Born to Run (58 page)

I catch sight of Patti smiling. She’s been my rock all week. I put my arm around her and away we go. They take us by golf cart to a holding tunnel right off the field. The problem is there are a thousand people there: TV cameras, media
of all kinds and general chaos. Suddenly, hundreds of people rush by us in a column shouting, cheering . . . our fans! And tonight also our stage builders. These are “the volunteers.” They’ve been here for two weeks on their own dime in a field day after day, putting together and pulling apart pieces of our stage over and over again, theoretically achieving military precision. Now it’s for real.
I hope they’ve got it down because as we’re escorted onto the field, lights in the stadium fully up, the banshee wail of seventy thousand screaming football fanatics rising in our ears, there’s nothing there. Nothing . . . no sound, no lights, no instruments, no stage, nothing but brightly lit unwelcoming green turf. Suddenly an army of ants comes from all sides of what seems like nowhere, each rolling
a piece of our lifeline, our Earth, onto the field. The cavalry has arrived. What takes us on a concert day eight hours to do is done in five minutes. Unbelievable. Everything in our world is there . . . we hope. We gather a few feet off the stage, form a circle of hands; I say a few words drowned out by the crowd
and it’s smiles all around. I’ve been in a lot of high-stakes situations like this—though
not
exactly
like this—with these people before. It’s stressful, but our band is made for it . . . and it’s about to begin . . . so, happy warriors, we bound up onto the stage.

The NFL stage manager gives me the three-minutes sign . . . two minutes . . . one . . . there’s a guy jumping up and down on sections of the stage to get them to sit evenly on the grass field . . . thirty seconds .
 . . white noise screams from our monitors . . . they’re still testing all the speakers and equipment . . . that’s cutting it close! The lights in the stadium go down. The crowd erupts and Max’s drumbeat opens “Tenth Avenue.” I feel a white light silhouette . . . Clarence and I share a moment. I hear Roy’s piano. I give C’s hand a pat. I’m on the move, tossing my guitar in a high arc for Kevin, my
guitar tech, to catch, and it’s . . . “Ladies and gentlemen, for the next twelve minutes we will be bringing the righteous and mighty power of the E Street Band into your beautiful home. I want you to step back from the guacamole dip. I want you to put the chicken fingers down! And turn the television ALL THE WAY UP!” Because, of course, there is just ONE thing I’ve got to know: “IS THERE ANYBODY
ALIVE OUT THERE?!” I feel like I’ve just taken a syringe of adrenaline straight to the heart. Then I’m on top of the piano (good old boots). I’m down. One . . . two . . . three, knee drop in front of the microphone and I’m bending back almost flat on the stage. I close my eyes for a moment and when I open them, I see nothing but blue night sky. No band, no crowd, no stadium. I hear and feel all of
it in the form of a great sirenlike din surrounding me, but with my back nearly flat against the stage I see nothing but beautiful night sky with a halo of a thousand stadium suns at its edges.

I take several deep breaths and a calm comes over me. Since the inception of our band it’s been our ambition to play for everyone. We’ve achieved a lot but we haven’t achieved that. Our audience remains
tribal . . . that is, predominantly white. On occasion—the Obama inaugural concert; touring through Africa in ’88; during a political campaign, particularly in Cleveland
with President Obama—I looked out and sang “Promised Land” to the audience I intended it for, young people, old people, black, white, brown, cutting across religious and class lines. That’s who I’m singing to today. Today we play
for everyone. For free! I pull myself upright with the mike stand, back into the world, this world, my world, the one with everybody in it, and the stadium, the crowd, my band, my best friends, my wife, come rushing into view and it’s “Teardrops on the city . . .”

During “Tenth Avenue” I tell the story of my band—and other things—“when the change was made uptown” . . . It goes rushing by,
then the knee slide. Too much adrenaline, a late drop, too much speed, here I come, Mike . . . BOOM! And I’m onto his camera, the lens implanted into my crotch with one leg off the stage. I use his camera to push myself back up and . . . say it, say it, say it, say it . . . BLAM! “BORN TO RUN” . . . my story . . . Something bright and hot blows up behind me. Later I’ll hear there were fireworks.
I never see any. Just the ones going off in my head. I’m out of breath. I try to slow it down. That ain’t gonna happen. I already hear the crowd singing the last eight bars of “Born to Run,” oh, oh, oh, oh . . . then it’s straight into “Working on a Dream” . . . your story . . . and mine I hope. Steve is on my right, Patti on my left. I catch a smile and the wonderful choir, the Joyce Garrett Singers,
that backed me in Washington during the inaugural concert is behind us. I turn to see their faces and listen to the sound of their voices . . . “working on a dream.” Done. Moments later, we’re ripping straight into “Glory Days” . . . the end of the story. A last party steeped in happy fatalism and some laughs with my old pal Steve. The Ump doesn’t fall on his ass tonight. He just throws the yellow
penalty flag for the precious forty-five seconds we’ve gone overtime . . . home stretch. Everyone is out front now, forming that great line. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch the horns raising their instruments high; my guitar is wheeling around my neck and on the seventh beat, I’m going to Disneyland. I’m already someplace a lot farther away and more fun than that. I look around: we’re alive,
it’s over, we link arms and take a bow as
the stage comes apart beneath our feet. It’s chaos again all the way back to the trailer.

The theory of relativity holds. Onstage your exhilaration is in direct proportion to the void you’re dancing over. A gig I always looked a little askance at and was a little wary of turned out to have surprising emotional power and resonance for me and my band. It
was a high point, a marker of some sort, and went up with the biggest shows of our work life. The NFL threw us an anniversary party the likes of which we’d never have thrown for ourselves, with fireworks and everything! In the middle of their football game, they let us hammer out a little part of our story. I love playing long and hard but it was the thirty-five years in twelve minutes . . . that
was the trick. You start here, you end there, that’s it. That’s the time you’ve got to give it everything you have . . . twelve minutes . . . give or take a few seconds.

The Super Bowl helped me sell a few new records and probably put a few extra fannies in the seats that tour. But what it was really about was this: I felt my band remained one of the mightiest in the land and I wanted you to
know it. We wanted to show you . . . just because we could.

By three a.m., I was back home, everyone in the house fast asleep. I was sitting in the yard in front of an open fire, watching the sparks light, fly and vanish into the black evening sky, my ears ringing good and hard . . . “Oh yeah, it’s all right.”

SEVENTY-ONE

MOVING ON

The rest of 2009 was taken up with the release of our
Working on a Dream
album and tour. Max’s son, Jay, stepped in for his dad, who was taking care of business with Conan O’Brien, and at age eighteen Jay became only the second man to sit on that drum stool in thirty-five years. After a few ragged starts, it was obvious Jay had the power, the precision, the ears, the discipline,
his father’s work ethic and willingness to learn. Plus he brought his own brand of young punk energy that kicked the shit out of our playbook. Still, something didn’t feel quite right. When Jay initially started playing with us, my skin wasn’t moving right. Then, I realized, with all his technique and power, he was playing “on top” of the band, riding over the surface of our arrangements.
We took a break. I walked over to him and quietly explained that the drums are not part of the exoskeleton of these arrangements. The drums are the soul engine, buried down and breathing inside
the band. You play not on top but immersed in the band. You power everything from within. I said, “Take a breath, take it back down and dig deep. When you hit that right position, when the beat is placed
correctly, you’ll drop inside the band naturally.”

That could be a pretty sophisticated idea for anyone to wrap their head around, much less an eighteen-year-old who up to this point had mostly played in front of approximately thirty people at a local club. But like father, like son.

That afternoon, Jay Weinberg took out his shovel and dug himself a hole so deep inside the rhythm section that
the question of who was going to do the job became moot. Jay brought fire, youth, intensity and his own brand of showmanship to the band. When we stepped on stage in front of 50,000 screaming fans, he blew the place apart.

Later that year we played the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. We had a blast backing Darlene Love, Sam Moore and Billy Joel. I sang “I Still Haven’t
Found What I’m Looking For” with U2 and “Because the Night” with my second-favorite Jersey girl, Patti Smith.

We had three weeks of touring left. My great concern was Clarence’s physical condition. This is something I had watched deteriorate for a long time. First, the knees, then the hips, then the back, then it got worse. C traveled with a trainer and someone who monitored his medical condition
but he still had to sit through much of the
Working on a Dream
tour. Getting him on and off the stage became a small production. An elevator was built. We walked on together so he had some support. But his inner strength, heart and commitment to playing never wavered. He had mellowed greatly with age until he often felt like this half-sleeping lion. He was not the danger he once was but you still
did not want to disturb him.

C’s presence remained large and his will ironclad. That’s why he was still there. He willed it, and if it’d been up to him, he would’ve died there. That always worried me. We found doctors before each tour to provide him with a full checkup. Somehow he was always ready to play. I told him, “I
need to know exactly what you can do and what you can’t do,” but he grew
furious if I poked my nose too deeply into his medical business. During the
Dream
tour he brought along a young mixed-race man as his assistant. For months I never really knew who he was. I just figured he was one of C’s people, who fluctuated regularly and brought some service or comfort to him. It was Jake Clemons, Clarence’s nephew, a saxophonist himself, though he never played, with the exception
of joining C one night on “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out.”

Clarence was always the last band member off the stage. As I held up that big body night after night and we slowly made it down the stairs, he often whispered, “Thanks for letting me be here.” I was thankful he was there. Even in his diminished state Clarence’s presence remained rocklike and essential to me. We flew up to Buffalo, New York,
where we played the
Greetings from Asbury Park
album start to finish for the first time. It was the last show of the tour, and the night was filled with high anticipation, camaraderie and the excitement of an adventure completed. The place was in an uproar and the party was on. Old ghosts were there. Mike Appel had accompanied us to the concert, stood in the circle of hands before the show and
was deeply welcome. We were alive and farther down the road. The place filled with Mike’s old cackling laugh and carny energy; music played, people drank. Back on the plane, as we drew closer to Newark, from his seat, Clarence lifted his glass and said, “I’ve just got something I want to say . . . this could be the start of something big.” Everyone laughed.

But that’s how it felt. The band was
playing great and we were navigating this part of our work life with grace and energy. Half of our set was drawn from new material of the past ten years and we were still thrilled to be amongst one another. We remained in love with the music, with our band and with our audience. With the lights of the Eastern Seaboard sparkling beneath us, carrying us home, we knew we’d worked hard and been lucky.

SEVENTY-TWO

WRECKING BALL

One afternoon, driving back from a séance at my local watering hole, I started singing at the wheel, “You put on your coat, I’ll put on my hat, you put out the dog, I’ll put out the cat . . .” “Easy Money.” Bing . . . the light went on. The muse had materialized along the roadside. “Easy Money” was the key to a record I needed to make.

After the crash of 2008, I was
furious at what had been done by a handful of trading companies on Wall Street.
Wrecking Ball
was a shot of anger at the injustice that continues on and has widened with deregulation, dysfunctional regulatory agencies and capitalism gone wild at the expense of hardworking Americans. The middle class? Stomped on. Income disparity climbed as we lived through a new Gilded Age. This was what I wanted
to write about.

I’d been following and writing about America’s post-industrial trauma,
the killing of our manufacturing presence and working class, for thirty-five years. So I went to work. I had some music in my notebooks waiting. “Jack of All Trades,” written in a fury. “We Take Care of Our Own” and “Wrecking Ball.” Then I wrote “Easy Money,” “Death to My Hometown” and “This Depression.” I
had “Shackled and Drawn” and “Rocky Ground” from a gospel film project I’d been working on and they fit perfectly. Finally, I knew I needed a closer. I had “Land of Hope and Dreams,” with which we struggled to beat our own live version until Bob Clearmountain came in with a transcendent mix. But still, I needed the song that would address the new voices of immigration, the civil rights movement and
anyone who’d ever stuck their neck out for some righteous justice and was knocked down or killed for their effort. Where were they? I decided they were all here now and speaking to those who would listen. Those spirits don’t go away. They haunt, they rabble-rouse, from beyond the grave. They have not been and can never be silenced. Death has given them an eternal voice. All we have to do is listen.
That would be the message of my last song, “We Are Alive.” Listen and learn from the souls and spirits who’ve come before.