“Something in the back of my psyche said, ‘This is okay. He’ll come back. Because anything so great cannot be destroyed altogether. Anything the goddess created can’t be thrown away. It’ll come back.’”
• • •
Just before Thanksgiving 1989, Bruce and Patti learned that she was carrying their first child. A son, Evan James, was born on the evening of July 24. Watching from the side, a surge of feeling burst against a part of himself Bruce had kept locked down since he was old enough to know how to protect himself. “I got close to a feeling of a real, pure, unconditional love with all the walls down,” he told David Hepworth. “All of a sudden, what was happening was so immense that it just stomped all the fear away for a little while, and I remember feeling overwhelmed. But I also understood why you’re so frightened. When that world of love comes rushing in, a world of fear comes in with it.” It was a moment Bruce had imagined, described, and sang about for years. “My music over the last five years has dealt with those almost primitive issues. It’s about somebody walking through that world of fear so that he can live in the world of love.”
Bruce and Patti made their bond official at a backyard wedding the next spring, and their daughter, Jessica Rae, was born on December 30, 1991. “I had to change old attitudes and leave a lot of fears behind,” Bruce told USA Today’s Edna Gundersen in 1995. But he called having a family “the birth of my second life.”
Not that he could shake off every lingering shadow. Living in Los Angeles, Bruce and Patti were about an hourlong commuter plane ride from the house he’d bought his parents in Belmont, a pleasant suburb about ten minutes down Highway 101 from San Mateo. Bruce always reveled in his mother’s company, but the prospect of seeing his father still set him on edge. “Doug was tough for him even when he was grown up,” says Shelley Lazar, a tour staff veteran who became a close friend to both Bruce and Patti. “He’d be a little more tense than when he was at home. I’m not sure if it was intimidation as much as the respect he had for his father.” In the early phases of a battle with emphysema, Doug’s breathing became labored and his health lagged. “Bruce knew [Doug] was his dad, and that he wasn’t feeling well.”
The anger between father and son had largely faded, due both to the passage of time and other less expected developments. A stroke Doug suffered in 1979 had somehow rewired the part of his personality that made it all but impossible for him to share his emotions. “Now he couldn’t hide anything,” Pam Springsteen says. “You could mention any of his kids’ names to him, and he’d burst into tears. You could see what meant the most to him. He was just a very real person. No pretense, no persona. And everyone loved him.”
Doug’s new openhearted countenance had a magnetic effect on the people who encountered him. “He was lovable,” Pam says. “He drew people to him, especially women. Put him on a plane, and within seconds the stewardess was standing over him. And he’d be doing nothing. He was just warm and kind, and had a warmth in his voice.” As Bruce once recounted to the writer Nick Dawidoff, he was settling in for a visit with his family backstage after a show in the late 1980s when his father held up his hand. He wanted his son to sit in his lap. Taken aback, Bruce stammered. “Really?” Doug nodded. So Bruce lowered himself, and all the years of hurt, anger, and misunderstanding, into his father’s lap. It couldn’t have been comfortable for either of them—physically, emotionally, and in every other conceivable way. But the awkwardness told its own story about an aging father and his grown son still struggling to express the love that had haunted them both for so long. Some scars never heal, and the strangeness of the scene hung thick in the room. But they still sat like that for quite some time.
The love between Springsteen men might come in unexpected ways, but to them, that only made it more meaningful. When Bruce held his own son in his lap a few years later, Patti noticed that her husband hadn’t read a word of the picture book he held. Instead he’d hold up the book so he and Evan could both see it, and then, after a minute or two of silence, turn the page so they could look at the next picture.
Patti, puzzled, said. “You’re not reading it to him!” Bruce shrugged. “This,” he explained, “is how Springsteen men read.” The toddler, meanwhile, twinkled happily. “Evan was loving it,” Lazar says. “There was something nonverbal going on with them, and it was so touching.”
• • •
About a month after making the fateful band telephone calls, Bruce dialed up Roy Bittan, the E Street Band keyboardist, and invited him out to dinner. Bittan had moved to Los Angeles a few months earlier, and they didn’t live very far from each other, so it was easy to grab the keys and head out for a casual evening. The wheels in Bruce’s internal songwriting machinery had been locked for a month or two, and he was on the prowl for some kind of inspiration. When they got back to Bittan’s house, the topic turned to home recording and the multisynthesizer recording rig the pianist had set up in his garage. Bruce absolutely had to take a look and check out some of the tracks his old colleague had been recording. “I took him into my garage studio, fired it all up, and played him my demo of ‘Roll of the Dice,’ ” Bittan recalls. “It seemed shocking to him.”
At first Bruce marveled at the breadth of the sounds available on Bittan’s synthesizer setup. Virtually everything he heard—the guitar sounds, the drums, the percussion, and more—had been simulated so well that you had to strain to believe that you weren’t hearing the natural instruments. And as Bittan explains, he’d written “Roll of the Dice” with Bruce’s style in mind. “It was an E Street Band track. It had the riff and everything. The glockenspiel, the tambo, the whole bit.” Eager to hear more, Bruce listened to two or three of Bittan’s other backing tracks. The pianist hadn’t composed the melodies or lyrics, but the body of the songs were there, along with the central riffs and structure. Bruce liked what he heard. “Make me a cassette,” he said. He took it home with him that same night.
At nine thirty the next morning, Bittan’s phone rang. When he picked up, a familiar voice barked one word: “Hit!” Bittan recognized Bruce but had no idea what he was talking about. “I wrote a hit last night,” Bruce proclaimed. Bittan laughed. “Well, that’s nice,” he said. Bruce explained that he’d spent the night writing to the instrumental tracks Bittan had handed him twelve hours earlier, and that the keyboardist should come over right that minute to take a listen. Bittan sped to Bruce’s house. When he got there, his host played the cassette he’d taken home the previous evening, singing his just-composed lyrics and melodies over the top. “And I was like, ‘Oh my God,’” Bittan says.
Bruce felt the same way. Bittan’s songs had jump-started his own writing, and the keyboardist’s skill at digital recording (yet another quantum leap in home recording) gave him a new sense of technical possibility. With a growing list of tunes to capture and more appearing every day, Bruce asked Bittan if he’d like to coproduce his next record. Bittan was up for that. “I’d gotten the breakup call too and was as devastated as anyone,” he says. Given a shot at jumping back in without missing a beat, he wasn’t going to say no. When news of the new creative union filtered back to the other ex–E Streeters, their responses were what you might call muted. “I didn’t speak to the guys about it,” Bittan says. “Max called me occasionally—we had a special relationship since we joined the band together. But I could tell in his voice that he was feeling emotions from my working with [Bruce]. Frankly, I had survivor’s guilt. It’s like the plane goes down, everybody dies except for the one guy who survives. I had to ask myself, ‘Why me?’”
• • •
The question in Bruce’s mind was closer to “What’s next?” He summoned Landau from New York, ushered him into the studio, and played him two new tracks—“Roll of the Dice” and “Trouble in Paradise”—singing his lyrics over the recorded music. “He was incredibly excited about both of these songs, and I happened to love both of them,” Landau says. “That got us both moving.” As determined as he’d been to trade E Street
for the unexplored horizons, Bruce wasn’t entirely certain that he wanted to disassociate himself entirely from the people he had come to depend on. So the production team of Springsteen, Landau, and Plotkin stayed put, now with Bittan elevated to coproducer status. Anticipating the risk of familiar tropes, Bruce established a rule: Bittan had to leave the piano alone and stick to synthesizers and other electronic keyboards.
A series of home demos, made two-man-band-style with engineer Toby Scott and Bittan, got things rolling. A few weeks later they moved to Ocean Way Studios, then they ended up at Soundworks West, better known in its previous incarnation as Motown’s Los Angeles studio. No longer bound to the E Street Band’s skills and textures, Bruce followed his own musical history back to the soul belters who had first defined his sense of musical passion and performance. His writer’s block cleared away, Bruce returned to cranking out more songs than he could possibly use. Most didn’t survive the editing process, but of the ones that did stick, more than a few bore the mark of psychotherapy, while others had the determinedly upbeat, structured language of self-help books. “If I can find the guts to give you all my love / Then I’ll be feelin’ like a real man,” Bruce declared in the evolved man’s swagger of “Real Man.” The tune’s companion piece, “Man’s Job,” repeats the same clog-stepping sentiment: “Gettin’ up the nerve is a man’s man’s job / Lovin’ you’s a man’s job.” Other songs took on more visceral themes—the sultry lust in “Cross My Heart” and “All or Nothin’ at All”—but the conceptual thrust of the songs sounded curiously like post-therapy directives.
Feeling again that he’d hit a crucial, make-or-break moment in his career, Bruce slowed the recording to a crawl. The sessions dragged for months, a year, and then kept on going. Determined to stretch into the future while remaining true to the essential spirit that had always animated his music, Bruce and company blended the grit in his voice and guitar with the synth-and-drum-loop backdrop that had come to define nineties hip-hop and soul music. Hoping to add a little more human chemistry into the playing, Bruce, Bittan, and the others called in an all-star lineup of LA studio players: Sting’s drummer Omar Hakim, Little Feat keyboardist Bill Payne, ex-Faces and longtime Rolling Stones keyboardist Ian McLagan, bassist and future American Idol star Randy Jackson, and, in an intriguing move, long-ago E Streeter David Sancious on keyboards. Ultimately, the LA studio whiz-turned-cofounder of the popular 1980s pop-rock band Toto, Jeff Porcaro, and Jackson became core band members, along with Bruce and Bittan. The small parade of guest vocalists was even more prominent, including Sam and Dave’s Sam Moore, Righteous Brother Bobby Hatfield, and every songwriter’s idol, Smokey Robinson. And yet the unifying spirit of the project remained elusive. “The atmosphere was occasionally a little glum, then lots of times it was very exciting,” Landau says. “I think it was a very challenging spot for Bruce to be in. He was trying to make a rock album in this new world without E Street. I think he was taking a lot of time doing the work he was doing and thinking about the work to come.” Coproducer Bittan puts it more succinctly: “He didn’t have a real good vision of where he wanted to go. And the production really suffered as a result.”
Taking a break to join Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt in a two-night benefit for the public interest law firm the Christic Institute at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium in mid-November 1990, Bruce broke a two-year live drought with sets that recast songs from throughout his career into the more intimate terms of a solo performance. Opening his first show with a plea for silence (“It’s been a while since I did this, so if you feel moved to clap along, please don’t”), he strapped on an acoustic guitar for a taut “Brilliant Disguise” that segued quickly into “Darkness on the Edge of Town” sped up to the point of twitchiness. “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” and “Thunder Road” played like memories from a long-lost youth, setting the stage for a surprise visit back to “Wild Billy’s Circus Story,” unheard onstage since the mid-seventies. Bruce also hearkened back to the old days with his song introductions, many of which were more personal and revealing than any he’d ever told in the spotlight. Along with affectionate stories about his costars and Patti, he told one or two of his Flannery O’Connor–like stories from his Freehold childhood, spoke openly about his therapy sessions, and told a sweet tale of watching Patti give birth to their baby son, Evan. “We go to the hospital, and I’m, you know, thinking, ‘Okay, I don’t wanna faint, that’s my main concern.’” He paused, as if to reconsider how self-involved that sounded. “That’s disgusting, right?”
He also premiered five new songs, including the comic blues plaint about modern media, “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)” and a rockabilly-style love song/letter to Penthouse magazine “Red Headed Woman,” which vividly described the songwriter’s enthusiasm for performing cunnilingus on his wife. The Bittan collaborations “Soul Driver” and “Real World,” the former played on guitar and the latter on piano, sounded like vintage Bruce, their basic rock chord changes a solid platform for gut-deep vocals describing love as a standoff between better angels and the “snakes, frogs, and love in vain” lurking in the forest. Performed by a lone musician armed with only a guitar and an evolving sense of his own psyche, they came girded with heart and bone, the sound of a man only just starting to believe that he could trust himself to be the man he wanted to be.
Back in the studio in the winter of 1991, Bruce blew past the deadlines for the spring release they had imagined, not looking up until the middle of the summer, when he, Bittan, and coproducers Chuck Plotkin and Landau put their heads together to winnow the stacks of finished songs into something closer to an album-length collection. Bob Clearmountain came in to perform his rites of mixology, and after Bruce had tentatively named the project Human Touch—for a love-from-the-ashes duet sung with Patti—they declared a halt to the production process.
“All the assistants in the studio were going, ‘You’re done! Finally!’ because it seemed like years since we’d started,” Scott says. “And I said, ‘We ain’t done. We just stopped, but we still aren’t done.’” A week later the engineer’s telephone rang, and Bruce was on the other end. “He said, ‘Hey, Tobe, don’t we have a bunch of recording equipment around somewhere? Can we get it set up in the house next door?’” (Bruce had recently bought a small house next to his family’s home, planning to use it as a combination guest house and temporary/portable recording studio.) Setting out to write a new single for the much-fussed-over studio album, he ended up writing an entirely new set of songs instead. “He was loose and happy,” Plotkin says. “Having Human Touch out of the way eased up the constipation factor. And then—Bam!—he had a whole new album in a matter of days.”
None of it sounded like it belonged in the uptown company of the songs Bruce had labored on for the last two-plus years. These tunes were raw and urgent, hand hammered structures built on three and four-chord footings, again addressing the harrowing journey through his own poisoned depths to the “little piece of the Lord’s undying light” he’d seen at the birth of his child. Throughout, the lyrics tumbled out in a rush, sometimes overwhelmed by the wildness of their creation. “I took a piss in fortune’s sweet kiss,” Bruce shouts in “Better Days,” while “Leap of Faith” ’s meaty chorus pins its testimony to a vague urging to “get things goin’” by showing some guts. But what doesn’t show up on the page—the fire in Bruce’s voice, the rich gospel chorale behind him, and the joy in the melody—trumps everything else, just as it does in (eventual title track) “Lucky Town” ’s windblown call to action; the rueful portrait-of-the-artist-as-recovering-celebrity “Local Hero”; and the everyday moral corruption traced in the murky folk-blues “The Big Muddy,” which is built on open-ended, unresolved chords that underscore the shifting moral sands in the lyrics.
All of it rough, spontaneous, and ready to be recorded in the knockabout way the music had erupted from his muse. Once Scott finished setting up the new Thrill Hill studio in the Springsteens’ guest house, he and Bruce worked in th
eir usual two-man way, programming a drum track upon which Bruce stacked the guitars, keyboards, bass, vocals, and effects. Finished with the basic tracks in about two weeks, they took a short break and then relocated to A&M Studios in Hollywood. There drummer Gary Mallaber (the Steve Miller Band, and more) replaced the computerized drums, and a small group of other guests—keyboardist Ian McLagan, bassist Randy Jackson, Roy Bittan, and vocalists Patti, Lisa Lowell, and Soozie Tyrell—added their talents where needed. Clearmountain created a basic mix, and the album was done. “I think the entire process took four weeks,” Scott says.
How could Bruce pivot from the yearslong pitched battle required for Human Touch to writing, recording, and finishing a whole other album in a single month? Easily, he told David Hepworth. “All that work on Human Touch,” he explained, “was me trying to get to the place where I could make Lucky Town in three weeks.”
• • •
Heading into 1992, more than four years since Tunnel of Love’s release and two years since the end of the E Street Band, Bruce had two new but very different albums waiting to be released. Ordinarily, Bruce would take measure of each set of songs, hold the individual tracks up to one another, consider how closely they reflected his feelings and the message he wanted to present, and send one set out into the world while locking the other into his increasingly crowded vault. When he played the nearly finished albums for Steve Van Zandt, his ex-bandmate and oldest friend first advised Bruce to trash all the Human Touch recordings and redo them with the E Street Band. “And he might have been right!” Bruce says. “But it just wasn’t something I was in a mood to do at the time. In fact, it was exactly what I was in a mood to not do. But then I played him Lucky Town, and he said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s more like it.’” But Van Zandt still couldn’t abide the chilliness he heard in the production of Human Touch. Bruce: “It was outside his self-interest to say that, ’cause he wasn’t in the band at the time. But once again, he said, ‘Look, this’ll be good with the band, this’ll be good the way they play.’ And he was probably on the money with that.” Landau disagreed. “Just the sheer time that went into Human Touch,” he says. “I just think there’s too much great stuff and blood, sweat, and tears with Human Touch. It just felt disorienting to me. Bruce quickly came to the conclusion that the best thing to do was to put them both out.”
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