Big Man Read online

  I had seen them open for Dr. John at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium the previous year and had been blown away. As an encore that night, they did the ballad “New York City Serenade.” I’d never seen anybody do a slow song to start an encore, especially one that opened with a virtually classical piano riff by David Sancious and a beautiful sax solo by the giant horn player Clarence Clemons. Then I saw them at the Troubadour, and I was convinced that Bruce was the most important artist of the age.

  I wanted them on The Cher Show. Columbia Records was supportive and even sent me an advance copy of the new album, called Born to Run. I thought it was pretty good. I had a feeling that it might even become a minor hit.

  Mike Appel was managing Bruce and the band at the time, but he wasn’t interested in me or Cher or television itself. At the time, I was stunned by this lack of vision. I thought I was the center of the universe and that The Cher Show was ground zero for what was happening now. To be dismissed was unacceptable. This guy just needed to be shown the true path to big-time show business.

  Later that season Bruce and the boys were booked to play the Roxy. I arranged to see them and to talk to Mike and convince him that he needed me. My case wasn’t helped much by the fact that about the same time of the Roxy shows, Bruce was on the cover of both Time and Newsweek magazines. Somehow the power of The Cher Show had been diminished. They turned me down. But I did get to hang around the club that week, see all those now-legendary shows, and meet Clarence, who is still my best friend to this day. That week in 1975 was noteworthy in more ways than one.

  In addition to hanging out at the Roxy, I was still producing The Cher Show. Our guests that week were the aforementioned Pat Boone, Frankie Valli, and Dion DiMucci from Dion and the Belmonts. It was our “salute to the ’60s” episode. As I said, we were ground zero for what was happening now.

  Dion was also recording an album while he was in town, and he had invited me to a session at the famous Gold Star Studios in Hollywood. My wife and I arrived at about eight o’clock that night and were directed to the control booth door. When I walked in, I saw several things. Zack Glickman, Dion’s manager, was sitting on a couch directly in front of me. To my left was a big glass window overlooking the studio, which was filled with the great musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, and Dion, who sat on a stool behind some baffles and was about to sing.

  From off to my right I heard a voice say, “Who the fuck are you?” I turned and looked at the riser where the board was located, and I saw a small man in a white jumpsuit and a matching white Afro wig pointing a .357 Magnum at my head. This was my introduction to Phil Spector. Against the wall behind him sat Bruce, Steve Van Zandt, and Robert Hilburn, the music critic for the Los Angeles Times.

  Zack jumped to his feet and said, “It’s okay, Phil. He’s with Dion.”

  “All right, then,” said Phil. “Sit down and shut up while I show Mr. Springsteen how to make a fucking record.”

  Over the very strange next few hours, Dion and the Wall of Sound Orchestra recorded a song called “Baby Let’s Stick Together.” Many, many years later, about the time that Phil was charged with murder, Clarence and I ran into Bruce in a hotel lobby in Ireland. He and Patti were returning from dinner, and Clarence and I were just leaving the bar. That night with Spector came up. I asked Bruce if he remembered it like I did. “I thought he was going to shoot you,” he said.

  Blauvelt / New York City Stories, Early ’70s

  Clarence

  When I woke up I had no idea where I was.

  I knew I was in a tent but I couldn’t remember why. I’m not much of a camper. This must’ve been in 1973. I don’t remember exactly, but it was around then sometime. Anyway, I hear this awful sound and I roll to my left side, and there’s Danny, fast asleep as usual, sawing logs, his mouth open. Then I remembered. We set up the tent out behind the 914 Studio in Blauvelt, New York, so we didn’t have to drive all the way back to Jersey to sleep. Mike Appel found that studio and thought it would be right for us. Plus it was cheap. We were working on The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, and Mad Dog was still playing drums at that time. In fact I’m pretty sure it was his tent. He took it with him when he left the band in early 1974.

  Vinnie “Mad Dog” Lopez had trouble keeping time. It was fucking everything up, but Bruce is such a loyal guy that he couldn’t bring himself to fire him. It was becoming a real problem. And Vinnie didn’t like me at all. He saw that Bruce and I were tight, and I guess it pissed him off ’cause all he would do was give me shit. And I took it for a long time.

  I was living in this little house with Vinnie, Danny, and three snakes. Boa constrictors. I hate snakes. I was deathly afraid of those motherfuckers. Every night before I went to sleep I’d count them. Know where each one was. Anyway, one day Vinnie did something that pushed me over the edge. I don’t remember what it was. It could’ve been something small, but I had been putting up with his bullshit for so long that on that particular day I just snapped. I went off on that motherfucker. I didn’t hit him but I put him up against the wall, I threw shit all over the apartment, I think I broke down the front door. At one point he was lying on the floor and I picked up one of his speakers and smashed it right next to his head. I was in a total rage. And I was big and strong and black. I must have scared the living shit out of him, because he ran from Neptune to Belmar where Bruce lived and said, “It’s either him or me.”

  Turned out to be the best day of Max Weinberg’s life.

  But Max didn’t join us right away. He and our piano player, Roy Bittan, came in toward the end of that summer. Mad Dog left in February 1974 and Ernest “Boom” Carter replaced him. I remember we auditioned him at Garry’s parents’ house. Boom was with us when we recorded the title track “Born to Run.” That was the last song we recorded at 914. Then a whole bunch of big changes happened in a short amount of time.

  That was when Bruce and his future producer and manager, Jon Landau, got together. Jon thought 914 was a little less than top of the line, so we moved our sessions to the Record Plant in Manhattan. Boom and David Sancious left, and Max and Roy came in. David wanted to pursue jazz, and we were strictly rock and roll. We spent the next forever recording the rest of that album. It felt like it would never get done. I remember thinking we’d be making that album for the rest of our lives.

  The stakes were so high. The first two albums tanked, so the feeling was that this was our last shot. There was tremendous pressure on Bruce to deliver not just a hit but a masterpiece. And the more time we spent in the studio, the greater the pressure got.

  In the beginning, I think Bruce was going for a rock opera kind of thing about this character called the Magic Rat. He had lots of songs and themes that were built around this narrative he had in his head. Eventually he let that go, but I know it frustrated him, and we’ve all heard the stories about how dissatisfied he was with the final product.

  Of course, it all worked out in the end. But that year was a huge musical struggle for all of us. It was like some giant jigsaw puzzle with a lot of key pieces missing. Steve Van Zandt was a big help. He did the horn arrangement on “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” and background vocals on “Thunder Road.” Plus, he was a good sounding board for Bruce. Steve is a great guy to bounce ideas off of.

  That was also the time we had the first woman in the band. Her name was Suki Lahav. She played the violin on “Jungleland” and did some background vocals on “Sandy,” I think. Interesting woman. Her husband Louis was an engineer we worked with, so Suki was always around. She was Israeli and had just gotten out of the army. She used to play kibbutz harvest songs on that fiddle. We thought she was an angel. We all loved her, especially Bruce. She had this kind of mystical aura. She used to wear these flowing white dresses onstage. We were sad to see her go when she and Louis got divorced and she moved back to Israel, but she has had a great career over there. Max told me she even wrote a couple of novels in Hebrew.

  She was with us about six months. She was
with us in the studio and out on the road for a while. If you listen to a live recording of “Incident on 57th Street” from that time you can hear the opening violin and piano intro that morphed into the opening of “Jungleland.” That’s the way things happened. When we got to that song in the studio Bruce told them to use what they’d been playing live. Turned out to be a perfect fit.

  That was also the first time I heard the term CD. We used it all the time while we were making Born to Run. But it didn’t mean the same thing it came to mean later. At first it stood for the Carnegie Deli, because we got takeout from there every day. But then it came to stand for Chicken Dinner. It included half a roasted chicken, stuffing, candied yam, and a veggie. I had a lot of CDs.

  After a while, Bruce would only call us when he needed us for something specific. He still works that way. So I would commute back and forth from Jersey with Max throughout that winter. Max was the proud owner of an American Motors car called the Gremlin. It was an ugly yellow color—I used to call it baby-shit yellow. The damn thing was falling apart when he got it. The windshield wipers had a mind of their own. Anyway, one day we get a call from Bruce to come over. Max picked me up and we started out into a blizzard that had begun the day before. It was tough going, and the car was coughing and spitting. It sounded like everything inside that engine was trying to get out. Anyway, we were just past the first tollbooth on the Garden State Parkway when the son of a bitch finally quit. Cars dying on me was a theme in my life for a long while. Not anymore.

  Anyway, Old Yellow was done, and Max glided her over to the side of the highway into the snow. And I’m talking a lot of snow. So there we were, stranded on the side of the road, and it was still coming down like shit. We sat there for a while trying to figure out if we should stay put and wait for help to come or get out and walk back to the tollbooth. We needed to get to a phone because Bruce didn’t tolerate anybody being late. He was the Boss even back then. He had only two rules: no drugs and be on time. Since I regularly violated the first rule, it was important to me to follow the second.

  So we were sitting there trying to figure that out, when I looked at the side mirror and I let out a scream. Scared the shit out of Max. There was a gigantic snowplow barreling down on us. It was shooting up this huge plume of snow and ice. We jumped out of the car and dove into the snowbank on the other side. The driver of the plow saw Old Yellow at the last second and swerved to avoid it, but he buried her under a ton of snow. I’m not shitting you… the entire car was gone. I never saw the Gremlin again. We hitched a ride into the city and got there on time.

  I’ve often been asked to talk about the wild times on the road in the early days and I’ve always declined until now. The truth is this: the women on the road in the early days were incredible.

  It was the most amazing thing. Everything got turned around. I’d spent my life chasing women, mostly in vain, and now they were chasing me. It was unbelievable. It was possible to have a different woman every five minutes. It was actually too much. I know that sounds stupid, but it was over the top. I mean, at first I took full advantage of this unbelievable position. Who wouldn’t? But later I started to get more selective. Then I got way more selective. Then I started to fall in love with one woman at a time. I married a bunch of them. But I don’t regret anything. I’ve known some amazing women, and I still love all of them.

  We were doing a show in Indianapolis in 1978. So after sound check, Danny tells me there’s a club right across the street called the Red Garter Lounge. Leave it to Danny. So we grab a couple of the other guys, I think Steve came with us, and we go over there. In those days, I had a fondness for strippers, and strippers had a fondness for me. It was a perfectly balanced relationship. We got friendly with a bunch of them and invited them to the show that night. So they show up backstage all dressed up and looking good. We all sat around in my dressing room, which was called the Temple of Soul, and before you know it it was showtime.

  We went out and started the show, and the girls were right there in the wings, watching. Now, these women were uninhibited by nature, and they’d had a few drinks backstage. We were doing “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” and Bruce was up front doing his thing, and the crowd started to go crazy. Bruce thought he must have been especially good that night, and he was smiling and singing, and I turned to my left and there were the girls dancing around on the stage and taking their clothes off. This was a first for us. Bruce turned around and saw them and started laughing. These were classy strippers. They just got down to their underwear and danced around until the song ended. Not many people wanted the song to end, band included.

  Then later in Houston, we had a three-hundred-pound stripper come out onstage and start taking off her clothes. And she was hot. This woman could dance her considerable ass off. She was great and the crowd loved her. After that we started to get a little more serious about security.

  Thinking about those early times makes me miss Danny. He was the one who always started all those high jinks. People thought he was just the quiet guy on the organ, but he was insane. He would do the craziest shit.

