Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Back at the Power Station in midtown Manhattan in the later months of 1983, Bruce, the band, Landau, Plotkin, and Scott continued to struggle over what the next album could or should be. Nearly two years since the sessions started with that amazing run in January 1982 (a dozen songs finished in three weeks) they had recorded sixty more tracks. All had their charms, most were release-worthy, and some felt like classics waiting for their moment in the sun. Once again, the litany of styles and moods could stretch to several albums for several different bands. “Lion’s Den” and “Pink Cadillac” sounded like rhythm and blues, while “Stand on It” and “Delivery Man” sprang from rockabilly. “Murder Incorporated” and “My Love Will Not Let You Down” rocked hard as nails, and “This Hard Land,” “County Fair,” and “None but the Brave” spun all of that together with strains of country, folk, and Bruce’s own boardwalk sound. But even given all that—and so much more—the album refused to take form. By late summer, coproducer Plotkin had no idea where the project was heading. Bruce’s tentative track list, which dispensed with “Working on the Highway,” “I’m on Fire,” and “My Hometown,” among others, from the January 1982 sessions in favor of newer cuts, including “My Love Will Not Let You Down” and “None but the Brave,” struck Plotkin as a conceptual mess. “I said, ‘The record I’m hearing starts with “Born in the U.S.A.” and ends with “My Hometown.” ’ I wanted ‘Working on the Highway’ back, ‘I’m on Fire,’ and some other stuff we cut.”

  Focusing again on the album’s earliest sessions, the album that began to emerge filtered the dystopian gloom of the Nebraska songs into the living world of love, work, and the hobbled pursuit of happiness. The martial beat and roared chorus of “Born in the U.S.A.” could be mistaken for an anthem, while the buddies’ road trip in “Darlington County” runs through small highway adventures before the narrator skips town with the image of his handcuffed pal receding in his rearview mirror. The central character in “Working on the Highway” pays for his love affair with a (slightly too) young girl on the Charlotte County road gang, and even the riotous “Glory Days” draws its light through nostalgia rather than faith in the future.

  Heading into the first weeks of 1984, it seemed that the album, now named Born in the U.S.A., was finished—until Landau declared that they still didn’t have the right song to serve as the all-important, project-defining lead single. A song, he explained, that would serve as a direct statement of who Bruce had become; a self-portrait his fans could understand and see enough of themselves in to feel a direct, human connection. Hearing his manager’s request/demand was not the least bit happy-making for Bruce, who cited the six dozen songs he’d already written and proposed that Landau write his own fucking song if he thought he could do better. When Bruce’s anger subsided, he said he’d give it a try and went to his hotel to get some sleep. Back in the studio the next night, he opened his notebook to a freshly scrawled page, took up his guitar, and played through “Dancing in the Dark,” a taut, melodic tale of frustration and isolation. Set in his own day-for-night world of recording studios, hotel rooms, and dark streets, the song started in high gear and kept pushing. When the verse pivoted into the chorus, Bruce’s voice climbed with the chords. “You can’t start a fire without a spark,” he sang. “This gun’s for hire, even if we’re just dancing in the dark.”

  Rooted deep in Bruce’s musical and lyrical terrain, “Dancing” still came through the speakers with a distinct Top 40 sheen. Recorded with Bittan’s synthesizers at the top of the mix and Weinberg nailing a straight-ahead 148-beats-per-minute beneath Bruce’s clear, urgent vocal, “Dancing in the Dark” was the most deliberate play for the mainstream he’d ever made. At one time, he wouldn’t even have considered doing such a thing. But being older, more experienced, and secure in his abilities and stature didn’t hurt. Neither did the blistering message he knew listeners would confront in the album’s title track, and in the class consciousness that connected so many of the album’s other tracks. In the midst of the Reagan presidency, and the “Morning in America” he described—despite the economic darkness just beyond the walls of the country’s gated communities—Bruce felt pulled to leverage his music and image into a strong dissenting argument.

  “I had an idea, and it was an idea that I had been working on for several records,” he says. “It shot through Nebraska, all through The River, all through Darkness on the Edge of Town, and, really, right there on Born to Run. I was a strange product of Elvis and Woody Guthrie, and I pursued the pink Cadillac in my own way, but I was fascinated by people who had become a voice for their moment. Elvis, Woody Guthrie, Curtis Mayfield, Bob Dylan, of course. I don’t know if I felt I had a capacity for it or just willed my way in that direction, but it was just something I was interested in. Probably because it was all caught up in identity.” Bruce’s self-exploration merged with his social, political, and commercial ambitions. “You cannot figure out who you are if you don’t understand where you came from, what were the forces that work on your life as a child, as a teenager, and as a young man. What part do you have to play? How do you empower yourself?”

  Bruce figured out how to empower himself the first time he’d stepped onstage with a guitar in his hands. He’d worked his way from the social invisibility of his Freehold boyhood to local and then regional popularity, and then rock ’n’ roll stardom. Born to Run and then The River made him a cultural figure, and with a new album that he was already confident would take him higher into the public consciousness, he sensed an opportunity to make an impact far beyond the Billboard charts, the pages of Rolling Stone, and the concert arenas. He could represent another kind of American face: the ones who went to war, sacrificed their health and sanity, and were ignored when they got home; the workers who gave themselves to jobs that were as essential as they were taken for granted.

  That was the grandest part of his reasoning, anyway, and it certainly helped assuage his fears of what such a resounding bid for superstardom might imply about his creative integrity, or what that level of success would do to the quality of his life. But those questions didn’t even begin to slow him down. They had already hired the era’s best pop/rock/dance mixer, Bob Clearmountain, to work his radio-friendly magic on the new songs. Given Clearmountain’s reputation and track record (the Rolling Stones’ hit “Miss You” and Tattoo You album, which included the smash “Start Me Up”; Huey Lewis and the News’ multiplatinum Sports album; Roxy Music’s hit LP Avalon; and many others), the option of swerving left was no longer operative. And that in itself signaled a dramatic shift.

  “On The River, Bob mixed an album’s worth of songs, and that didn’t end up being the record we used,” Bruce explains. “He wasn’t as dysfunctional as we were, so he worked quickly. We wanted to take a very long time thinking about it. Or I did, and everybody else wanted to follow along. We put those things together with glue and tape and, uh, plenty of talent. But moving to Bob was an acknowledgment of a place I’d gotten to in my recording work; an acknowledgment that I had those ambitions. I had to say I’m using this one and not that one because I think that this one is going to reach an audience that that one may or may not. So I had to acknowledge my ambitions, I had to acknowledge that we had moved into a level where we were now going to be interacting with professionals.”

  Still, the mixer of hit songs was flabbergasted to hear the master tracks for “Dancing in the Dark.” “It’s actually pretty different from the rest of the album. It’s got a really commercial groove to it,” Clearmountain says. “And it just took a few hours to mix—a very simple job, and still one of the easiest records I’ve ever mixed. But when I put that up, I just thought, ‘Whoa, this sounds like a hit song! Where’d that come from?’” As Landau says, it came straight from the ambitions that he and Bruce had always shared, which had drawn them together in the midst of Born to Run, steered them to make Darkness on the Edge of Town—a solid seller after its initial fizzle—and governed Bruce’s eagerness to have the similarly ambitiou
s Landau sign on as his manager in the summer of 1978. “If you weren’t interested in having an enormous impact and success, you wouldn’t have picked me to work with. Because I am interested in those things,” Landau says. “How Bruce saw himself, his role, his career, and all of those things was diverse, it wasn’t just one thing. But he did want—we both wanted—to have tremendous success. And everything that we did together culminated in Born in the U.S.A.”

  To make sure they were on the right track with the just-completed single, Bruce picked up an acetate copy of the song and took it with him down to Asbury Park’s Club Xanadu. Taking his usual seat at the bar, he ordered a beer and a shot and waited for the place to fill up. When the dance floor overflowed, he handed the disc to the DJ and explained what it was. Bruce didn’t want any fuss. “Don’t tell anyone what it is,” he insisted. “Just put it on, and we’ll see what happens.” The DJ got it spinning, and when he faded out the other song and turned up the volume on “Dancing in the Dark,” the dancers flew into overdrive, and the whole club seemed to levitate above Kingsley Street. “The place went wild, then all of the sudden we were dancing on the bar,” Paul Smith says.

  • • •

  Columbia/CBS chiefs Al Teller and Walter Yetnikoff started their dancing when Landau invited them to the recording studio to preview the follow-up to The River. They all got along famously—particularly in the wake of Nebraska, which the company helped push to gold-selling status before Christmas, and then to platinum a few months later. Pretty good for anyone’s album, and close to spectacular for a set of spooky acoustic demos. Landau had already made it clear that the new album shared a lot more in common with The River than with Nebraska, so they came in expecting something that would sound like a hit. They weren’t disappointed.

  “They start playing it,” Teller recalls, “and I’m listening with two distinct heads: my fan head and my professional head. And my fan head is loving it. But my professional head is going completely bonkers. I’m hearing one hit after another. There’s like five, six hits on there, and I’m already sequencing the singles in my head.” Turn up the album yourself, and you’ll hear it too. From the first blast of drums and synthesizer on the title song to the searing guitar, interlocking keyboards, and danceable rhythm on “Cover Me”2 to the ringing cowbell, snare blasts, and carnival organ–piano blend on “Darlington County,” distinctively new and yet still rooted in the soil of the common-man America he’d always known. Tallent’s bass is both economical and melodic. “Working on the Highway” evokes rockabilly and the English Beat at the same time, while “I’m on Fire” sounds like a Johnny Cash tune infused with neon. With one last song to play, Landau stopped the tape and told the story about how it had taken them until just weeks ago to realize that the album still lacked the perfect hit single, and how Bruce had gone off to give it one more try. “And I think we got it,” he said, nodding for the engineer to restart the tape. That’s when they heard “Dancing in the Dark.”

  “I think I hit the studio ceiling,” Teller says. Yetnikoff soared right alongside. “I don’t know if I wet my pants, but I may have. I’ve done that other times,” Yetnikoff says. “I was as rabid a fan as the fourteen-year-old girl in New Jersey. Sometimes record executives actually like the stuff they’re dealing with. And I was very turned on by what Bruce had become as an artist, and what he meant to the musical world, the rock ’n’ roll world.”

  Teller turned back to Landau and told him to prepare for a ride like he and Bruce had never taken before. “I don’t make predictions very often,” Teller says. “But I told Jon, guaranteed him, that the album was a smash hit number one record. That we’d sell tens of millions of albums in the US, and get at least a two-and-a-half-year run out of it. I told him they’d do two touring cycles behind this, and that this [‘Dancing’] is a smash hit number one single.”

  When Bruce came in—he’d been lurking, and perhaps listening in to the executives’ reaction, in the room next door—Teller wrapped him in a victory hug. “Forget about it!” Teller raved. “This is going to be your most spectacular album. Easily.” Barring one small hiccup (“Dancing” never quite got past Prince’s “When Doves Cry” to number one) every one of Teller’s predictions came true.

  • • •

  When Landau had asked Bruce to write a more personal song, the musician had produced “Dancing” and “Bobby Jean,” the latter a yearning rocker that bid farewell to a longtime friend. Whether he’s singing to a romantic partner or an old pal isn’t clear. The name in the title is sexually ambiguous, and the lyrics don’t tip one way or another. What is entirely clear, however, is the bone-deep connection between friends who have had each other’s back since they were awkward teenagers. “Now there ain’t nobody nowhere nohow / Gonna ever understand me the way you did,” Bruce sings. And the love in his voice is just as vivid as the hurt in the chorus: “Now I wished you would have told me / I wished I could have talked to you / Just to say good-bye, Bobby Jean.”

  Generally not the sort of thing Bruce would, or could, say to someone’s face. But “Bobby Jean” was directed to one distinct person to address one very specific fact: Steve Van Zandt had left the E Street Band. And maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise, given that the guitarist had been muttering about leaving ever since the start of the River sessions in 1979. Bruce’s insistence that Van Zandt become a full-fledged member of the production team had kept his childhood pal on board for the time being, but Steve’s frustration had mounted again during the 1982 sessions for Born in the U.S.A. Van Zandt formed his own band, the Disciples of Soul, to clear his palate during the break and quickly produced a debut album of biting, overtly political music called Men Without Women (1982), which he followed with a lengthy tour of Europe. A second album, 1984’s Voice of America, followed, along with another tour. But while Bruce went out of his way to be supportive of his pal’s solo work—contributing parts to the first album, although he’s uncredited—the distance opening between them grew increasingly obvious, even if Bruce refused to acknowledge it.

  Also unacknowledged, and far more upsetting to Van Zandt, was the deflation of his influence in the production team—and on Bruce’s ear. For a long time, the balance between Landau and Van Zandt had been tense, but productively so. “Jon on his right and me on his left. Jon representing the career, the business, the narrative end,” the guitarist says. “Me representing rock ’n’ roll, the street, where it was coming from. A healthy balance, and it proved to be quite successful.”3 Van Zandt had been a central influence on the wildly fruitful January 1982 sessions that produced the majority of the songs that ended up on the finished U.S.A. album in 1984. Between that and the massive success of “Hungry Heart,” which Van Zandt had helped rescue from Bruce’s indifference, he felt like claiming what he considered his due.

  “At a certain point, I needed my role to expand,” he explains. “I knew exactly what he sounded like, exactly what the band sounded like, exactly what he heard in his head, and how he needed the next album to sound. That’s what I thought, anyway.” Instead the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. “All of a sudden I could tell he wasn’t hearing me. I’m not getting through. That was new to me, and I wasn’t comfortable with it.” Hearing this in 2011, Bruce looks puzzled, then shrugs. “Steve’s very particular about the things he likes,” he says. “And sometimes my buddy feels a little underappreciated.”

  As Van Zandt recalls, his relationship with Bruce grew tense, then chilly, then edged toward the spiky. “I felt our relationship was in a little bit of jeopardy. And I thought the way to preserve the friendship was to leave. I knew if I stayed, the rather civilized disagreements were about to take a turn for the less civilized.” Van Zandt made fleeting appearances at the full-band sessions during the spring of 1983 and then didn’t turn up at all for the fall 1983–February 1984 recording work. Still, neither Bruce nor Van Zandt spoke publicly about their split, both referring to the Disciples of Soul as a side project. And as far as Bruce
was concerned, Van Zandt was still on board for the world tour he and the E Street Band had planned to start in the summer of 1984.

  In February 1984 Bruce recoiled visibly when he saw a news report on MTV announcing that Van Zandt had split from the E Street Band. “That’s a bunch of bull!” he sputtered to his weekend guest, fellow guitarist Nils Lofgren.

  “I was shocked,” Lofgren says. “I know Bruce is very private, and God knows the aggravation he’s learned to live with, with rumors and all that.” Bruce first met Lofgren in 1970 at the Avalon Ballroom audition on which Steel Mill had pinned its hopes during its brief San Francisco residency. Lofgren burst out of the gate earlier than Bruce, first as Neil Young’s sideman and then as the leader of a trio called Grin, which gained a cult audience in the early seventies. They bumped into each other from time to time on the club circuit after Lofgren went solo in 1973 and when he got dropped by his record company in 1984, Bruce made a point of reaching out.

  “I was down in the dumps. Then he said, ‘Why don’t ya come up for a weekend?’” They hung out for a few days, lighting up their evenings by checking out a couple of local clubs and stepping up to jam with whoever was playing. “That was his thing,” Lofgren says. “The band would find a couple of guitars, Bruce would lead us, and everyone fell in line.” The weekend was a tonic for Lofgren’s spirits. “It always helps to go to a couple of bars and hold your own with Springsteen next to you. But mostly we listened to Born in the U.S.A., and I thought it was a great, great record.” So when they saw the MTV news break, Lofgren didn’t resist the temptation to offer his assistance. “I said, ‘Well, if you do need a guitar player, I’d love an audition.’ He looked up and said, ‘Really?’” Then they went back to watching videos.