One could easily get hooked on the star-trip. But not him. As he let Rolling Stone know after “Johnny Bye Bye” finally received an official release, “The type of fame that Elvis had…the pressure of it, and the isolation that it seems to require, has gotta be really painful…[But] I wasn’t gonna get to a place where I said, ‘I can’t go in here. I can’t go to this bar. I can’t go outside.’” For Springsteen, it was still all about performing. And as he repeatedly insisted, “I’m gonna perform as long…as I don’t change into a parody of myself; and if I ever end up doing that, then I count on my good friends to tell me so.”
He had come dangerously close at various points the previous fall. Thankfully, he now remembered one element of those groundbreaking seventies shows he paid mere lip service to these days—doing great covers. They once provided both a point of reference and a way for Springsteen to embrace elements of popular songs he loved, but could not emulate in his own songs no matter how hard he tried. They remained all-important reminders of what got him started and kept him going through the long years of obscurity, an explication of the whole E Street Band aesthetic. As he told Michael Watts before the London shows, “Some people say rock & roll is fun, others say it’s trite; to me, it’s everything. I hear [The Drifters’] ‘When My Little Girl Is Smiling’ and, wow, that’s something to live by…Those moments are real.” He didn’t attempt that one, but Arthur Conley’s “Sweet Soul Music” sometimes sufficed.
Starting on opening night in Hamburg—where every sixties Britbeat band once went to be blooded—Springsteen trimmed his own sails, giving half the songs from The River a rest; preferring to doff his cap to past travelers on this lost highway. In part, he felt unsure whether he was fully connecting with non-English speaking audiences. As he told a Belgian reporter later that month, “At the beginning of this tour…they really were staring at us as if we were Pink Floyd, and then I decided to force a breakthrough by doing a number of rockers, six or seven of them right after one another, at maximum volume and without any comment in between the numbers. This had a result, but it was kinda creepy, because when I later started doing some slower numbers, they screamed for more rockers.”
When it got to encore time in Hamburg, he decided against ending with “Devil In The Blue Dress,” driving straight into a Creedence Clearwater moment instead. Elements of the German audience may have thought “Rockin’ All Over The World” was a Status Quo song, but it was a rousing finale to a show that had previously become overlong and needed pruning. A return to theaters in a number of cities (the arena-less north of Britain got five theater shows: two each in Edinburgh and Manchester and one in Newcastle) signaled a general return to Darkness-length sets (25–30 songs) with a healthy smattering of covers, a handful of which became showstoppers.
If “Follow That Dream” was a great way to kick off proceedings, so was another Creedence cover, the positively spooky “Run Through The Jungle,” which he introduced in Rotterdam on April 29 and retained for the duration. “Can’t Help Falling In Love” also continued to gain sporadic favor, as did “Jole Blon,” the closest Springsteen came to promoting the E Street Band’s other 1980 vinyl offering, Gary US Bonds’ Dedication (coproduced by Bruce and Stevie). But it was the stunning reinvention of Jimmy Cliff’s “Trapped,” dropped into the set from nowhere at the opening Wembley show (his first London gig since Hammersmith ’75), that really captured audiences’ imaginations. A song he found on cassette at an airport duty-free shop, it had evidently struck a chord, because the last time he had sung a cover with this much emotional undertow, he was singing “I Want You” to Suki Lahav.
One can’t help wondering what girlfriend Joyce Heiser, who accompanied Bruce throughout the European jaunt, made of this paean to a suffocating relationship—“Well, it seems like I’ve been playin’ the game way too long/ And it seems the game I played has made you strong/ Well, when the game is over, I will walk out of here again/ I know someday I will find the key”—especially as that last line was Bruce’s own lyrical addition. Fans didn’t care. They felt like they had got the old Bruce back again.
