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

by Clinton Heylin

  It was the 1975 live album argument all over again. When CBS responded by taping an equally great show from Berkeley two weeks later, featuring one of the last meaningful performances of “The Promise,” in order to pull a live version of the nine-minute “Prove It All Night” as a promotional item for radio stations—a common ploy in the era of “official bootlegs”—Springsteen nixed the idea. When talk of a live album reared its head, he said he preferred to leave it to the bootleggers to spread the good news:

  Bruce Springsteen: If I did a live thing, I would do a double album…There’ll probably be one coming out pretty soon [anyway], because we’ve just broadcast on the radio! Most of the time bootleggers are just fans…It doesn’t really bother me…I see where it’s coming from. [1978]

  The record company doubtless loved reading that kinda comment—and read it they did, because he said it to a whole host of rock journalists backstage at a west coast show a couple of nights after he informed the same purveyors of hot wax, during a live radio broadcast from The Roxy, “All them bootleggers out there in radioland, roll your tapes. This is a hot one.” That comment—and a similar one he made on another live broadcast from San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in December—would come back to haunt him. But at the time, live broadcasts of five entire shows—each to different regions of the US—were all part of a deliberate ploy to sell Springsteen’s “live rep” first, and album units second. In fact, a lengthy memo from Landau to CBS’s Fred Humphrey that October affirms the strategic significance he and Springsteen placed on these broadcasts:

  “I think we both agree that the single best promotional tool used during the last four months has been the series of live broadcasts. Of these broadcasts the one done at the Agora, in Cleveland, makes for the best all-around programming. My idea is that a week to ten days in front of selected dates on the tour, we schedule a tape of this three-hour broadcast in that particular market. In addition, we would naturally ask the participating stations to promote this very unique piece of special programming to the hilt…The one exception to the use of a pre-recorded tape would be our show at Winterland in San Francisco, on December 15. As you know, a live broadcast has already been scheduled and is in the works. Paul Rappaport has lined up KSAN and appropriate stations in Seattle and Portland…The reason for going live in San Francisco is that it continues, despite our best efforts, to be one of our weakest major markets. One of my special objectives in planning this [fall] tour has been to launch a total assault on this region. I think the extra excitement that comes from doing a live broadcast…as well as the extra promotion we can anticipate from the participating stations, makes this a logical and necessary course of action in this market.”

  The Winterland show would be the last of the lot, coming from a tag-on tour at year’s end they added in late September, with objectives Landau claimed were “primarily developmental. Rather than go back to the many markets where Bruce is now a complete superstar, we are concentrating on those markets where we have created a very real excitement, and where, with one more concert coupled with imaginative promotion, we can finish the job.” Making Bruce fulfill his destiny as “a complete superstar” (aka the future of rock ’n’ roll) now required a militarylike precision.

  The first of the five broadcasts, coming from The Roxy on July 7, was intended to consolidate the success of the 1975 Roxy radio broadcast, which had played such a large part in taking the west coast along with him on that Born To Run ride. At the same time, CBS ensured they got their own tapes of the show, which assumed extra importance because he was saying good-bye not just to clubs like the 700–capacity Roxy, but maybe even, in some territories, medium-sized theaters. In fact, the July 7 date had only become available when Springsteen agreed to scrap three nights at the six-thousand-seat Shrine Auditorium and replace them with a single night at the LA Forum, the eighteen-thousand capacity barn the likes of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and The Who had made a home away from home for Brit-rock heavyweights (and audience bootleggers).

  Having fought to resist the pull of arenas throughout the whole of the Born To Run era—even in territories like Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland and New York where it had long been a viable option—Springsteen broke his promise to himself just three nights into the Darkness tour, playing two shows at Philadelphia’s Spectrum, the self-same venue Appel had struggled to get him to play in 1976 to help clear the backlog of debt, and the very one he had forsworn on behalf of all such arenas after a disastrous support slot five years earlier. His excuse to Ed Sciaky was that “there were so many people that wanted to come in. After that, it felt good, and it’s been [generally] good experiences.” By mid-August he was back at The Spectrum, warming up for three nights at Madison Square Garden, shows he insisted he was playing “for all the long-term supporters.” He had evidently forgotten his own astute analysis of the drawbacks of these antithetical-to-music mausoleums, expressed to Paul Williams before Born To Run raised the stakes:

  Bruce Springsteen: There’s always something else going on all over the room. You go to the back row, you can’t see the stage, [let alone] what’s on it. You see a blot of light. You better bring your binocs! What happens [when] you go to those places [is] it turns into something else, that it ain’t. It becomes an event. It’s hard to play. That’s where everybody is playing, though. I don’t know how they do it. I don’t know what people expect you to do in a place like that. [1978]

  For the July 5 Forum show, he went down to just six Darkness songs, though he had added “Because The Night” to the repertoire five days earlier, belatedly reclaiming it for himself—to whoops of approval from the fans. Certain economic issues remained, though, and if Springsteen wasn’t hip to the new realities of the road, Landau was. Throughout that whole west coast jaunt in early July, Landau was slowly but surely assuming the helm, rounding up a retinue in case he decided to make the most momentous decision of his career—assuming the reins of management, and taking Bruce to the next commercial plane. He took some persuading:

  Paul Rappaport: I got to be part of the planning because he was new at it. Some of the questions he asked me he just didn’t know the answer to. I remember being backstage at San Diego Sports Arena, he had this great wrinkled suit—he never had time to get them cleaned—and I remember yanking him, “The rumor is you’re gonna manage Bruce. You really have to do this.” And he was like, “Rap, I’m not a manager, I’m a writer.” “Yeah, but you’re the only guy he trusts.” We could see Bruce was in trouble and needed [good] people around him. And Jon kept saying, “I don’t know.”

  Debbie Gold: By the time they came out to California I knew I had to be…a part of this. And Jon said to me, “If I manage Bruce, you work for me. If not, you work for Bruce.” But still Landau did not make up his mind right away. It was the day of The Roxy show, and I was in Iovine’s room, and suddenly I got summoned. That’s when Landau finally decided [to manage Bruce]…Landau learning the ropes took the whole first year I was there. It was fascinating. He got some information from [Michael] Tannen, but I watched him soak up information from all the people around him. He asked the same questions to a lot of different people. I watched what he became, and how he used that information. Don’t underestimate that guy!

  Lighting man Marc Brickman was one of those who pushed for the man: “Landau kept saying he didn’t want to be manager. But he’d always be around…Finally we went out on Darkness and it wasn’t happening, there were [some] problems monetarily. Suddenly we all said to him, ‘Why don’t you be the manager?’ [MOTH] As CBS’s Pete Philbin suggests, one immediate result was a switch to arenas where feasible: “Jon Landau systematically convinced Bruce Springsteen that he was letting his fans down and had to play bigger shows. He provided Bruce with an explanation to change the things he’d said in the past.” [MOTH] If, to Brickman and Philbin, the move in hindsight signaled “the beginning of the end,” initially good vibrations far outweighed the bad. And Springsteen was both the band’s biggest hitter and its
premier cheerleader, with reserves of energy that left everyone else in the dust:

  Debbie Gold: I’ve never been on a tour like that. He was so excited about playing, every minute of it. And then when the show was over he’d be saying hello to every reporter, every radio station person. It was a dream for me. And then we’d finally get on the bus and be ready to leave, [the rest of us] half asleep, there would be Bruce signing autographs.

  As a farewell to how it used to be, the Roxy radio broadcast was certainly a helluva way to go out. The Forum show had been a fairly chanceless affair, and as Paul Rappaport recalls: “Jon felt we didn’t make enough noise. We didn’t bust this town open…which is why did the Roxy.” The Roxy, though, was the old Bruce going for broke. For the first time, a Springsteen show breached the twenty-five song (and almost the three-hour) mark. Leaving aside the seven songs from Darkness, an introductory “Rave On” (after admitting on local TV the night before that he listened to Buddy Holly every night before going onstage) and a wild-in-the-country “Heartbreak Hotel,” there were spectacular E Street reclamations of “Fire,” “For You” and “Because The Night” (from Robert Gordon, Greg Kihn and Patti Smith respectively). It did what it had to do—it busted the town wide open. His west coast promotion man left the club mid-show just to get some air, and in leaving the epicenter of this media storm caught the zeitgeist in microcosm:

  Paul Rappaport: After three days of no sleep…I finally go out to the street to try and settle myself down just a bit. Wow, who knew what a scene it was OUTSIDE the Roxy! First, there were at least a couple hundred people with their ears pressed against the walls all the way around the club. On the Sunset Strip, where everyone is nightly cruising and the subsequent traffic jam is legendary, every single car had their windows rolled down and was blaring the show over their radios. People were bopping up and down in their seats and pumping fists outside their windows—whooping and hollering. The whole Strip was rocking out to one giant Bruce show. I am telling you it was extraordinary. It was like the whole town was listening.

  The broadcast just got better and better. There was a twelve-minute “Backstreets” that was part “Sad Eyes,” part “Cypress Avenue” and part “Drive All Night.”* (It was in Seattle, a fortnight earlier, that he had started to slip elements of that song into the “Backstreets” rap: “I remember then, baby, I’d drive all night. I swore that I’d drive all night, baby, I would drive all night just to taste your tender charms and to have you hold me in your arms, I’d drive all night through the wind and the rain…for just one look from your pretty, sad eyes.”) And if that was not enough to take the whole of LA’s breath away, he debuted two songs that took the essence of Darkness’s fatalistic worldview to an even more rarefied level, a fully-realized “Independence Day”—for his attendant Mom and Pop—and “Point Blank,” a song no one even knew about before that night, being something written after the sessions:

  Bruce Springsteen: On Darkness I just didn’t make room for certain things…I couldn’t understand how you could feel so good and so bad at the same time…The song that I wrote right after Darkness…was “Point Blank”—which takes that thing to its furthest. [1981]

  As singular a breakthrough as “Frankie,” “Point Blank” became a staple of the 1978 shows almost from the minute he debuted it at that all-important Roxy show, addressing what appeared to be new subject matter: an ex-girlfriend’s descent into drug addiction on finding the world an unforgiving place. Each live version from July to December included a variant on the verse he sang at the Roxy that first time: “You hear their voices at night as you lock the door/ There’ll be no sleep tonight for baby, she don’t believe them lies anymore/ And she stumbles into the morning tryin’ for her usual fix/ But, baby, them old distractions, they just ain’t got the kicks no more.” The image of being shot point blank by a needle, not a gun, was a rare reflection on the dangers of drugs, addressed to a former girlfriend who went down that poisonous path.

  But the song was primarily concerned with the need to escape a world in which “no-one survives untouched,” especially those people with “hearts full of anger, eyes filled with hate,” and was as such a natural development from “Factory” and “Badlands.” Hence, the various introductions he gave the song at 1978 shows, which varied from the purely cryptic, “You wake up one morning and you’re left staring…point blank”* to the familial, “This song is for my father. Forty-five years and you wake up to find out you’ve been shot in the back every day, point blank.” †

  Other former (or fanciful) lovers were also on his mind that Roxy night. A frantic “For You,” in its first E Street guise, finally gave the music the same menace as the lyrics, being placed between the definitive “Candy’s Room” and “Point Blank.” His current girlfriend, though, was back east, which would prove to be a mistake on the photographer’s part:

  Lynn Goldsmith: Darkness on the Edge of Town had just been released and Bruce was in Los Angeles for a week to do shows and press…He asked me to be there with him. I refused to come…Looking back, I can say I was afraid I’d lose my identity…I didn’t want to be known as “Bruce’s girlfriend.” I wanted to be “Lynn Goldsmith, the photographer.” He tempted me, telling me how they were going to climb this billboard on Sunset and paint over it and what a great picture I would get. I knew he felt alone and needed me, but I wouldn’t go…Miami Steve had a girlfriend, Maureen, who called me and told me about this girl, Joyce, who kept hanging out around the band trying to get to Bruce. I didn’t think anything of it. Bruce was the kind of guy who had a hard time even looking girls in the eye. Besides, I believed with all my heart that no one on this planet could be better for him than me. What I didn’t take into account was that Bruce wanted to be loved when he needed it, when he asked for it, not just when I felt like it was the right time for me…This pretty young thing, Joyce, who looked at him with adoring eyes while I was screaming at him about my career, hooked her fish.

  The fish lady’s name was Joyce Heiser, and she certainly fit the Bruce bill. A model/actress with wholesome good looks and a willingness to subsume her identity if necessary, she turned up at the Sunset Motel that week often enough for Springsteen’s new publicist to nudge Jimmy Iovine, there to record the Roxy, and say, “She’s just the girl for you.” He astutely replied, “How much d’ya wanna bet she leaves with Bruce?” Heiser, though, was not the only one subsuming her identity for the greater good. Just shy of thirty, Springsteen was still living for the time he spent onstage. For him, every minute offstage was dead time.

  Not only was he inspired every night, but he was hoping to inspire every night. As he told Robert Hilburn ahead of the Forum show, “The greatest thing is going out backstage after the show and seeing some kid there…whose face is all lit up. It’s like you’ve done something on stage to get things stirred up inside his head. That’s the whole idea—get excited…do something.” If he had crawled out of Jersey, then others could, too. It was a mantra Patti Smith had adhered to long before she climbed aboard Horses; and it made Springsteen an unlikely compadre of punk evangelists on both sides of the pond. In fact, when premier punk journo Tony Parsons caught a show at the New York Palladium in September—and was given the usual “let’s just chat” spiel, designed to ensure such backstage interviews never probed the depths—his NME cover-story almost single-handedly gave the boardwalk prophet honorary-punk status.

  Not that Bruce was about to brave the British boards. He resolutely stuck to the domestic market for the duration. But if he was unwilling to go toe-to-toe with the dynamic bands of the UK new wave, the best would come to him. Throughout the year, Elvis Costello & The Attractions—who packed almost as much energy into their one-hour set as Springsteen and his cohorts managed across their two-and-a-half-hour marathons—made regular sorties to the States, building an audience with pell-mell product and dynamite performances. If Costello, in his bug-eyed misanthropic guise, felt obliged to denigrate Springsteen in print (a fact Springsteen gently rem
inded him of when they recorded a fascinating two-part Spectacle in September 2009), he also nagged his CBS rep, Dick Wingate, to let him check out the competition at a rare college gig. That November Princeton show rocked even this jaundiced, ex-Hammersmith ’75 attendee’s world.

  By this point, the shows had begun to nudge the three-hour mark, with twenty-five-song sets the nightly norm. As Springsteen sought to explain, “We originally started off with a two-hour set. But when the tour got underway, we found it impossible to keep it down to that.” This was in part because he quickly realized he needed to rebalance the set to accommodate more early seventies material. The early shows, where “Spirit In The Night,” “For You” and “Rosalita” were token Sancious-era admissions, made too few concessions to fans who had been there from the first. By the time he hit the loyal east coast in August he had begun to slip in the odd “Incident On 57th Street,” an occasional “Kitty’s Back,” and even a blue-moon moment like “Lost In The Flood,” sung solo at the piano in Detroit (and fully the equal of former “For You”s). He also introduced, initially just for Texan fans with long memories, a new arrangement of “The Fever”—only to find it got a response which reminded him his own judgments of a song’s merits were hardly infallible. The song intros also began to take on a life of their own, like when he sent up nuns and psychiatrists in a rap that preceded “Growin’ Up:”

  I remember I was 12 years old and I was going to this Catholic school and I got sent home for pissing in my desk (cheers)—obviously, a popular pastime—and the Sisters told my mother that I needed psychiatric attention (chuckles). The only people that were more scared of the nuns than the kids was the parents, you know. I remember my old man and my old lady, they were terrified of them Sisters so downtown they take me to this doc and I’m sitting down there on the couch and he says “Son, how did you get this way?” I thought about it and I said, “Doc, I’m glad you asked, because up to now I’ve kept it a secret, but the fact was I was a teenage werewolf.” I said, “Doc, I was out in the street, I remember it was midnight, I looked up, there was a full moon, I felt this hair growing all over my face, I felt my fingers get longer and my nails pop out and a guitar pop out of my left side, my pants got tighter and my hair got longer, a man with a cigar come up and stung me on the ass and all of sudden in one moment I looked up and there was this light…I stood stone like at midnight.”