Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Van Zandt was just as stunned. “We break Europe, and we’ve made it. We are a success. And it’s like, wow! We really did it! Fifteen years in the making, y’know.” As Premier Talent’s Frank Barsalona had promised, Europe was, and remains, a lucrative market for Bruce.

  Even more important, the tour allowed Bruce and everyone else in the E Street touring party to look at the world from somewhere beyond American soil. Starting out as provincial Americans protected by the insularity of the rock ’n’ roll tour bubble, the journey through other lands, cities, and communities presented an entirely new perspective. So many of the people they met, particularly the young adults they found in the coffee shops and pubs, had come to see America as a forbidding imperial presence. “This kid accused me of putting missiles in his country, and I was like, ‘What are ya talking about? There’s a guitar in that case, not a missile,’” Van Zandt says. “But it wouldn’t leave my head until I realized that when you leave this country, you’re an American. It’s not Democrat or Republican, taxi driver or rocker. It’s just American. And we’re supposedly a democracy, so you are responsible for what your country does.”

  Bruce had already voiced his fears of the incoming Ronald Reagan administration onstage the night after the deeply conservative politician’s election on November 4, 1980.1 His anxieties, particularly when it came to the new president’s bellicose stance against the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc of nations, had already been realized in western Europe, where an influx of American missiles and personnel evoked forty-year-old memories of marching soldiers and rampaging tanks, along with fears of the modern chemical warfare that could reduce their lives into so many clouds of poisonous dust. Soon the narrative of the shows confronted the idea of America itself, in all its beauty and failings. Bruce had already introduced a striking cover of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” in late December, noting sharply that the folk tune so many people considered a fireside sing-along was intended as a rebuttal to the starry-eyed triumphalism in Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” Adding John Fogerty’s Vietnam-era “Who’ll Stop the Rain” and “Run Through the Jungle” drew out the social commentary already girding “Thunder Road,” “The Promised Land,” and especially “Badlands.”

  At the same time, Bruce focused his reading on American history, in search of stories and analyses that gave new perspective to the accepted saga of pilgrims, patriots, great men, and Manifest Destiny. Joe Klein’s Woody Guthrie: A Life sketched a real-life portrait of the roads, work sites, and campsites visited by the Joad family in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, while Henry Steele Commager and Allan Nevins’s The Pocket History of the United States described the nation’s development from a populist perspective that reflected his own experience as a child of the lower working class. “I never heard anyone talk about politics in my neighborhood,” Bruce says. “It might have come up once in school, because I came home one day and asked my mother if we were Republican or Democrats. She said we were Democrats, because they’re for the working people. And that was the extent of the political conversation in my entire childhood.”

  Raised to view the American story through the eyes of the downtrodden, Bruce could connect his parents’ struggles with the larger dynamics of a country prone to forget its most vulnerable citizens. To be a Springsteen in Freehold meant knowing all about vulnerability and the taste of the ashes scattered upon the people who couldn’t summon the power to fight for themselves. It was the same story he’d written about his father in “Adam Raised a Cain,” the flame-lit portrait of a man forced to work a lifetime “for nothin’ but the pain.” Only now he could recognize Doug Springsteen’s struggle in a larger context: as another glimpse of the underside of the American Dream. The story of the man whose perspective on American-style progress came from beneath its razor wheels.

  So much of Bruce’s ambition, and the unrelenting energy he had focused on building his career, had been fueled by his determination to avoid his father’s fate. In the midst of his biggest success2 the time had come to turn his attention, and more important, his audience’s attention, to the Americans whose nation had left them behind. After all, a significant percentage of his friends and fans were the people who suffered at the hands of a top-down socioeconomic structure. “We were at that very moment out and engaged with the people who were on the other end of the stick,” Bruce says. “So that became a regular part of the show. I still reserve a small part of the evening for a public service announcement. I do believe that there’s a section of my audience that’s involved with what I’m doing, so I address them, and it feels like a natural thing to do.”

