Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Ignore the temptation to draw lines, make rules, and dismiss anyone offering another way of doing things, he said. “Purity of human expression and experience is not confined to guitars, to tubes, to turntables, to microchips. There is no right way, no pure way, of doing it. There’s just doing it.” Talking directly to the musicians in the audience, the ones still sleeping off whatever SXSW hijinks they’d been up to the previous night and all the others in the world, Bruce projected his own internal experience into a universal code of being.

  Don’t take yourself too seriously. Take yourself as seriously as death itself. Don’t worry. Worry your ass off. Have iron-clad confidence, but doubt. It keeps you awake and alert. Believe you are the baddest ass in town—and [that] you suck! It keeps you honest. Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideals alive and well inside of your heart and head at all times. If it doesn’t drive you crazy, it will make you strong. And when you walk on stage tonight to bring the noise, treat it like it’s all we have—and then remember it’s only rock ’n’ roll.

  Nine hours later at Austin’s Moody Theater, Bruce delivered the same speech in musical terms. Starting with an acoustic, chorale-of-singers cover of Woody Guthrie’s “I Ain’t Got No Home,” the nearly three-hour show moved easily from the folk-rock-soul of his just-released (and currently chart-topping) album, Wrecking Ball, to the boardwalk R&B of “The E Street Shuffle,” to the dust-and-grease visions of “The Promised Land” and “Badlands” and beyond. Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, the very image of thrash-and-scream musical anarchy, added vocals and guitar screams to the live arrangement of “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” and the pair of Wrecking Ball songs he played on. Then the encores ranged even further, with collaborations with reggae hero Jimmy Cliff (“The Harder They Come,” “Time Will Tell,” and “Many Rivers to Cross”); old-school British Invasion with the Animals’ Eric Burdon (“We Gotta Get Out of This Place”)1; then a stage-filling “This Land Is Your Land” sing-along, with all of the above, the night’s first two artists (the Low Anthem and Alejandro Escovedo), Garland Jeffreys, and members of reigning indie-rock heroes the Arcade Fire.

  Bruce’s apparent mission, to establish his credentials and ongoing artistic vitality with the younger generation(s), proved enormously successful. From the festival’s Austin Convention Center headquarters, up to the beer-stained clubs on Austin’s Sixth Street, and out to the weird old roadhouses on the far side of the freeway, the roughnecks agreed with the city punks who agreed with the geek bloggers: the man could put on a show. “One of the most stirring and inspiring shows in SXSW history,” Dennis Shin wrote on PopMatters. Josh Modell, writing in the Onion A.V. Club, described his reaction like this: “I’d never seen Springsteen live before, though of course I’d heard the stories about him and the E Street Band . . . it was, as expected, an incredible experience.”

  • • •

  Fifteen months earlier, in late 2010, Bruce called Ron Aniello, a producer-arranger who Toby Scott and Brendan O’Brien had recommended (and who had worked on Patti’s record, Play It as It Lays), asking if he could help finish some tracks he’d been working on. As Aniello remembers, the thirty or forty unfinished tracks sounded like nothing Bruce had ever done. “It’s stunning, really. Like Aaron Copland, the American landscape style. Soft and deep and open sky. There’s definitely a story going, but it’s different. Just gentle and beautiful, gorgeous, and so disarming.” Aniello wrote a symphonic arrangement for one of the songs and worked with Bruce for the next few months creating similar treatments for a handful of the other tracks. They worked steadily until Valentine’s Day 2011, when Bruce interrupted one of Aniello’s work sessions to play him a song he’d written while running errands that afternoon. Bruce picked up an acoustic guitar, Aniello set up a microphone, and three and a half minutes later they had a rough demo for “Easy Money,” a front-porch-style three-chord stomper sung in the voice of a stickup man who finds inspiration in Wall Street traders and bankers. Bruce came with another new song the next morning, and when they played back the rough demo for “We Take Care of Our Own” a few minutes later, he looked up at Aniello. “This day is gonna change your life,” he said.

  Jon Landau drove down from New York to take a listen. First came the ten orchestrated songs and then the two demos they made in the last few days. The newer songs changed the expression on the manager’s face. “Rock ’n’ roll is back!” said Landau when “Easy Money” finished playing. Bruce and Landau went off to talk, and when they returned ninety minutes later, Bruce greeted Aniello with a hug. Now they were definitely making a full album. “And you’re the producer,” Landau said. Wondering aloud how they would find a union between the orchestrated songs and the snarly rock ’n’ roll, Landau shook off Aniello’s question. “Forget it. Bruce will write a new record. It starts with ‘Easy Money.’” Bruce came into the studio armed with new songs every morning for the next two weeks. “I thought, ‘This is what it’s like to work with a genius,’” says Aniello, who soon suspected that he would never be able to keep up. “I thought, ‘He’s killing me. He’s going to need three producers.’” Bruce insisted it was no big deal. “I’m a craftsman,” he told Aniello. “You give me the shovel, and I keep digging until I find what we’re after.”

  • • •

  Eight months later, Bruce drove a visitor up the dirt road to the recording studio that serves as the center of his musical world. It was late October. The album was all but finished, with only a final mix left to do. According to Landau, this afternoon would mark the first time Bruce played the new music to someone outside his immediate circle. This prospect was both exciting for the artist and, it was said, nerve wracking. Climbing out of his Jeep, Bruce did seem more pensive than he’d been earlier that day, but coming off of a sleepless night2 plus a long afternoon of talking, he was also pretty bushed. Still, he pushed through the door while explaining how the wood-and-glass building—the first real studio he’d ever owned—had been constructed under Patti’s aegis. The entry area leads directly onto the studio floor, which is open and airy, with the control board at one end and a music-store-sized collection of instruments—digital and vintage keyboards, basses, a drum set, scattered percussion instruments, walls hung with black cords, microphones, effects pedals, and a big array of electric, acoustic, and pedal-steel guitars3 stationed throughout. The sitting area back by the front door has a couch, a few comfy chairs, and a coffee table centered by a new boxed edition of Robert Frank’s The Americans, the collection of stark photographs that inspired so much of Darkness on the Edge of Town.

  Bruce led the way to the control board, introduced Rob, one of his engineers, and gestured to the two other chairs at the desk, both set with a neat stack of typed lyrics in front of them. When Rob had the first song cued up, Bruce turned to his guest. “One thing I have to apologize for in advance: musicians like to hear their music loud.” The pile-driver-and-siren opening to “We Take Care of Our Own” thundered from the speakers, and Bruce sat back in his chair and nodded along to the backbeat. He gazed into the middle distance, occasionally tilting his head and then launching forward to adjust a knob. Other times he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. But just when it seemed Bruce had dozed off, he bolted up to push another knob a fraction of an inch. When the songs ended, Bruce accepted compliments with a grin and led the way back to his car for the drive home.

  Bruce talked a lot about the new album over the next few days. Almost every subject led back to some aspect of the songs and their production, as if he’d taken every experience and thought he’d had in the last year or two and invested it into words, chords, beats, and melodies. Earlier that summer, Landau described the record as a summary, or perhaps a modern iteration, of themes Bruce had explored throughout his career. “I’m always looking for new ways to tell the story that I’m interested in,” Bruce says. “The point is, you come back and keep coming back until people hear you. That’s the point. You have to find new ways to tell it, you hav
e to find deeper and different levels in it.” As an artist fixated on the intimate stories of ordinary folks whose labors make wealthier mens’ dreams come true, the early twenty-first century offered nothing but inspiration. “People went for the easy money,” he said over pizza in Freehold. “Tore the whole thing down. Didn’t care about you or themselves, really.” He talked about the America he’d been raised to believe in, the one he described in one song as a place where “Nobody crowds ya / Nobody goes it alone.”4 “And if you throw that away, or spit on that, you’re throwing all of this away.” He gestured past the walls to the country beyond. “And if you do that, that should be addressed, and there should be some outrage.”

