“My father quit high school when he was 16 years old and the war was on, he went into the army…when he’d go to apply for something, they’d tell him the only thing he was qualified for was factory work…it wasn’t until I got to be about 28 or 29, I started to think…’bout what my folks did with their lives and the dreams that they gave up…When I was 16, I couldn’t figure out that what my old man was doing, laying on the cold ground at six in the morning, trying to get one of the junk cars to start so he could get to work…that he was doing that for me.”
This new-found empathy at least allowed Springsteen to retain his connection to “Independence Day,” the one 1977 composition he didn’t do a disservice to in rerecording it for The River. He was still putting finishing touches to it in late April 1980, two years and eight months after they first recorded it. (The April 25 tape-box reads “Take 53.”) At least he wisely resisted rewriting this lyric, though this was not the case with “Point Blank,” which he also returned to that spring, determined to put it right. He later told Dave Marsh the latter was one of those songs that, “right up until the very last two weeks, when I rewrote the last two verses…didn’t exist in the form [it is] on the record.”
At least the song again emulated its 1978 arrangement; as did two more songs from the Atlantic locker he reintroduced to the band at the February 1980 sessions, “Sherry Darling” and “Drive All Night.” He had seemingly revived his original plan to make the new record a composite of Albums #4 and #6 (“Ramrod” had already been earmarked for duty). Whether this was because by late February it was plain to him that the new songs he’d written and recorded over the past four months were simply not up to scratch, or because he no longer wrote songs with the same maudlin magnitude as “Drive All Night,” “Independence Day” and “Point Blank,” he wasn’t about to say.
What was certain was that after a promising restart to proceedings in the New Year, things had stalled badly in the past few weeks. The first night back, January 14, they had roared through the best song he had penned since “The River,” “Restless Nights,” and even found time to lay down a terrific cover version of the Cajun classic “Jole Blon” (to which Gary US Bonds would overdub vocals for his own E Street Band LP, Dedication). “Restless Nights” saw Bruce once again railing at those who think life’s a movie, pouring hot verbal oil down on those poor deluded fools locked to “late-night movie screens [where] young lovers look so sure/ Lost in wide-wake dreams that they can’t afford.”
But if the finished studio take was another powerful reminder of what made this band tick, it paled in comparison with some of the versions the sextet summoned up on Telegraph Hill three or four days earlier. In that rehearsal space, the song on a number of occasions genuinely entered “Prove It All Night” territory (and length). Barely contained by the band’s undoubted instrumental prowess, it found enough oxygen in that rehearsal room to explode into life. At Power Station, though, Springsteen stuck to his remit—even though containing the whole wide world in three/four-minute pop songs actually meant stopping the band from doing what it did best, stretching the parameters of the American pop song. The rehearsal “Restless Nights” also confirmed that the earlier version of “Janey Needs A Shooter” was no fluke, and that the recording equipment should have caught them in rehearsal not record mode if it wanted to capture the “true” Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.
Through January and February, this would become their routine. A day or two rehearsing a new song or arrangement. Then (if lucky) into the studio to capture the moment after the fact. Rehearsed the same day as “Restless Nights” was a fastish, countrabilly arrangement of a new song, “Wreck On The Highway,” that sounded real interesting. But in the three more months it would take him to haul this song’s raggedy ass into the studio, it became a near-cataleptic coda to “Drive All Night.” (On its release, he had the gall to claim it was an example of “an automatic song…that you don’t really think about or work on.”)
In some cases, even the drive to the studio rendered a song unrecognizable. In the case of “Stolen Car,” rehearsed five days after “Restless Nights,” Springsteen committed an act of self-sabotage, removing the ghost from his own song, as well as its “dreamed a dream” reverie, giving it a whole new arrangement to ensure it fit the same notch as other “downers” he was accumulating. Nor was it the only once-handsome song recorded the previous year given an unnecessary facelift. “Jackson Cage” was also prepared for a second tour of duty, in the process losing the couplet, “There is something I must say/ That you’ve been left to fade away” to another new song, before becoming another case of rattling the Jersey cage.
If some of the latent energy of “Jackson Cage” still carried over to Power Station, the other song rehearsed the same day, the strident “Slow Fade,” really did fade away. He seemed to have lost the invaluable gift of knowing when to leave something well alone and when to persevere. A promising idea for a song demoed the previous fall, called either “Mr. Outside” or “Looking After Number One,” was recorded mid-March in ersatz reggae form as “Down In White Town.” By then, he had introduced a helpless dancer from another torch ballad, who “disappears like the scenery in another man’s play/ [Though] at night she dances, oh, to the beat.” The greedy Mr. Outside is about to find out, “Your money and your power…won’t help you come The Hour/When your kingdom falls to your feet, and you’re left like any other thief out on the street.” From somewhere deep in his subconscious he had dredged up this classically Christian conception of the End Times, proving once again that you can take the boy out of the Catholic church, but you can’t take the church out of the boy.
“White Town” was at least a welcome thematic departure. But too many of the other songs trod over-familiar ground, swapping lines at will. “Chevrolet Deluxe”—another song he demoed, rehearsed and then abandoned—not only told us the name of the “stolen car,” but shared its opening scenario: “I had a wife and kid, and I tried to settle down/ I just wanted to live an honest life on the edge of an honest town/ But in the end they left me dangling in the night.” “Stockton Boys” revisited “Come On (Let’s Go Tonight),” describing working men who like “acting tough, making noise/ Man, they just want to get wrecked.” One couplet would make it to record, just not until 1984: “They wear it in their eyes, they wear it on their shirts/ They come down here looking to get hurt.”
It was only when he took time out to write consciously lightweight material that he rediscovered his gift for combining the deft phrase and the right hook. Thus, on “Dedication,” a song he recorded in December 1979 before donating it to Gary US Bonds, he gave a new slant to the canonical account of the Great Flood, his first humorous reinterpretation of the Book of Genesis, but not his last: “Well, way back in the Bible time/ A cat named Noah built an ocean liner/ Everybody laughed when they told him why/ But when the rain came, Noah was high and dry.”
The best love song he wrote that winter, “Your Love,” was also given to Bonds, who was keen to play to the E Street Band’s strengths. The highlight of his wrought rendition would be that crushing crescendo as realization dawns on the poor misguided fool who has seen “something new in her eyes”—just as Bonds’ voice drops to a despairing whisper, “Lately you been walking the streets at night/ Like an empty shadow in the morning light.” Another minor classic the bossman gave away.
And yet when Springsteen wrote similar songs for himself, the results put the self in self-conscious. This was perhaps because, as he told NME the following June, “I didn’t want to neglect the rock & roll songs, so we put them all on, as well as the slower stuff…[But] I don’t want to make records like the Fifties or Sixties. There’s always got to be some Eighties in there, too.” Some of the results gave Pastiche a bad name. And the worst of the lot was “Cadillac Ranch.” After six sessions working on this rustbucket, one wonders how he kept a straight face when singing lines like, “Hey little girlie, in the blue jeans so tight/ Drivin’ alone thro
ugh the Wisconsin night/ You’re my last love baby, you’re my last chance/ Don’t let ’em take me to the Cadillac Ranch.” If there was ever a Sprucesong that deserved to go straight to the scrapheap, this was it.
Instead, it went straight on the album, which by the middle of April was definitely a double. The shortlist still included “Cindy,” “Ricki Wants A Man Of Her Own”—a song recorded in July 1979 that reflected a brother’s alarm at the changes in a fast-maturing sister (“She don’t care to bring her boyfriends home to pass daddy’s inspection”)—“Held Up Without A Gun,” “Be True,” “Restless Nights” and a still-unreleased song called “Stray Bullet,” which he’d been working on since February. But Springsteen would take a degree of flak for omitting “Roulette,” claiming that he “just didn’t like the way it sounded…We might redo it and put it out later.” By 1999 he admitted, “I may have just gotten afraid…In truth it should have probably gotten put on. It would have been one of the best things on the record.” So what exactly was his problem?
Bruce Springsteen: I did a lot of rewriting [back then]…At the time I was trying to shape who I was and what I wanted to be about, and what I wanted to write about, and how I wanted the world to see me, and how I wanted to see myself. And also, the kind of writing I was interested in doing, which was using very classic rock & roll archetypes—cars, girls, Saturday night, the job, the end of the day…you’re either going to turn them into…archetypes or clichés. And I did a lot of shaving away to [hopefully] turn them into something more than that…Those were the days I’d second-guess, third-guess, fourth-guess, fifth-guess and sixth-guess myself constantly, until I got exhausted, and then finally decide[d] on something and put it out. [2010]
By the end of April he had narrowed things down to twenty-two tracks, but he was still some way off done. As he said at the time of Tracks, “It’s never over until it’s over. Everybody’s telling you you’re done and you take it home and it’s just not right…[But] my life at the time [of The River] was extremely focused, probably to the detriment of the records.” He even tinkered with songs carried over from The Ties That Bind, starting with “The River.” Not content with take five from the original August 26 session, he assembled seventeen imperceptibly different mixes of a near-identical retake and played them to CBS A&R man Peter Philbin, asking him which one was better, “Which one is better??! Hey, flip a coin!” He was asking the wrong guy. He should have been talking to Plotkin. As one go-between put it, “He was the one guy who could talk for an hour about the difference between mix twenty-seven and mix forty-two.” But others experienced the same OCD behavior. In Springsteen’s mind, he was focused on just one thing, the prize:
Bruce Springsteen: In the studio, I’m conceptual. I have a self-consciousness…I often would try to stop that…[But] it’s not a question of how you actually do it. The idea is to sound spontaneous, not be spontaneous…From the beginning I had an idea of what I felt the record should be…We started to work and I had a certain idea at the beginning. And at the end, that was the idea that came out on the record. It took a very long time, all the coloring and stuff, there was a lot of decisions [to make]…Right up until the very last two weeks, when I rewrote…“Point Blank”—“Drive All Night” was done just the week before that—those songs didn’t exist in the form that they’re on the record…I threw [“Ramrod”] ten million times off the record. Ten million times. I threw it off Darkness, and I threw it off this one, too…We [tend to] get into that little bit of a cycle. [1981]
Not surprisingly, elements of the music-media wanted to know what the hell was going on. His churlish response was, “Spontaneity…is not made by fastness. Elvis, I believe, did like thirty takes of ‘Hound Dog.’” (In fact, Presley recorded that song plus “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Any Way You Want Me” in just two three-hour sessions.) But no matter how often he reiterated the mantra, “You make your record like it’s the last record you’ll ever make,” every rock band since The Who knew if it took more than a month, they were doing something wrong. A Wayne King cover story in Anglophile music monthly Trouser Press that summer was among the first to seriously question whether the man still finishing up his fifth release in seven and a half years would be the same person who left the stage at Cleveland’s Coliseum on New Year’s Day 1979:
“In mid-April he took off to LA to mix the record; at press time he was still plugging away at it. Bruce Springsteen’s history has shown that his greatest talent, a rock intuition second to none, is often at odds with a relentless sense of perfection. After Darkness he told a Boston newspaper that he was past the obsessively self-critical stage: ‘No more, hey, is this perfect? Just let me do it.’ Yet the time spent making his fifth record proves that idea wrong. All of rock’s greats reach a point where they spend more time off the road than on, entrenched in the recording studio. Self-indulgent staleness sets in when live work is not interspersed meaningfully, enabling the artist to test out material live. Creating rock and then playing it to an audience has proven to be dangerous to creativity and communication.”
The dangers King outlined were all too real. Joel Bernstein ran into Bruce again at the Sunset Marquis that spring. Invited up to his poolside apartment, Bernstein found him there with a ghetto blaster and a bag full of tapes, one song per, flipping the cassettes in and out, supposedly sequencing The River (“I think he was doing it for weeks”). But if Springsteen was having a hard time making up his own mind, he also now had a number of other cooks who suggested he use their recipe.
The artist still took on board the opinions of Landau, as the person who “listens on the most gut level, and simultaneously will look at the record and see what it’s saying;” even if Landau had a protagonist with equal clout to contend with this time—Van Zandt. Landau later suggested, “The album where Steve’s influence was strongest was The River. [But] if Steve had had his way, there would have been only rockers on that album.” “Restless Nights” for one, a song which Springsteen described on its live debut in November 2009 as “Stevie’s very favorite song of all time.” (At the end of a creditable stab at this forgotten classic, a mildly chastened singer pointed at his friend and said, “Dammit, he might have been right all these years!”) Springsteen would suggest in Songs it was he and Stevie who, in tandem, “began to steer the recording of The River in a rawer direction.”
If so, any such rawness was lost in the transfer to vinyl. The record as released was his most thin sonic outing to date, sounding like something played on a Dansette even when put through a $1000 hi-fi. It sure as highwater didn’t sound like another album made at Power Station that spring, the second long-playin’ installment by the duo who originally coined the term punk rock (in 1971!), before disassembling the boundary between performance art and rock: Alan Vega and Martin Rev, aka Suicide. If Springsteen seemed a most unlikely disciple, the Suicide effect would not become fully apparent until the next notch on his CBS contract:
Alan Vega: Power Station was run by this engineer who [had] worked for us on the first Suicide album [at 914], Craig Leon. He didn’t know what to make of Suicide, so he quit in the middle of it. The irony of it is, we [ended up] using Bruce’s equipment. So we go to Power Station, and who’s there, [Leon]. He hears Suicide are coming in and freaked out, “I quit. I can’t fucking stand [them]”!…[But] everybody wanted to be around Bruce. Bruce came by and he heard the first Suicide record, and thought, “Holy shit!” And he started hanging out with me…We spent a lot of time in the men’s room [smoking and drinking]. That culminated in the last day, [when] we played the entire thing [for the label]. Marty and I down the front. We didn’t hear Bruce come in. Played the whole album and after the album was over, total silence. And out of nowhere, a voice, “That was fucking great, man!” It was worth everything to hear that.
The voice’s own offering was not so “fucking great,” but as he observed in 2010, “Those were the days I’d second-guess…myself constantly, until I got [so] exhausted…[I] put it out.” What he l
eft in the Station vault, as he duly admitted, was “an entire album…‘Restless Nights,’ ‘Roulette,’ ‘Dollhouse,’ ‘Where The Bands Are,’ ‘Loose Ends,’ ‘Living On The Edge of the World,’ ‘Take ’Em As They Come,’ ‘Be True,’ ‘Ricky Wants A Man,’ ‘I Wanna Be With You,’ ‘Mary Lou’—[that was] all three-minute, four-minute pop songs.” This didn’t even take account of the irreparable harm done to certain songs during the process of “second guessing;” or those that failed to make the transition from rehearsal room to recording studio. If it didn’t take him too long to realize that the likes of “Be True” and “Roulette,” “would have been better than a couple other things that we threw on there,” now was not the time to look back. The cupboard was bare. The process had not only worn away at his nerves, it had inexorably drained his not-so-plentiful bank account:
Bruce Springsteen: In 1980 when we went to go on The River tour, I was just broke. After almost ten years in the music business I had about twenty grand to my name…I had gotten into a lot of trouble and made some bad deals and had to hire a lot of lawyers. And then nobody in the band had ever paid any taxes…So we got chased after for an enormous amount of back taxes…So between 1974 and 1980, I paid lawyers, the tax man, tried to keep the band afloat (which I barely could), and spent money in the recording studio. [2010]
E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Page 27