  Back in the United States in mid-June, Bruce took his first step into a cause that had been playing on his conscience since his late-seventies encounter with Ron Kovic, the maimed Vietnam vet, antiwar activist, and bestselling author of the politically charged memoir Born on the Fourth of July.3 Bruce found a paperback edition of the book while on a road trip through the Southwest and read it in a desert motel somewhere between Phoenix and Los Angeles. Hanging out by the pool at the Sunset Marquis a few days later, he saw a wheelchair-bound man rolling over to say hi. Bruce spoke to the guy for a few minutes before he realized that the man in front of him was the author of the book he had just finished. “It was really strange,” Bruce said to Will Percy for Double Take in 1998. “I said, ‘You wouldn’t believe this, but I bought your book in a drugstore in Arizona, and I just read it. It’s incredible.’” Kovic took him to a veterans’ center in the Venice neighborhood and later put him in touch with Bobby Muller, a wounded vet who had started a national organization for his and Kovic’s contemporaries, the Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA).

  Hearing in 1981 that Muller’s organization had run out of money and would be forced to close its doors, Bruce invited him to a show at New Jersey’s newly opened Meadowlands Arena in July, and then asked him to stay late so they could talk. In the midst of that conversation, Bruce, Muller, and Landau hatched a plan: when the tour came back to Los Angeles in late August, they would make the opening concert at the Los Angeles Sports Arena into a benefit for the VVA.

  With a legion of veterans, many severely wounded, watching from a specially built deck on the side of the stage, Bruce started the show with a brief but emotional speech. Describing America’s Vietnam era as a long walk through a dark alley where thugs attack some people while others walk past without looking up, he urged the audience to throw a lifeline to the war’s victims. “Unless we’re able to walk down those dark alleys and look into the eyes of the men and the women that are down there and the things that happened, we’re never gonna be able to get home,” he said. Muller spoke next, concluding his speech by observing that rock ’n’ roll had always been the one thing that bonded his generation of Americans. “So let’s not talk about it, let’s get down to it, let’s rock ’n’ roll it!” Bruce kicked the band into Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain” and let it rip for nearly four hours, straight through the long-lost Bob Dylan–Roger McGuinn anthem “Ballad of Easy Rider,” an extended “Detroit Medley,” and then back to the start of his own rock ’n’ roll life with a wild run at “Twist and Shout.”

  A transformative event for the VVA and a significant step for the Vietnam vets movement in general (Muller later said, “Without Bruce Springsteen, there would be no Vietnam veterans movement”), the show also allowed Bruce to address the memory of Bart Haynes, the “swingin’ little drummer” the Castiles lost to the war in 1967, and Joe Curcio, a Freehold Regional classmate who had gone into the service with all the fire and energy of an eighteen-year-old kid and then returned two years later as a shattered spirit, his shoulders stooped beneath the weight of what he’d seen and done. As Curcio recalls, Bruce had always gone out of his way to be kind to him during his dark years, even when he found him in a barroom or on a sidewalk collapsed beneath his burden and whatever he had consumed to numb his distress. “I was kinda screwed up, but he was always nice,�
� Curcio says. “Bruce is special like that.”

  Special enough to realize that his own onstage tales of avoiding the war (throughout the seventies, Bruce spun wild tales about his attempts to convince the US Army he was crazy) might strike some veterans, or their survivors, as less than funny. All of those tactics were common in the late-1960s,4 but that still didn’t seem to justify Bruce’s celebrating a scheme that resulted in other Americans serving in his stead. Particularly given the crowning irony that Bruce needed only to submit his medical file—and its notes about the concussion and knee injury he’d suffered in his 1968 motorcycle accident—to be shooed out with 4-F stamped on his forehead. By the time he told the same story to introduce “The River” in the early eighties, all traces of slapstick were gone. When the audience cheered his failing the army’s physical exam, he cut them short: “It ain’t nothin’ to applaud about.”

  • • •

  On a night off from the River tour in Denver, Bruce went out to see Woody Allen’s film Stardust Memories. As he described it later to Dave Marsh, his solitary evening took a turn at the popcorn counter when a teenage fan came up to shake his hand. Noticing that Bruce had come alone, the guy invited the musician to watch the movie with him and his sister. Bruce said sure, and the three watched Allen’s acidic take on fame together. When the lights came up afterward, the teenager looked stricken. “Jesus, I don’t know what to say to ya,” he said. “Is this the way it is? Is this how you feel?’” Bruce reassured him he never felt besieged by fans, which relieved the guy enough to invite the musician to come back to the family’s house and meet their parents. Bruce didn’t hesitate to say yes, and after a brief you’ve-gotta-be-kidding-us scene at the door (resolved when the guy ran into his room and returned with his copy of The River, holding the cover portrait next to the real Bruce’s face), they welcomed Bruce like long-lost family, cooking up a late dinner for them all to share, and then sitting at the table for hours telling him all about their lives, ambitions, and all the rest. Talking to Marsh, Bruce was nearly breathless as he described the scene. “You get somebody’s whole life in three hours,” he said. “You get their parents, you get their sister, you get their family life, in three hours. And I went back to that hotel, and I felt really good because I thought, ‘Wow.’” As he’d already said, it was one of fame’s most rarified privileges. “That is something that can happen to me that can’t happen to most people.”

  And it wasn’t an isolated experience. As Bruce told Fred Schruers in his Rolling Stone cover story published in January 1981, another fan had recently come up to tell him he had just spent ten hours on a bus in order to celebrate his twenty-first birthday at that night’s concert. What’s more, being able to tell that to Bruce face-to-face was the most important thing that had ever happened to him. “In ten minutes I’ll know more about him than his mother and father do, and maybe his best friend,” Bruce told Schruers. “It’s just a real raw, emotional thing; it’s like the cleanest thing you ever felt. You gotta love the guy. If you don’t, there’s something the matter with you.”

  But there’s also something the matter with a thirty-one-year-old man who feels most comfortable engaging in such brief, fan-to-star encounters. And while Bruce invested the largest part of his energy in giving his audiences a night of music thrilling and genuine enough to be personally transformative,5 he came away each night feeling less like a man reveling in the company of his twenty thousand new friends than like a seduction artist creeping out of a lover’s bedroom with his shoes in his hand. “I’d rather go on the bus to another city than stay [after a show],” he told the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Hilburn. “I don’t like staying. It’s funny. It makes me feel uncomfortable.” As did the thought of having a permanent home of his own rather than the crash pads and the lightly decorated rental houses he had cycled through for more than a decade. Even when he bought a three-bedroom house in Los Angeles where girlfriend Joyce Hyser stayed when she was working in town—often with Bruce’s sister Pam as a housemate—when Bruce came to town, he usually avoided his own house in favor of the ease and anonymity of the Sunset Marquis hotel. “Bruce really loved the hotel life,” says Hyser. “He loved being on the road.”

  Then in the midst of her four-year romance with Bruce, Hyser had plenty of opportunities to feel the tension between her boyfriend’s sensitivity and his reflexive need to hide behind the barrier he’d erected to keep his inner self from other people. So while Bruce was happy to include his girlfriend in Springsteen family events, and went on to bond with her father, he never seemed all that upset when she shrugged off his occasional musings about getting married. “One reason why we stayed together as long as we did was that we both always had one foot out the door,” she says. “Everyone had an escape route.” Bruce traced the limits of his own commitment to Hyser by comparing his life to a totem pole, upon which one force would always rule above all others. “Honestly, there was nothing more important than his career,” Hyser reflects. “That’s what it came down to at the end of the day.” That, and the understanding that their relationship had to bow to his need for privacy. “His whole thing in those days was, ‘When I want to see you, you need to be here, and when I don’t, you need to be gone.’”

