E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (16 page)

Bowie himself was later asked about this session, and recalled “sitting in the corridor with him, talking about his lifestyle, which was very
Dylanesque—you know, moving from town to town with a guitar on his back…Anyway, he didn’t like what we were doing, I remember that. At least, he didn’t express much enthusiasm.” Springsteen was frankly appalled by what Bowie had perpetrated on “It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City,” which he had turned into ersatz white soul, part of what the Brit-rocker called “the squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of muzak rock.”

If the experience shook Springsteen to the core, it made him doubly determined to keep Heart and Soul the twin pillars of the E Street Band’s collective sound. But the despairing tenor of Appel’s memo had struck home. In October 1974, Springsteen carried his complaint to Paul Williams: “We have to play, because if we don’t, everything falls apart. We don’t make any money off records. We have to go out and play every week, as much as we can. If not, nobody gets paid…There’s no money saved at all. You can’t sell 80,000 records and have any money saved. Unless you’re totally by yourself.” In fact, as Appel recalled, booking agent Sam McKeith “had become the most important factor in our lives. He was getting us three or four college dates a week…so we wouldn’t die.”

Sure enough, they
were
soon back on the road again, booked for shows through the fall; and whatever economies were being made, they were not in the band department. After a series of auditions, Springsteen had replaced the most versatile musician in the band and his jazz/rock beatmeister with a classically trained pianist in the Richard Manuel mold, and a timekeeper, pure and simple. Somehow, he still kept the E Street Band moving forward. Not only had he recruited Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg, on keyboards and drums respectively, via a
Village Voice
ad, but he was now bringing up his engineer’s wife Suki Lahav on backing vocals and violin for certain songs; notably a captivating “Incident on 57th Street,” the set-defining “Jungleland” and a gypsy-caravan rendition of Dylan’s “I Want You” that injected pure mercury into the set.

He had evidently already been thinking about the Dylan song before talking to Michael Watts in September, going into a verbal riff on the power of those three little words, “‘I want you’—that’s it, the ultimate statement you can make to anybody. What else can you say? And that’s the greatest lyric in the song, those three words, in the whole damn song! I put that on, man, and I get blown away, I get blown down the street, ’cause there’s no hoax there.” Audiences were awestruck by Bruce’s
audacious arrangement. So much so that even Springsteen wasn’t always sure what to make of their reaction:

In fact, the fall 1974 shows saw the introduction of a steady stream of sixties classics, as if providing a context by displaying musical roots he was not sure had been previously provided. It was a format he retained through the whole
Born To Run
era. Yet, when asked the following year by an English reporter about these “oldies,” he snapped brusquely back, “We don’t play no oldies…They may be older songs, but they’re not nostalgic. I was never into that at all…‘Sha La La,’ ‘It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,’ ‘When You Walk In The Room’—they’re great, they’re great today, right now!” He even mastered elements of rockabilly and doo-wop well enough to debut an E Street version of Johnny Rivers’ “Mountain of Love” that spanned both styles, affirming the appositeness of another contemporary comment: “I’m not real familiar with the old r&b artists, but whatever I hear, I digest very quickly, and it comes right back out the way I want it to.”

Just as in that other lifetime, 1971, he had been delving into parts of his musical heritage he felt he’d missed, or treated too lightly. As he admitted after a 1978 show, “What came out of New Jersey in the early sixties was the girl groups…[and] I was listening to the radio at that time, but it was only later when I was starting to work that I went back and bought the records.” In 1998 Springsteen described how in that summer of uncertainty he would “lie back…at night…and listen to records by Roy Orbison, The Ronettes, The Beach Boys, and other great sixties artists. These were records whose full depth I’d missed the first time around. But now I was appreciating their craft and power.” And then there was Spector, who for a key period in the sixties made every 45 an event: “Phil’s records
felt like near chaos, violence covered in sugar and candy, sung by the girls who were sending Roy O. running straight for the antidepressants. If Roy was opera, Phil was symphonies, little three–minute orgasms, followed by oblivion.”

So when Springsteen introduced pop ballads like Sam Cooke’s “Cupid” or Ben E. King’s “Spanish Harlem” onstage, he was both enhancing his audience’s musical education and demonstrating the band’s versatility and virtuosity. The diffident Lahav was duly impressed by the subtlety of his vision: “Bruce used the violin only for the romantic side of him. I played only on the slow songs. Bruce was in total control…He was willing to accept suggestions; but always, he had the last say.” Reviewers agreed the addition of Lahav was an inspired touch. Susan Ahrens astutely described her as “not so much a member of the band as…Bruce’s personal vision…Her sweet strains of violin and blonde ethereal presence soften Bruce’s tough guy approach to a point of punkish sensitivity.”

Suki might have been surplus to requirements on the more raucous songs, but she served as tangential inspiration for two originals which entered the set that fall, “A Love So Fine” (aka “So Young And In Love,” with a new punchline) and “She’s The One.” Springsteen later claimed he wrote the latter “because I wanted to hear Clarence play the sax in that solo,” but the spoken intro prior to its live debut suggested it had a more lust-driven inspiration. Someone had the hots for “The One:” “About 20 years ago somebody discovered this beat, [which] was such that husbands would rape their wives…It would turn intellectuals into babbling idiots. Good girls get bad when they hear this beat, and bad girls get worse.”

At this formative stage, “She’s The One” also looked back to the time when Springsteen last got seriously hurt in a relationship, the “For You” phase of his songwriting (“You were with me in New York the time…I got beat/ And you ran and left me wasted, Mama, right there in the heat”). Compounding such feelings is a deep-seated hatred for the place he came from: “Most of all I hated that town and what they did/ I hated the way they made us live.” This ragbag of conflicting emotions would only resolve itself after the “betrayal” element transferred to “Backstreets.”

“She’s The One” wasn’t the only song in a continual state of flux throughout fall 1974. “Jungleland” continued to co-opt bits and pieces from other arrangements to its increasingly operatic cause. As Clemons
pointed out, “If you listen to a live recording of ‘Incident on 57th Street’ from that time you can hear the opening violin and piano intro that morphed into the opening of ‘Jungleland.’” Likewise, a guitar part that in the spring had served as an intro to “Kitty’s Back” became a lead break in the Sancious-less symphony of sound. The song grew ever more dramatic, visually and aurally. Appel vividly recalls, “I would get chills watching Bruce Springsteen die at the end of ‘Jungleland.’”

Performed nightly from October 1974 to February 1975, “Jungleland” received ongoing lyrical tweaks. More importantly, violin and sax supplanted the jazz abstractions of Sancious, whilst chimes at both ends of the song-cycle signaled the coming and going of Night. By the time of the fabled February 1975 Main Point show the original final verse, largely rewritten, had been shunted before the “real death waltz” verse. But he was still not quite prepared to shatter the hoodlum’s fantasy, so “in the tunnel of machines, Rat chases his dreams on that forever lasting night.” Surprisingly, given its urban setting, he considered “Jungleland” one of his most personal songs: “The subject I sing about is not necessarily
what
I sing about. I’ll use situations and probe for the very basic emotions…With some of the newer songs I really have to dig deep inside of me to try and understand how I work, so I can put it in the songs. ‘Jungleland’ is like that; it has a lot of little personal things inside it.”

But, however well-crafted the new arrangements, and however easily the new members settled into E Street life, there was a suspicion held by certain critics that the parameters of the band were inexorably contracting, that the spirit of improvisation which drove the Sancious-era combo had been fatally compromised. Lenny Kaye, asked to review a show that October in Boston, sensed that Springsteen and Patti Smith, his new employer, were already heading in wildly disparate directions: “I remember getting sent up by the
Village Voice
to review his show…when he had the girl come out from the wings with the violin. It was in my cross fade of being a writer [and becoming a rock guitarist]; and I began to feel a conflict of interest. I wanted them to be something [else]. I’m into free-form improvisation, finding the noise, and I’m realizing that’s not what they’re about.” The most expansive band in rock had begun to tighten its belt, even as its frontman planned his next record to have a truly mythic sweep:

Actually, Springsteen was struggling to capture
anything
in the studio. And the blame lay squarely at his own brass feet. Instead of working with what he had, he was dreaming of his very own AFM mini-convention. Asked by Jerry Gilbert about his new material in the summer of 1974, he instead talked about how he was “definitely going to add people, possibly a horn section.” Pressed for specifics, he insisted, “Lately I’ve been getting a rush to write new songs and I’ve got quite a few [done]—some short and some long.” He was finding his previous way of songwriting unfulfilling. Which is presumably why he told Robert Hilburn in early July: “The writing is more difficult now. On [the last] album, I started slowly to find out who I am and where I wanted to be. It was like coming out of the shadow of various influences and trying to be me.” The songs were only coming through in fits and starts; not as one unified whole, as had been the case for the last two years.

Looking back the following summer, he openly admitted: “For a while I lost the groove. I lost the spirit of the thing somewhere. It became very confusing to me. I didn’t understand what was going on. I was getting caged in all the time—in work and ‘stuff.’” Meanwhile, the label still needed an album, and a definitive mix for “Born To Run” which could be used to herald the next hopefully-great installment. Springsteen could no longer even hear its strengths, and in an act of desperation he asked his old(est) friend what he thought. Steve Van Zandt, unversed in production protocol, came from the school that believed, “Any time you spend six months on [one] song, there’s something not going exactly right. A song should take about three hours.” His response surprised Springsteen:

In fact, Appel was in full agreement. But Springsteen had stopped listening to him. Finally, in October, “Born To Run” was mixed, largely by the simple expedient of wiping all the gunk that had been applied since June, and bringing the one guitar figure Steve had heard buried in the mix to the fore. Knowing that the level of anticipation for any new product was growing in Bruceland, Appel decided he would send an advance tape of the song to those radio stations which had proven the most supportive in the last two years. It was something he had done once before, with the seven-minute “Fever” they demoed at 914 in May 1973. As it happens, the (almost) back-to-mono mix on that November 1974 “Born To Run” would prove cleaner and punchier than the one used on the album. No wonder listeners in Cleveland, Houston, Philadelphia and Boston began to call the stations. Unfortunately, CBS had by now remembered they didn’t do nonalbum singles. As of 1974, singles were promotional items, not product in their own right. And they demanded an explanation: