“This is a dark ride”: The bizarre tour that destroyed Bruce Springsteen’s marriage
At this point, we all know what to expect from a Bruce Springsteen concert, much like we know what to expect from winning the lottery. It may be true, but that doesn’t make it any less miraculous. We’re getting three to three and a half (sometimes four) hours of the most exciting, moving, dazzling rock ‘n’ roll ever made in a powerhouse, ever-changing rollercoaster ride led by a man playing such shows longer than a decent chunk of the audience has been alive.
By now, The Boss’s reputation is wrapped up in his work with the “heart-stopping, pants-dropping, hard-rocking, booty-shaking, love-making, earth-quaking, Viagra-taking, justifying, death-defying, legendary” E Street Band. Sure, he’s taken the occasional break to play solo, or to lead his Seeger Sessions band, but he’s always returned to good old E Street. After all, when you’ve got a formula that works that well, you’d be hard pressed to steer away from it, right?
Springsteen and the band know this fact all too well because they did for one tour and one tour only. They cut the set length dramatically, stuck to a single set-list for the whole tour, welcomed an extended horn section into the band, introduced a storyline and, perish the thought, choreography into the show. In fact, that storyline and choreography matched what was going on in real life so well that for the first time in Springsteen’s career, he began attracting the attention of the tabloids.
He performed the entire tour with the paparazzi following his every move and headlines howling about Springsteen’s marriage being on the rocks because of his carrying on with one of his backing singers. It all sounds like soap opera storytelling, but by the end of the tour, Springsteen was divorced and in a relationship with one of his backing singers. So let’s take a deep dive into one of the most bizarre and fascinating examples of art imitating life in the history of rock ‘n’ roll—Bruce Springsteen’s 1988 concert tour, The Tunnel of Love Express Tour.
Why did Bruce Springsteen want this tour to be so different?
In 1985, Bruce Springsteen seemingly had it made. His 1984 album Born in the USA had broken him out of the rock superstardom he’d enjoyed since 1975’s Born to Run, and into the upper echelon of pop megastardom. His peers were no longer Tom Petty and Bob Dylan but Michael Jackson and Madonna. Halfway through the tour for Born in the USA in 1985, he capped a banner year off by marrying Julianne Phillips, one of the most high-profile models in the world at the time.
Once the tour finished, there was only one question on everyone’s mind. What next? Suddenly, the man had to follow up one of the biggest albums of the decade, and the pressure was on Springsteen. In recent years, The Boss has written movingly and candidly about how he worked to escape his profoundly broken mental health. That instead of a therapist, he’d call his booking agent when in the throes of depression and take to the road, running away from his problems rather than confronting them.
However, that wasn’t something he couldn’t do after finishing a tour bigger than he could have comprehended just a few years ago. He couldn’t do that because he could barely confide in anyone about what he wanted and how he felt. After all, the man had it all. He was one of the most famous people on the planet, the most important rock star alive; he was richer than God and had one of the most beautiful women in the world married to him. And, despite it all, he wanted out.
If you ask anyone with a passing connection to the then Mr and Mrs Springsteen, you get the feeling that both of them wanted this to work out. They wanted some semblance of a domestic life and tried to make it work. As any screenwriter will tell you, though, wants and needs are two different things, and despite swearing he’d take a few years off, Springsteen was constantly at work, writing and recording at every moment of the day.
God forbid Phillips ever got a look at the kind of things her hubby was writing, either, because if they were the songs that made up Born in the USA‘s follow-up, her man would have some serious questions to answer. The music he was coming up with was seething with anxiety, resentment and claustrophobia. It’s no surprise that the title of his next record would come from a song that says, unforgettably, “Then the lights go out and it’s just the three of us. You, me and all that stuff we’re so scared of“.
The 1987 record Tunnel of Love has a pretty terrible reputation. Sure, it’s not the stadium-slaying rock supernova that Born in the USA was. The production couldn’t have aged worse if it began with James Cameron saying that he turned down OJ Simpson for the role of Terminator because “no one would buy him as a killing machine”. It’s also very much one of Bruce’s true ‘solo’ albums, recorded mainly by himself with a few instrumental flourishes by E Street Band members.
