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

by Clinton Heylin

  So when Springsteen introduced pop ballads like Sam Cooke’s “Cupid” or Ben E. King’s “Spanish Harlem” onstage, he was both enhancing his audience’s musical education and demonstrating the band’s versatility and virtuosity. The diffident Lahav was duly impressed by the subtlety of his vision: “Bruce used the violin only for the romantic side of him. I played only on the slow songs. Bruce was in total control…He was willing to accept suggestions; but always, he had the last say.” Reviewers agreed the addition of Lahav was an inspired touch. Susan Ahrens astutely described her as “not so much a member of the band as…Bruce’s personal vision…Her sweet strains of violin and blonde ethereal presence soften Bruce’s tough guy approach to a point of punkish sensitivity.”

  Suki might have been surplus to requirements on the more raucous songs, but she served as tangential inspiration for two originals which entered the set that fall, “A Love So Fine” (aka “So Young And In Love,” with a new punchline) and “She’s The One.” Springsteen later claimed he wrote the latter “because I wanted to hear Clarence play the sax in that solo,” but the spoken intro prior to its live debut suggested it had a more lust-driven inspiration. Someone had the hots for “The One:” “About 20 years ago somebody discovered this beat, [which] was such that husbands would rape their wives…It would turn intellectuals into babbling idiots. Good girls get bad when they hear this beat, and bad girls get worse.”

  At this formative stage, “She’s The One” also looked back to the time when Springsteen last got seriously hurt in a relationship, the “For You” phase of his songwriting (“You were with me in New York the time…I got beat/ And you ran and left me wasted, Mama, right there in the heat”). Compounding such feelings is a deep-seated hatred for the place he came from: “Most of all I hated that town and what they did/ I hated the way they made us live.” This ragbag of conflicting emotions would only resolve itself after the “betrayal” element transferred to “Backstreets.”

  “She’s The One” wasn’t the only song in a continual state of flux throughout fall 1974. “Jungleland” continued to co-opt bits and pieces from other arrangements to its increasingly operatic cause. As Clemons pointed out, “If you listen to a live recording of ‘Incident on 57th Street’ from that time you can hear the opening violin and piano intro that morphed into the opening of ‘Jungleland.’” Likewise, a guitar part that in the spring had served as an intro to “Kitty’s Back” became a lead break in the Sancious-less symphony of sound. The song grew ever more dramatic, visually and aurally. Appel vividly recalls, “I would get chills watching Bruce Springsteen die at the end of ‘Jungleland.’”

  Performed nightly from October 1974 to February 1975, “Jungleland” received ongoing lyrical tweaks. More importantly, violin and sax supplanted the jazz abstractions of Sancious, whilst chimes at both ends of the song-cycle signaled the coming and going of Night. By the time of the fabled February 1975 Main Point show the original final verse, largely rewritten, had been shunted before the “real death waltz” verse. But he was still not quite prepared to shatter the hoodlum’s fantasy, so “in the tunnel of machines, Rat chases his dreams on that forever lasting night.” Surprisingly, given its urban setting, he considered “Jungleland” one of his most personal songs: “The subject I sing about is not necessarily what I sing about. I’ll use situations and probe for the very basic emotions…With some of the newer songs I really have to dig deep inside of me to try and understand how I work, so I can put it in the songs. ‘Jungleland’ is like that; it has a lot of little personal things inside it.”

  But, however well-crafted the new arrangements, and however easily the new members settled into E Street life, there was a suspicion held by certain critics that the parameters of the band were inexorably contracting, that the spirit of improvisation which drove the Sancious-era combo had been fatally compromised. Lenny Kaye, asked to review a show that October in Boston, sensed that Springsteen and Patti Smith, his new employer, were already heading in wildly disparate directions: “I remember getting sent up by the Village Voice to review his show…when he had the girl come out from the wings with the violin. It was in my cross fade of being a writer [and becoming a rock guitarist]; and I began to feel a conflict of interest. I wanted them to be something [else]. I’m into free-form improvisation, finding the noise, and I’m realizing that’s not what they’re about.” The most expansive band in rock had begun to tighten its belt, even as its frontman planned his next record to have a truly mythic sweep:

  Bruce Springsteen: The next album’s…not actually a concept-type thing, but it’s like you get a jigsaw puzzle and you put it down on the floor and it slowly comes together. I’ve been getting batches of songs, many different melodies and lyrics, and putting them all together…Songs around a feeling, a mood. It’s going to need a lot more instruments than the other albums to get that feel, but it can be done. [1974]

  Actually, Springsteen was struggling to capture anything in the studio. And the blame lay squarely at his own brass feet. Instead of working with what he had, he was dreaming of his very own AFM mini-convention. Asked by Jerry Gilbert about his new material in the summer of 1974, he instead talked about how he was “definitely going to add people, possibly a horn section.” Pressed for specifics, he insisted, “Lately I’ve been getting a rush to write new songs and I’ve got quite a few [done]—some short and some long.” He was finding his previous way of songwriting unfulfilling. Which is presumably why he told Robert Hilburn in early July: “The writing is more difficult now. On [the last] album, I started slowly to find out who I am and where I wanted to be. It was like coming out of the shadow of various influences and trying to be me.” The songs were only coming through in fits and starts; not as one unified whole, as had been the case for the last two years.

  Looking back the following summer, he openly admitted: “For a while I lost the groove. I lost the spirit of the thing somewhere. It became very confusing to me. I didn’t understand what was going on. I was getting caged in all the time—in work and ‘stuff.’” Meanwhile, the label still needed an album, and a definitive mix for “Born To Run” which could be used to herald the next hopefully-great installment. Springsteen could no longer even hear its strengths, and in an act of desperation he asked his old(est) friend what he thought. Steve Van Zandt, unversed in production protocol, came from the school that believed, “Any time you spend six months on [one] song, there’s something not going exactly right. A song should take about three hours.” His response surprised Springsteen:

  Steve Van Zandt: Bruce had asked me to come in and check out his new song, “Born To Run.” I thought they were done, so of course me not knowing studio etiquette in those days…I pointed out something in the record that I thought was a screw-up and I was right. It changed the whole record…It was a big moment, because I think people started to realize that I was more than just a friend hanging around, that I also had some insights. Of course, his manager never spoke to me again after this, because I probably cost him another $20,000 to fix it.

  In fact, Appel was in full agreement. But Springsteen had stopped listening to him. Finally, in October, “Born To Run” was mixed, largely by the simple expedient of wiping all the gunk that had been applied since June, and bringing the one guitar figure Steve had heard buried in the mix to the fore. Knowing that the level of anticipation for any new product was growing in Bruceland, Appel decided he would send an advance tape of the song to those radio stations which had proven the most supportive in the last two years. It was something he had done once before, with the seven-minute “Fever” they demoed at 914 in May 1973. As it happens, the (almost) back-to-mono mix on that November 1974 “Born To Run” would prove cleaner and punchier than the one used on the album. No wonder listeners in Cleveland, Houston, Philadelphia and Boston began to call the stations. Unfortunately, CBS had by now remembered they didn’t do nonalbum singles. As of 1974, singles were promotional items, not product in their own right. And they demanded an e
xplanation:

  Mike Appel: CBS was absolutely adamant about not doing anything. They don’t release singles without an album! That’s why they were so infuriated with me when I sent it to like sixteen FM radio stations. Were they ever angry. [’Cause] when the kids go in the store for the album, there is no such thing. The guys in the stores say to the CBS [reps], “Where’s the album?” “There is no album.” “What!! Boy, oh boy.” “Who gave you that?” “Mike Appel.”

  As is the nature of such things, what seemed like a mistake proved a masterstroke, putting pressure on the label to throw their weight behind Bruce even as work on that third album ground to a halt. A further set of sessions in October had produced only a series of in-house demos. Certainly logged then was “A Night Like This,” a song written at a time when he still wanted the whole record to feel “like it could all be taking place in the course of one evening, at all these different locations.” The setting of the song, debuted that June in Toledo, was a familiar one—a topless bar at the Coral Inn, from where the stripper and her lover run “off in the night/ You catch up with her, you take her hand/ You lay your jacket down on the sand/ And she tries to make it all right.” The sleazier aspects of boardwalk life—a constant source of fascination for our one-time altar boy—are never far away. “The fags come in to drink and dance” at the Shady Bell, while the “lost boys hide beneath the pier, getting hard, drinking beer.” Finally, the song pans back to reveal this is the night to end all nights: “Because night after endless night, up and down the boardwalk we search for romance/ But on a night like this, with one last kiss, we die.”

  Also recorded at 914 at this time—if not in late October, then later in the fall at an undocumented 914 session—was the still-vengeful “She’s The One.” There was also “Walking In The Street” aka “Lovers In The Cold,” which Springsteen later claimed he wanted on Tracks but could not find the master. And then there was another song, so personal only a solo version would suffice, “Chrissie’s Song”—which should have been released years ago and let “Walking In The Street” take a hike. All three would appear on the very first bootleg of Springsteen studio outtakes, E Ticket, evidently culled from 914 tapes circa 1973–74, compiled for purposes unknown. *

  But Bruce didn’t think any of these songs were ready to be released. “A Night Like This” would morph into “Lonely Night In The Park,” which would itself become a Record Plant refugee, while parts of the 914 version of “She’s The One” would splinter into the shadier “Backstreets.” “Thunder Road” would take its tune—and a single image, “Babe, I can’t lay the stars at your feet/ Oh, but I think we could take it all, just you and me”—from “Walking In The Street,” and its lyrical thrust from “Chrissie’s Song” (at the expense of the line, “When you’re born with nothing in your hands, baby, it’s your only chance”). The birth pangs of a new Bruce were proving problematic and painful:

  Mike Appel: He was trying to make something great. “Born To Run” was the kick-off song. That was the song that was taking the band in a whole other direction. That was gigantic. And this is the direction we’re going—this is the archetype. So Bruce had to live up to “Born To Run.” But not instantly—you have to put that kinda time and energy into it if you expect to produce anything great. Not [just] good. Portions of the great songs come in flashes, but they have to be woven together. Then there’s that [inherent] nervousness, not being totally sure that you got it.

  Frustrated at himself, Springsteen chose to turn on Appel. Yet Paul Nelson correctly suggested in his 1975 Village Voice piece, “It was Springsteen himself who was responsible for the technical agony and ecstasy.” Nor was Nelson alone in noticing his dissipation of focus in the studio. A CBS rep, on hearing Born To Run, remarked, “It’s true that his recordings have been rather poor, but I have yet to meet anyone who knows more about what he’s after than Springsteen does…The problem is that he’s not interested in documenting what he’s learned.” [BTR]

  Acquiring such a “rep” in such short shrift, Springsteen was clearly as stubborn as a mule with a bull’s head to match. Even his new best buddy Landau told Newsweek, after finally getting together in the studio, “Underneath his shyness is the strongest will I’ve ever encountered. If there’s something he doesn’t want to do, he won’t.” Like the Orson Welles who made Citizen Kane when he was not even twenty-five, the Springsteen who turned twenty-five that September had “the confidence of ignorance,” and he was not about to settle for second best; and he had yet to give up on attempting perfection.

  Bruce Springsteen: I wrote ambitiously. From the beginning I wrote wildly big with the idea of taking the whole thing in and being definitive in some fashion. I think the show took on that approach also…I was shooting for the moon. And I guess somewhere inside, I felt like I could hit it. [1992]

  He was convinced “writing these mini-epics…were meant to make you feel something auspicious was gonna occur.” Central to this conceit was still “Jungleland.” In fact, as Clemons wrote in Big Man, “In the beginning, I think Bruce was going for a rock opera kind of thing about this character called the Magic Rat. He had lots of songs and themes that were built around this narrative he had in his head. Eventually he let that go, but I know it frustrated him.” A handwritten track-listing for Album #3 dating from spring 1974 devoted a whole side to a four-part “Jungleland” suite—divided into “From The Churches To The Jails,” “The Hungry & The Hunted,” “Between Flesh & Fantasy” and “Jungleland” itself—with “Zero and Blind Terry” inserted at mid-point.

