E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (11 page)

Being able to play some stuff acoustic did have its advantages. It made it a whole lot easier to do “in-house” radio sessions, a strategy Appel and Springsteen adopted early on, after both realized a gauche Bruce was possibly the worst interviewee in Rockville. Dick Wingate, who would end up as marketing manager to the man, met him first that summer of ’73, when “he was brought up to WVRU by the Columbia promotions person and he was dressed exactly like the cover [of
Greetings
]. White t-shirt. It’s the middle of the summer…we didn’t put him on the air because he didn’t seem like he wanted to. He was very, very shy. He didn’t have a whole lot to say. Then when I see him perform a few months later, it was like, ‘Holy shit!’”

Here was something else Bruce had in common with Van Morrison (though in Morrison’s case, he frequently hid his own inarticulacy behind a torrent of four-letter words), a comparison contemporary critics noted far more than the Dylan one. Indeed, Paul Nelson in their first interview required (and got) a response from Springsteen himself: “I listen to Van Morrison because he [has always] had a lot of elements of other music that I love—even the latest album,
St. Dominic’s [Preview
]—and I listen to him a lot because he’s a great singer.” Morrison was also a great improviser. By 1972 he would usually do these long mid-song raps that gave audiences raptures, though the first instance of it on record dated back to the earliest days of Them, when on the fade-out to “Little Girl” he expressed a desire to “little girl, little girl, little girl, I wanna fuck you,” resulting in the fastest recalled LP in Decca’s history.

(Springsteen seemed on the verge of replicating this feeling a number of times in 1980 when intersecting “I Wanna Marry You” with a similar extended reverie: “Sometimes at night when I lie in bed I still see her face…running round my head…here she comes…walking down the street…here she comes…walking down the street…she’s looking so fine, she’s looking so sweet…she’s so fine, she’s looking so sweet…and someday I’m gonna make her mine…she’s gonna stop. She ain’t just gonna pass me by, she’s gonna stop. She ain’t just gonna pass me by, she’s gonna stop. She ain’t gonna just pass me by, she’s gonna stop. She ain’t gonna pass me by…little girl, little girl, little girl…”)

For now, though, Springsteen’s onstage stories were one way of figuring out which characters might work in song. As Clemons wrote, in one of the few genuinely illuminating sections of a dull autobiography, “This was how the guy thought…in stories. And there was no end to them. He could go on and on and on, and the stories were actually fucking good. He’d throw in little insights and nuances that made the characters come to life. He gave them dimension. They all had secrets.” One wonders what the small audience thought when he went into such a story the night he
debuted “Rosalita” in Richmond, Virginia in February 1973, a year almost to the day after the Bruce Springsteen Band were run out of town:

Where did such tall stories spring up from? Indeed, where did that sassy stage-persona come from, period? Recalling those days in a Springsteen feature, Martin Kirkup described how he “once saw him go into a ten-minute monologue between songs, all about the trouble his band used to have with the mafiosos in Jersey, and then say to an audience of six hundred, ‘Now, hey, that’s in confidence. I wouldn’t want that to go outside this room.’” And Peter Knobler recollects him introducing one song at this time with, “This is the songwriter-poet as innocent,” and the next one, “Now the songwriter-poet as pervert.” Both got a laugh. He also learned how to play with the very idea of autobiographical revelation onstage. On his first live radio broadcast he came up with a particularly surreal explanation for why he got a 4–F in the army induction exam:

He seemed able to deliver such stories with an innate, comedic sense of timing, acquired from God knows where. A couple of years later, when telling a story about his and Miami Steve’s pursuit of one particularly unattainable girl—the preface to the E Street Band’s extended reinterpretation of “Pretty Flamingo”—he sent up the whole idea of such storytelling by stopping mid-rap, having got to where “it was about quarter to twelve…and I said ‘Steve, Steve, I’m in love, I got to find out what this girl’s name is.’” He then informed these Philly fans, “The fact [is], I could go on with this story and tell you that I did find out [her name] and that we broke into the house and knocked everybody down, picked her up and ran down the street, but the real story is we gave up and went home.”

And yet, when you put him on the radio in a sterile studio with just a mike and a DJ for company, he froze up, as he did that day up at WVRU. Which didn’t stop the hipper east-coast DJs from putting him on the radio. They, and his manager, just quickly realized that a broadcast of the live act was the way to go. From day one, Appel realized that “if you could, through a King Biscuit Flower Hour or a WNEW…if you could get Bruce to do a two, two-and-a-half-hour show over the air, you’re covering those airwaves for [all] those hours!” Springsteen also learned to appreciate the enduring rewards of such a strategy:

However, to put this in context, America is a big place, and away from the east coast such a plan was (for now) doomed to failure. As Appel recently noted: “If you went down to Virginia, he could even play at a theater and damn near sell the whole place out. So it wasn’t like he was a nobody everywhere. But you’re talking about…the Northeast—and that was it, basically. You couldn’t take him anywhere else.” For those converts, though, every live broadcast from 1973 to 1975 (and there were at least three a year) provided Affirmation, beginning at Max’s on January 31, 1973, when Springsteen made his, and King Biscuit’s, radio “in concert” debut.
*

And he did it via a stunning “Spirit In The Night” with the band, straight after the brand-new “Bishop Danced” solo, which he had introduced at his first acoustic radio session three weeks earlier as “a song about this bishop and his woman and this violin-player, and this little girl who lost her mother to mathematics. And it’s about pancakes and…James Garner, and how he married this woman with one eye, who kicks like a mule. And it’s about the sexual patterns of elderly boys, and this little boy who thinks that the Indians are still in the woods, only nobody sees them.” Still in love with quick-fire rhymes (“double-quick back flip…fiddlestick fiddled quick”) and madcap monikers (Baby Dumpling, Maverick Daddy, Mama Tuck), Springsteen unrepentantly basked in the reflected glory of ever-more rococo rhyme-schemes.

If King Biscuit had no need for more than three or four songs, Appel smartly ensured the whole of one Max’s set was recorded. And it was quite a set! It had been four and a half months since
Greetings
was completed, and the faucet remained on full-blast. “New York City Song,” “Song To Orphans,” “Saga of the Architect Angel” and “Thundercrack” were now added to the
Greetings
songs, and would all enjoy favor in the months (and years) ahead.

Though none of the four (save the first verse of “New York City Song”) would make the second album, “Thundercrack” would be a show-stoppin’ encore for the next fifteen months. Rhyming for kicks, but no longer gratuitously, he throws out some of his most infectiously memorable lines: “She moves up, she moves back/ Out on the floor there ain’t nobody cleaner/ She does this thing she calls the Jumpback Jack/ She’s got the heart of a ballerina,” the lyric of someone who has finally discovered
rhyme needs its own internal “rithmetic. “Thundercrack” also showed he had adapted well to the demands of writing for a band. As he put it in 1992, “I became more arrangement-orientated. I got more interested in how the thing was going to function as an ensemble.” “Thundercrack,” a quintessential example of “function[ing] as an ensemble,” was evidently written at the end of 1972, one of a flurry of songs fusing the lyrical grandiosity of
Greetings
with an endlessly inventive musical chutzpah. Songs like “Rosalita,” “Thundercrack” and “Kitty’s Back” hinted of great(er) things:

And yet, when he entered 914 Sound Studios on January 29 to demo some new songs ahead of his second Max’s residency not one of them was a ballbuster. The five songs demoed over the next two days were “I Met Her In A Tourist Trap in Tiguara”—which sounds more like one of his concert raps, and remains uncirculated—“Architect Angel,” “Janey Needs A Shooter,” “Ballad of a Self-Loading Pistol” and “Winter Song.” If none of them were attempted at the
Wild, the Innocent
sessions (though “Architect Angel” appears on a September 1973 shortlist, presumably in demo guise), he was still working on “Architect Angel” at the early
Darkness
rehearsal sessions and “Janey Needs A Shooter” at the
River
rehearsals. So stockpiling songs for future projects began this early.

Of the songs themselves, “Architect Angel” was another Zane Grey meets Zero in Jungleland epic, a saga which stretched “from the cellar ways to the attics and all across the plains,” thus anticipating future panoramas. But the architecture ain’t quite there. “Ballad of a Self-Loading Pistol,” if it anticipates anything, anticipates
Nebraska
, being about a father who teaches his son to shoot and shows him “the story of the self-loading pistol,” only for the boy to end up killing someone in a hold-up. He duly boasts to his father, “Your son, he’s an outlaw/ And this blood feels good on my hands.”

“Winter Song” demonstrates that allusions to prostitution in three other winter 1973 songs (“Janey Needs A Shooter,” “Tokyo” and “Hey Santa Ana”)
were no passing whim. This one is specifically about, “Winter, that old icy whore,” who can make one “drip like honey down soot mama’s leg” and works for “the mademoiselle/ who holds the keys to all these doors around her waist/ And rings the bell.” If “Winter Song” puts some cracks in that Freehold facade of Catholic coyness, the magnificent “Janey” breaks the dam. “With her doors open wide, she begs, come inside,” one of Janey’s come-ons, is uncharacteristic of the
Greetings
-era songwriter. The song depicts the loose lady in a series of liaisons with every kinda profession—a gynecolorist who “tears apart her insides;” a mechanic who “smashed my car with [a] big tow bar;” and a peeping-Tom cop who likes to “peek in my window every night.” Each of them is haunted by the lady who “needs a shooter.”

If “Janey Needs A Shooter” introduces one of Springsteen’s great heroines, “Tokyo,” a song demoed three weeks later, again at 914, introduced another. Looking for a recommendation from a Catholic priest for “a cheap virgin,” the padre helpfully suggests, “You can try Rosalie, around the corner and across the street, word is out that she’s fast.” (Anyone who doubts Rosalie and Rosalita are one and the same should note that early versions of the latter song refer to her “sweet samurai tongue,” not her “soft sweet lil’ girl tongue.”) “Tokyo” was another song which although not attempted at the second-album sessions, survived live into 1974. He already knew it was horses for courses.

In fact, the only song demoed in February 1973 that did make the summer sessions—and album—was something he’d been playing around with for months, but had yet to spring on the band; even on Clarence Clemons, the archetypal vibes man. “Vibes Man” is often portrayed as the germ of an idea he then added to “New York City Song,” making “New York City Serenade.” In truth, the released “Serenade” owes far more to “Vibes Man” than “New York City Song,” though it was the latter which Springsteen worked up at spring shows, and “Vibes Man” which stayed secret—until that moment in mid-July when he took the first verse of “New York City Song,” the
whole
of “Vibes Man” and made a single serenade. Lyrical losses from “Vibes Man” would be minimal, though he does delete a couplet revealing the fish lady’s battered past: “You were born black and blue/ You didn’t have to wait for somebody to hit you,” his first reference to domestic violence in song (these lines appear in the first known performance of “New York City Serenade,” at Max’s in mid-July, but not on the end-of-month My Father’s Place broadcast).