The Afterglow - Working with Bruce Springsteen

I always fantasized about meeting a huge rock star. Along the way it unfolds that he wants to work with me at what I love to do – in my case, painting. Usually by this point, the daydream ends or the alarm clock rings…. The truth is this really happened, and the huge star was real; I never imagined I would work with Bruce Springsteen.

In reality, I saw that working with a star was never exactly what you thought or pictured it to be. Fortunately, in many ways, it was better. I may have passed up an opportunity of a lifetime, I will touch on later, that I could have easily resolved today, but this was pre-internet. All said, life has a way of playing out, regardless if better choices were not executed at the time.

Bruce Springsteen’s album cover, the one I was originally asked to create, held dark tones of the mean streets Bruce sings about. Fortunately I made that design happen for the cover; then something unexpected occurred which mucked it all up. But here’s the squeeze: I always dreamed big, real big, perhaps too big. And although I missed the moon, barely grazed a star, I think I hit a satellite. Yes, definitely a satellite. And I would have never hit that damn thing if I did not dream big in the first place. The dreams of hitting the moon began when I was young and naive enough to dream of becoming a well-known painter and gracing the walls of the Metropolitan and MoMa.

To speed things up a bit here, this all started with designing a book jacket illustration for an art director at Disney’s Hyperion books. Many projects just led into the next this way. Soon Victor Weaver, the art director I worked with, recommended me to work with his other client on a book interior with Simon and Schuster. It was a rock and roll book with the founding member from Spin magazine, Scott Cohen. His collection of interviews contained midnight confessions he did with everyone from Talking Heads’ David Byrne, to Madonna, to even Bobby Dylan. I fit illuminating images into the interior with photos of so many musicians, from James Brown sweat droplets to a coy Marianne Faithfull in several Rolling Stones spreads. We sprinkled the photos with insights about their lives in the evening of the day as tears go by in this book Yakety Yak.

After working with me on this huge rock and roll project, the client was surprised to learn I was a painter as well. She asked to see more of my artwork and mentioned something I never forgot; she felt I painted in the same style that Bruce Springsteen wrote songs. She worked with Bruce for a long time and with Victor as well, and she felt that we would be a good fit if I could work together on some projects with Bruce. We started on a few concepts at first. I think it may have originally started with his CD cover art, and while doing so we began to work on his world tour book at the same time. Soon a dozen other art related projects followed.

Bruce sent me his music, wanted me to hear his new songs and show some ideas after listening. Spent days and nights playing the songs over and over until I could practically sing each verse myself. Sketching into the night, I truly got into it and came up with inspiring concepts and sketches, honing in on a blues feeling, into a dim hollow future about life – life long gone by not only in the lyrics but also in the haunting tone, an emptying out of the inside into real disaster for common folk across our land. The ideas became a sketch and the sketch became a painting reflecting Springsteen’s lyrics, people trying to hang on to strands of hope while longing for something else - an American Dream not really meant for them, or every American. I felt I was listening to a similar but starker version of his Nebraska CD, but more raw, dark and right up my aesthetic alley. The art was well received. More work was commissioned, and this painting was slated for the tour book cover to sell at Springsteen’s venues around the world. It went in the interior and used for back cover.

I worked on sketches around the clock too many nights in a row, attempting to emulate both the vibe off his songs and something Bruce shared with me - a very large-scale piece of art he liked that depicted his aesthetic vision. The art piece was huge, with many figures dyed into what seemed to be the material of burlap, depicting minimalistic figures in the time of the Work Projects Administration, WPA, very 1930’s.

All these songs together became his album “The Ghost of Tom Jode,” modeled after John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. It was a stripped down stark look at America, old and now. Perhaps his intentions were to convey the reality of the new world order, stuck, out of gas on a lonely highway landscape, immigrants and personal stories of struggle in hard times USA.

I weaved many figures into a work, ranging from depression families, evangelists at baptisms to prisoners and bread lines. It all came together somehow with rich imagery of men within an old folklore look, striking the right cord between his cold rich stories and musical vibe for the tour book art. The theme matched the blue-collar industrial steal workers and farmers turned drifters from that dust bowl era.

The painting I gave them stayed minimal, very colorless. It had an airbrush technique almost like a stencil to capture the light. I loved the outcome, however nervous I felt in showing him it. I definitely hit the satellite; they seemed blown away. The artwork said a lot about the songs without detailing too much of the literal. I was asked to change one small detail of a figure, the dead body, stiff and desolate nestled on railroad ties to nowhere…into something else. I reluctantly agreed and went with the idea of more hope, depicting two figures huddled under a blanket walking up the back tracks.

While waiting for Bruce to decide on the art, I dove into the three CD cover designs for the new album; I think they commissioned around sixty cover designs for them to choose from. I went with a depiction of a guy blown away, left for dead, now on a gurney in the coroner’s office, which was derived off an actual mob hit in Florida.

Already feeling a bit cheapened by agreeing to alter the figure of the body on the tracks in the tour book painting; I went darker within the undertone. A corpse was my choice for the album cover. Bruce liked that version the best out of the three I submitted. Actually out of the full sixty versions in all that they commissioned. This was it, I did it, and Bruce loved the art. But then as luck would have it...

At the time they loved it, I mean really loved it. Bruce’s art director actually came over to the studio, beaming with a big smile, to give me the good news personally. I guess I was too jaded to appreciate that my artwork was going to grace the next album cover of one of the biggest recording stars in our history.

Here is just how it happened, how I missed my opportunity. Don’t try this at home kids.

However satisfying you get from the feeling of approval, it felt vaguely unreal when she arrived. I watched while staring at how excited she was about this honor for me.

I was pleased don’t get me wrong, well, without a huge deep-feeling sensation of the magnitude of what this would have meant. Not sure why, perhaps sleep deprivation numbed me.

But this was exactly why I played it wrong. The one small catch - the reality bites clause - was this: I could only get my art on Bruce’s next album cover if I could secure the rights to the reference photo I had utilized in the design stage. If so, it was a go! However, without the rights secured, the cover design was dead as the figure on it.

Why this was my attitude at the time, and why was this such a big deal? Not getting the full picture really, it should have been simple; that was what was in my mind. All it meant was a visit to a small newspaper way down south. At the time, the idea of flying down to Florida to look up the AP photographer seemed a waste of time, especially something a simple phone call could easily settle. I made a few calls, yet also I felt impervious…after all they loved this cover, the art looked different enough than the photo but the fact was, they told me, when people sued Bruce Springsteen, it was not for under six million but rather for the staggering sum of sixty million dollars. So I had better research the rights. Now whether stubbornness, ignorance or both, I gave up my art for his cover because I had more trouble than I realized finding out even the name of the newspaper that ran the story of the mob-hit.

Years earlier I had ripped the photo portion out of the newspaper and pasted it into a journal I kept, which just said Florida AP on the corner in 6pt. type. Sadly, it got to the point where I said hey, I cannot find this newspaper photographer, and that was that, they went with door number two of another artist’s work. Some Sam Spade I turned out to be.

The upshot was by this point they wanted to see more and more artwork and my ideas. I kept busy creating icons and branding for Bruce’s tour that were used in his apparel, back-stage passes, etc. I worked on a steal gear motif to match the industrial era, which ended up branding the tour. The design depicted the spacing of letterforms of the font inside cogged wheels, so one set of gear teeth married inside another, his first name I separated from his last on the outside of each gear. It was also stitched into blue jean workman shirts and silk-screened onto T-shirts. Gears were then used as backgrounds in the tour book pages behind photos of Bruce as well.

Then they asked if I would work on some stage sets for the venue. This style of work went on for a while. But then a decision was made to scale back everything to a minimalistic presence of Bruce sitting on a chair, guitar in hand by himself on stage.

Next, he wanted his stories and songs illustrated for a coffee table book. I created some sketches of new ideas, and then he switched gears. It turned into a book of photography, with Bruce taking many of the photographs himself on the road.

All of the work up to this point was a lot of fun yet over time began to wear on me. Everything he wanted needed to be done yesterday, very quickly. All nighters were the norm. This said, all the work was some of the strongest and most satisfying I experienced up to this point and definitely worth all the effort.

Years earlier, when I was still a kid in my twenties; I became friends with this guy on the Jersey shore from just seeing each other on the beach when we surfed. He grew up in the next town over in Asbury. He once told me that he met this couple from far off in Eastern Europe somewhere, and they traveled all the way down to Asbury Park just to see where Bruce grew up. He could not believe it, because at that time Asbury Park was such a dive of a town. He knew Springsteen well and spoke of how Bruce would act when they hung out together. He had a deep respect for him being just a regular guy with his friends.

My first year of college was also spent down in this same area in Long Branch, New Jersey. Monmouth College was a shore school with toga parties in frat houses. Ironically, at the end of 1979, I was 18 years old and living just a few miles from Asbury Park. I went to local shore clubs to see bands such as Southside Johnny and John Mayall’s Bluebreakers. John was a killer harp player. The main club known as the Stone Pony in Asbury was notorious. Bruce happened to pop in and play there all the time in the late 70’s, early 80’s. Although I never went to see him, college kids and friends would always alert me and say, “Hey, Paul, come on, Bruce will be playing tonight. Let’s go check him out,” whenever they heard. But I could care less, perhaps due to the fact that he was all over top 40 radio constantly, just really off my radar of what I was soaking in. I suppose with Elvis Costello, the Dead and Talking Heads occupying my ears, I just never paid Bruce much mind. I must say I was sadly mistaken about him then. In retrospect he was more a powerful force who, I found out later, happened to be discovered by John Hammond, the same producer who discovered Aretha Franklin and Dylan.

Years later, the work I did with Bruce together through his team turned me on to his music more organically to allow me to enjoy all it offers. I have seen Bruce play many shows since that time. No doubt I now wish that I had listened to my friends who had gone to hear Springsteen play live back then in the small pony of a venue in Asbury Park, NJ.

Politically Bruce Springsteen and I are on the same page. I like when he often goes into his usual poetic-preached-constitutional sermon half way through his later shows, which seems to cue all the yokels to go grab a beer. I actually enjoy his earnest warning signs for the youth…to think next time, hard and long, when Uncle Sam’s TV spot is asking you to go on an adventure before getting yourself killed…in reality some huge oil company’s conflict was the gist of it. Today the army is a mind twisting experience for young children out of high school easily seduced. The kids take the bait, but come back from it all - different, broken, with images they will never forget for the rest of their lives if they come back at all.

In my own youth, after college and fresh out of SVA in New York City, heading to SoHo to be a fine artist really helped me out in so many ways. The experience of my early introduction into the fine art world and time spent cutting my chops, paying dues helped out tremendously with the amount of artwork I did for Springsteen a decade later, from the paintings and logo icons to the stage sets and commissions, became a real thrill and boost to my career. Being paid to listen to his music and paint works of art inspired by it was a bit of a dream come true in the afterglow.

Springsteen used my art to promote his art, his story telling in music. That is something I will always cherish. I suppose his nickname, the Boss, rings true for me. For a spell he was sort of my boss, too.