E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (13 page)

To realize this vision, he still lacked one component. It was one he felt he had been missing all along—David Sancious, “a man whose notes belong in quotes, whose groove has hung loose, twenty years old, [with] digits of solid gold.” Stalwart of the Bruce Springsteen Band, and habitué of the Upstage, his introduction into the band he always belonged in proved positively painless. As Lopez asserts, “He was The Dude. The way I play, I just fit right in with him. A couple of nights, we were doing this other stuff, Bruce turned around and said, ‘That’s
it
, that’s the stuff.’” He was also the reason “the band” became the E Street Band (The Band having already been taken as the name of another fabled “backing band”). But it wasn’t because of his musical contribution. It was because, to adopt Lopez-lingo, “When we were on tour, we’d get to his house [on E Street] and we’d wait forty minutes for him to come out of his house. We spent a lot of time waiting for David!”

By the time Sancious punched the clock on June 28, “Zero and Blind Terry” was already recorded, but he still happily overdubbed a new part that made all the difference: “I came up with this one organ riff that Bruce really loved. There is one part that’s real slow, and I did a cathedral-type voicing.” He was also on hand when it came time to transform “Vibes Man” and “New York City Song” into the semi-symphonic “New York City Serenade.” He already knew Springsteen would give every E Streeter latitude musically, even as the sound in his head overrode all others:

After that first batch of sessions in late June, remaining sessions had to be slotted around live commitments; with a third landmark residency at Max’s in mid-July—this one in tandem with Bob Marley’s original
Wailers—providing the perfect opportunity to break in both Sancious and some new songs. These included an exquisite elegy to summer’s end on the Jersey boardwalk, “Fourth of July, Asbury Park,” known universally as simply “Sandy.” At the time of its live debut he was still honing the lyric. The original second line (“Sparkin’ an empty light in all those lonely faces, reachin’ up like bandits in the sky”) would make it to the initial studio recording, but not to the album. Likewise, a final verse finds “them northside angels…parked with their Harleys way south out on the Kokomo.”

Even though he was still working on this so subtle song, he elected to open with it at a private bash in San Francisco just four days after the Max’s run came to an end. The shindig in question was the CBS Sales Convention, a three-day affair at which the E Street Band was expected to follow Edgar Winter’s White Trash, who restricted their set to fifteen minutes—which was how much good material they had—and let rip with smoke bombs and fireworks to hide the fact. Lopez thinks, “We were supposed to open the show, and Edgar Winter…insisted, ‘No, we’re opening the show,’ and we didn’t have pyrotechnics [like them]. And [then] we had to go on after them. We just did our thing.” John Hammond later suggested, “Bruce came on with a chip on his shoulder and played way too long.” So much for championing his own signing! But Springsteen made his point
his
way, “I followed Edgar Winter with his smoke bombs…You can’t compete with that. So Danny and I did ‘Sandy,’ which I had just written, just accordion and acoustic guitar.”

He had actually been in a strange mood all day. West coast promotion man Paul Rappaport remembers: “He walked into the hotel, looking a little disheveled, and he said, ‘Rap, what day is it?’ ‘You mean, what time is it?’ ‘No, what
day
is it?’ So something was up…[But] in those days not all of Columbia was behind Bruce. There were three or four of us.” Aside from “Rap,” there was Ron Oberman, fresh from Mercury and a music man through and through. And Pete Philbin. Period.

The band would soon need all their support, and then some, as they returned to New Jersey to put the finishing touches to an album whose overarching vision was quite unlike anything the past coupla years had produced in Rockville. At two sessions in August, Springsteen put the finishing touches to the studio “Sandy,” scrapping a children’s choir and making engineer Louis Lahav’s wife, Suki, multi-track her backing vocals
instead. He also persevered with “Thundercrack” and “Zero and Blind Terry,” both of which fell at the final hurdle, in the former’s case because it never came close to the energy it generated in concert. There was another lost song, too, “Fire On The Wing” (later shortlisted for
Tracks
). It would be late September before they finally had the album in the can, after Springsteen decided he needed something which stamped this new ultra-confident songwriting self on the record. It took till then for Springsteen to pen, arrange and record his most ambitious song to date. Originally called “Puerto Rican Jane,” it would be released as “Incident on 57th Street.”

Asked in 1975 if he ever felt self-conscious when writing about people and scenes from his own life, he suggested: “You don’t have to put it into words…You just write the songs and that’s what comes out,” citing “Incident” as an instance where he felt “more of an observer.” For the first time, the
auteur
inside was yelling “Roll ’em.” “Puerto Rican Jane” seems like a duskier Janey, still in need of a shooter; and in Spanish Johnny, she seems to have found him. Johnny himself is a chancer who can’t resist the importunings of the other “young boys” when they whisper “You wanna make a little easy money tonight?” He slips from his snug bed and sleeping lover to go off into the night. Though we are spared the bloody denouement, Spanish Johnny is a close cousin of the punk whose dreams will gun him down when the story climaxes in “Jungleland.”

Now all he had to do was sequence such shuffles. A September shortlist for
The
Wild, the Innocent
lists six of its seven eventual songs (the one missing, surprisingly, is “E Street Shuffle”), as well as “Thundercrack,” “Santa Ana,” “Zero and Blind Terry” and “The Architect Angel,” which could never have fitted onto a single album. It would have required a double set of
Exile On Main Street
proportions. “Seaside Bar Song,” one of the most spontaneous-sounding tracks from the sessions, had already been set aside, probably because, as Appel observed, “He never took a relaxed approach to music. He would find some cute little riff, or something, and he’d end up thinking it wasn’t important enough to put on the album.” It would, however, make
Tracks
at a time when he proffered an explanation for why such songs got the snip:

There is almost as much unity among the material that didn’t make
The Wild, the Innocent
—including the likes of “Bishop Danced,” “Fever” and “You Mean So Much To Me,” all played live in the first half of 1973—as there is to those that made the grade. Springsteen even uncharacteristically expressed a desire to release such a record the night after opening the
Born In The USA
tour: “I do have an album of outtakes from
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
that feels just like that record. There may be a whole album’s worth of it…I’m singing all the crazy words, and it’s like those songs. Some time I’d like to get that out.”

It would have made for a very different album from
The Wild, the Innocent,
which had the Sancious imprint in every nook and cranny, from the string arrangement on “New York City Serenade” to the jazz-funk of “Kitty’s Back” and “E Street Shuffle.” Of all the band members he was the one who now took Bruce’s license to improvise and ran with it, without ever blundering into a Weather Report-like jazz-fusion. As Sancious asserts, “Most people don’t understand what you’re doing when you say improvise. They think you just sit down and start riffing away, but it’s really a lot more refined than that.”

And yet, for all its musical advances on
Greetings
, there was a sense in which
The Wild, the Innocent
was a premature bulletin from a band still coming to terms with such grand material. In a letter to a radio executive, John Hammond suggested that there was an air of disappointment at the label: “Bruce’s performances [on the LP] do not have the ease or the joy of his live appearances and have the feeling of material being far too carefully worked over. It’s all pretty embarrassing for Columbia, since most of us here have felt that this album doesn’t do him justice.”

Sancious and co., though, were just warming up. The period between July 1973 and January 1974 saw this band in their onstage element, wending their way down E Street and straight into the likes of “Incident on 57th St,” “Kitty’s Back” and their namesake shuffle, with something magical happening nightly. It would even prompt a certain nostalgia from the man who broke the spell, Springsteen himself, twenty-five years later: “We had come out of a band that had jammed a lot,
so when I put the band together as an ensemble, they had this tendency to want to play and play and play. [The band’s] style was quite beautiful and very responsive and just totally original. [But] it only lasted for a very brief period.”

In that “brief period,” he revived “Something You Got” and “Walking The Dog” from the Bruce Springsteen Band repertoire, and “Let The Four Winds Blow” from Lozito’s collection of Fats Domino 45s. A coupla recast originals from that earlier “jam-band,” “Secret To The Blues” and “You Mean So Much To Me Baby” also found renewed favor. If the former was quickly dropped, the latter by January 1974 had assumed epic proportions, reflecting “this tendency to want to play and play and play.” Something unique was happening, and the whole band was instinctively attuned to it. Appel sensed it, too. When they returned to a familiar hunting ground, Joe’s Place in Boston, for a three-day residency (January 4–6, 1974), he decided it was high time they were captured on tape. Twenty-three days later, he rolled tape again at another intimate club show in Nashville, hastily arranged because CBS reps were in town for a convention, and Appel wanted to show them what they were missing:

Yet just a few days later Springsteen pulled the plug, removing the E Street Band’s central ballast, and making a mockery of all his talk of loyalty and blood brothers. He fired his oldest musical collaborator, Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez, supposedly because of an exchange of words and fisticuffs at ten paces with Appel’s brother, Steve, after a show. The argument, as per usual, was about money. Lopez believed, “We were being cheated. Well, Mike Appel’s brother and I had a few words. I pushed him and he went down.”

Lopez states that the disagreement dated back to the day David joined the band: “When they brought Sancious in, we weren’t making a lot of money, but instead of giving him what we were getting, they took it out
of our money…I had a problem with that. That’s probably one of the reasons I got fired. When I have I problem, I say something. They branded me a troublemaker…I’d be like, ‘What about the band getting some royalties?’ Mike was like, ‘Whoddya think you are? Chicago? This is Bruce Springsteen.’ [But] when it came to getting paid, me and Danny were the ones who went to New York to the office to get everyone their money. Bruce said, ‘You guys do that, you’re good at it.’” He had no intimation he was treading on thin ice when the boss came a-callin’ that early February afternoon:

Appel thinks it was a combination of the two, his temper
and
his time-keeping. But, he insists, “In Vini’s defense, he was more of a drummer in the Keith Moon sense, always trying to make the drums like a lead guitar, not just keep a beat, and what would happen invariably is he would lose the beat…[However,] Vini had also got on the wrong side of Bruce a few times: he had punched my brother out, stupid things. He would get feisty with Clarence. So Vini was always problematic on that side of things…[In the end,] it was Bruce’s decision.” And it was one which threatened the equilibrium of an outstandingly original band.

That possibility, however, was lost on Bruce, and the other lynchpins in the current set-up, Clemons and Sancious. Clemons in his autobiography suggests he had already voiced concerns to Springsteen: “Vinnie ‘Mad Dog’ Lopez had trouble keeping time. It was fucking everything up, but Bruce is such a loyal guy he couldn’t bring himself to fire him. It was becoming a real problem.” Meanwhile, at some point Sancious mentioned a friend who played drums and knew how to walk the dog. He later put a disingenuous spin on the switch: “Bruce had decided to change drummers, and I told him about Ernest [‘Boom’ Carter]…He
auditioned a bunch of kids, and Ernest came and tried out.” But Carter was hardly gonna fly up from Atlanta—as he did—just to “try out.” Carter’s recruitment barely a week after Lopez got the boot rather suggests Sancious began importuning Bruce before that fateful February afternoon.