  The songs did not stint on outrage. The drums on “We Take Care of Our Own” led the charge against the ones who looked the other way when New Orleans drowned, whose good hearts had hardened into stone. “Easy Money” described the financiers in the terms of a petty thief with a .38 tucked in his waistband. “Jack of All Trades” and “Death to My Hometown” told the story from the workers’ perspective, while “Rocky Ground” and “We Are Alive” spun today’s struggles into an entire history of bad times. And the confusion and heartbreak didn’t begin or end in the political or socioeconomic tides. The death of Clarence Clemons, four months into the process, left Bruce as wrung out as a ghost, forced to contemplate a future without the man whose spirit had somehow made his own burn brighter and loom larger. No surprise, perhaps, that the funereal “This Depression” brooded on a helplessness that sounded more psychological than economic. “I haven’t always been strong, but never felt so weak,” the narrator intones, “All of my prayers, gone for nothing.”

  The music spun into a distinctively new kind of rhythmic folk-and-funk, as redolent of his ancestor Ann Garrity’s Ireland as of cyberspace, of Harlem’s gospel churches as of the Jersey Shore and Preservation Hall in New Orleans. When a familiar saxophone blared from the studio speakers the day before in the midst of the new recording of “Land of Hope and Dreams,” Bruce cuffed his visitor and shouted over the music. “C’s last solo!” Asked later when Clemons had recorded his part, Bruce added a little more detail. “That was a combination of some things he recorded, you know. He played it live often, so we were able to use some of that. And that meant a lot to me, this sort of, ‘Yeah! That’s the song, that’s the solo.’” What anyone would think of it—or of the entire album, for that matter—was still unclear. “It’s going to be interesting,” he said, goosing his Jeep down a dark country road a few miles outside Red Bank. “It’s very different, and I know it’s a lot to take in during one listen, but I wanted to give you an idea of what I’ve got my hands in next. It connects to The River, and Tom Joad, and Darkness. Thematically it connects to a lot of my music in my past. But now we’re headed to the next stand of trees.”

  • • •

  Four months later, Bruce and the E Street Band—Steve Van Zandt, Garry Tallent, Roy Bittan, Max Weinberg, Nils Lofgren, and Patti Scialfa, with Charles Giordano on organ, Soozie Tyrell on fiddle, a five-piece horn section, singers Cindy Mizelle, Curtis King, and Michelle Moore, and Everett Bradley on percussion and vocals—have set up on the stage of the bomb shelter–like Expo Theater in the middle of Fort Monmouth, a disused military base near Tinton Falls, New Jersey. The day’s rehearsal started late due to the designer who came to fit the musicians for the coming Grammy Awards, so Bruce took a seat in the house to wait. He talked a bit about Jake Clemons, a nephew of Clarence who would share saxophone duties with Jersey Shore veteran Eddie Manion.5 At first it wasn’t clear how visible a presence Jake would have beyond the horn line’s place at the left rear of the stage. But when it became clear that his intonation and feel for the instrument, along with his bushy-haired charisma, were every bit as striking as his uncle’s, Bruce felt a kind of inevitability taking hold. “Another great sax player from the same family?” he said. “What are the odds?”6

  Dressed in a white T-shirt, black trousers, and black boots, Bruce started the session by striding to the center of the stage, announcing “Okay, everyone man your stations!” into his microphone, and accepting one of his blond Telecasters from Kevin Buell. When the musicians and singers were in place, he counted off “We Take Care of Our Own,” the ending of which segued into “Wrecking Ball,” which erupted into “Badlands” and then “Death to My Hometown.” Some songs went more smoothly than others. Nils Lofgren dropped a few vocal cues, Max Weinberg forgot a key drum fill—earning a swivel of Bruce’s head and a loud gale of teasing laughter. When the horn section sat mutely during what was supposed to be a charted riff, Bruce shot Manion a look and laughed again. “Gotta figure that spot out, gents!” he called after the song ended. Bruce constructs his shows in modular fashion, with minisuites of songs blending into distinct moods or themes that feed into the larger thrust of the show. The rehearsal broke between each setlet, and as they got back to it, stage moves started to emerge. Lofgren did a few of his spins; Bruce jumped on his monitors to lock in with Weinberg, and then did a few jumps to emphasize shifts in rhythm and mood. By the end of the second setlet, he was drenched in sweat. “Very good! Great! Terrific!” he called into the microphone. “Yeah, yeah, yeah!”

  When the afternoon ended, Landau huddled with Bruce onstage, prompting quick revisions to the harmonies and piano riff on “We Take Care of Our Own.” Bruce fairly skipped offstage, but when he returned a half hour later, his face was blank and his body seemed to droop. “Same time, same place tomorrow,” he said to me. But his voice sounded empty. An hour later, Landau called to explain. In his dressing room, Bruce had learned that a close friend, just forty years old, had unexpectedly died. Bruce was devastated, and feeling far too vulnerable to have a guest at the next day’s rehearsal. He would get in touch the next afternoon. Bruce did exactly that, apologizing for the change in plans, saying he’d come by in a half hour. Why he felt more comfortable being interviewed than having an observer at rehearsal is as intriguing as it is hard to figure. But true to his word, Bruce walked into the hotel bar on schedule, ready to tell more stories about his life, work, and glorious career.

  After the interview ended, he sipped his beer and talked about the friend he had just lost. He’d come from a tough background and, like Bruce, hadn’t had the benefit of a good education. But he’d worked his way up to owning a business and settling into the life of husband and father. Bruce had lived his own version of that life, too, and hoped to give his friend a helping hand on his way to a better life. But now that the darkest kind of fate had stepped up, all Bruce, or anyone else, could do was try to absorb the blow. In the silence that followed, he did not look like a cultural icon or even a rock ’n’ roll star. He looked like one of his own characters. Strong but sad and a little crumpled around the edges.

  Bruce has wrestled with his moods, and a psyche genetically prone to extremes, for most of his adult life. Decades of psychotherapy helped reveal and cast light on some of his most primal traumas and conflicts, but his raw moods, and occasional descents into full-blown depression, never quite went away. “You go through periods of being good, then something stimulates it,” he says. “The clock, some memory. You never know. The mind wants to link all your feelings to a cause. I’m feeling that because I’m doing this, or because that happened.”

  Eventually Bruce realized that his worst moods had nothing to do with what was actually taking place in his life. Awful, stressful things could happen—conflicts, stress, disappointments, death—and he’d be unflappable. Then things would be peaceful and easy and he’d find himself on his knees. “You’re going along fine, and then boom, it hits you. Things that just come from way down in the well. Completely noncausal, but it’s part of your DNA, part of the way your body cycles.”

  Not long after the end of the Rising tour in 2003 Bruce started taking antidepressants. Within days he felt like a shroud had been lifted from his shoulders. “It was like, get me this stuff now, and keep it coming,” he recalls. Almost always a prolifi
c writer, now Bruce not only composed and recorded a flood of material but also released it. Devils & Dust, the multidisc Born to Run box set, We Shall Overcome (The Seeger Sessions), Live in Dublin (a double live set with the Seeger Sessions band), Magic, the Magic Tour Highlights video/music EP, and then Working on a Dream, along with four world tours, emerged between 2005 and 2009, making those years the most productive in his career, by far.

  And yet Bruce knows his particular brain chemistry will never leave him completely in the clear. “You manage it, you learn and evolve, but another recognition you gotta have is that these are the cards you were dealt,” he says. “These things are never going to be out of your life. You gotta be constantly vigilant and realistic about these things.”

  • • •

  The release of the new album, titled Wrecking Ball, kicked up a satisfying fuss in early March 2012, greeted with reviews that were mostly positive, if not quite the tsunami of veneration that swept his earliest albums to such lasting heights.7 The lead single, “We Take Care of Our Own,” inspired more talk than anything Bruce had released since “The Rising.” The band’s show-opening appearance at the Grammy Awards made more news, while the debut of the new, Clarence-less E Street Band—in a special concert at Harlem’s soul music palace, the Apollo Theater, simulcast by SiriusXM Satellite Radio—extended the group’s reputation into another decade. Meanwhile, Wrecking Ball shot to the top of the charts in fifteen countries, including the United States.