Perhaps, though, it was this “old Bruce,” and his outmoded view of rock as a force for good, which had got him caught in a trap. After a show in Brighton, in conversation with Nick Kent, the one rock critic Carr had worked so hard to keep away from him, Springsteen talked for the first time about how “rock has abused that ability to give that sense of something better to kids. A lotta kids in America and, I guess, here use a certain style of rock to just shut off. Completely! They just want to forget, to numb themselves from their existence. And that just horrifies me.” Could it be that Kent’s coworker, Julie Burchill, had been right all along; and his natural constituency really was country music’s cognoscenti? Landau shared Springsteen’s concerns, telling Kent, “Great rock not only defines what is, but suggests what might be. And it’s [that] sense…we’re in danger of losing.” He just didn’t expect Kent—who by May 1981 had substance abuse issues which made Elvis little more than a drugstore wannabe—to remember the conversation in the morning. Bruce, though, had only just begun having this little conversation with himself:
Bruce Springsteen: I had to get out from under my misinterpretation of what the whole rock & roll dream was about. It took me a long time to do it. Partly because to do it means you have to accept death itself…In the end, you cannot live inside that dream. You cannot live within the dream of Elvis Presley or…The Beatles…You can live that dream in your heart, but you cannot live inside that dream…/…I guess I used to think that rock could save you. I don’t believe it can anymore…You can dance, you can slow-dance with your girl, but you can’t hide in it. And it is so seductive that you want to hide in it. [1987/1988]
He saw no future in the rock dream at precisely the point when, for many, he fulfilled the “future of rock ’n’ roll” epithet, having proven definitively that London—and indeed the whole of Europe—was finally ready for him. If he benefited from fans and (most) critics having no point of comparison with former glories, even critical comparisons with Dylan’s own European arena tour barely three weeks later—to promote an album coproduced by Chuck Plotkin (at Debbie Gold’s recommendation)—were invariably cast in Bruce’s favor. In fact, the shows of born-again Bob were equally stamina-sapping, he had never been more committed to performing and his band was perhaps his most musical since The Band. Bruce’s live reputation, though, had achieved (un)critical mass and he could do no wrong.
Landau knew he was onto a good thing, hurriedly booking his all-American boy to do thirty-two summer shows at some of the largest arenas in America, starting with a week of shows which opened the doors on the 20,000–seater Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey. The six shows sold out in an instant, even before Springsteen decided to record the last four shows for that still-pending live album (he already had tapes of the last three London shows). By now, though, the sets were essentially set in stone. A “Jackson Cage” for a “Point Blank,” an “I Wanna Marry You” for an “Independence Day” were almost the extent of any variants. This was very much a victory procession, or as Landau chose to spin it, “The concept was to go back to cities that had been very special in Bruce’s career. Basically, come in and stay for a while and play a little bit in depth.” In the process they made more money in two months than on the whole Darkness marathon. It was almost as if, this time, Springsteen knew he needed to hoard a few nuggets for the coming hibernation.
So it might seem on the face of it a rather strange time to develop a political conscience. But develop one Springsteen now did. He later suggested it was his trip to Europe that first opened his eyes: “When you spend a good amount of time over [in Europe], you do have a moment to step out of the United States and look back with a critical eye…It’s very difficult to conjure up a real worldview from within our borders.” In fact, the first flowering of a wider awareness had come earlier. His introduction to “Badlands” at Tempe the previous November—“I d
on’t know what you guys think about what happened last night, but I think it’s pretty frightening”—represented his first-ever political pronouncement onstage. I guess this was one vote Ronald Reagan didn’t get the night he took the presidency.
By the following February, Bruce was informing Rolling Stone, “The cynicism of the last ten years is what people adopted as a necessary defense against having tire tracks up and down their front and back every day.” No longer an innocent abroad, he was canvassing against arch-cynicism and advocating responsibility. As he subsequently said, “If you’re a citizen, and if you’re living here, then it’s your turn to take out the garbage.” On August 20, 1981 he signaled this new social awareness (and replacement belief-system) by donating all the proceeds from opening night at the unforgiving LA Sports Arena to the Vietnam Veterans Association, and prefacing his performance of “Who’ll Stop The Rain” that night with his first pre-scripted political speech:
“It’s like when you feel like you’re walking down a dark street at night and out of the corner of your eye you see somebody getting hurt or getting hit in the dark alley, but you keep walking on, because you think it don’t have nothing to do with you and you just want to get home…Well, Vietnam turned, turned this whole country into that dark street and unless we’re able to walk down those dark alleys and look into the eyes of the men and the women that are down there, and the things that happened, we’re never gonna be able to get home.”
