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

by Clinton Heylin

  He was writing (and demoing on cassette) like there was no tomorrow. Like, indeed, it was 1976–77 all over again. As he later revealed to Chet Flippo, “I just locked in, and it was real different for me. I stayed in my house, I just worked all the time…I realized that this was different from stuff I’d done before and I didn’t know what it was.” Once again, his way of reclaiming the night was staying up late, writing. According to Springsteen, “Mansion On The Hill,” which he “had the beginning of for some time,” was the first song finished. Nodding to another major influence in its title—and perhaps finding at least one line in the Hank Williams original which struck home, “I know you’re alone with your pride…in that loveless mansion on the hill”—it was the first time he had written in such a nakedly autobiographical way since “Randolph Street,” a decade earlier. He yearned to experience those feelings in the here and now, still fearing the ghost of Johnny Bye-Bye:

  “When I was a kid, my father used to drive me outside of town. There was this nice white house used to sit on this hill. As I got older, it took [on] more meaning. It became very mystical…like a touchstone. Now when I dream, sometimes I’m outside the gates looking in, and sometimes I’m the man inside.” *

  To call “Mansion” the earliest song written for Nebraska, though, would be untrue. There were at least two songs he worked on now which were lyrical recastings of 1979 River outtakes: “Baby I’m So Cold,” a reworking of “Loose Ends” which he now set to the “Follow That Dream” tune debuted the previous April, and “Open All Night,” originally “Living On The Edge of The World.” A snatch of the latter appears at the end of the April 1981 home demos. Though lyrically it is still “Living on the Edge of the World” (with a snippet of “This Hard Land” thrown in for good measure: “What happened to the seeds I’ve sown/ in this hard land?”), musically he has already made the switch to “Open All Night.” Inspired by a William Price Fox short-story, it updated the sentiments of “Drive All Night,” with “the hero brav[ing] snow sleet rain + the highway patrol for a kiss from his baby’s lips.”

  However, as he knew all too well, there were no “baby’s lips” waiting for him back home. His response was to turn the jagged “Loose Ends”—written when Heiser was around—inward. A new verse now made the track sound right when reaching for those razor blades: “We both made promises we couldn’t keep/ Now last night, I found you crying in your sleep/ Baby, we used to walk on nights just like this/ And I would hold you in my arms, fill you with my kisses.” (By the time he was rehearsing the song for the Electric Nebraska, this pair of star-crossed lovers had also become “like strangers who know too much about each other.”)

  Another song which directly addressed a failed relationship that fall was the claustrophobic “Fade To Black”—another component of spring ’82 E Street sessions. Demoed when the emotions were red-raw, he pared its lyrics to the bone to provide his first film-treatment in song: “Sunday matinee in a one-dog town/ You’re two seats away, I move two seats down/ And the lights cut off, I walk out from my seat/ I walk you home, as the credits rise.” Skillfully using cinematic shorthand to advance the fateful narrative—“Wipe the tears from your eyes, the first kiss I stole/ I walk you home, the credits roll/ Fade to black”—the song fits its author’s description of the Nebraska material perfectly: “The…record had that cinematic quality, where you get in there and you get the feel of life…some of the grit and some of the beauty.”

  However, “Fade To Black” was not destined to constitute part of that fabled demo tape. Nor was another of his Biblical mock-parables, “Love Is A Dangerous Thing,” which had a cast of characters including Eve, who “tempted Adam with an apple/ You know the story in the end,” and Delilah, who “took on Samson/ And left him slowly twisting in the wind.” Just no Jezebel.

  Other songs demoed that fall—“Johnny 99,” “The Losin’ Kind” and the rock formation “Born In The USA”—perhaps suggested a more enticing direction. In each case, he had created convincing characters caught in a moral bind. On the first two occasions they acted without thinking, while on the last occasion the protagonist went from one existential wasteland (home) to another (Vietnam) and back. Each song he was writing served to address, even embrace, the darkness, but the narration became almost exclusively third-person as Springsteen attempted to separate himself from invidious feelings of impotence and self-loathing, applying them to far more dysfunctional individuals than any previous singer-narrator. Rather than indulging in the kind of lachrymose self-pity found in most modern country music, he revisited its hillbilly roots and the traditional story-songs that were its bedrock, adopting a persona that was a cross between Luke the Drifter—the name Hank Williams gave himself when he wanted to spin parables-in-song—and the stoic Sun-era Johnny Cash, ever caught somewhere between heaven and hellraisin’:

  Bruce Springsteen: All during the last tour…I listened to Hank Williams…That and the first real Johnny Cash record with “Give My Love to Rose,” “I Walk the Line,” “Hey Porter,” “Six Foot High and Risin’,”…“Guess Things Happen That Way.” That, and the rockabilly…All that stuff just seemed to fit in with things that I was thinking about, or worrying about. Especially the Hank Williams stuff. He always has all that conflict, he always has that real religious side, and the honky tonkin’…side [as well]. [1981]

  Like many who came before (and after), Springsteen’s introduction to the works of Woody Guthrie had opened up an Anglo-American musical backdrop he had been blithely unaware of (even if Dylan had been mining it to the core for twenty years). It was a tradition which suggested that what happened at the Sun studios was as much an end as a beginning; that something unearthly went down south which changed the parameters of song forever, ultimately taking some of the traditional mystery out of the process. (Hence, presumably, why Springsteen recently described driving “past Sun Studios. I just wanted to know it was there, that it was real. That all of that stuff really happened.”) By fall 1981 Springsteen was in fast rewind when it came to the influences he allowed to impact on his songwriting craft:

  Bruce Springsteen: My music utilizes things from the past, because that’s what the past is for. It’s to learn from…I don’t want to make a record like they made in the ’50s or the ’60s or the ’70s. I want to make a record like today, that’s right now. To do that, I go back, back further all the time. Back into Hank Williams, back into Jimmie Rodgers…The human thing that’s in those records is just beautiful and awesome…It’s got that beauty and the purity. The same thing with a lot of the great fifties records, and the early rockabilly. [1981]

  What he says he found in many pre-rock ’n’ roll reference points was a “sense of consequences” that “rock & roll didn’t pick up from country and rhythm & blues.” And it was to country he now leaned. As he put it in 2012, “Country’s fatalism attracted me. It was reflective. It was funny. It was soulful. But it was quite fatalistic. Tomorrow looked pretty dark…If rock and roll was a seven-day weekend, country was Saturday night hell-raising, followed by heavy ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down.’ Guilt, guilt, guilt, I fucked up. Oh, my God.” And one of the things he now set out “to do was provide that set of consequences”—though, in truth, most of the story-songs he was writing seemed more about comeuppance than consequence. The arbitrary nature of most punishments meted out on Nebraska reflected a worldview culled more from the works of Alan Vega rather than those devout sinners, Williams and Cash.

  For Springsteen had not entirely surrendered his interest in modern music, or one of its more cutting edge cult-artists. He had only dug deeper since bonding with Vega at those Power Station sessions the previous year. And if few at the time would have considered Vega an obvious brother-in-song, Springsteen was keen to acknowledge his influence in a 1984 Rolling Stone interview: “I like the band Suicide…They had that two-piece synthesizer-voice thing. They had one of the most amazing songs I ever heard. It was about a guy that murders [his family]…That’s one of the most amazing r
ecords I think I ever heard.”

  The song he was referring to was the psychotic centerpiece of Suicide’s eponymous debut, “Frankie Teardrop,” which if it hadn’t just reached the shops under its own steam, would have slotted right on Darkness On The Edge of Town: “Twenty year old Frankie, he’s married, he’s got a kid/ And he’s working in a factory/ He’s working from seven to five…just trying to survive.” Frankie, though, “can’t make it, ’cause things are just too hard,” and so he decides to kill himself, though not before he has “picked up a gun/ Pointed [it] at the six month old in the crib,” and then at his wife. But if Frankie is convinced he has escaped a world of existential terror, he awakes to find himself “lying in hell.” The “moralizing” coda is as unsparing as it gets: “We’re all Frankies/ lying in hell.”

  A “Hollis Brown” for the post-punk world, “Frankie Teardrop” literally caused riots across Europe when Suicide were invited to support the likes of The Clash and Elvis Costello in 1977–78. It also provided Springsteen with a fictional role model for Nebraska’s most impenitent mass murderer, Charlie Starkweather; to go with the nonfictional role models of Starkweather himself, and the Gary Gilmore whom Norman Mailer had just epically depicted in his “nonfiction novel,” Executioner’s Song. Because, as Springsteen openly admitted in 1987, “In the end, I was probably using Charlie Starkweather to write about myself.” (Intriguingly, he once suggested in a 1975 interview that if he hadn’t become a rock singer, he’d “probably [have] done something crazy. Maybe robbed stores or something. That always appealed to me, robbing things.”) Like the Dylan who saw something of himself in Lee Harvey Oswald, and nearly got metaphorically lynched at an Emergency Civil Liberties Committee dinner for saying so, Springsteen had come to feel just like Frankie and Charlie:

  Bruce Springsteen: There was something about [“Nebraska”] that was the center of the record, but I couldn’t really say specifically what it was, outside of the fact that I’d read something that moved me…I think in my own life I had reached where it felt like I was teetering on this void. I felt a deep sense of isolation, and that led me to those characters and to those stories…I was at a place where I could start to really feel that price…for not sorting through the issues that make up your emotional life…I just felt too disconnected, I just [felt I] wasn’t any good, right at the moment that record occurred. [1999]

  Having recently read a contemporary account of Charlie Starkweather’s murdering spree, Caril, and garnered some further background from the coauthor Ninette Beaver, a local reporter who covered the case, Springsteen’s interest had been piqued by Terrence Malick’s curiously amoral 1973 movie, Badlands. What led him there he couldn’t say. It just “seemed to be a mood…I was in at the time.” But if “Nebraska” never excused the malevolent misfit his murderous mindset, he did seem to consider the Starkweathers of this world an outward manifestation of a deeper societal malady, something he made plain to audiences on the Born In The USA tour when introducing the song thus: “I was reading in the papers about how television and all the media and stuff is bringing the whole world closer together. But it seems like in these times people [can] get isolated from their jobs; sometimes they [also] get isolated from friends and from their families, until you get that sense of powerlessness, and just explode.”

  That he was mythologizing a particularly nasty specimen in Starkweather did not at this stage trouble him. Nor was he concerned by the clear historical liberties he was taking with what was, after all, a true story. (He had learned that lesson from Guthrie, f’sure.) And the most egregious of those liberties came on the song’s punch line. When “they wanted to know why I did what I did,” the mass murderer replied, “I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” Needless to say, Starkweather never said anything of the sort. It is what another homicidal murderer said when about to murder a God-fearing old lady, this one the fictional creation of Flannery O’Connor in her seminal short story, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.”

  O’Connor’s character is only ever identified as The Misfit, and his explanation of where the world went wrong skewered Christ’s message in a way only a lapsed Catholic could have accepted as an explanation for why a good man might be hard to find: “Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead, and He shouldn’t have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness.” The murderer in “Nebraska” applies a similarly warped worldview to the jurors who sentence him to death: “They declared me unfit to live, said into that great void my soul’d be hurled.” However, it was only Charlie—and his fictional brother-murderer, Frankie—who envisaged life after death as “that great void.” O’Connor fervently believed The Misfit would eventually be “lying in hell.”

  For Springsteen to have reached a place where he felt he “wasn’t any good—right at the moment that record occurred,” openly identifying with those inner feelings of a callous murderer, suggests how little light now filtered through those blinds. Only later would he see the wider picture and acknowledge that a “sense of consequences” was as important in one’s life as in one’s songs. As he said the night he rekindled that “Nebraska” mindset onstage at the Christic Institute Benefit in November 1990, delivering his most powerful performance this side of a Portastudio, “When I did the Nebraska album, I really didn’t think anything about what its political implications were, until I read about it in the newspapers…But something I was feeling moved me to write all these songs, where people lose their connection to their friends and their families and their jobs and their countries, and their lives don’t make sense to them no more.”

  This was the overarching theme he took from Starkweather and Teardrop, Gilmore and The Misfit, constructing an album for “every hung-up person in the whole wide universe;” peopled by folk who because they “struggle to find the language…of the soul…explode into violence or [implode into] indifference or numbness,” a view he only articulated after touring with the songs solo in 1995–96. *

  Not that Alan Vega’s influence was confined to his more Suicidal offerings. If Frankie Teardrop would inform Nebraska, so would Vega’s eponymous 1980 solo debut, with its demo-rockabilly sensibility, specifically the eight-minute “Bye Bye Bayou” which whoops and hollers like Jimmie Rodgers on a bed of nails. (In 2006, Bruce suggested, “If Elvis came back from the dead I think he would sound like Alan Vega—he gets a lot of emotional purity.”) Alan Vega certainly thought he’d heard a ghost the day he visited his label and heard someone spinning Springsteen’s latest:

  Alan Vega: I was on Zee Records, and I walk in, there’s something on the turntable blasting out, and I’m hearing [all] these typical Alan Vega things—the whooping [&c.]. The music is very raw. And I’m just going, “Man, did I do a record I forgot I did?” The yelps were me—and the music was very Suicide. Turned out to be “State Trooper.”

  Springsteen openly admitted, in handwritten notes to the songs which he gave to Jon Landau that winter, that “State Trooper” was something he dreamed “up comin’ back from New York one night. I don’t know if it’s even really a song or not…It’s kinda weird.” (I refer readers to Steve Wynn’s cover version on the Light of Day Springsteen tribute 2–CD set for an even more Vega-like version.) In this unearthly concoction, he told the story of a man who professed to have “a clear conscience ’bout the things that I done,” without really explaining what these things might be. In the end, the driver asks someone to “listen to my last prayer…[and] deliver me from nowhere,” a rare expression of faith on a faithless record.

  At least the other murder-ballad on the album returned its author to the land of fiction. “Johnny 99” was the first of the “desperado” songs written for Nebraska, predating even the title
track. Johnny’s “explanation” for what drove him to his doom again pointed the finger at society—“It was more ’n all this that put that gun in my hand”—replaced an original couplet that had more of the country in its blood, crossing “Folsom Prison Blues” with The Gunfighter, “Step in my way and I’ll shoot you down/ Until the day that you understand.” (Anyone who doubts such a synthesis took place might want to refer to a 1996 observation on the subject, “Since the early eighties, my musical influences…[have gone] back in a way [to] Hank Williams and some of the blues guys and folk guys, but films and writers and novels have probably been the primary influences on my work.”)

  Though Springsteen’s “Johnny 99” had no obvious real-life parallel, there was a probable literary source, the monumental Executioner’s Song, the story of Gary Gilmore and the two senseless murders that led to his state-sponsored execution, published the previous year to enormous fanfare and justified critical acclaim. Like Gilmore, Johnny asks to be executed, rather than face life without parole. Unlike Johnny, though, Gilmore did not seek to excuse his crimes. (When asked what someone should say to his mother, Gary replied, “I guess that it’s all true.”) The penny-ante nature of the crime Johnny commits also replicated Gilmore’s, even if Springsteen deleted the actual incident after that initial home demo: “It’s only $200, that was all I was asking for/ Judge, just $200 and I would have been on my way out the door/ He reached ’neath the counter and I saw something shiny in his hand/ He spewed blood like a fountain and I dropped my gun and I ran.”