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

by Clinton Heylin

  Nils Lofgren: In the fall of ’87, we went up to Jersey for a series of weekends where we’d get together and just jam with Bruce. It was just kinda an exploratory gathering for Bruce to bounce around ideas and just see how he felt about it. And I think after three weekends of that, we all went home…Somewhere after that exploratory series of rehearsals or jams, Bruce decided to do the Tunnel of Love tour. So we knew about it before the end of the year.

  Actually, he needed to get away; and what better excuse was ever invented than, “I gotta go on tour with the band (y’know, the one with that hot, single, redhead backing singer).” But he already knew this route contained one road he had to walk alone. Indeed, it was a surprisingly sanguine Springsteen who inducted his musical mentor, Bob Dylan, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that January with a speech describing how the elder statesman’s music had helped this boy grow up to be a man: “When I was fifteen and I heard ‘Like A Rolling Stone,’ I heard a guy like I’d never heard before, a guy that had the guts to take on the whole world and make me feel like I had to, too. Maybe some people mistook that voice to be saying somehow that you were going to do the job for them, and as we know as we grow older, there isn’t anybody out there that can do that job for anybody else.”

  The weight of expectation, which had proven such a burden to Dylan through the sixties and seventies, now weighed as heavily on the last of the New Dylans. But with the Tunnel of Love Express, he was determined to throw it off. As he informed Rolling Stone on the opening week of the tour: “The idea on this tour is that you wouldn’t know what song was gonna come next. And the way you do that is you just throw out all your cornerstones, the stuff that had not become overly ritualized on the Born In The USA tour, but would have been if we did it now.”

  Certainly opening night at Worcester’s Centrum contained its share of left-field inclusions. Of the two songs entirely new to Bruce fans, “I’m A Coward (When It Comes To Love)” and “Part Man Part Monkey,” and those resurrected River outtakes, “Be True” and “Roulette,” it was the professions of abiding faithfulness in songs one and three which cut the least mustard. BITUSA also contributed its share of outtakes—“The Light of Day” and “Seeds”—to the mix, while a belatedly acoustic “Born In The USA” was another part of a process he later called “taking the whole thing down, making it feel more human-scaled, less iconic and more about everyday issues; which I [also] thought the Tunnel of Love record…dealt with.”

  Perhaps the most telling set changes, though, were the substitution of “Can’t Help Falling In Love” with “Have Love, Will Travel” midway through the five-month tour, and a belated switch from “Ain’t Got You” to “Who Do You Love?” as precursor to “She’s The One.” It was a message his baby back home did not receive right away, but the redhead sharing his mike nightly did. When the paparazzi snapped Bruce and Patti canoodling on a hotel terrace, it was evident some E Street members were more equal than others. It wasn’t just the end of the marriage, it was time’s up for this band of blood brothers.

  As a final gesture, and one more way of avoiding going home, Springsteen agreed to share nineteen stadium dates in September and October with Sting and Peter Gabriel, raising money for Amnesty International. It was a strangely muted end to the E Street era. The sets themselves lasted barely long enough to raise steam, let alone hands. And the set-lists—save for an E Street arrangement of “Chimes of Freedom” almost as powerful as 1975’s “I Want You”—were entirely predictable. And the backlash kept raining down, John Lombardi in Esquire delighting in depicting the crowd as “louder than the band because it apparently needs to be…For Bruce and his fans, noise ha[s] replaced action in the modern scheme of things.”

  Springsteen, to his credit, remained stoic in the face of deserting crew members, a disaffected wife and an alienated critical consensus. As he philosophically observed on his return in 1992, “As far as the whole myth thing goes…it ends up being dismantled for you anyway. It doesn’t matter whether you do it or not, somebody’s going to do it.” He did at least now have a woman, in Patti Scialfa, who understood him and his music. (And wanted kids, pronto.)

  For his band, though, the future was decidedly uncertain. Lombardi’s December 1988 Esquire “Saint Boss” piece quoted an anonymous inside source who had heard “Bruce [was] breaking up the band because it ‘was no longer efficient.’” Some of the band felt it was about time. Federici, for one, opined that what had “started out as a band…turned into a super, giant corporate money-making machine.” But even Federici thought that a year of silence and then a single phone call was not the way to go about it: “I thought the way the band broke up was really crappy. It left a sour taste in everybody’s mouth; we really didn’t know what happened, if we were “‘ired’ or ‘let go’—any of those words are not good. They don’t sound nice.” “Busy hands” Bittan also thought it was handled badly, although he was the one band member Springsteen recalled when starting work on another solo album in January 1990:

  Roy Bittan: I got the same phone call that everybody else in the band got…I think he felt like he had come to a certain stage with the band where he thought he had finished something, and he wanted to move on somewhere or at least explore…On the other hand, emotionally, I think that I speak for everybody, we all felt that we had invested a lot in this situation. We had all really given the best years of our lives to the band, to Bruce, and that we were a big part certainly of what Bruce is about. It was difficult to be told…that we were not supposed to be part of it anymore.

  The most enraged of the E Streeters was the one who perhaps feared he had the least future as a jobbing musician on other artists’ albums and tours—Max Weinberg. That he had enjoyed ten times the career and a hundred times the rewards of the men he replaced in the E Street Band counted not a jot. He even phoned Dick Wingate, who had not worked for Bruce since 1979: “He was fucking furious. He was really pissed! I guess there was some financial offer he wasn’t very happy with. He felt the way it went down was really bad.” And three years later, he had still not quite calmed down. Talking to Backstreets in the winter of 1992, Weinberg spoke of a deep and debilitating disappointment:

  Max Weinberg: Initially, it was very difficult to accept. In fact, I didn’t accept it at first; I denied it…because it was never truly articulated to me that the relationship the E Street Band had with Bruce was definitely over. I had to figure that out for myself…I spent a large part of my life as a member of the E Street Band…I never saw it as just a “job.” You know, one of the things that made what happened a bit more difficult was that six weeks before I got the phone call from Bruce, I had read…how he was in LA recording with studio musicians…Now that hurt.

  But Springsteen had simply faced up to the inevitable truth. The E Street Band—America’s finest live rock band in their day—had become an anachronism; a way of ensuring he could fill arenas, but only if he wanted to be a nostalgia act. He had arrived at a different shore. As he said, shortly after Weinberg let rip, the music he was making now was “about somebody walking through that world of fear so that he can live in the world of love.” It just happened to come from a man who once spit in the face of these badlands with a band of brothers who for fifteen years never stopped feeling the self-same way.

  Epilogue: November 22, 2009—Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

  I think we got to a place where everybody realizes that this is a very singular thing…this group of people playing together in this fashion…We wanted to live up to that thing, and we wanted to continue to serve in the fashion that we served before with our audience…Every person on the stage is very singular and we do something that is very unique together. And I think that unspoken recognition was a part of the resolution of whatever [bad] feelings someone might have had from [when we broke up].—Bruce Springsteen, 2001

  Ten years of intermittently burning down the reunion road had brought the E Street shuffle to Buffalo in upstate New York at the end of another
marathon year of touring. After nigh on ninety dates promoting the third E Street Band album of the 21st century, Working on a Dream—and a decade after a 1999 reunion tour turned inexorably into the second E Street era—Bruce had decided to return to the starting point, “the miracle…the record that took everything from way below zero to One.” He and a reconstructed E Street Band, including both Miami Steve and Nils Lofgren, were going to play Greetings from Asbury Park, for “one time only.” And, completing the circle, he had asked Mike Appel to join them for this symbolic moment of closure:

  Mike Appel: Bruce just called up out of the blue. I was in a diner with my son. “Who’s this [on the phone]?” “It’s Bruce.” “What on earth are you calling about?” “Well, it’s the last date of the tour and we’re gonna do the Greetings From Asbury Park album. We never did it [live]. I’d like you to be there.” “Bruce, it’s twelve noon now. How am I gonna be there?” “Don’t worry ’bout a thing. Go to your house. I’ll arrange everything.” So we return to the house. An hour later, a limousine picks us up, takes us to the airport. Of course, they have their own jet. We all went up there with the E Street Band.

  For the past month, Springsteen had been selectively performing each of the six first-era E Street albums in their entirety—even The River—as a way of making these final shows, after three years of almost continuous recording and performing, something special. (Of the six, the attempt to replicate The Wild, the Innocent proved the most hit and miss.) It was a tacit acknowledgment from an older, wiser Springsteen of the E Street Band’s central importance to those genre-defining records: “As I said when I inducted U2 into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, one of the rules of rock & roll is, ‘Hey asshole, the other guy’s more important than you think he is!’ It can take time away from people to get a [real] view on that.”

  It was also a logical extension of the “let’s present the past in modern dress” modus operandi Springsteen adopted the minute he brought the band back to life in the winter of 1999—when the album they were primarily promoting was a four-CD retrospective of (mainly) songs left off the E Street Band albums: legendary lost songs like “Hey Santa Ana,” “Seaside Bar Song,” “Zero and Blind Terry,” “Thundercrack,” “Rendezvous,” “Don’t Look Back,” “Restless Nights,” “Roulette,” “Loose Ends,” “I Wanna Be With You,” “Cynthia,” “My Love Will Not Let You Down,” “Frankie” and “The Promise,” every one of which he would perform at some point in the ensuing decade—“Restless Nights” excepted. That one he saved for his 2009 shuffle off to Buffalo.

  By this time, the brand-name backing band contained just two members who had played on that original 1973 artefact—Garry Tallent and Clarence Clemons. Danny Federici’s death in 2008 had robbed this newly revamped E Street combo of an irreplaceable original member. And by November 2009 Clarence Clemons was not a well man, either. Another E Street tour for him looked increasingly unlikely. But the Big Man had a big heart, even if it looked at times like he was gonna leave part of it in Buffalo. As Appel wrote after that final public performance, “It ain’t easy blowing a saxophone all night…when you’re sick.”

  Thankfully, the Greetings album had only ever required Clarence’s clarion blasts on two songs, “Blinded By The Light” and “Spirit In The Night”—though “Growin’ Up” and “Does This Bus Stop” followed suit in concert. It was an album much of which had been written at, and for, piano; containing some of Springsteen’s most personal songs. And so it was that, on this November night, Roy Bittan got to put years of musical virtuosity into the parts of “Lost In The Flood,” “The Angel” and “For You” Springsteen wrote for and by himself.

  The greatest challenge for Springsteen and Bittan in Buffalo was to make “The Angel,” the one Greetings song the E Street Band had never manhandled, rise from its “marble dome.” Somehow, with Soozie Tyrell’s violin effortlessly slipping into the cracks ’twixt vocal and piano, they made this wordy work a little more heavenly. “Lost In The Flood” was also given a wailing guitar coda by the ex-Steel Mill lead guitarist, while “For You” was transported back in time to the Roxy, and a younger Greg Kihn copycat. Somehow the elements of a rekindled E Street Band were setting off sparks and bridging the years—their failing flesh willing to fuel fans’ fantasies one last time.

  But Greetings was just the starting point for a night of rock ’n’ roll reconciliation. By 2009 Springsteen had eight more albums to add to the eight he had made in the first E Street era. And so, although he acknowledged the audience’s desire to hear the “old stuff”—even when drawn from 1999’s Tracks, as “Restless Nights” and “My Love Will Not Let You Down” were—he was “still try[ing] to keep a schematic that remains centered around our newest material.” Even if he knew this was a losing battle. And had been ever since the band reformed in 1999 without a new record to promote, and only three fair-to-middling albums of Springsteen originals (Lucky Town, Human Touch and The Ghost of Tom Joad) separating them from their decade-old dissolution. But still, he liked to think, “On any given night I’m playing to many of my audiences out there. There’s the Tom Joad audience, there’s the “Dancing In The Dark” audience, but hey, they’re all there at that particular moment.”

  In upstate New York—which had last seen Springsteen before Magic and Working On A Dream tripled the count of 21st century E Street albums—he chose to play as many covers as second-era originals. All were certainly familiar to any serious Bruce taper: “Merry Christmas Baby,” “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,” “I Don’t Wanna Hang Up My Rock & Roll Shoes” and—as final encore—“Higher And Higher” and “Rockin’ All Over The World;” each a song Springsteen had claimed for his own three decades earlier. All affirmed the promise he had often spoken about, at a time in his life when everything was at stake and there was all to play for. The nights when miracles were commonplace. Back in the glory days.

  • • •

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  Acknowledgments

  This book—though it comes relatively quickly on the heels of my All the Madmen (Constable, 2011)—has been a long time coming. I have always wanted to do a history of the E Street Band era, but in the immediate aftermath of their 1989 disbandment the climate did not seem right; and after catching the first rays of reunion, I have to admit I listened to Bruce’s music—old and new—less and less. What first set me thinking along these lines again were the performances Springsteen & the E Street Band gave of the albums they had made between 1972 and 1984 in their sequential entireties at the end of the 2009 tour—performances so fresh and committed that they made me look again at those songs. Hard on the heels of the general circulation of these shows (in what I like to call their “hearing aid” versions) came Springsteen’s own 2010 recasting of the Darkness sessions, the 2–CD Promise and—altogether more enticing and authoritative—the Darkness On The Edge of Town boxed-set, a triple-DVD, triple-CD extravaganza housed in a remarkably well-executed facsimile of one of Bruce’s 1977 notebooks. I dived in.

  Immediately, I wanted to know more about the sessions, and in particular whatever happened to some of the things he still saw fit to omit from his official oeuvre—could he really have decided “Preacher’s Daughter” was less deserving of release than “Outside Looking In?” What about all those songs he demoed the first night at Atlantic (1 June 1977)? My good friend Glenn Korman, archivist extraordinaire, showed me just how much Darkness material was catalogued in the Sony database. And a book-idea was born. So my first and most fulsome thanks go to Glenn, who once again couldn’t have been more generous with his time and expertise, helping me to construct—for the first time, I believe—an authoritative studio chronology of the E Street era using Sony’s own documentation.

  The next candidate I wish to put forward for Saint in New York City status is Mike Appel. I had always thought that Appel’s role in the rise of Bruce Springsteen had been somewhat muddied by the Marsh-man. With no love lost between Springsteen’s ex-manager a
nd rock scribe Dave Marsh, the latter’s two-pronged bios, Born To Run and Glory Days, were bound to minimize the Appel contribution to Springsteen’s climb to the top. And with the field of Brucebiography to himself until the nineties, Marsh lore became rocklore. Marc Elliott’s Down Thunder Road (1992) gave Appel’s side of the story for the first time, but Elliott was himself hamstrung by a poor sense of Springsteen’s musical graph and the seventies music industry’s own workings (despite once writing a book called Rockanomics). Thankfully, Appel graciously agreed to sit down and answer all the questions I couldn’t find the answers to in previous tomes. And when, after three hours, the hubbub of the Roosevelt Hotel bar got too much, he allowed me to persevere with my queries via e-mail and even unto the diners of Brooklyn. I found a man as generous with his opinions as he was with his time. Thank you, Mike.

  If Mike Appel’s role in the formulation of the E Street sound and live reputation has gone under-recognized, so has the contribution of Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez. Though he had been interviewed a number of times previously, again the one man who had been an integral part of Child, Steel Mill, Dr. Zoom, the Bruce Springsteen Band and the first two incarnations of the E Street Band gave up an afternoon to answer my questions and allow me to pry into his painful removal from the band that had been his life. He remains, for me, the most sympathetic stickman Springsteen ever had.