• • •
When Senator John Kerry claimed the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in the summer of 2004, he’d already known Bruce for nearly twenty-five years, and known of him even longer than that. A richly decorated Vietnam veteran who had returned from duty a vehement opponent of the war, Kerry met Bruce when he played the Vietnam vets benefit in Los Angeles in 1981, and kept a framed, autographed copy of the concert poster in his offices as he ascended from lieutenant governor of Massachusetts to the US Senate. When Kerry got back in touch with Bruce during the summer of 2004, the musician didn’t hesitate to throw his support to the Democratic candidate. It was a bridge he hadn’t set out to cross, certainly not when his music and his career loomed over every other aspect of his life. But with three children at home, other priorities loomed. “Well, it’s your flesh-and-blood connection to the future; this is what’s going to matter when I’m gone,” he says. “Their presence sets off a whole series of new realizations that affect you all along the spectrum, including political.” However Bruce had made his decision, the candidate was delighted to have him on board. “There’s an authenticity about Bruce that’s just incontrovertible,” Kerry says. “I think it’s because he is so true to who he is, and people know it.”
Bruce also signed up (with the E Street Band in tow) to headline the Vote for Change tour put together by the political group MoveOn.org. The series of large-scale benefits starred pop and rock stars (Bruce, R.E.M., John Legend, John Mellencamp, the Dixie Chicks, Pearl Jam, and others) equally determined to change the nation’s direction. As they all knew, or were soon to learn, celebrities shouldn’t expect to transition into political advocacy without taking fire from a variety of fronts. Even Ted Koppel, who had devoted so much time on Nightline to the release of The Rising, didn’t hold back his skepticism when Bruce came back two years later to talk about the presidential campaign. “Who the hell is Bruce Springsteen to tell anybody how to vote?” Koppel asked pointedly. Some fans, Bruce admitted, marched up to him on the street to explain why they wouldn’t be coming to see him this time around. But Bruce didn’t care. “It’s an emergency intervention,” he told USA Today’s Elysa Gardner. “We need to get an administration that is more attentive to the needs of all its citizens, that has a saner foreign policy, that is more attentive to environmental concerns.”
The Vote for Change tour ended in mid-October, and when the presidential campaign entered its final week at the end of the month, Bruce went out on the road again, playing warm-up for Kerry at a series of rallies heading into election day on November 2. He came out Woody Guthrie–Pete Seeger style, carrying an acoustic guitar and a pair of songs—“The Promised Land” and “No Surrender”—that spoke to the electoral battle to come and the visions that fueled it. When Kerry and Bruce came to Madison, Wisconsin, on October 28, the amassed crowd filled the Capitol Square and flowed down the streets. “The future is now, and it’s time to let your passions loose,” Bruce told the crowd. “The country we carry in our hearts is waiting.” When the candidate reached the stage, he was astonished. “It was huge,” Kerry recalls. “Just stunning, people lined the street, there must have been one hundred ten thousand people out there, and it was electric. A beautiful fall afternoon, near the end of the campaign. There was just an energy and a magic to that particular rally and appearance.”
A thrilling afternoon at the end of a heated campaign that would end, for Bruce, in heartbreak, as optimistic early returns turned darker as election night went on. Kerry conceded the election to Bush late the next morning. “Patti peeled me off the wall after a couple of weeks,” Bruce said to NBC’s Matt Lauer. “I was disappointed like everyone else, y’know?” The next day in Atlanta, Brendan O’Brien’s telephone rang, and Bruce’s craggy voice greeted him. “I’m ready to get back to work,” he said. “I’ll play you some songs, tell me what you think, and we’ll take it from there.”
• • •
When he reemerged a few months later, Bruce came in the cowboy boots and black suits of America’s ghost-swept frontiers. He’d set his course back to the lonesome houses and the sad-eyed souls living within. Titled Devils & Dust, the new album collected a dozen stark, character-driven songs, much like the ones that had filled his acoustic solo projects Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad. The songs didn’t represent a new burst of creativity as much as a thoughtful sifting of Bruce’s old notebooks and recorded archives. The title track, a whispered monologue by a soldier clutching a gun in some unnamed but sandy battle zone, dated back to 2003. And that was the newest song on the album. “All the Way Home” had been composed in 1991, while many of the others were recorded originally during the Joad sessions in 1995.
O’Brien counseled Bruce to add more texture to this set. “I said, ‘You can do it one of two ways,’” the producer says, recalling his first hearing of Bruce’s tentative lineup. “ ‘Either just like this, as per Nebraska, which not a lot of people would connect to, or else another way.’” They chose the latter route, punching up the songs with new instruments and vocals, giving the disparate material a unified sound. The songs focused most intently on relationships: what holds them together, what tears them apart, what survives their collapse, and what doesn’t. Far more melodic and musically feisty than Bruce’s earlier folk albums, the songs on Devils & Dust also range far beyond traditional song structures. The verses ramble with the needs of the narrative, abandoning the mathematics of meter. Few of the songs boast anything like a traditional chorus. Most strikingly, the verses of “Matamoros Banks” describe the drowning death of a Mexican immigrant in reverse order, starting with his body floating up from the river bottom and ending with the moment he leaves his lover behind, bidding her to meet him by the same river that would claim him.
Released in late April, Devils & Dust established the sales pattern that Bruce’s nonrock albums would follow in the digital/iTunes–defined world. Buoyed by loyal fans eager to pick up any new Springsteen album the moment it became available, Devils debuted at the top of the Billboard album chart and then fell into a downward drift eased—and sometimes reversed—according to media coverage and tour schedules. Devils earned gold status (five hundred thousand units) within weeks and then settled into a slower pace toward platinum. Bruce’s sales certainly benefited from his bottomless appetite for the road. Starting with the marathon reunion tour in 1999–2000, he mounted an even longer charge to promote The Rising in 2002 and 2003, pausing for only a year before taking the band on the Vote for Change jaunt in the fall of 2004. After that, only a few months passed before Bruce set out on a global Devils & Dust tour, playing in seventy-two cities across the United States and Europe.
Unlike the austere Tom Joad shows a decade earlier, the Devils shows featured a stage crammed with instruments, the acoustic guitars joined by piano, pump organ, banjo, and several varieties of keyboards and synthesizers. Just beyond the edge of the stage, a hidden collaborator, Alan Fitzgerald, played tape loops and added other textures. Bruce changed instruments according to his whims, at one point performing “I’m on Fire” on the banjo, and finding new sounds in his keyboards, synthesizers, and sound processors. The most striking example came at the end of the show, when he sat at the pump organ to play the electronic punk duo Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream.” Slowing down the original’s pace to give the song a rich, hypnotic flow, Bruce sang the chant-like lyrics in his sweetest Orbisonian croon, evoking the romanticism that flowered on “Born to Run”—as if the years and the mileage had never come and gone, as if he still believed that a simple pattern of chords and a few romantic phrases could light up the night and alter the course of a life. “Come on and open up your heart,” he sang. “Come on and dream on, baby, dream.”
• • •
And so Bruce kept moving and dreaming. Dreaming about the horizon, and yet wide awake to the sawtooth realities of daily life and the arc of his own life—what he’d felt, what he’d heard, and played along the way about the folk music he’d played
back when he went to his older cousin Frank Bruno to help tune his guitar and maybe learn a few chords. Frank had switched from accordion when the folk revival hit in the early 1960s and thus pointed his pimply cousin to the plainspoken music’s wonders and possibilities. Three chords and the truth, and it’s only the last part that’s complicated. That fed into Bruce’s Bob Dylan fixation a few years later, and the Woody Guthrie passion that came in his early thirties. But those early songs, the ones about work and slavery and the outsized characters who wielded the axes, hammers, picks, and guns that built America’s identity, if not the nation itself, never left Bruce’s imagination.
Invited in 1997 to contribute a song to a tribute album for the great activist folkie Pete Seeger, Bruce signed on happily, forming a backing band the old-fashioned way: he hired the guys who had just performed at his birthday party. The Gotham Playboys were a New York–based zydeco-Cajun outfit that included Patti’s musical partner, Soozie Tyrell, on fiddle and vocals, along with keyboard-accordion player Charlie Giordano among its members. They could play anything with equal dollops of charm and skill, so of course they’d be perfect. Summoned for a day’s worth of sessions in early November 1997, the band followed Bruce’s lead through a half dozen folk songs Seeger had played (if not written) during his career.
Working in one of the restored farmhouses nestled around Bruce and Patti’s farm, the band came in cold, which was exactly how he wanted them. “The feeling I got was that we weren’t going for perfection but for energy and spontaneity. That was the approach,” Giordano says. “This was going to be fun.” When the musicians walked in and uncased their instruments, they ran through the usual technical chores: tuning, miking, balancing, and so on. But when Bruce slung on his guitar, that was the end of the preparing. He called out the name of a song, counted it down, and boom, off they went. If you couldn’t figure out the key by looking at the chords his fingers formed on the neck of his guitar, that was your problem. “Just focus, listen, and look, and don’t think,” Giordano says. And, of course, that was exactly what Bruce wanted.
“It’s fascinating to record a song when musicians don’t know it,” he told USA Today’s Edna Gundersen. “If people learn their parts too well, they consciously perform rather than flat-out play. When you just launch into it, it breaks down another barrier between you and the audience. One less layer of formality.” Bruce could take a little more time when the situation called for it; as in the hushed version of the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” that he eventually chose to contribute to the Seeger tribute album. But mostly his aesthetic could be summarized in the instructions he gave upon hearing a rough-and-ready intro to one of the songs: “That’s good!” Then he waved his hands to make them stop. “If it gets any better than that, it’ll be worse.”
Years passed, but Bruce always remembered the day’s spontaneity most fondly, and when he sat with Jon Landau to spin through their archives with an ear toward a Tracks follow-up, he heard it again and decided on the spot to get the gang back together and give it another go. They reconvened on March 19, 2005—this time with Frank Bruno’s son, Frank Jr., on board as a rhythm guitarist—and knocked out another handful of tunes. Ten months later Bruce called the band back for a final recording date in January 2006, after which they had more than enough tracks for a full-length album. Released three months later, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions10 got Bruce itching to hit the road and give his new band a whirl around the globe. Landau booked a fifty-six-show tour that began with an emotional appearance at the first New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival since Hurricane Katrina had all but drowned the city in September 2005. From there they headed off for a long swing through Europe and then returned to the United States for a few months of shows at concert halls and, in larger eastern cities, a small scattering of arenas. Then it was back to Europe for a final go-round before the holiday season. Also, Bruce had another batch of rock ’n’ roll songs he wanted to play for Brendan O’Brien. Two months later, he went back to Atlanta to work on the next E Street Band album.
• • •
Watching as it happened, and then in the weeks that followed, Bruce couldn’t get the flood of New Orleans out of his mind. The city’s role in the birth of jazz, along with its rich mix of cultural and ethnic traditions (African, Cajun, Caribbean, Hispanic, French, and more), would be more than enough to make it an indispensable cultural resource. And even that should have been dwarfed by the simple fact that the lives of a half million Americans were in immediate danger. For Bruce, the motivations mattered less than the simple fact that the government had neglected to help citizens who needed it desperately. “When you see the devastation and realize the kind of support the city will need to get back on its feet, there’s no way to make sense of someone pushing for more tax cuts for the [top] one percent of the population,” he told USA Today’s Edna Gundersen. “It’s insanity and a subversion of everything America is supposed to be about.”
Bruce rolled out a series of compositions that spun what he saw as the essential themes and failures of the Bush administration into terms intimate enough to describe a broken romance. “The best of my music that has social implications functions like that,” Bruce explains. “They reach for your heart first, they speak to your soul, then they get in your bloodstream, move through the rest of your body and into your mind.” The approach comes through in every note of “Livin’ in the Future,” the deceptively upbeat rocker that fell across his guitar in late 2003. Seemingly a rueful response to a Dear John letter, the song begins with its narrator reminiscing about his ex, from the moment he first saw her strutting his way, boot heels snapping like “the barrel of a pistol spinnin’ round.” So alluring, so dangerous, and far too seductive to not fall for, no matter the obvious warnings. Consider the hint of blood in her mouth as they kiss. From there, the seas rise, the earth gives way, the forces of liberty and justice head for the exits. Did he mention that they met on Election Day? Beneath skies as gray as gunpowder? Now his faith is ruined, the thunder sounds like righteousness crumbling into fragments. What remains? Try denial: “We’re livin’ in the future, and none of this has happened yet.”
Sonically, Bruce came at the tracks in an expansive mood, working with O’Brien to sculpt the songs into the sort of intricate productions he hadn’t attempted since he and Mike Appel spent six months hand tooling “Born to Run” into a rock ’n’ roll symphony. “He was really ready to bust it out that time,” O’Brien says. “It’s always my thinking that if you can present a tough lyric with a brightness to it, it keeps it from getting too one-dimensional. And he was letting it go. Let ’em all be filled with candy and sugar. And I was only too happy to oblige.”
Released in the fall of 2007, Magic and its accompanying one-hundred-stop tour played out at the same time as the American presidential election. Although Bush was nearing the end of his political career, his philosophies and policies loomed over the process. Looking among the candidates for someone who seemed to come from the country Bruce grew up imagining he lived in, he settled on Illinois senator Barack Obama. Clearly, Obama’s liberal-realist policies matched Bruce’s fire-cured optimism. But after reading Obama’s prepolitical memoir, Dreams from My Father, he was even more impressed by the senator’s history. The symbolic impact of electing the nation’s first African-American president only made it feel that much more crucial. “He’s a unique figure in history,” Bruce told the UK Observer’s Mark Hagen. “The fundamental American-ness of his story and the fact that he represents . . . an image and a view of the country that felt like it was so long missing in action . . . that’s fabulous.”
When the rough-and-tumble campaign for the Democratic nomination turned particularly bruising during the Pennsylvania primary in April,11 Bruce posted his strongly worded endorsement of Obama on his official website. “He has the depth, the reflectiveness, and the resilience to be our next President,” he wrote. “He speaks to the America I’ve envisioned in my music for the past 35
years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country that’s interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit. A place where [quoting now from the Magic song “Long Walk Home”] ‘ . . . nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone’.”
Released without the knowledge of the Obama campaign, the endorsement caught the candidate by surprise. “We were on the campaign RV in Pennsylvania, and he came back and said ‘Bruce Springsteen just endorsed me!’” campaign chief David Axelrod remembers. Obama sat down, handed his BlackBerry to him, and kind of beamed. “I’m not usually impressed by celebrity endorsements, but I just read this thing,” the candidate said. “And I like the guy. I’ve got a bunch of his music on my iPod. I really like him.”
Obama got Bruce on the phone by that afternoon, and when the general campaign began in the fall, the musician played starring roles at benefits and last-week campaign stops. After Obama won the election in November, he invited Bruce to perform at the We Are One concert held two days before his inauguration, where Bruce stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to sing “The Rising” with a gospel choir and then joined with Pete Seeger for a sing-along of “This Land Is Your Land.” When Bruce got tapped for a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, the president of the United States watched the proceedings from the presidential box with the musician seated just beyond First Lady Michelle Obama, who sat at her husband’s side. Still within reach of any presidential whisper, which Obama delivered multiple times that evening.
“I think [the president] sees Springsteen as a kind of poet of the American dream,” Axelrod says. “A poet who brings life to everyday hopes, aspirations, and challenges people face in a distinctive and wonderful way.”
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