Suppose you get past all that, the record’s songwriting is extraordinarily revealing. So much so that what came next probably shouldn’t have been a surprise. After floating the idea of touring the record entirely solo in large theatres and concert halls, the plan was set to bring the band back together, but play a show that was radically different from what they’d done before. Springsteen’s idea was to set this tour apart from the Born in the USA shows, which were essentially just the E Street Band’s bar band antics hypercharged for stadiums. In fairness to the lad, that’s exactly what they came up with.
The show would begin with an elaborate, theatrical band entrance where each member of E Street would take the stage separately. In keeping with Tunnel of Love‘s repeated carnival metaphors, they would each pass Springsteen’s assistant Terry Magovern. He would be playing a ticket-taker underneath a lit, neon sign forbodingly proclaiming, “This is a dark ride”.
This way of introducing the band allowed certain members to get their time in the spotlight. The newly added brass section, The Miami Horns, were allowed a moment to shine. Clarence Clemons obviously got his moment, entering with a rose clenched between his teeth. However, there was really only one person this entrance, and in a lot of ways, this whole show was built to show off. It wasn’t even the man on the marquee, but a backing singer by the name of Patti Scialfa.
How did Patti Scialfa meet Springsteen?
Scialfa had actually joined the E Street Band as a backing vocalist for the Born in the USA tour. By the Tunnel of Love Express, she had graduated from one voice among many to Bruce’s primary vocal sparring partner. This was a spot she’d carpetbagged off Clemons himself, and the chemistry between the two was obvious from the very beginning. Springsteen biographer Dave Marsh summed it up best when he said, “You could have written it off just to musical magic…if you were dumb as a doorstop”.
The problem was that Springsteen wasn’t just acting out his extramarital philandering as the subtext of his art; it was in the text as well. Tunnel of Love highlight, ‘One Step Up’, tells the story of a man tired of the constant fights he gets into with his spouse at home, who goes to a bar and fantasises about hooking up with another woman. Three guesses how this song, a fixture of the Tunnel of Love Express Tour setlist, was staged in the show. However explicit they got with it, there’s no way in hell it was as on the nose as the choreography for The River highlight, ‘You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)’.
Springsteen and Scialfa spend almost the entire song singing directly to each other, with the former trying to run over to her multiple times before the male members of the E Street crew bundle him back up to the microphone. Upon the song’s end, a fairly standard bit of ‘Boss’ showmanship would happen, where Bruce would revive himself by soaking himself with a sponge full of water. Except this time, he looked Scialfa dead in the eye, pulled the belt of his trousers forward and squeezed the sponge directly into his crotch.
One wonders how often Bruce Springsteen was reminded during the show’s creation that he was, in fact, a married man. That said, anyone with a passing knowledge of his marital relationship knew that it was dead in the water. May 13th, 1988, would have been their third wedding anniversary, and Bruce played a show in Indianapolis that night where Phillips was not in attendance. Three nights later, Springsteen began a five-night residency at Madison Square Garden, where both the audience and the tabloids alike noticed that Springsteen was without his wedding ring.
The writing was on the wall long before Springsteen and Scialfa were pictured cosying up to each other outside of working hours during the tour’s European leg. On June 17th, Phillips’ publicist broke the news that the couple had split, and by August 30th, their divorce was finalised. In his autobiography, Born To Run, Springsteen looked back at this period with a deep sense of regret, which… y’know, we love you ‘Boss’, but you should.
He said, “I dealt with Julie’s and my separation abysmally, insisting it remain a private affair, so we released no press statement, causing furore, pain and ‘scandal’ when the news leaked out. It made a tough thing more heartbreaking than necessary. I deeply cared for Julianne and her family, and my poor handling of this is something I regret to this day.”
If nothing else, the tour, like the album it was promoting, was an incredibly brave artistic step. Maybe not entirely for the right reasons, but one that, nonetheless, pushed Bruce Springsteen into bold new territory. The kind of territory we’ll never see him inhabit again. There’s a part of me that wonders what might have been if he’d leant more fully into that theatrical side of him; preferably without the philandering. However, one would have to be pretty cold-hearted to be dissatisfied with what we’ve got now.
In Bruce Springsteen, we’ve still got one of the great artists of our time operating at more or less the peak of his powers. He’s still thriving, still rocking, still raging against the evils of our time and while it’s cool to have a glimpse of something different, why change what is still the best show in town, nearly half a century after its debut?
