Born to Run (22 page)

Dylan was preeminent amongst these types of writers. Bob Dylan is the father of my country.
Highway 61 Revisited
and
Bringing It All Back Home
were not only great records, but they were the first time I can remember being exposed to a truthful vision of the place I lived. The darkness and light were all there, the veil of illusion
and deception ripped aside. He put his boot on the stultifying politeness and daily routine that covered corruption and decay. The world he described was all on view, in my little town, and spread out
over the television that beamed into our isolated homes, but it went uncommented on and silently tolerated. He inspired me and gave me hope. He asked the questions everyone else was too frightened
to ask, especially to a fifteen-year-old: “How does it feel . . . to be on your own?” A seismic gap had opened up between generations and you suddenly felt orphaned, abandoned amid the flow of history, your compass spinning, internally homeless. Bob pointed true north and served as a beacon to assist you in making your way through the new wilderness America had become. He planted a flag, wrote the
songs, sang the words that were essential to the times, to the emotional and spiritual survival of so many young Americans at that moment.

I had the opportunity to sing “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” for Bob when he received the Kennedy Center Honors. We were alone together for a brief moment walking down a back stairwell when he thanked me for being there and said, “If there’s anything I can
ever do for you . . .” I thought, “Are you kidding me?” and answered, “It’s already been done.” As a young musician, that’s where I wanted to go. I wanted to be a voice that reflected experience and the world I lived in. So I knew in 1972 that to do this I would need to write very well and more individually than I had ever written before. I’d saved a few dollars playing here and there since I got
back and for the first time in my life I stopped playing with a band and concentrated on songwriting. At night in my bedroom with my guitar and on an old Aeolian spinet piano parked in the rear of the beauty salon, I began to write the music that would comprise
Greetings from Asbury Park
.

I called Mike Appel. He remembered me and told me to come on up, so I took Lincoln Transit to New York City,
met Mike at Wes Farrell’s and played him my new stuff. He said these were songs we could knock down some doors with. He got crazy excited, as only Mike could. The words flew a mile a minute, the hand gestures threatened dismemberment, his face lit up and in thirty seconds he compared me to Dylan, Shakespeare, James Joyce and Bozo the Clown. Mike could raise hard-ons in half a cemetery with his
enthusiasm. It was what drew me to him. He could get you excited
about yourself. Mike had the carny barker’s and tent preacher’s 110 percent belief in whatever was flying out of his mouth at any given moment. It’s a gift. By the time I left his office, my superstardom had been preordained. All we had to do was get a somebody to listen to a nobody. I kept writing, kept visiting and met Mike’s partner,
Jimmy Cretecos, a milder, sweeter version of Mike. We started to work together and make some basic tapes. I visited Jimmy’s spectacular apartment in Tuxedo Park. He had a gorgeous wife and a ritzy place, so it looked to me like these guys had it made. They’d had some bubblegum hits but Mike said they made most of their money writing jingles. I went with Mike to one of his sessions and ended
up playing harmonica on a Beech-Nut Gum commercial demo.

In the meantime, we planned and schemed while only one thing stood in the way. Before Mike would consent to use his many talents on my behalf, he explained, he would have to be protected. That meant contracts. I’d never signed a contract in my life, didn’t know shit about them and therefore was extremely suspicious of them. I’d lived off
the grid for so long, I was totally ignorant in the ways of the law, musical or any other kind. I knew no lawyers; I’d been paid in only cash my entire life and had never paid a cent of income tax, signed an apartment lease nor filled out any form that might bind me in any way. I had no credit card, no checkbook, just what was jingling in my pocket. I had no college-educated friends. My Asbury Park
was an island of misfit, blue-collar provincials. Smart, but not book smart. I’d never gotten to know anyone who’d made an actual record or been signed to a big-time recording contract. I’d never seen a contract of any kind or been in touch with any businessmen. I had no professional resources.

Mike explained each contract, what it would do for me and how we would be protected. Production—that
was our recording deal. I was signed to Laurel Canyon Productions, Mike and Jimmy’s company, and they would produce my records and sell them to a major label. Publishing—Mike and Jimmy would publish my music under Laurel Canyon Publishing, in theory working to get other artists to cover my songs. I would receive my writer’s
half of the royalties but none of the publishing revenues. Management—like
Elvis and the Colonel, Mike’s business model, we would split everything fifty-fifty. The problem would be all the expenses would end up coming out of my half. The whole thing was overreaching and counterproductive on Mike and Jimmy’s part, leading to a lot of damage in the end, but who was I to say?

The bottom line was I liked Mike and I knew he understood what I wanted to do musically. We weren’t
aiming for a few successful records and some modest hits. We were aiming for impact, for influence, for the top rung of what recording artists are capable of achieving. We both knew rock music was now a culture shaper. I wanted to collide with the times and create a voice that had musical, social and cultural impact. Mike understood that this was my goal. I was not modest in the assessment of
my abilities. Of course I thought I was a phony—that is the way of the artist—but I also thought I was the realest thing you’d ever seen. I had a huge ego, and I’d built up the talent and craft to pursue my ambitions with years of playing experience and study. I had my doubts and I had a sense of humor about the balls I had and the big bite I was trying to take, but damn, that’s where the fun was,
and . . . I was a natural. It was in my bones.

In the end, I would’ve signed Mike’s jockey shorts, if he’d presented them to me, to get my foot in the door. I was closer than I’d ever been to the real work I wanted to do. I could feel it. I spent a few nights on my own trying to get through the biz speak, the legalese, of the contracts myself. It was a joke. I sat with Mike’s lawyer, Jules Kurz,
who mildly explained the basic provisions of the contracts, but in the end, I just said “fuck it”; I had to get in, and if these meaningless papers were the price, so be it. If I’m a bum, then all this stuff adds up to zero, and if I’m champ, then who cares? I’ll have gotten there and the rest will be sorted out. I didn’t look back until much later, and by then, of course, it was too late. Frightened,
slowly, reluctantly, recklessly, contract by contract, I signed, finishing the last one, one evening, on a car hood in a New York City parking lot. Done deal.

TWENTY-FOUR

ONWARD AND UPWARD

Our first audition was at Atlantic Records. All I remember is going up to an office and playing for somebody. No interest. The next thing Mike finagled—and I couldn’t believe it—was an audition with John Hammond. John Hammond! The legendary producer who signed Dylan, Aretha, Billie Holiday—a giant in the recording business. I’d just finished reading the Anthony Scaduto
Dylan biography and I was going to meet the
man
who made it happen!

The motor mouth of Mike Appel was a fierce and surgical instrument when put to proper use. Mike could’ve talked Jesus down from the cross, Santa Claus out of Christmas and Pam Anderson out of breast augmentation. He talked us off the street and into the inner sanctum of John Hammond’s
office. My man was a managerial genius. To
give you an idea about how much the music business has changed, John Hammond, a historical figure in the industry, was receiving complete no-names like us off the streets of New York in his office! I’m sure Mike laid down a hell of a spiel, but still . . . John later told me his trusted secretary and gatekeeper, Mikie Harris, after she spoke to Mike, simply said to him, “I think you ought to see
this guy.” The doors to El Dorado opened and in we strode.

I had no acoustic guitar of my own so I borrowed a cheap one with a cracked neck from Vinnie “Skeebots” Manniello, my old Castiles drummer. He had no case, so I had to haul it
Midnight Cowboy
–style over my shoulder on the bus and through the streets of the city. It’s a hokey feeling, as if you’re showing off and are about to burst into
song at any moment. Bare guitar in my hands, Mike and I walked into John Hammond’s office and came face-to-face with the gray crew cut, horn-rimmed glasses, huge smile, gray suit and tie of my music business hero. I would’ve been in a state of complete panic except on the way up in the elevator I’d performed a little mental jujitsu on myself. I thought, “I’ve got nothing so I’ve got nothing to lose.
I can only gain should this work out. If it don’t, I still got what I came in with. I’m a free agent. I make my way through the world as myself and I’ll still be that person when I leave no matter the outcome.” By the time I got there I almost believed it. I walked in nervous but confident.

