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

by Clinton Heylin

  At this juncture, he still “believed that it was good for the artist to remain distant from the seat of power, to retain your independent voice.” And that “independent voice” continued to express itself between songs at the shows, even if less and less of the downbeat songs written between 1977 and 1982 were permitted entry to the three-hour sets. The most powerful of the nightly raps probably came before “Racing In The Street,” when he talked of a time “I took the car out, and when I won that it was the only time I really felt good about myself…to have just one thing that you do that makes you feel proud of yourself, I don’t think that’s too much for anybody to ask.” Such stories operated as parables, not personal insights.

  Not that this was the only modern parable at shows which were at times akin to a revivalist meeting. For an ex-Catholic like Springsteen, the parable form itself remained ripe for parody, as he did rather memorably in the long intro to “Pink Cadillac” that began to assume epic proportions just as he realized he had left another rockabilly rocket off an album of his. What had begun as a spoof on the “commie” scare-stories of the fifties—in which “Russian infiltrators [hope to] have so weakened the morals of American society that by 1985 they’re planning to have sex on the streets of every street corner coast to coast and the music that they’re playing to ruin the morals of an entire generation is that dirty filth, rock and roll”—by the first stadia shows in January 1985 had become his own blasphemous account of the Garden of Eden. Whatever would the nuns of Freehold think?:

  Now, the Garden of Eden was originally believed to have been located in Mesopotamia, but the latest theological studies have provided conclusive evidence that its actual location was ten miles south of Jersey City, off the New Jersey Turnpike. That’s why they call it the Garden State. In the Garden of Eden, there were none of the accoutrements of modern living…you didn’t go get your Pop-Tarts and put ’em in the toaster and jump in the sack and watch Johnny Carson—no Sir! In the Garden of Eden there was no sin, there was no sex. Man lived in a state of innocence. Now, when it comes to no sex, I prefer the state of guilt that I constantly live in. But before the tour I decided to make a spiritual journey to the location of the Garden of Eden to find out the answer to some of these mysteries and so I hitchhiked on out there and I found out that that spot was now taken up by Happy Dan’s Celebrity Used Car Lot. I walked in, I said, “Dan, I wanna know the answer to some of this conflict, I wanna know what temptation is all about, why does my soul pull me one way and why does my body pull me the other all the time?” He said, “Well, Son, in the Garden of Eden there were many wondrous things: there was a Tree of Life, there was a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, there was a man, Adam, there was a woman, Eve, and let me tell you she looked so fine and when Adam kissed her, it was the first time that a man had ever kissed a woman. And she had legs that were long and soft to the touch, and when Adam touched her, it was the first time that a man had ever touched a woman. And then they went out into the green fields and they lay down and…well, let’s just say it was the first time. But there was something else in the Garden of Eden on that day, old Satan came slithering up on his belly and somehow he turned their love into a betrayal and sent them driving down into the darkness below. But that’s all right because if you’ve got the nerve to ride, I’ve got the keys to their getaway car…the first…pink…Cadillac.”

  The “Pink Cadillac” rap slowly but surely took over from the more jaundiced portrayal of relationships with which Springsteen had been prefacing “I’m Going Down” the previous fall. In these raps, the sexual dynamic had begun with, “Every place you go, you can’t keep your hands off ’em, you’re touching ’em all the time and you wanna make love to ’em all the time,” only to end thus, “If you come back about six months later…it’s like, ‘Ain’t I gonna get a goodnight kiss?’”

  At the same time, he insisted, “I’m just not really looking to get married at this point. I’ve made a commitment to doing my job right now.” But by the time of the 27th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony, on February 26 1985, his point of view had switched 180 degrees. The reason was Julianne Phillips, a young actress who could have stepped right out of a Chuck Berry song. American Pie-pretty, she came from good solid Catholic stock. She was also someone to hang onto when the world started spinning. But what she had on Karen or Joyce was anybody’s guess. Whatever it was, in the matter of a couple of months bad-boy Bruce had gone from on the prowl to looking to settle down. Inside, though, the process had taken somewhat longer:

  Bruce Springsteen: For a long time there were a whole lot of things I was trying to avoid. Part of it [was] because I thought, “If I don’t do this and I don’t do that, well, maybe I won’t get any older.”…[But] for quite a few years previous to when I got married, I was going in that direction. Not necessarily that marriage is the only thing that puts you in that place, but it is one of the things. And I realized that you can’t live within that rock ’n’ roll dream that I had in my head…/…When I was young, I had this idea of playing out my life like it was some movie, writing the script and making all the pieces fit. And I really did that for a long time…And it’s bad enough having other people seeing you that way, but seeing yourself that way is really bad. It’s pathetic…I had locked into what was pretty much a hectic obsession, which gave me enormous focus and energy and fire to burn, because it was coming out of pure fear and self-loathing…[Finally,] I realized my real life is waiting to be lived. All the love and the hope and the sorrow and the sadness—that’s all over there, waiting to be lived. And I could ignore it and push it aside, or I could say yes to it. [1987/1992]

  In fact, the (re)introduction of his favorite Elvis tune, “Can’t Help Falling In Love” at the January 10 Louisville show—with an extra notch of vocal commitment—probably signaled a newly besotted Springsteen; so in love that the words to that Percy Sledge classic, “Take Time To Know Her” temporarily slipped from his mind. Springsteen and Phillips tied the connubial knot on May 13 at Our Lady of the Lake, the parish church of Julianne’s family, set in Lake Oswego, an affluent suburb of Portland, OR. Springsteen now looked forward to a life as far removed from his songs’ heroes and villains as possible: “The night that I got married, I was standing at the altar by myself, and I was waiting for my wife, and I can remember standing there thinking, ‘Man, I have everything. I got it all.’ And you have those moments.” The feeling didn’t even last through 1987. Because, as he later ruefully observed, “You end up with a lot more than you expected.”

  If the groom entered matrimony with his eyes wide shut, his bride evidently kept her 20/20 vision throughout. Just a few months later, she informed an entertainment journalist, “I don’t feel I married a superstar. He’s my husband and I love him very much, but he’s a normal human being with faults.” By then, she was advancing her short-lived film career, and Bruce was back in the stadia of America.

  The second installment of her honeymoon had been an all-access pass to a series of stadia shows across Europe, beginning in the bucolic setting of Slane Castle in Ireland on June 1, somewhat spoiled by 150,000 Irish drinkers holding their second annual convention, this year to an E Street Band soundtrack. Springsteen did his best to inject some much-needed romance into the proceedings, singing a solo version of Brian Wilson’s “When I Grow Up (To Be A Man),” prefaced by an admission that “I’m thinking a lot of different things standing here today. I guess this song kind of sums it up.” Intended as an affirmation of a grown-up Bruce, lines like: “Will I look for the same things in a woman that I dig in a girl?” would soon enough look like a double-edged query.

  If there were moments when the Slane show became more about crowd control than crowd-pleasing, there was no turning back. The course was set. Over the next four months he would play forty-five stadia shows, reaching more folk than in all his seventies odysseys. Sadly, by the time he played three nights at London’s Wembley Stadium in early July the set was hopelessly out of kilter. Pick the right night and
you might get two Nebraska songs. In fact, he was doing as many BITSUSA outtakes. (“Seeds” and “Pink Cadillac” were now nightly highlights.) As for the ten BITUSA tracks he performed nightly, they had become an excuse to Singalonga-Springsteen.

  On September 27, the traveling band rolled into LA’s 90,000–seater Coliseum for the final four BITUSA shows, and again the tapes would be rolling. He even produced a couple of surprises that first night: a live debut for “Janey Don’t You Lose Heart,” the song originally supposed to close the 1983 BITUSA, and a cover of Edwin Collins’ 1969 antiwar anthem, “War”—because “the values from that time are things that I still believe in. I think that all my music, certainly the music I’ve done in the past five or six years, is a result of that time and those values.” He was apparently “looking for some way to reshape that part of the show to make it as explicit as [possible], without sloganeering.” But his lung-busting performance merely stripped the paint from the walls of the Coliseum, and the scales from the eyes of anyone with ears. He was done. And he sorta knew it:

  Bruce Springsteen: At the end of the Born In The USA tour and after we made the live album, I felt like it was the end of the first part of my journey…By the end of the whole thing, I just felt “Bruced” out. I was like, “Whoa, enough of that….” Eventually it oppresses you…/…Success at that level is a tricky business because a lot of distortion creeps in and…it was fascinating realising that you really do comment on a lot of different levels…I found very often that your success story is a bigger story than whatever you’re trying to say on stage…When you lock into it on a very big level, it’s a big wave that you ride and you try and stay on and think,…“What did I accomplish? Where do I feel I’ve failed?” I thought about all that stuff after we came home. [1992]

  Proving that some things never change, he still “thought about things” way too much. What he most needed was some downtime, and some tlc. from Mrs. Springsteen. But if Ms. Phillips thought her husband was about to take a break from all that jazz, she didn’t know her man. He wasn’t listening to her importunings. Maybe all those stadium shows had done some permanent damage to his hearing. Certainly, on the evidence of his 1986 listening sessions, he could no longer tell the difference between strong singing and shouting. Starting in the new year, he began drawing up plans for the greatest live album ever made. They were first formulated after Landau sent him a four-song sample from the final Coliseum show:

  Jon Landau: Bruce is a perfectionist. And he wants to give the best; the live album had to be special. If he had released it earlier, it would have been just the normal stuff. The public would have liked it, but it wouldn’t have been an event; and that’s what he wanted…One really important part of the [Live 1975–85] set is “Born In The USA,” “Seeds,” “The River,” with that long talk about the draft, “War.” Actually, everything started with that part. We played them, and then we understood it was not only fantastic live material, but that these four songs together were telling different things, things never heard before on any of our albums. [GD]

  Things like how to really over-PROJECT. What Springsteen didn’t do was ask his label to pull tapes from Max’s January 31 1973 as a point of comparison. Or Joe’s Place, a year later. Or give a serious listen to the Main Point the following February. In fact, it would appear he chose not to listen to any show before 1978 (except the first five minutes of the Roxy ’75, before the band played). It was a point maybe lost on a post-stadia Springsteen but it was not lost on reviewers of the resultant artefact, Live 1975–85, certainly not on Sounds’ Billy Mann:

  “[Perhaps] there were no recordings from that earlier period of a quality that would satisfy Springsteen the Perfectionist. But as Mike Appel had already pencilled in a double or triple live set to follow Born To Run (a move Springsteen resisted as too ‘easy’) and dispatched crack producer Jimmy Iovine to preside over live recordings in New York, Philadelphia and Toronto, this is an unlikely explanation…It is significant [precisely] because by 1978, which is effectively when this live thing starts…, many would argue that a lot of the experimentation of the earlier live work—the reworking of old songs into fresh musical statements—had been replaced by the obligation to perform to large rock audiences in a characteristic Rock way.”

  In fact, what Landau and Springsteen—with due diligence—set out to produce was the exact opposite of the May 1974 show that once convinced the former he had seen “the future of rock ’n’ roll.” For Springsteen, the pressure to do such a set had become overwhelming. As far back as 1981, he gamely admitted, “I have this live reputation and I cannot allow myself anything less than to produce the best live LP ever. Perhaps I have to make another five LPs like The River, and then compile the best songs from those.” He had made five LPs, but only released two of them. Then in 1984 he spoke about how he particularly wanted to find definitive live readings of the songs on Darkness: “I always felt it was a little dry recording-wise. I felt like I oversang…I’d be interested in getting different versions of a lot of those songs…just the best of that stuff.” Yet of the six Darkness songs on Live 75–85, only “Adam Raised A Cain” came from the requisite era. As for oversinging, nothing from Darkness came close to those Coliseum concerts. One-two-three HUH!!!

  But there was now a commercial imperative underlying the gesture. A multi-volume set on the back of Dylan’s surprisingly successful five-LP Biograph was no longer such a scary prospect for Sony (who had their eye on CD sales as much as vinyl). As Mike Appel noted at the time, his former client had finally “realized he couldn’t follow Born In The USA with anything but a live album for the…same [reason] I’d offered ten years ago: that it would be impossible to immediately follow up a studio album as strong as either of the Borns with another studio album.” Landau meanwhile assured fifteen million fans said collection did “not detract in any way from your memories of Bruce live.” Assuming said memories were as short as his, or as shot as his ears.

  Plotkin was back on board, too, and had more of an excuse for omitting all evidence of the pre-Darkness band. He wasn’t there then. But he was now, as he and Bruce “spent about six hours a day, five days a week, essentially trying to come up with the right songs to use, come up with little segments of sequences, and to come up with the right takes of the songs.” Yet there was precious little evidence of such deliberation in the set released, which blithely disregarded every show pre-1978, with even multitrack tapes from a dozen shows in that peak year—from Berkeley in July to two San Francisco shows in December—discounted, save for half a dozen full songs and a mutilated “Backstreets” from the Roxy, and a solitary “Fire” from the second Winterland.

  The remaining 43 songs were all culled from eighties shows, with those from Born In The USA and the sparsely-represented Nebraska largely taken from summer ’85 stadia shows. If, as Springsteen claimed on its release, “We started with the idea that there was a certain amount of [good] material from each phase of the band,” most of it was caught between the grooves. He had managed a rare coup—using only the finest ingredients, he’d produced a turkey few could finish just in time for Christmas 1986. The initial rush of sales, fed on the hype-to-end-all-hypes and fans starved of living proof of the live E Street experience, sent the album to the top of the charts, with three million shipped. But by new year boxes were piling up in the warehouses of Tower Records &c., prompting Rolling Stone to suggest as many as 750,000 copies were gathering dust.

  As paydays go, it was a bonanza for the band, who had been twiddling their thumbs for the past fifteen months. But then news reached the musicians that Springsteen was back in the studio, as of January 20, 1987, without making the requisite call to former brothers-in-arms. Landau may have just told a French reporter “the E Street Band can play everything Bruce writes,” but his client was no longer reading from the same book. He was out in LA, looking to repeat the winter 1983 experiment.

  Sure enough, on day one an inspired Springsteen cut three songs, “Walk Like A
Man,” “Spare Parts” and “If You Need Me,” the latter pair first and second takes respectively. A second session four days later was even more productive, with five songs recorded (two of which—“Pretty Baby, Will You Be Mine” and “Things Ain’t That Way”—would go unused). A rough idea for a song listed as “Is That You?” at a February 5 session became “Brilliant Disguise” by month’s end. In just eighteen sessions he had enough songs to leave off the resultant album the most personal, “The Wish,” addressed to the woman he loved most—his Mum. What was on there suggested he had yet to find a bridge across troubled marital waters, even if he tried putting his best spin on things in interviews:

  Bruce Springsteen: When this particular record came around, I wanted to make a record about what I felt, about really letting another person in your life and trying to be a part of someone else’s life. That’s a frightening thing, something that’s always filled with shadows and doubts…My main concern is writing that new song that has that new idea, that new perspective. [1988]

  Only when the album was all but done, on May 25, did he invite the entire E Street Band (Federici excepted) to add some musical color to the recently-written “Tunnel of Love” and, while they were at it, “Valentine’s Day.” Initially, though, “Tunnel of Love” was the title track to an album it nearly didn’t appear on. (“Lucky Man” occupied its slot.) Finally, though, he went with the catchier option, incorporating two songs the band knew should he decide to play with them again after the record appeared. That the album would need some promotion became immediately apparent on its October 6 release, when it spent just a single week in the top spot and the lead single, “Brilliant Disguise,” even with another nonalbum B-side, failed to emulate “Dancing in the Dark’s” cross-generational appeal. Although initial reports suggested he might tour solo, he changed his mind and made that SOS call to his trusty sidekicks: