Lopez states that the disagreement dated back to the day David joined the band: “When they brought Sancious in, we weren’t making a lot of money, but instead of giving him what we were getting, they took it out of our money…I had a problem with that. That’s probably one of the reasons I got fired. When I have I problem, I say something. They branded me a troublemaker…I’d be like, ‘What about the band getting some royalties?’ Mike was like, ‘Whoddya think you are? Chicago? This is Bruce Springsteen.’ [But] when it came to getting paid, me and Danny were the ones who went to New York to the office to get everyone their money. Bruce said, ‘You guys do that, you’re good at it.’” He had no intimation he was treading on thin ice when the boss came a-callin’ that early February afternoon:
Vini Lopez: When he came to my house and told me I was out of the band, I was taken aback. Whenever we came off the road, I used to have his guitars, and the next day he’d come over. I said, “You’re kicking me out of the band? I get a second chance, right!” He goes, “There are no second chances. It’s a dog eat dog world. You’re done.” He said I was a shitty drummer, said, “You can’t do this and you can’t do that….” [In the end,] I said, “There’s the door,” and handed him his fucking guitars…We were steam-driven, so I get blamed for being steam-driven.
Appel thinks it was a combination of the two, his temper and his time-keeping. But, he insists, “In Vini’s defense, he was more of a drummer in the Keith Moon sense, always trying to make the drums like a lead guitar, not just keep a beat, and what would happen invariably is he would lose the beat…[However,] Vini had also got on the wrong side of Bruce a few times: he had punched my brother out, stupid things. He would get feisty with Clarence. So Vini was always problematic on that side of things…[In the end,] it was Bruce’s decision.” And it was one which threatened the equilibrium of an outstandingly original band.
That possibility, however, was lost on Bruce, and the other lynchpins in the current set-up, Clemons and Sancious. Clemons in his autobiography suggests he had already voiced concerns to Springsteen: “Vinnie ‘Mad Dog’ Lopez had trouble keeping time. It was fucking everything up, but Bruce is such a loyal guy he couldn’t bring himself to fire him. It was becoming a real problem.” Meanwhile, at some point Sancious mentioned a friend who played drums and knew how to walk the dog. He later put a disingenuous spin on the switch: “Bruce had decided to change drummers, and I told him about Ernest [‘Boom’ Carter]…He auditioned a bunch of kids, and Ernest came and tried out.” But Carter was hardly gonna fly up from Atlanta—as he did—just to “try out.” Carter’s recruitment barely a week after Lopez got the boot rather suggests Sancious began importuning Bruce before that fateful February afternoon.
As it happens, Carter was an inspired choice. Though he didn’t have the frenetic style that came part and parcel with the “Mad Dog” moniker, nor was he quite as busy. And he could keep time on a dime. But he was Sancious’s, not Springsteen’s man, and the newly-forged alliance made for none of the do-or-die camaraderie of the original E Street Band. Springsteen seemed to sense it, because in an April interview he was already talking about how “the band’s built to be flexible—that way if everybody leaves tomorrow or everybody stays, it’ll work out.” He had never talked this way before.
Lopez’s limitations seemed less evident to those critics who had just received copies of Springsteen’s second long-playing installment. Just as he was handing Mad Dog his cards, Rolling Stone’s Ken Emerson was praising the band, who “cook with power and precision,” in a timely but terse second-album review. Creem’s Ed Ward, given more latitude, was unstinting in his praise: “The rhythm section…is able to cope with all the changes nicely, as well as propelling the band along when things are at their most frantic…[while] the music has the same kind of freedom as good jazz, and…the beat and drive of good rock.” Ward’s only concern, in a rave review that compared The Wild, the Innocent (favorably) with Astral Weeks, was whether “his band can play anywhere near this good on stage.” He need not have worried.
Indeed, Ward was just about the only major rock critic in America not to have checked out the E Street band in their performing pomp. The British music press were predictably tardier, but NME’s Charles Shaar Murray called it right when he did suggest, “After seeing Springsteen you realize that his records are dumb and irrelevant; forget ’em, they’re trash, they’re a shadow show in a distorting mirror, and he’s not really there at all. It’s possible to hear his records and hardly dig him at all; it ain’t possible to see his show and walk out quite the same. I mean, the cat is good…And I was blown over when I saw him live and discovered that the aspect of his work that had impressed me the most [his white r&b voice/musical identity] was, in fact, the deepest and most central core of his work.”
Though CBS had cut the marketing budget for his second album in half, and Rolling Stone had relegated him to the also-rans review-section, it mattered not. Word of mouth, by the spring of 1974, was something else. As Springsteen himself asserted, post-Born To Run: “You couldn’t get the whole story from the records we did earlier but whenever we played, it was like—instant!” In fact, for all the good press they were getting, Springsteen doubted it was this which turned things around. He told Street Life the next year, “I’ve had a million good articles but they don’t sell records. Why? ’Cause the kids don’t care what they read…The kid on the street, he heard about you from a friend. So he buys your record. He comes to see you, he likes your band. He tells his friend, who decides to check it out for himself. And that’s how you get the circle going.” After the fact, he would suggest it was a strategy of sorts: “We didn’t start selling records till we started playing smaller places. It’s a slow process. But I was always certain.”
Unfortunately, as David Bowie could have told him, with the right show things might ultimately work out fine, but it was damn wearing on the wallet (and nerves). If everyone needs a push, Springsteen got two solid shoves the second week in May, both the direct result of articles written by converts who caught the Boom-era E Streeters that spring, and aired their thoughts in forums so far off the beaten track only someone reading the tea-leaves of popular culture could have been led there. That the first of them resulted in a wholesale change in the attitude of his record label was mere happenstance. It came just in time. As Appel recalls, “We were just about forgotten completely, and it forced us to start thinking about how we were going to survive…/…When I called up the promotion men, nobody would pick up the phone. There was nothing we could do.” Even advocates like Paul Rappaport at the label were meeting a brick wall: “We had to fight for money for Bruce. I remember being in a [CBS] convention and I was jumping up and down, ‘This is rock & roll history. We need money!’ And the head of promotions is going, ‘I don’t care about rock & roll history. We have budgets.’”
Everyone was playing for their lives. Night after night. On April 26, the boys pulled up at Brown University to play the Alumni Hall. Dick Wingate, already a fan, became an acolyte that night: “I’d never been so thunderstruck in my life; and I just remember being floored…The performance was beyond anything I’d seen. I’d seen the [Who] Quadrophenia tour, I’d seen [Floyd do] Dark Side, but this was so personal. It didn’t feel like a show.” But it was actually one of Wingate’s fellow students whose interview with Springsteen put a Persian among the doves:
Mike Appel: Clive Davis and John Hammond are no longer effectively at CBS. We had no champions—we had low-ranking champions. But we had no big guys…I said [to the label], “What do you want me to do?…You’re not gonna give me permission to do the album. What do you expect me to do? I’m not gonna sit on my hands.” They could care less…And Bruce is acutely aware of all this. ’Cause I told him this is what’s happening. I said [to Bruce], “There’s a guy named Irwin Siegelstein, from NBC Television, who’s now running Columbia Records, and he’s definitely not on our team.” As fate would have it, Bruce was doing a concert at Brown University
, and I set him up with a little interview with the Brown University paper, and in that interview he mentions how Irwin Siegelstein is stymying his career. Now Bruce never says a bad word about anybody on the planet, but this one particular instance he happens to mention this guy. Irwin Siegelstein’s son goes to Brown University, and he’s a fan of Bruce Springsteen. So he calls his father immediately, “Dad, what are you doing? This guy is the greatest…” So Irwin Siegelstein calls me up, and says, “Bruce Springsteen bad-mouthed me [blah blah blah].” I’m thinking, “Wow, what a lucky break.” I blurted out, “He’s going to do an interview with Rolling Stone. He’s got a lot of bad things to say. This is the way it is between you and us.” Total lie. He says, “I want you, Bruce and your attorney at Mercurio’s tomorrow at one o’clock. We’ll settle this once and for all.” I said, “Irwin, we’ll be there.” We sat down and hammered it out, “We wanna go in and record the record.” “Okay, [but] no more interviews where he bad-mouths me.”…From then on, they got on board.
