Born to Run (28 page)

My writing
was focusing itself around identity issues—who am I, who are we, what and where is home, what constitutes manhood, adulthood, what are your freedoms and your responsibilities. I was interested in what it meant to be an American, one small participant in current history at a time when the future seemed as hazy and shape-shifting as that thin line on the horizon. Can a rock ’n’ roll artist help
sculpt that line, shade its direction? How much? With influences as varied and seemingly polarized as Woody Guthrie and Elvis, Top 40 radio and Bob Dylan, along with a thousand nights of bar playing behind me, I was curious to press on in search of what I could do and where I belonged.

Alongside my wife Patti, my band and a few close friends, I’ve shared my mind with Jon more than anyone else.
When it’s a good match, along
the way, your heart ends up thrown in too. There is a love and respect at the center of everything we do together. It’s not just business, it’s personal. When you came to work with me, I had to be assured you’d bring your heart. Heart sealed the deal. That’s why the E Street Band plays steamroller strong and undiminished, forty years in, night after night. We are
more than an idea, an aesthetic. We are a philosophy, a collective, with a professional code of honor. It is based on the principle that we bring our best, everything we have, on this night, to remind you of everything
you
have, your best. That it’s a privilege to exchange smiles, soul and heart directly with the people in front of you. That it’s an honor and great fun to join in concert with
those whom you’ve invested so much of yourself in and they in you, your fans, the stars above, this moment, and apply your trade humbly (or not so!) as a piece of a long, spirited chain you’re thankful to be a small link in.

Up River

In our quest, Jon became the Clark to my Lewis. In the future we would travel together through more than a little wilderness. He had befriended and counseled me
when it felt like I was teetering a little too close to the edge of my favorite abyss. Prior to Jon, I knew no one who’d spent three minutes in an analyst’s office. I grew up around a lot of very ill people, secretive, susceptive to serious depression, and disturbing, unpredictable behavior. I knew it was a significant piece of my own mental makeup. In New Jersey, in my crowd, the psychiatric profession
might as well not have existed. When I looked down and saw bottom, Jon assisted me toward help that would refocus and alter the course of my life. I owe a great debt to my friend for his kindness, generosity and love. He’s done a pretty nice job of management too. We’re still here after many years. When Jon and I discuss our future course of action, he’s always been guided by two things—my
well-being and happiness (then the tour gross!). These first two were the answers I was long looking for in the receding mists of Freehold, New Jersey. They are
the incredibly complicated and simple answers of parenthood, of friendship. The only ones.

The day naturally came when that changed too. I no longer needed a surrogate dad or a mentor, just a friend and partner. Jon really no longer needed
any single embodiment of his rock ’n’ roll fantasy and he began to successfully manage a variety of other artists. Adulthood, or something awfully like it, arrived. For a while, in these years of transition, there was tension and some misunderstanding between Jon and me; coded conversations, anxious phone calls, anger lying just beneath the surface, and frustration. It’s not easy moving forward
together; people get set in their ways, their perceptions cut in stone. Most don’t make it. Twenty years after we’d started, I’d changed. So had Jon. That was the idea. For a short while, it seemed we were victims of our own good promise. Then it all eventually came to a head and we sorted through it in our quiet way, sitting one sunny Los Angeles day, talking in my backyard. “Whaddaya think?”

We’d navigated the treacherous part of the river, the part Mike and I couldn’t make, where the current changes and the landscape will never be the same. So, breaking into the open I looked behind me in our boat and I still had my Clark. Up front, he still had Lewis. We still had our own musical country to chart, many miles of frontier to travel, and music to make. It’s too late to stop now.

THIRTY-ONE

THUNDER ROAD

As our evening session at 914 ground to a stop, Jon leaned over and whispered, “You’re a first-class artist, you should be in a first-class recording studio.” That made sense to me. My friendship with Jon had grown slow and steady, so I’d decided to invite him to the studio to observe and perhaps bring some insight into the problems we were having. Back in New York, we
went out for a late-night bite. As we sat side by side on two stools at the counter of a small diner, Jon offered, “If you need me to do something, I’d be glad to do it.” He seemed to have a clear idea of the steps that needed to be taken to get us out of our midflight stall. I thought about it. I’m insular by nature and I don’t let new people in casually. I decided it was necessary and he was the
right man. I liked and trusted Jon; our working relationship grew out of our musical friendship. He was not a cold professional but a
friend who perhaps had the expertise to help me make a great record. That’s what I was here for.

I talked to Mike. I explained this had to happen. He was unsure, but if I felt that strongly about it, he’d agree. A short while later we entered the legendary Record
Plant studios on West Forty-Fourth Street in Manhattan. On our first evening there a skinny Italian kid was operating the tape machine. His job was to change the tape reels and turn the player off and on upon the engineer’s command. He was a classic New York character, quirky, funny, with attitude to spare. When I came in the next night, he was sitting at the center of the long recording board,
replacing Louis Lahav. Jon felt we needed a new engineer and he and Mike decided to take action. I asked Jon if he thought this kid could pull it off. He said, “I think he can.” So Jimmy Iovine, brilliant impostor, young studio dog with the fastest learning curve I’ve ever seen (and soon to be one of the world’s biggest music moguls and star of
American Idol
?!), became the engineer on the most
important record of my life.

Jon had been to rehearsals in New Jersey and together we’d begun to edit some of our long, winding arrangements. We’d grown out of them. He’d helped me compress the song lengths for maximum impact. He told me longer was not always better; neither necessarily was shorter, but I’d caught the bug and Jon had to stop me before I took an ax to the classic intro and outro
of “Backstreets.” Jon’s opinions were always very measured. What would give us the biggest bang for our buck? The arrangements began to take shape and when we went into the Record Plant to record, suddenly, music got recorded.

I’d loosely imagined the
Born to Run
album as a series of vignettes taking place during one long summer day and night. It opens with the early-morning harmonica of “Thunder
Road.” You are introduced to the album’s central characters and its main proposition: do you want to take a chance? “The screen door slams, Mary’s dress sways”—that’s a good opening line, you can take it anywhere. “We’re pulling out of here to win.” That’s about
as good a closer as you’re going to get. It lays out the stakes you’re playing for and sets a high bar for the action to come. Then,
you’re introduced to the soaring, highway-blown-open sound of Clarence’s saxophone outro. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Big Man. “Thunder Road” is followed by “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out,” the story of a rock ’n’ soul band and our full-on block party. It’s Steve Van Zandt’s only
Born to Run
appearance, where he spontaneously arranged, badgered and befuddled the jazz players of a prize New York City
horn section, amongst whom were the Brecker Brothers and David Sanborn (all of whom must’ve been thinking, “Who
is
this crazy fucker in the wife-beater tee and straw fedora?”), into honking out some primitive boardwalk soul. Pedal to the metal, we steam into “Night,” followed by the stately piano, organ and broken friendships of “Backstreets”: “We swore forever friends . . .”

Side two opens with
the wide-screen rumble of “Born to Run,” sequenced dead in the middle of the record, anchoring all that comes before and after. Then the Bo Diddley beat of “She’s the One” (written just so I could hear C blow that sax solo over the top of it) and we cut to the trumpet of Michael Brecker as dusk falls and we head through the tunnel for “Meeting Across the River.” From there it’s all night, the
city and the spiritual battleground of “Jungleland” as the band works its way through musical movement after musical movement. Then, Clarence’s greatest recorded moment. That solo. One last musical ebb, and . . . “The poets down here don’t write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be . . . ,” the knife-in-the-back wail of my vocal outro, the last sound you hear, finishes it all in
bloody operatic glory.

At record’s end, our lovers from “Thunder Road” have had their early hard-won optimism severely tested by the streets of my noir city. They’re left in fate’s hands, in a land where ambivalence reigns and tomorrow is unknown. In these songs were the beginnings of the characters whose lives I would trace in my work (along with the questions I’d be writing about—“I want
to know if love is real”) for the next four decades. This was the album
where I left behind my adolescent definitions of love and freedom; from here on in, it was going to be a lot more complicated.
Born to Run
was the dividing line.

In a three-day, seventy-two-hour sprint, working in three studios simultaneously, Clarence and I finishing the “Jungleland” sax solo, phrase by phrase, in one, while
we mixed “Thunder Road” in another, singing “Backstreets” in a third as the band rehearsed in a spare room upstairs, we managed to finish the record that would put us on the map on the exact day our
Born to Run
tour was starting. That’s not supposed to happen. The record should be ready months before you hit the road, released at tour’s beginning, but that’s how close we cut it. In the early-morning
light, after three days of no sleep, we flopped into the waiting cars that would drive us straight to Providence, Rhode Island, and the stage.

Still, I wrestled with
Born to Run
for a few more months, rejecting it, refusing to release it and finally throwing it in a hotel swimming pool in front of a panicked Jimmy Iovine. He’d brought the finished master out on tour but to hear it, the two of
us had to go to a downtown stereo store and beg them to let us use one of their record players. I stood in the back of the store, fretting, hemming and hawing as the record played, Jimmy’s eyes plastered to every look on my face, begging, “Please just say yes and let’s be done.” Jimmy, Jon and Mike got crazy but I still just couldn’t release it. All I could hear was what I perceived as the record’s
flaws. The bombastic big rock sound, the Jersey–Pavarotti–via–Roy Orbison singing, the same things that gave it its beauty, power and magic. It was a puzzle; it seemed you couldn’t have one without the other. Jon tried to patiently explain to me that “art” often works in mysterious ways. What makes something great may also be one of its weaknesses, just like in people. I let it go.

THIRTY-TWO

JACKPOT

On August 25, 1975, all the aces came up, the sevens rolled round and an endless river of noise and silver poured forth from the mouth of the one-armed bandit of rock ’n’ roll—JACKPOT! Bingo! Bull’s-eye! We had a HIT! I was exhilarated but also extremely wary. A conceptual optimist but personal pessimist, I believed that along with the jackpot would come its terrible twin .
 . . trouble, as in bad gris-gris, a Gypsy’s curse, the
malocchio
, the “evil eye” down on ya. I was right. It was going to be a lot for a twenty-five-year-old to handle.

My first challenge was
Time
and
Newsweek
calling to put me on the cover of their magazines. I hesitated, because, back then, popular entertainers, particularly rock ’n’ rollers, were not on the covers of what were considered serious
news publications. The media culture of the midseventies was vastly different than that of today. First, nobody called it “media.” There was no Internet, no
Entertainment Tonight
, no happy talk news, no E! network, no MTV, no TMZ, no cable, no satellite TV. There were
newspapers, and on network television at seven p.m. there were old men in suits reporting the events of the day. That was it. There
were tabloids, but they didn’t give a damn about rock ’n’ roll punks. They wanted to know what kind of adult craziness Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were up to, they were interested in who Frank Sinatra was screwing.
Time
and
Newsweek
were prestigious magazines, but the first taste of future pop culture (and the demise of their influence) was beginning to bubble up. Modern “media” and all
its attendant roar, screech and babble were just around the corner.

I had a choice. No interview, no cover. Interview, cover . . . two of ’em. Though I was young, I’d had my season in obscurity. I knew well the near misses, the disappointments, the many miles covered and the small tastes of near discovery that went sour. THIS WAS NO TIME TO BUCKLE! I was reticent and would remain so, but I needed
to find out what I had. Forty years later I did not want to be sitting in my rocking chair on a sunny afternoon with the woulda, shoulda, coulda blues. All I could think of was my dad covered in a cloak of cigarette smoke lamenting, “I could’ve taken that job with the phone company but I would’ve had to travel . . . ,” so instead, it was lights-out, the blues, beer and resenting his own family
for what he thought he might’ve accomplished. Dead meat.

I worried, but in the end my ego, ambition and fear of not taking my shot outweighed my insecurity. I called Mike . . . “Send in the press.”

Hype

When the big noise came down, I was lounging in a deck chair at the Sunset Marquis hotel. The Marquis was an infamous LA crash house for wayward rockers. As the covers hit the stands, we were
out west to perform at the Roxy nightclub on the Sunset Strip. These shows were to be the center of our West Coast campaign after the raucous war we’d waged back east at New York’s Bottom Line. The Bottom Line was the gig that finally put us
on the map as big-time contenders. For five nights, two shows a night, we left everything we had on the tiny stage at 15 West Fourth Street. For us, they
were groundbreaking appearances, the band pushing its limits as I cakewalked across the skinny tabletops, leaving that burn in the air of something happening. Yes, we had our naysayers, and if our show couldn’t convince you, you were going to remain unconvinced for a while, but inside the band
and
on the street, you could feel the whole thing taking off.