The movie marquee in Red
Bank, N.J., simply said 'HOMECOMING'" because everyone
knew who was home. Out in the audience was Cousin
Frankie, who taught him his first guitar chords. So were
the guys from Freehold High who played in his early rock
'n' roll bands. They did not have to be hyped on Bruce
Springsteen. This was the scruffy kid they had seen for
years in the bars and byways of coastal Jersey. But Bruce
was suddenly big time. The rock critics, the media, the
music-industry heavies all said so. And in Red Bank,
Bruce showed them just how far he had come. With Elvis
shimmies and Elton leaps, Springsteen re-created his own
electric brand of '50s rock 'n' roll magic. He clowned
with saxophonist Clarence Clemons, hustled and bumped his
way around the stage and gave a high-voltage performance
that lasted more than two hours. When he leaned into the
microphone, ripped off his black leather jacket and
blasted, "Tramps like us, baby, we were born to run," the
Jersey teeny-boppers went wild. After four footstomping
encores they were ready to crown Bruce Springsteen the
great white hope of rock 'n' roll.
The official investiture
took place last week in Los Angeles at Springsteen's
carefully staged West Coast debut, at the Roxy Night Club
on Sunset Strip. At the kind of opening-night event that
defines hip status for at least six months, new Hollywood
and rock royalty embraced Bruce Springsteen as one of
their own. In a rare ovation that lasted a full four
minutes, Jack Nicholson, Ryan and daughter Tatum O'Neal,
Wolfman Jack and Neil Diamond seconded Cousin Frankie and
the boys from Freehold High in Red Bank. Bruce
Springsteen was a superstar.
Bruce who? He is still
not exactly a household name across America. In San
Mateo, Calif. last week, his 13-year-old sister Pam said,
"Only one girl at school has his record." The bus
driver's son -- who bears a striking resemblance to
Dylan, sports black leather jackets like Brando in "The
Wild One" and wears a gold hoop earring -- was known to
only a small coterie of East Coast devotees a year ago.
But since the release last August of his highly
professional third album, "Born to Run," which rocketed
to a million-dollar gold album in six weeks, 26-year-old
Bruce Springsteen has exploded into a genuine pop-music
phenomenon. He has already been compared to all the great
performers -- Elvis, Dylan and Mick Jagger. And rock
critic Robert Hilburn of The Los Angeles Times called him
"the purest glimpse of the passion and power of rock 'n'
roll in nearly a decade." Springsteen's own insistence on
performing in small halls and clubs has created a kind of
cult hysteria and his emergence as one of the most
exciting live acts in rock today has only added to the
mystique. Springsteen buttons, T shirts, decals, key
chains and three different kinds of wall posters are
currently the hot rock paraphernalia. In fact, Bruce
Springsteen has been so heavily praised in the press and
so tirelessly promoted by his record company, Columbia,
that the publicity about his publicity is now a dominant
issue in his career. And some people are asking whether
Bruce Springsteen will be the biggest superstar or the
biggest hype of the '70s.
In a $2 billion industry
that thrives on smash hits, the artist who grabs the
public's emotions the way Elvis or the Beatles once did
is the fantasy of rock critics and record-industry pros
alike. Springsteen's punk image, his husky, wailing
voice, his hard-driving blues-based music and his
passionate, convoluted lyrics of city lowlife, fast cars
and greaser rebellion recall the dreams of the great rock
'n' roll rage of the 1950s:
Well now I'm
no hero
That's understood
All the redemption I can offer, girl
Is beneath this dirty hood
But he also injects the
images with a new sophistication:
The highway's
jammed with broken heroes
On a last-chance power drive
Everybody's out on a run tonight
But there's no place left to hide
Some critics, however,
find Springsteen's music one-dimensional, recycled teen
dreams. "Springsteen's lyrics are an effusive jumble,"
music critic Henry Edwards wrote in The New York Times,
"his melodies either second-hand or undistinguished and
his performance tedious. Given such flaws there has to be
another important ingredient to the success of Bruce
Springsteen: namely, vigorous promotion." Even some of
his champions like disk jockey Denny Sanders of WMMS in
Cleveland agree on that point. "Columbia is going
overboard on Springsteen," he says. "He is the only
unique artist to come out of the '70s, but because the
rock 'n' roll well is really dry, they are going crazy
for Springsteen."
As the real world has
caught up with the record world, the penny-pinched
economy has begun to erode the record industry. Album
sales are down (Warner Brothers, for one, is off by
nearly 20 per cent), the albums going to the top of the
charts are getting there on fewer sales while advertising
budgets are being drastically slashed. "Unless an act has
a great potential for sales," says one record-company
executive, "the companies won't spend the big
dollars."
Too often, the companies
have gotten burned when they spent their money on the
sizzle and forgot the steak. Bell Records dished out more
than $100,000 last year in parties to promote an act
nobody ever heard of -- Gary Glitter -- and people are
still asking who he is. Atlantic bankrolled the rock
group Barnaby Bye for an estimated $200,000 but failed to
turn up any album sales. MGM decided to promote a
singer-songwriter named Judi Pulver.
They sent her to a
Beverly Hills diet doctor, created a Charles Schulz
"Peanuts" ad campaign, rented a Boeing 720 to fly
journalists to her opening in San Francisco and even got
astronaut Edgar Mitchell to go along for the ride. When
the evening was over, the inevitable truth set in. Judi
Pulver just couldn't carry the hype. MGM's $100,000
experiment bombed.
Everyone in the industry
is aware of the pitfalls of The Hype and insiders think
that the current Springsteen mania might inflict damage
on his career. "All the attention Bruce is getting now
might hurt him later on," says Hilburn. "What I'm afraid
of is that while Springsteen has all the potential
everyone says he has, it's still chiefly potential. I
just hope he's strong enough to stand up under the
pressure." Warner Brothers Records president Joe Smith
appreciates the "tumult" Bruce is creating for the
industry but is dubious about the extent of his ultimate
influence on the development of music. "He's a hot new
artist now," says Smith, "but he's not the new messiah
and I question whether he will establish an international
mania. He's got a very long way to go before he does what
Elton has done, or Rod Stewart or The Rolling Stones or
Led Zeppelin."
Bruce himself is
concerned about the effect the publicity campaign will
have on his creative equilibrium. "What phenomenon? What
phenomenon?" Springsteen asked in exasperation last week
while driving up from Jersey to New York. "We're driving
around, and we ain't no phenomenon. The hype just gets in
the way. People have gone nuts. It's weird. All the stuff
you dream about is there, but it gets diluted by all the
other stuff that jumped on you by surprise."
Springsteen is
experiencing superstar culture shock. He has never
strayed far from his best friends like Miami Steve Van
Zandt and Gary Tallent, who are in his E Street Band. He
has spent hours hanging out on the boardwalk at Asbury
Park, N.J., and listening to the barkers tell their
tales. For gigs, he used to hitchhike to New York to play
his guitar in Greenwich Village. In both places, he found
the cast of characters who people his lyrics -- Spanish
Johnny, the Magic Rat, Little Angel, Puerto Rican Jane.
They inspired him but they didn't corrupt him.
Springsteen rarely drinks, does not smoke, doesn't touch
dope and never swears in front of women.
"I'm a person -- people
tend to forget that kind of thing," he says. "I got a
rock 'n' roll band I think is one of the best ones. I
write about things I believe that are still fun for me. I
love drivin' around in my car when I'm 26 and I'll still
love drivin' around in my car when I'm 36. Those aren't
irrelevant feelings for me." The feelings usually find
their way to vinyl. "The record is my life," says
Springsteen. "The band is my life. Rock 'n' roll has been
everything to me. The first day I can remember lookin' in
the mirror and standin' what I was seein' was the day I
had a guitar in my hand."
Throughout his
unconventional career, Springsteen has found people who
felt he was born to star. From the moment he and his
abrasive new manager, Mike Appel, walked into Columbia
Records in 1972 to audition for the legendary John
Hammond -- discoverer of Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin
and Bob Dylan -- Springsteen was the object of
high-pressure salesmanship. "I went into a state of shock
as soon as I walked in, says Springsteen. "Before I ever
played a note Mike starts screamin' and yellin' 'bout me.
I'm shrivelin' up and thinkin', 'Please, Mike,
give me a break. Let me
play a damn song.' So, dig this, before I ever played a
note the hype began."
"The kid absolutely
knocked me out," Hammond recalls. "I only hear somebody
really good once every ten years, and not only was Bruce
the best, he was a lot better than Dylan when I first
heard him." Within a week, Springsteen was signed to
Columbia and although he and Appel had little previous
recording experience, they insisted on producing their
own album -- the uneven "Greetings From Asbury Park,
N.J." released in January 1973. At the time Bruce had no
band" he sang alone with an acoustic guitar. And because
of the originality of his lyrics -- and perhaps the
familiarity of their cadence -- he was compared to
Dylan.
Oh, some
hazard from Harvard
Was skunked on beer playin'
Backyard bombardier
Yes and Scotland Yard was trying
Hard, they sent some dude with a
Callin' card
He said, 'Do what you like but don't do it here.'"
The comparison was so
tantalizingly close that Columbia promoted the first
album with ads announcing they had the new Bob Dylan. The
cover letter on the records Columbia sent to the DJ's
flatly stated the same thing. But the hard sell
backfired. "The Dylan hype from Columbia was a turnoff,"
said Dave Herman, the early-morning DJ for WNEW-FM, the
trend- setting pop station in New York. "I didn't even
bother to listen to it. I didn't want Columbia to think
they got me."
Without radio airplay --
the single most important ingredient in any hit -- a
record dies. Though the Springsteen campaign was a
special project of then Columbia president Clive Davis,
who personally read Springsteen's lyrics on a promotional
film, and even though Bruce got good notices from
important rock publications like Crawdaddy, only a
handful of the 100 or so major FM stations across the
country played him. The record sold less than 50,000
copies. "He was just another media hype that failed,"
said Herman. "He was already a dead artist who bombed out
on his first album."
Springsteen's personal
appearance at the Columbia Records convention in the
summer of 1973 was his biggest bomb. "It was during a
period when he physically looked like Dylan," says
Hammond. "He came on with a chip on his shoulder and
played too long. People came to me and said, 'He really
can't be that bad, can he, John?'"
That fall, Springsteen's
second album, "The Wild, The Innocent &" the E
Street Shuffle," was released. Again it got some terrific
reviews -- Rolling Stone later named it one of the best
albums of 1974 -- but it sold even less than his first
LP. This time, accompanying a stack of favorable reviews,
the DJ's got a letter from Springsteen's manager Appel
saying "What the hell does it take to get airplay?"
Meanwhile, Springsteen had a disastrous experience
playing as the opening act for the supergroup Chicago on
tour, and he refused to do what most new rock acts must
do to get exposure -- play short, 45-minute sets in huge
halls before the main act goes on.
Columbia began to ignore
Springsteen because he couldn't make a best- selling
album or hit-single. But Springsteen was getting better
in his live performances and was starting to build
followings in towns like Austin and Philadelphia, Phoenix
and Cleveland. "The key to Bruce's success was to get
people to see him," says Ron Oberman, a Columbia staffer
who pushed hard for Springsteen's first album within the
company. After a concert in Cleveland, says local DJ
Sanders, "Springsteen was a smash, and requests zoomed
up. We had played him before but now the requests stayed
on."
ln April 1974, Jon
Landau, the highly respected record editor of Rolling
Stone, caught Bruce's act in Boston, went home and wrote
an emotional piece for the Real Paper stating, "I saw
rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen."
Landau's review was the turning point in Springsteen's
faltering career -- for the artist as well as the
company. "At the time," says Springsteen, "Landau's quote
helped reaffirm a belief in myself. The band and I were
making $50 a week. It helped me go on. I realized I was
gettin' through to somebody." Columbia cannily used the
blurb in marketing Springsteen's second album and other
critics began to take notice. It was the first time a
record label used the prestige of a rock critic to push
an artist so hard.
"His first two albums'
not selling was the best possible thing for Bruce," says
the 28-year-old Landau. "It gave him time to develop a
strong identity without anyone pushing him prematurely.
For twelve years he has had time to learn how to play
every kind of rock 'n' roll. He has far more depth than
most artists because he really has roots in a place --
coastal Jersey, where no record company scouts ever
visit."
One month after the
Landau review, Springsteen, alone with Mike Appel in a
sparsely equipped studio in upstate New York, began to
record his third album -- his last chance to make it. It
took three months to record the title song, "Born to
Run," and Columbia immediately sent it out to some key
people to review for singles potential. The word came
back: It's not top 40, forget it, it's too long. Then the
ever-assertive Appel released a rough mix of the song to
a handful of stations that had played
Springsteen.
The response was
overwhelmingly positive. The stations wanted the record.
But the potential superstar was in the studio for the
next six months unable to finish his masterpiece. "He
told me he was having trouble getting the sound he heard
in his head on record," says Landau. In April 1975, a
year after his review, Landau became an adviser on the
album and quit his job at Rolling Stone to be come
co-producer. He moved them into a better studio, and
helped shape the album into a heavily produced wall of
pulsating sound.
Last June, a group of
Columbia executives heard a rough cut of the album and
decided to launch an unprecedented campaign. Building on
the Landau quote and $40,000 worth of radio spots on FM
stations in twelve major markets, they promoted the first
two dud albums, mentioning a third was on the way. It
worked. Sales for the first two LP's climbed back on the
charts, more than doubling their original
sales.
Columbia knew it had a
winner" the question was how to showcase the act. Appel,
without consulting Springsteen, thought big. He asked a
booking agent to get 20,000-seat Madison Square Garden
for an artist who had never sold more than 150,000
records. He finally settled on the 400-seat Bottom Line
club in Greenwich Village for the week before the release
of the third album last August. The tickets sold out in
three and a half days, with Columbia picking up 980 of
the 400O tickets for the media "tastemakers." "Columbia
put it on the line," said DJ Richard Neer of WNEW-FM,
"They said, 'Go see him. If you don't like him, don't
play him -- don't write about him'." With the tickets so
limited in number, the ensuing hysteria created more
press coverage and critical acclaim for Springsteen --
who delivered topnotch shows -- than any recent event of
its kind. "It was a very intelligent use of an event,"
says Stan Snadowsky, co-owner of the Bottom Line.
"Columbia got all the right people down there." DJ Dave
Herman, who refused to even play Springsteen's first
album because of the hype, was completely won over. The
next day he apologized on the air. "I saw Springsteen for
the first time last night," he told his audience. "It's
the most exciting rock 'n' roll show I've ever
seen."
Orders for the new album,
which had been given an initial press ordering of
175,000, came in at 350,000. The LP has sold 600,000 so
far, and Columbia has spent $200,000 promoting it. By the
end of the year they will spend an additional $50,000 for
TV spots on the album. "These are very large expenditures
for a record company" we depend on airplay, which cannot
be bought," says Bruce Lundvall, Columbia Records' vice
president. "What the public does not understand is that
when you spend $100,000 on an album for a major artist,
your investment is not so much on media as on the number
of people you have out there pushing the artist for
airplay." Now, for the first time, a Springsteen single,
"Born to Run, has broken through many major AM stations,
where the mass audience listens.
The stakes are enormous,
since a hot album can earn up to several million dollars
for the record company in a matter of a few weeks. Today
Bruce Springsteen is still a promising rookie. Nobody
knows whether he can sell like Elton John or even lesser
publicized groups like Earth, Wind &" Fire -- a
group that will ship more than 750,000 initial orders
with the release of its new LP. Because of his enormous
build-up, Springsteen now has the awesome task of
fulfilling everyone's fantasy of what a new rock hero
should be. And most of the country -- which isn't even
aware of Springsteen yet -- may or may not agree that he
is born to succeed. "Bruce is undergoing a backlash right
now," says Irwin B. Segelstein, President of Columbia
Records, "but even his critics are treating him
importantly."
Springsteen himself has
not yet seen any big bucks. He keeps 22 people on his
payroll. He maintains sophisticated sound and lighting
equipment for his shows and has a video crew following
him everywhere. He only plays small halls where he can
barely cover his expenses, but that hasn't put a crimp in
his style. He has just moved into his first home, a
sparsely furnished cottage overlooking the ocean -- about
a 10-minute drive from the Asbury Park boardwalk. His
girl friend, 20-year-old Karen Darbin, a Springsteen fan
from Texas, lives across the Hudson River in Manhattan.
In Bruce's garage stands his prized possession -- a '57
yellow Chevy convertible customized with orange flames,
the same color as his first guitar.
On the eve of his West
Coast debut last week, Springsteen seemed to be down.
"People keep telling me I ought to be enjoying all this
but it's sort of depressing to me." He riffled through
his beloved '50s records -- Elvis and Dion --from stacks
of albums on the floor, which also included Gregorian
chants, David Bowie and Marvin Gaye. "Now this," Bruce
announces in a faintly Jimmy Durante delivery, "is the
sound of universes colliding." The room fills with Phil
Spector's classic production of the Ronettes' "Baby I
Love You." Springsteen swoons. "Come on, do the greaser
two-step," he says, beginning to dance.
Although Springsteen is a
German name, Bruce is mostly Italian, and he inherited
his storytelling ability from his Neapolitan grandfather
Zirili. "In the third grade a nun stuffed me into a
garbage can under her desk because she told me that's
where I belonged," he relates. "I also had the
distinction of being the only altar boy knocked down by a
priest on the steps of the altar during Mass. The old
priest got mad. My Mom wanted me to learn how to serve
Mass but I didn't know what I was doin' so I was tryin'
to fake it."
He finally saved $18 to
buy his first guitar -- "one of the most beautiful sights
I have ever seen in my life" --and at age 14, Springsteen
joined his first band. He was originally a Rolling Stones
fanatic but gradually worked back to early rock. "We used
to play the Elks Club, the Rollerdrome and the local
insane asylum," he says. "We were always terrified at the
asylum. One time this guy in a suit got up and introduced
us for twenty minutes sayin' we were greater than the
Beatles. Then the doctors came up and took him
away."
Springsteen's parents
moved to California when he was 16, but he stayed behind
scuffling in local bands. A year later he drove across
country -- someone else had to shift because Bruce did
not know how to drive -- to play a New Year's Eve gig at
the Esalen Institute. "I've never been outta Jersey in my
life and suddenly I get to Esalen and see all these
people walkin' around in sheets," he says. "I see someone
playing bongos in the woods and it turns out to be this
guy who grew up around the corner from me." "Everybody
expected Bruce to come back from California a star,"says
his old friend "Southside Johnny" Lyon who used to play
with Bruce at the Stone Pony bar in Asbury Park. But
according to Bruce, "nobody wanted to listen to a guy
with a guitar."
They do today. Onstage
Springsteen projects the same kind of high school macho
and innocence that many young male fans, for whom glitter
is dull, strongly identify with. Women think he's sexy
and it's likely he'll end up with a movie contract. "He's
able to say what we can't about growing up," said John
Bordonaro, 23, a telephone dispatcher from the Bronx who
traveled to Red Bank to see Bruce in concert. "He's
talking about hanging around in cars in front of the
Exxon sign. He's talking about getting your hands on your
very first convertible. He's telling us it's our last
chance to pull something off, and he's doing it for us.
"The peace and love movement is gone," chimed in his
friend, Chris Williams. "We have to make a shot now or
settle into the masses."
The question is will
Bruce Springsteen be able to reach the masses? "Let's
face it," says Joe Smith of Warner Brothers Records.
"He's a kid with a beard in his 20s from New Jersey who
happens to sing songs. He's not going to jump around any
more than Elton. His voice won't be any sweeter than
James Taylor's and his lyrics won't be any heavier than
Dylan's."
Springsteen's promoters
would disagree, but they don't think it matters. "The
industry is at the bottom of the barrel," declares
Springsteen's manager Mike Appel, 32, as he paces around
the Manhattan office once occupied by Dylan's manager,
Albert Grossman. "We've got people scratching around for
new talent. There's an amazing paucity of talent because
there hasn't been anyone isolated enough to create a
distinctive point of view." He whispers
dramatically,
"What I'm waiting for,
what Bruce Springsteen is waiting for, and we're all
waiting for is something that makes you want to dance!"
He shouts, "Something we haven't had for seven or eight
years! Today anything remotely bizarre is gobbled up as
the next thing. What you've got to do is get the
universal factors, to get people to move in the same
three or four chords. It's the real thing! Look up
America! Look up America!" Appel sat down. Hypes are as
American as Coca-Cola so perhaps -- in one way or another
-- Bruce Springsteen is the Real Thing.
