Fever (25 page)

One or two bridge-free ABA songs can work on a richer album, but here things felt incomplete—and not in an expressive way. The goal seemed to be skeletal, the theme of loss drawn by omission. “Waitin' on a Sunny Day,” for example, switched keys aimlessly—it's the slightest thing here. “Let's Be Friends (Skin to Skin)” opened with a fetching Stax lilt and some coy piano rejoinders rippling down from up above. But the song never got much traction; it was another good beginning in search of a middle. “Countin' on a Miracle” and “Mary's Place” strove to be crowd pleasers but only made half the journey. And no producer, young or old, should have let the man who wrote “I got debts no honest man can pay” and “Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet” get away with a line like “Yeah we're chasin' the clouds away.” By comparison, Springsteen's
Born to Run
songs built arrangements off their own creative steam and guzzled melody like cheap gasoline. True, Springsteen's themes had come full circle, from the son who once railed against and escaped his working-class roots to the adult who celebrated the fellowship and sacrifice of the very same folk. But he wasn't reverting to his parents' values so much as affirming the fundamental changes culture had witnessed, partly as a result of rock's influence: the new attitudes surrounding sexuality and manhood these new heroes—and their children—were living out.

Other flaws stemmed from bandleader largesse. The promising lead track, “Lonesome Day,” featured a fiddle player, Soozie Tyrell, who has since become a full-fledged E Street Band member. This may not be the producer's call, but somebody should have put their foot down: the last thing the E Street Band needed was another person onstage, especially given the garage-rock flag they hoisted nightly. There were already way too many people up there, with Springsteen himself taking the majority of guitar solos even though he had Nils Lofgren riding shotgun (and Miami Steve never should have left in the first place). During the 1999–2001 tour, Springsteen made it all work somehow; he seems generous-hearted to a fault, and his embrace of his band made the music irresistible. The
Live in Barcelona
DVD shows how these songs developed onstage over time, too, but it would have been more challenging for everybody if he had pared down instrumentation the way he did for
The Rising.

Ironically, where Springsteen is known for overworrying his albums and spending way too long in the studio fussing over mixes, this record could have used some more thought.
The Rising
sounded like the first draft of something that cried out for editing—namely, Landau. And Springsteen himself seemed aware of it: for both his
Today
and
Late Night
sets, he played its two standouts, “The Rising” and “Lonesome Day,” which only seemed to get better with time. David Letterman posed a pointed question about the creative process: “Are you the best judge of when something is finished?” Springsteen shrugged and said he'd gotten pretty good at it over the years. In fact, he allowed, he never felt as though
Born in the U.S.A.
was really finished, but he hit the road anyway. (That's some admission!) As producer, O'Brien may have been too busy befriending these vets, or simply too intimidated, to focus more on preproduction (imagine having to tell Bruce you didn't think his songs were ready to record!). But if you're going to produce Springsteen, part of your job is to tell him that certain songs need more work. You have to wonder: did Landau have a say in the final cut? This may be one recording Springsteen finished too soon.

*   *   *

On a
Saturday Night Live
appearance after the tour was underway, Springsteen sat alone at the piano for “You're Missing,” and the effect was of a devastating loss—not just personal, but public. Perhaps the road will yet give the right shape to a lot of these songs, and the bootlegs will bear our
The Rising
's promise. And in another way, Springsteen made the ambition of addressing 9/11 almost as compelling as the title song, which stands alongside any work he's ever done. As always, watching him tinker, adjust, fine-tune, and rethink his writing onstage was among the more fascinating aspects of sizing up Springsteen's talent. In July 2003, Springsteen took the stage to the Ronettes song “Walking in the Rain” and turned his show into an answer to that girl-group supernova, the tail to its comet of possibilities.

If Springsteen fell behind with
Human Touch, Lucky Town,
and
Tom Joad,
all his fans had to do was wait (and ignore moves like “My Best Was Never Good Enough”). And touring beside the Rolling Stones and the Who (who kept going while its members literally dropped dead, and barely introduced new material), Springsteen with the E Streeters were one long-standing act that was worth at least the price of admission, far cheaper than what you paid to hear the Stones, the Eagles, or Paul McCartney. After Dylan's
Love and Theft,
Springsteen actually competes with his former mentor as rock's best-loved elder statesman. Springsteen realizes that his larger tour, the grand rock myth he's been chasing his whole life, is about much more than him, his band, his songs, Presley's symbolic redemption, Tina Turner's imaginary white stud, or even his cumbersome American icon of a persona. It's about all of us.

CHAPTER 7

Double Fantasies

While a lot of rock songs dreamt of the perfect couple, most duets and celebrity pairs strutting through rock's pageant were in constant flux. Rock had changed men and women for the better, but they also faced new challenges as intimate partners. The ideals in the songs they sang to one another were subverted or completely contradicted in real life. This only made the noblest aspiration—complicated yet committed long-term relationships—seem all the more triumphant when acted out: think of John and Yoko's reunion in 1975, followed by the birth of a son, Sean, then
Double Fantasy
in 1980; Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson; Ashford and Simpson; Womack and Womack duetting on
Love Wars;
Richard and Linda Thompson (briefly, anyway) on
Shoot Out the Lights;
the Pet Shop Boys; or underground stalwarts like Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon or Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley.

If early rock had misogynist wrinkles—those notches on Presley's bedpost, the hostility that greeted Yoko Ono at Beatles sessions—later rock offered everything from feminist househusbands (John Lennon) to gay activists (Sir Elton John or Melissa Etheridge), hardcore feminists mired in ambivalence (Ani DiFranco) to hardcore feminist alterna sex symbols (Sinéad O'Connor, Liz Phair, PJ Harvey), and everything in between. Poly Styrene (of X-ray Specs) and Exene Cervenka (of X) pillaged the idea of conformity in either looks or vocal attack in fronting punk bands, and Corin Tucker (of Sleater-Kinney) stood on their shoulders in ways nobody could have imagined. And when rock figures fell short of these ideals, Madonna was always there to pick up some slack; she signified like a rock star through her music (especially CDs like 1992's
Erotica,
1998's
Ray of Light,
and 2000's
Music
) long after she bombed out in Hollywood. And poison darts like
Music
's “What It Feels Like for a Girl” punctured most others' sexual politics without half trying.

Elvis and Tina towered above and through it all, either by direct reference or by refracted influence, making even the most prominent rock couples seem like pale imitations of what could be. Few women in any medium were classier or sexier than Tina, who toured throughout the nineties as she hit her sixties, surveying her domain from the exalted purview of James Bond soundtracks and Hanes hosiery ads. Lennon and Springsteen took the Presley model further, and in different directions. But in manly terms, neither improved upon the premise of Presley's son-eats-father-for-breakfast conceit. No new type of man toppled Presley the way he toppled John Wayne.

All of these performers are a mixture of everything they came to mean through song and real-life exploits and our own fantasies of how their public and private selves blur together in the music. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to forget about Sinatra's tawdry private life when he's singing, nor is it entirely misleading to hear a lot of Dylan's real-life divorce trauma on a record like
Blood on the Tracks.
Whether it's Ike Turner loaning out Tina out for a session with the Man, Phil Spector, or Phil Spector holding Ronnie hostage in his Bel-Air mansion, the woman's rock story was about the struggle for feminist ideals, if not always the success. Tina Turner stood out because she broke away from a domineering, violent husband, and as late as 1984 was among the first to sing about it explicitly, to turn her story into a crusade for anyone trapped by domestic abuse in any form.

But for all her strengths, Tina stood alone—at least until Roseanne Barr began her reign on 1990s prime-time television. Until her last-season nosedive, Barr was standup gone sitcom as rock 'n' roll matriarch, her writers bare-toothed gender satirists. Fat and unrepentant, Barr pulled the rug from Hollywood's strict female code and earned enormous latitude on taboo subjects like teen sex and parental ambivalence by being both hilarious and popular. It's hard to imagine her rise without Tina Turner's precedent. Barr might as well have been a rock star, and Hollywood is still catching up with her.

