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

by Clinton Heylin

  I lived 18 years of my life next door to a gas station in a small town in New Jersey and it was Ducky Slattery’s Sinclair Station. Ducky Slattery had this one line he ripped off the Marx Brothers, anytime anybody’d come into the gas station, he’d always say “You wanna buy a duck?” That was his big line, not too original but it worked, you know…[Well,] my father killed a duck for Thanksgiving once. Helped me get out of the draft. I went down to the Army, told ’em ever since I seen my father kill that duck, I go crazy every time I see a duck. If I was out there on the battlefield in Vietnam and a duck came walking by, I might go nutty, I might shoot generals or something.

  He seemed able to deliver such stories with an innate, comedic sense of timing, acquired from God knows where. A couple of years later, when telling a story about his and Miami Steve’s pursuit of one particularly unattainable girl—the preface to the E Street Band’s extended reinterpretation of “Pretty Flamingo”—he sent up the whole idea of such storytelling by stopping mid-rap, having got to where “it was about quarter to twelve…and I said ‘Steve, Steve, I’m in love, I got to find out what this girl’s name is.’” He then informed these Philly fans, “The fact [is], I could go on with this story and tell you that I did find out [her name] and that we broke into the house and knocked everybody down, picked her up and ran down the street, but the real story is we gave up and went home.”

  And yet, when you put him on the radio in a sterile studio with just a mike and a DJ for company, he froze up, as he did that day up at WVRU. Which didn’t stop the hipper east-coast DJs from putting him on the radio. They, and his manager, just quickly realized that a broadcast of the live act was the way to go. From day one, Appel realized that “if you could, through a King Biscuit Flower Hour or a WNEW…if you could get Bruce to do a two, two-and-a-half-hour show over the air, you’re covering those airwaves for [all] those hours!” Springsteen also learned to appreciate the enduring rewards of such a strategy:

  Bruce Springsteen: There were a few cities where we developed strong early audiences…The support of the old-school radio stations was enormous and incredibly important. It was where the band’s live experience paid off…It was a very organic, grassroots growth that you were able to get going in those days. It was a combination of the band’s excellence in live performance and a system that could respond to that excellence…It was a very different day and age. The music business was much smaller, there was no entertainment media…there was no coverage of rock music on television…The upside was you had quite a bit of room to grow, experiment, and get your act together. [2010]

  However, to put this in context, America is a big place, and away from the east coast such a plan was (for now) doomed to failure. As Appel recently noted: “If you went down to Virginia, he could even play at a theater and damn near sell the whole place out. So it wasn’t like he was a nobody everywhere. But you’re talking about…the Northeast—and that was it, basically. You couldn’t take him anywhere else.” For those converts, though, every live broadcast from 1973 to 1975 (and there were at least three a year) provided Affirmation, beginning at Max’s on January 31, 1973, when Springsteen made his, and King Biscuit’s, radio “in concert” debut. *

  And he did it via a stunning “Spirit In The Night” with the band, straight after the brand-new “Bishop Danced” solo, which he had introduced at his first acoustic radio session three weeks earlier as “a song about this bishop and his woman and this violin-player, and this little girl who lost her mother to mathematics. And it’s about pancakes and…James Garner, and how he married this woman with one eye, who kicks like a mule. And it’s about the sexual patterns of elderly boys, and this little boy who thinks that the Indians are still in the woods, only nobody sees them.” Still in love with quick-fire rhymes (“double-quick back flip…fiddlestick fiddled quick”) and madcap monikers (Baby Dumpling, Maverick Daddy, Mama Tuck), Springsteen unrepentantly basked in the reflected glory of ever-more rococo rhyme-schemes.

  If King Biscuit had no need for more than three or four songs, Appel smartly ensured the whole of one Max’s set was recorded. And it was quite a set! It had been four and a half months since Greetings was completed, and the faucet remained on full-blast. “New York City Song,” “Song To Orphans,” “Saga of the Architect Angel” and “Thundercrack” were now added to the Greetings songs, and would all enjoy favor in the months (and years) ahead.

  Though none of the four (save the first verse of “New York City Song”) would make the second album, “Thundercrack” would be a show-stoppin’ encore for the next fifteen months. Rhyming for kicks, but no longer gratuitously, he throws out some of his most infectiously memorable lines: “She moves up, she moves back/ Out on the floor there ain’t nobody cleaner/ She does this thing she calls the Jumpback Jack/ She’s got the heart of a ballerina,” the lyric of someone who has finally discovered rhyme needs its own internal “rithmetic. “Thundercrack” also showed he had adapted well to the demands of writing for a band. As he put it in 1992, “I became more arrangement-orientated. I got more interested in how the thing was going to function as an ensemble.” “Thundercrack,” a quintessential example of “function[ing] as an ensemble,” was evidently written at the end of 1972, one of a flurry of songs fusing the lyrical grandiosity of Greetings with an endlessly inventive musical chutzpah. Songs like “Rosalita,” “Thundercrack” and “Kitty’s Back” hinted of great(er) things:

  Bruce Springsteen: When I went on the road, I took the point of view I developed on my first record and I began to just write with the band in mind, with the idea of mixing those two things…[When it came to] the second record…I said [to myself], “Well, I want to hold onto these characters, this point of view and this writing style, but I want to include the physicality of rock music, or band music.” [1999]

  And yet, when he entered 914 Sound Studios on January 29 to demo some new songs ahead of his second Max’s residency not one of them was a ballbuster. The five songs demoed over the next two days were “I Met Her In A Tourist Trap in Tiguara”—which sounds more like one of his concert raps, and remains uncirculated—“Architect Angel,” “Janey Needs A Shooter,” “Ballad of a Self-Loading Pistol” and “Winter Song.” If none of them were attempted at the Wild, the Innocent sessions (though “Architect Angel” appears on a September 1973 shortlist, presumably in demo guise), he was still working on “Architect Angel” at the early Darkness rehearsal sessions and “Janey Needs A Shooter” at the River rehearsals. So stockpiling songs for future projects began this early.

  Of the songs themselves, “Architect Angel” was another Zane Grey meets Zero in Jungleland epic, a saga which stretched “from the cellar ways to the attics and all across the plains,” thus anticipating future panoramas. But the architecture ain’t quite there. “Ballad of a Self-Loading Pistol,” if it anticipates anything, anticipates Nebraska, being about a father who teaches his son to shoot and shows him “the story of the self-loading pistol,” only for the boy to end up killing someone in a hold-up. He duly boasts to his father, “Your son, he’s an outlaw/ And this blood feels good on my hands.”

  “Winter Song” demonstrates that allusions to prostitution in three other winter 1973 songs (“Janey Needs A Shooter,” “Tokyo” and “Hey Santa Ana”) were no passing whim. This one is specifically about, “Winter, that old icy whore,” who can make one “drip like honey down soot mama’s leg” and works for “the mademoiselle/ who holds the keys to all these doors around her waist/ And rings the bell.” If “Winter Song” puts some cracks in that Freehold facade of Catholic coyness, the magnificent “Janey” breaks the dam. “With her doors open wide, she begs, come inside,” one of Janey’s come-ons, is uncharacteristic of the Greetings-era songwriter. The song depicts the loose lady in a series of liaisons with every kinda profession—a gynecolorist who “tears apart her insides;” a mechanic who “smashed my car with [a] big tow bar;” and a peeping-Tom cop who likes to “peek in my window every night.” Each of them is haunted b
y the lady who “needs a shooter.”

  If “Janey Needs A Shooter” introduces one of Springsteen’s great heroines, “Tokyo,” a song demoed three weeks later, again at 914, introduced another. Looking for a recommendation from a Catholic priest for “a cheap virgin,” the padre helpfully suggests, “You can try Rosalie, around the corner and across the street, word is out that she’s fast.” (Anyone who doubts Rosalie and Rosalita are one and the same should note that early versions of the latter song refer to her “sweet samurai tongue,” not her “soft sweet lil’ girl tongue.”) “Tokyo” was another song which although not attempted at the second-album sessions, survived live into 1974. He already knew it was horses for courses.

  In fact, the only song demoed in February 1973 that did make the summer sessions—and album—was something he’d been playing around with for months, but had yet to spring on the band; even on Clarence Clemons, the archetypal vibes man. “Vibes Man” is often portrayed as the germ of an idea he then added to “New York City Song,” making “New York City Serenade.” In truth, the released “Serenade” owes far more to “Vibes Man” than “New York City Song,” though it was the latter which Springsteen worked up at spring shows, and “Vibes Man” which stayed secret—until that moment in mid-July when he took the first verse of “New York City Song,” the whole of “Vibes Man” and made a single serenade. Lyrical losses from “Vibes Man” would be minimal, though he does delete a couplet revealing the fish lady’s battered past: “You were born black and blue/ You didn’t have to wait for somebody to hit you,” his first reference to domestic violence in song (these lines appear in the first known performance of “New York City Serenade,” at Max’s in mid-July, but not on the end-of-month My Father’s Place broadcast).

  “New York City Song” also lost its own reference to wife beating in the coupling process: “She got a dirty Big Daddy whose fist pump like gears/ He’s kept her in hope, supplied her in fear.” But it is the proto-“Jungleland” ending to “New York City Song” that is the greater loss, hinting at something ground-breaking to come: “Some people say he was the holder of the cosmic keys/ Oh, and his throat was choked with lightning from some childhood disease/ And with a tommygun blast he got the people screamin’, till he falls helpless in Times Square, just like street scum/ Cryin’, New York City kill their young [x2]/ And from a tenement window I heard sighing.” Through the spring of 1973 “New York City Song” regularly opened a set which, even before Rolling Stone condescended to review Springsteen’s slightly-stilted debut album, was moving at warp speed away from that tentative template.

  With “Thundercrack” the other bookend to every ballroom blitz, a callow Springsteen seemed positively fearless about the type of song he would perform; the newer and obscurer, the better. Probably the most lyrically ambitious of the songs no one in the audience knew was “Hey Santa Ana,” using as it did the idea of a town waiting on the appearance of its own personal saviour, in this case Santa Ana, “he who could romance the dumb into talkin’.” While “the giants of Science” start out fighting for “control over the wild lands of New Mexico,” in the end they “spend their days and nights…searching for the light…just to be lost in the dust and the night.”

  Chancing again on that newfound lyrical sophistication, the song’s narrator-observer describes each character in the song with an eagle eye: Kid Cole, Kansas, Max (“some punk’s idea of a teenage nation”) and, of course, Contessa, the object of his lust, who runs the Rainbow Saloon. The song ends in classic Springsteen fashion, with a plea to dance the night away “’cause only fools are alone on a night like this!,” the perfect coda to a song which ultimately proved too “Dylanesque” for his liking:

  Bruce Springsteen: “Santa Ana” is just a series of images, but it works, there’s a story being told. But later I turned away from that kind of writing because I received Dylan comparisons. If you go back and listen it’s really not like Dylan at all, but at the time I was very sensitive about creating my own identity, and so I moved away from that kind of writing. [1999]

  He already knew it was one thing to play with audience expectations in a club. It was another thing entirely to attempt the same when you’re the no-name support act for someone else’s tour, as happened that spring with the likes of Blood, Sweat & Tears, Black Oak Arkansas and Chicago, none of them suitable bed-partners. The show with Black Oak Arkansas was further soured by that band’s decidedly southern attitude to Springsteen’s saxman. (Lopez recalls, “We get done playing, me and Clarence are backstage and one of the band guys comes up to Clarence and says, ‘You can’t be back here.’ We were a bunch of skinny white kids from New Jersey with a big black guy in our band. I guess some people didn’t like the black man thing.”) Such slots obliged them to promote product. And, indeed, the one extant soundboard tape of these “support” slots (Berkeley, March 2) shows the E Street Band slowly coming to grips with the Greetings songs, with a stunning “Lost In The Flood” and a knockout “Blinded By The Light” the highlights of a seven-song, forty-minute set.

  Three months later, they found themselves even more at odds with audiences on an east-coast stint with the bombastic Chicago, an arena act if there ever was one. Almost from the opening night in Richmond, Va., a clear line was being drawn. Ironically, that was the night Springsteen got heckled by former fans because, as Lopez says, “They wanted to hear Steel Mill stuff.” On a radio phone-in the previous afternoon, Springsteen had actually been asked to do “Resurrection,” an old Steel Mill song, but preferred to play the brand-new “New York City Song.” Which was pretty much the case at all the Chicago shows. Greetings barely got a look in. Springsteen preferred to spring the likes of “Tokyo,” “Hey Santa Ana,” “Thundercrack,” “Rosalita” and “E Street Shuffle” on mystified attendees. At The Spectrum in Philadelphia, they even ran tape on live versions of the last two (and maybe captured the definitive “Rosalita” into the bargain). But even these soon-to-be concert classics failed to rouse the cataleptic Chicagoans as the band played on. As Lopez sarcastically notes, “When you’re on stage at a Chicago concert and you’re looking off the stage, there’s nuns, priests, people in wheelchairs for the first ten rows. You’re not seeing anything past that.”

  Arriving at Madison Square Garden for the last two nights of the tour—knowing CBS execs would be there checking on their investment—Springsteen finally made a concession to promoting his latest fab waxing, performing “Spirit In the Night,” “Blinded By The Light” and “Lost In The Flood,” the three most dynamic cuts from the album at this point, on night one as part of a full, one-hour set. When the audience demanded an encore, and got a ten-minute “Thundercrack” for their pains, Appel had to cross swords with the Garden management. Lopez takes up the story: “We actually got in trouble…because we did an encore song—shouldn’t have done it. The next night they took us off the [video] screen; half an hour, that’s it. ’Cause it was overtime. We went three minutes over time and it cost them [like] $10,000.” Appel suspects it was Chicago who took umbrage: “Bruce really did great that night. He knocked them dead. So the next night the guys from Chicago wouldn’t let us use their video.” Either way, it was both a promising end to the tour, and the start of a solid policy on Springsteen’s part that he would not play arenas ever again, one he cogently articulated the following year to a nodding Paul Williams:

  Bruce Springsteen: I did the Chicago tour. I did that tour because I had never played big places. And I said, I ain’t gonna say no, because I don’t know what they’re like. So we went and played it, about fourteen nights in a row. I went crazy—I went insane during that tour. It was the worst state of mind I’ve ever been in…just because of the playing conditions for our band. I couldn’t play those big places. It had nothing to do with anything that had anything to do with me…So I won’t go to those places again. That was it. Usually we won’t play any place over 3,000—that’s the highest we want to do. We don’t want to get any bigger. And even that’s too big…I�
�m always disappointed in acts that go out and play those [big] places. I don’t know how those bands can go out and play like that…If you get that big you gotta realize that some people who want to see you, ain’t gonna see you. I’m not in that position, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be in that position. All I know is that those big coliseums ain’t where it’s supposed to be…I don’t know what people expect you to do in a place like that. Especially our band—it would be impossible to reach out there the way we try to do. Forget it! [1974]

  There was another problem with support slots. They didn’t give Springsteen time to build momentum. Hence, his description of these Chicago shows to another long-time supporter the following year: “We got introduced, walked on stage, blinked and that was it. It’s hard to show an audience what the band is about in that little time.” All he could do was hope anyone at CBS who did catch that first MSG show or heard the couple of tracks from Philadelphia was converted. Because by the time he decamped to 914, the third week in June, he needed all the label help he could get.

  On May 29, Clive Davis had been summoned to the office of CBS president, Arthur Taylor, and told to clear his desk immediately. At the front door he was “met by two CBS security men and served with the company’s civil complaint against me, alleging $94,000 worth of expense-account violations.” Davis would rise again at his own label, Arista, but Bruce had just lost his one powerful ally at CBS. Hammond, too, was effectively dead in the water, any hands-on relationship he had with his protégé ending the night he caught one of the Max’s shows and had a heart attack in mid-set, his third in the past few years. Though, according to a Rolling Stone report, Hammond’s doctor blamed the heart attack on his “enthusiasm at the Springsteen” show, he was simply not a well man. And when sessions for a second Springsteen album started in June, again at 914 Sound Studios in Blauvelt NY, a small hamlet near the New Jersey border, Appel decided the night time was the right time. A paranoid Hammond was convinced that “Mike had the sessions start at midnight so I couldn’t come.” In fact, Appel bent over backward to accommodate Hammond, while also trying to balance the books: