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

by Clinton Heylin

  “Growin’ Up” also received its own mid-song rap, which only amped up the blasphemy with him and Clarence driving out to the swamplands of Jersey for a conversation with God, whose message was “just three words, LET IT ROCK!” Meanwhile, “Backstreets” ventured into the slipstream of Too Late To Stop Now again, with its repeated references to the little girl with lonely sad eyes, who cried all night long. Finally he had to break the news to her, “You’ve been laughing and lying and now you’re back…Well, little girl, I’ve been out too, and I’ve seen some things and I know all about you. We gotta stop…if we could only stop…it’d be all right, if we could only stop…if we could only stop…if we could only stop…if we could only stop…stop, stop, stop, STOP.”

  If he wisely refrained from referencing The Man directly onstage, he still found an occasional berth for early Stones (“The Last Time,” “Mona”) or The Animals (“It’s My Life” in Pittsburgh and Passaic, for the steeltown boys and Jersey girls). But mainly he preferred to remind these all-American audiences of those communal indigenous rock ’n’ roll roots. One innovation heralded at the Roxy was retained—opening most shows with a fifties rock ’n’ roll cover. “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” “Oh Boy,” “High School Confidential,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Ready Teddy,” even “Summertime Blues” received outings. Asked about this, he insisted, “I love that early rock & roll. That’s what I listen to while I go to sleep: Elvis, Buddy Holly.” But he was also broadening his cultural horizons. Tuning into country stations throughout his American odyssey, he discovered that there was more to the musical landscape than rock ’n’ roll. Slowly but surely, a whole wide world of music—and, indeed, literature and film—was opening up to him:

  Bruce Springsteen: I went back to Hank Williams and Jimmy Rodgers, to soul and spirituals. Suddenly I found what I had heard back in the old rock & roll records. Or read in that fantastic book, American Dreams, Lost and Found by Studs Terkel; or seen in the [John Ford] movie, The Grapes of Wrath. [1981]

  That August, talking to the trustworthy Ed Sciaky, he admitted, “What I’ve been listening to a lot now is Hank Williams.” What he found there would lead to his next stage of development as a songwriter. As he told Kevin Avery, three decades on, “I liked the toughness of country music and I liked the fact that there was so much of it that was about compromising…I was interested in getting that idea into my music.” But this was an epiphany he had to work at—he needed something that would take him further than just the dark end of the street:

  Bruce Springsteen: I want[ed] to write music that I can imagine myself singing on stage at the advanced old age, perhaps, of 40?…I wanted to twist the form I loved into something that could address my adult concerns. And so I found my way to country music…I remember…playing Hank Williams’ Greatest Hits over and over. And I was trying to crack its code, because…it just sounded cranky and old–fashioned. But slowly, slowly, my ears became accustomed to it, its beautiful simplicity, and its darkness and depth. [2012]

  Initially, he needed to resolve how to incorporate Hank Williams’ sensibility in the current shows. He tried the direct approach just once, a guitar/piano arrangement of “(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle,” sandwiched between “The Promised Land” and “Prove It All Night” at a show in Pittsburgh at the end of August, gamely assisted by Bittan, the most versatile band member. (In the past couple of years rather than twiddle his thumbs between E Street engagements, Bittan had contributed his musical skills to albums as important as Peter Gabriel’s solo debut and Bowie’s Station To Station, and as shamelessly Springsteenesque as Bat Out Of Hell.)

  In that moment Springsteen probably knew neither his band nor the bemused audience were quite ready to embrace both kinds of music, country and western. But there were still the soundchecks, which could be as epic as the shows themselves, especially if Springsteen was uncertain about an arena’s acoustics, or there was some pressing reason he needed the sound to be just right. Such was the case the second night at the Passaic Capitol Theater in September. Springsteen knew they were taping the next two nights for a possible “home turf” live album, after a three-night warm-up stint at the equally intimate New York Palladium. He seemed to be gradually reintroducing some older songs into the set for just such an occasion—hence the likes of “Incident on 57th Street,” “Kitty’s Back,” “The Fever,” “It’s My Life” and “Meeting Across The River,” all passionately recreated at these last two Passaic shows. Yet he spent much of the soundcheck on the 20th running down Hank Williams songs and Sun-era Johnny Cash covers, every one of which petered out, perhaps because the band refused to join in the fun.

  They may have still been wondering when Bruce was gonna get back to the brand-new song they had run through at the start of the soundcheck. His first in months, it went by the name of “The Ties That Bind,” and it was a keeper. But if he had performed it at one of these shows, it would have baffled many a fan when a song of the same name appeared on record two years later. Because this was a very different song, and a magnificent one at that, with a great pop hook set to a strong, if undeveloped lyrical idea—“No-one at my side/ There’s just a cold dark highway and a thin white line/ [Which] will lead me to the ties that bind”—and the whole thing wrapped up by a guitar coda worthy of “Prove It All Night.” Though already ready to record, it would be stripped bare and rebuilt by November 1, its live debut.

  What he wanted was the kinda song which would slot into the record he had already talked to Dave Marsh about: “I got an album’s worth of pop songs like ‘Rendezvous’ and early English-style stuff. I got an album’s worth right now…I wanna do an album that’s got ten or eleven things like that on it.” Hence, presumably, the reintroduction of “Rendezvous”—another Atlantic reject—to end-of-year sets, and the version of “The Ties That Bind” he introduced in November, which made an affirmative pop song out of its Passaic prototype. Two frat-rockers, “Sherry Darling” and “Ramrod,” also suggested he had in mind a more fun-filled successor; as did a lengthy intro the night he introduced “Sherry Darling” for the first time, in Charleston, Virginia:

  “This was a song that we recorded live in the studio about two years ago, the beginning of the summer and it was originally gonna be on Darkness but it was too weird, so we left it off…There’s a whole bracket of music, this is not real well-known, but it was known as Fraternity Rock. It used to be like ‘Louie Louie,’ ‘Farmer John’ by the Premiers, uh, what else?, ‘Double Shot of My Baby’s Love’ by the Swinging Medallions…Oh shit, I’m an old man up here tonight (laughs). No recognition for these songs! It used to be anything that was loud, raucous and like, sounded like you’d just had about ten too many beers. So that’s what this song was supposed to be, and that’s why we gotta start this song off with party noises…/…and vomiting in your girlfriend’s purse is also allowed during this number.”

  Was he seriously planning to produce a lightweight pop album—based around some of the lesser songs cut for “Album #4”—as Darkness’s successor? Perhaps the relative failure of Darkness was already preying on his mind? But what about “Point Blank” and “Independence Day,” major works that every night garnered standing ovations, even though they were known only to those who collected 1978 radio broadcasts or caught multiple shows? If, as he later claimed, he wanted to make an album that “accept[s] the fact that the world is a paradox, and that’s [just] the way it is,” then there needed to be more of heaven and earth on it than could be contained by the philosophies of “Rendezvous,” “Ramrod” and “Sherry Darling.”

  He had another problem, of his own making. He had already aired “Point Blank,” “Independence Day,” “The Ties That Bind” and “Sherry Darling” in widely-taped live radio broadcasts, which even now were being pressed to bootleg disc: something which, as of July 1978, Springsteen had insisted “doesn’t really bother me.” His introduction to “Sandy” at the December 15 Winterland show, suggesting the Jersey girls would get to hear this particul
arly fine version “through the magic of bootlegging,” rather implied he still didn’t.

  But by 1979 he was no longer so keen on these clandestine copyists. Or more accurately, perhaps, Jon Landau on behalf of Bruce Springsteen was less keen on them. And once Springsteen realized the next studio album was as far away as ever, he was prepared to sign off on the pursuit of the two most redoubtable of these Californian brigands, Vicki Vinyl (née Andrea Waters) and her sidekick, Jim Washburn. They had taken Springsteen at his on-air word and had pressed up the Winterland show in its three-hour entirety. When that three-disc set sold well, they issued the Passaic FM broadcast too, as the memorable Piece De Resistance; while CBS held back from issuing either of the two Passaic shows they, and they alone, had.

  A Roxy double—pruned of some of its V8 moments—also appeared, prompting Jon Landau’s old friend, Greil Marcus, to attempt in a New West feature the difficult juggling act of suggesting that the show itself was a must-hear slice of rock history, but that one mustn’t buy “any of the Roxy bootlegs…[which] are badly mastered and pressed off-center on second-rate vinyl.” Instead, one should, “call, write or picket KMET and get them to broadcast the show again, and then, as Springsteen has suggested, roll your own tapes.” Fans simply waited until the bootleg was re-pressed, not off-center, and bought that. When CBS’s lawyers went after Vicki and Jim, the latter was stunned, and attempted to engage with the artist in a futile attempt to get him off his back, based on a misguided idea of the corelationship between onstage and offstage personae:

  Jim Washburn: In 1975, one of our [record] swap meet customers, a Cypress schoolteacher named Lou Cohan, kept pressing Vicki to put out an album by his favorite artist, Bruce Springsteen. She wasn’t interested because she didn’t like Springsteen’s music and few other people had even heard of him then. To get Lou off her back, she showed him how to make a boot himself, and he put out The Jersey Devil. [But] I was a fan by the time Springsteen played the Roxy in October that year, and was so blown away by that show that I went with friends to his subsequent show at the UC Santa Barbara gym. After the show, we hung around behind the gym and gave Springsteen a copy of Lou’s boot. He seemed delighted, running up to bassist Garry Tallent with it, rasping, “Hey, lookit this! We’ve been bootlegged! We’ve finally made it!” They then pored over the song list together…Throughout the course of the [1979] lawsuit, I couldn’t believe that Springsteen was behind it. He must be uninformed, this guy who was going onstage and talking…about how lawyers shouldn’t run the world. I wrote him a letter—wrapped in a rare Ronettes picture sleeve—in which I asked to meet with him, and if he still thought I’d wronged him after I explained our side, I offered to do anything I could to make it up to him. I delivered it to the desk at the Sunset Marquis in Hollywood when he was staying there, and it was promptly turned over to his attorneys, who were not terribly nice about it. Having slept on sidewalks to get Springsteen tickets and all that…I still couldn’t believe Mr. Populist Rocker had gone corporate. As the suit was winding to a close, Springsteen was again in town for a series of concerts. I spent all the money I had getting a room at the Sunset Marquis in hopes of talking to him. Which I did when he showed up poolside, and he made it clear that that’s what he had lawyers for, and to leave him alone.

  Actually, it was what he had Landau for. It was Landau who, after an LA court awarded Springsteen and CBS $2,150,000 in damages from Vicki and a disillusioned Washburn, gave Rolling Stone the requisite quote. It was a master class in how to make the argument an artistic one, while an inner voice screams, “Where’s my fucking money?:” “Bruce spends a year of his life conceiving and executing an album so that it will perfectly reflect the musical statement he wants to make. Then these people come along and confiscate material that was never intended for release on an album, sell it, and make a profit on it without paying anyone that’s involved.”

  There was, of course, no money. Vicki and Jim had already filed for bankruptcy, and anyway Vicki had already plowed most of the profits into a series of Rolling Stones bootlegs, a band she actually cared for. Springsteen may have ducked Washburn’s questions, but he couldn’t duck and dive forever, and finally in 1981 he was queried about his volte face in attitude to bootlegs by the still zinelike Creem:

  Bruce Springsteen: I remember when I first started out, a lot of the bootlegs were made by fans, and then there was more of a connection. But it became…there was a point where there were just so many…that it was just big business, ya know? It was made by people who didn’t care what the quality was. It just got to the point where I’d see a price tag of $30 on a record of mine that to me just sounded really bad, and I just thought it was a rip[-off]. [1981]

  By then, both Landau and Springsteen had learned the hard way that they were pissing in the wind—and would continue to be soaked just as long as the latter refused to release a live document of the E Street Band, preferably after each tour. They had just spent further futile sums, running to several thousand dollars, pursuing someone who had leaked tapes from the sessions for Darkness’s successor. As Gold recalls, “Some tapes got out. They were playing the rough mixes at like 45th and Broadway. Well, we hired one of the best detectives. It was fascinating. He’d interview [all these] people. There were three or four Bruce fanatics [we suspected]. I take this guy to the Power Station—I learned more in five minutes than I had learned in three years [in the studio]…It turned out it was a 14–year-old runner, and we had to go tell his mother!” So much for Mr. Big.

  The premium Springsteen placed on product still played directly into bootleggers’ hands. If CBS wasn’t going to put out a new studio album in 1979, a bootlegger—this one safe in his European home in Camden Town—was happy to oblige. Fire On The Fingertip finally released studio versions of “Hey Santa Ana,” “Zero and Blind Terry,” and “Seaside Bar Song,” and Max’s versions of “Bishop Danced” and “Thundercrack.” It might have been better called Tip of the Iceberg. For that is what it proved to be. Alongside E Ticket, an early U.S. bootleg of 914 outtakes which was certainly “made by fans”—helping to subsidize the first Springsteen fanzine, Thunder Road, where production standards far exceeded subscriber numbers—Fire On The Fingertips proved that Springsteen’s current trouble deciding what tracks to release hardly represented an about-turn in methodology.

  By the end of the decade, his indecision in the studio would seem like a full-blown pathology. Yet work on the successor to the anti-commercial Darkness started promisingly enough. Determined to be fully prepped before checking in at Power Station, he had been demoing songs on a small cassette-recorder for three months, first in LA, where he had been spending time post-tour getting to know Joyce, and then back in Jersey. Sometime in March 1979, he recalled the band for a series of rehearsals designed to whip the best songs he now had into shape ahead of clock-ticking, money-dripping studio time. He seemed like a man in a hurry, the same person who told Ed Sciaky the previous August, “Because of the lawsuit, I’m a little behind. I got records I gotta make, a lot of songs I wanna get out…I got a lot of catching up to do.”

  However, although he seemed to have plenty of song scraps, he didn’t have a lot in his locker that could sit comfortably alongside the songs he’d brought to the June 1977 sessions. Of the songs he thought worthy enough to transfer to band rehearsals in mid-to-late March, “Chain Lightning,” “Night Fire,” “The Man Who Got Away” and “Under The Gun” all made the transition to sessions (though in “Chain Lightning”’s case, not until February 1980). But only “The Man Who Got Away” made any kind of album shortlist (and that for the aborted 1979 single LP, The Ties That Bind). It was time he found a new vein to call his own:

  Bruce Springsteen: Your inner world is a mine, and there are many, many different veins. And if you work one vein a lot, it may go dry…But then you may, if you turn around and your eyes are open so you can see, you may go, “Oh, what’s that over there?” Chip chip, boom, a vein of a certain kind of music may come bursting
forth and music will pour out of you—the minute you finish a record, sometimes. [2010]

  There was a strong sense that the imagery he was mining that spring had already been thoroughly excavated, and not just in the ephemeral sense of a car, a girl, on the outskirts of town. Thus, on “Find It Where You Can,” a song known only from a solo demo, the girl Bruce is urging to wise up had been addressed this way many times: “I didn’t ask for this conversation/…I’m just another desperate man/ In this world you don’t pick and choose, girl,/ You just find it where you can.” Billy also returns, as the whole “world is tougher than tough” shtick gets another working over in “Under The Gun,” “Some nights, Billy, I just lie awake/ I pull her a little closer, feel every breath she takes/ I want to go downtown and get me a gun/ You take what you’re given when your living, Billy, under the gun.” The best of the new songs initially rehearsed was “Chain Lightning,” another promethean display of pyrotechnics, à la “Fire.” This time the portents are there for all to hear: “There’s a rumble in the park, there’s a thunder in the dark/ A night so quiet—chain lightning.” With a riff lifted clean off Link Wray’s “Pipeline,” “Chain Lightning” suggested his new-found love of rockabilly could have yielded real dividends—if only sessions had proceeded smoothly.