Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  • • •

  Committed to mounting another world tour in 1988, Bruce couldn’t decide whether he wanted to go out with the E Street Band or as a solo performer. He and Landau booked a series of midsized theaters (three thousand to five thousand capacity), thinking the smaller venues would be the right size for a solitary or near-solitary (if he wanted to add a small combo) performances. But Bruce thought about it again in the late fall, and called in his usual gang of musical compadres. “He convened all of us two days a week in New Jersey, and we started to play the Tunnel songs,” Lofgren says. “He was exploring how he wanted to tour this time. One weekend I went in alone with acoustic instruments. Fortunately, by late ’87, he decided he wanted to tour the album with the E Street Band and bring the horns along too.”

  When Bruce abandoned thoughts of touring solo, he opted for an onstage lineup that expanded the usual band with the five-piece Miami Horns, a regularly changing set of players that started as the horn section for Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes in the mid-1970s. (The “Miami” part was in tribute to Steve Van Zandt, the band’s original producer and arranger.) A version of the section had toured with Bruce and the E Streeters on and off in 1976–77, and popped up at other gigs through the years.2

  As Bruce imagined the tour ahead, other changes came to mind too. Determined to not replay the same ritual night after night and year after year, he made a list of his most-beloved stage songs—“Thunder Road,” “The Promised Land,” “Badlands,” and so on—and put them on his do-not-play list. “I just felt I’d have to drop all the cornerstones of my set,” he told journalists at the tour opener in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 25, 1988. In the mood to toss everything in the air, Bruce had the set designed to move Weinberg’s drums from the traditional back-middle spot to the rear left corner. Bittan’s and Federici’s keyboard rigs traded sides of the stage, while Clemons moved from Bruce’s right to his left. In the Big Man’s old place now stood Scialfa, who played acoustic guitar for most of the set while also taking many of Clemons’s duties as the bandleader’s onstage foil, dancing with him during some songs and joining him at the center stage for duets on others.

  Along with the new stage placements came an array of other ideas, strategies, and strictures Bruce wanted his band members to follow. In a striking shift from every tour they had ever played, the set list for these shows would remain almost entirely consistent from night to night. When not participating in previously choreographed moves or theatrical bits between songs, the musicians were to stay on or near their designated spots onstage. Also, each band member had to meet with the tour’s costumer in order to put together an approved set of of stage clothes that would match the elegant look Bruce wanted to match the more mature sound of his new music.

  Between all that and the elaborately painted backdrop (a colorful blend of the Garden of Eden, cartoon lovers, and a juicy red rendition of the words Tunnel of Love) and the staged opening bit that involved a carnival ticket booth (manned by Bruce’s assistant Terry Magovern), the highly structured, theatrical bent of the tour clattered all kinds of warning bells in the ears of the band members. “It was like a Broadway stage sort of thing,” Tallent says. Weinberg took note of how carefully the tour name—Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love Express Featuring the E Street Band—described Bruce’s distance from the band. “[Earlier] he was one of us,” the drummer says. “Now we were a completely separate entity.” Covering Bruce’s new solo songs also proved discomfiting for musicians accustomed to playing original parts they had developed for themselves. “I think some of us never felt comfortable with it,” Bittan says. “The drum machine parts felt uncomfortable for Max, and the bass parts weren’t in Garry’s style.”

  The players also noticed a new caste system in the touring arrangements, in which Bruce and a few top management figures stayed in different hotels than the band did, and where the fancier parties along the way—the champagne-and-caviar affairs thrown by promoters and the record label bigwigs—no longer included the E Streeters. “We’d hear about it the next day,” Tallent says. “Not even that you wanted to go, but you might, so you like to be asked. So Bruce would go, and the management and record company people. The publicity people would go. Anyone but the band. That was the vibe. Danny and I were completely fed up.” Bruce remembers the tour differently, particularly when it came to the parties.

  The Tunnel of Love Express tour was noticeably more subdued than any series of shows Bruce had ever played, divided between a tightly constructed first set built from the Tunnel songs and an unexpected assortment of B sides and rarities (including the River-era B sides “Roulette,” “Be True,” and a blistering cover of John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom”), and a set-ending sweep of “War” and “Born in the U.S.A.” A more spirited second half tossed in a few E Street favorites (“She’s the One,” an occasional “Backstreets” and “Rosalita”) among a slew of new or obscure songs: a disused original called “Part Man/Part Monkey,” the reclaimed throwaway “Light of Day,” and a cover of Detroit R&B singer Gino Washington’s 1963 minihit “Gino Is a Coward” rewritten into “I’m a Coward (When It Comes to Love).” The encores trended back to crowd favorites, with an emphasis on the radio hits, from “Hungry Heart” to “Glory Days” to “Dancing in the Dark.” But the climactic “Born to Run” came in a subdued solo acoustic arrangement, less a call to action than a more mature man’s realization (as Bruce said every night during his introduction) that “I thought I was writing about a guy and a girl who wanted to get in the car and run and keep on running. And I realized later that home really wasn’t out there, but that it was buried deep inside of me someplace.”

  The shows had their joyous moments, to be sure. But on some nights Bruce came onstage looking agitated. On occasion he directed his anger at the audience, as when he was met by a celebratory crowd bouncing beach balls over one another’s heads. Bruce concluded the opening song with a snarly edict: “Do me a favor and get rid of those fucking beach balls.” When the tour reached Tacoma, Washington, in the first week of May, Bruce responded just as virulently when an unruly fan snuck onstage and interrupted his spoken-word introduction to “Spare Parts.” Security guards had the guy in hand within seconds, but even after the intruder was gone, Bruce glared icily at the audience. “A short public announcement,” he barked. “No one onstage but the fucking band, please.” Looking over his shoulder back to where the guy had emerged from, Bruce shook his head. “I hate assholes like that.”

  Surprising bursts of anger from a man who always found his greatest joy while standing on a stage with a guitar in his hands and an audience at his feet. But he had his reasons. Days earlier, he and Julianne had separated.

  • • •

  Talking about his marriage to Rolling Stone’s Steve Pond earlier that spring, Bruce enthused about the sense of security he got from being in a committed relationship. Asked if he had found the elusive “place where we really want to go” he’d envisioned in “Born to Run,” he nodded. “Sometimes I really do,” he said. “You have to find the strength to sustain it and build on it and work for it . . . [but] gee, I’ve been married for three years, just about, and I feel like we’d just met.” Was he saying that his marriage still had the magic of early love, or that the years together still hadn’t fostered the emotional intimacy married people are supposed to develop as a part of each other’s lives? Bruce didn’t seem to know. “There’s a part of you that wants the stability and the home thing, and there’s a part of you that isn’t so sure . . . there’s days when you’re real close and days when you’re real far away.”

  Both halves of the couple kept news of their breakup as quiet as possible. No press releases, no leaks to friendly reporters, no public heart-to-hearts with People or Barbara Walters. Some sharp-eyed observers might have figured out that Bruce had taken off his wedding ring. Backstage crew and visitors noticed that Julianne, a fixture at earlier shows on the tour, was nowhere to be seen, even on the couple�
��s third anniversary on May 13. What could be seen, however, was that the duets he performed with the increasingly prominent Patti Scialfa, particularly on “Tougher Than the Rest,” had grown so steamy it seemed like the singers’ romantic heat was, perhaps, a bit too realistic to be limited to the stage. But what might have seemed shocking to outsiders—is Bruce really fooling around with his backup singer?—was no surprise to anyone who had seen the Born in the U.S.A. tour from the inside. “What was obvious on the Tunnel tour was also obvious at an early point in the Born in the U.S.A. tour, let’s just say that,” says Dave Marsh. Even if the electricity between Bruce and Patti seemed obvious in 1984, the in-house gossip didn’t travel beyond the touring party. When Julianne became a part of the scene in the fall of 1984, the crowd on the tour figured her for an outlier candidate for Bruce’s affections. So when word broke that Bruce would be traveling with a serious girlfriend during the Far East swing in the spring of 1985, some tour members assumed they could book one less hotel room for the band. “I know I was surprised when he came to Japan with someone other than Patti,” Marsh says.

  Still, when he thought about settling into a serious romance, something pushed him in a different direction. Certainly Julianne’s beauty, warmth, and intelligence had magnetic properties all their own. And the prospect of taking up with his newest band member, weaving a romance into the always-complex chemistry of the E Street Band while also stirring up a tabloid frenzy, couldn’t have seemed appealing. So then came Julianne, the wedding, and three years of marriage that hardly anyone had guessed might be less than the openly affectionate romance most observers believed they were witnessing. When Julianne accompanied Bruce to the early shows on the Tunnel tour in late February and early March, they had impressed observers with how relaxed and happy they looked together. But something else was going on too.

  Both members of the couple were, and remain, tight lipped about the inner workings of their marriage. Speaking to the writer Nick Dawidoff in the mid-1990s, Bruce said, “[Juli]’s one of the best people I’ve ever met. But we were pretty different, and I realized I didn’t know how to be married.” When asked now, Bruce has one question: “Did Juli speak to you at all?” Told that she basically hadn’t, he speaks only about his ex-wife’s strengths and his own weaknesses. “The emotions of mine that were uncovered by trying to have an adult life with a partner and make that work uncovered a lot of things I’d avoided and tried not to deal with previously,” he says, and more or less leaves it at that. Julianne returns the favor. “I have always been incredibly private when it comes to my private life,” she says. “The one and only thing that I will say is that that period was a time of incredible personal growth and introspection for me. And I will forever give that credit to Bruce.” Which is remarkably gracious given how swiftly, and thoughtlessly, Bruce moved into the next stage of his life.

  Once Bruce showed up backstage without his wedding ring, he and Patti stopped hiding their affections from the rest of the touring company. They cuddled backstage and shared seats on the jet from one show to the next. Given no official declaration about his separation from Julianne, it came as a shock to Tallent and his girlfriend when they stumbled across the couple smooching on the airplane. “My girlfriend’s going, ‘What’s going on here?’ and I had no idea what to say.” But the news stayed hush-hush, more or less, through the end of the American tour on May 23 and through the first few dates on the European tour, until the company got to Rome in mid-June.

  The sun was bright, the skies deep blue, and the hotel room’s balcony all but irresistible when Bruce and Patti woke up on the morning of June 15 and stepped outside to take in the view. With the sun on their shoulders and new love in the air, they held each other as they gazed across the rooftops—not suspecting that an observant photographer, a professional in the land that invented the term paparazzi, was peering at them through his viewfinder. Click-click-click. Then they were lying together, drinks in hand, on a single patio recliner. Clickity-click. Those photos made headlines all across Europe and then in the United States, and on June 17 Jon Landau Management released a statement acknowledging that Bruce and Julianne had separated. A day after that, Bruce and Patti sealed the deal by strolling arm in arm through Paris, in full view of a procession of French reporters and photographers.

  At the moment, and with memories of Bruce and Julianne’s wedding still fresh in the public mind, photographic evidence of his marital two-timing struck at the roots of the moral righteousness he seemed to carry onto the stage. That his wholesome image was only the latest iteration in more than two decades of growth, change, and shape-shifting did not seem to matter. The vast majority of the popular culture media had come to know Bruce since he’d taken on his clean-cut working-class hero image. Having been branded as such, he was expected to behave accordingly. The first wave of headlines were as jagged as you might expect. Phillips’s friends stood up for their justifiably wounded friend. But given Phillips’s dignified response (essentially saying nothing in public, except for a career-focused interview in Us magazine in August, followed by more than twenty years of silence), and perhaps the foreshadowing in virtually all of the key songs on Tunnel of Love, the story fizzled quickly. As David Hinckley reported in the New York Daily News, many fans accepted Bruce’s affair as a sign not of perfidy or hypocrisy but of mortality. And if the “It humanizes him” argument might have exuded the aroma of fan-boy rationalization, a closer look at the artist’s work—going all the way back to the Castiles’ Theiss-Springsteen B side “That’s What You Get”—made clear that the conflicting calls to sin and grace had never relaxed their grip on his soul.