Such figures were the exception. The norm in Presley's era was
The Mickey Mouse Club
's Annette Funicello, flirting chastely with Frankie Avalon through a series of B-for-beach movies; or Bob Dylan hitching a ride on Joan Baez's folk coattails to boost his career in the early sixties; or Sonny and Cher singing “I Got You Babe” well after their divorce. “Chestnut Mare,” the Byrds' hit from 1968, a thinly veiled macho boast about virgin conquest (taming a wild horse), is unimaginable coming from any sixties woman besides Tina Turner, who could have aimed its metaphors almost anywhere. And the Rolling Stones launched a tasteless promotional campaign for 1976's
Black and Blue
that featured a leather-clad dominatrix on huge billboards with the quote “I'm black and blue from the Rolling Stones … and I love it!” Through the end of the century and into the next, rock was still a man's world, but a man's world where women were freer to assert themselves than in any other entertainment medium.

Like most creative influence, the progression from Elvis Presley to gender activism was anything but linear. Almost as soon as Elvis became King he was the culture's imaginary companion to Marilyn Monroe, because he was the only male star imaginable capable of responding to her enormous sexual heat. That pop culture hasn't improved on either of these figures since speaks to their imperious symbolic energy. Presley was linked with quite a few starlets in real life: Tina Louise, Natalie Wood, Ann-Margret; he even dated Memphis belle Cybill Shepherd long before Peter Bogdanovich cast her in
The Last Picture Show.
Barbra Streisand came knocking to cast Presley in
A Star Is Born,
but she was off the mark: Kris Kristofferson was both a better actor and (at that point) more the beautiful-loser type the character cried out for—Colonel Tom Parker would never have leased Elvis to anybody for such a role.

This Presley-Monroe coupling wasn't acted out on screen or in song nearly so much as it was in the imagination of the public, who knew instinctively that Marilyn wasn't nearly as suited to baseball heroes (Joe DiMaggio) or playwrights (Arthur Miller) as she was to a rock 'n' roll stud. By singing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy, the culture's hunk Prince, Monroe sang out her desire to play with power, disrupt assumptions, and throw wild pitches into propriety's expectations; she, too, might as well have been a rock star. It always seemed a failure of nerve that, in 1968, Presley married his first sweetheart, Priscilla Beaulieu, the officer's daughter he first dated in Germany when she was fourteen, when he easily could have married Ann-Margret. The Presley-Monroe affair finally found muted if ambitious expression in David Lynch's
Wild at Heart
in 1990, with Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as a symbolic Elvis and Marilyn hitting the road. When the Beatles came along, John Lennon's marital status was an open secret that spoke to his culture's myopia around macho privilege. His onscreen ID during the Beatles' debut on
Ed Sullivan
revealed “Sorry, girls, he's married.” Manager Brian Epstein was cheeky about Lennon being “spoken for,” and yet the truth was more involved: his being spoken for only attested to his adult status, and greater desirability; his shotgun marriage was simply the inconvenient byproduct of hard living. Within a couple years another two Beatles were married, and none of this encroached on their individual or collective sex appeal one iota. Lennon was a sex symbol from day one. Whether married to Cynthia or bagging it with Yoko, he reflected an entirely new set of values around marriage by fiat.

The Beatles don't come up a lot in discussions about gender, but early on their long hair was androgynous before anyone could put a name to it—before androgyny became basic pop currency. When they split up in 1970, it seemed a measure of Lennon and McCartney's songwriting intimacy that they each took their wives out onstage as part of their “solo” acts. This had the unintended effect of weakening both the perceived stability of their marriages and their previous creative partnership. If joining a band was once a perfectly natural way for men to bond, leaning on wives in performance as they entered adulthood only made them seem more macho. McCartney opted for domestic tranquility, raising three kids out of the spotlight, parading his vegetarian lifestyle as if it were an extension of the perfect marriage to Linda. Even before he was knighted, he earned the odd imprimatur of pop gentleman, despite how he turned Linda's 1999 funeral into another narcissistic platform for his music. His 2000 coup,
Run, Devil, Run,
was a batch of rock covers and two originals that somehow delivered a kind of redemption—both personal and professional—through slap-happy grief. His second wife, Heather, had to talk him out of his battles with Yoko Ono: only a very insecure man would blow songwriting credits into such an ordeal, and then relent without explanation.