Flashback, October 1987: ‘Tunnel of Love,’ Springsteen LP of 'Men and Women Songs,' Released

Tunnel of Love, the first studio album since Bruce Springsteen’s multi-platinum Born in the U.S.A., marked a shift in tone and content for the New Jersey rocker. Written two years after his marriage to model-actress Julianne Phillips (to whom he dedicated it), the LP spoke openly about relationships. At the time, many critics noted its consistent theme of the cost of commitment, an observation reinforced when the singer-songwriter split with Phillips after the tour supporting this cycle of what the artist called his “men and women songs.”

At first, Tunnel of Love could have been read by some Springsteen fans as part of the ebb and flow of his career from anthemic to stripped-down songs. The former tended to lend themselves to arenas and outsized expectations that made him recoil and reassess his direction.  

Darkness on the Edge of Town featured prominently featured harder-edged guitar work than predecessor Born to Run and dispensed with the Spectorian “wall of sound” he had worked tireless hours to achieve. (At the same time, he had informed his record company, Columbia, to tone down the hype that had colored reaction to the earlier record.) With the downbeat Nebraska (1982), he practically guaranteed that there would be no Top Five singles on the order of “Hungry Heart” from The River (1980).  The three singles from Tunnel of Love—the title tune, “Brilliant Disguise” and “One Step Up”—were hardly as radio-friendly as the seven singles of Born in the U.S.A. (1984).

The two million units of Tunnel of Love shipped by Columbia testified to the residual impact of Born in the U.S.A., but the prospects of repeating that earlier sales performance were dim: The Boss was challenging his audience to follow him on his journey, one that even a cursory playing of Tunnel revealed as uncharted terrain. Most love songs reflect the exhilaration involved with that emotion, and breakup or torch songs probably nearly match upbeat love tunes in number. But far fewer songs express the self-doubt, even terror, evoked by the word “forever” when spoken in a relationship.

In retrospect, the LP can also be seen as a transition point in his commitment to another family: Springsteen’s “band of brothers,” the E Street Band. His questioning of his marriage paralleled his questioning of whether the backup musicians with whom he had played, in some cases, 17 years could fulfill his musical ambitions. The sounds he heard in his head were not that much more extensive than those reproduced on his acoustic Nebraska five years earlier. He recorded most of the parts himself at home, with the help of drum machines and synthesizers.

Never a wildly eclectic musician such as Paul Simon, Billy Joel or Elvis Costello, Springsteen might have felt a greater necessity at this point in his career in trying out new tones, instruments and moods. Indeed, the “Johanna’s Visions” blogger notes, "You’ll be baffled by the number of country artists who took a crack at ‘Tougher than the Rest.’”  (From what I can put together, these include the following: Emmylou Harris, Travis Tritt, and Chris LeDoux—though I’m surprised it wasn’t done by Johnny Cash, who took a crack at "Johnny 99" from Nebraska.) The movement toward a non-E Street sound that began with Tunnel of Love gathered momentum in 1988, on the Amnesty International tour, as Springsteen saw the creative freedom enjoyed by Sting in his post-Police life.

That set the stage for what Rolling Stone has numbered among “The 25 Boldest Career Moves in Rock History”: i.e., Springsteen's calls to each of his musicians in 1989, informing them that he was breaking up the band. He would not record any songs with them (save for pianist Roy Bittan) until his Greatest Hits in 1995, tour with them again until 1999, or produce a full CD of new studio material until The Rising in 2002.

Springsteen’s shifting lyrical and musical direction can be seen through the prism of three of his closest associates in the E Street Band. Charismatic saxophonist Clarence Clemons, his longtime concert foil and, more recently, best man at his wedding to Phillips, found that his instrument had become a disposable part of the new album. In fact, his only contribution was a vocal on “When You’re Alone.”  For longtime listeners, the Big Man had morphed into the Invisible Man.

Clemons did not vent his frustration—certainly publicly—at the time. One band member who did speak out was “Miami Steve” Van Zandt, Springsteen’s friend from his youth, who reinforced his artistic/social conscience. Upon hearing “Ain’t Got You,” an Elvis-style vocal with a Bo Diddley backbeat, Van Zandt made known how little use he had for it in unmistakable terms. As related in David Remnick’s profile of Springsteen in the July 30, 2012 issue of The New Yorker, the Boss’s friend got his back up over the point of view of the narrator, a multimillionaire who moaned about the loss of his lover, even though he had “the fortunes of heaven” and a “house full of Rembrandt and priceless art.” The result, in Van Zandt's words, was “one of the biggest fights of our lives”:

“I’m, like, ‘What the ---- is this?’ And he’s, like, ‘Well, what do you mean, it’s the truth. It’s just who I am, it’s my life.’ And I’m, like, ‘This is bullshit. People don’t need you talking about your life. Nobody gives a shit about your life. They need you for their lives. That’s your thing. Giving some logic and reason and sympathy and passion to this cold, fragmented, confusing world—that’s your gift. Explaining their lives to them. Their lives, not yours.’ And we fought and fought and fought and fought.” Despite the fact that each suggested that the other should perform an anatomical impossibility, “I think something in what I said probably resonated,” Van Zandt concluded.  (Or maybe not: the song not only was included in the LP, but led off Side 1.)

The one band member with an indisputably larger role than before was backup singer Patti Scialfa, for reasons both professional and personal. When she signed on for the Born in the U.S.A. tour, she had fundamentally altered the all-guy emotional dynamics of the band. Tunnel of Love represented her first appearance on a Springsteen studio album, where her vocals are featured most prominently on the title song. Before long, her involvement in his life would take a much different turn.

For all Springsteen’s protests, at the time and later, that he was speaking in the voices of characters rather than himself on Tunnel of Love, it seems obvious now that the album flashed warning signals of his emotional turmoil. Consider, for instance, these lyrics from “One Step Up”:

There's a girl across the bar

I get the message she's sendin'

Mmm she ain't lookin' to married

And me well honey I'm pretending.

In the subsequent tour to promote the album, the onstage chemistry between Springsteen and Scialfa became impossible to ignore. Many fans were not surprised by the paparazzi photos that caught the two in an intimate moment on the balcony of an Italian hotel.

“God have mercy on the man/Who doubts what he’s sure of,” Springsteen sings on “Brilliant Disguise.” Tunnel of Love is an attempt to confront his uncertainties as musician and husband. I would not rate it at the top of his discography, but its honesty—and frequent raw emotional power—makes it hard to eradicate from the mind.

This Day in Rock History (Springsteen Releases Two-Fer)

March 31, 1992—Five years after his last studio album, Bruce Springsteen made up for lost time by simultaneously rolling out two CDs that told the painful, guilt-ridden unraveling of his first marriage and his joy in a second: Human Touch and Lucky Town.

I know what some of my more faithful readers are thinking right now at the sight of this piece: “Mike, you had a post about The Boss just the other day. We’ve lost track of how often you’ve written about him already. Don’t you think this is getting to be a little too much?”

Were I of a mind, I could cast out such unbelievers or lapsed members from Brother Bruce’s Travelin’ Rock ‘n’ Roll Revival Show. Instead, I’ll simply state, as explicitly as possible, one of the governing principles of this blog: There’s no such thing as too much Bruce Juice.

Since Tunnel of Love (1987), Springsteen had thrown his fans into confusion, not least because he was confused. Tunnel had practically crackled with its fear of commitment. It laid bare, for all to see, the ineradicable unease of a man in a situation he had never known before. It wasn’t a complete surprise, then, when the world learned of the breakup of his three-year marriage to actress/model Julianne Phillips and of his affair with backup singer Patti Scialfa.

The resulting divorce drove Springsteen into intense psychotherapy. The same period of introspection and crisis also led the rock ‘n’ roller to reevaluate his career. In the 1988 Amnesty International tour, he was struck by how Sting was able to stretch his creative boundaries outside the confines of The Police. That realization, he noted later, was partially responsible for his November 1989 decision to shut down indefinitely his backup group, the E Street Band.

In Night Beat: A Shadow History of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Mikal Gilmore noted that in the early Nineties, Springsteen “retreated further from his role as an icon and spokesperson, and attempted to redefine the scope of his songwriting.” The weight of being “icon and spokesperson” is heavy, and an obvious inspiration for Springsteen, Bob Dylan, also got under from under the role, in a far more dramatic fashion than Springsteen. In any case, Springsteen felt in no condition to comment on national affairs when he felt so hollow inside.

Human Touch and Lucky Town were released when Springsteen was beginning to solidify his life again, after remarriage to Scialfa and the birth of the first two of their three children. Yet they also came amid what Springsteen himself calls his “lost years.” The relatively substandard sales of the disks might have been one reason why the singer as well as many of his fans perceived the 1990s as such.

But just as important was the absence of the E Street Band. Fans weren’t protesting—this was Springsteen we’re talking about—but neither were they particularly pleased with the new studio musicians. 

One Saturday morning later that year, as I stood on line for tickets for a Springsteen concert at the Brendan Byrne Arena, I heard another fan snicker, about the new guitarist: “I mean, come on: Shane Fontayne?”

It’s not that the new musicians were terrible, but they weren’t the “Blood Brothers.” In fact, if you want to see how they’re referred to these days on Google, it’ll be as the “Other Band,” with no collective identity. Fans felt the void, and within a few years, so did Springsteen.

I’m not going to say that everything Springsteen did in the Nineties was a success (e.g., he wimped out, with only a single acoustic song—the first—on what was supposed to be an “MTV  Unplugged” appearance, and it’s hard to differentiate the songs of The Ghost of Tom Joad). But there was also much to admire in those years in general and on Human Touch and Lucky Town in particular:

·        *  Willingness to experiment. Sooner or later, musicians are going to want to incorporate as many of the sounds in their heads as they can. Coming of musical age in the Sixties, Springsteen was exposed not just to rock ‘n’ roll but soul. On Human Touch, he injected some elements of the latter into his work, notably on “Roll of the Dice” (featuring Sam Moore) and “Man’s Job” (the terrific Bobby King).

·         * Forget local hero—how about guitar hero? The tighter structures urged by producer Jon Landau in the albums beginning with Darkness on the Edge of Town limited, to some extent, Springsteen’s guitar work, so that the only way to really appreciate what he can do on his instrument is in concert. (For an example of what I’m talking about, see this YouTube clip from his 1978 appearance at Passaic’s Capitol Theatre, of the extended version of “Prove It All Night,” when, spurred by Roy Bittan’s evocative piano, he plays like a man possessed.) Several songs on the 1992 albums feature some of the most textured guitar playing he ever did in the studio, including “Gloria’s Eyes,” “Soul Driver,” and “Man’s Job.”

·         * Fine songs. Some albums are so abysmal that they’ll not only make fans wonder, “What was he thinking?” but actually lose fans (e.g., John Mellencamp’s Big Daddy). But Springsteen’s compositional gifts didn’t suddenly desert him, and both albums contain songs that not only would not suffer in comparison with the rest of his discography, but also deserve to be covered by other artists, if they haven’t been already, including “I Wish I Were Blind,” “If I Should Fall Behind,” “Living Proof,” and “Big Muddy.” He might have been better off compressing the best of the two CDs into one, but there was still much to treasure in these works.

·         * A chastened attitude. In the last decade, with greater sales and critical acclaim, Springsteen has chuckled about the reception of his two albums released in March 1992, noting that he had tried releasing happy songs and they hadn’t worked out well. But the happiness feels earned because of what he had to go through, including the public purging on these albums. Entertainers’ sense of their own fallibility cannot help but make their work more honest and better able to relate to the lives of others. The collapse of Springsteen’s marriage informs some of the most painfully truthful moments on the two CDs. On “Roll of the Dice,” he practically shouts his confession: “I’m a thief in the house of love/And I can’t be trusted.” 

t At times, the songwriter’s personal situation leads him to a realization of the larger state of human imperfection. “How beautiful the river flows and the birds they sing/But you and I we're messier things,” he observes in “The Big Muddy.”

nAll of this underscores a point made by Fr. Andrew Greeley in an article for the national Catholic weekly America back in 1988 about this lapsed believer's adult form of the faith: “Springsteen sings of religious realities—sin, temptation, forgiveness, life, death, hope—in images that come (implicitly perhaps) from his Catholic childhood.”

SSpringsteen’s realization that he was no different from the mass of men only enhanced his ability to penetrate the hearts of other people. His Oscar-winning theme song for the Tom Hanks film Philadelphia, written in the first-person voice of a gay AIDS victim, would seem to be considerably beyond Springsteen’s experience—except that, in his moments of greatest uncertainty, far removed from the concert stage, he surely felt, as the song’s protagonist does, “unrecognizable to myself.”

 An interesting take on Human Touch and Lucky Town is offered by Matt Wardlaw, guest writing for the blog “Viva la Mainstream.”