Immediately, as the door opened, my representative, Mike Appel, showed a personal tendency for unnecessary
confrontation that would weigh on us as time passed. I figure once the door is open you can stop kicking at it. Not Mike; he walked in swinging. Straightaway, with no discernible self-consciousness and before I’d played a note, he told John Hammond of Columbia Records I was perhaps the second coming of Jesus, Muhammad and Buddha and he’d brought me there to see if Hammond’s discovery of Dylan
was a fluke or if he really had ears. I found this an interesting way of introducing and ingratiating ourselves to the man who held our future in his hands. Mike then sat back on the windowsill, pleased as punch he’d had his
“no bullshit” say, and handed the ball off to me, an act we would repeat often in the future. John later told me he was poised and ready to hate us, but he just leaned back,
slipped his hands together behind his head and, smiling, said, “Play me something.” I sat directly across from him and played “Saint in the City.” When I was done I looked up. That smile was still there and I heard him say, “You’ve got to be on Columbia Records.” One song—that’s what it took. I felt my heart rise up inside me, mysterious particles dancing underneath my skin and faraway stars lighting
up my nerve endings.

He went on, “That was wonderful, play me something else.” I played “Growin’ Up,” then something called “If I Was the Priest.” He loved the Catholic imagery, pointed out the lack of clichés and said arrangements needed to be made for me to play for Clive Davis. He told me he’d had his successes and his failures in the acts he’d signed at Columbia and these days, Clive’s say
was final. He then asked to see me perform live that night. Mike and I said we’d try to find a club that would accommodate us for a few songs; we shook hands and left his office. We got into the elevator and when we slipped out of CBS’s big Black Rock building and hit the street, hell broke loose.

We’d climbed to the heavens and spoken to the gods, who told us we were spitting thunder and throwing
lightning bolts! It was on. It was all on. After the years of waiting, of struggling toward that something I thought might never happen, it had happened. With Skeebots’s junk guitar, the sword we’d just pulled from the stone, now proudly, nakedly slung over my shoulder, we had a celebratory cheeseburger and, floating down the street, jumped into a cab and headed for the Village. I was twenty-two
years old.

We started at the Bitter End; no good. The Café au Go Go; nope. My old stomping grounds, Café Wha?; closed. And finally, a basement club on MacDougal Street, the original Gerde’s Folk City. Sam Hood was the current manager, a fellow who’d support me greatly in the future when he’d run Max’s Kansas City on Union Square. He said they had an open-mike night and between eight o’clock and
eight thirty I could go on. John
Hammond breezed in a little before eight and took his place amongst at best six other patrons, and the show was under way. Playing live was something I knew how to do. I’d tell stories, make jokes and dramatize the songs I was singing. “Saint in the City,” “Growin’ Up,” “If I Was the Priest,” a song called “Arabian Nights,” a few others, and the show was over.
John was beaming. I could perform.

Things started to happen . . . slowly. A few weeks after I met John, he ushered me into Clive Davis’s office, where I was warmly welcomed. I played Clive a few songs and with gentle fanfare, I was invited to join the Columbia Records family. John took me into their Fifty-Second Street studio and we made a demo he produced. It was the last days of the fifties-style
recording studio system. Everybody wore suits and ties and were adults. The engineer, the assistants, all longtime, old-school recording men. I sang a dozen or more songs into a microphone in the middle of a very antiseptic room. I played piano on a few others. It was all very bare bones; that’s the way John heard me. Listening to those demos today, I don’t know if I’d have chosen that kid
to lay all my money down on, but I’m thankful he did.

I was now living on the remainder of my “bureau drawer” savings, a few bucks from Mike and the kindness of strangers. I had a sweet girlfriend who tipped me some eating money once in a while and a gal lightly on the side who owned her own business and drove a fancy sports car. She was fabulously Jewish, a little older than me, and would occasionally
sweep me up off the corner of Cookman Avenue to spend a night in her condo apartment high overlooking the beaches of Asbury Park. There we occasionally engaged in what, I’m sure, was some of the worst sex of our lives (if such exists). She held all the aces, which I didn’t mind, and we had a nice, screwed-up semirelationship for a while. The periodic evenings in her solidly middle-class
digs took the chill out of street-level living in Asbury, and were comforting and most welcome.