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

by Clinton Heylin

  Considering the contracts he already had, Appel was being generous to a fault in his attempts to broker a deal. Whereas Landau was focused solely on the prize proffered by Bruce himself, who had already told the ex-critic, “Look, this is definitely the last record I am doing with Mike.” According to Landau, “What was on [Springsteen]’s mind was his failure to get his ideas on tape,” for which he blamed the man who had recorded his first album in one week and his second in two; not the man whose presence helped turn the Record Plant sessions into a three-month slog.

  Fixated on a misdirected sense of betrayal, Springsteen showed himself to be a lousy strategist. The management contract with Appel had a year to run, and the production deal had only two albums to run. And it would have been the easiest thing in the world to OK a live album that counted as one of these. So, all he needed to do to extract himself from Appel’s loving grip was record a single studio album with a producer of Appel’s choosing—and he had been offered a list of other potential producers, every one of whom had a track record which made Landau’s slim credits look risible—while seeing out the management deal. Yes, Appel would continue to get his share of the publishing but, as he had already indicated, that was itself open to negotiation. But Bruce remained the same arrested adolescent his parents once despaired of; and what the suit became about was a truculent teenager getting his way. As his next girlfriend told one biographer, “Bruce had rules of behavior and everyone was afraid to cross him.” Appel, though, was not.

  The opposition’s initial strategy, based on the erroneous belief that Springsteen had been ripped off by Appel, was abandoned the minute he brought in new counsel, in the form of Michael Tannen. As Appel’s own counsel, Leonard Marks, informed Rolling Stone, “Springsteen’s new lawyers saw that [the accountant’s report] was useless because it was so biased and full of holes that you could drive a truck through it.” So Tannen went with “conflict of interest” instead. Surely, Appel acting as producer-publisher-manager was “unconscionable,” whatever the careers of Andrew Loog Oldham or Joe Boyd might suggest? But, as Appel points out, “They had forgotten…I was not his manager for months after he signed the publishing-production contract. That was a fatal mistake. They didn’t look at the dates on the contract.”

  In fact, he had only become manager at Springsteen’s insistence, and against his better judgment. In his countersuit, Appel also challenged the notion that Springsteen was the only artist here. He rightly resented the painting of himself as a mere businessman. He asked the court to recognize that the “plaintiff’s exclusive right to Springsteen’s services as a recording artist, and its right to produce each of Springsteen’s albums is of great artistic value, as well as commercial value, to plaintiff.”

  But what really did for Springsteen was a particular clause in the original Laurel Canyon contract, signed before he ever “specifically assented” to the CBS-Laurel Canyon production agreement, or had browbeat Appel into managing him. It read: “If the fulfilling of this Agreement shall become impossible by reason of ‘force majore’ or any other cause outside the control of the parties hereto, then either party shall be entitled…to suspend the operation of this Agreement until such time as such fulfillment shall again be possible…During said suspension, Artist shall not be able to record for any other person, firm or corporation in violation of the terms of this Agreement.”

  Michael Tannen, who certainly knew how to litigate, still remained confident of ultimate victory, even if the self-assured lawyer felt obliged to inform Springsteen “I think we should fight this, but it’s your life.” His response was never in doubt: “I’m fighting this to the end. If it takes another ten years, I don’t care.” [MOTH] One doubts he’d have given the same answer if he had bothered to ask an older, wiser John Fogerty, who would indeed have to surrender a decade of his career to get away from Fantasy Records. In 2010, Bruce could still believe, “It wasn’t a lawsuit about money, it was about control. Who was going to be in control of my work and my work-life…If I don’t go in the studio, I don’t go in the studio, but I don’t go in the studio under somebody else’s rules.”

  His inability to surrender the slightest element of control—all in the name of art—would ultimately bring his career as an abidingly creative artist to a juddering halt. As for the lawsuit, it merely ensured he paid off one devil he once trusted with the largesse of a devil he never trusted (CBS), all the while forsaking the opportunity to record at a time when he had songs which needed to be caught in the moment. He himself made this point to the court, albeit in an act of craven self-justification: “I have started countless numbers of songs which I have been unable to develop to their potential for lack of a proper recording opportunity…Many of these songs will never be finished.”

  And the first of these was “Frankie,” a song he would still be trying to capture at the Born In The USA sessions, unwilling to accept he had already caught it in all its transcendent glory at a handful of April 1976 shows. After suffering another nine-month gap waiting on his errant muse, the disillusioned “future of rock ’n’ roll” found a way to move forward that suggested a natural progression from the “search” songs on Born To Run, while taking one step back from the existential angst of Darkness. There is still magic in the night, a belief that “in the darkness there’ll be hidden worlds that shine.” In performance that spring he even gave the song its very own Morrisonesque coda, seeking to exorcise the girl’s abiding sadness by whispering (to her) over and over the single mantra, “Walk softly tonight little angel, into the shadows where the lovers go/ Talk softly to me tonight angel, whisper your secrets so soft and low,” a couplet that could have walked all the way from Cypress Avenue. When words finally failed him, the Big Man stepped in to lead the song gently into the night. Magnificent.

  It had taken Van Morrison a series of bitter disputes with managers who had signed him to far more egregious contracts than anything Appel produced, plus an extended spell away from his hometown, to produce the majestic Astral Weeks. And now Springsteen, in the early months of 1976, also began writing songs which looked back in anger and regret. Even before he began “Frankie,” he had penned a prototype “Darkness On The Edge of Town” that addressed lost promises: “Billy, remember when we were younger, seemed like there was some strange kinda magic out there/ Me and you, we was always runnin’, not worrying, didn’t care/ You got a good life but Billy I’m still foolin’.” It would eventually become the last piece of the jigsaw-puzzle, a whole album about home (“When I wrote ‘Racing In The Street,’ that’s like home. And ‘Darkness On The Edge Of Town.’ ‘The Promise,’ too”):

  Bruce Springsteen: Most of the material on Darkness is confrontational. It’s about somebody that turns the car around and heads back to town…That was where I felt there were so many people who had lost that part of themselves…and when they did, if they didn’t die physically—which many of them did, much younger than they should have…they died somewhere inside, [and] that just cut them off from everything and everybody else that meant something. [GD]

  These growing pangs had been set in motion by the simple expedient of “making it.” Already in September 1975 he was describing his hometown thus, “It’s like desperate faces. You seen all these guys in Asbury Park and [it’s] like, there’s nothing else.” By May 1976, he was taking time to seriously think about such things: “I had all that time off, and I spent a lotta time home…[and saw] what my old friends were doing, what my relatives were doing. How things were affecting them, and what their lives were like…/…During the lawsuit, I understood that it’s the music that keeps me alive, and my relationships with my friends, and my attachment to the people and the places I’ve known. That’s my lifeblood.”

  He had found a subject matter close to his heart. From hereon it would become the central joist to his life’s work. In the only interview he gave during the lawsuit, he insisted: “I can take anything that’s thrown in my direction…[and] not be abused by it, just take it, chan
nel it, put it in perspective, and then turn it into some kind of thing…that’ll give me the strength to go the next mile.” That is certainly what he was doing now. The immediate result was some of the most potent songs of his career. One of these, “The Promise,” the highlight of many shows between August 1976 and July 1978, changed everything.

  It is the song on which, in a sense, Springsteen’s whole songwriting pivots. From his past he drew on the triumphalist “Thunder Road,” but now he turned its central motif to a darker purpose in a repeated refrain (“Thunder Road, we were gonna take it all and throw it all away”).* The promise itself was an ideal; the ultimate expression of the integrity he set such store in, which could still be found in the music. As he told a Stockholm audience in 1981, “In the rock and roll music that I heard [on the radio], there was a promise that there was a meaning in life, a meaning in living…but it’s a promise that gets easily broken today. There’s nobody but yourself, I guess, that can make that promise come true.” The promise was also something greater. As he said at this time, “The promise as such is connected with human nature, and everyone’s longing for redemption. It’s about proving your own possibilities.”

