Born to Run (54 page)

We were rock’s early third generation. Born in time to get the best of rock’s reinventors of blues, pop and soul, the British wave, yet young enough to experience its originators, Muddy
Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis . . . all still alive and active at the crest of the wave of the sixties. It was rock’s most vibrant and turbulent era. I saw the Doors, Janis Joplin and the Who in Asbury Park’s Convention Hall. The Who opened for Herman’s Hermits! And were preceded by a New York City band, the Blues Magoos, who wore electric
suits that glowed in the dark. Janis had in her band one of my great guitar heroes, Danny Weis from the band Rhinoceros, whom Steve and I followed slavishly whenever they came into the Jersey area. I received all these hands like a supplicant directly upon my trembling forehead and fell stunned by their power. With the radio and country exploding, there was enough rough fuel to last a poor boy a
lifetime . . . and it has.

Much great and inspirational music has come since, particularly the punk explosion of the late seventies and hip-hop in the eighties, but all in all, we had the luck of the draw. It’s part of what’s made our band unique: the cross-tensions of the fifties blue-collar world and sixties social experience clashing and melding in our music. We are pre- and post-hippie sixties
soul survivors. It’s a blend that won’t exactly exist firsthand anymore when we’re done. The world and society changes too quickly and too much. The birthing
conditions of today’s musicians will be different—just as valid, but different. And as the social conditions that gave rise to Motown, Stax, the blues and rockabilly slip out of existence, the elements that form the basis of what was created,
the golden age of radio, the industrial age, pre-Internet localism, post-industrialism, will shift into an entirely different set of influences and create the next generation’s rock heroes. It’s already happened quite a few times and is happening as we speak. Long live rock! (Whatever that may be.)

Induction

Come ’98 I got the word I was to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’d
been twenty-five years since the release of
Greetings from Asbury Park
and that was the criterion for inclusion. Our old paradox would be revisited. I’d long ago signed as a solo artist and recorded as “Bruce Springsteen” for twenty-five years. The Hall of Fame induction rules stated you were inducted under the name of your earliest recording. We’d toured since 1975 as Bruce Springsteen and the
E Street Band and what I’d accomplished was inseparable from my work with my friends. A few weeks before my induction, Steve visited me in my Rumson home and made his case that I should push for the Hall of Fame to induct us as Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band because, in his words, “that was the legend.”

He had a point but it’d been ten years since we’d played live together. I still had
a good deal of ambivalence, and the closeness we’d rekindle over the next decade had not yet taken hold. And . . . I had a lot of pride about walking into John Hammond’s office on my own that day in 1972. I’d set the band aside in the early seventies and determined to be a solo artist. I put together the greatest band in the world to further that purpose and in doing so we created something that
was not quite fish nor fowl. My primary heroes were solo artists—Frank, Elvis, Dylan—and I went in on my own with the determination to forge a solo voice. My model was the individual traveler, the frontiersman, the man in the wilderness, the highwayman,
the existential American adventurer, connected but not beholden to society: John Wayne in
The Searchers
, James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause
,
Bob Dylan in
Highway 61 Revisited
. These would later be joined by Woody Guthrie, James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, Flannery O’Connor—
individuals
who worked on the edges of society to shift impressions, create worlds, imagine possibilities that would then be assimilated and become a part of the culture at large. I needed a grand instrument and more, the feeling of heart-and-soul commitment that gave
me the room, the time to make the music I felt within me. That was the E Street Band.

The Hall of Fame did not have an apparatus to consider the gray area my work and my collaboration with the band fell into. There wasn’t a structure specific enough to take the important subtleties of our kind of musical entity into account. Steve was probably right; I could’ve petitioned the Hall of Fame to
make an exception as to how I’d be inducted. Though it had never been done with any other group or individual, I’m sure they would’ve in this case. But to do so I would’ve had to have felt with absolute clarity that that was what I wanted to do. In 1970, when I walked out of Steel Mill as a twenty-year-old kid and decided that was the last of small-unit democracy and “bands” for me, I’d chosen a different
path.

On March 15, 1999, I was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the guys at my side. Some had hurt feelings and some were simply happy for me, but at the end of the day, they all came through. We’d soon commence the tour that would signal a decade of some of our most productive years and bring us to several new generations of E Street fans.

Rehearsal

On March 11, 1999, we went
back to our roots and set up band rehearsals in Asbury Park’s Convention Hall. In ’99, Asbury was still blighted and struggling mightily from decades of neglect and corruption, but down on the fringes of Cookman Avenue, there was movement. A small group of
artists/frontiersmen and gays drifting in from New York had found the town’s low rents and laissez-faire social attitudes attractive. Asbury
was now the borderlands, a canvas driven blank by poverty and abandonment, leaving room for something new to be created. There was a faint light at the end of the city’s long, dark tunnel. Here we set about finding who we were
now
.

On the first day, as I kicked the band into “Prove It All Night,” I could feel it was all there. I was startled by some things I’d forgotten. My ears had lost
their insensitivity to how loud we were. That, along with deafness, would soon return. The big rolling sound of the band, the weight it carried, felt both welcoming and unsettling. If I was going to release this big machine again, I’d better know what I wanted to do with it. Midway through “Prove It” it felt like we could’ve played this song just two weeks ago. Ten years vanished into faint remembrance.
It was an enjoyable day but still I went home unconvinced. I held long conversations with Jon about my ambivalence. Ambivalence, of course, being one of my specialties, I couldn’t have honestly expected to make my way to where we were heading without a full-on wrestling match with my own dissonance. So be it. I was drawing a lot of our set from
Tracks
, an sixty-six-song set of outtakes, which
would be released simultaneously with our tour. I was resisting going to the classics for fear of relying too heavily upon yesterday.

One evening I sat with Jon in the Film Center Café on Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen and I wrote out my proposed set list. He looked it over and said, “We’re a little short on the songs that after ten years, people might want to hear.” “Really?” I made my protestations:
I can’t . . . I won’t . . . blah, blah, blah. Then I confided in him that I was unsure if the whole thing was going to work. If I could make it “real.” Jon calmly responded, “If you come out with your band and play your best music, people are going to like it.” Oh.

The next afternoon at Convention Hall, I went through a stressful rehearsal, running through music we’d long known that was feeling
somehow leaden and lifeless to me. I was quietly seething with anxiety but I didn’t
want to disturb or draw the confidence out of the band. There had been about fifty or so fans milling around outside of the hall for the past few weeks and around midafternoon, with a few songs left to rehearse, I told one of the crew to let them in. A rush of shining, excited faces rushed stage front as I counted
into “Promised Land” and suddenly, there it was . . . liftoff. The band felt light as a feather and deep as the sea. I’d looked into those faces and found what I was missing. It was all there inside of me. A great relief washed over me and it all made sense. As we’d slogged away for weeks on the Convention Hall stage in isolation, trying to pump life into our much-vaunted songbook, there’d been
only one thing missing: you.

With these few souls in front of me, I could feel not only our shared history but the
presentness
of what we were doing. It’d be all right.

The day before our opening-night concert I brought in a song called “Land of Hope and Dreams.” I wanted something new to start this new stage of the band’s life with. “Land of Hope” summed up a lot of what I wanted our band
to be about and renewed our pledge to our audience, to point the way forward and, once again, become a living presence in our listeners’ lives. That evening we closed the show with it and we were off.

We started on April 9, 1999, in Barcelona, one of the cities that had become an epicenter of our European popularity, and were met with a blind hysteria that would continue to bring us back to this
beautiful city for the next decade. It was not a reunion but a revival, and the band played hard and well for 133 shows, winding down to a last stand in New York City that would crystallize our return in a way we hadn’t expected.

“American Skin”

As our first tour in a decade drew to its close, I wanted to write something new for our New York engagement at Madison Square Garden as a signpost to
where we were heading. The shooting of Amadou Diallo, an African immigrant, by plainclothes police officers as he was reaching for his
wallet seemed to underscore the danger and deadly confusion of roaming the inner-city streets in black skin that still existed in late-twentieth-century America. I wrote as thoughtfully as I could, trying to take in the perspective of not just the Diallo family
but the officers as well. I tried the song out in Atlanta, our last show before New York City. I just thought it was another piece of music I had written that followed my long career path of dealing with topical subjects and I was mildly shocked when Steve came running into our Fort Monmouth rehearsal on the day before our Garden gig saying, “Have you seen this?” There on the cover of the venerable
New York Post
was the head of the New York State Fraternal Order of Police calling me a “dirtbag” and a “floating fag.” I understood “dirtbag” but I had to retreat to my pre-
Wikipedia Webster
’s for a definition of “floating fag.” It wasn’t there. I received letters, one from the police commissioner asking me NOT to play the song! . . . Huh? It’s a SONG! No one, except the folks in Atlanta, had
even heard it yet! But the storm continued on CNN and in newspaper editorials.

Come opening night at the Garden, needless to say, some tension filled the air. You could feel the restlessness of the audience, perhaps smelling a little blood. The police backstage, usually a great part of my audience, were unsmiling and uncommunicative. Mr. and Mrs. Diallo had requested to be in attendance. I met
them both briefly backstage, two elegant and beautiful Africans who in gentle voices spoke a little of Amadou and thanked me for writing about their son. Despite the press ruckus, I had no big presentation to make. I simply inserted the song in the part of the set where it would naturally come and went out to do my job. I gathered the band in a circle backstage, explained that something unusual
might occur but that this was what we did at our best. We held hands, the house lights dropped and we took the stage.

The opening of the set was stiff with apprehension, both our own and the audience’s. You could feel it was not going to be a normal evening. I’ve never stood onstage and felt people waiting, waiting, waiting for just
one
song. Finally, six songs in, I cued Roy and Max to go
into the dark, drawing riff and clocklike rhythm that introduced “American Skin.” Some in the crowd began to incongruously clap along and I asked for some quiet, then each band member, beginning with Clarence, chanted the opening lyric, “Forty-one shots.” At that point I could hear some scattered booing (regardless of what they say, it is quite distinctive to the ear from “Bruuuuuuce”-ing!). Well,
that was to be expected. Then several angry young men, one flashing a badge and saluting me with the New Jersey state bird, rushed to the front of the stage. They stood for a moment shouting at my feet; what, I couldn’t quite tell, but it wasn’t greetings and salutations. They were shortly hustled away by Garden security. We played on to a mixture of supportive applause and boos with the Diallos
in view in their seats and that was it. I followed “American Skin” with “Promised Land,” two songs about the demand for and refusal to give human recognition and the cost of that refusal.

Though “American Skin” was critical, it was not anti-police, as some thought. The first lines you hear after the intro are from the policeman’s point of view: “Kneeling over his body in the vestibule, praying
for his life.” In the second verse, a mother tries to impress on her young son the importance of his simplest actions in a neighborhood where the most innocent of motions (your hand reaching for your wallet or moving out of sight) can be misinterpreted with deadly consequences.

In the bridge, the lyrics “Is it in your heart, is it in your eyes” ask the singer and his audience to look inside themselves
for their collaboration in events. The third verse, “We’re baptized in these waters and in each other’s blood . . . it ain’t no secret, no secret my friend. You can get killed just for living in your American skin,” spoke of life in the land of brotherly fear.

The sheer number of shots, forty-one, seemed to gauge the size of our betrayal of one another. “Forty-one shots . . . forty-one shots”:
that was the mantra I wanted to repeat over and over throughout my song, the daily compounding of crimes, large and small, against one another. I worked hard for a balanced voice. I knew a diatribe would do no good. I just wanted to
help people see the other guy’s point of view. The idea was: here is what systematic racial injustice, fear and paranoia do to our children, our loved ones, ourselves.
Here’s the price in blood.