Of course, a picture of us all together would have been nice.
But I never think of these things.
nine
I Don’t Want to Go Home
(1975)
Art can provide insight, inspiration, motivation, even information, but at the very least it communicates you are not alone.
—THE UNWRITTEN BOOK
The ’70s were the worst time in history to record.
Virtually every record sounded great in the ’50s and ’60s, and they would sound great again in the ’80s and beyond. But in the ’70s most recorded music sounded weird. Artificial. Claustrophobic.
The reason? Engineers had temporarily taken over. There’s a reason most Engineers don’t become great Producers and most Producers aren’t great Engineers. They require two very different, complementary sensibilities.
Engineers have relationships with electrons and digits and knobs and meters, the science of sound, which is one-quarter of the record.
Producers deal with the songs, the arrangements, the performances, the living, breathing people. They rely on their own taste to shape emotional content. That’s the other three-quarters of the record.
For a brief time in the ’70s, the Engineers wrested control from the Producers and the Artists, resulting in total separation of instruments for the purpose of “complete control.”
Lots of padding on the walls! Get those buzzes out of the drums! More rugs! Separation! Separation! Separation!
Everything that makes Real Music want to throw up.
Then, during the mix, the Engineers would reproduce room sound, resonance, buzzes, and hums to make the records more exciting! Really.
That was the state of the art when I found myself lying on the floor as horns were being overdubbed for Bruce’s new song, “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.”
It was only the fourth time I’d been in a recording studio.
The first time was when my teenage band the Source recorded my first song, “Traveling.”
The second time was up at 914 Sound Studios, when I got kicked out of what was going to be the band.
The third time was also at 914, when Bruce played me “Born to Run.”
So I was on the floor thinking, This is the big time? This is the music business we’ve worked our butts off to get in? This boring sound made worse by this terrible horn chart?
I remember Mike Appel looking like he regretted taking out that second mortgage to pay for this catastrophe.
Bruce did the last thing in the world the gang wanted him to do, which was to ask my opinion. “What do you think?”
“Fucking sucks,” I said. There was no muffler between my brain and my mouth in those days. All I knew was my friend was trying to make a record and these guys were fucking it up.
Silence. A nervous chuckle or two. But Bruce knew it sucked, or he wouldn’t have asked me. “So go fucking fix it then,” he said, pretending to be mad so everybody knew who was boss.
So I did, pretending to be the loyal soldier doing his duty to make sure everybody knew he was boss.
This was in the earliest days of the nickname. I myself was a local boss, very respected, and at various points, more popular than he was. When the nickname started, it was just Bruce having fun, imitating Frank Sinatra. Nobody took it seriously until a respected boss like me joined up, which no one could believe, and started referring to him as my boss. That’s when he became the Boss.
By then, I had been arranging the horns for the Jukes for a while. “Tenth Avenue” was a Stax-type song, but they were playing trumpet, tenor sax, and baritone sax, so I separated out the baritone, more of a Motown move (Stax typically didn’t use a bari) and gave the trumpet and tenor some simple Memphis Horns–type riffs.
To explain what I wanted, I sang them the parts like I did every day in Jersey. I didn’t know the guys were the biggest horn players in New York, the Brecker Brothers and Dave Sanborn. I don’t think it would have mattered if I did. I believe they would have taken riff ideas from the maintenance guy just to get the session over with.
According to one of Dave Marsh’s books, that was the moment Jon told Bruce that maybe I should join the band. Who knows? We’re all making up half of this shit anyway.
On return visits, I managed to catch two of the coolest moments of the entire album. The amazing trumpet and stand-up bass on “Meeting Across the River,” with Randy Brecker, again, and Richard Davis, who had played bass on Astral Weeks! Whoa. And the full sixteen-piece string section on “Jungleland,” of which only about five seconds was used.
The Engineer for those sessions was a skinny, very Sicilian or Napolitano looking, very New York dude named Jimmy Iovine.
Jimmy… what can I say? He was a character like most of us, only a little more so. To call his life charmed was… well, let’s just say that compared to him, Snow White couldn’t pick a horse!
Remember Welcome Back, Kotter? Picture Arnold Horshack. That was Jimmy. One day, he was an assistant Engineer watching his boss Roy Cicala record John Lennon’s Rock ’n’ Roll, which Phil Spector was producing. Either Lennon or Spector got into an argument with Cicala, who walked. Lennon pointed to Jimmy: “You! Kid! Get in the chair.” Jimmy faked his way through it, and suddenly he was the guy that recorded John Lennon. The King of the Parlay had begun his climb.
Jimmy wore Capezio ballet shoes, which no heterosexual from New Jersey had ever seen before, and he became Jimmy Shoes. The shoes were more than a nickname. They symbolized his whole being. He acted like a millionaire when he had absolutely nothing, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. He managed to drive a Mercedes and live on Central Park South on an assistant Engineer’s income. I shit you not.
No furniture. I remember him, me, and Bruce going shopping for pillows to sit on. We were at the Navarro Hotel right down the block.
And he was sleeping with models, actresses, singers, DJs, while being broke like the rest of us.
I loved this guy. We bonded immediately.
He acquired an additional nickname soon enough, as people began to notice his extraordinary ability to change his personality, chameleon-like, to suit different situations. For a while he became Split-Screen Iovine. But that wasn’t used as much as Shoes.
This was also the period where I tried to get Bruce to change the name of the band.
He had started calling it the E Street Band, which I didn’t get. Not only did it have no real resonance or meaning, but it was named after the street where Davie Sancious’s parents lived—a guy who was no longer in the band!
We had a softball team at the time. No idea how or why. We were pretty good. We’d regularly play and beat other bands like Crosby, Stills, and Nash, who had the disadvantage of not only running around the field but smoking it.
Our team was called the E Street Kings, which combined the name of the band with a line in “Backstreets.” I tried to talk Bruce into changing the band name to follow the lyrics.
How much cooler would that have been?
Bruce Springsteen and the Duke Street Kings!
Fuhggedaboudit!
The E Street Band had like seven gigs lined up for when Born to Run came out. Bruce had decided to try fronting, singing without playing, so he asked me to play guitar for those shows. It didn’t exactly make Southside or Popovich happy, but I told them I needed a break. I wasn’t exactly sure what Ms. Destiny had in mind, so I was keeping my options open.
I had mixed feelings about where Bruce was going musically.
My issues started with the piano.
I was never a big keyboard fan, which was why I never got into the entire Progressive Rock genre, except for Procol Harum and the Left Banke, the two that invented it. Piano for me was Nicky Hopkins in the Rock world, Lowell “Banana” Levinger’s electric Wurlitzer in the Country/Folk/Rock world of the Youngbloods, or Otis Spann and Lafayette Leake in Blues. A color instrument to complement the guitars. And sometimes not there at all.
Roy Bittan, the E Street pianis
t, was obviously overqualified for Rock and Roll. And still is! He had that Broadway-meets-popular-standards accompanist style of providing all the music, all the time. We had to literally tie one hand behind his back so he would fit into the less grandiose albums that came after Born to Run. He was simply too good.
What I didn’t realize until later was that Bruce was not intending for us to be a traditional Rock band, making traditional Rock music. He didn’t want the instruments playing the traditional roles all the time. He was imagining something else, something bigger. A marriage of Broadway storytelling, Gospel inspiration, and Rock dynamics. So Roy’s style was essential.
We all had to adjust. Having both piano and organ indicated a Gospel influence, and like the other two most notable bands that used both piano and organ, the Band and Procol Harum, we were a hybrid from day one.
The church is where theater probably began in the first place. You’ve got to believe Scorsese’s first infatuation with drama had to happen in the Catholic Church. The black Baptist Church is all theater.
I’m sure Bruce was absorbing some of the theatricality that had emerged in the Rock world. It had begun with Mick Jagger, who was transformed by his acting role in the film Performance, continued with David Bowie, became Glam and Disco, peaked with KISS, Alice Cooper, and George Clinton’s Funkadelic, and ended up with Meat Loaf—an actor who modeled his style on a completely fictionalized idea of Bruce, to the point where he used Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg on his breakthrough album.
I didn’t get it. Any of it. I was a street kid stuck in tradition, in Rock that was autobiographical and more straightforwardly authentic. It would take me a few years to understand how Art can illuminate life by illusion, abstract expressionism, distortion, surrealism, and exaggeration.
While I had been working a jackhammer on 287, my friend had never stopped searching and would keep reinventing himself until he found the mother lode. It was only an album away.
The Born to Run gigs included five days at the Bottom Line, on West Fourth between Mercer and Greene. It’s gone now, like so many other of Rock’s sacred sites. It’s a damn shame. Rock history should be preserved just like the George Washington Slept Here joints.
That’s why I tried to save CBGBs, the historic club where Punk was born, when they came to me at the eleventh hour, even though I knew it was a lost cause. Wouldn’t it have been amazing if a hundred years from now some teenage band could play on the stage where the Ramones and Richard Hell invented Punk?
Around that time, I went to the Bottom Line with Bruce to see the Dictators, who had just released their first album, Go Girl Crazy. We loved the hilarious brilliance of writer/singer Andy Shernoff (spelled Adny in those days) and the sheer lunacy of the group’s MC, Handsome Dick Manitoba, who wore an old wrestling costume and did inexplicable, completely inappropriate intro raps. Humor hadn’t existed in Rock since the Mothers’ Freak Out! ten years earlier. What closed the deal for us was the backing vocalists on their cover of “California Sun.”
And I’d Mouse,
(And I’d Mouse),
And I’d Robot,
(And I’d Robot),
And I’d Twist,
(And I’d Twist)
And I’d Shistanoobah)
(And I’d… what?)
Bruce had brought back Marlon Brando’s leather-jacket look from the Wild One, which he’d wear on the cover of Born to Run and which the Ramones would soon adopt as a permanent tribute to teenage angst.
As we walked in to the Bottom Line, somebody yelled, “Hey, punk!”
I stopped and turned to Bruce. “I know you’re in the business now, so you gotta act civilized, but you want me to go deal with this guy?”
He laughed. “No, it’s a new thing. They mean it as a compliment.”
