Bruce
Page 44
In Los Angeles the culture of desperation became all too visible. In the jerry-rigged camps beneath the bridges and in the faces of Hispanic families lined up for day labor. As if nothing had changed since John Steinbeck walked among the Dust Bowl migrants in the 1930s. Something about the Mexican immigrants pursuing their lives in the face of racial, cultural, and economic discrimination touched Bruce the deepest. “He talked about stuff he’d read and people he’d met,” says producer Chuck Plotkin. Once again, the stories of outsiders resonated with those awful memories of childhood isolation. “The main thing he said was, ‘They’re all me. It’s all me.’”
The first tendrils of the new work emerged in January, when Bruce sat down to write some songs for the E Street Band to record for the Greatest Hits project. Combining his own experiences with stories gleaned from the pages of the Los Angeles Times and from a book about the history of the American underclass, Bruce located “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” a portrait of modern poverty that transformed Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath character into a guiding spirit for all displaced and ill-treated people. The ex-con turned laboring family man in “Straight Time” lives on eggshells, only just resisting the pull of easy money. The narrator of “Highway 29” falls to temptation until his existence shatters, while the drifter in “The New Timer” grieves the murder of a friend until his own blood grows poisonous.
As with the songs that became Nebraska, a sense of gloom infuses everything. But given the thirteen years of home, family, and professional psychiatry, the darkness couldn’t keep hope entirely at bay. With a small acoustic band (Gary Mallaber on drums, Marty Rifkin on pedal steel guitar, Federici manning the keyboards, and Tallent on bass) adding color, and an implicit sense of community, the glimmers of humanity never quite fade away. Murderous hands are stilled; love defies the least humane strictures of the law; even a battered dream of the promised land carries on. “For what are we / Without hope in our hearts.”
• • •
If Bruce wasn’t ready to lead his own band through a new rock ’n’ roll album and tour in 1995, he did find a way to air out his noisier impulses thanks to Joe Grushecky and his Pittsburgh-based band, the Iron City Houserockers. Friendly since Grushecky’s band had worked with ex-Columbia exec Steve Popovich and Steve Van Zandt in the late seventies and early 1980s, the two singer-songwriter-guitarist-bandleaders stayed in touch even after the Houserockers broke up in the mideighties and Grushecky worked his day job as a special education teacher in Pittsburgh. Grushecky spent the next decade raising his family, but he continued writing songs and playing the club circuit. The two musicians’ paths would cross occasionally, and when they did, Bruce always made sure to check in. Grushecky’s songs—with their East Coast bar band sound, girded with tough-minded observations on the day-to-day life of working people—shared a lot of Bruce’s own impulses, and he enjoyed the other writer’s sensibility. Still, Grushecky’s career continued to ebb in the nineties, and by the early weeks of 1995, the now solo artist (playing several nights a week in an unpopular Mexican restaurant) figured he’d reached the end of his rope. Tempted to pack it in entirely, Grushecky instead followed his wife’s advice and reached out to his famous friend from New Jersey. Bruce returned the call a day or two later and invited Grushecky to come to Los Angeles and bang around some songs. “I borrowed some money from my dad to get out there,” Grushecky says.
After hearing a dozen of Grushecky’s new compositions, Bruce told him to try again. “He said, ‘Well, you can do a lot better,’” Grushecky recalls. But when Bruce heard a rough draft of “Homestead,” a song about the Pennsylvania mine that employed almost every man in Grushecky’s hometown, Bruce’s eyes lit up. He helped finish the lyrics, cowrote another song (the Native American story “Dark and Bloody Ground”), and then told Grushecky that he wanted to help make the album in his own New Jersey studio, starting as soon as possible. “That record became American Babylon, which he graciously produced for us,” Grushecky says. In fact, Bruce got so caught up in the project that he volunteered to join the revived Houserockers as a lead guitarist and backup singer for the six-stop tour Grushecky had booked to launch the album for its October release. “That’s pretty wild when you think about it,” Grushecky says. “He’s playing bars with these guys from Pittsburgh.”