  One time, I was in my hotel room someplace on the road, and there was a knock at the door. I opened it and Danny was standing there in the hall completely naked. He stepped into the room, giggling like a kid, and said, “You’ve got to try this, C. It’s an incredible rush to run down the corridor naked. I’m going to run back to my room. Take off all your clothes and run down. You won’t believe what a buzz you’ll get from it. C’mon, do it, man. I’ll see you down there.” And he ran back to his room.

  I was already a little high and it sounded like fun. So I took off all my clothes. I was totally naked, right? I opened my door and looked down the corridor. It was empty. Danny’s room was all the way down the other end by the elevators. So I stepped out into the hall, closed the door behind me, and took off down the corridor as fast as I could. And he was right. I got this incredible, silly rush. I mean, I was running down the corridor of a nice hotel butt naked.

  I got down to his room, and his door was closed. So I knocked on the door. My room was locked, and I had forgotten to bring the key. And I heard him in there laughing. “Gotcha,” he said. He had planned the whole thing. I was left out there in the wind. It was just about then the elevator doors opened, and I turned around to see the nuns.

  The Legend of the Highway, 2008

  Bruce and I have driven thousands of miles together in all kinds of cars and vans and trucks. If you’ve ever taken a road trip with somebody, you know that after a while boredom sets in and you look for ways to entertain yourselves. It’s impossible to accurately re-create specific conversations we’ve had, but the following story contains a good approximation of what it’s like when we’re together. —C.C.

  The car was a fucking beast. It was a ’69 Chevy with some humongous souped-up racing engine putting out over 800 horsepower. The car was painted with black/gray primer paint, which seemed to absorb light like a black hole. The thing had an event horizon. It may have been the definition of dark energy.

  Bruce was driving. Clarence was sitting in the other bucket seat. A man who might have been Hideki Matsui was in the backseat. He hadn’t spoken at all since he’d gotten into the car two hours ago.

  Astral Weeks was playing. They had listened to the whole album twice already.

  It was raining.

  Hideki was wearing running shoes, jeans, and a soft black leather jacket over a green T-shirt. On the T-shirt in red was the word RELAX. Under that in white letters were the words, GOD IS IN CONTROLL. Hideki was looking out the window at the dark, wet night.

  They were driving west on the Connecticut Turnpike, headed for the City. Bruce couldn’t wait to get there. Sometimes the City looked and felt like Oz to him. This would be one of those times.

  A wedge of black swans flew by.

  “What the fuck happened to Marshall Crenshaw?” said Clarence. “That song of his, ‘Someway Somehow,’ was fucking great. I loved that motherf
ucking song.”

  “ ‘Someday, Someway,’ ” said Bruce.

  “That’s what I said,” said Clarence.

  “Good song,” said Bruce. “No ‘Madame George,’ but good.”

  Clarence half-turned and spoke to Hideki. “How you doing back there?”

  Hideki just smiled and gave the thumbs-up signal.

  “You think he speaks English?” Clarence asked Bruce.

  “I don’t know,” said Bruce. “Why don’t you ask him?”

  Clarence turned again. “You speak English?” he said.

  Again Hideki smiled and lifted his thumbs.

  “Jury’s still out,” said Clarence.

  “His T-shirt is cool,” said Bruce.

  “Control is misspelled,” said Clarence.

  “I think that’s irony,” said Bruce. “If it isn’t, it is anyway.”

  After the game at Fenway the night before, the man who might have been Hideki Matsui went to Harvard. He loved Harvard. Everybody looked smart. It was as if all the people there were doctors. His friends were professors who specialized in quantum physics. Kevin Rooney, Chuck Sklar, and the brilliant Frank Sebastiano. These were the best minds on the planet, all trying to find an explanation for the force greater than gravity. The solution to the problem of an expanding universe. Hideki found magic in math. It spoke to him in the same way that music spoke to Bruce and Clarence. Hideki spent all his free time doing equations. Sure, it was a cliché to be an Asian math whiz, but how many of them could hit a ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball? At least he didn’t play the violin. Numbers were his true love. Somewhere deep within mathematics was the secret of space and time. The search for that secret was thrilling.