'Round the World, a Boss Boom

By Jay Cocks

All that fame, all of a sudden. What was it all about? Even back then, Bruce Springsteen was too smart to try to find out. Except one time.

It was in Memphis, after a concert in 1976. Springsteen and a couple of pals made a midnight pilgrimage out to Graceland, where rock's first real King still dwelled. Outside those gates, a certain madness took hold. The Boss wanted to meet Elvis, and he made a sudden, sprung-loose, solo commando raid on the sacred fortress. He was grabbed and turned back, and it was then, as he still likes to tell it, that he cashed in all his chips. "I'm Bruce Springsteen!" he yelled. "I was on the cover of TIME! The cover of Newsweek! I got an album, Born to Run. It was in the Top Ten!"

Bruce got the heave. Never did get to see the King. He got something else, though. Nine years later, after four more albums, six Top Ten singles and several transcontinental concert jaunts, Bruce Springsteen has become the biggest American rocker since Elvis Presley. He is the new King. He owns the dream. It is his fence the fans are hopping now.

Born in the U.S.A. has been a Top Ten album for over a year and, with 13 million copies sold worldwide, has become the all-time best seller in Columbia Records' history. Springsteen, 35, has been on a concert blitz since a year ago. By the time he takes a break this October, he will have played 62 cities around the world in 15 months. The shows have sold out everywhere; in Milan and Kyoto, the audiences sang whole songs with him.

Aug. 5 began what will likely be the Boss's last haul around the circuit for a while, and fans are descending in pickups, limos, vans, customized hardtops and road-weary convertibles onto his Super Bowl-size venues. This week and next he will be playing on home turf, six nights at New Jersey's Giants Stadium, which will hold, with field seating, 60,000 people at a time. The size of all this may be a little hard to grasp, but try using this for scale: the Beatles, appearing at Shea Stadium in 1965, played before 56,000 people, one time only. They also played for 35 minutes.

Springsteen still performs his full show (four hours, counting intermission) and has made no concessions to flash. There are video screens to beam images of the Boss and the E Street Band up to seats where the air may get thin, but Springsteen works hard to retain the feeling of one-on-one communion that has characterized his shows since the early days. Intimacy is lost incrementally as venues and audiences get larger, of course, and Boss fanatics of long standing will have to do a little adjusting to their dreams. Playing music on a ball field may never be ideal, but with state-of-the-art stadium sound by Engineer Bruce Jackson and with Springsteen onstage, bearing down hard on Cadillac Ranch, this is as good as it gets. The Springsteen concerts are the fulfillment of one of pop's dearest ideals: sensationally popular music that is also great rock 'n' roll.

For Springsteen, this pandemic musical phenomenon has been matched by some profound personal changes. Last year Steve Van Zandt, probably Springsteen's best friend and one of his closest collaborators, left the E Street Band to follow his own highly charged musical course. As Little Steven, Van Zandt has made two exemplary albums that fuse hard rock with tough, heartfelt politics. But the departure, which was thoroughly amicable, was rough on all concerned. Springsteen set down some of his feelings in Bobby Jean: "I'm just calling one last time/ Not to change your mind, but just to say I/ miss you baby, good luck, goodbye/ Bobby Jean."

And, of course, Springsteen got married, to Julianne Phillips, 25, a model and actress from Lake Oswego, Ore. The ceremony became one of those all-media shooting matches that are the sudden, awful baptism of American superstardom and the price you pay for it. After some frayed nerves and some skulduggery of scheduling, the ceremony took place uninterrupted on May 13, at a church in the bride's hometown. Van Zandt, Manager Jon Landau and Clarence Clemons, the E Street Band's knight-errant sax player, were best men. The media got foxed on photos, and on all but the skimpiest details. (Only last week did Springsteen and his wife allow a brief photo session; it was done for TIME.) During his concerts Springsteen has started to make jokes about being married. "Gotta be cool now!" he laughs, and the audience laughs with him. But anyone who has taken a high dive into Springsteen's lyrics knows how much honor and emotional obligation mean to him, and can guess, at least, how the carny atmosphere of the wedding must have cut him.

Conjecture will have to serve for the moment, until Springsteen writes a song on the subject, or gives formal interviews again. He has not spoken officially to the press since late last year. But he is still writing, and a new tune called Seeds shows his heart has not been blunted by all the pandemonium. Seeds is a bitter and desperate blues about workers who leave the languishing auto industry in Detroit for jobs in the oil fields around Houston. Bad times hit oil town, and the workers get shorted again on their fair portion of the American dream. They have to live in their cars. "Kid's in the backseat with a graveyard cough," Springsteen sings, and closes out with a simple, strangled, "Gone, gone, it's all gone."

There is no misunderstanding what he is up to here. Seeds is a cry of outrage that vaults over both self-pity and partisan politics. It is a hard tune, without the irony of, say, Born in the U.S.A. Born is a coruscating song about hopes put on hold. Despite that, its bouncy chorus has been yanked out of context and appropriated as an anthem of renewed American pride. "Born in the U.S.A. has been fabulously misheard and misread," observes Rock Critic Greil Marcus. "Clearly the key to the enormous explosion of Bruce's popularity is the misunderstanding of that song. He is a tribute to the fact that people hear what they want."

Bumper stickers and stadium banners proclaim BRUCE--THE RAMBO OF ROCK! "In the midst of a lot of music about love, he's a spokesman for patriotism," says Larry Berger, program director of New York City's powerful WPLJ-FM. "He's the Ronald Reagan of rock 'n' roll." In fact, the only thing Springsteen has in common with Stallone's marauding murder machine is a bandanna around the forehead; and the one time the President tried to cut himself in on Boss territory ("America's future rests ... in the message of hope in songs of ... New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen"), he was met with an oblique but sharp rebuff. "I kinda got to wondering what his favorite album must've been," Springsteen speculated at a Pittsburgh concert. "I don't think he's been listening to this one," he added, tearing into a ripsaw version of Johnny 99, about an unemployed factory worker who shoots a hotel night clerk: "Now judge I got debts no honest man could pay/ The bank was holdin' my mortgage and they/ was takin' my house away/ Now I ain't sayin' that makes me an innocent man/ But it was more 'n all this that put the gun in/ my hand."

Politicians still keep running for a rumble seat on the Springsteen bandwagon, however. New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley has written about the Boss for USA Today and, declaring himself "an old rock and roller," told the CBS Morning News that Bruce was "part Elvis, he's part Chuck Berry, he's part Buddy Holiday." The old rocker must have meant Buddy Holly, but, even with facts straight and names neatly in place, a professional politician is not likely to get an endorsement from Springsteen, who now seeks out small organizations in each town he plays, then makes a donation and a fund-raising plea from the stage. He has given nearly half a million dollars so far.

"He's something to be proud of," says Ron Weisen, whose United Steelworkers of America Local 1397 in Homestead, Pa., was one of the first organizations to receive a Springsteen contribution, almost a year ago. "He worries about the underfed and the underprivileged." Says Robert Muller, president of the Vietnam Veterans of America: "We would not exist if it were not for Bruce Springsteen." Back in 1981, when, as Muller says, "nobody wanted to hear about the Viet Nam War," a Springsteen concert raised about $100,000 for the V.V.A. "That was the beginning of Bruce's political involvement," Muller thinks. "My hope is ten years down the road, he'll run for President."

Well, in the words of old Buddy Holiday, that'll be the day. Springsteen is a superstar, but he is also bent on being a populist, marrying the mythic dimensions of major celebrity to the kind of moral and social responsibility seldom found bobbing in the musical mainstream. "He's closer to his public image than any of the other rock stars I've known," says his friend and biographer Dave Marsh. "It's hard to accept, but the guy is all there in his music." Backstage at a concert, the atmosphere is a little more restrictive, less familial than in times past, but Springsteen, off the road, is still the superstar who will tag along home on the spur of the moment with a casual friend and plunk out a few notes for the family on a toy piano. Recently, after a rehearsal in New Jersey, Springsteen found a fan lounging on the Boss's '69 black Chevy Malibu convertible. The fan took a bluff, bold shot: "How about a ride home?" "Hop in," said the Boss, and they drove off.

There may be a variety of musical reasons for the current Springsteen ascendancy. The new songs are sharper, neater, more carefully formed than in the past. His voice is clearer, and it is brought further up front in the recording mix. On his rock videos, he shows enough charisma to burn out the entire Brat Pack, while fueling endless idle speculation about a future in Hollywood. In a half-decade full of switchback curves and turning points, however, the starting line may have been a moment when Springsteen opened Joe Klein's luminous 1980 biography of Woody Guthrie. Nebraska, the solo album he released in 1982, has direct roots in Guthrie tunes like Pretty Boy Floyd, just as Springsteen's current populism has models in the blue-collar activism of the 1930s.

One of the high points of the current concert tour is Springsteen's heartbroken guitar-and-harmonica version of what he calls "the best song ever written about the promise of America, This Land Is Your Land. It's a promise," he adds, "that's eroding every day for a lot of people. Countries are like people. It's easy to let the best of yourself slip away."

Huge as they are now, Springsteen's concerts remain full-throttle performances that depend on intensity, not special effects, to reach the back rows. Scramble up to the farthest seats, look down toward the field. Springsteen, on the bright, distant stage, looks as if he were singing in the engine room of the Close Encounters spaceship. But the sound is buoyant, even this high, enhanced by people all around, dancing, singing along. You can just about see Bruce below, but you can hear him everywhere, and, even at this distance, you recognize him. He is the promise that has not eroded, the best part of every single person there to hear him. --By Jay Cocks. Reported by Cathy Booth/New York

With reporting by Reported by Cathy Booth/New York