Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  TWENTY-SIX

  THAT’S A BIG SHARK, MAN

  SITTING ON THE BALCONY OF his beachside thirtieth-floor penthouse on Singer Island, Florida, Clarence Clemons took in the morning sun as he considered the future of the E Street Band. He’d be ready, he was sure. It was a Wednesday in early March 2011, somewhere between the end of Clemons’s morning physical therapy session and the start of the one that would fill the latter half of his afternoon. A couple of months past his sixty-ninth birthday, the regal saxophonist had suffered a chain of physical betrayals. Knees gone bad, hips shot, spine scraping so painfully that he had to have portions of it fused just to stay on his feet. He said repeatedly in interviews that he felt more bionic than human. So many organic parts traded out for artificial replacements, some functioning better than others. For the last few years, Clemons had required a golf cart to get from dressing room to stage. “I’ve been going through hell, man,” he told me with a shrug. “Having to climb those steps to get up to the show—it’s amazing pain just to get to the steps. But I don’t care what happens. I’m gonna make it happen. This is what I do; this is who I am.”

  His eyes narrowed, and he nodded at the water below. “See that?” Not at first, but then he pointed out the five-foot mud shark slicing its way through the breakers. It looked like a warhead, colorless, fast, and razor finned. Even thirty floors up, it cast a chill. Clemons chuckled. They come past all the time, he said. Vast migrations, all sifting the waves for something, or possibly someone, to eat. “Oh yeah, people get chomped,” he said. “Not as often as you’d think, though.” The thing came closer, slid even with the balcony, and continued on its way. “That’s a big shark, man,” he said.

  The beast slithered off and Clemons began to talk about Danny Federici. They had always been partners in crime, going all the way back to that wild house they shared with Vini Lopez during the $35-a-week days of 1973. Back then they had to combine their talents to fend off starvation: Lopez could catch fish, Clemons could clean and cook them, and Federici made pasta. So many miles, so many nights on the road, so many great shows, so many surprise twists. For instance, the girl Federici met in Houston in 1974, who offered to drive the organist and his sax-playing friend the 250 miles to the next day’s gig in Dallas so they could sightsee and have a few laughs. Who knew that she had stolen that car? Or that she had just gotten out of jail? Or that her dad was a cop? “I knew something was fucked up,” Clemons said, laughing. “Something was always going to fuck up.”

  Oh, but put the man at the business end of a Hammond B3. “Danny’s sound was so important to the sound of the band,” Clemons said. “I always thought Bruce wrote tunes according to what he knew he had in his hands, bandwise. He could anticipate how a song would sound.” The trick was realizing that Federici would never play the same part in precisely the same way. If Bruce, or anyone, pressed him to repeat a performance, he’d shrug. “If you asked him to play something twice in recording, he’d say, ‘I probably can’t remember,’” Roy Bittan says. “But he’d come up with something else that was totally organic and very natural and beautiful.” Nils Lofgren, the creator of a million intricate song charts, could only marvel at his colleague’s ability to play from the opposite direction. “Danny was a stream-of-consciousness player,” he says. “Half the time he couldn’t tell you the chords to a song, but he could weave with extreme technical precision. He could play the hell out of it, with soulfulness and technical facility.”

  On his balcony, Clemons had tears in his eyes. “We’d been very close, ever since we lived together in that house. He was on my side of the stage, so we had our own thing going on over there. Always talking about the girls in the front row: ‘the white vest to my right!’ So it was particularly tough for me.”

  In November 2005, Federici found some bumps on his back, went to a dermatologist, and learned he had a cancerous melanoma. The treatment knocked the disease into remission for a while, but it came back with a vengeance just as the Magic tour got rolling in the fall of 2007. He made all the rehearsals, manned the keyboards at the big Today show album launch, and then set out with everyone else on the first leg of the world tour, a six-week swing through media centers and the American East and Midwest. When they learned in early November that Federici would have to leave the tour to focus on battling his cancer, Bruce called on Charlie Giordano, the keyboard-accordionist from the Seeger Sessions band, to fill in. After spending a week poring through Bruce’s catalog, often with Federici’s help, Giordano joined the tour to watch the organist do his thing. “I watched three shows, and Danny was so kind to me and ready to help in any way,” he says, “in spite of his being in tremendous pain, and also the sadness.”

  When they got to the final bows at the end of the first leg of the Magic tour, Bruce made straight for Federici, threw his arm across his shoulder, and steered him to center stage. With Bruce on one shoulder and Steve Van Zandt on the other, the one E Street resident who could claim to being in the band longer than Bruce (given that he and Lopez had hired Bruce to be their guitar player-front man in Child) smiled into the spotlight and leaned into his friend’s hug. Federici shouted something into Bruce’s ear, and they both laughed. Speaking in the tongues of the Jersey Shore, of musicians, of boyhood friends.

  Bruce and the band took six days off, then flew overseas for a three-week trip across Europe. When the opening strums of “Radio Nowhere” kicked on the lights in Milan, Italy, on November 26, Giordano sat in Federici’s place. He stayed there through the foreign swing and into the second American leg. A dozen songs into the set in Indianapolis on March 20, 2008, Giordano slid off the bench and left the stage.

  “We got a treat for ya tonight!” Bruce declared as Federici, smiling broadly beneath a dark slouch cap, slid onto the bench and threw himself into “The Promised Land” with the ease of a man who had never left. “Spirit in the Night” came next, and then Federici took up his accordion and stepped forward. “Before we went on, I asked him what he wanted to play,” Bruce said a few weeks later. “He said ‘Sandy.’ He wanted to strap on the accordion and revisit the boardwalk of our youth during the summer nights when we’d walk along the boards with all the time in the world . . . He wanted to play once more the song that is of course about the end of something wonderful and the beginning of something unknown and new.” Federici’s cancer had metastasized into his brain. The next time Bruce played the song was at the April 21 memorial service in Red Bank.

  Bruce and the band cancelled three shows after Federici’s death and then traveled to Tampa to honor their April 22 booking. The show began with a filmed tribute to their vanished organist. When it ended, a single white spotlight shone on the riderless Hammond B3, holding for a long moment until the first notes of “Backstreets” grew into the full cacophony of innocent love, time, and the cruel verities of life. The show became a kind of public wake, a succession of musical tributes and funny stories from back in the band’s wildest days. Federici’s sweet, cockeyed spirit hung over the next few nights too, with more memory-freighted oldies (“Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?,” “Spirit in the Night,” “Blinded by the Light,” and “Wild Billy’s Circus Story”), more stories, and a growing sense that Danny had taken something big with him.

  “The thing I’ve been proudest about for a long time was that unlike many other bands, our band members lived,” Bruce said to the Observer’s Mark Hagen. “And that was something that was a group effort. Something we did together, the surviving part. People did watch the other person. And it was a testament to the life force that I think was at the core of our music. Nobody gave up on you. That lasted a long time.”

  The inevitable cracks in the E Street foundation snaked into view a year earlier. For more than twenty years Bruce had leaned on the broad shoulders of Terry Magovern, an ex-navy man, club owner, and (mostly) gentle behemoth who had served as his longtime assistant, bodyguard, and buffer against and connection to the real world. Magovern went all the way back to the prehisto
ric Jersey Shore days too,1 knew exactly who was who and why they mattered, and kept his arms crossed and his heart open to those who needed it. “He was a lifeguard,” Bruce says. “That’s not a job you pick. It’s who you are internally.” Once an explosives expert in the Navy SEALS, Magovern also trained to rescue American astronauts in case their water landings went awry. “He was always busy saving someone,” Bruce wrote on his website. “That was his blessing and his tragedy.” His body weakened by cancer and cardiac problems, his spirit sapped by the death of his fiancée, Joan Dancy, whom he’d nursed through amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Magovern died in his sleep, inspiring Bruce to make his just-written and recorded tribute “Terry’s Song” a last-second addition to Magic. “A bad attitude,” Bruce sang, “is bigger than death.”

  A year later Bruce wrote “The Last Carnival” for Federici, revisiting the rolling home of Wild Billy nearly forty years since he’d signed on to a lifetime of flash, daring, and illusion. Imagining them both as a team of daredevils—trapeze artists, high-wire walkers, lion tamers—Bruce climbs alone onto the steaming train, pausing for one last glance into the gloom rising in the fields behind.

  Sundown, sundown / Empty are the fairgrounds / Where are you now, my handsome Billy?

  The next day, clouds smeared the Florida skies, and Clemons stayed in his kitchen. He had an industrial-strength stool back there and enough wingspan to reach into the refrigerator on his right and then adjust the temperature on the stove in front of him. He had some oxtail soup going, and a nice bottle of red a friend had recently shipped from his winery in Italy. “I’m not really supposed to drink these days,” he said. “But if you want some . . .” He produced two glasses and suggested letting it breathe for a few minutes.

  Clemons spoke at length, recalling the many moments when he and Bruce stood together—the brilliant white boy and his dark-skinned shaman—basking in and amplifying each other’s glow. “In the old days, we’d do these crazy dances, slide across the stage. So spontaneous, so magical. Like that time when he slid into my arms and kissed me. That was sudden, out of nowhere, and became a big thing.” But the tectonic plates shifted, and relationships changed. When Bruce turned in other directions for inspiration, Clemons resented it, even when he understood why it had to happen. “It’s like being married to someone. You have certain expectations of someone because you love them so much. But then these things happen, and he probably doesn’t even notice. So I felt like I put out all this for the situation and didn’t get much back.” Clemons felt that way for most of the nineties. Then the telephone rang in 1998 and it all came rushing back.

  “Bruce is so passionate about what he believes, that if you’re around him, you have to feel it. It’ll become part of your passion,” he said. “I believed in him like I believe in God. That kind of feeling. He was always so straight and dedicated to what he believes, you became a believer simply by being around him. People see him and think, ‘This is how it’s supposed to be, this is how it’s supposed to happen.’ You dedicate your life to something. And Bruce represents that.”

  • • •

  On the threshold of his sixtieth birthday, after achieving virtually everything he ever imagined achieving and then some, Bruce felt free to follow his instincts. “I’d gotten to an age where you’re less caught up into being fooled into believing that you have something to protect,” he says. “So you’re more relaxed about who you are. You’re as serious as ever about it, but it doesn’t feel ephemeral anymore. It doesn’t feel like something that’s going to disappear or vanish.” When a burst of new songs came at the end of the Magic sessions, he called the band back to put down some more basic tracks, and then visited more studios around the country during the tour’s off days. Expanding on the dense, Brian Wilson–esque production style of the earlier album, the new songs came cloaked in strings, bells, and other sonic fancies. But if the studio sparkle played counterpoint to the dystopian visions on Magic, the new songs came out as upbeat or whimsical: meditations on supermarkets, cowboy legends, and the joys and complexities of long-standing love. Some of the songs had undeniable charms. “What Love Can Do” is all sharp angles and minor chords, its lovers finding their connection on the rim of an apocalypse where “our memory lay corrupted and our city lay dry.” “Surprise, Surprise” jangles like prime sixties pop, with a melody so hummable that even the seasoned popsmith Mike Appel pronounced himself impressed. “That’s surprisingly melodic,” he told Bruce. “I didn’t think you had it in ya!” His former client laughed happily. “See?” he said.

  “Queen of the Supermarket” imagined a pure form of beauty in the aisles of the neighborhood Whole Foods.2 Elsewhere, the gnarly blues heart of “Good Eye” vanishes beneath layers of studio silk. The midtempo “Working on a Dream”3 trudges the same path trod by all those other determined Springsteenian laborers, only this time it doesn’t lead anywhere beyond the formless dream cited in the title.

  Still, the Danny Federici tribute, “The Last Carnival,”4 brimmed with enough love and sorrow to sting the eyes. And the real masterpiece in the collection, recorded by Bruce alone in his home studio, turned out to be “The Wrestler,” the elegiac theme he wrote for the low-budget film of the same name. Starring the brilliant but mercurial Mickey Rourke, the portrait of a broken-down professional wrestler risking his life to reclaim former glories felt remarkably familiar. Following its character through the same crumbling East Coast towns Bruce had always known, the film played in his eyes as a kind of nightmare vision of who he might have become if the anger had consumed him and left him alone and fuming in a barely rented mobile home, broke and deaf, the Telecaster long lost to the pawn shop. That wasn’t Bruce’s fate. But he knew what might have led him there, and how easy it would have been to slam that aluminum door and feel right at home. Another variation on the archetype portrayed by John Wayne in the emotionally fraught western The Searchers. The story of the young rocker so determined to make a home and family through his music that he couldn’t sit still long enough to make those things part of his real life. “These things that have comforted me I drive away / This place that is my home I cannot stay / My only faith’s in the broken bones and bruises I display . . .”

  • • •

  Titled Working on a Dream, and wrapped in a gauzy, airbrushed painting of Bruce standing with the ocean behind and heavenly sky (half scattered stars, half summery clouds, all dreamy) above, the new album floated into the marketplace on January 27, 2009. Released just sixteen months since Magic in September 2007, Working set an instant mark as the quickest follow-up album Bruce had made with the E Streeters since The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle emerged in November 1973, ten months after the January release of Greetings from Asbury Park. While the album was greeted with respectful, if muted, reviews,5 the weeks surrounding its release featured some of Bruce’s most spectacular promotional appearances.

  He started with the Golden Globes, where “The Wrestler” won the Best Original Song–Motion Picture Award. Next, Bruce made his star-spangled appearance at Barack Obama’s inauguration festivities on January 18, then pivoted immediately into rehearsals for his appearance at another unimaginably huge, nation-binding event. Which is to say, the halftime show of Super Bowl XLIII. “I wasn’t sure I expected it to mean something,” Bruce says. “I thought it would be just, okay, we’ve got a record coming out. You’re looking for new ways to have your music heard. Also, they’d been asking me to do it for ten years.”

  Why wouldn’t Bruce play the Super Bowl for all those years? Pop stars (from Michael Jackson to Britney Spears to Shania Twain) had in recent years turned the halftime shows into gigantic promotional stunts for their next albums and tours. Serious-minded rock ’n’ rollers, on the other hand, took it to the people over the radio and in the concert halls. At least, that’s how it worked until the radio industry collapsed into tiny, computer-programmed shards. For most of the mainstream rock stations in the United States, even the most worshiped artists
had been reduced to the sum of their original hits. No matter how prolific you were, or how celebrated your new work, you had little chance of introducing listeners to anything new. By the mid-’00s the terrain had shifted enough to push Paul McCartney to make the pilgrimage to the big game in 2005. The Rolling Stones followed in 2006, then came Prince in 2007. And when Jon Landau saw fellow stripped-down rockers Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers playing the halftime of the 2008 Super Bowl, he had a small revelation. “I just thought, ‘That could be us,’ ” Landau says. He picked up his telephone and dialed Bruce, who also happened to be sitting in front of his living room TV. “He had the same reaction.” Landau called the National Football League executives charged with planning the Super Bowl broadcast, and it wasn’t long before they had a deal. Bruce and the E Street Band would star in the 2009 halftime show.

  Despite the many, many thousands of concerts Bruce had performed over the years, the twelve-minute Super Bowl appearance was the first to be scripted with graphic storyboards. Still, Bruce’s shows had long included light cues and even skits that required particular performers to be in particular places at precise times, so it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for him or anyone in the band. The one requirement Landau had lain down to the producers, in consideration for his man’s oft-stated standards, was this: no fireworks. Looking over the storyboards a few months later, only one detail furrowed Bruce’s forehead. “Where’s the fireworks?” he demanded. Told that Landau had ruled them out, Bruce gazed at his partner incredulously. “How are you gonna do the Super Bowl without any fireworks? Are you crazy?” When game time approached in Tampa, Bruce fired up the E Streeters by telling them to think about the one hundred million pairs of eyes that would be locked on them during the show. “I said, ‘Look, today’s a day when we get to do what we’ve always wanted to do. We’re gonna play for everybody.’”