  • • •

  The River tour ended with two shows in Cincinnati in mid-September 1981, after which the entire band, plus wives, girlfriends, management, and key E Street staffers traveled to Hawaii to celebrate Clarence Clemons’s wedding to Christina Sandgren, whom he’d met in Scandinavia during the group’s European swing that spring. Bruce served as the sax player’s best man and led the entire band in a long set of oldies and originals during the reception. Returning to his latest rental house in New Jersey, he contemplated the posttour silence with mixed feelings. Finally flush with the long-delayed rewards of rock stardom, he had the financial freedom to do virtually anything he could imagine. Except for that he couldn’t imagine anything he wanted to do other than to write and record a new album, or be on the road, or jam at the Stone Pony or in Clemons’s new club, Big Man’s West, a few klicks up the Jersey Shore in Red Bank.

  “It was definitely a closing to a certain earlier section of my life, the initial section of the traveling and touring and those early records,” Bruce says. “There was more contemplation. I was thirty or thirty-one, and something turned me back around toward my early childhood. That moved me into Nebraska, so that was pretty telling. I’m not sure what brought that music around, really.”

  Probably the same thing that compelled him, night after night, to climb into his car and drive the streets of Freehold, visiting the empty space on Randolph Street, where he had once lived with his grandparents; the duplex on Institute Street where he had been a schoolboy; and then the duplex on South Street where he’d lived as a teenager. He had no idea what he was looking for, Bruce admitted later. But that didn’t stop him from going back. No matter where he was, memories of the Randolph Street house, and the shattered remnants of the life his grandparents had lost when their daughter died, fell over him. When he saw Badlands, the 1973 Terrence Malick film based on the exploits of teenage mass murderer Charlie Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old lover, Caril Ann Fugate,6 the disconnection in the characters’ eyes, the sense of living so far beyond meaningful social engagement that the rest of the world spins into a blur, brought him back into the house’s chilly living room. “I was trying to capture the mood of what the house was like when I was a child,” he says. “Austere, haunted . . . just this incredible inner turmoil.”

  The song Bruce first called “Starkweather” took shape quickly, the transposition of his childhood memories into the Midwestern murder saga made easier by his reading of Ninette Beaver’s book-length description of the killings and a vintage state map of Nebraska he’d turned up somewhere. Pairing it with another freshly written song, “Mansion on the Hill,” set the emotional terrain firmly in his Freehold youth, so while the stories ranged from undisguised autobiography (“Used Cars,” �
��My Father’s House,” “Mansion on the Hill”), to bleak accounts of criminals, cops, and gangster wars (“Johnny 99,” “Highway Patrolman,” “Atlantic City”), to “Born in the U.S.A.,” a bitter account of the life of a small-town Vietnam veteran, the same mood of desolation wove the songs into a unified whole. From song to song, story to story, and character to character, the same images and thoughts repeat, often word for word: “I got debts no honest man can pay,” declares the last-chance narrator in “Atlantic City.” The same phrase appears in “Johnny 99,” this time from the mouth of a just-convicted criminal begging the judge to send him to death row.

  Where poverty doesn’t loom, spiritual emptiness does. “Deliver me from nowhere” declares the incipient psychopath talking himself in and out of a murderous rage in “State Trooper.” Less threatening, and yet similarly lost, the narrator of “Open All Night” pins his hopes on the radio dial: “Hey ho, rock ’n’ roll, deliver me from nowhere.” And if the explicitly autobiographical songs lose the criminal element, the air of anguish is just as thick. Recollections of a summertime party in “Mansion on the Hill” (the name clearly reminiscent of Anthony Zerilli’s House on the Hill) filter through the stalks of corn where the uninvited young narrator hides with his sister to take in the music and lights. Memories of accompanying his father on trips to an auto dealership play as exercises in humiliation in “Used Cars,” while “Reason to Believe,” which in any other setting would be the title of a rousing anthem, unspools as existentialism. “Still, at the end of every hard-earned day, people find some reason to believe,” he concludes. It’s that some that makes all the difference. Put your faith in this, put your faith in that. For all the good it does, it might as well be nothing at all.