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

by Clinton Heylin

  “Jungleland” was the apotheosis of everything Springsteen had been working toward since he “got more interested in how the thing was going to function as an ensemble.” And it was what more critical fans had been anticipating. One of them, Playback’s Lorraine O’Grady, had predicted in a February 1974 overview of his career to date that The Wild, the Innocent’s successor might be “a rock opera based on the characters in it, that [is] even more magnificent than W, I & E.” She also noted, “He’s become more actor than singer.” “Jungleland” soon became this method actor’s nightly audition. In fact, the song at this juncture was essentially of a piece with the jazzed-up NYC songs from The Wild, the Innocent, with Sancious still playing the role of Bruce’s bag-man. The song even resolved itself with an “extra” verse that, like “Incident on 57th Street,” held out the hope everything could work out fine:

  Beneath the city two hearts beat, soul cool engines tired and brave,

  Them colored girls cry like violent angels in port authority halls.

  And in the tunnels in a machine you hear the screams

  Drowned out by the roaring trains.

  And layers above are locked in love as he appears on Flamingo Lane.

  And an angel rises from his hand and disappears—down in Jungleland.

  Few who witnessed any of the Bottom Line shows left unimpressed. Clive Davis, in the midst of setting up Arista, took time out to check out his former signing; and shook his head at what an opportunity CBS were missing. In fact, just as Springsteen—after nine months of writer’s block—had again unlocked his muse, CBS were finally delivering on their promise to give his latest album the big push. That fortnight’s issue of Rolling Stone carried a full-page ad on page three which reprinted most of Landau’s Real Paper rave, with the famous “I saw rock & roll future…” line in 36–point type emblazoned across the top of the page, and a photo of the second-album sleeve at the bottom of the page. They had lived up to their part of the bargain. Now all Bruce had to do was produce an album that delivered on the fulsome promise of the shows that spring. It was time to roll tape again. And again.

  * There has been much dispute about what was played on King Biscuit at the time, but certainly broadcast at some point in 1973 were “Spirit In The Night,” “Bishop Danced,” “Mary Queen of Arkansas” and “Song To The Orphans.”

  Chapter 3: 1974–75—Trading In Wings For Wheels

  People thought [Born To Run] was a record about escape. To me…I always felt it was more about searching.—Bruce Springsteen, 1984

  On August 1 1974 Springsteen, the E Street Band, producer Mike Appel and engineer Louis Lahav returned to 914 to commence work on that difficult third album, a make or break effort for all concerned. Despite all the protestations, Springsteen had dutifully recorded the single CBS said they wanted back in May, and the plan now was to use these sessions to put the finishing touches to the two tracks already recorded, “Born To Run” and “So Young And In Love,” to maybe lay down the already-debuted “A Night Like This,” and to secure a usable basic track for “Jungleland,” already earmarked as the centerpiece of the album. The August 1 tape box suggests they cut two takes of “Jungleland,” the second complete. A show in Central Park on the third—the infamous Anne Murray show, when most of a five thousand strong crowd came to see “support act” Springsteen, and many that stayed did so only to heckle the presumptuous Murray—called a temporary halt to the sessions, but when all shows for the next ten days were canceled to continue recording it seemed they were finally getting down to things in earnest.

  In fact, a certain urgency had been injected into these sessions with the news, relayed to Springsteen first, that Sancious and Carter were leaving the band forthwith to form their own jazz-rock combo, Tones, who had their own record deal in the offing. Sancious’s departure was a prospect which had never been too far away. Springsteen had talked about the possibility after the Brown gig in April, openly admitting, “Davey is very jazz-oriented [and] I’m sure he’ll have his own band in years to come, whenever he feels he’s ready.” But he clearly did not expect it to happen quite so soon and when Sancious did break the news, he took it badly:

  David Sancious: I wish I could’ve done it differently. A lot of the guys in the band were shocked. They didn’t know I had [already] told Bruce. There’s no easy way to do that kind of thing, leaving people you really dig. [But] I didn’t leave for any reason other than I wanted to do what I [ended up] doing…There came a point when my desire to do this was so strong that I started to feel that maybe it was taking my attention away from Bruce’s thing. It was only fair for me to take off and make room for someone who wanted to do it with Bruce. When I told Bruce, I sensed that he was disappointed.

  Any headache Sancious caused Springsteen was compounded by taking Carter, too. The gamble the frontman had taken when replacing the fiercely loyal Lopez with a man who had little investment in the E Street ethos had not paid dividends. As Carter openly admitted to Brucezine Backstreets, “I was closer with David than Bruce. He was someone I grew up with. And when he decided to leave the band, I felt I should go too. Plus, we had this music that we always wanted to do, and [now] we had the chance to do it…It was always there that David wanted to leave and that I’d probably go with him.” Clemons, for one, was nonplussed: “‘Boom’ was living with me, and he didn’t tell me he was leaving. I didn’t understand [why].”

  One immediate result was hot August nights at 914 putting “finishing touches” to the three tracks they thought they nearly had in usable form. Of these, “Born To Run” was almost there. Having recorded a basic track live with the band in May, Springsteen had added his vocal (probably on June 26). But now he had all these grandiose ideas for overdubbing instrument on instrument until the whole thing was buried beneath sonic strata. The initial idea was a good one. As he says, he had written “and conceived [the song] as a studio production. It was connected to the long, live pieces I’d written previously by the twists and turns of the arrangement.” In other words, he was trying to jam all the “twists and turns” of the ten-minute “Thundercrack” into a four-minute track. And the song’s live “debut” at The Bottom Line in July suggested he was onto something. The air positively crackled with electricity when the song ended; and then came sustained whoops of affirmation. But he had forgotten that less is sometimes more. As Sancious says on the Wings For Wheels DVD, “Lotsa, lotsa stuff [was overdubbed]—all of which wasn’t used; there was synthesizer stuff, horns, all kinds of stuff.”

  Driven to distraction by Springsteen’s demands, engineer Louis Lahav refused to give up: “It was more than just cutting a song. It was this thing you believed in so much—like a religion…It was [done on] a sixteen-track, but it was packed, like a thirty-two track today. You couldn’t relax in the mix for a second.” In the process they abandoned several mixes with strings, clearly Springsteen’s attempt to emulate one avowed inspiration, the instrumental track “Because You’re Young.” (Recorded by Duane Eddy in 1960, though the song “was made into a real trashy old movie…he had a great sound to his guitar.”) There was also a belief that he could somehow capture a Spectoresque sound appropriate to the seventies:

  Mike Appel: [How was] the great “Born To Run” done? Well, Jeff Barry had told…me how [Spector] produced records. And Bruce says, “I want my records to sound like Phil Spector,” and I said, “I know how that is.” He said, “You do? Well, that’s the way we’re gonna do it.” So I said, “All we need now is a song.” He writes “Born To Run” and announces he’s gonna do it at this open-air gig at Swarthmore College. And…I could just hear the riff. [But] recording it took us six months.

  Production values were not all Springsteen was trying to emulate. The other song cut back in May, “So Young And In Love,” seemed like a pastiche of a mid-sixties Philly single, a self-conscious reaction of sorts to that modern rock sound. Here was Springsteen’s response to the ever-increasing number of recordable tracks available in a studio yield
ing ever thinner-sounding records: pressing rewind. Shortly after these August sessions he informed Melody Maker’s Michael Watts that “it was the genuine, horny old stuff he dug. The Beatles were [too] pop, the Stones he stopped buying after December’s Children. Something to do with the fancy production.” He wanted a sound that was as broad and wide as the songs he had started writing:

  Bruce Springsteen: We approached the record the way that some of the early sixties producers like Phil Spector or Brian Wilson would approach their records, which is to create this sound. It’s sort of an extreme record. The only concept that was around was that I wanted to make a big record, you know, just like a car, zoom, straight ahead; that when that sucker comes on it’s like wide open. No holds barred! [1975]

  Principle and practice, though, would prove reluctant bedfellows. When Appel delivered a rough mix of “Born To Run” to the record company in early August, they were underwhelmed. (He would tell Springsteen in a typed memo that month, “CBS has taken the single that we worked on for three months, to be frank, lightly.”) The recording of “Jungleland” was not going any better. Peter Knobler’s 1975 Crawdaddy profile describes one evening at 914 when “they spent until 4 a.m. playing ‘Jungleland’…fourteen times straight through. Inevitably, someone would blow a line and the entire take would be shot.” Even after they got it right, Springsteen decided to rewrite the last two verses—determined to prove the maxim that no lyric was ever finished, only abandoned. As the departing Carter concluded, “Recording was like trial and error. Bruce had so many different ideas about how the songs should sound. I think we tried them all, and then some.” The problem went deeper: he needed the final say, but didn’t know what he wanted to say.

  Mike Appel: Bruce had a lot of ideas. But he wasn’t knowledgeable about the studio. He had definite ideas, so many that he didn’t know which one to pursue. He had so many ways of expressing the same song…/…The truth of the matter is, Bruce had [now] lost his direction, his energy, and to some extent his confidence. [BTR/CH]

  In the end, they had to call time on the sessions and return to the road just to keep this whole rickety venture afloat. The departures of Sancious and Carter couldn’t have come at a worse time. As Appel spelled out to Bruce in the above memo, “We’ve only worked twenty nights out of a possible 123 nights in the last four months…[And] the record company is already annoyed for having advanced us the money for an LP that they won’t receive for months yet.” In fact, the situation was so bad that Appel’s partner, Jim Cretecos, announced he wanted out, allowing himself to be bought out for a bargain-basement $1500:

  Mike Appel: When I bought him out, I didn’t actually buy him out. Jules [Curz] actually bought his shares in Laurel Canyon. I bought them from Jules six or eight months later. Nobody had the fifteen hundred bucks! Jimmy always felt that he was screwed, that he shouldn’t have sold his rights. [But] I don’t know if it was his idea or his wife’s idea…I handled most of the business stuff during the day, then go in the studio at night. Jimmy was great in the studio at night, no problem. Well, Bruce always wanted the guy who was in the studio to do the sound console in concert—it’s two different skills, but in Bruce’s mind, it was one skill. And [Jim] was just getting together with this woman—he wanted to stay home. He didn’t want to go out on tours, [so] finally I said I’m gonna go on with Bruce, carry the torch so to speak, and I did. Then Bruce, of course, became successful and…[suddenly] you’re talking about something that is quantifiable.

  The outfit’s financial worries even managed to permeate Springsteen’s thick hide. When English rock journalist Jerry Gilbert called that summer, he caught him in an uncharacteristically talkative mood: “We’re at the lowest we’ve ever been right now. It means that if we don’t play every week of the year then we don’t have money…Hopefully I’ll be getting some money from Columbia; and maybe with David Bowie doing some of the songs, that’ll be good…I’d just like to get some income, because in the last two years we’ve just managed to make ends meet. And sometimes we don’t.” Bowie had been threatening to use at least one Springsteen song on his next album. Paul Nelson would tell the full story in the original draft to his 1975 Village Voice Springsteen feature, but then cut it at the last minute:

  The [New Jersey] singer was in [Philadelphia] when David Bowie was recording Young Americans there, and the two met briefly. Things went very well. Bowie had just finished doing a song, and during the break, asked an engineer to order lunch for him. Various musicians wandered about, smoking and talking. When the food came, Bowie retired to a side room, ate it, then started recording again. Springsteen was both shaken and amazed. “He didn’t even ask his band if they wanted anything,” he said, “And when the food came, he didn’t eat it with them.” To a young man from Asbury Park, the power of stardom had been made clear. Not only could he not understand it, he hated it.

  Bowie himself was later asked about this session, and recalled “sitting in the corridor with him, talking about his lifestyle, which was very Dylanesque—you know, moving from town to town with a guitar on his back…Anyway, he didn’t like what we were doing, I remember that. At least, he didn’t express much enthusiasm.” Springsteen was frankly appalled by what Bowie had perpetrated on “It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City,” which he had turned into ersatz white soul, part of what the Brit-rocker called “the squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of muzak rock.”

  If the experience shook Springsteen to the core, it made him doubly determined to keep Heart and Soul the twin pillars of the E Street Band’s collective sound. But the despairing tenor of Appel’s memo had struck home. In October 1974, Springsteen carried his complaint to Paul Williams: “We have to play, because if we don’t, everything falls apart. We don’t make any money off records. We have to go out and play every week, as much as we can. If not, nobody gets paid…There’s no money saved at all. You can’t sell 80,000 records and have any money saved. Unless you’re totally by yourself.” In fact, as Appel recalled, booking agent Sam McKeith “had become the most important factor in our lives. He was getting us three or four college dates a week…so we wouldn’t die.”

  Sure enough, they were soon back on the road again, booked for shows through the fall; and whatever economies were being made, they were not in the band department. After a series of auditions, Springsteen had replaced the most versatile musician in the band and his jazz/rock beatmeister with a classically trained pianist in the Richard Manuel mold, and a timekeeper, pure and simple. Somehow, he still kept the E Street Band moving forward. Not only had he recruited Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg, on keyboards and drums respectively, via a Village Voice ad, but he was now bringing up his engineer’s wife Suki Lahav on backing vocals and violin for certain songs; notably a captivating “Incident on 57th Street,” the set-defining “Jungleland” and a gypsy-caravan rendition of Dylan’s “I Want You” that injected pure mercury into the set.

  He had evidently already been thinking about the Dylan song before talking to Michael Watts in September, going into a verbal riff on the power of those three little words, “‘I want you’—that’s it, the ultimate statement you can make to anybody. What else can you say? And that’s the greatest lyric in the song, those three words, in the whole damn song! I put that on, man, and I get blown away, I get blown down the street, ’cause there’s no hoax there.” Audiences were awestruck by Bruce’s audacious arrangement. So much so that even Springsteen wasn’t always sure what to make of their reaction:

  Bruce Springsteen: I’m not into people screamin’ at me, like Bowie. Once they do that, it’s over. I’ll go back to playing the small clubs. I’m not there for them anyway. I’m there for me, y’know, that’s all. If they can dig it, cool, if not, they don’t have to come. I’ll still be the same. A lot of times the audience thinks that they are there to scream at you. They think that’s what you want, maybe. And that’s not it. I can dig silence after a tune. Like we did Dylan’s “I Want You” and the response was
exactly, well, it was somewhat confused. Some were digging it and others weren’t sure. I can dig that. That got me off. [1975]

  In fact, the fall 1974 shows saw the introduction of a steady stream of sixties classics, as if providing a context by displaying musical roots he was not sure had been previously provided. It was a format he retained through the whole Born To Run era. Yet, when asked the following year by an English reporter about these “oldies,” he snapped brusquely back, “We don’t play no oldies…They may be older songs, but they’re not nostalgic. I was never into that at all…‘Sha La La,’ ‘It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,’ ‘When You Walk In The Room’—they’re great, they’re great today, right now!” He even mastered elements of rockabilly and doo-wop well enough to debut an E Street version of Johnny Rivers’ “Mountain of Love” that spanned both styles, affirming the appositeness of another contemporary comment: “I’m not real familiar with the old r&b artists, but whatever I hear, I digest very quickly, and it comes right back out the way I want it to.”

  Just as in that other lifetime, 1971, he had been delving into parts of his musical heritage he felt he’d missed, or treated too lightly. As he admitted after a 1978 show, “What came out of New Jersey in the early sixties was the girl groups…[and] I was listening to the radio at that time, but it was only later when I was starting to work that I went back and bought the records.” In 1998 Springsteen described how in that summer of uncertainty he would “lie back…at night…and listen to records by Roy Orbison, The Ronettes, The Beach Boys, and other great sixties artists. These were records whose full depth I’d missed the first time around. But now I was appreciating their craft and power.” And then there was Spector, who for a key period in the sixties made every 45 an event: “Phil’s records felt like near chaos, violence covered in sugar and candy, sung by the girls who were sending Roy O. running straight for the antidepressants. If Roy was opera, Phil was symphonies, little three–minute orgasms, followed by oblivion.”