He seemed OK with it, so I pretended I understood.
Our Bottom Line gigs were in August 1975, a week of doubleheaders that faced the stiffest of all possible headwinds at that time: the deadly accusation of hype.
Before joining Bruce’s camp, Jon Landau had been the king of Rock journalists. After a 1974 show in Boston, he had written in the Real Paper that “he had seen rock and roll future and its name was Bruce Springsteen.”
The world saw that lavish praise and showed up to put us down. In those days, authenticity still mattered. Hype was the enemy. But in this case, the hype was based on a misunderstanding.
Jon didn’t say “rock and roll’s future.” He said “rock and roll future.”
He did not mean that Bruce was, as the Dictators put it, the next big thing! He meant that Bruce was evolving Rock by using all the Artforms that came before him. The literature of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain. The films of John Ford, Elia Kazan, and Jacques Tourneur. The poetry of Rimbaud, Whitman, and Ginsberg. The explosive palette of Van Gogh and the formal invention of Picasso. Not to mention the audacity of Little Richard and Elvis Presley, the craft of the Beatles, the sex of the Stones, the social observation of the Kinks, the vision of Pete Townshend and the power of the Who, the blue-collar frustration of the Animals, the confessional lyrical genius of Bob Dylan, the spiritual elevation of Van Morrison, the musical ambition of the Byrds, the dark cinema of the Doors, and the historical breadth of the Band.
That’s what Jon Landau meant, if you’re asking me.
The pioneers of the ’50s invented Rock. The Renaissance acts of the ’60s elevated it to an Artform. Bruce was determined to create work that would not only distract, entertain, and transport but also educate, stimulate, and inspire. He wanted to provide irrefutable proof that life had meaning.
If an audience didn’t leave a show feeling substantially better than when they arrived, we had failed. The E Street Band was delivering something that hadn’t been delivered in its purest form since the Beatles.
Hope. Not hype.
Landau got there in that same article: “On a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time.”
Three hundred people? Four hundred? I don’t know how many jammed into the Bottom Line twice a night for five straight days, or how many of them had come to scoff.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the hype. We lived up to it. We blew the audience’s mind.
We had a big advantage. We’d been making our bones playing live for ten years by then, and we had done our residency as a dance band at a time when people had mostly stopped dancing. It took extra energy to get the crowd moving, and we carried that energy into the Bottom Line, and every show since.
One other thing happened at the Bottom Line. A big thing.
“Stevie, meet Maureen.” It was Twig, aka Mark Greenberg, one of those friends who appeared out of nowhere and seemed like he had always been there. He was on our softball team. And since I don’t know where Twig came from or why we even had a softball team, my memory tends to write the whole thing off as a Twilight Zone episode or a dream.
Except that I met Maureen.
Wow! Was she fine! Sexy. A New Jersey Brigitte Bardot. Always the prettiest girl in the room. Still is. Smart, too, as it turned out. I always found smart sexy and later found out there’s a word for that, “sapiosexual.” And boy, was I a sap for her. All the way.
She had been a ballet dancer and a clothing designer, had gone to an Arts school in Newark and then the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of ’60s music and literature and had studied acting with Herbert Berghof, Stella Adler, and Bill Hickey.
I’d never met anybody quite like her. Before or since.
I started pursuing her immediately. But she managed to fight me off for quite a while. Did I mention she was smart?
After we conquered New York, it looked like Bruce’s career wasn’t over after all. I figured I might as well stick around to see how the story ended.
The seven gigs I joined for turned into seventeen cities and nineteen shows between New York and October: places like Atlan
ta, Austin, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Omaha. In Milwaukee, just before we went onstage, the theater had a bomb threat. The place was emptied and every seat checked. It took hours. The rumor was that some white supremacist group thought Bruce was Jewish.
In those early days, the record company threw after-parties in nearly every city. And in Europe, every country. Now if you see the record company once per tour, you’re lucky. During the delay, they decided to have the party before the show.
We got plastered. I have never seen Bruce so drunk in public. On our way back to the theater, he decided to climb onto the roof of the car while we were going seventy miles an hour on the highway. I had to use all my strength to hold on to him to stop him.
Onstage, we reverted back to our drunken bar-band days, which were not that far behind us at that point, opening with Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie.”
It was one of the best shows ever.
Next stop, Hollywood.
We were ready for our close-up.
ten
LA A-Go-Go
(1975–1976)
True bliss is a perfect drum fill.
—THE UNWRITTEN BOOK
The Roxy was the Bottom Line of LA, the showcase club for serious new contenders.
Rumors had Phil Spector and half of Hollywood in the crowd.
We opened with either “When You Walk in the Room” or “Needles and Pins”?
I know how hard this is to believe, but by 1975 just acknowledging the ’60s existed was a revolutionary act. That’s how fast music was progressing.
I glanced up midway through the first song and saw Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Jackie DeShannon, David Geffen, and Cher. I didn’t look up again.
We were something new for the jaded world of entertainment. We were characters, but the real thing. Journalists were having a hard time believing we weren’t some company invention. We had an unusual amount of personality and played real good. A New Jersey bar band. Quite exotic.
Unrequited Infatuations Page 10
