Designed as a kind of comic book version of the history and spirit of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, the halftime show began with Bruce and Clemons evoking the Born to Run cover by standing back to back against a sheer white backdrop, their instantly recognizable profiles augmented by the outlines of their lofted saxophone and Telecaster guitar. They separated with the opening chords of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” Bruce jogging to center stage and hurling his Tele to hardworking guitar tech Kevin Buell,6 then bolting to the front to lead the band’s best-known creation myth. A quick four-count announced the start of “Born to Run,” minus its second verse, but with its “everlasting . . . kiss” emphasized with a burst of rocket fire. The berobed Joyce Garrett Singers jogged out to bring some gospel to a sliver of “Working on a Dream,” which gave way to a goofier than usual “Glory Days,” with lyrics adjusted for the occasion (“I had a friend who’s a big football player . . . He could throw that Hail Mary right by ya . . .”), and a zebra-striped referee sprinting out to throw a delay of game flag when the show threatened to run long. Another hail of rockets swept the band off the stage, and a private plane carried Bruce back to New Jersey in time for him to light a bonfire in his backyard and contemplate the stars until close to dawn, the pulse of the one hundred million viewers still tingling in his fingertips. “It wasn’t what I expected,” he says. “I wasn’t sure I expected it to mean something. But it had a little strange sacrament to it. For weeks afterward, everybody came up and told me what they thought. The guy handling the baggage on the airlines, this person, that person, the nine-year-old kid on the street. ‘Hey, didn’t you . . . ’ You know? It was quite wonderful and meant quite a bit to all of us.”
• • •
Clemons nearly didn’t make it to the game. In early October 2008 he entered a New York City hospital and in two weeks weathered two knee replacement surgeries. The recovery process was excruciating. The pain, Clemons told Don Reo, his close friend and cowriter of his memoir, Big Man, was beyond anything he’d ever known. “They haven’t made a drug that can touch this pain,” he said. “I feel like I’m made of pain.” Almost entirely convinced that he could never be in shape for the halftime show, Clemons worked with trainers through the holidays and then into January. And when the lights came on in Tampa that evening, one hundred million Americans, and God only knows how many other viewers around the world, saw him standing tall, moving with the music as he blasted his trademark solos, and moving easily to punctuate Bruce’s “Tenth Avenue” proclamation that Scooter and the Big Man were about to tear the Super Bowl in half with a mighty high five. “There’s something about being onstage,” Clemons said. “I call it the healing floor. I do all this shit, then I sit back later and wonder, how the hell did I do that? It revives you.”
Clemons made it onto the Working on a Dream tour, albeit with the golf cart and elevator, and a stool to lean on when he didn’t have an active role in the song at hand. As on the Magic tour, Clemons’s hobbled condition altered his presence. No longer able to stalk and then rush into the spotlight, he hung back in his shades, fedora, and floor-length black duster, dark and inscrutable until the moment the spotlight put the gleam on his sax and he pinned his shoulders back. “I’ll be seventy years old soon,” Clemons said that afternoon on his balcony. “So you have to find different parts of your body to make it happen.”
Bruce, on the other hand, made like Peter Pan with his gym-solid shoulders and chest, his impressively trim waistline, and the jumping, strutting, piano-dancing performances that seemed every bit as electric as they had been in the nineties, the eighties, and the seventies too. This time out, however, his new material didn’t light up the arenas like the tunes from Magic and especially The Rising had done. So while Bruce had long built his shows around his newest songs,7 mixing in the older stuff to underscore certain themes or to allow the new material to reveal new dimensions in songs whose meanings had once seemed chained to other eras or messages. True to form, the Working on a Dream tour’s April 1 opener in San Jose, California, featured half a dozen songs from the new album, with a nearly ten-minute “Outlaw Pete” tapped as the night’s second song and each of the show’s five-to-six-song minisets built around Working tracks. When the tour got to Philadelphia on April 28, the set was down to four new songs, which ebbed to two when they opened the European swing on May 30. When the tour ended in Buffalo six months later, only the album’s title song remained in the set. “It was a record that just wasn’t as popular as a lot of our other records,” Landau says. “On the Magic tour, he was doing seven or eight Magic songs a night. And on the Working tour [the new songs] weren’t making a connection to the live audience that we would like them to make. Not for a lack of trying, though.”
Sensing the lag in his audience’s enthusiasm, Bruce went back to his catalog for rarely played songs, many inspired by the handmade signs audience members brought to inspire a last-second call for “New York City Serenade,” “I’m on Fire,” and so on. That Bruce even acknowledged the signs represented a philosophical shift. The signs had first appeared nine years earlier during the reunion tour, when a concerted effort by hard-line fans (rallied for the first time by Internet fan sites) tried to compel Bruce to play “Rosalita,” the one beloved classic he had made a point of not performing on the tour.
Back then the “fuckin’ signs,” as he called them, aggravated him so much that the one time he did play “Rosalita,” at the end of the fifteen-night stand in the Continental Airlines Arena, it was because he didn’t see any “Rosalita” signs in the crowd. Bruce did a 180 on the signs during the Magic tour in 2008, and made a ritual of calling for them to be passed forward to the stage, where he could sift through the requests and pull out the ones he liked. He became particularly fond of the requests for obscure and/or just plain odd non–E Street oldies, which led to a recurring feature he called Stump the Band. Anything could happen, given the right sign. One night, ZZ Top’s “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide.” The next, ? and the Mysterians’ “96 Tears.” Or maybe the Troggs’ “Wild Thing,” the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.” Or how about a “Hava Nagila”–“Blinded by the Light” medley?
When the tour went into its final leg in the fall of 2009, Bruce began a series of full-album shows, during which he and the band would perform one of his most beloved albums from start to finish. Starting with a complete Born to Run in Chicago, they repeated the performance at Giants Stadium, following at the same venue with shows featuring Darkness on the Edge of Town and Born in the U.S.A. When they got back to New York after a short sweep of Midwestern and East Coast arenas (which included several Born to Run shows), they lit up their Madison Square Garden shows with song-by-song re-creations of The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (with Richard Blackwell playing his original conga part from “New York City Serenade”) and then a full playing of the two-disc The River. A few more Born to Run shows followed, but Bruce saved the tour’s last concert—an arena show in Buffalo—for the full performance of his debut record, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. With Mike Appel along in the airplane and then backstage, Bruce pulled his ex-manager into the preshow band circle and called out to every person in the ring—Clemons, Tallent, Appel, and Van Zandt, and the absent Federici and Vini Lopez—who had helped him get into that first recording studio and then so far beyond. Onstage Bruce dedicated the show to his ex-manager. “This is the miracle,” he said. “This is the record that took everything from waaay below zero to, uh, to one.” He reminisced about John Hammond and the audition he’d earned thanks only to Appel’s insistence. “So tonight I’d like to dedicate this to the man who got me through the door. Mike Appel’s here tonight. Mike, this is for you.” That tumbling guitar riff kicked off “Blinded by the Light,” and off they went, back to his tentative first steps in the big-time music industry and on the road that had led them so far.
When they got to “Growin’ Up,” and the spot in the middle where the music had always hushed in order for Bruce to te
ll one of his shaggy dog tales about the birth of the band, he put on his dreamiest voice and began with what has to be the archetypical opening line of every band story he’d ever told.
“There I was . . . it was a stormy, stormy night in Asbury Park, New Jersey . . .”
The audience roared happily.
“A Nor’easter was blowing in, rattling all the lampposts and washing Kingsley Avenue clean. And me and Steve were in a little club down the south end of town. When suddenly the door lifted open and blew off down the street. And a large shadow of a man stepped in. I looked. King Curtis? King Curtis has come out of my dreams and landed right here! No! Jr. Walker! He walked to the stage and—”
Clemons, his eyes hard and face blank, stepped to Bruce’s microphone and spoke in his most sinister baritone.
“I wanna play witchoo.”
Bruce cracked up.
“What could I say? I said, sure! And he put the saxophone to his mouth, and I heard . . .”
Clemons played a pretty little riff.
“Something as coooool as a river.”
Clemons let loose a snarling run up the blues scale.
“Then I heard a force of nature coming out. And at the end of the night, we just looked at each other and went—”
The two men faced each other, gazed into each other’s eyes for a long moment, and then nodded slowly in perfect unison. Clemons turned to face the crowd, put his saxophone to his mouth, and hunkered down low enough for Bruce—Telecaster against his waist—to lean against his shoulder in the iconic Born to Run pose.
“So we got in the car, a loooong Cadillac. Drove through the woods at the outskirts of town. And we got very sleepy. And we fell into this long, long, long, long dream. An’ when we woke up . . .”
Bruce paused, the crowd straining to hear what would come next.
“We were in fuckin’ Buffalo, New York.”
An avalanche of drums, and the song burst into its final verse, pushing Bruce right into that old parked car with the keys to the universe dangling from its ignition.
Three weeks later Bruce reconvened the surviving members of the 1978-era band—Bittan, Clemons, Tallent, Van Zandt, and Weinberg, with Giordano subbing for Federici—to perform all of Darkness on the Edge of Town in Asbury Park’s beachside Paramount Theater. The house dark and empty, save for documentarian Thom Zimny and his film crew, Bruce and the band played the songs without regard for their future audience, their eyes on one another, their bodies given over to the rhythm and the music. Shot by Zimny with virtually all of the color washed out of the shot, Bruce and the band seemed lost to time. Still squaring off to fight their way off the boardwalk, out of town, and onto the western highway. As if they hadn’t already been there and back a hundred times. As if the years had done nothing to shake their bond or weaken their belief in the music.
The Darkness box set, released in 2010, came five years after the multidisc commemoration of Born to Run’s thirtieth anniversary . Both included a remastered version of the original album, along with bonus CDs and documentaries directed by Thom Zimny, Bruce’s go-to documentarian since 2000. The BTR package included a full-length video of the notorious Hammersmith Odeon show from 1975, while the Darkness box included a 1978 show filmed in Houston and, to the endless joy of Van Zandt, a two-disc set of the sixties-pop-inspired songs Bruce had written and recorded, only to toss aside. “Thank God he finally put ’em out!” Van Zandt says. “That’s his highest evolution, and he takes it completely for granted.”8 As if to show he still had it in him, Bruce took the bones of “Save My Love,” an unused song seen in a filmed 1976 rehearsal Zimny included in his documentary film about Darkness, finished the lyrics, and got the Darkness-era band (plus Giordano) into his home studio to record it like they used to do: all in the same studio at the same time, playing it exactly as they had when they were skinny, frizzy-haired kids on a hot summer afternoon, making a big noise in Bruce’s basement rec room.
With no tour planned for 2011, Bruce made a few talk show appearances,9 then in early December got the Darkness band together to play a handful of the unearthed songs in the Carousel House just off the Asbury Park boardwalk. Playing for a small invited crowd and Zimny’s cameras (which would capture the performance for an edited Internet broadcast a few days later), the band—enhanced by the Miami Horns and violinist David Lindley, who had played on some of the original sessions—seemed a bit stiff. Blame the winter chill in the unheated Carousel House, the year of not playing together, the crowding of the cameras. But also note the flatness of Bruce’s performance. And when he throws it to Clemons for his big solo in “Gotta Get That Feeling,” moving right over to cheer him on and maybe bump shoulders, Bruce finds him on his stool, his eyes hidden behind thick glasses, and his entire being focused on hitting notes he once played while stalking the stage like a colossus.
• • •
Back in his Florida penthouse, Clemons was in his living room, rolling the shades up after previewing his documentary, Who Do I Think I Am?, about the spiritual evolution he experienced traveling through Asia, where no one knew or cared about his fame and achievements in the Western world. Now it was about to be screened at a couple of festivals. He had a lot going on. Clemons played some sessions with pop sensation Lady Gaga a few weeks earlier and found the experience thrilling.
“When I asked her what she wanted, she just said, ‘Just be Clarence Clemons. Play what you want, be who you are. I’m gonna drop the needle, and you go.’” The memory opened a smile. “So that’s what I did, and she loved it. That was very cool. Something I hadn’t experienced in a long time, not since Bruce’s first albums. Sit down to play, and just play. It reminded me of why I love being a musician and doing what I do.” Now she wanted him to be in her videos and accompany her to American Idol for her performance on the series’s season finale.
