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

by Clinton Heylin

  He cut the song in a single session, witnessed by photographer Joel Bernstein who had been shooting Bruce and the band (along with Landau, at Springsteen’s insistence) outside Power Station, after informing Landau he thought Darkness was a great album but a terrible cover. Given his Neil Young and Joni Mitchell cover credits, Landau knew enough to take him seriously; and after the shoot invited him to the session which began with Springsteen teaching the band “The River,” before they ran through different arrangements. By two a.m., they had the finished song. Bernstein was impressed. So was Springsteen when he saw the contact sheets of the photo-shoot, inviting Bernstein, an accomplished musician in his own right, to spend a few days at his house when the snapper returned to shoot the “No Nukes” benefits in September.

  Bernstein found Springsteen wrestling with the sequence to another album he had invested heart and soul in; a process he had already experienced first-hand with Neil Young. Even before he had written “The River,” Springsteen had constructed a sequence for The Ties That Bind, which ran as follows:

  Side 1: The Ties That Bind. The Price You Pay. Be True. Ricky Wants A Man of Her Own. Stolen Car.

  Side 2: I Want To Marry You. Loose Ends. Hungry Heart. The Man Who Got Away. Ramrod.

  But by the time Bernstein arrived, the second week in September, “Ricky Wants A Man Of Her Own” and “The Man Who Got Away” had been replaced by “Cindy” and “The River.” When Bruce played Bernstein the nine-track album, ending with “Ramrod”—“to inform what I was going to shoot”—it was clear “it wasn’t finished.” Nonetheless, Bernstein came away with “a copy of [that] single album of songs: I [always] preferred it to the released album.” He thus became the first recipient of the legendary Ties That Bind LP.

  Yet barely had Bernstein returned west before Springsteen pulled “Ramrod,” restored “Loose Ends” and resurrected the rockabilly “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch).” The result was another “flawed masterpiece;” one that still shone a light on “Hungry Heart” and “I Wanna Marry You” at the expense of “Roulette” and “Independence Day.” But even with these lightweight tracks, it developed on Darkness without allowing itself to be enveloped by the bleak nightscape. Embracing a gamut of genres from rockabilly (“You Can Look”) to prototypical alt-country (“The Price You Pay”), it returned the E Street Band to stage center, and gave AM stations hooks to hang their programming on. After spending almost a month at the outset reworking songs from “Album #4,” not a single track composed before September 1978 had made it to The Ties That Bind. He had moved on. But barely had he delivered the finished album the first week in October than he was sticking his shiny new car in reverse:

  Bruce Springsteen: After some recording we prepared a single album and handed it to the record company. When I listened to it later on, I felt that it just wasn’t good enough. The songs lacked the kind of unity and conceptual intensity I liked my music to have…/…It wasn’t expansive enough—that was when we decided to go to the two records…I wanted a record that balanced the two things that I was doing [at that time], that had a sense of continuity coming out of Darkness. [1998/1999]

  He was still looking for a bridge that could span Albums #4 and #6. Landau, like the band, was in despair, but knew he’d be wasting his breath trying to change Springsteen’s mind. Instead, he found a most unlikely ear to bend. During the fall, for the first time since the lawsuit, he (and Bruce) met up with Mike Appel. They had decided the sums on the latest CBS statement/s simply did not add up and had demanded an audit of their accounts, to which Appel as an interested party and potential beneficiary was invited. Whilst there, Landau confided in Appel, “Mike, I almost had it. We finished, we had this record done, I walked it in. And [then] Bruce gave me a call and said, ‘I’m not sure about this and that.’” Appel pithily responded, “Rather you than me, Jon.”

  After The River ultimately emerged, Springsteen told Robert Hilburn he made his decision not because the original single album wasn’t good enough—something Hilburn couldn’t have challenged—but rather because “it wasn’t personal enough.” Whereas he told Dave Marsh it was scrapped because “the exuberance of the audience at MUSE had just made the album seem inadequate,” a reference to the two shows he gave at Madison Square Garden on September 21–22 to raise awareness of the dangers of nuclear energy—the so-called “No Nukes” concerts. If the sell-out audiences seemed pleased to see him, and even responded well to the live debut of “The River,” it was not their energy and appreciation but his own mortality that seemed to weigh most on his mind.

  On night two, his thirtieth birthday, he again showed that displays of petulance were his default response to anyone who openly defied his diktats: in this case an instruction to his ex-paramour Lynn Goldsmith that she not take photos at an event to which she had a photo-pass, and at which he was merely one of a number of headliners. When she continued to snap away even after he gave her “the look,” he dragged her up on stage and publicly humiliated her—and, as it turned out, himself. He then attempted to turn the blame on her, telling the ever-receptive Rolling Stone: “She was doing something she said she wouldn’t do. I tried to handle it in other ways, but she avoided them. So I had to do it myself,” thus showing a man who, even in the cold light of day, was incapable of seeing when he was the one blundering in the dark; or who was the likelier to end up shot dead “on a sunny Florida road…[because] she couldn’t stand the way he drove,” to quote his latest song, “From Small Things, Big Things One Day Come.”

  He remained as far away as ever from making “the greatest rock ’n’ roll record ever made.” So when the EQ’d master of The Ties That Bind—the one that turned up at a Pasadena swap-meet in the early nineties, where it was snapped up for $200—came back from the studio on October 4, Bruce exercised his veto. He decided, mid-life crisis or not, he would return to Power Station and immerse himself in the process all over again. And maybe, this time, he could make a record that would encompass all that the world might allow:

  Bruce Springsteen: When I didn’t put the album out in 1979 it was because I didn’t feel that that [sense of conflicting emotions] was there. [In the end,] I felt…I just got a bigger picture of what things are, of the way things work…I wanted that all on there. [1981]

  Having got over the disappointment of another aborted album, Landau took Bruce’s change of mind on the chin, determined to convince himself that Springsteen’s “fear of completion” was not some full-blown pathology; it just reflected someone for whom a perfect plan tomorrow was always better than a good plan today. Perhaps the erudite manager could again help the autodidact Springsteen realize his goal. He informed Nick Kent in 1981 that at this point he gave his friend a play he thought might show him how it was possible to include all things in heaven and on earth in a popular piece of entertainment. No longer was he content to let his charge be the new Dylan. Maybe he could be the new Shakespeare:

  Jon Landau: Bruce reached the point where he’d amassed something like forty songs [for The River] and was still intent on crafting a single album out of some incredibly diverse musical areas. It became evident to me the only way it could be best resolved for Bruce’s artistic benefit was to make the project a double-album package. Initially, he still couldn’t quite see it work, he couldn’t see a logical sequence in there. So I gave him a copy of Hamlet, simply informing Bruce that though the play was a tragedy there was still something quite humorous in a sense, though not light-hearted, on every other page. I think that helped him to open up the overall concept.

  A pattern emergeth, methinks. The result would be a lot closer to a comedy of errors than all’s well that ends well, the narrator falling between two stools, neither of them solid enough to stand the strain. That outcome, though, was six months and another hundred thousand in studio bills away.

  * The Roxy version of “Backstreets” on Live 75–85 unforgivably edited the long spoken section out.

  * Passaic 9/20/78.

  �
� Montreal 11/8/78.

  Chapter 7: 1980–81—Take Me To The River

  I gained a certain freedom, in making the two-record set, because I could let all those people out that usually I’d put away. Most of the time, they’d end up being my favorite songs, and probably some of my best songs, you know…I’m the kind of person, I think a lot about everything. Nothing I can do about it.—Bruce Springsteen, 1981

  Bruce had a lot of songs. And he kept doing and doing it…But not one song on The River matches Darkness. He thought too much. He tortured himself thinking about [it]. I think it got to him…[But] Bruce thought too much about everything—about writing, about what the critics said, about everything!—Debbie Gold

  The decision not to release The Ties That Bind as-is was nothing new. The one to make a double album was. Initially, he may simply have intended to reconfigure the album (again) to achieve that chimerical “balance” he was searching for. Four days of sessions the week after the master was made, saw him working again on “Independence Day” and three new tracks, all of which were in the pop vein: “Crush On You,” “Where The Bands Are” (which did at least explicate what he was looking for: “I want something that’ll break my chains/ Something to break my heart/ Something to shake my brains”) and “Party Lights” (in which the partner of a girl who married at fifteen sits at home wondering, “Do you miss the party lights?”). Perhaps he still thought he could find a slot for one of his most important songs if he counterbalanced it with a pastiche Clash or Knack B-side. After all, the album to date was only thirty-nine minutes, and when he told Hilburn in 1980 he scrapped an album the previous September, he suggested it contained thirteen songs. *

  But if that was the new plan, it didn’t last long. Seven weeks later he was back at Power Station, now firmly set on stockpiling more songs. The December sessions—also lasting four days—produced one untitled effort; three with nomenclatures but no fixed abode—“Dedication,” “Living On The Edge of The World” and “I’m A Rocker”—and one that was the real deal, “Take ’Em As They Come.” This rousing call to face down the future was all very affirmative on the surface, but once again it was the singer’s way of breaking it to some gal it’s over (“All the promises we made/ Lie shattered and broken in the morning light”). At least he was now pastiching New Wave A-sides. However, two months down the line, a single worthy addition to The Ties That Bind was hardly cause for celebration for either his coproducers or accountant.

  It was almost as if he had come to revel in the legend that had formed around his studio excursions, brazenly boasting the following year: “I stopped feeling bad about…spending a long time in the studio…I said [to myself], That’s me, that’s what I do. I work slow, and I work slow for a reason: To get the results that I want.” (The anonymous employee who said of Landau and Bruce, “Put them in a studio, and they’re like two kids in a sandpit,” probably came closer to the truth.) His ex-marketing manager Dick Wingate, who came by one day, found plentiful evidence of that pathology: “I had been at the Record Plant and I had an idea of how many boxes of tape there were [for Darkness]; and there were even more boxes for The River…At one time, one of the tape ops took me in the back room and showed me this mountain of 2 Springsteen tapes. It was literally a mountain.”

  Wingate himself had a new act to push, an English band, one of Bruce’s favorites. And they had just finished a double album that was already drawing comparisons with Exile On Main Street. In mid-November The Clash had finally delivered to a flustered CBS the ultimate twofer, London Calling, not in time to make a 1979 US release, but in time to give the import shops of New York a much-needed Christmas present. One suspects that Springsteen, if he did not prize an advance pressing out of Columbia, was one of their first customers. In the New Year, he would set about making his very own New Jersey Calling. Again, The Clash had shown him it didn’t have to be this way. In a year when they managed two nonalbum singles and two U.S. tours, they had found time to cut a double album that retained all the angular attack of punk but gave those amphetamine-rushes a welcome respite.

  Springsteen had a message as unpalatable as that of The Clash, but he wanted it wrapped in the audio equivalent of a neat ribbon bow. His own confused state of mind was duly reflected in the music he was now making. As he told Rolling Stone in 1987, when everything he had built in the past decade was beginning to crumble and fall, “From Darkness to The River, I was attempting to pull myself into what I felt was going to be the adult world, so that when things became disorienting, I would be strong enough to hold my ground. Those were the records where I was trying to forge the foundation and maintain my connections.” But no matter how hard he tried, things still failed to add up and he didn’t know why:

  Bruce Springsteen: On [The River] I just said, “I don’t understand all these things…I don’t see how all these things can work together.”…It was just a situation of living with all those contradictions. And that’s what happens. There’s never any resolution. You have moments of clarity…but there’s never any…longstanding peace of mind. [1981]

  Contradictions abound in the material he was writing. He liked the idea of marriage, but every song he wrote about such folk ended in recrimination, divorce and/or suicide. He wrote longingly about home and the family, but had no proclivity to embrace either. He saw rock as an affirmative, life-enhancing form but all the best songs he had written in the past year were replete with negativity and faithlessness. He wanted to make music that was as commercial as a TV message, but real as a rifle-shot.

  And on top of all this he really wanted to get onto record “the need for community…which is what ‘Out In The Streets’ [is] about. Songs like ‘The Ties That Bind’ and ‘Two Hearts’ deal with that, too. But there’s also the other side, the need to be alone.” It was “the need to be alone” which had driven him thus far and provided an impressive private soundtrack; whereas songs of “community” were not his forte—and never had been. “The Ties That Bind,” good as it was, had been a better song when it was about escape. Whereas “Out In The Streets” and “Two Hearts”—two songs written that winter—were greeting-card standard. (In the former’s case, he took a perfectly decent rocker, “I’m Gonna Be There Tonight,” and made it about someone who worked “five days a week…loading crates down on the dock”—an experience as divorced from his own life as that of a Thai hooker.)

  He was increasingly inclined to idealize the people he grew up around—the self-same folk he once disparaged in interview and lyrics as narrow-minded and uptight. It was like he could no longer delineate the corelationship between good and bad, hope and despair (themes which imbue everything Flannery O’Connor wrote, and which—with her help—he would locate again). What began as a laudable attempt to write about “people trying to do that deal with their friends, their lovers and their jobs, trying not to let life drag them down,” had become instead an explicit romanticization of the lives of friends and family, obviating “the need to be alone” as the prime subject-matter for the songs:

  Bruce Springsteen: To me, the type of things that people do which make their lives heroic are a lot of times very small, little things. Little things that happen in the kitchen, or between a husband and wife…There’s plenty of room for those types of victories, and I think the [recent] records have that. [1984]

  Where there was a narrator to such “songs of community,” he resembled Springsteen’s father refracted through the eyes of an all-seeing son. Yet his real father had moved 3,000 miles away from the godforsaken place Springsteen continued to call home; which in 1984 he admitted was an attempt on his part, “to maintain connections with the people I’d grown up with, and the sense of the community where I came from. That’s why I stayed in New Jersey. The danger of fame is in forgetting or being distracted.” In reality, he remained rootless; a contradiction not always lost on him:

  Bruce Springsteen: All my houses seem to have been way stations. That’s the kind of person I have been, you know? I don�
�t like feeling too rooted for some reason. Which is funny, because the things that I admire and the things that mean a lot to me all have to do with roots and home. [1984]

  The very fact that he continued to rent rather than buy a place rather suggested he still felt like a rolling stone (by now he knew the next line in the Hank Williams song Dylan stole the image from was, “All alone and lost”). He informed Michael Watts the following spring how he disliked “dragging too much stuff around. I guess that’s…why I’ve avoided buying a house: things just clutter up your life.” He was equally frank to a Rolling Stone reporter: “I don’t like to sit at home. I spent years sitting at home. And my family’s not there anymore…No reason to go home.” If home was where the heart was, it was where the band was (though this may be a sentiment he had yet to share with Joyce).

  Having being “very distant from my family for quite a while in my early twenties,” he finally turned the authority-figure with whom he had spent his entire youth locking horns into the hero of a thousand songs. The trait father and son had most in common was that neither was ever “a big verbalizer” (to use Bruce’s own term). Which is why the son spoke to him through his songs.Though he ultimately realized, “It’s probably not the best way to find your way through the woods on those sorts of things, it was part of the way it happened for me and him.” Even in some songs that did not directly address Doug, there was a sense that it was him who was narrating. “The River,” for one. Meanwhile, the raps which prefaced the desultory “Factory” on The River tour would achieve what earlier songs singularly failed to do, they made Doug a sympathetic figure: