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

by Clinton Heylin

  It was two days later that they next departed from songs considered for the Electric Nebraska, though the way Bruce talked about “Glory Days” one could easily be misled into thinking it was something left over from the former project: “What I wanted to do was to make it feel like you meet somebody and you walk a little while in their shoes and see what their life is like. And then what does that mean to you? That’s kind of the direction my writing’s going in, and in general it’s just the thing I end up finding the most satisfying. Just saying what somebody had to say, and not making too big a deal out of it.”

  Based on a real-life encounter with an old school friend in the summer of 1973—as Bruce confirmed to a fellow classmate at their 1997 school reunion—“Glory Days” first showed up on the winter 1982 home demos. Over eight years had passed since he, then a struggling recording artist with a single flop album, ran into ex-classmate Joe DePugh at The Headliner. DePugh had indeed been a star Little League pitcher and a teammate of Springsteen’s in the Babe Ruth League “back in high school.” After a try-out for the LA Dodgers, he ended up playing college basketball before becoming a self-employed contractor.

  But 1973 was a long time ago. Something else must have triggered the song; and it was probably a movie Springsteen saw in November 1980 with a fan he met on the street, Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories. In that underrated film, there is a memorable scene where the grouchy film director returns to his hotel after a long day only to be confronted by someone from his old high school, who has clearly been waiting all evening in the lobby. When he asks if the director remembers him, Allen replies, “Sure, we used to play stickball together.” He asks what his school buddy is doing. The guy replies, “I drive a cab.” “There’s nothing wrong with that.” “Yeah, but look at me compared to you…the broads, you know.” It’s a priceless scene and, although Springsteen told the fan who accompanied him to the Allen film he didn’t feel this way, one can’t help suspecting it reminded him of a similar incident from his own life.

  In fact, when he first demoed the song, all he had was this scene with the baseball buddy, “just talking about them glory days,” and a verse about a father who at fifty-nine got put on the scrapheap after twenty years working “in production on the Ford plant assembly line/ Pluggin’ in them, slappin’ in them firewalls and windshields.” But by May 5 he had a song that walked the full mile with a skip and a beat. It was part of a highly productive session, resulting in “Gun In Every Home,” “Stop The War,” an even better “Downbound Train,” and two songs it would take him seventeen years to release, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” and “My Love Will Not Let You Down.”

  The former of these, logged simply as “Pittsburg,” took its full title and another reference to the meanness in this world from Flannery O’Connor’s most famous short story. But the song itself is concerned with a broken-hearted woman who realizes that someday she’s gonna have to tell her own daughter the facts of life: “Now there’s a little girl asleep in the back room/ She’s gonna have to tell about the meanness in this world/ And how a good man is so hard to find.” Lyrically at least, “My Love…” was something of a natural successor to “On The Prowl,” with lines like, “At night I walk the streets lookin’ for romance/ But I always end up stumblin’ in a half trance.” Like in that song, he is primarily concerned with physical potency—love as a four-letter word spelt l-u-s-t. He even adopts a suitably sacrilegious image to depict the virgin he is planning to deflower tonight: “I see you standin’ across the room watchin’ me without a sound/ But I’m gonna push my way through that crowd, I’m gonna tear your holy walls down.”

  By the end of that first week of sessions he had the makings of a weighty eighties E Street album. They weren’t hanging around. As Weinberg would inform Musician, “There was very little rehearsal. We just went in without ever really running the songs down and recorded everything live…Sometimes the band didn’t even know the chords.” Springsteen was determined to get the band’s first instincts—and to hell with second-guessing. His own memory of these sessions certainly chimes with Weinberg’s: “We didn’t do any more than five takes on any one song. If it got any more than that we’d choose an earlier take…We put some more guitar on some of the tracks and some backing vocals, but they were all done real live and quick.” Could it be this was how they made all those great records he had heard growing up?

  But when the band returned to Power Station on the following Monday (the 10th), he was preparing to take them down the dark end of the street. Over the next two days, he would summon forth “Johnny Bye Bye,” “Your Love Is All Around Me,” “Fade To Black,” “Baby I’m So Cold,” “Wages of Sin” and something logged as “Stay Hungry (Common Ground)”—all songs with the kind of wind-chill factor that came whistling straight from Nebraska.