He had one foot in ecstasy and the other planted in irritation. Bruce is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and deservedly so. But what about the E Street Band? Didn’t they have something to do with that big, and always distinctive, noise that made Bruce so beloved? “What the fuck are we, chopped liver? I’ve gotta go to jail because of the band but still don’t end up in the Hall of Fame.” The Big Man was clearly pissed, but then he shrugged and his smile returned. “The thing is, now they have a saxophone of mine in the Hall of Fame. My manager at the time told me it’d be a good idea to let ’em have that. But I’m still not in there. My fuckin’ saxophone is in there, but I’m not. And I’m the one who fuckin’ played it. So my sax is in the Hall of Fame, my ass is on the cover of Born to Run, and here we are. Oh man!”
• • •
Victoria Clemons called the paramedics at about three o’clock on the morning of June 12. Clemons had suffered a serious stroke. The surgeons did what they could to seal the blood leak in his brain, to mend the artery and relieve whatever swelling or damage it created. When Bruce got the news in France, where he and Patti were celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary, he flew immediately to Palm Beach, with Patti and the rest of the band in close pursuit. The official diagnosis made clear that Clemons was seriously ill, with significant paralysis on his right side. Still, the next hours and days seemed promising. By Tuesday, reports had him conscious and in stable condition. “Miracles are happening!” one unidentified friend told the Backstreets fanzine website. Friends and family got another message: get here fast.
Clemons’s condition grew worse; then his brain function collapsed entirely. Realizing that his body no longer contained his soul, the Clemons family chose Saturday, June 18, to allow his body to take its leave. When the machines switched off, Bruce brought his guitar to the room and sat close for the next three hours, singing and playing with the Clemons family, giving witness to his friend’s departure and, perhaps, on some level, easing his journey. “I’ll miss my friend, his sax, the force of nature his sound was, his glory, his foolishness, his accomplishments, his face, his hands, his humor, his skin, his noise, his confusi
on, his power, his peace . . .” Bruce said in his eulogy.
But his love and his story, the story that he gave me, that he whispered in my ear, that he allowed me to tell . . . and that he gave to you . . . is gonna carry on. I’m no mystic, but the undertow, the mystery and power of Clarence and my friendship, leads me to believe we must have stood together in other, older times, along other rivers, in other cities, in other fields, doing our modest version of God’s work . . . work that’s still unfinished. So I won’t say good-bye to my brother. I’ll simply say, “See you in the next life, further on up the road, where we will once again pick up that work, and get it done.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
THE NEXT STAND OF TREES
A FEW TI CKS AFTER TWELVE NOON on March 15, 2012, Roland Swenson, the executive director of the South by Southwest indie music festival in Austin, Texas, got the day’s festivities started with a worshipful introduction of the keynote speaker. Uncompromising artistry, he said. Wild energy, unwavering commitment to righteousness and the determination to “give it all he’s got, without hesitation, every time he steps on the stage.” And with that, Bruce Springsteen came clomping out to the lectern, pulled a few wrinkled yellow legal sheets out of his jeans pocket, and gazed across the convention hall crowd.
“How can we be up this early in the fucking morning?” That was his hello. “How important can this speech be if we’re giving it at noon? Every decent musician in town is asleep. Or they will be before I’m done with this thing, I guarantee you.”
It wasn’t a sleepy kind of speech. Leaning crookedly against the podium and kicking his right foot against the stage floor, Bruce channeled his scrawled notes about music and life into the jazzy rhythms of a beat poet. “Doo-wop!” he chanted. “The most sensual music ever made! The sound of raw sex. Of silk stockings rustling against leather upholstery, the sound of bras popping open all across the USA. Of wonderful lies being whispered into Tabu-perfumed ears. The sound of smeared lipstick, untucked shirts, running mascara, tears on your pillow, secrets whispered in the still of the night, the high school bleachers in the dark at the YMCA canteen. The soundtrack for your incredibly wonderful, blue-balled, limp-your-ass walk back home after the dance. Oh! It hurt so good.”
Bruce Page 50