  None of this justifies ill behavior, no matter toward whom it’s directed. But it was (and remains) impossible to accuse Bruce of violating some code of ethics he’d prescribed for others in the text of his work, since the real struggle his characters waged almost always took place within themselves. Virtually every male character on Tunnel of Love and the B sides and outtakes recorded during the sessions has some kind of ungodly hound baying at his door. “When I look at my face I don’t see / The man I wanted to be,” he sang in the self-lacerating “One Step Up,” in which the confused, unhappy husband makes eyes with a woman sitting across the bar. Like Bill Horton, whose marked hands labored to reconcile the divided forces of love and fear, Bruce could only raise his fists and hope that he wouldn’t hurt anyone else as badly as himself.

  “But of course I did,” he says. “I didn’t protect Juli. Some sort of public announcement would have been fair, but I felt over concerned about my own privacy. I handled it badly, and I still feel badly about it. It was cruel for people to find out the way they did.”

  • • •

  Away from home, cut loose from whatever chains of anger or guilt he’d carried through the last months of his marriage, Bruce hit the stages of Europe with a renewed appetite for unrestrained rock ’n’ roll. The last few weeks of the American tour had already traded out the romantic “Be True” for the man’s-man blues “Boom Boom,” with Clemons’s saxophone blasts kicking down the doors that Bruce’s guitar attacks hadn’t already splintered. A steamy “Because the Night” brought the passion to the second set in the European tour’s opening night in Turin, while U.S.A. tour highlights “Bobby Jean,” “The River,” and “Downbound Train” pounced back into the set during the next week or two. In Munich on July 17, Bruce called out for “Badlands” as an onstage audible, and was so thrilled by the arms-aloft response that he made it the opener for the band’s next performance, with “Out in the Street” following in the second slot and another previously exiled favorite, “The Promised Land,” turning up a few songs later. Which would seem like a conceptual retreat of sorts, but for the fact that the July 19 show was taking place in East Berlin, just beyond the wall that compelled so many nations to view one another as combatants.

  Already aware that the people of Eastern Europe were shaking off the grip of the Soviet empire, Bruce and Landau imagined th
e impact that a big rock ’n’ roll show might have on the freedom-starved Easterners. Landau asked the tour’s promoter to see if the East German government would allow a free concert on its side of the Berlin Wall. The officials loved the idea, particularly given Bruce’s proletarian, seemingly anticapitalism reputation. With the show set for the Radrennbahn Wessensee park, the Communist politicians borrowed a play from Ronald Reagan by sweeping Bruce into their own political narrative. As the war between the socialist government of Nicaragua and American-funded rebels (the Contras) simmered, the East Germans dubbed the nationally broadcast show the Concert for Nicaragua. And while Bruce was no fan of the Reagan administration’s covert war against the government of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega, he also wasn’t going to sit still long enough to let the Soviets drape a red flag over his shoulders.

  Set loose in front of 250,000 Berliners and far more East German TV viewers, Bruce and band marched onstage with something beyond the intricacies of romance on their mind. From “Badlands” to “Out in the Street” to “The Promised Land,” “War,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” and the first full-band “Born to Run” since 1985, the show served as a testament to the basic right of freedom. To make his point—and refute the government’s attempt to co-opt him—Bruce wrote (and then worked with his German driver to translate) a statement separating himself from any government or political system: “[I’m here] to play rock ’n’ roll for East Berliners, in the hope that one day all walls will be torn down.” Or that was the plan until word about Bruce’s statement leaked and the panicked West German promoter begged him to change “walls” to the less offensive “barriers.” Bruce made the change, but if he pulled that punch, the performance of Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom” (in the Byrds’ arrangement, with harmonies and jangling guitar leads) that came next made his liberation ideology entirely clear.