Peter Ames Carlin

equipment manager during the sessions told me that Bruce was acting like at times would be like such a psychotic and just torment you.

forcing everyone to go over this again and again and it would go on and on and he was changing his mind and appell steven said finally you know by the end of the session you were the psychotic because he had driven you insane and bruce when i asked him about that he just sort of shrugged and said yeah that was kind of the gig back then you know he was aware of what he was putting people through but he needed to know that the people who are going to be with him

If you're just joining us, my guest is Peter Ames Carlin.

Well, there are two listening sessions actually.

I think someone came down with a reel-to-reel of the finished mix of the album, which they listened to the whole band and Bruce and Micah Pell and the crew guys.

listening to it.

And Bruce is suddenly hearing everything that's wrong with it.

All he can sense is the distance between what he's hearing and what he imagined should be on the vinyl.

And he just starts lashing out at everyone like, oh, geez, there's the saxophone.

That's a cliche.

And he's criticizing himself and everyone's performance.

And the next day, Jimmy Iovine comes down from New York with an acetate of the mastered version of the album, which is what actually is going to get cut into the vinyl.

They play it and Bruce just freaks out and he grabs the acetate and he storms back to the hotel and hurls it into the deep end of the swimming pool and essentially says, we're not putting this out.

We're going to rerecord all these songs when we play the bottom line in a couple of weeks, which was like record it live.

Yeah, just rerecord the whole album live in front of an audience because that's where we're at our best anyway.

But of course, Columbia wanted to have it out at the end of the summer.

And all this promotional machinery was beginning to crank up.

And so Bruce's impulse was, I can't stand this.

You know, as he told me, it made him feel itchy on the inside and the outside.

And so he just was doing everything that he could to delay that moment of truth.