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

by Clinton Heylin

  Bruce Springsteen: [Darkness] couldn’t be a warm, innocent album…because it ain’t that way, it wasn’t that way for me anymore. That’s why a lot of pain had to be there…But still, I came out of it…I had a big awakening in the past two, three years. Much bigger than people would think…Realized a lot of things about my own past. So it’s [all] there on the record. [1978]

  The onset of an existential dark night of the soul was probably the direct result of the end of his relationship with an emotionally drained Darvin. Although he soon embarked on another fiery relationship with another “rock ’n’ roll chick,” photographer Lynn Goldsmith, his inability to hang onto Darvin—the paradigm for every spirited lover to date—and time spent with his sister and her husband, seeing them “living the lives of my parents,” had made him reevaluate a life which still repeated patterns set in his youth. As he said in 1996 of these years, “I was locked into a very specific and pretty limited mode of behavior…I had no capability for a home life or an ability to develop anything more than a glancing relationship.” It was a journey’s end of sorts for the ex-innocent:

  Bruce Springsteen: On The Wild, the Innocent, I bought my band in and that had real warm songs and a lot of characters, and…a kinda in-society type feeling. Even if it was low-rent. And then, on Born To Run…it still maintains some warmth, but there was a certain element, a certain fear, that started to come in. I don’t know why. On this [fourth] record, it’s less romantic—it’s got a little more isolation…/…All my albums connect up, but in a particularly conscious way [they] only [do so] on the last two, [where] the characters tend to look toward themselves more…Y’see, on the old stuff there’s a lot of characters and groups of people; and as it goes along it thins out, people drop by the wayside, until on Born To Run it’s essentially two: it’s a guy and a girl. And here on Darkness, there’s a lotta times when there’s just one. In the end, on the last song, the title song, there’s just one…just one. [1978]

  “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” written early in 1976 and attempted at that first week of sessions, was absent from all the early sequences, perhaps because he was still some way from figuring where it fit. On the only circulating alternate take—a slower version with rockabilly undertones, probably from the June 6 session—Springsteen has the first verse but largely bluffs his way through the remaining two. It seems he was still “laying down demos.”

  At this stage, it was “Racing In The Street” that generally formed the centerpiece of rough sequences. As Landau told Nelson, this potential classic “was [also] written before the album. We hadn’t actually rehearsed ‘Racing In The Street’; but we knew we were going to do it, and it was from ‘before.’ It was written around the time of ‘The Promise.’ ‘Something in the Night,’ ‘Candy’s Room’ (sic), ‘Racing In The Street’ were [all] part of the original concept of the album. And ‘Darkness’ was, too.” “Racing In The Street” was the song where he did get the girl, but things still turned to shit. It was a point he would embellish on the Born In The USA tour when the song was prefaced with a powerful “walk a mile in my shoes” monologue:

  There was this strip little ways in off this river, and I guess it was like an old junkyard where folks would bring stuff down from town and leave it off there, just to rust out in the rain. There was this little clearing where on weekends we’d get together and that was where I first met her…When we first started going out, it was like it always is when you first start going out with somebody, you know, everything is great, you know, laughing at each other’s stupid jokes. We had a real good time that summer, but I don’t know what happens, I don’t know what changes people. Time. Time passes, and she got to where she didn’t talk as much as she used to, didn’t like going out at night and started hiding my keys, so I couldn’t take the car out. We were good friends for a long time and I know that she understood that when I took the car out, and when I won, that something was happening to me…That was the night that we got out of there, we just packed up our bags…we’re just gonna keep going…and keep searching.

