“He came over to my house, and we made a plan, just he and I,” the photographer says. In her telling, Goldsmith described where she had to be during the evening, and said she’d get another photographer, Joel Bernstein, to shoot Bruce’s backstage area once he arrived. “He’d come at a certain time, I’d go to the front [of the stage]. And I wouldn’t go backstage after that. I thought the whole thing was fine after that.”
It wasn’t. So while Goldsmith shot the first of Bruce’s two shows without incident, the second show, with its unhappily received birthday celebrations, turned sour before Bruce saw his ex-girlfriend with other photographers clustered on a platform above the eleventh row. “She was real close right in front, and that’s in Bruce’s field of vision,” road manager Bobby Chirmside says. First Bruce started to pace the stage; then he glared up at Goldsmith until they made eye contact. “He gets down on one knee, and kind of bent his finger at me like, ‘C’mere,’” Goldsmith says. “I knew that look in his eye, and I wasn’t going there.” When Bruce saw Goldsmith packing up her gear, he leaned over to Clemons and shouted “Watch this!” Then he leapt off the stage and into the aisle. Goldsmith tried to vanish into the crowd, but it took only a moment for him to grab her arm. “I was saying, ‘Please stop, you’re hurting me,’” Goldsmith recalls. But Bruce could not stop. He twisted her arm so hard she thought it would snap. Surrounded by rows of stunned and unhappy faces, he pulled Goldsmith down the aisle and then up the stairs to his microphone at center stage.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” he shouted. “This is my ex-girlfriend!” Goldsmith tried to laugh it off in front of the crowd, but then he marched her to the edge of the stage and pushed her into the arms of Chirmside, ordering him to throw her out of the building. Chirmside put his arm around Goldsmith and held her more gently than Bruce had done. But he still escorted her down to the arena’s inner tunnels, where she realized he was following his boss’s orders. “She said, ‘Bobby, you’re not really going to throw me out, are you?’” Chirmside says. “I said, ‘I’m not. But I’ve got to hand you over to security, and then they’re going to have to throw you out.’”
Humiliated and furious, Goldsmith marched out into the night. The other MUSE stars had no idea what had happened, or why. “I just kind of stood there with my mouth hanging open,” Browne says. The understanding backstage was that Goldsmith—despite her leadership role among the MUSE photographers—had violated an agreement to stay away from Bruce’s performance. And yet this didn’t make Bruce’s behavior any less ugly or shocking. “It was kind of Bruce’s personal thing hanging out there.” Browne says. “And I know Lynn; she’s a great gal. It sounds like a misunderstanding that played out in a very dramatic way.”
The drama only got more intense when Joyce Hyser, who had been seated in the arena, burst through the dressing area’s door, cheeks burning with outrage. Bruce hadn’t told her about the brewing conflict with Goldsmith, so when she saw her boyfriend plucking his ex out of the crowd and announcing her as his girlfriend, Hyser—who obviously had missed the “ex” part of his rant—could assume only that she had been had. Storming in Bruce’s direction, Hyser was intercepted by Browne, who guided her into a dressing room and put his arms around her shoulders to calm her down.5 They were still standing like that when an elated Bruce came skipping down the stage stairs, followed by his band, singing the chorus to the Village People’s “Macho Man” in his wake. “He’s all pumped up, then he finds Jackson with his arms around me, and I’m a sniveling mess,” Hyser says. Seeing his current girlfriend in the California singer’s arm refired his temper. “What the hell is going on here?” he snarled, prompting frantic explanations from both Browne and Hyser. Bruce ended the evening begging Hyser’s forgiveness, but even when he and Goldsmith bumped into each other at the Sunset Marquis hotel in Los Angeles a year later, he refused to apologize for anything. Instead, Goldsmith recalls, Bruce blamed her for his public tantrum. “He said, ‘Why did you do that?’ and I just laughed. ‘Why did I do that? Why did you do that?’ Then we both started laughing.”
• • •
Bruce felt much more in control when the time came to oversee his part of the No Nukes movie set to premiere in theaters during the summer of 1980. Although Goldberg recalls Bruce as being uniquely warm and charming throughout, the musician still put the production through his own kind of wringer, starting with the songs the filmmakers wanted to use in the film and on the album. The original cut that Goldberg and codirector Anthony Potenza made included four songs from Bruce’s sets: “The River,” “Thunder Road,” “Stay,”6 and “Quarter to Three.” But when Bruce came in to look at his segments and weigh in on their look, feel, and sound, he had a problem. Given the gravity of the concerts, and his own desire to be taken seriously, he didn’t want his party music to dominate his appearance in the film. So “The River” and “Thunder Road” could stay, but “Stay” and “Quarter to Three” had to go.
He was never rude or peremptory, Goldberg says. Mostly, Bruce responded to the producer-director’s entreaties by not saying anything. And when Goldberg came up with the right explanation about how the narrative of the film, which already included more segments about energy technology than the majority of concert movie attendees would tolerate, required the climactic rush of a Bruce Springsteen encore, Bruce nodded. “He gave me a hug and said, ‘Okay, I get it. You can use these songs,’” Goldberg says. “It was one of the great moments of my life.”
From there Bruce took residence in the editing bay, watching his scenes with the precise eyes of an auteur, calling for different shots or angles.7 And when Bruce got into the sound editing studio, he fussed with the mix at such microlevels and macro length that Goldberg had to beseech Toby Scott (Bruce’s trusty engineer, called in to oversee the music mixing in Bruce’s segments) sometime between midnight and dawn that union rules governing payment for film industry engineers had just put them in an overtime pay bracket (“It was like double-double-golden-overtime-overtime, I think,” Scott says) that could bring the production to its knees. “We wrapped it up a couple of hours later,” says Scott.
• • •
Work on Bruce’s new album continued through the end of 1979 and into the winter of 1980. Attempts to edit the new material into a single album came to nothing. They kept recording, and when the boxes of session tapes hit three hundred and kept growing, they sent a crew member to buy a gigantic 10 foot x 10 foot x 10 foot road case to use as an in-studio storage locker. When they ended a session and loaded the new tapes into their storage container, they secured it with several chains and locks. Soon the box—called the Bruce Springsteen Memorial Couch or the Houdini Box—became a visual metaphor for the seemingly endless project.
As with his previous two albums, Bruce couldn’t stop thinking, and worrying, about the record. And the more he stewed, the more energy he had for writing even more songs. As Hyser remembers, his mind churned constantly, forever absorbing and analyzing the things he saw, heard, lived, and felt, channeling them through his guitar and then into scraps of verse he wrote into his notebook—or, if his binder wasn’t available, onto notepaper that piled up on the coffee tables, counters, and end tables where he sat when inspiration hit. “He always had his guitar,” Hyser says. “Bruce was very romantic but very single-minded about nothing getting in the way of his work, including relationships and friendships. That’s what sustained him at that time . . . and it was just constant.”
When the bill for recording time hit $1 million and kept climbing, CBS president Walter Yetnikoff visited the studio to make sure Bruce understood that it only looked like the company was footing the bill for all their work. All those charges would end up being paid for through Bruce’s own royalties. “His response was, ‘How better can I spend my money than on my art?’” Yetnikoff says. “What was I supposed to tell him?’ ‘No! You should spend all your money on drugs!’?” Bruce was just as convincing when he insisted that The River could only work as a double album. Record
company chiefs tend to hate that sort of thing (double albums cost more in the shops, thus selling in lower numbers), but when Bruce told him that a single album didn’t give him enough space to say what he needed to say, Yetnikoff says he was powerless to respond. “You can’t argue with that. You can’t respond except to say, ‘All right! You win!’” Still, Yetnikoff had little sympathy for Bruce’s fixation on achieving the most perfect of all perfect mixes. “I said, ‘You know what? Nobody gives a fuck about the snare drum sound,’” says Yetnikoff. “I said, ‘Let me mix your record. Just show me the voice button, and I’ll mix the fucking record. And don’t worry about the snare drum—nobody hears it. Another musician might, but everyone else is listening to your voice!’ ” Bruce passed on the offer.
At the start of the sessions in 1979, Bruce had brought in “Hungry Heart,” a cheery pop tune built around a piano riff he borrowed from the Four Seasons’ 1964 hit “Dawn (Go Away).” He ran the band through a handful of takes and then lost interest when he decided it sounded too airy for the hard-bitten album he’d envisioned. True enough, earlier drafts of “Hungry Heart” sketch a dark story, admitting “Sometimes I can’t explain the things I do / I guess I did it ’cause I wanted to.” The title phrase also appears in an earlier, even bleaker version of “Stolen Car,” in the narrator’s admission that the end of his marriage came because “I fell victim to a hungry heart.” Even “Hungry Heart” ’s recorded lyrics—which begin with the narrator deserting his family and then describe the start and end of another relationship in a single sentence (“We fell in love, I knew it had to end”)—seems out of step with its breezy music. Nevertheless, Bruce abandoned the song, deciding to give it to the Ramones for their next album. Landau, on the other hand, refused to let it go. In this he had an enthusiastic partner in Van Zandt. “It just had this groove,” Van Zandt says. “Something about this song. So I said, ‘Let’s get some extra high harmony on it.’” They called in Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, cofounders of the harmony-centric sixties band the Turtles (“Happy Together,” etc.) to add a touch of Beach Boys to the backing vocals. Thinking that Bruce’s Big Voice croon made the song sound a bit too mature for Top 40 radio, Plotkin sped up the tape to give the vocal a more boyish lilt. “We got up to Mickey Mouse speed ’til we backed it down,” Landau says. Finished tinkering, Van Zandt handed the mixing duties over to Bob Clearmountain, already known for his ability to give potential hits just the right coat of gloss. Excitement all around.
Until they played the completed track to Bruce, who shook his head. He still didn’t like it. Too pop, too lightweight. So just hand it off, just like they’d done with “The Fever,” “Because the Night,” and “Fire,” the latter of which had climbed to number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the Pointer Sisters in February 1979. So, conversation over. Except that it wasn’t. As both Van Zandt and Landau knew, the time had come for Bruce to have a real hit song on Top 40 radio. “It’s a complicated moment,” Van Zandt says. “You really need it to be the right hit single at the right time, or else your rock credibility goes away. But this is our fifth album. We’ve paid our dues. And this felt right.”
Eventually convinced that “Hungry Heart” did fit on the new album and would serve nicely as the project’s lead-off single, Bruce gave up worrying about the corrosive effect of the Top 10. Then he began to look forward to seeing what a hot single might do for his career—particularly when CBS publicist Paul Rappaport pulled him aside in October to tell him how strong the response from radio programmers and other industry factota had become. “I told Bruce, ‘Hey, ka-ching! That song’s gonna be a hit!’” Bruce beamed. “Great!” he said, “I’ve been wanting to get some new tires for my ’Vette!” Rappaport laughed. “I said, ‘You can probably buy a whole Corvette factory when this is over.’ He just looked at me like I was crazy and walked away.”
Bruce had no idea. Released on October 17, 1980, The River bolted for the top of the Billboard album chart, selling more than 1.5 million copies in the run-up to Christmas. “Hungry Heart,” released four days after the album, was ubiquitous on Top 40 radio throughout the fall, climbing to number 5 of the singles chart. None of Bruce’s previous singles had even come close to the Top 10. By the time the band got to the Rosemont Horizon arena in northern Illinois on November 20, the chiming sound of the hit song’s intro so excited the crowd that Bruce couldn’t get the first line of the first verse out of his mouth before the fans drowned him out, shouting every word in perfect unison. “Bruce’s eyes were popping out, like ‘Holy shit!’” Rappaport remembers. “He’s always let the crowd do the first verse ever since, but that was the moment. The shock on his face, the pure delight. That was priceless.”
• • •
Set adrift on opposing currents of ecstasy and dread, The River reveals as much about Bruce’s internal life as he’d ever displayed in public. The mostly live performances (the basic band tracks were often enhanced with overdubbed vocals and/or guitar and saxophone solos) emphasize the big studio’s ambient blend, giving the songs a barroom feel that trades the precision of “Born to Run” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town” with the power of the full band’s instrumental wallop. “I wanted to cut some music that felt very explosive,” Bruce says. “I wanted to combine the fun aspect of what the band did along with the story I was telling. Find a way to combine those things and create a bigger picture of what we did out in front of the people.”
Thus the legion of new fans who would push The River to quintuple-platinum status were introduced to a performer and band whose approach was defined by what Bruce describes as “desperate fun”: a joyful noise meant to keep the encroaching gloom at bay, if only for the moment. Singing with the raw voice of an embattled ordinary guy, Bruce narrated his stories as directly and unromantically as possible. “I was interested in what adulthood meant,” he says. “That was a life that I was not living, but seeing from the outside looking in, I admired it in a lot of ways. I thought it was certainly the roots of the place that I grew up in and the people that I knew.” People who lived and worked hard, and who celebrated their glories and assuaged their wounds to the sound of barroom rock ’n’ roll.
From a distance, the simple joys of rock ’n’ roll are all over the album, from the Delta House rock of “Sherry Darling” (with cheers and chorus singing concocted in the studio), to the taut drums and guitars on “The Ties That Bind,” “Two Hearts,” and “Out in the Street.” But just as “Hungry Heart” ’s joyous music belies its uneasy core, “Cadillac Ranch” ’s celebration of America’s most luxurious gas-guzzler, complete with its shout-outs to famous hot-rodders Junior Johnson, James Dean, and Burt Reynolds, lead to the long black Cadillac that takes all its passengers on a one-way trip.8 The narrator of “Ramrod” also has death on his mind, even as he pushes his automotive slang into the red zone of sexual metaphor. “This guy . . . he’s there, but he’s really not there anymore,” Bruce told Dave Marsh in 1981. The song’s last line, “Give me the word now, sugar, we’ll go ramroddin’ forevermore,” made the shadow of death inescapable, at least to its author. “I don’t know,” he told Marsh. “That’s a real sad line to me sometimes.” Thirty years later it’s easier for Bruce to put his finger on why: “When you make your big choices in life—who you’re going to be with, where you’re going to live, what you’re going to work at—there’s a very natural clock that starts ticking. And that’s your time clock, my friend.”
And so even as The River traces the human toll of economic and social inequity (particularly in the title track, “Jackson Cage,” and “The Price You Pay”), the real-life verities of adult romance (“I Wanna Marry You”), and the chill of emotional isolation (“Stolen Car”), the entire journey is geared to end, with the richest possible symbolism, with the bloodied wreckage and shattered body we find in “Wreck on the Highway.” “So at the end of the record, that’s what gets introduced,” Bruce says. “The highway’s closed at a certain point. You have a certain amount of miles that you can
make. It’s a recognition of mortality.”
EIGHTEEN
DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE
THE 140-STOP RIVER TOUR KICKED off in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on October 3, 1980, hauling through virtually every major city in the United States before playing a final stateside show in Indianapolis on March 5, 1981. A first-ever full-length European tour was scheduled to start in Brighton, England, on March 17. But when the cold he’d been fending off at the end of the stateside tour floored him for more than a week, Bruce came to understand how much the US tour had drained from his tank. Leery of venturing back to the United Kingdom with something less than all cylinders wide open and roaring—particularly to London, from which he still felt he’d been spanked and sent home in 1975, Bruce and Landau rescheduled the twelve British shows to be the last stops on the European itinerary.
Heading into the opening concert in Hamburg, Germany, on April 7, Bruce’s pretour nerves frazzled a bit more when the local promoter warned that Hamburg audiences were notoriously undemonstrative. Just because they’re sitting there silently with blank looks on their faces, Bruce heard, didn’t mean they weren’t having fun per se. Just don’t expect an American-style eruption of energy. “So the audience sat through the first set, just nothing, until we came back and opened the second set with ‘Badlands,’” Bruce recalls. “Then they rushed the stage, and that was it for the rest of the tour. Just mayhem every place we went.”
The wild reception chased them across Europe and into Britain, running particularly hot at London’s 12,500-seat Wembley Arena, which Bruce and band filled completely each night of their six-night stand in late May and early June. “It was startling,” Bruce says. “If I were to list some of the high points of being out there working, that tour was one of them.”
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