  He was going to have to (re)learn about record-making if they were ever gonna get out of 914 alive. Unfortunately, the man he turned to in his confusion was not Appel, but rather Jon Landau, who later stated (under oath) that in one of their first conversations that spring “He asked me about the concept of production. He said, ‘I noticed in your [album] review you mentioned production. I don’t really know what production means. What is it that producers do?’”

  By then, Springsteen had aimed an ill-conceived dig in Appel’s direction: “In the studio I want somebody who can help me where my weaknesses are, rather than anyone ordering me around. That’s not where it’s at for me. If I didn’t know how to play or arrange or do nothing, then it would be different. [But] I know what I want to hear.”

  Between October 1974 and February 1975, the third album lay in limbo. What work was done—and it was minimal—failed to discernibly advance the process. Finally, sometime in February—according to Landau’s later deposition—Springsteen asked the critic to join them in the studio to see if he could identify the problem. Some of the issues were essentially practical—Weinberg was desperately in need of a little drumming direction. But mainly Springsteen needed to settle on an arrangement and stick with it. Landau told Springsteen he could provide some answers:

  Bruce Springsteen: There reached a point where what we knew wasn’t enough; it was the third time I’d been in the studio, and I knew the sounds I wanted to hear…You’re taking something that is not real, it’s in the air, and you’re trying to make it a physical thing. It’s an idea, sounds in your head, and you have to make them exist…It reached a point where…we were not [even] getting close. Then Jon came in and he was able to say, “Well, you’re not doing it because of this, and this, and these…are blocking what you’re doing.” [1977]

  Perhaps the real problem was breaking in a band parts of which had minimal studio experience. As Garry Tallent says, “When we started [Born To Run] we were still trying to find out exactly what we did together and how that all worked.” Springsteen, though, did not want “a strictly professional set-up, because I did not want to contain my talents in that box.” Bringing in session musicians was a nonstarter. They would have to work with what they had.

  Landau would later suggest there was a fundamental aesthetic difference in approach, telling Michael Watts in 1978, “I didn’t think there was any real point of view, a focus to the sound, on the albums Mike Appel pro
duced. The sound was not integrated into the total aesthetic.” As it presumably was on Back In The USA. Yet Appel was as anxious as anyone to break the logjam. If Springsteen wanted Landau to come on board, Appel was prepared to go along with him, even if a producer-critic with nominal studio experience and a high opinion of his musical instincts did not seem like the answer:

  Mike Appel: Bruce is a taskmaster. He would get everyone to play everything flawlessly, and we just recorded it. [But] “Blinded By The Light” was not “Born To Run” [or] “Jungleland”—it didn’t demand that kind of attention. There was a problem with the piano [on the 914 “Jungleland”]; when you put your foot down, it had some kinda squeak. But Landau took umbrage, he said the studio was not up to snuff, “Look at this pedal.” So I said, “If everyone is agreed we go elsewhere, we’ll go elsewhere. Any suggestions? Record Plant seems okay.” [But] I thought it would go much quicker. Bruce was normally bang-bang-bang, but not this time. He met in match in terms of material, production values, arrangement values. It wasn’t gonna be like anything before!

  What Appel did not fully appreciate was how high a value Landau would place on what he could bring to the process—demanding “points” on the finished product, half of which would come from CBS, half from Laurel Canyon. But he had more pressing matters to deal with. The E Street Band was again wracked with division at the end of February as Suki Lahav took leave of the band and, along with husband Louis, of the USA. According to Appel, “Quite simply, Bruce fell in love with Suki and she with him. She then had to get out to try and save the marriage.”[DTR] This was presumably the fraught situation that prompted Louis to comment in 2010, “I prefer not to say [why I left the States]…[but] I felt a Mack truck might have run me over if I’d stayed one more day.”