Born to Run (57 page)

It turned into a beautiful evening. We were in the last hour before sundown and the weather was glorious. Gradually, things moved, loosened up; people started dancing, swaying, taking in the noise we were making and going with it. We had the balls to blow “Jersey Dixieland” in Dixieland! The crowd was
judging but generous too. Then we hit “How Can a Poor Man” and I made sure I annunciated every line as clearly as I could to be understood. We were an hour and fifteen minutes in and I was pushing our rhythm as far toward rock while still letting the band swing. Slowly I could feel those two pieces sliding together. Then “My City of Ruins”; that’s what it took. A mutual acknowledgment of pain and
hard times.

We closed at exactly sunset. I walked to the front of the stage, where to my left, over the field’s rim, the sun sat, a red ball on the horizon. I let its golden light wash over me like no spotlight could and I felt the band and the crowd fall into each other’s arms. We finished with the prayerful arrangement of “Saints” we’d worked out just for this moment. I watched white handkerchiefs
flutter from a thousand hands in the last rays of the sun. There were some tears both on and off the stage as the cool evening rose up and the crowd dispersed back onto the streets of the Crescent City.

I’ve played many, many, many shows, but few like this one. I had to work very hard and lead the band with a conviction I wasn’t sure I felt myself. But maybe that’s what the evening was all about:
trying to rise above the uncertainty of the day and find something to stand on. You cannot book, manufacture or contrive these dates. It’s a matter of moment, place, need, and a desire to serve in your own small way the events of the day. There, in New Orleans, there was a
real
job to do. One the lovely but fleeting notes that poured out of that day’s participants and off the stage onto the streets
of New Orleans could only scratch the surface of. Still, something as seemingly inconsequential as music does certain things very well. There’s a coming together and a lifting, a fortifying, that occurs when people gather and move
in time
with one another. It’s a beautiful thing.

This was one of the shows that went to the very top of the list for me. I don’t know if
we
were great but I know it
was a great evening. Sometimes, that covers a lot of ground and is all the day calls for.

In the 1970s I went to a Grateful Dead show at a community college. I watched the crowd swaying and doing its trance-dance thing and I stood very outside of it. To me—sober, nonmystical, only half hippie, if that, me—they sounded like a not-very-talented bar band. I went home gently mystified. I don’t know
if the Grateful Dead were great but I know they
did
something great. Years later, when I came to appreciate their subtle musicality, Jerry Garcia’s beautifully lyrical guitar playing and the folk purity of their voices, I understood that I’d missed it. They had a unique ability to build community and sometimes, it ain’t what you’re doing but what happens while you’re doing it that counts. In New
Orleans that year, we were a left-field but good fit and filled our important slot well. Then New Orleans did the rest.

A lot of what the E Street Band does is hand-me-down shtick transformed by will, power and an intense communication with our audience into something transcendent. Sometimes that’s all you need. I once read a review of a very competent hit-making group where the reviewer stated,
“They do all the unimportant things very well.” I knew exactly what he
meant. Rock ’n’ roll music, in the end,
is
a source of religious and mystical power. Your playing can suck, your singing can be barely viable, but if when you get together with your pals in front of
your
audience and make
the noise
, the one that is drawn from the center of your being, from your godhead, from your gutter, from
the universe’s infinitesimal genesis point . . . you’re rockin’ and you’re a rock ’n’ roll
star
in every sense of the word. The punks instinctively knew this and created a third revolution out of it, but it is an essential element in the equation of every great musical unit and rock ’n’ roll band, no matter how down-to-earth their presentation.

SIXTY-NINE

MAGIC

At the end of the
Rising
tour, I had a few songs from my road writing. Brendan O’Brien once again paid me a visit. I played him what I had and we took it from there. I remember working on a decent amount of
Magic
at my worktable in Rumson, but by this time I tended to write anywhere and everywhere. I no longer separated touring and writing as I had in my early years. I wrote in
my dressing room often before the show or after in my hotel room. It became a way I meditated before or after a raucous night. Quiet, lost in my own thoughts, traveling to places I’d never been, looking through the eyes of those I’d never met, I dreamt the dreams of refugees and strangers. Those dreams were somehow also mine. I felt their fears, their hopes, their desires, and when it was good,
I’d lift off from my hotel digs and find myself back on some metaphysical highway searching for life and rock ’n’ roll.
Magic
was my state-of-the-nation dissent over the Iraq War and the Bush years.

Still, I aimed everywhere on
Magic
for the political and the personal
to meld together. You can listen to the whole thing without ever thinking of the politics of the day or you can hear them ticking
deadly through the internal thread of the music.

•  •  •

Like many before, our
Magic
tour started in Asbury Park’s Convention Hall. There, as a young aspiring musician, I’d seen the Doors with Jim Morrison, whose live presence and command of the stage completely engulfed you, and in 1966 I somehow managed to miss the Rolling Stones as they passed through. I’d seen the Who demolish their equipment
in a cloud of smoke in front of wide-eyed teenyboppers with Mom and Dad in tow, who were waiting to see the headlining act, Herman’s Hermits. The Who’s show sent me running in a fever out to pick up a strobe light and smoke bomb for my upcoming CYO gig with the Castiles. There, at the end of our last set, in the basement of St. Rose of Lima on a Saturday night, I switched on the strobe, set
off the smoke bomb, climbed on a chair and smashed a vase of flowers I’d lifted from a first-grade classroom onto the floor. This didn’t quite pack the nihilistic punch of Pete Townshend bashing his guitar to bits against his smoky Vox amplifier, but limited funds and one good guitar could only take you so far.

Convention Hall was the first mansion of my rock ’n’ roll dreams. There under its
roof a wider world awaited, real magicians appeared and anything could happen. Midget wrestling, boat shows with yachts the size of your backyard, hot-rod exhibitions, roller derby and rock ’n’ roll baptisms all coursed through the veins of this modest concert hall that seemed to me the size of Madison Square Garden. Its front doors opened onto the interior of the Convention Hall promenade. There
stands of cotton candy, cheap T-shirts, seashells, pinball arcades and an endless amount of shore tchotchkes lined your walk to the hall’s brass doors, which promised absurdity and transcendence. It’s still pretty much the same.

For me now, it’s just a home. A home of my own, the Asbury
boardwalk, where I bring my band to reconnect with where we come from and to tighten up and get ready for battle
on our newest adventure. Here on the boardwalk I now play the role of the ghost of Christmas past as the city and its exciting new development passes me by. There is even a ridiculous bust of me somewhere in town primed and ready for seagull shit. Still, on any summer night, I feel comfortably at home walking the boards wearing my ninja cloak of invisibility, a baseball hat, all while going
almost as unrecognized as I did in 1969. I still feel amongst friends and my people. It’s still my place and I still feed off and love it. So on a fresh September morning, we packed our gear and left Asbury for Hartford, Connecticut. We were off.

•  •  •

This was the first tour where an illness would sideline a band member into missing shows. Danny Federici had contracted melanoma and now needed
serious medical treatment. Danny had been misdiagnosed early on and the cancer was now moving through his system. He had been quietly receiving care for a while but could no longer keep it from the band, and so began a long and difficult journey. Charlie Giordano from the Sessions Band was tutored for a few shows by Dan, then quietly stepped in to take over the organ duties while Danny was treated.

One evening on one of Danny’s short returns to the band, he stepped into my dressing room before the show and sat in the chair opposite me. He basically explained things weren’t looking so good. At one point he seemed to run out of words and, gesturing silently, moved one palm over the other, trying to tell me what I already knew. His eyes filled and finally we sat there looking at each other
 . . . it’d been thirty-five years. I gave him what assurances I could that might ease his mind. We stood up, held each other for a long moment and went out and played. Not long thereafter, Danny appeared with us for the last time, at Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis on March 20, 2008. In the band we all knew this was it. We wouldn’t see Danny onstage again.

Danny was a believer in the world
as it stands. We never spoke a single word about a single lyric or idea that was in the many hundreds of songs I wrote. The same songs that his fingers and heart magically and instinctively knew how to color perfectly. Danny and I were closest on evenings when he found me in my lowest self. He never judged. He just observed and breathed a sigh. I always felt it was a bad way to bridge the gap between
the two of us. It was. But when I tried it the other way, to bring Danny to personal accountability, I felt like his taskmaster or his old man with a pole so far up my ass it embarrassed me.

As a leader, even of a rock ’n’ roll band, there is always a little of the
padrone
in your job description, but it’s a fine line. And the members for whom I played that role too fully usually fared the worst.

But Danny tried hard. He beat alcoholism, stayed pretty true to his AA program and worked to put a life together. But in the end, for Dan Federici it would never be easy.

One spring afternoon a few of us gathered in a Manhattan hospital around Danny’s bed. We circled the bed holding hands and said our individual prayers and farewells.

•  •  •

Danny died on April 17, 2008. He left behind a son,
Jason; two daughters, Harley and Madison; and his wife, Maya. There was a lovely, light-filled service held for Danny at the United Methodist Church in Red Bank on April 21. To an overflow crowd, music was played, remembrances given, good-byes said.

I had watched Danny fight and conquer some tough addictions. I watched him struggle to put his life together and, in the last decade, when the band
reunited, thrive on sitting in his seat behind that big B3. I watched him fight his cancer without complaint and with great courage and spirit. He was a sunny-side-up fatalist. He never gave up, right to the end.

Before we went on for that last night in Indiana, I asked him what he
wanted to play and he said “Sandy.” He wanted to strap on the accordion and revisit the boardwalk of our youth during
the summer nights when we’d walk along the boards with all the time in the world.

He wanted to play once more the song that is of course about the end of something wonderful and the beginning of something unknown and new.

Pete Townshend once said, “A rock ’n’ roll band is a crazy thing. You meet some people when you’re a kid, and unlike any occupation in the whole world, you’re stuck with them
for the rest of your life no matter who they are or what crazy things they do.”

If we didn’t play together, the E Street Band would probably not know one another. We wouldn’t be in a room together. But we do . . . we do play together and every night at eight we walk out onstage together, and that, my friends, is a place where miracles occur . . . old and new miracles. And those you are with in
the presence of miracles, you never forget. Life does not separate you. Death does not separate you. Those you are with who create miracles for you, like Danny did for me every night, you are honored to be amongst.

Of course, we all grow up, and we know “it’s only rock ’n’ roll” . . . but it’s not. After a lifetime of watching a man perform his miracle for you, night after night, it feels an
awful lot like love.

SEVENTY

SUPER BOWL SUNDAY

Six air force Thunderbirds have just roared overhead at what felt like inches above our backstage area, giving myself and the entire E Street Band a brush cut. With twenty minutes to go, I’m sitting in my trailer trying to decide which boots to wear. I’ve got a nice pair of cowboy boots my feet look really good in, but I’m concerned about their stability. There is no
canopy overhead at the Super Bowl and two days ago we rehearsed in full rain on the field. We all got soaked and the stage became as slick as a frozen pond. It was so slippery I crashed into Mike Colucci, our cameraman, coming off my knee slide, his camera the only thing that kept me from launching out onto the soggy turf. Then our “referee” for “Glory Days” came running out, couldn’t stop himself
and executed one of the most painfully perfect
“man slips on a banana peel” falls I’ve ever seen. This sent Steve, myself and the entire band into one of the biggest stress-induced laughs of our lives that lasted all the way back to our trailers.

I better go with the combat boots I always carry. The round toes will give me better braking power than the pointy-toed cowboy boots when I hit the
deck. I stuff my boots with two innersoles to make them as fitted as possible, zip them up snugly around my ankles, stomp around in my trailer a bit and feel pretty grounded. Fifteen minutes . . . I’m nervous. It’s not the usual preshow jitters or “butterflies” I’ve had before. I’m talking about a “five minutes to beach landing,”
Right Stuff
, “Lord, don’t let me screw the pooch in front of a hundred
million people” kind of semiterror. It only lasts for a minute . . . I check my hair, spray it with something that turns it into concrete, and I’m out the door.