  There were, however, some who interpreted the song to be “about” the lawsuit, finding layers of meaning in the sign-off couplet, “When the promise was broken/ I cashed in a few of my own dreams.” In fact, the voicing of this interpretation in print led to wholesale rewrites, which seemed at least partly designed to remove any reference to the psychological scars from the Great Hype: “I won big once and I hit the coast, oh but somehow I paid the big cost/ Inside I felt like I was carrying the broken spirits of all the other ones who lost.”

  “Something In The Night,” the other new song Springsteen debuted at a Red Bank August residency, itself referenced the early live versions of “The Promise” at least twice—“Sleeping with a stranger in the backseat of a borrowed car” and “There’s something dying on the highway tonight”—confirming they were of a piece. In the original 1976 version he picks up another “crazy chick” in verse two—probably a cipher for current crazy love, Karen Darvin—trying in a single night, an endlessly rewritten final verse and a single act of copulation, to capture that “something in the night:” “I pick this chick up hitch-hiking, she just hung her head out the window and she screamed,/ She was looking for someplace to go, to die or be redeemed/ For all the ones caught laughin’ in the face of the devil, waitin’ ’till the moment is right/ Somewhere we’ll surrender to the beauty of something in the night.”

  That version, captured in still-life perfection from an August ’76 Red Bank show on the 2010 Thrill Hill Vault DVD, may be the single most evocative moment of Springsteen onstage on film. The song would even fleetingly acquire an exquisite horn arrangement, for the October ’76 New York Palladium shows, along with a lyric rewrite which shattered the lovers’ cozy dream—“When we found the things we loved, they were crushed and dying in the dirt”—leaving the singer alone, contemplating death and redemption.

  He’d been thinking a lot about both in the past nine months. And at moments such as these, even his girlfriend couldn’t get inside. As he informed Peter Knobler in an unguarded moment the previous fall, “Karen says, ‘Sometimes I don’t know you,’ and then other times she knows me real well. There must be times when you say, hey, yeah, that’s you, and other times when there’s a side of me that, like, you would not know.”

  That secretive side had always been there. It was something the observant Michael Watts noted as early as 1974, when fame was a goal, not a reality: “In pursuing this self-discovery, away from the stage he’s grown self-contained, untouched by people in the final analysis. Although easy and friendly, not a bit aloof, he’s still a lone star, moving on his own, independent trajectory.” It was a trait the rock-singer now embraced, even as he admitted, “It gets harder as it goes along. I guess it’s because you got to fight your way through more and more of the bullshit. You have to go a little farther than you went the last time. Go a little deeper down into yourself.” He was also discovering that a little distrust of his fellow man might be a healthy thing:

  Bruce Springsteen: I was always the kind of guy who liked to walk around and slip back into the shadows…Most people are all right, but…you gotta keep a certain distance…In the end, it’s always myself…I [just] don’t think you can completely trust people…There’s a point where, when it really comes down, I think everybody will turn. There’s just a point where other things become important. [1977]

  As he lost control of the things he held to be most precious—his girlfriend, his music, his career—he tightened down that inner lid, allowing any personal confusion to come out only in song. Even the traditional refuge of the working stiff—a local bar and drinking buddies—he denied himself. As he revealed to a journalist on the Darkness tour, “I suppose if I wanted to get drunk I’d go to a bar—on my own—with the precise intention of getting right out of it. But I wouldn’t want anybody else to see [me].”

  He didn’t even seem to relate particularly well to fellow futurists in modern music. When he ended up cruising Cleveland in a rustbucket, the day after a triumphant April 1976 show at the Allen Theater, with Creem’s Robert Duncan and Pere Ubu’s Peter Laughner, he only dimly realized that the man at the wheel was as out of control as he was in control; or that the hyper Laughner, who frequented working men’s bars with the precise intention of “getting right out of it,” would drink himself to death within fourteen months, age 24. While the lugubrious Laughner drove like a dervish, a frazzled Springsteen regaled the pair with stories of the great Frat-rock bands, a passion he never quite abandoned. It was as close as Springsteen ever got to Cleveland’s nascent punk scene.

  Another punk scene had also been sprouting wings in New York while he had been at the wheel on E Street. And after his own successful Bottom Line radio broadcast, he and Landau took in Patti Smith’s end-of-year Bottom Line gig-cum-broadcast on the back of her own LP triumph, Horses. She feigned disinterest: “He’s never really entered my consciousness…That night at the Bottom Line all anyone was whispering was that Bruce Springsteen was there. So what? If John Lennon was there I might have a heart attack.” Bruce felt they shared a common bond, even if she didn’t. When Patti and her boyfriend, Blue Öyster Cult’s Allen Lanier, took in the last two shows at the Palladium in November 1976, Bruce dedicated the highly appropriate Animals anthem “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” to the pair. When Patti returned to The Bottom Line for more end-of-the-year shows, he strapped on a guitar and joined in. But Patti remained aloof, and Springsteen gleaned this was another scene to which he was not invited.

  The only time he really felt like he belonged to a band of brothers was onstage with the E Street Band. He fully meant it when he said, at this time, “I play because I don’t have a choice. If you have a choice then you should quit. If I wasn’t playing at the Palladium I’d be playing at home in Asbury Park. I can’t be stopped. I can’t stop myself.” This obsession, real and all-consuming, excluded even those nearest and dearest. As he openly admitted the following March, “Nothing means as much to me…I can’t tell anyone that they’re the most important thing in my life, because nothing in my life could ever be as important as this.” It was a realization he had arrived at when just a teenager, and he still felt the exact same way: “If you’re dealing with people 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.” It was even dawning on Darvin that he meant these things he was saying; especially after she caught a number of shows in the fall of 1975 when Springsteen prefaced Ike and Tina Turner’s “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” with a telling tale:

  “I just had a birthday, and I was noticing I was getting old, you know, and I was watching all these friends of mine, realized that almost all the cats that I played with in bands, years back…they’d all gotten married and settled down.
How many married folks here in the crowd ? Who’s married here? That’s not many, there’s a lot of people out there still messing around…What started me thinking ’bout it was this guy came to my house, a few weeks ago, knocked on the door, right. I went to the door and this guy dressed in a suit and a briefcase was selling insurance. I knew I recognized the guy right away. He looked real familiar but I couldn’t remember where, and I realized I went to high school with him…He said he’d got married and had four or five kids and was doing this gig, you know. So it started me thinking about all that stuff…All you married people can tell me if this is the way it was when you got married.”

  After one such show he admitted to one scribe, “I couldn’t bring up kids. I couldn’t handle it. I mean, it’s too heavy, it’s too much…I just don’t see why people get married.” What had brought him to this place of inner certitude was spending time with his sister Virginia and her husband Micky. Indeed, one night he dedicated the above song to them, “Ginny, you can tell me if this was the way it was when he proposed to you.” On the penultimate night of the spring 1977 tour, he became more expansive on the subject of relatives as people with not the least idea how to live or when to die:

  “[My] relatives are funny. They’re like all these reformed greaser type cats that got married…[with] ten kids all running around and screaming and stuff…Anyway, this got me thinking about my sister. She married this guy who lived down on Route 9, which was like heavy…There was these like Mongolians or something, they had this big gang out on Route 9—she’s with her husband now and I’m an uncle, you know. It started me thinking about this fellow who decides that he’s finally through screwing around, messing around, he’s gonna settle down. [’Cause] he’s found somebody he liked.”