going through the practicalities of the proposed tour with Landau and Springsteen’s booking agent Frank Barsalona. Asked to speak to Bruce alone after the show, Healey later described the meeting. ‘I go into this long room and there’s Bruce, very tired with a terry cloth on him and he just said, “Tell me about human rights.” So I blathered on for fifty minutes, giving it my best shot. He just stared the whole time and didn’t say a word apart from two questions: one was about American Indians and the other was about refugees. At the end he said, “Well, what can I do?” I swallowed hard and said, “You have to do the whole tour.” He just said, “OK, whatever it takes. I’ll be there.” I was overcome and, being Irish, I leapt on him, hugged him and he started crying.’ In a formal statement he made on behalf of the Amnesty tour, Bruce said, ‘When you’re young and you pick up a guitar, it feels so powerful. It feels like you pulled the sword from the stone. But as you get older you realise that, although it can do a lot of things, there are also a lot of things it can’t do. I used to believe that it could save the world, but I don’t really believe that any more… As I’ve got older one of the things I’ve wanted to do with my music is somehow take that power that I got from those records when I was a kid and somehow put it to work in some nutsand-bolts way. And I’ve tried to find out who the people are out there who are working in the trenches, who are taking those ideas and ideals – same ideas and ideals that I got from those records – and putting them to use in some pragmatic way.’ A few weeks after the announcement, during a specially arranged show in East Berlin (billed as the unofficial start of the previously arranged Nicaragua solidarity festival, with all proceeds going to the Karl Marx Hospital in Managua) which was broadcast live on East German radio, Springsteen introduced Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom by saying, in German, ‘I am not here today in support of, or opposition to, any government. I’m here to play some rock ’n’ roll music for East Berliners in the hope that someday all the barriers between us will be torn down.’ The second sentence was cut, however, by the ever watchful old guard establishment figures that ran the station. The official Tunnel of Love European Tour ended at the start of August. The Amnesty International Human Rights Now! Tour began on 1 September, kicking off in London where the tabloids ran with the unsavoury story of Julianne announcing her decision to divorce her estranged husband after she and Bruce had ‘burnt up the telephone lines trying to hash out our future.’ Meanwhile, along with all the other artists on the bill – including Sting, Peter Gabriel and Sinead O’Connor – Springsteen was busy undergoing his first official Amnesty press conference, in lieu of the first official date of the tour at Wembley Stadium. ‘Rock ’n’ roll can offer a transcendent moment of freedom,’ he announced grandly. But the speech got no further as he found himself buried under an avalanche of questions about the uncertain state of his marriage; questions he steadfastly refused to answer. 30
Musically, the Amnesty shows saw Springsteen revert back to the kind of crowd-pleasing material he had fallen back on during the enormous Born in the USA Tour, though via a much more streamlined set. There were now just fifteen songs, including the E Street Band backing the entire company on the final song of the night, Chimes of Freedom. This move saw Clarence Clemons returned to centre-stage, and Patti Scialfa somewhat conveniently returned to the relative anonymity of the backline chorus. As the tour progressed, the set also included a duet with Sting on an emotionally-charged version of The River. Speaking to the official tour biographer before the show in Barcelona on 10 September, Bruce claimed his band was ‘happier than they’ve been in years, but one of the reasons I wanted to do this was because I wanted to work with other artists. I haven’t toured with any other bands since I was twenty-four. I wanted to work in a collective of some sort. I wanted to get in with a bunch of people who had an idea and subsume my identity into that idea, into that collective, and try to come out with something that’s more meaningful and bigger and better than I could do on my own.’ In October, as the tour reached Harare, in Zimbabwe, Springsteen was spotted lurking in a record shop buying cassettes of various albums by African artists. Speaking from the stage that night he introduced Edwin Starr’s War to the 15,000 white South Africans in the crowd with the words: ‘There can be no peace without justice and where there is apartheid – systematic as in your country or economic as in mine – there is no justice, there is only war.’ Flying into Abidjan on the Ivory Coast the next day, Springsteen elaborated on the theme of his onstage comments the night before. ‘Unfortunately,’ he concluded, ‘most of the audiences I draw in the US are white. In Harare I had my first chance to play to an integrated audience. Looking out and seeing black hands raised with white hands was a very emotional moment for me.’ Having flown over 35,000 miles to play to more than an estimated million people, the Amnesty tour drew to a close exactly a week later with a massive sold-out concert in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Because of unforeseen technical difficulties, what was supposed to be a seven-hour live worldwide radio broadcast ended up including only one hundred minutes of music. This was less than half the length of Springsteen’s own usual set and was disappointingly padded-out with banal interviews and high-velocity spot-ads for tour sponsors Reebok and Trojan condoms. Nevertheless, Bruce was moved enough by the tour to tell the final press conference on the eve of the last show how ‘this tour was about trying to assert myself as a world citizen. As a boy all I knew of Africa and India and South America was what I studied in geography class. And I wasn’t a very good student. The end of this tour marks my graduation of sorts. And I hope that I’ll be able to go back home and, in my music, write about a different sensibility that I felt. And I hope to get American young people out of their shell.’