  He also brought with him the freshly-minted “I’m On Fire.” Actually, according to the man himself, the latter came to him “one night in the studio when [he] was just goofing around with a Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three rhythm.” “I’m On Fire” may have pared its imagery to the point of parsimony, but it communicates its dirty little secret just fine. A straightforward song of adulterous desire, the narrator’s ardent professions of lust again mask a secret sorrow: “Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife baby, edgy and dull/ And cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my soul.”

  Finally, on the 12th, after reviving “Cover Me” and overlaying it with bongos, he produced the ultimate anti-relationship song, “Down, Down, Down” (issued as “I’m Going Down”), a cut he would preface in concert with a humorous but oh-so-telling summation of relationships—the gospel according to Bruce:

  “Here’s a song about relationships, how when you first meet somebody, you’re kissing all the time and holding hands every place you go. It’s like, if you’re gonna go out to the movie, she says, “Oh, honey, I don’t care, we can see whatever you wanna see,” and you say, “No, we can see whatever you wanna see.” Whatever they wear, it’s like, “Oh honey, you look so beautiful tonight,” and, “Gee, do you wanna go out tonight?” “Oh, I don’t care what we do, as long as I’m with you”…/…You come back about four or five months later and you hear, “Are you gonna take me out tonight or do I have to sit here and look at your face?,” “Are you gonna make love to me tonight, or are we waiting for the full moon again?”…. In the end you’re sitting there and she’s sitting there, it’s just a cold hard stare.” *

  Already, in just eight sessions, they had recorded enough world-weary world-beaters for a three-sided album. Judiciously pruned, it could have been potentially the equal of Darkness, returning him to the road he spun off when heading down to The River. But after a series of bold steps forward in the first eight sessions, he took two steps back at the last two. First, he returned to an idea originating in a song called “Stay Hungry,” which now became “This Hard Land” (the final line of which reads, “If you can’t make it stay hard, stay hungry, stay alive if you can”). A song conceived from a stray couplet in an early version of “Open All Night,” it was a ponderously self-important résumé of every Bound For Glory cliché that had ever captured the Jersey boy’s heart. Evidence he thought he’d stumbled onto the set of some John Ford movie comes thick and fast: “We’re ridin’ in the whirlwind searchin’ for lost treasure/ Way down south of the Rio Grande/ We’re ridin’ ’cross that river in the moonlight/ Up onto the banks of this hard land.”

  The session on the 13th then ended with an unexpected revival of a song he originally wrote for Darkness, “Darlington County.” Perhaps he really was looking to connect the dots. Conclusive evidence was provided the following day, when he wrapped up “Another Side of the E Street Band” with a reinterpretation of the song that in 1976 changed everything, always, “Frankie.” However, a few lyrical changes were intended to demonstrate a shift in perspective. In the 1982 version, possibilities have been shut down. Escape is no longer an option as Springsteen penned the chilly couplet, “Wel
l, everybody’s dyin’, this town’s closin’ down/ They’re all sittin’ down at the courthouse, waiting for ’em to take the flag down,” to replace the fieriest image in the original, a summation of a greater Darkness, “There’s machines and there’s fire on the outside of town.”

  Other lyrical tweaks suggested a similar failure of nerve. That glorious original-sin image, “Living and dying like I was born to do,” has been replaced with the anodyne, “Now and forever, my love is for you,” while the transcendent, “In the darkness there’ll be hidden worlds that shine” has become enclosed in four walls: “I don’t know what I’m gonna find…maybe a world I can call mine.” In keeping with the austere vibe of recent songs, there was not even a sax coda to convince us it’s still gonna work out fine. Whatever its lapses, though, this former classic gave him a second album in less than six months. If only Springsteen were willing to allow himself to be convinced:

  Bruce Springsteen: What takes so long is finding out what the idea is. You have a feeling that you go by. After Nebraska, you have to come from there and get back to somewhere very different. We recorded a lot of [other] stuff when I did Nebraska. But I just didn’t seem to have the whole thing as to what I wanted to do…I [felt I] had recorded a bunch of songs. I never had an album. Because if I had an album, I would have put it out. [1984]

  That was not quite the whole truth. Throughout June, Plotkin, Springsteen and co., worked on mixing both albums. The one with the E Street Band received the following sequence:

  Side 1: Born In The USA. Murder Inc. Downbound Train. Down Down Down. Glory Days. My Love.

  Side 2: Working On The Highway. Darlington County. Frankie. I’m On Fire. This Hard Land.

  The other LP took nine demos from the January 3 tape (having decided, once and for all, that three of them belonged to an E Street album), and added something equally home-grown but more recent to the mix. He initially intended to prepare both artefacts for release—after which, he would toss a coin. (As he told Mojo at the time of Tracks, “I was going to put out [Nebraska and Born In The USA] at the same time as a double record. I didn’t know what to do.”) Slowly, though, Nebraska began to take precedence over the E Street Band’s answer-album.

  Perhaps, rather than putting out another double record, he could issue the two in close succession. The E Street LP could wait. And wait. The end result would be, as Geoffrey Himes suggests, all “those extra songs, products of the most fertile songwriting period of his career, [which] could have reached the public as fresh fruit, contemporary commentaries on the world of the mid-80s, instead petrifying into historical artefacts, released in the late 90s on various anthologies.”

  By mid-July, BITUSA was on semi-permanent hold. The sequencing of Nebraska was, thankfully, a lot more straightforward. After all, he only had twelve tracks—the eleven original January demos (minus “Born In The USA,” “Downbound Train” and “Working On The Highway”) and a song he had recorded with the same Portastudio setup in two takes on May 25, eleven days after time was called on E Street duties. “My Father’s House” was partly a reworking of a song he had spent the whole of May 10 working up with the band, “Wages of Sin,” and wholly the creative by-product of recent therapy sessions:

  Bruce Springsteen: I had this habit for a long time. I used to get in my car and drive back through my old neighborhood, the little town I grew up in. I’d always drive past the old houses I used to live in, sometimes late at night. I got so I would do it really regularly—two, three, four times a week for years. I eventually got to wondering, “What the hell am I doing?” So I went to see this psychiatrist…He said, “What you’re doing is, something bad happened, something went wrong, and you’re going back thinking you can make it right again…to see if you can fix it, if you can somehow make it right…Well, you can’t.” [1990]

  A new-found maturity here invaded his songwriting, albeit mining images familiar to any long-time fan: “My father’s house shines hard and bright, it stands like a beacon calling me in the night/Calling and calling, so cold and alone/ Shining ’cross this dark highway where our sins lie unatoned.” Co-opting the last verse of “Wages of Sin”—with its image of a young boy running home “with the devil snappin’ at my heels”—Springsteen crafted a song which was deliberately and self-consciously “meant to evoke emotion—to individualize personal emotion in the listener.” He did this by relating a story “that came directly out of my experience with my family” in the form of a dream. He instinctively knew he required this one song to remind himself you can’t go home again, and to intersect “Open All Night” and “Reason To Believe.” Now he just needed to lose a coupla others:

  Bruce Springsteen: When I wrote the Nebraska stuff, there were songs I really didn’t get—because I didn’t get the people. I had all the detail, but if you don’t have that underlying emotional connection that connects the details together, then you don’t have anything. There were songs that didn’t get onto Nebraska because they didn’t say anything in the end. They had no meaning. [1984]

  The losers in this lottery were “Pink Cadillac” and “The Losin’ Kind,” though both had been transferred to four-track half-inch tape on June 10, when work began in earnest on turning this “crappy cassette” into a proper album. This took over two months—longer than it took to write and record the record—because, as Springsteen noted, “It was hard to get on an album; that took us some time, because the recording was so strange that it wouldn’t get onto wax…/…It’s amazing that it got there, ’cause I was carrying that cassette around with me in my pocket without a case for a couple of weeks, just draggin’ it around.”

  By 1982, bootleggers had been transferring acoustic demos from cassette to vinyl for thirteen-plus years. But Springsteen wasn’t prepared to just put the tape out “as is” (as an Italian bootlegger did in 1996, when he got his hands on that original 14–track “master” cassette). Even with just a four-track cassette to work with, he did nine separate mixes of “Used Cars,” with “more slap,” “more echo,” “brighter;” and added a synthesizer to “My Father’s House.” A synthesizer was also added to “State Trooper,” making its Suicide nomenclature explicit—a decision he wisely reversed. As such, it was August 16 before there was a production master for a ten-song edit of a cassette demo.

  Now they just needed to market a non-E Street Bruce Springsteen album of solo demos in bootleg sound quality to a mass audience. Again, they relied on the no-hype template of John Wesley Harding, issued eighteen months after the kaleidoscopic Blonde on Blonde. They even took a leaf from Columbia’s old Dylan press ads, turning the famous “Nobody Sings Dylan Like Dylan” into “Nobody But Springsteen Can Tell Stories Like These.” Nonetheless, the label was heavily reliant—in a way they hadn’t been since 1973—on good reviews to help sell fans on this daring departure. Springsteen professed not to give a damn:

  Bruce Springsteen: [Nebraska] was the only record where after it was done, I really didn’t care what people thought about or said about it. I just thought it was right. It rang true…[And] what made the record work [was] the sound of real conversation. [1984]

  In fact, Greil Marcus had predicted a corelationship between Dylan’s 1967 album and Springsteen’s 1982 offering some eighteen months earlier: “As Jon Landau…wrote in 1968, an awareness of the Vietnam War could be felt all through Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding; it is an almost certain bet that the songs Springsteen will now be writing will have something to do with the [election] of November 4. Those songs likely will not comment on those events, [but rather] reflect those events back to us, fixing moods and telling stories that are, at present, out of reach.” He was bang on. But even as Nebraska directly addressed Reagan’s America, Springsteen was insisting he still saw himself as an apolitical man in a political world:

  Bruce Springsteen: I didn’t think about the politics of Nebraska until I read in a review that it had a variety of political implications. At the time that was my most personal record—it reminded me of the
way my childhood felt, the house that I grew up in. I was digging into that…The political aspect wasn’t something that was really on my mind at the time, it was more just people struggling with those particular kinds of emotional or psychological issues. [1999]

  Just about every review commented on the social and political climate in which Nebraska had been made. The reviews themselves, though, were decidedly mixed, even if Robert Hilburn later claimed the album “was instantly hailed by the critics as a masterpiece of boldness and individuality.” Hilburn himself certainly hailed it as such, suggesting that in its “best moments, Springsteen combines a captivating sense of cinematic detail with an endearing sense of America that we have not approached in pop music (sic) since the early works of John Prine and The Band.”

  Another old-time advocate, Paul Nelson, had larger doubts: “Initially, Nebraska sounded so demoralized and demoralizing, so murderously monotonous, so deprived of spark and hope that, in comparison, the gloomy songs from Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River seemed not altogether unhappy.” Gradually, though, over the course of his Musician review, he allowed those doubts to dissipate (though not wholly fade away) as he “found a road map that took me to the right places.”

  Richard C. Walls, in Creem, was another one who damned with faint praise: “I like this album. Its singular gloom seems appropriate to the times and its underlying compassion is restrained and moving, though I suspect that most people will find it more admirable than likable.” With Rolling Stone’s review predictably uncritical, it was left to English music weekly Sounds to crack the kernel and rub the nub: “The whole deal sounds like a return to basics, capturing the rough, natural feel of the songs with no embellishment. Or depending on your view, it sounds like a bunch of demos.”

  What wasn’t on the cards was any kind of promotional tour or bout of interviews. As Springsteen himself noted in 1996, Nebraska was “enough of an accident that I didn’t really think that [it] was something I was going to tour with.” In fact, he pretty much disappeared from view in the months after Nebraska’s September 1982 release. Even the stylized promo video for “Atlantic City” failed to feature the song’s auteur. He was busy relocating operations to Los Angeles, where he could further cut himself off from the humanity he professed to embrace in song: