E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (14 page)

As it happens, Carter was an inspired choice. Though he didn’t have the frenetic style that came part and parcel with the “Mad Dog” moniker, nor was he quite as busy. And he could keep time on a dime. But he was Sancious’s, not Springsteen’s man, and the newly-forged alliance made for none of the do-or-die camaraderie of the original E Street Band. Springsteen seemed to sense it, because in an April interview he was already talking about how “the band’s built to be flexible—that way if everybody leaves tomorrow or everybody stays, it’ll work out.” He had never talked this way before.

Lopez’s limitations seemed less evident to those critics who had just received copies of Springsteen’s second long-playing installment. Just as he was handing Mad Dog his cards,
Rolling Stone
’s Ken Emerson was praising the band, who “cook with power and precision,” in a timely but terse second-album review.
Creem
’s Ed Ward, given more latitude, was unstinting in his praise: “The rhythm section…is able to cope with all the changes nicely, as well as propelling the band along when things are at their most frantic…[while] the music has the same kind of freedom as good jazz, and…the beat and drive of good rock.” Ward’s only concern, in a rave review that compared
The Wild, the Innocent
(favorably) with
Astral Weeks
, was whether “his band can play anywhere near this good on stage.” He need not have worried.

Indeed, Ward was just about the only major rock critic in America not to have checked out the E Street band in their performing pomp. The British music press were predictably tardier, but
NME
’s Charles Shaar Murray called it right when he did suggest, “After seeing Springsteen you realize that his records are dumb and irrelevant; forget ’em, they’re trash, they’re a shadow show in a distorting mirror, and he’s not really there at all. It’s possible to hear his records and hardly dig him at all; it ain’t possible to see his show and walk out quite the same. I mean, the cat is
good
…And I was blown over when I saw him live and discovered that the aspect of his work that had impressed me the most [his white r&b voice/musical identity] was, in fact, the deepest and most central core of his work.”

Though CBS had cut the marketing budget for his second album in half, and
Rolling Stone
had relegated him to the also-rans review-section, it mattered not. Word of mouth, by the spring of 1974, was something else. As Springsteen himself asserted, post-
Born To Run
: “You couldn’t get the whole story from the records we did earlier but whenever we played, it was like—instant!” In fact, for all the good press they were getting, Springsteen doubted it was this which turned things around. He told
Street Life
the next year, “I’ve had a million good articles but they don’t sell records. Why? ’Cause the kids don’t care what they read…The kid on the street, he heard about you from a friend. So he buys your record. He comes to see you, he likes your band. He tells his friend, who decides to check it out for himself. And that’s how you get the circle going.” After the fact, he would suggest it was a strategy of sorts: “We didn’t start selling records till we started playing smaller places. It’s a slow process. But I was always certain.”

Unfortunately, as David Bowie could have told him, with the right show things might ultimately work out fine, but it was damn wearing on the wallet (and nerves). If everyone needs a push, Springsteen got two solid shoves the second week in May, both the direct result of articles written by converts who caught the Boom-era E Streeters that spring, and aired their thoughts in forums so far off the beaten track only someone reading the tea-leaves of popular culture could have been led there. That the first of them resulted in a wholesale change in the attitude of his record label was mere happenstance. It came just in time. As Appel recalls, “We were just about forgotten completely, and it forced us to start thinking about how we were going to survive…/…When I called up the promotion men, nobody would pick up the phone. There was nothing we could do.” Even advocates like Paul Rappaport at the label were meeting a brick wall: “We had to fight for money for Bruce. I remember being in a [CBS] convention and I was jumping up and down, ‘This is rock & roll history. We need money!’ And the head of promotions is going, ‘I don’t care about rock & roll history. We have budgets.’”

Everyone was playing for their lives. Night after night. On April 26, the boys pulled up at Brown University to play the Alumni Hall. Dick Wingate, already a fan, became an acolyte that night: “I’d never been so thunderstruck in my life; and I just remember being floored…The performance was beyond anything I’d seen. I’d seen the [Who]
Quadrophenia
tour, I’d seen [Floyd do]
Dark Side
, but this was so personal. It didn’t feel like a show.”
But it was actually one of Wingate’s fellow students whose interview with Springsteen put a Persian among the doves:

In fact, Springsteen kept Siegelstein’s name out of his rant at the label’s expense; but his exasperation had come through loud and clear: “Of course I don’t know how Clive [Davis] would have turned out as time went on. Anyway, Clive and I got along. He came down—he still came down after he got ousted to see how we were doing. He was interested. Now I’m a pain in the ass to them is all and, you know, they want to make somebody else famous…I haven’t sold many records yet and we don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things.” And if this wasn’t enough, he further complained
“They’re bugging me for a single. I don’t know, maybe they mean well, but I doubt it.”

If it was a highly uncharacteristic outburst, Springsteen had never been a willing interviewee. When Robert Hilburn asked for an interview after a July 1974 Santa Monica gig, “He asked why I wanted to talk to him and whether it wasn’t better to let fans just listen to the music, rather than read about the artist as well.” He went on to gently berate Hilburn, “[Rock] interviews are like questions and answers where there is no answer, so why is there a question?” He had a simple faith in his ability to communicate, and in rock audiences in general, his own in particular. He had already informed Hilburn, his first important west coast advocate, “You should never be ‘satisfied’ [with your performance]. Once you’re satisfied, you’re dead. You’ve got to ruffle people, stir them, make them have wants, make them realize their desires…Don’t just make them boogie and jump up and down. That’s a hoax.” It was a mantra he held onto throughout the most trying year of his career:

So when he ran into the reviews editor from
Rolling Stone
outside Charlie’s Place, Cambridge on April 10, 1974, he was relieved to find Jon Landau had come to see the show. Landau’s interest had been piqued by the second album and, like Ed Ward, he was curious how they sounded live. If Landau’s local review of
The Wild, the Innocent
, posted in the window of Charlie’s Place, was essentially positive, he thought Lopez’s drumming “a weak spot,” and found the recording to be “a mite thin or trebly-sounding, especially when the band moves into the breaks.” When Springsteen introduced Landau to his producer inside, Appel rightly called him out, “So you don’t like the album’s production, huh!” Coming from the man who had gutted the most abrasive band to ever come out of Detroit’s Grande Ballroom (Landau produced the MC5’s weak second album,
Back In The USA)
, Landau’s comments suggested an expertise he simply did not
have. But Springsteen did not know that. And the critic was saying the things he wanted to hear.

Though he loved it, Landau did not review the show that night. Rather, he checked them out again at the Harvard Square Theater a month later, when he somewhat memorably “saw rock & roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” So fast did that night pass before his eyes that he imagined he’d seen a “two-hour set,” initiating that great Rockritic contest to see who could most inflate the length of a live Springsteen set. (For the record, there is no such thing as a four-hour Springsteen show!) For Landau it all boiled down to one question: “When his…set ended I could only think, can anyone really be this good, can anyone say this much to me, can rock & roll still speak with this kind of power and glory?”

To put his epiphanic critique in context, the mid-seventies were the heyday of such bulletins from jaundiced critical claimants. Whether it was then-critic Patti Smith lauding Television, Lester Bangs and Nick Kent testifying to The Stooges, Richard Williams experiencing Roxy Music or Jonh Ingham being blown to kingdom come by the Pistols, everyone was looking for the next big thing; and the ad-men knew it. The issue before
Rolling Stone
ran Bruce’s “rock & roll future” ad, they carried an ad for Weather Report that risibly announced, “The Future is Here.”

As John Lombardi put it in his 1988
Esquire
“roast” of “Saint Bruce:” “Bruce was a rock critic’s dream, a means of rationalizing nostalgic feelings of ‘rebellion’ and blue-collar sympathy with comfortable middle-aged incomes and ‘life-styles.’” Unlike most of the others listed above, he did not represent any kinda threat to The Pantheon. His was a reclamation, not a deconstruction, of Rock’s decade-long history. The most telling line in Landau’s review is not the oft-quoted one, but the one which preceded it: “I saw my rock & roll past flash before my eyes.” And if Springsteen was an answer to critics’ prayers, the influence Landau still exercised was an answer to his. As he recently observed, “The power of rock criticism in the seventies would be unrecognizable perhaps to rock writers today…It was a powerful forum, particularly for people who were just starting [like me].” Dave Marsh, who edited Landau’s review, later claimed on both their behalves that the review was a conscious act of hyperbole:

Whether Springsteen approved of being hyped a second time was a question neither Landau nor Marsh deigned to ask. He certainly needed their help, as Bruce duly admitted after the review went viral: “At the time we weren’t doing so good, and it helped me out with the record company.” At least Landau’s review made no mention of Dylan, not even in passing. For Springsteen, this was important: “I wanted to get away from the Dylan comparisons at the time…At the time I was self-conscious about it and trying to find my own voice.”

When
Rolling Stone
finally ran a nonreview piece on the artist in September 1974, he went to great pains to convey those musical influences as one big melting pot: “I like [Dylan]. The similarities are probably there somewhere. But…shit, man, I’ve been influenced by lots of people. Elvis was one of the first. Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, the Beatles, Fats [Domino], Benny Goodman, a lot of jazz guys. You can hear them all in there if you want.” At this time one could almost check the influences off, such was the sweep of styles the 1974 E Street Band embraced in concert. The show Landau reviewed featured an almost-showband arrangement of the Blue Belles” “I Sold My Heart To The Junkman,” while a segue into Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City” in the middle of “Kitty’s Back” was so seamless it seemed just another part of the unraveling saga of a stripper with a heart of gold.

But just about the time this panorama of
a priori
pop was bubbling to the surface, CBS were dictating in what direction they wanted Springsteen’s career to go. Yes, the purse strings had been relaxed enough for his recording career to resume, and there was even a commitment of sorts to “repromote”
The Wild, the Innocent
(which was now starting to sell steadily despite their worst efforts); but they were still bugging him about
that
single. Such was the state of affairs when Landau received a call shortly after his birthday, May 22. It was Bruce: “He said he was having problems…in his relationship with Columbia Records and…his
problems in recording. He said there was this fellow Charlie Koppelman who, because of the lack of commercial success [to date], wanted to impose some kind of direction on Bruce’s future recordings.”