• • •
Released on November 21, 1995, The Ghost of Tom Joad presented a tonic for critics unsettled by Human Touch. The album earned Bruce a renewed chorus of good reviews, many informed by their authors’ own expertise in cultural, literary, and political history. Which was entirely appropriate, since, as the bibliography in the album’s liner notes made clear, the songs on Joad came with specific sources and references ranging from Depression-era literature, movies, and news stories published in the Los Angeles Times. “At a time of increasing income disparity—when the right distracts with immigrant-bashing—Springsteen, rock and roll’s populist, offers an eloquent reminder of what economically dispossessed angry white men and desperate brown border crossers share,” David Corn wrote in the political journal the Nation. “Where else in popular mega-culture are the nightmares of the American and immigrant poor recognized and granted sympathy?” Indeed, The Ghost of Tom Joad contains some of Bruce’s most gripping lyrics: slashing portrayals of economic injustice in “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and “Youngstown”; miniaturized portraits of racism in “Galveston Bay” and “The Line”; and the small but symbolic lives and deaths traced in “Sinaloa Cowboys,” “The New Timer,” and “Balboa Park.”
Perhaps it isn’t surprising that The Ghost of Tom Joad also stands as the least musical album Bruce had ever made. Even Nebraska, set entirely to Bruce’s guitar, harmonica, and percussion, built its desolate vision on songs with distinctive rhythms, chord changes, and melodies. On Joad, even the five (of twelve) tunes featuring the other musicians hardly register as musical constructions. The players brush their instruments lightly. Bruce half whispers most of the songs, accentuating their intimacy but at the same time raising a barrier for listeners. If you wanted to grasp these stories, you had to find a quiet place, shut the door, and focus. Preferably with the lyrics within reach. Certainly, Bruce can’t help but uncork a few memorable melodies when he’s got his guitar in hand. But the Joad songs that bear his musical touch9 wield it as subtly as possible. In the context of the album, the approach makes sense. Drawn to a kind of postgrad version of Woody Guthrie’s folk journalism/commentary, Bruce focused his muse on socially charged storytelling. Anything that stood between the character’s voice and the listener’s ear was obviously in the way. And even if the album’s sales suffered as a result,10 the risks made sense to an artist whose whims had mined so much gold in the past two decades.
With more than two and a half years gone since the last show of the ’92–’93 Human Touch–Lucky Town tour, Bruce geared up for another world tour, this time as a solo act. Just himself, a few guitars, harmonicas, possibly a piano, and maybe a nice rug on the floor. As new experiences went, this one wasn’t entirely unprecedented. The pair of solo sets he’d performed at the Christic Institute benefits in 1990 set a model for how he could present his work, including the stadium-shaking anthems, in arrangements that drew power from the empty space once inhabited by the roar of a rock ’n’ roll band.
And as with the album that launched it, the Joad tour came with an entirely new set of aesthetics and expectations. Booked into theaters seating two thousand to five thousand—tiny halls compared to the arenas and stadiums he had played for most of the previous twenty years—Bruce stepped onto the stage in loose-fitting trousers and earth-toned work shirts, his goatee and long, tightly swept-back hair describing the profile of a passionate, if stern, academic. Unconcerned with showmanship, he came out each night bearing orders for the audience to respect his, and the music’s, need for peace and quiet. No singing along, in other words. No clapping along, either. If anyone felt moved by what they heard, they should keep their appreciation to themselves unti
l the song’s final notes had rung. Which sounds a lot more off-putting than it actually was, since Bruce’s appeals tended to be funny and self-deprecating, begging the audience to not make him wreck his good-guy image as he’d been forced to do in Los Angeles when a chatty crowd required him to speak harshly to supermodels, confiscate cell phones, and so on.
The unsmiling image Bruce presented for Joad could never quite eclipse the joy he felt performing to the fans he saw gazing up at him every night. No matter the seriousness of his new material—and the older songs that told different versions of the same stories (“Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” among others)—he also found room for the likes of “No Surrender,” “This Hard Land,” and even rarities such as “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?” and “Blinded by the Light.” As the tour went on, Bruce also made a point of lightening the mood with one or two of his new, darkly comic tunes, such as the sleazy pickup ballad “It’s the Little Things That Count” and the infomercial satire “Sell It and They Will Come.”
• • •
The Tom Joad solo tour ran from late 1995 into the spring of 1997, stretching through two American and European legs and jaunts through Japan and Australia. Bruce collected a Grammy in the Best Contemporary Folk Album category along the way, but no other show was quite as emotionally charged as the evening he spent playing in the gymnasium at the St. Rose of Lima elementary school in Freehold. He had few pleasant memories of the place—mostly from the CYO dances the Castiles played on Friday nights in 1965. Even so, he’d been singing about the school, one way or another, for his entire adult life. Now the institution was celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary with an increasingly Hispanic population, and when its administration asked him to play a show to benefit the school’s scholarship fund, Bruce couldn’t refuse.
Set for November 8, 1996, the show created a bigger buzz in Freehold than President Bill Clinton’s visit had done two months earlier. Anticipating a rush of out-of-towners, the organizers set strict guidelines for ticket sales, requiring every attendee to present some form of identification or other proof of Freehold residency to pass the school’s door. When the night arrived, the crowd jammed inside the auditorium greeted Bruce just like they used to when they saw him walking down the street to the park. Even the “Brooooce!” calls sounded familiar enough to ignite a boyish smile. And the feeling was mutual. So many of Bruce’s old friends and neighbors had long ago come to see him in the bars, or made the trek to catch the big shows up at the Meadowlands Arena or Giants Stadium and marvel at the hero he’d become. But here in the old neighborhood, he went right back to being one of them: an overgrown kid who managed to get out for the night.
After opening with “The River,” Bruce paused to absorb his unlikely setting. “I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I wasn’t standing here now,” he said with a chuckle. “Right under the cross, too.” Everyone laughed, and he described a friend’s reaction to hearing that he’d be playing his old Catholic school. “He said, ‘Oh! Revenge, eh?’ But I said no, no, no.” He paused for a beat. “Well, maybe just a little.”
Bruce wasn’t kidding, as St. Rose’s Father Gerald McCarron would soon learn. But Bruce also had serious—and often quite moving—memories and observations to share, including a tender dedication of “The Ghost of Tom Joad” to a nun, Sister Charles Marie, whom he remembered teaching him about empathy and kindness. He spoke at length about the Vinyards, remembering Tex (who had died in 1988) and the crucial help he and Marion gave to the Castiles, and dedicating “This Hard Land” to her. He also talked lovingly to Adele, capping it with a rare airing of what he liked to call his “mother lover’s song,” “The Wish.”
And yet the warm memories took him only so far. For no journey back to the cradle of his youth would be complete without a glimpse back into the cauldron of “Adam Raised a Cain” or the gleeful rebellion fueling “Growin’ Up.” Back in the seat of his Catholic education, hoisted up onto a stage with a large wooden cross over his head, Bruce couldn’t resist pushing the church’s boundaries of acceptability until he could hear them splinter. He made a brief gesture while introducing “Highway 29,” noting that the sort of insight reflected in its final verse “usually comes after you fuck up pretty badly.” He’d glanced apologetically at St. Rose’s head priest just then, but he wasn’t all that sorry, as Father McCarron, and some unsuspecting congregants learned when Bruce got around to his tribute to Patti, “Red Headed Woman.”
“I’m gonna move on now, to a great song about a great subject,” he announced. “Cunny-lingus.” He let that hang in the air for a beat. “I know, I know. You’re sayin’, ‘Bruce, how can you stand up in your Catholic school and sing a song about cunny-lingus?’ But I talked to Father McCarron, and I said, ‘Father, can I sing a song about cunny-lingus in your school?’ He said [speaking stonily], ‘I’m not sure.’ So I took that for a yes.”
“That’s when the priest walked out, I’m pretty sure,” says Freehold native Kevin Coyne. “I don’t know if he stormed out or stalked out. But he definitely left. That’s for sure.”
If Bruce saw, he didn’t care. “Because I’m talking about marital sex here. That’s right, marital sex. And as we know, the doctrine on that is that the Pope says, ‘I can’t, but you go right ahead.’ So anyway, as we speak, there’s probably some folks practicing cunny-lingus right here in my hometown. Well, uh, I hope so. You do need practicing because it takes a while to get that, uh, down. Pun intended.”
Lest anyone get the idea that he had come to ridicule the church, humiliate its leader, and leave his neighbors in the ashes, Bruce had written an original song for the evening; an alternately sharp and loving ballad for the town and people he could never bring himself to abandon completely. Titled “In Freehold,” the song recalled his youth, from Randolph Street to St. Rose of Lima, from escorting Doug home from the pool hall to picking up his first guitar, his first kiss, the Vinyards, the tragedy of his father’s life, and the small-mindedness that made Freehold “a bit of a redneck town” to outsiders and outcasts. “He nailed it with that one,” says former musician-turned-mayor Mike Wilson. He also offered more recent memories: walking the streets with his kids, taking them on a fire engine ride (he didn’t mention that he had single-handedly paid for the city’s new rescue vehicle), and, he had to confess, being happy to be on the streets that raised him. “Well, I left and swore I’d never walk these streets again, Jack / Tonight all I can say is, ‘Holy shit, I’m back.’”
It was true. After eight years of living in Los Angeles, Bruce and Patti had packed up their kids, including their youngest, Sam Ryan, born in 1994, and made a family home in Colts Neck, a quiet, partly rural town about ten minutes from the Monmouth County court building at the center of downtown Freehold.
TWENTY-FOUR
HOPE, DREAMS, AND REDEDICATION
BRUCE AND PATTI MOVED THEIR family back to New Jersey in 1996, setting up in a farmhouse on a pastoral spread of land just east of Freehold. Moving so close to his hometown had not been an accident, Bruce told me. “My oldest boy was going into first grade, and we just decided we didn’t want to raise the kids in LA. Patti and I wanted the children to have more of a normal upbringing.” In Colts Neck, he says, “We lived in a nice neighborhood, and [the kids] went to good schools, but outside of that they grew up around dry cleaners, hunters, people who did all sorts of things. So, really, the intent was to create as regular a life for the kids as possible, and we liked it. We have a family that is huge, and everybody really gets along. It’s truly a miracle, you know.”
Back on his home turf, Bruce took on the paradoxical roles of ordinary neighbor, dad, old friend, and local legend. Stranger still, his easygoing commitment to being the former only added more of an otherworldly glow to the latter. The more normal he behaved, the more extraordinary it seemed.
You didn’t hear about it so much if you didn’t live in central New Jersey. But from the Springsteen epicenters around Freehold and Asb
ury Park, the stories have the ring of folk legends. There he is on Main Street on Freehold’s weekly Cruise Night, his son perched on his shoulders as they watch the vintage hot rods parade past. See that guy in the Range Rover with the car seats in back? That’s Bruce Springsteen dropping his kids off at school. An hour later he’s in sweats in the Gold’s Gym at the mall, straining through his weight room regimen while his trainer barks encouragement. By midafternoon, he’d be back at school, arriving early enough to sit on the hill above the playground to watch the kids running and swinging through recess. “That’s my boy down there,” he boasted, pointing out his eldest to a friend. He’d never seemed more proud. Possibly because the boy wasn’t lost on the outskirts of the games; he was right there in the middle, laughing and playing with everyone else.
Bruce also couldn’t resist an invitation to take a seat at the center of a party. So when he pulled over on Route 97 to check out a Harley-Davidson with a For Sale sign on it, Bruce introduced himself to the owner when he came out, talked about the bike, spent a little while trading road trip stories, and when the guy mentioned that he and his buddies were grilling and drinking beers out back, Bruce came right back to have a few. He shook hands all around and ended up staying for two hours, working through a few Budweisers and a plate of ribs before he realized how late it had become. In the summers you’d find him stretched out on the sand at Manasquan Beach or standing on the Asbury Park boardwalk—just outside Madam Marie’s little fortune-reading shack. He didn’t wear disguises or come with a posse or even a single bodyguard. He simply lived the adult version of the life he always led on the streets and boardwalks.
• • •
Since the mid-1980s, Bruce’s chief recording engineer, Toby Scott, had spent his out-of-the-studio periods listening to, cataloging, and converting to digital files the enormity of recorded music his boss had compiled over the years. Rehearsal tapes, live tapes, the teetering skyscrapers of studio outtakes, rejects, and early versions of subsequently rewritten tunes. A Herculean job, given the wildly prolific habits Bruce had lived by for so long. “We had at least three hundred fifty unused songs by the time we got to 1997,” Scott says. And not all of them had been judged substandard. More than a few, in fact, had been dismissed in favor of songs whose main strengths derived from what they added to their albums’ narratives rather than their own singular charms. “Listen to ‘Roulette,’ that’s a great little piece,” Jon Landau says of the early River outtake. “Bruce and I would hear that and look at each other in shock, both of us saying, ‘It wasn’t my idea to leave that off the album!’ We had our reasons at the time, and every decision represented a choice.”