  This evocative rap was clearly a way of explicating the song’s final couplet, “Tonight my baby and me we’re gonna ride to the sea/ And wash these sins off our hands,” lines he apparently inserted to make “sense of the journey the guy’s taking…How do you carry your sins? That’s what the people in ‘Racing in the Street’ are trying to do.” If the expiry date on residual Catholic guilt was still a way off, these lines were intended to suggest some hope in the darkness:

  Bruce Springsteen: At the end of “Racing In The Street,” what I was trying to show is that through all that, and through all the disappointments—in the face of all that, that darkness out there—you still hold on to some element of hope, the belief that somewhere out there, there’s some place better than where you are—and if not, [that] at least there’s some value in the search. [1978]

  It is true that the first take recorded at Atlantic—the so-called “dying in the street” version—lacks any such redemptive coda. But redemptive codas would generally be in short supply on a final album that lacked a “Frankie,” and turned the once-affirmative “Something In The Night” into a wreck on the highway. In fact, finding “some value in the search” became the veritable key to an album that shifted focus with every new song Bruce brought to Atlantic.

  Having been inspired for so long in the months leading up to the sessions, Springsteen seemed reluctant to take such largesse at face value. Instead, he worked on songs that took the album somewhere that, for all its hothouse intensity, was monochromatic. At the center of this whirlpool, there was precious little light and no shade. He would also be guilty of denying fans—at least those without access to bootlegs—evidence that there had been a missing link, a Basement Tapes to his very own John Wesley Harding, an intermediary “Album #4:”

  Bruce Springsteen: Rock ’n’ roll has always been this joy, this certain happiness that is, in its way, the most beautiful thing in life. But Rock is also about hardness and coldness and being alone. With Darkness it was hard for me to make those things coexist. How could a happy song like “Sherry Darling” coexist with “Point Blank” or “Darkness on the Edge of Town”? I could not face that. [1980]

  A song he began at the last Atlantic sessions in August gave the first real inkling that he was finally coming to terms with a difficult upbringing. Sung as one side of a conversation with his Dad (“Papa, go to bed now, it’s getting late”), “Independence Day” was the start of a dialogue-in-song that remained one step removed for some time to come, largely because, as Springsteen said in 1992, “[My Dad] was never a big verbalizer, and [so] I kinda talked to him through my songs. Not the best way to do that…but I knew he heard them.” At the same time as he was singing “Independence Day”—and, indeed, “Factory” and “Adam Raised A Cain” for Doug—he seemed to be making the whole album as a statement to his sister, who was struggling to keep her head above water in her Jersey shore home:

  Bruce Springsteen: I got a sister and [her and her husband] work two jobs a day, and I go over to their house, and somebody’s trying to take their house away…and I see them, and they’re trying to hold on. It’s a fight just to hold on to their beliefs…/…When I go home, that’s what I see. It’s no fun. It’s no joke. I see my sister and her husband, they’re living the lives of my parents…That’s why my album is the way it is. It’s about people that are living the lives of their parents…It’s also about a certain thing, where they don’t give up. [1978]

  The sense that he was the one who got away imbued a number of songs written between sessions, of which “Adam Raised A Cain”—which did not enter the equation until November—was the most angst-ridden. Originally called “Daddy Raised A Cain,” it owed more of a debt to the famous 1956 movie of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, starring James Dean, than to the original story in Genesis, to which he seems to have paid very little attention as a child (or as an adult, if his interpretation of original sin was, “You’re born
into this life paying for the sins of somebody else’s past”). Likewise, his depiction in an early take of his father’s ghost “haunt[ing] these empty rooms rattling his chains” seemed to owe more to Alastair Sim’s A Christmas Carol than any section of the Old Testament.

  According to Springsteen, when he started writing this song he “went back [to The Bible], trying to get a feeling for it.” But he still expressed dismay after he attended a family funeral at this time, and “all my relatives were there…They’re all in their thirties, my sister and all, and they all feel the same way I do. But [still] their kids go to Catholic school and to church every Sunday. They’re really under the gun to this Catholic thing.”

  “Adam Raised A Cain” finally brought out the gunslinger in the ex-lead guitarist. Landau recalled it being one song where “we did a lot of takes—every take another fantastic guitar solo…[But in the end] we made the right selection…Everything that was left out, there was a good reason for leaving it out.” Meanwhile, Landau argued long and hard for the inclusion of “Independence Day” on Darkness. In the end, though, he found Springsteen adamant: “He didn’t want that weight…The only problem with the way we work is that it…cuts no ice with him, the argument, ‘Jesus, this deserves to be heard’…His attitude is, they become other songs.”

  Perhaps surprisingly, at no point did either Landau or Springsteen ever consider making Darkness a double album. Bruce certainly would have had enough clout at CBS to demand it, but as Landau stated at the time, “I never thought we were [working on one]. [Sure,] we have enough material for a double record, but we don’t have a double record. The reason the material was removed was because it was not a part of the unity of what he was doing.” (Springsteen was terser still: “It’s much easier to centralize on one record.”)

  Actually, by the time they began to switch from Atlantic Studios to the Record Plant at the end of August, they probably had enough for three records.* Yet still he refused to produce a working sequence, or begin mixing this album of strong songs. Even as the sessions stretched into September, Springsteen continued using the two expensive New York studios as his very own private rehearsal room, even allowing superfan Barry Rebo to capture the interminable sessions on open-reel video (for a documentary that would remain forever “in the works”). Springsteen later described his then-regime thus: “I can remember working really hard on [Darkness]…I just used to sit in my room eight hours a day and…I just worked out each song, verse by verse, real specifically.” Nor was Landau offering the dissenting voice. His view was that, “[Although] we rehearsed for quite a while before we actually started recording the album…it makes more sense to be in the studio: to work these things through to their logical conclusion.” So much for providing “focus and direction”:

  Jon Landau: It began as a bunch of songs [which had] been around for a while; and we started out by experimenting with different approaches, how much overdubbing we wanted to get involved in, how much live recording. The first period of time was largely spent in evolving what the recording approach was going to be—which…evolved into a live type of recording…getting that real sense of the band playing together. [1978]

  Not only were songs worked on multiple times, but in almost every case they would spend precious studio time (and tape) recording tracks that were really not finished. It was 914 all over again. As an unnamed band member told one biographer, “Bruce [was] coming in most afternoons with a new first draft…It was like painting the fucking George Washington Bridge.” Yes, he had previously “work[ed] a lot on the lyrics before we record[ed] a song,” but he was then recording these rough drafts. Given that he had spent eighteen months preparing for these sessions—and rehearsed the band extensively beforehand—the approach smacked of indulgence, openly encouraged by Springsteen’s latest surrogate father figure:

  Jon Landau: For Bruce, the easiest thing is getting the idea for the beginning of the song, the hardest thing is finishing. Some songs we’d get 99% of the way through, and he couldn’t get that last one percent that finishes it. Sometimes he’d forge ahead with the same song, [sometimes] he’d circle back to it. A great deal of the time was spent in the evolution of the content, both musically and lyrically. One month it would be a certain set of ten songs, another month it would be half that set, half another set. Songs kept appearing, disappearing and reappearing in different forms…circling, circling, circling, getting closer to the center. [1978]

  By the time they had definitively switched the sessions to the Record Plant in mid-September, Springsteen had fully abandoned “Album #4” and was working on Album #5. When he arrived at work on September 12 he had two new songs: “Prove It All Night” and “Ramrod.” The first of these began life by using band arrangement of an old song. On the first take of “Prove It All Night,” he sang the lyrics to “Something In The Night,” save for the refrain, “Prove it all night, I’ll prove it all night for you,” and one “new” element from a draft lyric he’d scrawled in his notebook, “Well, baby wants a Cadillac, and wants a dress of blue/ And honey, if I can I’d get these things for you/ Girl, I got a hunger, I hunger I can’t resist/ There’s so much that I want, right now I want one kiss/ To seal our fate tonight.” It would take him four more sessions to really prove it all night.

  After another short break, sessions resumed on September 26. Again, though, he spent most of the time working on songs written in the interim, even as he continued to play the likes of “The Promise,” “Because The Night” and “Independence Day.” Of the five new songs, “Someday (We’ll Be Together),” “Breakout,” “Down By The River (Say Sons)” and “Ain’t Good Enough For You” all had the mark of Outtake on them (although he worked on “Someday” and “Breakout” for days). The one song that suggested real promise was “The Promised Land,” nodding to Chuck Berry in its title, but nowhere else. If Berry used the term ironically, referring to the California he was vainly trying to reach throughout his 1964 classic, Springsteen displayed no such irony. Nowhere in the song was he celebrating “the promised land.” Another ditty of defiance, this one literally spat in the face of a portent of biblical proportions—“I’m heading straight into the storm”—having taken its cue from a single stray line in his lyric notebook, “Hot rod angels rumblin’ through a promised land.” Now that did sound like a Chuck Berry line. (It ended up in “Racing in the Street.”)

  At the end of September another ten-day break was called; but again he returned not with some cogent idea of what to do with the forty-plus songs he already had, but with four more songs—“City of Night,” “The Ballad,” “English Sons” and “I’m Going Back,” all of which he cut in a single session and then promptly forgot for three decades. A further fortnight sojourn from the studio resulted in still more new songs, one of which he set to the same “Bo Diddley” riff as “I’m Going Back” (and, indeed, “She’s The One”), “Preacher’s Daughter.” Then there was the chilling “Iceman.” Each was an inspired addition to this relentless accruing process.

  “Preacher’s Daughter,” one of the most atmospheric things recorded at the Record Plant, was a five-minute-plus exhortation of love for a preacher’s daughter in the teeth of parental disapproval, and as such ticks just about every psychoanalytical box a good Catholic boy could. But rather than being wracked by feelings of fear and loathing, the boy has developed a sense of humor (“It’s a long walk to heaven on a road filled with sin/ They’d better open up the freeway to let me in”), and a cinematic gift for visual imagery: “Well, just as I got the preacher’s daughter ready for a light/ There’s a V-8 on fire and something ain’t right/ And like a she-devil howlin’ from the gates of hell/ Goddamn! Here come the preacher in his Coupe De Ville.”

  “Iceman” displayed the other side of the coin, a case of Springsteen drawing back the curtain on a troubled psyche only to quietly retire the results. And who can blame him with lines like, “Once they tried to steal my heart, beat it right outta my head/ But, baby, they didn’t know that I
was born dead/ I am the iceman, fighting for the right to live.” Maybe the stress from months of sessions was finally getting to him. At least this time he has a girl by his side. It is the “preacher’s girl” again, and the pair are literally hellbent: “We’ll take the midnight road right to the devil’s door/ And even the white angels of Eden with their flamin’ swords/ Won’t be able to stop us.” In the end, though, “The Iceman” became one more memory he chose to suppress.

  These killer cuts—both destined for the scrapheap (where “Preacher’s Daughter” still resides)—were realized in a single inspired October night when the album returned to the main road. At the same time, Springsteen finally got the right coordinates to “The Promised Land” and attempted something called “New Fast Song.” He had finally found room for Candy. Now he just needed Adam to raise Cain, which he duly did a fortnight later—after spending equal time on “I Want To Be Wild” and “Give The Girl A Kiss,” the kinda songs he’d “bring in…to break the tension in the studio”—and he had an album that fit an increasingly bleak worldview:

  Bruce Springsteen: My main concern was making an honest record…The characters in the songs are people who are inside the system and don’t know how to get outside. They’re not, like, cerebral. A lot of their thing is based on a certain bluntness, a certain force. I still see a lot of them when I go home. They don’t know what to do. They didn’t find a guitar; they didn’t find anything…[And] I wanted a certain intensity. [1978]