The Long and Winding Road

The show would be well into its fourth hour, the musicians visibly wilting under the hot lights and the damp weight of their own sweat as they summoned up the energy for that last blast of "Born to Run." But Bruce Springsteen would never say, "Enough," until the last member of the audience keeled over in joyous exhaustion. After each encore, every night for nearly a year and a half during his 1984-85 world tour, Springsteen called his E Street Band into a brief huddle backstage.

"We had a saying," explains saxman Clarence Clemons. "'Are they still on their feet? Yeah, let's go back and get 'em. Can they still raise their hands? If they can, we haven't done our job.' When we finally saw the guys in the front row falling down, lying over each other, then we said, 'Okay, they've had enough. Let's go home."'

Having started the Born in the U.S.A. tour in St. Paul, Minnesota, on June 29th, 1984. Springsteen and the E Street Band didn't go home until October 2nd, 1985—after their last four shows drew more than 330,000 people to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Their labors, of course, did not go unrewarded. Born in the U.S.A. sold more than 10 million copies in the United States alone, becoming the biggest-selling album in the history of Columbia Records. The tour grossed $80 to $90 million from ticket sales ($34 million of that came from Springsteen's stadium shows in only fourteen cities). Bruce was the people's choice in Rolling Stone's 1985 Readers Poll, sweeping the Artist, Male Vocalist, Songwriter and Best Live Performance of the Year categories. And in the Critics Poll, he shared Artist of the Year honors with miracle worker Bob Geldof, while the E Street Band — Clemons, drummer Max Weinberg, keyboardists Roy Bittan and Danny Federici, bassist Garry Tallent, guitarist Nils Lofgren and vocalist Patti Scialfa — tied for Band of the Year with Irish pals U2. In short, Bruce Springsteen was indisputably the Boss in 1985.

The sales figures and tour grosses tell, however, only the accountants' side of the story. Whether it was the June '84 warm-up date at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey, or the outdoor concert in Göteborg, Sweden, where Springsteen performed under the burnt-orange rays of the midnight sun, his shows were do-it-till-you-drop spectaculars, parties already way out of bounds by the time he trotted out the old bar-band standbys ("Twist and Shout," "Devil with a Blue Dress On"). One night in Japan, Springsteen brought a young girl up onstage, as he did everywhere, to do the twist with him on "Dancing in the Dark." "She was good, too," Clemons recalls, "but as soon as she got offstage, she collapsed. She fell right over."

The fun of falling over never obscured Springsteen's unmistakable message — you've got to stand tall in spite of it all — in songs like "Born in the U.S.A.," the bouncy "Working on the Highway" and his electrified Nebraska meditation "Mansion on the Hill." Springsteen took it upon himself to set the example, giving his usual 110 percent during an '84 show in Tacoma, Washington, even though he was suffering from a debilitating virus. In the face of Rambo-mania and the misrepresentation of his Born in the U.S.A. message by nearsighted conservatives, he plugged Vietnam-veterans organizations, local food banks and community-action groups while quietly pledging his own money to many of these causes. And in a year when Live Aid proved what a world community of rock fans could accomplish, Springsteen demonstrated night after night what just one die-hard rock fan could do.

"I don't really think I could live with myself if I did it any other way," Springsteen told Rolling Stone early in the tour, describing his faith in the power of music and how that faith manifests itself in his performances. "A lot of what I do up there I do for myself, because you go out there and your pride is on the line, your sense of self-respect, and you feel like 'Hey, there's something important happening here.' You have a chance to do something. And you wanna make the best of it."

"It takes a lot of courage to believe as strongly as he does," remarks Patti Scialfa, whom Springsteen hired after hearing her sing at a Stone Pony jam session one Sunday night in 1983. "It made every show special to me because you carried that belief with you. It was great to be going around making music that had such a strong center of faith. It made every show seem to have so much more depth. It wasn't just a musical expression; you were working your heart muscles, too."