E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (2 page)
Read E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Online
Authors: Clinton Heylin
Like many a bright kid living in a cloistered, claustrophobic environment, he retired into the world of imagination when he was barely old enough for school, a form of escape he shared with fellow New Jerseyite Patti Smith, born three years earlier to similar circumstances: an agnostic ex-soldier father, a zealot of a Christian for a Mom, white-trash poor. Not surprisingly, he was quickly labeled a dreamer by his teachers, who failed to provide the intellectual stimulus he sorely needed, and most certainly wasn’t receiving at home; especially after the Springsteens finally flew the grandparents’ coop to set up home down on South Street.
Barely had they changed homes than the Springsteens had another mouth to feed, and Bruce had a lil’ sister. Though it only made tough times still tougher, Springsteen remembered the period after Pamela was born in 1962 as “one of the best times I can ever remember…because it changed the atmosphere of the whole house for quite a while.” (Again an experience he shared with the young Patti, who later wrote the magnificent “Kimberly” about the night her younger sister was born.) But for the boy from the Jersey shore it seemed Life had already dissuaded Opportunity from making house-calls on the Springsteens. As he later told a St. Louis audience, “I grew up in a house where…there wasn’t a lot of things that make you aware of the possibilities that you have in life.” Even when it came to the realm of politics, it seemed the adults brooked no discussion—Bruce was informed he was a Democrat, and that was that:
Bruce Springsteen
: The only political discussion I ever remember in my house was when I came home from school when I was little…It must have been during an election season…I was probably…eight or nine. And I came home and said, “Mom, what are we?” And she said, “Oh, we’re Democrats. We’re Democrats because they’re for the working people.” And that was it—that was the [extent of] political discussion that went on in my house. [2004]
After his pubescent rock ’n’ roll epiphany, he would not feel this lack of any intellectual stimulus so keenly. Only in full-blown middle age would he recognize how great the loss had been: “I didn’t grow up in a community of ideas—a place where you can sit down and talk about books, and
how you read them, and how they affect you…I’m more a product of popular culture.” Fortunately, the popular culture he refers to was enjoying one of its most inspired epochs, which TV and radio ensured seeped into every U.S. household, no matter how close to the breadline. And the Springsteens never managed to do more than make ends meet for their growing family, and sometimes not even that:
Bruce Springsteen
: I lived in a household that was caught in the squeeze, endlessly trying to make ends meet. My mother running down to the finance company, borrowing money to have a Christmas, and then paying it back all year until the next Christmas and borrowing some more. So I know what that’s like. [2004]
It was Bruce’s mother, Adele, who was often the only one who kept hungry wolves at bay. Though his father had once known job security at a plastics factory, in the years before he took his wife to California in 1969 the head of the household bounced from pillar to temporary post in a series of unskilled and unchallenging short-term jobs. The experience left an indelible mark on his son, captured in a couplet he would later cut from 1982’s “Glory Days”: “I was nine years old when he was working at the Metuchen Ford plant assembly line/ Now he just sits on a stool down at the Legion Hall, but I can tell what’s on his mind.” By then, the not-so-young Bruce could admit, “There ain’t a note I play onstage that can’t be traced directly back to my mother and father.”
The two parents themselves were very different in temperament. And of the two there was never any question whom Bruce most resembled, and therefore whose authority he set out to challenge. Like his father, Doug, Bruce was a lone wolf who tended to bottle things up, a comparison the
Born To Run
Bruce did not shy away from: “I’m pretty much by myself out there most of the time. My father was always like that. Lived with my father for twenty years. Never once saw a friend come over to the house. Not one time.” Nor did Doug tend to engage his family in stimulating conversation. Even after Bruce became the subject of press interest, he would describe his father (in the present tense) as someone who “never has much to say to me. But I know he thinks about a lot of things. I know he’s driving himself almost crazy thinking about these things.”
Meanwhile, Doug’s stoic wife Adele was the one who bequeathed their
only son the work ethic he espoused nightly on stage—“Her life had an incredible consistency, work, work, work every day, and I admired that greatly”—and when she could afford it, and even when she could not, she would indulge her son’s whims. When he was thirteen, his overriding obsession was to own an electric guitar. Forty years later, on the night he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Adele’s son acknowledged the enormous debt he owed her, specifically and generally:
Bruce Springsteen
: I’d like to thank my mother Adele for that slushy Christmas Eve…when we stood outside the music store and I pointed to that Sunburst guitar and she had that sixty bucks, and I said, “I need that one, Ma.” She got me what I needed, and she protected me and provided for me on a thousand other days and nights. As importantly, she gave me a sense of work as something that was joyous and that filled you with pride and self-regard, and that committed you to your world. [1998]
He had wanted a guitar to be his pen and sword ever since he first saw Elvis Presley, the scourge of all American parents who thought they had teenagers on a leash, on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. For him (and his generation), “It wasn’t just the way Elvis looked, it was the way he moved that made people crazy, pissed off, driven to screaming ecstasy, and profane revulsion. That was [the power of] television.” And, as he later recalled, “I had to get a guitar the next
day
. I stood in front of the mirror with that guitar on…and I knew that
that
was what had been missing. But then it was like I crawled back into the grave or something, until I was thirteen.”
Like many a baby-boomer, he discovered that big, cumbersome guitar around his neck looked nothing like it did when nonchalantly slung across his hip by a gyrating Elvis, while forming chords with his puny little fingers wore down his skin and sounded nothing like Elvis did: “My little six-year-old fingers wrapped themselves around a guitar neck for the first time, rented from Mike Deal’s Music in Freehold, New Jersey. They just wouldn’t fit. Failure with a capital F. So I just beat on it, and beat on it, and beat on it—in front of the mirror.” He put the guitar aside and went looking for another reason to believe: “I tried to play football and baseball and all those things. I checked out all the alleys and just didn’t fit. I was running through a maze. [But] music gave me something [else]. It was never just a hobby.”
Before he could nail his own manifesto to the doors of perception, though, he had first to reject the faith of his forefathers. By the age of thirteen, he had had enough of the liturgy of lessons he received at the convent school his mother had sent him to. As he put it to Bill Flanagan, recounting this experience, “That very literal translating of the Bible and the belief that, ‘This is it, this is all there is, and don’t try to step outside this thing!’ always seemed a little presumptuous. I [could]n’t see how that sort of arrogance—to believe that you’ve got the inside dope on what the word of God is—would line up with some sort of real spiritual feeling.”
He soon began to show a mile-wide rebellious streak. Initially, when he tried to challenge the authority of the nuns, they demoted him to an infants class and set his fellow pupils on him. So he took off: “I did a lot of running away. And a lot of being brought back…It started when I was in the sixth grade, I was eleven…They’d find me and I’d be brought back that afternoon…I hated [that] school. I had the big hate. I put up with it for years, but in eighth grade I started to wise off.” He finally announced to his parents that he’d had enough of old-time religious education and insisted on attending the local high school. Their reaction suggested he was, if not quite dead to them, a pariah on long-term probation:
Bruce Springsteen
: I quit that [Catholic] stuff when I was in eighth grade. By the time you’re older than thirteen, it’s too ludicrous to go along with anymore. By the time I was in eighth grade I just lost it all. I decided to go to public high school, and that was a big deal…It was like, “Are you insane??! You are dirt! You are the worst! You’re a…barbarian!” [1978]
If his parents feared for the soul of the apostate in their midst, worse was to come. At the same time as he lost his faith, Bruce discovered the opposite sex and the true meaning of sin, though it would be some years before he would progress beyond a furtive fumble in the backseat of a borrowed car. After all, we’re still talking 1962. Only presidents got to fuck around. Still, he sensed that there was
something
more to girls than sharing a slow smooch at the end of an evening at the local Catholic social club. Placing himself back in just such a moment, one night in February 1975, he described to a female journalist precisely what was at stake:
“Okay, I’ve been staring this girl down for hours and I don’t aim my sights too high, if you know what I mean. It’s five to ten, five to eleven, whenever the dances used to end, and a song like this [turns up the radio] would come on. So I start walking across the dance floor, and let me tell you, that is a
long
walk. Many a night I never made it across. Y’know, I’d start walking and get halfway, then turn back. ’Cause you weren’t asking a girl, ‘Do you want to dance?’ You were asking her, ‘Do you
wanta
? My life is in your hands! We’re not talking about a dance; we’re talking about
survival
.’ If she said, No [he curls up in a ball]; but if she said Yes, you were saved. ’Cause man, dancing is more than just holding a girl in your arms.”
But the walls of Jersey’s Jericho did not tumble so easily. As he told a small Boston club crowd one particularly gregarious night in January 1974, “At the parochial school dances—like the [Catholic Youth Organization] things—they had this one woman that would come around and embarrass you, pull you out of your chair and pull you into the middle of the room…And then, when you go back to school on Monday; and the girls would all sit over there, and boys would all sit over here, and you had those little green ties…and green pants.” No wonder he wanted out. There was another problem with the dances organized by the likes of the CYO—the music. It was strictly for squares. And by 1963, he was starting to hear music on his mother’s preferred morning radio station, WNEW, that didn’t sound like it had been recorded in Squaresville, daddy-o:
Bruce Springsteen
: We never had a record player in the house, never had records or anything like that, not until I was thirteen or fourteen. But I remember my mother always listened to the radio—she always listened to the AM stations. Elvis was big then, in the early sixties, and the Ronettes, all the Spector stuff, and the girl groups from New York, which is what for me is a big part of my background. The Ronettes, the Shirelles, the Crystals, the Chiffons, who put out a lot of great music at the time. And then the big English thing happened, the Beatles and all that stuff, and the Stones, Manfred Mann…So the music that got me was what was on AM from 1959 to 1965…My roots were formed by then: Roy Orbison; the great English singles bands; the girl groups from New York; Chuck Berry, of course. [1975]
No longer a dead man walking, the teenage Bruce had been saved by the blood, sweat and tears of Spector, Leiber and Stoller. Nor is salvation too strong a word for how he came to feel. Indeed, when on his first English tour he described that Damascene radio experience to England’s preeminent rock critic, Nick Kent. And his choice of words is telling indeed: “The music on the radio gave me my first real reason for being alive…Whenever I heard a new record—now we’re talking about the early to mid-sixties, all that stuff from Elvis to Spector…Tamla, Stax, all the British bands—that music sounded so miraculous that it sucked me out of my surroundings and presented me with this sense of…wonderment.”
However, if it was Elvis who again provided the parameters for further Pop lessons, it was a very different Elvis from the one he had previously seen on Ed’s primetime weekly bulletin. This was the Hollywood Elvis; the one who sang cheesy fare like “Can’t Help Falling In Love,” “Viva Las Vegas” and “Follow That Dream,” not the life-affirming promise of “Hound Dog,” “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Jailhouse Rock.” And though Springsteen would cover all three of these post-army soundtrack songs in the post-
River
era, it was hearing “the British bands” that banished Movie Elvis from his thoughts.
And once again it took that snake-oil salesman Ed Sullivan to show him the way. For it was on February 9, 1964 that Ed turned over his show to four boys from Liverpool with tight trousers and even tighter harmonies, The Beatles. Just eleven weeks after an assassin’s bullet (or three) snatched away JFK, and seemingly the hopes and dreams of a generation, this fab foursome landed on a distant shore and shook the shifting sands of American youth, for good. Like many a contemporary, a stunned Springsteen had been waiting a lifetime for something like this: “This was different, shifted the lay of the land. Four guys, playing and singing, writing their own material.” Indeed, he would spend the next twenty years trying to create a similar explosion in someone else’s soul:
Bruce Springsteen
: The Beatles opened doors…If any stuff I do could ever do that for somebody, that’s the best…Rock ’n’ roll motivates. It’s the big gigantic motivator, at least it was for me…That’s the real spirit of the music. You have to click that little trigger, that little mechanism. [1978]
The message had a profound effect on an entire demographic, but in the long run most then-kids got on with living the life their parents had mapped out for them, reserving their little rebellions for their nights out dancing or in relationships with unsuitable suitors (a subject the Jersey devil would explore thoroughly at the sessions for
The River
). But it took the fourteen-year-old Springsteen over, and stayed with him for the next two decades. His reasoning was simple, but profound: “Rock ’n’ roll came to my house where there seemed to be no way out. It just seemed like a dead end street…nothing I wanted to do except roll over and go to sleep, or something. And it came into my house—snuck in, ya know—and opened up a whole world of possibilities.”