In fact, Springsteen kept Siegelstein’s name out of his rant at the label’s expense; but his exasperation had come through loud and clear: “Of course I don’t know how Clive [Davis] would have turned out as time went on. Anyway, Clive and I got along. He came down—he still came down after he got ousted to see how we were doing. He was interested. Now I’m a pain in the ass to them is all and, you know, they want to make somebody else famous…I haven’t sold many records yet and we don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things.” And if this wasn’t enough, he further complained “They’re bugging me for a single. I don’t know, maybe they mean well, but I doubt it.”
If it was a highly uncharacteristic outburst, Springsteen had never been a willing interviewee. When Robert Hilburn asked for an interview after a July 1974 Santa Monica gig, “He asked why I wanted to talk to him and whether it wasn’t better to let fans just listen to the music, rather than read about the artist as well.” He went on to gently berate Hilburn, “[Rock] interviews are like questions and answers where there is no answer, so why is there a question?” He had a simple faith in his ability to communicate, and in rock audiences in general, his own in particular. He had already informed Hilburn, his first important west coast advocate, “You should never be ‘satisfied’ [with your performance]. Once you’re satisfied, you’re dead. You’ve got to ruffle people, stir them, make them have wants, make them realize their desires…Don’t just make them boogie and jump up and down. That’s a hoax.” It was a mantra he held onto throughout the most trying year of his career:
Bruce Springsteen: Some people can be stopped and other people can’t be stopped…I can’t stop, they can’t make me stop ever, because I can’t stop. I don’t know what I’d do. If you’re dealing with people who say, “Ah hell, I gotta go back to hanging wallpaper,” or who say, “I don’t know if I want to play or if I want to get married.” If you have to decide, then the answer is don’t do it. If you have a choice, then the answer is no. [1974]
So when he ran into the reviews editor from Rolling Stone outside Charlie’s Place, Cambridge on April 10, 1974, he was relieved to find Jon Landau had come to see the show. Landau’s interest had been piqued by the second album and, like Ed Ward, he was curious how they sounded live. If Landau’s local review of The Wild, the Innocent, posted in the window of Charlie’s Place, was essentially positive, he thought Lopez’s drumming “a weak spot,” and found the recording to be “a mite thin or trebly-sounding, especially when the band moves into the breaks.” When Springsteen introduced Landau to his producer inside, Appel rightly called him out, “So you don’t like the album’s production, huh!” Coming from the man who had gutted the most abrasive band to ever come out of Detroit’s Grande Ballroom (Landau produced the MC5’s weak second album, Back In The USA), Landau’s comments suggested an expertise he simply did not have. But Springsteen did not know that. And the critic was saying the things he wanted to hear.
Though he loved it, Landau did not review the show that night. Rather, he checked them out again at the Harvard Square Theater a month later, when he somewhat memorably “saw rock & roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” So fast did that night pass before his eyes that he imagined he’d seen a “two-hour set,” initiating that great Rockritic contest to see who could most inflate the length of a live Springsteen set. (For the record, there is no such thing as a four-hour Springsteen show!) For Landau it all boiled down to one question: “When his…set ended I could only think, can anyone really be this good, can anyone say this much to me, can rock & roll still speak with this kind of power and glory?”
To put his epiphanic critique in context, the mid-seventies were the heyday of such bulletins from jaundiced critical claimants. Whether it was then-critic Patti Smith lauding Television, Lester Bangs and Nick Kent testifying to The Stooges, Richard Williams experiencing Roxy Music or Jonh Ingham being blown to kingdom come by the Pistols, everyone was looking for the next big thing; and the ad-men knew it. The issue before Rolling Stone ran Bruce’s “rock & roll future” ad, they carried an ad for Weather Report that risibly announced, “The Future is Here.”
As John Lombardi put it in his 1988 Esquire “roast” of “Saint Bruce:” “Bruce was a rock critic’s dream, a means of rationalizing nostalgic feelings of ‘rebellion’ and blue-collar sympathy with comfortable middle-aged incomes and ‘life-styles.’” Unlike most of the others listed above, he did not represent any kinda threat to The Pantheon. His was a reclamation, not a deconstruction, of Rock’s decade-long history. The most telling line in Landau’s review is not the oft-quoted one, but the one which preceded it: “I saw my rock & roll past flash before my eyes.” And if Springsteen was an answer to critics’ prayers, the influence Landau still exercised was an answer to his. As he recently observed, “The power of rock criticism in the seventies would be unrecognizable perhaps to rock writers today…It was a powerful forum, particularly for people who were just starting [like me].” Dave Marsh, who edited Landau’s review, later claimed on both their behalves that the review was a conscious act of hyperbole:
Dave Marsh: However you wish to view the pros and cons of that whole “hype” issue, the fact remains that Columbia was on the point of dropping Bruce from the label straight after E Street Shuffle had initially bombed. Jon and I knowingly interceded with that article. Clive Davis had been ousted and only the press department really believed in Bruce’s worth. You could say that we were aware of our intentions.
Whether Springsteen approved of being hyped a second time was a question neither Landau nor Marsh deigned to ask. He certainly needed their help, as Bruce duly admitted after the review went viral: “At the time we weren’t doing so good, and it helped me out with the record company.” At least Landau’s review made no mention of Dylan, not even in passing. For Springsteen, this was important: “I wanted to get away from the Dylan comparisons at the time…At the time I was self-conscious about it and trying to find my own voice.”
When Rolling Stone finally ran a nonreview piece on the artist in September 1974, he went to great pains to convey those musical influences as one big melting pot: “I like [Dylan]. The similarities are probably there somewhere. But…shit, man, I’ve been influenced by lots of people. Elvis was one of the first. Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, the Beatles, Fats [Domino], Benny Goodman, a lot of jazz guys. You can hear them all in there if you want.” At this time one could almost check the influences off, such was the sweep of styles the 1974 E Street Band embraced in concert. The show Landau reviewed featured an almost-showband arrangement of the Blue Belles” “I Sold My Heart To The Junkman,” while a segue into Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City” in the middle of “Kitty’s Back” was so seamless it seemed just another part of the unraveling saga of a stripper with a heart of gold.
But just about the time this panorama of a priori pop was bubbling to the surface, CBS were dictating in what direction they wanted Springsteen’s career to go. Yes, the purse strings had been rela
xed enough for his recording career to resume, and there was even a commitment of sorts to “repromote” The Wild, the Innocent (which was now starting to sell steadily despite their worst efforts); but they were still bugging him about that single. Such was the state of affairs when Landau received a call shortly after his birthday, May 22. It was Bruce: “He said he was having problems…in his relationship with Columbia Records and…his problems in recording. He said there was this fellow Charlie Koppelman who, because of the lack of commercial success [to date], wanted to impose some kind of direction on Bruce’s future recordings.”
It seems the deal Springsteen and Appel had reached with Siegelstein came with strings attached. As Springsteen now told a British paper, “They want me to put out a new single before they let me do the album.” The idea of a nonalbum single was actually a good one (it was still the norm on the other side of the pond), but Springsteen wanted to get on with building castles in his own conceptual sky. On July 12 1974 he decided to show CBS his vision could not necessarily be contained by seven inches of vinyl. He was back in New York for a three-night residency. This time he had moved up in the downtown world, as far as The Bottom Line. He decided it was high time he debuted his latest spin on West Side Story, “Jungleland.” At the same time he had a new lighting man, Marc Brickman, who could sell his songs like no other lightman could:
Mike Appel: Marc [Brickman] started using a special overhead spot on Bruce, which none of us had ever seen before, and much more dramatic colors…Well, this guy…transformed this little ratty show we had developed into something we’d never thought about before. Now, suddenly, we could all see new horizons. I mean…his performance took on dramatic dimensions that raised the entire show to new visual, musical and emotional heights. He began to literally die at the end of “Jungleland.” He’d clutch the microphone and go down on the stage and die! [DTR]
E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Page 11