If a movie of a book had inspired the noirish Darkness, it was the book of someone’s life which sparked this new concern. How ironic that the most famous New Dylan should alight on a biography of Woody Guthrie, seen through the prose of Joe Klein, as a way to reinvent himself. (There was a time, twenty years earlier, when Dylan was the New Guthrie.) In fact, Springsteen had been playing “This Land Is Your Land” since the first night at Nassau (12/28/80), as if he already knew he wanted it on any resultant live album. Reading Klein, he had discovered this was a song which had been misrepresented since the day it was conceived, and he decided to reclaim it. Hence introductions like, “This song was written a real long time ago…[It] was written to fight all the prejudice and all the hatred that gets passed on as patriotism or as nationalism.”
He finally sought to connect himself to that “long tradition of artist involvement in the nation’s social and political life. Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield…When they spoke, I heard myself speaking. I felt [that] connectedness.” And yet, he had admitted back in 1974 that he had never really listened to the protest songs of Dylan, only the electric Rimbaud. When the battle was outside a-ragin’, he’d been back home reading Rolling Stone. Now a galvanized Springsteen was enthusing about how “Guthrie and Dylan had the courage to comment on all that happened in America in the fifties and sixties…It’s time that someone took on the reality of the eighties.” He may not have discovered a new religion, but he had found a soapbox.
With the tour over by mid-September, and the band taking a well-earned rest, he returned to his New Jersey home determined to write a “This Land Is Your Land” he could call his own, one that would deal with “the reality of the Eighties” by addressing a war from the sixties. Again, he initially looked for that story in picture form: “I remember going to see The Deer Hunter with [the Viet-vet] Ron Kovic…he was looking for things that reflected his experience. The song came out of all that.” The song he was talking about was “Born In The USA.” But that was not the song which came out first. Rather, he began something called “Vietnam Blues” on his return east.
A “stranger in his own home town” saga, “Vietnam Blues” was neither “Born In The USA” nor “Shut Out The Light,” though elements of both appeared therein, notably the prototype for the latter’s first verse: “The runway rushed up at me, I felt the wheels touch down/ Stood out on the blacktop, and took a taxi into town/ Got off down on Main Street, to see what I recognized/ All I seen was strange faces watching a stranger passin’ by.” But “Vietnam Blues” was some way from either offspring, and its refrain lacked universal resonance—“You died in Vietnam, now don’t you understand.” No, he needed something with a more Guthriesque quality. Something which suggested, whatever he’d been told previously, that this land was made for him and them.
* David Gahr was still taking shots for an album cover on October 16, suggesting a release was still on the cards.
* The line partially dates the recording by referencing the bombing of Philip Testa on March 15, 1981, a hit man for the mob known universally as “The Chicken Man.”
Chapter 8: 1981–82—Reasons To Believe
I have the impression that I have only just begun to write since “The River;” that I have [now] touched upon matters which will never leave me without inspiration: love, hate, sex, hypocrisy in marriage, adultery. Matters about which…very little…ha[s] been said in rock n roll.—Bruce Springsteen, 1981
[The albums] after Born To Run…through Nebraska…were kind of my reaction, not necessarily to my success, but to what…I was feeling—what I felt the role of the musicians should be, what an artist should be…So I just dove into it. I decided…to move into the darkness and look around and write about what I knew, and what I saw and what I was feeling. I was trying to find something to hold onto that doesn’t disappear out from under you.—Bruce Springsteen, 1984.
As Ralph and Carter Stanley harmonically pointed out, the darkest hour is just before the dawn. Well, throughout the fall of 1981 Springsteen spent all his time penning song after song with that four a.m. feeling, and when he wasn’t doing this he was listening to Hank Williams, Robert Johnson and Suicide. (Thankfully, he excluded any British antidote to melancholy, as one spin of Richard Thompson’s “I’ll Regret It All In The Morning” might just have tipped him over the edge.) He was shutting others out, repeating well-worn patterns of interpersonal behavior again—in a partly-conscious attempt to drive another long-time girlfriend away:
Bruce Springsteen: There’s people who feel, “I get what I need when I go onstage and I don’t need the rest.” I felt like that for a long time. I always got to a point in relationships where if it got too complicated or there was too much pressure, whether it was right or not, I’d say, “Hey! I don’t need this!…” My fear of failure always held me back in dealing with people and relationships. I always stopped right before I committed to the place where, if it failed, it would really hurt. [1992]
The very person who had once proclaimed, “I eat loneliness, man. I feed off it,” had again reached the place he would describe so convincingly in a 1984 introduction to “Racing In The Street,” “It’s hard to understand what brings people together and then what pulls ’em apart. You meet somebody, you think that they can take away all of your loneliness, when in the end nobody can take away the loneliness. You just hope that you can find somebody maybe that you can share it with.”
He still couldn’t decide how much of his essential self he was willing to share with another person. It wasn’t like he didn’t know by now he was a difficult person to live with, or that he “tend[ed] to be an isolationist by nature. And it’s not about money or where you live or how you live. It’s about psychology. My Dad was…the same way.” For Joyce, though, missing Karen Darvin’s phone number from her address book, it was increasingly hard to bear. Barely had he returned from the road when he made it clear in gesture and deed that he wanted to be alone. She left her ex-boyfriend with no secrets to conceal, and a new notebook to write them in:
Bruce Springsteen: That whole Nebraska album was just that isolation thing, and what it does to you…I wrote all those songs, and to do it right, you’ve got to get down in there somehow…[But] when that happens, there’s just a whole breakdown. When you lose that sense of community, there’s some spiritual breakdown that occurs. And when that occurs, you just get shot off somewhere where nothing seems to matter…/…At that point—well, that was the bottom. I would hope not to be in that particular place ever again. It was a t
hing where all my ideas might have been working musically, but they were failing me personally…I got to a point where all my answers—rock & roll answers—were running out. [1984/1986]
He needed to find another route out. Even before he began writing the songs that would form the cornerstones of Nebraska (and, ultimately, Born In The USA), he started searching for a new outlet from his inner turmoil. For the first time he decided to stop bottling up these neuroses, the self-same ones which had led him to quit a psychology course in college, and turn to a qualified therapist to help him address those “moments when it was very confusing. Because [although] I realized that I was a rich man…I felt like a poor man inside.” Having pursued his singular goal—to be rich, successful, famous and good—with unswerving dedication for a decade or more, he found there were still more questions than answers. His new-found success merely raised ever more questions about who he was, and wanted to be. Experiencing an existential crisis of the soul, he sought outside help:
Bruce Springsteen: I found I’d gotten very good at my job and because I was good at my job, for some reason I thought I was capable of a lot of other things, like relationships. If you’re not good at those things and you’re in your twenties, you don’t notice it because you’re too busy scuffling. But when you get a little older, you start to realize that there are all these other things that you’re really bad at…basically your real life, your life away from your guitar, your music, your work, your life outside your work—you’ve been failing miserably at for a long time…I always enjoyed my work but when it came to functioning outside of that, I always had a hard time. [1992]
It took a great deal of personal courage to admit, as he did first in therapy and then in a number of 1984 interviews, that “you’re just somebody who plays guitar, and you do that good…but the rest of the time, you’re scramblin’ around in the dark like everyone else.” This process of personal development would ultimately take his songwriting in a more self-aware—though not necessarily such an abidingly creative—direction. For now, he was feeling the birth pangs of a born-again songwriter who, perhaps for the first time, was “growin’ into the particular shoes I was wearing.” And the songs flowed.
E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Page 29
