voiced reservations about his boss’s idiosyncratic way of handling his client’s money, Appel shrugged it off. “He’d say, ‘We’re gonna get it all back!’” Spitz recalls. In the bad old days, the point was difficult to argue because, as Spitz knew, Appel used his own money in precisely the same way, taking as little salary as possible when the Laurel Canyon accounts ran low. That was the only way to feed the cars, hotels, and salaries that kept Bruce and the band moving and working their way to the acclaim Bruce deserved. Who had time to keep neat books when they had a world to conquer? Bruce certainly didn’t care about such niceties, and as long as the music stayed pure and their vision clear, everything else would take care of itself. And he knew Appel agreed with him. “I think Mike is the greatest, number one,” Bruce told John Rockwell just before Born to Run’s release. “I don’t go out there and do half. Mike understands this. He ended up takin’ the heat for a lot of decisions I made.”
And yet Appel was no longer the only man he’d met with the commitment, musical passion, and business expertise to complement his own strengths and shore up his weaknesses. And maybe Landau’s intellectual and emotional sophistication would make him a much better partner for the next part of Bruce’s journey. Nearly two years after Landau had pronounced him the incarnation of rock ’n’ roll’s future, Bruce remained convinced that the critic-turned-producer was the right man to get him there. Bruce took Landau’s word so seriously it often seemed like the writer had already set up shop in Appel’s management office. Once enthusiastic about the live album that Appel had already told CBS they would deliver as a follow-up to Born to Run, Bruce reversed himself abruptly when Landau argued that it was far too early in his career to produce such a summary document. Appel’s ambitious plan to mount a summer university tour with their own six-thousand-capacity circus tent as a portable venue also died a quick death once Bruce heard Landau raise a few potential logistical problems. “And he [Bruce] got vitriolic, and he said it [was] the dumbest thing that he ever heard of,” Landau said in a pretrial deposition. “He said, ‘I can’t believe that I ever thought of it for ten minutes!’” Landau sounded surprised at how quickly and radically Bruce’s mind could change.
Other offers flowed in, some big enough to resolve Bruce’s financial problems in the course of one performance. NBC offered $500,000 for an hour of prime-time television that Bruce could fill however he pleased. No way, Bruce said. A Philadelphia promoter dreamed up a massive July 4, 1976, concert at JFK Stadium, making it a kind of dream opportunity by offering to let Bruce handpick a dozen unsigned New Jersey bands to fill the undercard. And depending on ticket sales, he stood to earn at least $500,000 and as much as $1 million for his work. Once again Bruce shook it off. A stadium concert, he insisted, was the last thing he’d ever do.
Bruce’s lawyers did work out a temporary truce allowing Appel to continue booking a two-month tour that would generate some income by hitting smaller markets they had never taken the time to play, such as Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and the Freedom Hall Civic Center in Johnson City, Tennessee. The project gained the not-so-elegant title of the Chicken Scratch tour, which would have seemed insulting to the towns themselves were Bruce and the band not so desperate for whatever dollars they could pull together i
n order to keep their houses heated and stomachs filled.
Still hoping that there might be a way to construct a situation where Appel and Landau could both work with him, Bruce went to his manager with an offer that could define their futures and resolve their contractual problems in one blow. Appel would have to agree to tear up the old contracts and work by the more equitable terms they had already ironed out. Plus, Bruce wanted complete control over his songs. And if Appel agreed to that, then they could keep rolling just as they had been. With only one more condition: from here on out, every aspect of their business relationship would be guaranteed by a handshake. Nothing more, and nothing less. “I was about contracted out,” Bruce says. “Just very, very gun shy of whatever was going to happen next. But Mike and I had gotten to a place where I thought we had it all sorted out. It was between the two of us. But we did have an arrangement that we had settled on.” Bruce went away feeling relieved. But then Appel talked it over with his dad. And when Appel Sr. told his son that he’d be a fool to tear up his very favorable contracts, Appel changed his mind. “The next day it was off,” Bruce says with a small shrug. “I knew it had something to do with the influence of his pop, and that was the end of that.”
Now it’s easy for Bruce to shrug it off. But in the heat of 1976, Appel’s abrupt change of heart was an affront. “He can’t accept my word!” Bruce seethed to Landau. “Mike knows my word is worth a thousand percent, and he knows if I say I am going to stand by this stuff, I intend to stand by it. And still he’s walking away from it!”
From there the conflict spiraled toward the civil courts. Bruce hired Mayer to carry his standard while Appel worked with Leonard Marks. The attorneys came with small armies of partners, associates, investigators, and paralegals, all poised to attack the variety of contracts and agreements that tied Bruce to Appel, and the both of them to CBS Records, the William Morris Agency, and so on. The two principals kept their distance from each other during the spring and early summer, playing close to the vest while their respective brigades girded for battle. Nothing much happened until mid-June, when Bruce’s representatives informed CBS that the artist planned to start recording his fourth album in August, with Landau joining him in the production booth. Two weeks later Appel’s troops shot back with a letter informing all and sundry that no such recording sessions would take place: given that Bruce’s relationship with his label was as a subcontractor to Laurel Canyon Ltd., the actual signatory on the CBS contract, the agreement obligated the musician to work in accordance with Appel’s directions and then deliver his recordings to the production company. And in early July Appel’s lawyers made it clear that their client would not allow Landau to participate in any recording sessions with Bruce Springsteen.
Now that Appel had, in effect, taken his career out of his hands, Bruce had no option but to fight back as hard as he could. His lawyers filed the lawsuit on July 27, accusing Appel of multiple counts of fraud, breach of trust, and more. Appel countersued two days later, alleging a variety of sins committed by Bruce against his manager and the legally binding agreements by which they had agreed to live.
The most significant recording Bruce made that summer turned out to be the depositions he gave to Appel’s lawyer, Leonard Marks, in the company of his own attorneys, the legal representatives for CBS Records, even more attorneys representing Jon Landau (who had also been named in Appel’s suit), and Bernard Jacobs, a notary public of the state of New York. Thoroughly unschooled in every aspect of civil litigation (a fact that the lawyer Mayer and company should have anticipated), Bruce had no idea what to expect or how to function in what would be an antagonistic procedure.
Appel’s attorney certainly brought the antagonism. Pushed repeatedly to answer questions that were either flummoxing (for instance, the endless series of questions about the precise job titles, duties, and salaries of his road crew) or designed to reveal Bruce’s bratty rock star ways (“Did you stay in good hotels on your tours in 1975?”; “Is it a fact that you generally had a suite of rooms yourself?”), Bruce flipped. He shouted. He swore, referring scornfully to Mr. Marks, Esq., as “Lenny.” At one point, Bruce climbed onto the conference table and jumped up and down in outrage. Then he leaped down, kicked open the door, and burst down the hall and into the women’s bathroom.
A disastrous performance by any measure, and it eventually fell to the judge to take Bruce aside and explain exactly how his own testimony might be used to destroy his case. But when Bruce replaced Mayer with a team of attorneys led by Peter Parcher, his legal strategy shifted to take advantage of the raw anger behind Bruce’s outbursts. According to Springsteen, attorney Mike Tannen, Landau, and others, the team realized that Appel would never settle until he came to understand that his relationship with Bruce was beyond fixing. When the deposition picked up again Bruce still spoke heatedly, but with a distinct strategy behind what he was saying and how wrathful he seemed when he said it. “I never looked at Mike Appel, and I found out that I don’t own a fucking thing that I wrote . . . He told me I had half my publishing, and he lied to me . . . I have been cheated . . . every line of [“Born to Run”] is me, and no line of that [expletive deleted] song is his. I don’t own it. I can’t print it on a piece of paper if I wanted to. I have been cheated.” Bruce repeated the phrases like a chorus. “He lied to me!” “He was dishonest with me!” “He betrayed my trust!”
If that didn’t make Bruce’s feelings about Appel clear, he had also written a mournful new ballad called “The Promise.” Set on the highways of the Jersey Shore, the lyrics told Bruce’s story in the words of a street racer whose hand-built speedster, the Challenger, shared the name of the surfboards that Tinker West made in the factory where Bruce had lived and worked with Steel Mill. Throughout, the song weaves the icons of Bruce’s own life—the familiar roads and factories, the hardworking rock band “lookin’ for that million-dollar sound,” Highway 9, and even Thunder Road, the glittering highway that leads to everything that happens on Born to Run. But in “The Promise,” all of those youthful visions have been stolen, battered, and left for dead on the side of the road. In the end the racer sees himself as a ghost, drifting across a desert as empty as his spirit has become. “When the promise is broken you go on living, though it steals something from down in your soul,” he sang. “Like when the truth is spoken, and it don’t make no difference / Something in your heart grows cold.”
Bruce performed an early version of “The Promise” at the Monmouth Arts Center in Red Bank on August 3, and then played it consistently as he tweaked the song through the nine-month streak of shows they dubbed “the lawsuit tour.” An instant fan favorite, “The Promise” joined “Something in the Night”—another dark ballad featuring dreamers who realize, too late, that making it all come true can be the worst thing that can happen—as a clear harbinger of where he was headed. Still, the emotional core of the evening came most often in “Backstreets” and the heated spoken-word passages that dominated the transition from the song’s final verse to its howling close. As heard in a particularly fiery performance at the Palladium theater in New York City on November 4, the band faded to Bittan’s piano and the light chiming of Federici’s glockenspiel. Bruce stood alone in the spotlight, speak-singing softly at first.
It was me and you, baby. It was me and you, baby. I remember the night when you promised. I remember, I remember, the night. The night you promised . . . You swore that it was me and you, you promised it was me and you. You promised it was me and you.
He stopped for a moment, his voice becoming a harsh, descending wail in the microphone. Federici’s chimes became the sound of church bells.
We swore. I remember, I remember . . . we promised, we promised. You said that when the kids rang the bells . . . you said that when it was midnight, that when it was midnight and it rang, when the kids rang the bells, when the kids rang the bells, we both promised. That when the kids rang the bells . . . we swore. We swore. We swore. We swore. We said we’d go!
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sp; Then the piano and the bells chimed together, gaining volume just as Bruce’s voice climbed into a frenzy.
You said . . . you said we’d go! . . . When the bells were ringing! When the kids ring the bells! When the kids rang the bells, you said. You promised. You promised. And you lied. You lied! You lied! You lied! You lied!
Then a sweaty hand reached into the air, Weinberg hit a rim shot, and just like that, they all switched back into the climactic recitation: “Hidin’ in the backstreets, hidin’ in the backstreets . . .”
Every word, every incantatory phrase, every scream of outrage confirmed what the lawyers and record executives had already concluded about the battle between Bruce and Appel: that the money was the least of it; that the accusations of fraud and contractual violations were actually a veneer above a much more emotional struggle. “These were two people who were essentially married, who had broken down walls for each other and together,” reflects David Benjamin.3 “And it was a great partnership when it worked.” But as in so many early marriages, one of the partners fell under the influence of someone else. “Look, I’ve been divorced; I’ve been there,” Benjamin says. “So just as important as Mike was, he was the starter marriage. Jon took Bruce to places Mike probably couldn’t. And when one of the partners falls in love with someone else, the hurt in the old marriage becomes magnified.”
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