This Day in Rock Music (Springsteen Inks Irksome Deal With Manager, Columbia)

June 9, 1972—A month after auditioning for a legendary record executive, Bruce Springsteen, through an interlocking set of agreements, entered into what has turned out to be a 40-year relationship with Columbia Records. While that part of the deal proved enduring, another—stipulating the relationship among the singer, the label, and the company owned by Springsteen’s producer-manager of the time—led to a protracted legal struggle several years later.

In Stephen Sondheim’s musical, Merrily We Roll Along, a bitter lyricist is asked how he works with his slick, money-obsessed composer collaborator: “Which comes first generally — the words or the music?” “Generally, the contract,” the lyricist answers. All too true. This time, however, we’re going to talk first about the audition—specifically, the one that took place at Columbia on May 2, 1972.

At 10:30 in the morning, a 22-year-old rock ‘n’ roller from New Jersey, carrying a borrowed acoustic guitar with no case and accompanied only by his bulldog manager who had been unable to secure a meeting with Columbia Records exec Clive Davis, arranged an informal private audition with the next best thing: legendary talent scout John Hammond. Hammond, impressed, arranged a longer, more formal audition the next day, and the musical journey of Springsteen had begun.

Tom Greenwade earned undying gratitude among New York Yankee fans as the scout who discovered Mickey Mantle, Bobby Murcer, Elston Howard, Hank Bauer, Clete Boyer, and Ralph Terry. (Before joining the Bombers’ organization, he had also strongly urged Branch Rickey to sign Jackie Robinson for the Dodgers.) Hammond’s achievement as a music scout was even longer and more diverse, as he was responsible for discovering, besides Springsteen and Dylan, the likes of Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, Aretha Franklin, and Pete Seeger.

The above list, you’ll notice, was dominated before the 1960s by jazz musicians. But Hammond’s discovery of Franklin, Seeger—and especially Dylan, who originally had been derided as “Hammond’s Folly” at Columbia when his first album didn’t sell well—had served notice that he still had an eye for the musical mainstream, even as it had shifted more to rhythm and blues, folk and rock ‘n’ roll. (See my prior post on what Hammond had to face at the studio in signing Dylan.)

Springsteen knew this history all too well as he sat down at the piano—not his best instrument anyway—and began banging out chords with more feeling than skill. Nevertheless, after listening to the young man’s first three songs (“Growin’ Up,” “Mary Queen of Arkansas,” and “It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City”), Hammond was impressed enough to ask if the singer-songwriter had any others that he would play in concert but not record. Springsteen then launched into “If I Was the Priest.”

You can listen to that song on Springsteen’s boxed set of rarities, Tracks, but for the purposes of this discussion, we’ll note that in the song the Holy Ghost is a brothel-owner and the Virgin Mary, who “runs the Holy Grail Saloon,” is:

“…a stone junkie, what's more she's a boozer

And she's only been made once or twice

By some kind of magic.” 

Remembering the meeting several years later, Hammond chuckled: “It seemed unlikely he was Jewish. But when he played the song, I knew he could only be Catholic.”

Springsteen would not be the only baby-boom entertainer from New Jersey in rebellion against his parochial school upbringing. So was John Travolta, who went for several years to the elementary school that I myself attended, St. Cecilia in Englewood, N.J. But, like James Joyce, Catholicism left an indelible mark on Springsteen's use of language and themes. "The Boss" didn’t simply announce, “It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City.” In the opening title of his breakthrough album, Born to Run, he’s calling for “redemption” and “faith.”

Springsteen would need plenty of faith, even if not in the style he grew up with, over the next couple of years. During that time, one of the few music professionals demonstrating any belief in him was his manager, Mike Appel. Unfortunately, Appel had crafted his own agreement with Springsteen in such a way that the two fell out over it. 

As outlined in Dave Marsh’s Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts: The Definitive Biography, 1972-2003, one month before the Columbia deal, Springsteen had signed a management agreement and another agreement ceding to Laurel Canyon exclusive rights to his recordings for one year, followed by four one-year options. 

That deal called for Laurel Canyon to receive royalties of 3% of the retail selling price. While that pact called for Springsteen to make five albums, a second one, between CBS and Laurel, required that he make 10. In that case, Laurel would make about 9% of the retail price, about three times what Springsteen would receive.

Even on the surface, the deal sounds lopsidedly against Springsteen, yet at this point in his life and career he was without serious prospects or even a place of his own. He was so unsophisticated that he not only didn’t submit the agreement to an attorney, but, if the legend is to be believed, signed it on the hood of a car. All that mattered to him now was that he’d receive a $25,000 advance and a $40,000 recording budget—the chance, finally, to make the record he wanted.

For the next four years, Appel compiled a mixed record for his client. On the one hand, he was so aggressive in promoting Springsteen that a number of people were turned off by his approach. On the other hand, he was the original believer in The Boss—not just recognizing his brilliance as a songwriter and his electrifying concert performances, but supporting his desire for recordings centered around the E Street Band rather than studio musicians. His drumbeat of promotion for the single Born to Run in the Philadelphia market, for instance, kept interest alive in the artist while Springsteen was still struggling to come up with hsi desired Spectorian "wall of sound" in the studio.

The blog Your Friday Bruce Fix (love that title, but...why stop at Fridays????) has a fine post about the denouement of the relationship: the growing friendship between the singer and the outsider he brought in as a producer for Born to Run, Jon Landau, followed by Springsteen’s discovery, after the album's release, that not only was he making less than he should have from record sales and airplay, but that Laurel rather than himself owned publishing rights to his first three albums. Therein followed suit and countersuit between the singer and his now-fired manager. The litigation ended in mid-1977 with Appel out and Springsteen able to record with Landau.

The relationship between Springsteen and Appel would remain icy until the release of a documentary about the making of Born to Run a few years ago, when the singer and the manager-producer reconciled.