E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band

by Clinton Heylin

  He was already looking to place some distance between his own trashcan characters and those of New York’s downtown song-poets. Penning yet more new songs to spring on the attendees at Max’s, specifically “Henry Boy” and “Song To Orphans,” he was starting to think he might want another crack at the album Appel thought he’d completed. “Song To Orphans” was another long, wordy song, with a great lil’ chorus that kept the whole thing together: “So break me now big mama, as Old Faithful breaks the day/ Believe me, my good Linda, let the aurora shine the way.” The orphans—who perhaps doubled as “The Chosen”—would only appear in the final verse, having been “abandoned on silver mountains/ Or junked in celestial alleyways.” At this point, Springsteen cut a studio version of one song—possibly this very track—which “came out like nine minutes something. We had a steel player on it and we had Clarence, who played a great solo.” He told Nelson he “fought like a mother” to get this on the record, but there simply wasn’t room. “Song To Orphans” was never going to cozy up to your average AM listener. But as Springsteen informed Nelson, the transition into street band, minus choir, had begun:

  Bruce Springsteen: Immediately John [Hammond] says, “You’re a folksinger, period….” And so I said, “All right, I got signed by myself, I’ll play by myself.” But I slowly started to push to get a little more band. You can see it on the record—toward the end I finally started to break the light a little bit. I got this sax [player], a really good cat who used to play with James Brown [sic]. And I went back to playing a little [lead] guitar. Now the band is starting to come around to…some real funky music trip. [1972]

  Two other songs were also cut as the album changed tack in September. “Blinded By The Light” and “Spirit In The Night” would be the template for what Springsteen was calling “some real funky music trip.” As he subsequently informed Dunstan Prial, “I knew that when it came time to present that [music] the best way to do it, I felt, was with a group behind me. I wanted to present it that way because I knew I could be exciting onstage and I could get people excited about the music.” The folks from Jersey certainly expected something like what he had been playing on the shore the past three years: “The people back home used to bitch all the time because…I was a big guitar player around town; for years that was what I did. I didn’t sing, I didn’t write songs, I played guitar…Then I got a record deal and I made a first album with no guitar on it.”

  The addition of sax and electric guitar was just what the album needed. As he explained to Nelson, “‘Blinded By The Light’ wasn’t really an acoustic song. Finally, I brought Clarence in, and that kind of opened the way for me to get more of the feeling I wanted to.” As for “Spirit In The Night,” it was his first song “about” a car and a girl since “Street Queen,” although he later felt moved to insist, “If you’ve listened carefully to ‘Spirit In the Night,’ you’ll know that it’s about two people who leave town in their car to go and truly love each other for the first time near a lake. I find it hard to say that [it] is about cars.” It provided a perfect segue into “Saint In The City,” Clarence showing himself to be a perfect foil to our newly-galvanized frontman. But although they sounded good on those two tracks, Bruce had a way to go before converting Appel, who still held the purse strings:

  Mike Appel: The [band] came down and played, but I thought it was more like for us to hear what they sounded like as a band…/…Miami Steve was there, Clarence Clemons, Garry Tallent, Danny Federici, Vini Lopez. Okay. They play “Hard To Be A Saint In The City,” “Does This Bus Stop”…/…and my first impression was that they didn’t really add much to the music, to the sound. I don’t think Davey Sancious was there…[But] that was the most screwed-up audition. Guys didn’t know the songs, they weren’t together, they weren’t adding anything, and I told Bruce [as much]. “No,” he said, “I need a band.”

  If Appel thought he had been attending an audition, he had been misinformed. According to Danny Federici, now returned to the fold, “After it was over, I went up to Bruce and said, ‘Well, what’s the story?’ He said, ‘It’s not an audition.’ There was no audition; it was a rehearsal. And we went out on the road seven days later.”[BTR] Bruce, though, had simply not thought it through. In his naivety, he seemed to think a record company advance of $25,000 would be sufficient—after recording costs and Laurel Canyon’s cut—to fund a touring band for the time it took to write and record a second album. Nor did the fact that he had neither a manager nor a booking agent seem to faze him. He simply asked Appel to take on the former’s duties, and then sent him to the William Morris Agency to find a suitable booking agent; who, like the new sax player, was black. And a life-saver. As Appel said: “Sam McGee kept us alive.” But he still wasn’t sure he wanted the added responsibilities. Once again, Springsteen dug in his heels until he said yes. It was a decision he would come to rue:

  Mike Appel: We weren’t managers. In fact, we signed Bruce to a production/publishing contract in February or March ’72, and it wasn’t until about six months later that we signed him to a management contract. He wanted it. He said to me, “I want you to be my manager.” Because people were hitting him up to be his manager. I said, “That’s not really my thing.” [Out came] that stubborn streak. Bruce can be mule-stubborn when he wants to be. He said, “No, I want you to do it.”

  If Springsteen simply disregarded the no-cost lesson in rockonomics he’d gained from running a big band the past eighteen months, David Sancious didn’t make the same mistake. He found himself, “living in Richmond doing sessions when he asked me to record and go on the road. I agreed to play on the album, but I didn’t really want to go on the road at that time.” He knew it would be a long, hard slog. And Springsteen was a rather demanding boss. As the frontman recalled in 2002, “I needed to be able to call the shots, [but] I needed musicians who were very dedicated to me and to the music we were gonna make together.”

  Miami Steve, though present at some Greetings sessions, would also be absent from the as-yet-unnamed E Street Band when in late October 1972 it took to the road to spread the word on an album that was not really theirs. Like The Attractions, who in 1977 would champion Elvis Costello’s debut album My Aim Is True live, though he’d actually recorded it with soft-shoe rockers Clover, the E Street Band now perforce became electric evangelists for Greetings from Asbury Park. Springsteen’s schizophrenic approach, though, initially required an acoustic prelude introducing the singer-songwriter responsible for “Mary Queen of Arkansas,” “The Angel” and a handful of other angsty excursions.

  Meanwhile, the CBS publicity-machine swung into gear. The boss was on board when a marketing budget of $50,000 was approved—maybe not a Moby Grape-like sum, but a testimony of faith nonetheless in the product this prodigal had produced. Even before the album rolled off the presses, Clive Davis had personally got in touch with Jon Landau, the then record editor for Rolling Stone. As Landau remembered it in 1977, “He told me he was particularly interested in…this album and would I pay special attention to it…I said I would give it to one of our best critics. I gave it to Lester Bangs.” Bangs was not “one of” Stone’s best critics; he was head and shoulders the best. Nonetheless, he was an odd choice. An acolyte of everything scuzzy and arch-advocate of bands who tipped their hats to the Velvets and The Stooges, he was hardly Mr. Singer-Songwriter. But, as Crawdaddy’s Peter Knobler remarked during an October 1975 overview of Springsteen’s initial rise to prominence, “[Because] he was Clive Davis’ pet project…there was knee-jerk antagonism to a product being pushed too hard.” Even from Landau.

  As it happens, Bangs saw through the hype to the heart beating within. He also had the smarts to namecheck The Band and Van Morrison as primary influences. (It took Springsteen twenty years to own up to The Band’s profound influence at this time, admitting how much he “liked the way Robbie Robertson was writing at the time with The Band. Sort of colloquial. It sounded like people telling stories…as if you were sitting on the couch.”) In c
onclusion, Bangs suggested “Bruce Springsteen is a bold new talent with more than a mouthful to say…Watch for him; he’s not the new John Prine,” a clever little dig at the last “New Dylan” to sail on the hype barge.

  However, Bangs’ medium-length review of Greetings didn’t run until the July 5 1973 issue, nigh on six months after the album appeared, by which time Springsteen was well along with his next offering. It was all in keeping with Rolling Stone’s long tradition of missing the boat with anything happening more than a mile away from Laurel Canyon or Haight-Ashbury, one it never really relinquished. Even with the likes of Landau and Nelson on staff, it would be 1978 before they ran their first cover story on “The Springsteen Phenomenon.”

  As such, Springsteen and his supporters would be primarily reliant on the likes of Crawdaddy, Creem and Circus to spread the word. Thankfully, Crawdaddy’s ex-editor Paul Williams and current editors Peter Knobler and Greg Mitchell were almost in competition to see who could be more effusive about this New Somebody. The latter pair ran a five-page piece in the March 1973 issue, presciently entitled, “Who Is Bruce Springsteen and Why Are We Saying All These Wonderful Things about Him?” Creem, meanwhile, turned Bruce’s debut offering over to its one remaining enfant terrible of protopunk journalism, Dave Marsh, who spent most of it slamming CBS for “trying to steal the scene by the usual act of ritual infanticide, i.e. claiming that Bruce is the Baby Bobby Dylan.” He had decided burying Dylan was the best way to praise his bastard son: “There’s one crucial different between him and Dylan, see, Bruce Springsteen’s no has-been.” Already, the strategy which CBS had so expensively adopted was having a negative effect on Springsteen’s public profile, and doing precious little to generate airplay. As of April 1973, Appel and his artist were left to generate their own hype, one based on word of gaping mouth from those who caught him on stage, alive as live can be.

  * “Sad Eyed Lady” begins “With your mercury mouth”

  * The track-listing of the so-called “London demo-tape” is as follows: Street Queen. Southern Son. Henry Boy. If I Was The Priest. Vibes Man. Song To The Orphans. She’s Leaving. The Song. Arabian Night. Cowbos Of The Sea. Four other songs were also lodged with Intersong, including “No Need.”

  Chapter 2: 1973—Hammond’s (Other) Folly

  Onstage is about as carefree as I can get, that’s where things switch off and you’re just living, you know. Most of the rest of the time, it was always my nature to [over-] analyze.—Bruce Springsteen, 2006

  Thirty years on from the release of Greetings from Asbury Park, Springsteen would recall a conversation with Appel in which he asked his new manager, “How did we do?” Appel replied, “We didn’t do very well. We sold about 20,000 records.” “Twenty thousand records! That’s fabulous! I don’t know 20,000 people. Who would buy a record by someone they have no idea about!??” Perhaps recalling the story in Scaduto of how Dylan’s eponymous debut had sold a mere five thousand copies in that first year, Bruce decided there ain’t no success like relative failure. What he forgot was that the near-disastrous sales of Bob Dylan led one cruel wit in the organization to dub the folksinger “Hammond’s Folly.” For a while the name stuck. Thankfully, back then Hammond had the ear of the president, Goddard Lieberson, and when one executive even hinted they were thinking of dropping Dylan, Hammond replied, “Over my dead body.”

  How ironic then, that the next singer-songwriter of note Hammond signed—a decade later!—should be marketed by the same label as a New Dylan. Hammond didn’t see it, telling Pete Knobler in January 1973, “When Bobby came to me, he was Bobby Zimmerman. He said he was Bob Dylan; he had created all this mystique [about himself]. [But] Bruce is Bruce Springsteen. And he’s much further along, much more developed than Bobby when he came to me.” Others inside the record company probably wanted to send a message to Bob, who had allowed his five-year CBS contract to die a natural death the previous August. Appel hinted as much when asked about the whole New Dylan hype in 1975, after CBS found another way to hype his man:

  Mike Appel: [Dylan’s] lawyer comes in and asks for the world…And then when the negotiations fail…the whole world was looking at Columbia Records, and everyone was taking potshots at them. They were very nervous. Very uptight at this particular time, trying to prove themselves. [So] they might have said, in the heat of the moment, “Screw Bob Dylan, we’re going to take Bruce Springsteen and use him and show that guy just where it’s at.”

  By the time Springsteen was ready to return to Max’s for a second residency—this time with band in tow—he was itching to shake off such shackles and rock this joint. And, as Appel notes, “[If] there was a [key] difference between Bruce and Bob Dylan lyrically: Bruce’s lyrics were more spastic, more emotional, more energized than Bob’s…[but] once you start dealing with the live show, it’s a whole different thing.” That he adopted an approach reminiscent of Dylan’s 1965–66 electric tour—starting out solo, before bringing out the band to rip it up—was neither here nor there, though the approach almost cost him one important convert, in town to play two sell-out shows at Radio City Music Hall, who stopped by the club on February 1:

  David Bowie: I originally went to Max’s to see an artist called Biff Rose, a quirky but interesting writer…I stuck around as there was another act on. So this guy is sitting up there with an acoustic guitar doing a complete Dylan thing. My friend and I were about to leave when he started introducing a band who were joining him onstage. The moment they kicked in, he was another performer. All the Dylanesque stuff dropped off him and he rocked.

  Being able to play some stuff acoustic did have its advantages. It made it a whole lot easier to do “in-house” radio sessions, a strategy Appel and Springsteen adopted early on, after both realized a gauche Bruce was possibly the worst interviewee in Rockville. Dick Wingate, who would end up as marketing manager to the man, met him first that summer of ’73, when “he was brought up to WVRU by the Columbia promotions person and he was dressed exactly like the cover [of Greetings]. White t-shirt. It’s the middle of the summer…we didn’t put him on the air because he didn’t seem like he wanted to. He was very, very shy. He didn’t have a whole lot to say. Then when I see him perform a few months later, it was like, ‘Holy shit!’”

  Here was something else Bruce had in common with Van Morrison (though in Morrison’s case, he frequently hid his own inarticulacy behind a torrent of four-letter words), a comparison contemporary critics noted far more than the Dylan one. Indeed, Paul Nelson in their first interview required (and got) a response from Springsteen himself: “I listen to Van Morrison because he [has always] had a lot of elements of other music that I love—even the latest album, St. Dominic’s [Preview]—and I listen to him a lot because he’s a great singer.” Morrison was also a great improviser. By 1972 he would usually do these long mid-song raps that gave audiences raptures, though the first instance of it on record dated back to the earliest days of Them, when on the fade-out to “Little Girl” he expressed a desire to “little girl, little girl, little girl, I wanna fuck you,” resulting in the fastest recalled LP in Decca’s history.

  (Springsteen seemed on the verge of replicating this feeling a number of times in 1980 when intersecting “I Wanna Marry You” with a similar extended reverie: “Sometimes at night when I lie in bed I still see her face…running round my head…here she comes…walking down the street…here she comes…walking down the street…she’s looking so fine, she’s looking so sweet…she’s so fine, she’s looking so sweet…and someday I’m gonna make her mine…she’s gonna stop. She ain’t just gonna pass me by, she’s gonna stop. She ain’t just gonna pass me by, she’s gonna stop. She ain’t gonna just pass me by, she’s gonna stop. She ain’t gonna pass me by…little girl, little girl, little girl…”)

  For now, though, Springsteen’s onstage stories were one way of figuring out which characters might work in song. As Clemons wrote, in one of the few genuinely illuminating sections of a dull autobiography, “This was how the guy though
t…in stories. And there was no end to them. He could go on and on and on, and the stories were actually fucking good. He’d throw in little insights and nuances that made the characters come to life. He gave them dimension. They all had secrets.” One wonders what the small audience thought when he went into such a story the night he debuted “Rosalita” in Richmond, Virginia in February 1973, a year almost to the day after the Bruce Springsteen Band were run out of town:

  “I was eight years old. I’d been hitchhiking around the country for five years…I was something else…and I got arrested for loitering, and they put me in the same cell as James Brown. He looked me in the face and he said ‘Ungh, aah…ain’t it fun?’ The next time he opened his mouth to say something, out came (some James Brown-style music), then he walked away. Just by sheer coincidence, in the very next cell, sitting there with his surfboard was Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. I said, ‘Dennis, what are you doing in that cell with a surfboard?’ Said he was looking for the perfect wave. He came up to me, looked me in the face and said (band does ‘Fun, fun, fun’). Then he split. By sheer coincidence they [then] brought in Wilson Pickett for being, uh, too funky or something. I forget the exact charge but he came up to me and said, ‘Son, if you’re ever in trouble, all you got to do is…’ and showed me this…”

  Where did such tall stories spring up from? Indeed, where did that sassy stage-persona come from, period? Recalling those days in a Springsteen feature, Martin Kirkup described how he “once saw him go into a ten-minute monologue between songs, all about the trouble his band used to have with the mafiosos in Jersey, and then say to an audience of six hundred, ‘Now, hey, that’s in confidence. I wouldn’t want that to go outside this room.’” And Peter Knobler recollects him introducing one song at this time with, “This is the songwriter-poet as innocent,” and the next one, “Now the songwriter-poet as pervert.” Both got a laugh. He also learned how to play with the very idea of autobiographical revelation onstage. On his first live radio broadcast he came up with a particularly surreal explanation for why he got a 4–F in the army induction exam: