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

by Clinton Heylin

“Intensity” became the mantra Springsteen would adhere to even when the wheels fell off on the promotional road—“I drew from things that I liked on my last album, the drums and the power: I wanted a certain intensity,”—as he set about crafting an album out of solid Rock. For all their repeated discussions about direction, he and Landau kept coming back to a punklike aesthetic. As Landau told Nelson, “We [often] used to discuss the sound of the record as it evolved…What kind of sound-picture was the record suggesting? We did want an unglamorized sound. There was [to be] no sweetening. We wanted the coffee black.”

  Springsteen wanted it to be a double espresso sonic shot, “to be just relentless…a barrage of the particular thing I had in mind,” as he explained the following July. What they ultimately got, or so Landau insisted, was something which was “clear without being too clean—without being too studio, [or] too neat. A real strong middle, real strong bass drum, real good highs…What we tried to do this time was get the Born To Run excitement, but at the same time [something] a little more concise-sounding.”

  That might have been how it sounded in the studio—a notoriously misleading environment, with its state-of-the-art speakers, ideal acoustics and deafening volume—but it was not how the songs came across on tape. And that was a transition for which Landau was ill-equipped. Not that his forte was ever “producing” the sound. As he informed a European monthly in 1986, “In the recording studio, I represent the audience. When you read on a record-sleeve ‘co-producer Jon Landau’ it means I helped Bruce to know if the song delivered the wanted effect. I am never involved in the technical side of recording.”

  Although Springsteen always listened to Landau, he gave equal credence to Van Zandt, as someone who now had the experience of producing the first two Southside Johnny albums behind him. But Jon and Steve’s ideas of how a record should sound were at opposite ends of the spectrum. Springsteen knowingly played the pair off against each other: “I didn’t want any one person to have too much control over what direction the music was taking—so I would yin-yang a little bit. It was the way that I played it.”

  He still thought he could get by without the requisite technical input. Just before the sessions commenced, he had insisted in print, “You can’t let the technical side of it get it in the way—you’re looking for a complete marriage of structure and spirit.” And he clung to this ideal in the face of all the audio evidence coming out of Atlantic and the Record Plant that the sound on tape was—yet again—not the one in his head:

  Bruce Springsteen: I fantasized these huge sounds…but they were always bigger in my head. And so we constantly were chasing something that was unattainable. The thing that I didn’t understand was that if you get big drums, the guitar sounds smaller; if you have big guitars, the drums sound smaller. Something has to give—there’s only so much sonic range. But we didn’t know this at the time. We just assumed everything could sound huge. [2010]

  Actually, there was a terrific sounding record being made just across the hall at the Record Plant. The album was called Easter, and its producer was on an extended sabbatical from engineering the E Street Band’s latest opus. Lenny Kaye, guitarist on those sessions, believes that by the time the Patti Smith Group were building an album around “Because The Night,” Jimmy Iovine “wasn’t working on Darkness that much. He was more in our world.” In reality, Iovine had grown increasingly frustrated by the engineering job, perhaps because, as Landau subsequently stated, “Engineers take a great deal of pride in what they do [technically]…[but] Bruce requires an ability to adjust. ‘It can’t be done’…never gets said. The only rule.” The final straw came when it became apparent Iovine was not going to be doing the mix on Bruce’s record. So he gave Patti the mix he would have given Springsteen—bequeathing her the most AOR-friendly studio sound she ever had.

  Before Springsteen himself could produce a statement to match, he would need a final sequence. Through December 1977 he worked on a shortlist of thirteen songs, some lucky, some not. They included Atlantic tracks like “Come On (Let’s Go Tonight),” “Independence Day,” “Don’t Look Back” and “The Promise.” Also in the mix was “The Way,” a torch ballad he cut back in August, and would still be working on come 12 February 1978 (by which time he was on take sixty-six). Listing the many ways “you belong to me,” “The Way” culminated in a surprisingly pantheistic version of fidelity, “The way the river belongs to the sea/ That’s the way you belong to me.” Also still a candidate for inclusion was “Streets of Fire,” a song which was, as Landau put it, “something that happened in the studio.”

  By January 16, they had a sequence—and a strong one.* But for the second album in a row, this initial sequence was missing its eventual title track. Not only was “Darkness on the Edge of Town” absent, it had been since June. At no stage had it been a potential title of the album. A number of provisional titles were considered that fall; the two favorites, Badlands and American Madness, both derived from famous film titles. Indeed, throughout the making of Darkness Springsteen had been in the grip of the American madness that was film noir.

  It had all begun when Landau suggested the two of them watch John Ford’s adaptation of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. It had a profound effect. Interviewing Bruce the following year, Paul Nelson, by this juncture more film buff than rock critic, commented on the change: “He talked for the first ten minutes of the interview about how much he’d been influenced by [movies]. And how, like [in] John Ford, the real story [in these songs] is underneath the action.” To another reporter, Springsteen went so far as to describe Ford’s Grapes of Wrath as “part of the [album’s] production for me. Like, I’m sitting there and I’m watching something that I never watched before…and it has an influence, it has an effect on me.”

  As it came time to create his own totality, he began to see the album as an audio noir-movie, a reference-point he made repeatedly following Darkness’s release: “There comes a point where the song becomes more and more like a movie. And when that happens you cease to become its creator and assume the role of director…My songs have a kinda drive-in quality about them…I’m just there, quietly directing…/…The songs I write [now], they don’t have particular beginnings and they don’t have endings. The camera focuses in and then out.”

  What he now says he got from Ford at that time was “that elegiac view of history—warmth, fidelity, duty—the good soldier’s qualities…[because] people [like him] had [an] interest in the undercurrents, the underbelly, an interest in peering behind the veil of what you’re shown every day.” It also made him consciously seek “out forties and fifties film noir such as Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past. It was [this] feeling of men and women struggling against a world closing in that drew me to those films. Even the title, Darkness On The Edge of Town, owed a lot to American noir…[But] I always liked the flash and outlaws of B-pictures—Robert Mitchum in Thunder Road and Arthur Ripley’s Gun Crazy.”

  He had already namechecked Thunder Road in “The Promise,” though at no point does he ever seem to have considered calling the LP after the song which permanently shifted the parameters of his songwriting; and which, as of January 16, was the designated album-closer, bookending an LP that began with “Badlands.” But even at this juncture Springsteen had his doubts about the recorded version. Sometime around September, he had rewritten the “paid the big cost” couplet, after a Rolling Stone reporter suggested the song was actually “about” the lawsuit. The new lines suggested someone a hair’s breadth away from Nebraska: “Well, my daddy taught me how to walk quiet and how to make my peace with the past/ I learned real good to tighten up inside and I don’t say nothing unless I’m asked.” It was this version, recorded with the full band, which was on the January 16 sequence. Yet eight days later he was back at the Record Plant, recording the song solo at the piano, planning to add strings (according to Landau, a “string” version was cut). But as he would suggest in 1999—when he had just cut the song solo for a second time, hiding its b
attered corpse on 18 Tracks—“I just didn’t have a take of [‘The Promise’] I was happy with.”

  Even with a sequence that seemed to work, Springsteen allowed doubts to creep in and they centerd on three songs, “The Promise,” “The Way” and “Candy’s Room.” As a result, he expended thirteen sessions over the next seven weeks to applying yet more vocal overdubs and instrumental tweaks to the first two. By March 8, he was ready to throw up his hands and walk away. But he didn’t. Instead, at the end of that day’s session he went back to a song he last explored the previous June, “Darkness On The Edge of Town.” He returned the following day and resumed where he left off, though not before running down a take of Them’s highly apposite “I Can Only Give You Everything.”

  The day after that, he dug out “Come On, Come On (Let’s Go Tonight),” another song he originally cut that first week at Atlantic—possibly even at the first “demo” session (Note: there is an undated Sony reel marked “take one, complete, with Vox [organ]”). As its title indicates, this was originally a guy ’n’ girl song and an important benchmark, at least as far as subject matter goes. The implicit threat of violence in earlier songs had been made explicit—not least in its subtitle, “Let’s Go Tonight.” The platitudinous pop opening—“Hey little girl with the red dress on/ There’s a party tonight ’till the early dawn”—is a bum steer belying its true subject matter: getting into a fight. When in the second verse the singer declaims, “The new world will beat you, on the beach you’ll hide,” he is not in the land of metaphor, but On The Waterfront.

  In a number of interviews in 1978 Springsteen talked about the underlying aura of violence he had felt growing up, telling one reporter, “You go into the bars and you see the guys wandering around in there who got the crazy eyes. They just hate. They’re just looking for an immediate expenditure of all this build-up” and another, “Most of those guys don’t go to the bar looking to hit somebody. They go looking to get punched.”

  But the song he was ostensibly discussing was one that took “Come On”’s last verse as its starting point. Called initially “The Factory Song,” later just “Factory,” this new song focused on the build-up of frustration that would inexorably lead to a fistfight (“And you just better believe, boy/ Somebody’s gonna get hurt tonight”). Unfortunately, the song itself was a dreary monologue about the drudgery of a daily existence Springsteen himself had never experienced, save second hand. (“I remember my old man was working in this plastics factory [and] my mother, if he forgot his lunch, she used to have to bring it down to him…and all I remember, when we used to go in that place, was him standing near ’em loud fucking machines.”)

  Even if his intention was to suggest he now understood something of the sacrifices his father had made for his family, choosing “Factory” over “Independence Day” made some of Dylan’s contemporary album choices look positively measured. “Come On, Come On” wasn’t the only song considered from the outset, only to appear on the final album in a form that was a fudge. “Candy’s Room” made it to the January 16 sequence still in a guise more “Candy’s Boy” than “The Fast Song.” Starting on March 3, he spent three solid days trimming the track and dubbing a new vocal, until he had successfully pruned the song of its avenging angels and at least one naked profession of desire, “Our love they cannot destroy/ I will forever be Candy’s Boy.”

  And still they were not done. It would be April 18 before Springsteen approved a second sequence, even though, as Landau says, “We were working on [just] the eleven [tracks] for the last two months of the record. We basically mixed twelve songs.’ The last-minute casualties were “The Way” and “Don’t Look Back,” both stronger statements than either “Factory” or “Streets of Fire,” the latter tracks making it to the April 18 sequence, taking the album into fifty-minute territory. That would never do if he was hoping to get the requisite sonic intensity. As for “The Promise,” he still “felt too close to it.”

  With a twelve-song shortlist, no-one in situ seemed entirely sure how to get that barragelike sound, and with Iovine off making someone else a star it was time to bring in another set of ears. The person they brought in was Landau’s suggestion, Chuck Plotkin, currently head of A&R at Elektra and a producer in his own right. When Plotkin heard the tapes that first time, it seemed to him that all “the players [were] fighting for space inside the music.” As for Springsteen’s vocals, he felt they needed to “keep the voice tucked in, so that you feel like you could understand the words if you wished to try hard enough,” while not making them wholly or instantly intelligible (i.e. the Marcusian dialectic). He quickly realized his would be a two-fold task, mixing the record and tutoring the artist himself about the art of mixing. Because Bruce not only lacked the technical knowledge to do it himself, he also lacked the self-awareness to relinquish control to someone who did:

  Chuck Plotkin: They needed to have somebody who was essentially sympathetic to the artist’s role in…mixing and someone who understood that, among other things, the process for Bruce was learning about how all this stuff worked. I mean Bruce, as accomplished an artist as he was even at that time, had only made four records…[But] both of us seemed…interested in staying in the saddle until the thing was right.

  Even if it meant saddle sores. The combination of levels of paranoia that made Watergate look like a high-school prank, and a relentless, obsessive quest for musical perfection that proved Landau wasn’t joking when he told Rolling Stone in 1975, “Bruce is determined before he dies to make the greatest rock & roll record ever made,” served to make every “outsider” who entered the Record Plant the subject of deep suspicion. When record company runner Debbie Gold had a message to convey to Plotkin, she was expected to sit there and wait/rot:

  Debbie Gold: Getting into the Record Plant, it probably would have been easier to get into the Pentagon. It was well known during [the making of] Darkness, no one got near the place. No record company. No family. Somehow I got in, and I just sat there. There’s nobody around. The only people there were Landau, Jimmy, Bruce, Chuck and Tom [Panunzio]. And all I heard for the first week or so was the harmonica on “Promised Land.” Every time the door [to the studio] opened…Then after a week, they say, “Hey, we wanna play you something.” They sit me down and blast the song, “Something In The Night”…“So what do you think?” It blew my mind.

  What Debbie didn’t know was that the basic track she’d just heard had been recorded in a single take on day one—and this was now day one-o-one, and they were still tinkering with it. Nonetheless, Gold was more privileged than anyone who worked for the record company picking up the eye-watering tab for this twelve-month tutorial on the ways of the studio. It was the third week in April when just two invites were extended to CBS staff for a playback session. What they heard had even a Bruce zealot like his marketing manager slightly worried:

  Dick Wingate: I had a very strong relationship with Landau, but nobody from Columbia was ever at the sessions. He invited me and [Mickey] Eisher, who was head of A&R, to come to a playback at The Record Plant when it was done. It was just Jon and Jimmy Iovine, and I remember thinking, “Holy shit! This is a whole new Bruce.” And I knew right away the marketing of the record, which was so much harder and more adult and dark, would by necessity have to change dramatically from anything that came before.

  Springsteen had made a difficult album, and spent a fortune into the bargain. So it goes without saying that he wanted it released with no publicity, and with a lead single that sounded like, well, one of eight beefy, wordy album tracks (as opposed to one of two clunkers). But “Prove It All Night” was not a leap-out-and-grab-ya 45. As he almost boasted in Songs, “There was a lot of variation in the material we recorded, but I edited out anything I thought broke the album’s tension.” He could equally have said, “Or might generate AM airplay.” He fervently believed there was this great big audience for the new, serious Springsteen, who would welcome the lack of frivolity and embrace the darkness, and he was
prepared to prove it, night after night:

  Bruce Springsteen: When I was young, I was a serious young man. I had serious ideas about rock music. I believed it was a serious thing, I believed it should also be fun—dancing, screwing, having a good time, but…I also believed it was capable of conveying serious ideas and that the people who listened to it, whatever you want to call them, were looking for something. [1996]

  It wasn’t like it was his money he was laying on the line for his beliefs. It was CBS’s bottom line he was endangering, at least until he cleared a million dollars’ worth of debt from the Appel suit and eleven months of more or less solid studio time. And still he insisted that Darkness should receive the most muted fanfare for any album by an established rock artist since Columbia released Dylan’s first post-motorcycle accident effort, John Wesley Harding, the week after Christmas 1967:

  Dick Wingate: We had this lunch in LA, just him and I, and he said, “OK, no more sneakers, no more pictures with a beard, no earring. All that stuff, put it away.” I have a letter from his lawyer that was sent to me which specifies, point by point, exactly what has to be approved by Bruce in the way of imaging and packaging. He just wanted to be seen as having grown up. He felt that the whole Born To Run thing [had been] so hype driven. He told me, “I don’t want to be hyped. If it was up to me, the album would just appear in the stores one day, with no fanfare, so the music can speak for itself.” So we sat and talked for a while, and we eventually agreed the advertising would have no copy except Bruce Springsteen—Darkness on the Edge of Town—The New Album, and the release date.

  Back in the day, John Wesley Harding had indeed “just appear[ed] in the stores one day;” and although Bruce might not have remembered this, Landau surely did. His most famous, nonpredictive piece of rock journalism was his Crawdaddy review of that landmark LP. What he may not have known, or had clean forgotten, was that JWH—an unalloyed masterpiece—initially sold less than either its predecessor, an expensive double-album, or its successor, the countrified Nashville Skyline, stalling at number three in the album charts. Wingate meanwhile put on a brave face, sending a memo to the rest of CBS’s marketing department that in no way sold the album’s manifold qualities short: