Bruce Springsteen: I had a small place in California from the early eighties on, and it was a place where I could go and I had my cars and my motorcycles…You can be out of Los Angeles in thirty minutes and hit the edge of the desert and travel for a hundred miles. There is still a lot of nothing out here and I loved it. [1999]
It was there, in January 1983, that Springsteen resumed work on Nebraska Mk.2. Or, as he later put it, “When I stopped the Nebraska record, I just continued [recording] in my garage, in Los Angeles. I improved the recording facilities somewhat; I just got an eight-track board. I drove across the country and I got to Los Angeles and I just set up…[and] continued [recording], because I was excited about the fact that I felt the Nebraska stuff was my most personal stuff.” With only Mike Batlan and personal assistant Obie Oziedzic on hand, Springsteen began experimenting with the drum computers and digital synthesizers that had been Suicide’s private domain until The Human League nabbed the idea and sold it to the masses:
Mike Batlan: We were working four to ten hours every day. Bruce was learning about all this new technology that showed up on Born In The USA. He was experimenting with 24–track, cutting complete songs—and he was starting to sound like the E Street Band. He was really good…Those six months were a period of real growth for Bruce…[He] was alone—Chuck Plotkin wasn’t around, Jon Landau wasn’t around—he had no serious girlfriend, he was hanging out.
At least one E Street Band member was seriously worried—the one most directly affected by Springsteen’s flirtation with drum machines, Max Weinberg. He called Batlan up for reassurance “that Bruce wasn’t preparing to release a sophisticated 24–track recording with machines standing in for the E Streeters.” With a fine E Street album already in the can the boss had no need to make another, and anyway, as Landau later observed, “He was[n’t] ready to suddenly switch back into the Born In The USA mode.”
Yet almost the first thing Springsteen did that winter was complete the sister-song and flipside of “Born In The USA,” “Shut Out The Light.” Finally, the songwriter had figured out what to do with that evocative opening to “Vietnam Blues.” He has come home but not to a homecoming parade, and the first thing he needs is a drink. Meanwhile, the girl he left behind fixes herself up for her returning hero. But he ain’t the man she knew before. The segue from first verse to chorus uses cinematic shorthand to make its point: a close-up of a man in bed, it is four a.m., he is staring at the ceiling wondering why he can’t move his hands—cue chorus, “Oh mama, mama, mama come quick/ I’ve got the shakes and I’m gonna be sick/ Throw your arms around me in the cold dark night/ Hey now mama, don’t shut out the light.” For in that darkness he knows he will see the same recurring vision: “Deep in a dark forest, a forest filled with rain/ Beyond a stretch of Maryland pines, there’s a river without a name.”
Like “Born In The USA,” the song was then trimmed of some fat pre-release. In this case it lost lines which made the debt to John Prine’s “Sam Stone” explicit—depicting him locking the back bedroom door each evening before lying back to indulge in “a few habits he’d brought back from over there.” All in all, “Shut Out The Light” showed the new-found lyrical sophistication of “My Father’s House” was no fluke. Nor was it the only idea dating back to 1981 worked on that winter. “Johnny Bye Bye”—the only other song from these sessions officially released in the eighties—and “Follow That Dream” were both demoed a number of times, in the former’s case beefed up with a cryptic last verse that later got the chop: “In the Nevada desert a young boy travels alone/ Walking five thousand miles trying to get home/ Stars rising in the black and endless sky/ He stares up into the darkness, he looks down and walks on.”
And still the question remained: what was he intending to do with these tracks? All twenty-two of them? A curious document from the time suggests he still planned to release his 1982 E Street Album—now provisionally entitled Murder Incorporated—with a single change, “Johnny Bye Bye” for “Darlington County.” Five songs, all recorded at these January home-sessions, were down as potential B-sides: “Sugarland,” “Follow That Dream,” “Don’t Back Down,” “One Love” and “Little Girl Like You.” But “Shut Out The Light,” recorded at the January 19 session, was tellingly absent from this list, probably because he had already earmarked it (and other weightier songs recorded between January 18 and February 17) for a more serious-minded project.
After all, neither “One Love” nor “Little Girl (Like You)” were about to change the parameters of popular song. The former was little more than a cut-up of every rock-chick cliché he could recall that day, “Come on baby, rock me all night long/ I been searchin’ for you for so long/ You’re the one, yeah, you’re the one for me;” and no amount of vocal commitment was ever gonna raise it higher. “Little Girl” was the proclamation of an infamous prowler, claiming those days are done: “Seen a lot of girls, had a lot of fun/ Ran around a lot, now my runnin’s done,” which he wisely left unreleased (given its condescending lines about how he’s “got a plan, but it’s one made for two/ So I need a little girl like you.”) Likewise, “Don’t Back Down” may have raised Cain, but he was still working with less than earth-shattering material (“A time comes and you just gotta…make a stand somewhere.”)
Of the five potential B-sides just “Sugarland” had real potential, with its well-honed sense of despair that many a contemporary American farmer would have recognized: “They’re grazin’ the field covered with tar/ Can’t get a price to see my way clear/ I’m sitting down at the Sugarland Bar/ Might as well bury my body right here.” Of the other songs demoed that month, just one would make BITUSA. “Your Hometown” aka “My Hometown” was a song “about the place where you live, and sharing the responsibility in it; and how you can run, but you can’t hide.” On the initial demo the lonely rock star even embraced a more ordinary life: “Now there’s a hill outside of town where me and my wife/ Watch the stars rising brightly in the black endless sky/ I’m thirty-five, we got a boy of our own.”
But he had not quite relinquished those Nebraskan narratives, penning a new song about the Ku Klux Klan as seen through a child’s blinkered eyes: “I was ten years old when my Pa said, Son, some day you will see/ When you grow to wear the robes like your brother and me.” But compelling as “The Klansman” may be, it was a curio, something written as if this were the late fifties and Springsteen was channelling Guthrie, rather than addressing his own generation.
Two other songs created characters straight out of an O’Connor short-story, “Delivery Man” and “Betty Jean” (who is described in both songs as having “eyes like a jack rabbit starin’ dead in your high beams.”) The former song ends in riotous fashion, with the narrator and his sidekick Wilson chasing the chickens they lost on a low bridge across the road as the highway patrolman pulls up; at which point the song abruptly ends. “Betty Jean,” sung in his best Robert-Gordon-meets-Buddy-Holly voice, was probably one he intended to rev up, too, with its share of good one-liners—“We were married in the Spring out on 531, had fifteen kids and I hate every single one;” “Stretched out on the hood of my GTO/ she’s filin’ her nails shoutin’, Go, Bobby, go!”—placing us firmly in trailertrashland. But after sessions on February 15th and 17th gave Springsteen three more songs to lose—“Seven Tears,” “I Don’t Care” and “The Money We Didn’t Make”—he called a three-week hiatus on the sessions; probably in part to decide whether to release Murder Inc. as is. He chose to just say no.
On March 9 he was back again at Thrill Hill West, his jokey name for this LA home setup, working through April 23. This go-round the songs were mostly reworked older ones. “Johnny Bye Bye” was done again, as were “Don’t Back Down,” “Jim Deer” and, surprisingly, “The Losin’ Kind.” Two of the songs he reexamined, “Jim Deer” and “Fugitive’s Dream” (both recorded at the January 20 session) were transformed into “Richfield Whistle” and “Unsatisfied Heart” respectively, as Springsteen continued to point his songs in
a Nebraskan direction.
“Richfield Whistle” intricately wove a number of Nebraska’s strands—the man who never had a chance, the dreams he shared with a loving wife, the single misjudgment, the senseless murder, the comeuppance—in a six-and-a-half minute narrative that was another nod to Executioner’s Song: “Well, that night me and Pat, we had a fight/ I was out drivin’ ’round in the rain/ With a fifth of gin and a half-tank of gas and ten dollars to my name/ I passed a deserted liquor store way out on Highway One.” But by April 1983 everyone knew how the story ends.
“Unsatisfied Heart” also plowed over-cultivated territory, beginning with a man who “was respected and satisfied/…had two beautiful children and a kind and loving wife.” Then, “one day a man came to town, a man with nothing and nowhere to go/ [Who] came to my door and mentioned something I’d done a long time ago.” It ends with that all-too-familiar dream of how it used to be: “Night after night the same dream keeps comin’ round/ I’m standing high on the green hills on the outskirts of town.”
Good as both songs were, it was time to return to The River’s edge. Even if he had to do it circuitously, he needed to write some band-friendly material they could record. By now, Springsteen had decided if there was to be an E Street Band album after Nebraska, it wouldn’t be Murder Inc. Talking to Rolling Stone in April about the (non)prospect of a tour, he struck an ominously familiar note, “We’d like to…but it depends on the record. I don’t have much control over that myself. I just gotta wait till the record feels right.” For this to happen, his songwriting would need to maybe lighten up.
So he wrote the shamelessly nostalgic “County Fair,” about a Carol who was presumably as fictional as the fabled Chuck Berry heroine, recalling the time he pulled her “close to my heart/…I wish I never had to let this moment go.” After which, his next heroine-in-song would be the anti-Carol. Cynthia was the name he gave to this modern-day Pretty Flamingo. And like that mythical figure, “Cynthia” will never be his: “Cynthia, when you come walkin’ by, you’re an inspiring sight/ Cynthia, you don’t smile or say hi, but baby that’s all right…I just like knowin’, Cynthia, you exist in a world like this.”
Before the spring was through, both songs would receive the E Street stamp of approval. First, though, Landau sat him down for a long chat. What he told him was the result of hearing the songs Springsteen had spent the past three months recording. And it distilled down to a single point: “The problem with the Nebraska thing as a permanent approach…is that…you have so many capabilities that are not utilized, that it seems like it’s less than you can be.” [GD] It was time to submerge the whole wrecking crew in studioland again:
Chuck Plotkin: One of the things that happens when you work for Bruce, you go down—as if in a submarine—for a period of time, and when you resurface, you realize that you’ve let the rest of your life go to seed. Whenever I’ve finished working on a project, it takes six to eight weeks to regain my bearing. My tax returns are always late. I’m scrambling around trying to pay my bills. I get home…and the phone’s been shut off, the gas doesn’t work.
In an almost exact replication of the previous spring’s trials and tribulations, Springsteen recalled the E Street Band to Power Station May 23 and began recording a bunch of songs he’d already demoed solo, a fair few of which—like “Richfield Whistle” and “Sugarland”—did not obviously lend themselves to the E Street ethos. Finally, he turned to the kind of songs which actually suited them. And after they stockpiled enough songs for a whole new album and mixed and sequenced it, he scrapped the whole thing and started again. However, this time there was a significant change in the dynamic. Two of the key contributors—Chuck Plotkin and Steve Van Zandt—were becoming exasperated by Springsteen’s working methods. And in Plotkin’s case this meant that by the end of proceedings they were barely speaking:
Chuck Plotkin: It looked for a long time like we could end up with Nebraska II…Bruce would ask me what I thought about a guitar solo, and I’d say, “I don’t know. I don’t know what the song’s about. I don’t know whether the guitar solo’s the right guitar solo, because I’m not getting any hit off the song….” After two or three of those responses, he just stopped asking me what I thought…I was there every day [for two months] and hardly ever expressed an opinion because he stopped asking me. [GD]
Van Zandt, too, had his mind on other things. The previous year, he had taken advantage of another lull in E Street activities to record a decent solo album, Men Without Women. Not surprisingly, when he ventured out to promote the record live, he was asked about his status in Springsteenland. He answered unambiguously, “I haven’t left the E Street Band, and I don’t see any serious reasons why I should unless it conflicts with what I’m currently doing.” Nonetheless, those intimate gigs reminded him why he did this in the first place.
He may well have been having a go at his old friend when he told a journalist on his second solo tour, “Rock ’n’ roll has never stopped being the most important art-form of our time. It’s never changed, it’s never lost the power to communicate, the power to affect people, it’s just that nobody’s using it.” By the time of the 1983 E Street sessions, Van Zandt had started a second solo album, Voice of America, where he finally found his own voice, having been as inspired by Guthrie’s scoundrel-free version of patriotism as his friend. Songs like “I Am A Patriot” and “Vote (That Mutha Out)” were stripped of ambiguity, raising a clarion call for change. And though he lent a hand to the May–June E Street sessions, they would be his last this side of the millenium:
Steve Van Zandt: At the time I joined Bruce I didn’t know what would happen. I might have just been there for one tour, but I ended up staying for seven years because I was able to contribute along the way to his thing. But with [Voice of America] it became obvious that, artistically, I had something that was just too important [to stay].
Springsteen seems to have been fully aware of the shift in dynamic, though he made light of Plotkin’s despair in typically humorous fashion during his 1998 Rock n Roll Hall of Fame induction speech, thanking Plotkin and engineer Toby Scott for remaining “in the saddle as often the years went by, wondering if we’d ever get the music or if they’d ever get a royalty check. They kept their cool and their creativity…Of course, they’re basket cases now.”
His response to Van Zandt’s imminent defection was more immediate. He wrote one of his great songs of camaraderie, “None But The Brave,” ostensibly to a girl: “These nights I see you, my friend, the way you looked back then/ Ah, on a night like this, I know that girl no longer exists/ Except for a moment in some stranger’s eyes…In my heart you still survive/ None, baby, but the brave.” If the girl herself was a fiction, all the people he was celebrating were wholly real. As he admits in the Essential liner-notes, the song was “set in the bars and 70s circuit in Asbury Park.”
Even as he wrote this farewell to former brothers- and sisters-in-arms, he was still convinced the E Street Band gave him some X factor otherwise missing from his studio work. Recalling these sessions, he talked about the process in comradely terms, “We get together and the band plays and sometimes we get something and sometimes we don’t, but we do have a feeling that everybody’s chipping in and working on a project…[that] something[‘s] going on.” He clung to this garage-band mentality even when his was the last gang in town, tellingly stating the following year, “The people that I’m fortunate enough to have around me have been there since I was young, they’re the same guys…It’s hard…just holding onto relationships.” As he knew only too well, a good band is hard to find. And these guys still could make things happen in the most unpropitious circumstances:
Max Weinberg: I remember one night when we were completely packed up to go home and Bruce was off in the corner playing his acoustic guitar. Suddenly, I guess the bug bit him, and he started writing these rockabilly songs. We’d been recording all night and were dead tired, but they had to open up the cases and set up the equipment so
that we could start recording again at five in the morning. That’s when we got “Pink Cadillac,” “Stand On It” and…“TV Movie”…Bruce got on a roll, and when that happens, you just hold on for dear life.
Yet none of the songs from that highly productive night would make the 1983 sequence, let alone the 1984 album. In fact, the series of E Street sessions which ran from May 23 through June 16 would not produce a single song on the latter, multi-platinum smash. The one song from this long hot summer of sessions which did make the final cut would be an afterthought. (“My Hometown” was cut on June 29, when Plotkin had already started mixing tracks for the July 26–27 sequence.)
Predictably, there were a number of ripsnorters cut in these weeks that never made the light of day. These included a song logged as “Just Around The Corner To The Light of Day,” which would last longer in the live set than most of Born In The USA. It represented an overdue return to writing about cars and girls (“Been driving five hundred miles, got five hundred to go/ I got rock and roll music on the radio”). Equally enduring was a song logged as “Gone Gone Gone,” about those “people who came down from up north looking for work in the oil fields and the refineries; then when the price of oil went bad, they were shutting down the refineries…[and] they [were] just telling ’em to move on.” The final lines said it all: “You ain’t gonna find nothin’ down here friend/ Except seeds blowin’ up the highway in the south wind/ Movin’ on, movin’ on, it’s gone, gone, it’s all gone.” Neither track even made the July 1983 sequence, though the latter was belatedly introduced into the live set the following July under the title “Seeds.”
E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Page 34
