Born to Run (43 page)

At stage right, Pete Townshend and a variety of rock luminaries bemusedly watched me break into the big time. At stage
left stood my wife; this was our first trip together as a married couple and I felt like I was going to come apart before her eyes. I was singing, I was playing, I was
thinking
 . . . “I can’t stand up here and sing these songs, not
these
songs, while putting people in a situation where they could be grievously injured.” I kept singing, I kept playing, but I was in a pure rage and simmering panic.
Okay, Mr. Big Time . . . how’d you get here?

We broke for intermission. I was seething. Mr. Landau joined me in my trailer during intermission and there, in the middle of the biggest concert of my life, we had a highly charged debate about canceling the entire tour. I could not face what was happening in front of the stage at Slane on a nightly basis. It was irresponsible and violated the protective
instinct for my audience I prided myself on. Fans were pouring, red faced, soaked in booze and heat exhaustion, over the front barriers to be taken to the medical tent or to flank the crowd, throw themselves back in and take another crack at it. Our insistence on having seats at our concerts had begun in the early seventies, after I stood, hidden, at the side of the bleachers in a college
gymnasium one evening and witnessed the cattle rush to the front of the stage. I didn’t like the way it looked. I’d made my compromises with European local customs over the years, but this was something else.

Keep in mind this was the first and only stadium show I’d ever performed
or
attended. I had nothing but this night to judge my decisions
upon. Jon wisely counseled we postpone our decision
until we had at least a few more concerts to judge by. (We’d already committed to, and sold out, the entire tour.) He was frightened also, and said if it was a recurring situation, he’d honor my feelings; we’d cancel and take the heat. It never happened again. The crowd settled during the second half of the Slane show and I observed there was a sketchy but ritual orderliness to what appeared from
the stage to be pure chaos. The crowd protected one another. If you fell, the nearest person to your left or right reached down, grabbed an arm and pulled you upright. It wasn’t pretty (or, to my eye, safe), but it worked. The other ninety-three thousand gatherers were clueless about the soul-searching minidrama being played out right before their eyes. To them, it was just a beautiful day with
a rocking band. In the end, Slane joined a rising number of our other performances to attain “legendary” status and, despite my distraction, turned out to be a solid show. On the streets of Dublin, it is often mentioned to me. If you were there, you were
there
. I was certainly there.

Newcastle, England

At our
second
stadium show, it was all sunshine and smiles. The band, already growing more
confident in the bigger venues, played spiritedly, and a safe, festive atmosphere prevailed. Question dismissed. We
could
play stadiums, but I never forgot my experience at Slane. Short note: When a crowd of that size gathers, particularly a young crowd, danger is always in the air. It’s simply a matter of the math. An unexpected mishap, a little hysteria, and the day can shift hard and very quickly.
Over the years, we’ve been careful and lucky at our stadium concerts. Some very well-intentioned and serious-hearted musicians, who carry a deep commitment to their fans, haven’t been as fortunate. Today’s stadium concerts are thoroughly organized but still, in those numbers, the potential for danger always lurks.

Headaches and Headlines

We traveled on. The tour became complicated by several
issues. Since my marriage, I’d suddenly become tabloid news fodder. In a Scandinavian newspaper, the day after we checked out of our local digs, I was shown a picture of Julie’s and my bed. We weren’t in it. It was just a picture of a freshly made bed. It was new, unsettling and a pain in the ass. Photographers were everywhere.

In Gothenburg, Sweden, things got broke. We were either confined
in our hotel or followed by a pack of paparazzi wherever we went. This was
not
what I’d signed up for. I was a private person and not comfortable with my personal life in the spotlight. What I wanted most, when I didn’t have a hundred thousand eyes
on
me, was all eyes
off
me. In the second half of the twentieth century, in the public arena, this was not a deal you could cut. Fuggeddaboutit! So
you took your blessings and accepted the fact that this nuisance was the price you’d paid for . . .
getting everything you ever wanted
! In ’84, beneath the white-hot spotlight, during the whitest-hot moment of my career, this sanity-inducing knowledge was not yet in my possession . . . so.

A shiny, new, black Takamine acoustic guitar was whizzing within inches of the thinning hair on my trusted
amigo Jon Landau’s pate. As it skimmed over his few remaining hairs, he startled but remained impressively calm. Then the atonal twang of rock ’n’ roll bells ringing, the splintering crack of dead midnight in the house of a thousand guitars, filled the backstage halls as my Takamine burst into a million pieces on the wall of my Gothenburg dressing room. Unless you’re Pete Townshend, I do not generally
counsel or condone the demolishing of perfectly good musical instruments. I would go so far as to say wrecking the righteous tools of Mr. Gibson, Mr. Fender or any other craftsman of fine guitars is near sacrilege. But when a healthy insanity calls, you do what you must. I’d had it just about up to here with the whole merry-go-round I’d just jumped on. Plus, I had no way of knowing if this
was going to be my life, my
whole
life,
everywhere I’d go, day after day, country after country, bed after bed, in a
Groundhog Day
of stultifying, inane attention, brought on by my own sacred ambitions crossed by the normal human longing for life and love. Would there eventually be one thousand pictures of freshly made beds my wife and I had slept in, printed, published and preyed on? There would
not. But at that moment, on that day, who could guess?

Mr. Landau, who’d simply been trying to bring a little perspective to my predicament, quietly moved back from his friend, the guitar smasher, and out into the hall. There he joined many others, who at that moment were glad they did not have his job.

After my guitar Armageddon, we went out and proceeded to literally destroy the Ullevi stadium.
The jumping up and down and synchronized twisting of so many gonzo Swedes during “Twist and Shout” cracked its concrete foundation. That’ll teach ’em.

FORTY-NINE

GOING HOME

The European leg of our tour spun on without a hitch, the seats full, the crowds rapturous. We’d grown comfortable in the expanded environs of the stadiums that had become our workplace. Our anthems were built to fill and
communicate
in places of this size, so from Timbuktu to New Jersey, crowds dropped one by one to the powerhouse show we’d started developing overseas. Some
cities stood out: three shows, centered around the Fourth of July, drew seventy thousand fans a night (with Steve dropping by to sit in) to London’s Wembley Stadium. Our debut in Italy, the motherland, brought us to Milan’s eighty-thousand-seat stadium. We walked down its damp, dim, gladiatorial tunnels with the distant ear-shredding sound of eighty thousand Italians rising, louder and louder,
until we broke onto the sunlit field. A cheer rose that sounded like we’d just returned from the
Crusades with our vanquished enemies’ heads held high on the necks of our guitars (or perhaps we were just about to be fed to the lions).

Walking amid the thunder toward the ramp leading to stage front, I noticed an entire section of empty seats. Our promoter at my side, I said, “I thought the show
was sold out.” He answered, “It is. Those seats are for the people who are going to break in!” Got it. And so they did. We hung huge video screens on the outside of the stadium to satisfy those unable to attend, but that only held them for a little while. Gates were rushed, security was breached and soon all “seats” were full, and then some. I stood in front of the mind-bending hysteria I’d come
to realize passes for a normal reaction from an Italian audience as women blew kisses and cried, men cried and blew kisses, and all pledged undying love and beat their hearts with their fists. Some grew faint. We hadn’t even started playing yet! When the band crashed into “Born in the USA,” world’s end seemed near; the stadium shook and swayed as we played for our lives.
Marone!

Back in the
USA, our show at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium proved unique. A crowd of sixty thousand Steelers fans got to watch me count off “Born in the USA” while several key members of the E Street Band, Roy and Nils, were cluelessly locked in deadly battle on our backstage Ping-Pong table! My testosterone-drenched “One, two, three, four” and the sound of Max’s crushing snare were met not by Roy’s massive
synth riff but by Danny Federici’s tinkling glockenspiel! New records were set in the quarter mile by Nils and Roy as they listened to the most heart-sinking syllables of their lives, the distant stadium-echoing, “Your ass is in a sling and I’m going to burn that fucking Ping-Pong table DOWN!,” incredulous “One, two, three, four” of their front man. I watched sixty thousand faces go from awe
to aw-shit as I stood, not too happy, pants metaphorically around my ankles, experiencing one of the greatest weenie-shrinkers of all time. Ping-Pong tables were banned for years. Heads rolled.

Giants Stadium: six sold-out shows to three hundred thousand of our
New Jersey faithful brought the tour’s size and significance home. My people. Never the hottest audience on our tours (it’s hard to beat
those Europeans!), but damn, they show up
and
they are my life-giving, loving homies.

In Texas, an infestation of locusts the size of your thumb swooped like World War II dogfighters around and over our heads during the show. On a cool night, they’d been drawn to the warmth of the stage lights and gathered in congregation on every available inch of our bandstand. Nils (a bug-o-phobe) ran skittering
to Danny’s organ riser. One went eye-to-eye with me perched on my microphone stand, popped to my hair and, during “My Hometown,” slowly crawled down the neck of my shirt to sit in the center of my back. Thousands littered the stage, to be swept away by long brooms at intermission time. It was biblical.

A short while later we were greeted by snow and thirty-degree temperatures at our show in Denver,
Colorado’s Mile High Stadium. The audience, in ski jackets, carrying blankets, came dressed for a winter football game. We cut off the fingers of our gloves to play our guitars through, did what we could to stay warm and froze our asses off. Steam rose in plumes from our shoulders as hot sweat met freezing air. About three-quarters of the way through our three hours, you could feel the cold
coming in for the kill, settling in your bones. Once I put my guitar down, my fingers went numb and couldn’t be revived; every syllable I sang left a cloud of visible breath streaming from my lungs. On to sunny, warm Los Angeles!

September 27, 1985, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, site of the 1984 Olympics. Our finale was a four-night wrap party. Hard blue skies and balmy temperatures greeted
the band and eighty thousand Los Angelenos. The band peaked amid an atmosphere of end-of-the-road celebration. We were now one of the biggest, if not
the
biggest, rock attractions in the world and to get there we hadn’t lost sight of what we were about. There were some close shaves, and in the future I’d have to be doubly vigilant about the way my music was used and interpreted, but all in all,
we’d come through intact, united and ready to press on.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Julianne and I returned home to our cottage in LA and I felt great . . . for two whole days. On day three, I crashed. What do I do now? Jon visited and mentioned the tour had been very successful . . .
economically
successful, so successful, in fact, I would need to meet my accountant. My accountant? I’d never met
him (or her) . . . ever! Fourteen years into my professional recording career, I’d never met those whose job it was to count my money . . . and watch it. Soon I would shake the hand of a Mr. Gerald Breslauer, who would tell me I had earned a figure that at the time sounded so outrageous I had to ban it from thought. Not that I wasn’t happy; I was—giddy, in fact. But I couldn’t contextualize it
in any meaningful way. So I didn’t. My first luxury as a successful rock icon would be the luxury to not think about, to downright ignore, my luxuries (some of them). Worked for me!

The aftermath of the
Born in the USA
tour was a strange time. It was the peak of something. I would never be here, this high, in the mainstream pop firmament again. It was the end of something. For all intents and
purposes, my work with the E Street Band was done (for now). We would tour together once more on my solo record
Tunnel of Love
, but I would intentionally use the band in such a way as to cloud its former identity. I didn’t know it then but soon we’d be finished for a long while. The tour also was the beginning of something, a final surge to try to determine my life as an adult, a family man, and
to escape the road’s seductions and confinements. I longed to finally settle in, in a real home, with a real love. I wanted to lift upon my shoulders the weight and bounty of maturity, then try to carry it with some grace and humility. I’d worked to get married; now, would I have the skills, the ability . . . to be married?

FIFTY

REGRESAR A MÉXICO

Right before the
Born in the USA
tour, I bought a home in the Republican stronghold of Rumson, New Jersey, only minutes from the plot of sand that once held the old Surf and Sea Beach Club, where we “townies” had been spit on by the children of my new neighbors. The house was a rambling old Georgian-style “mansion” on the corner of Bellevue Avenue and Ridge Road. I went
through my usual buyer’s remorse, but I held out, promising myself I’d fill the big old house with what I’d been searching for: family and a life. One morning I received a phone call from my father. This was unprecedented. The man who banned telephones from our home for nineteen years, if alive today, would never be in any danger of maxing out his minutes. I’d never received a phone call directly
from my dad so I was apprehensive. I called California.