“Bruce” - Chapters 10 & 11
In which I review Peter Ames Carlin’s Springsteen autobiography Bruce in tiny bites on Tumblr
CHAPTER 10
Do you remember Loudon Wainwright III’s song called “Dead Skunk”? I remember it, but didn’t know it was by Loudon Wainwright, and I equally didn’t realize that this piece of tripe was competing against Greetings From Asbury Park in the minds of Columbia. (This, in a nutshell, explains much that is wrong with the music business.)
These are the Appel years, the struggling years, the Danny and Vini Lopez camping in a tent in the studio parking lot years, the Bruce eating Devil Dogs years. (I had older friends that would bring boxes of Devil Dogs to the band back in the day.)
My favorite scene remains Peter Philbin yelling at Walter Yetnikoff that he didn’t know who Bruce was gonna be.
CHAPTER 11
The early E Street Band years. One of the things Carlin has done with painstaking care is listen to those old live shows and old outtake tapes and relayed them back with copious, intricate detail.
Jim Cretecos would not speak to Carlin. (Neither would Appel, for what it’s worth, as I learned going through the acknowledgements earlier tonight. I am going to hazard a complete guess that things are good between him and Bruce now and why would he ruin it by saying something he might regret later.)
The Firing of Vini Lopez, Columbia pushing Billy Joel over Bruce (a thing I would always insist on as a teenager but of course didn’t know a damn thing except that guy was bigger than my guy and I couldn’t understand why).
Bruce forbid Appel to produce merchandise. This was boneheaded because it would have been a much needed income stream.
The auditions that produced Max and Roy. “All must sing.”
