E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (26 page)

Perhaps surprisingly, at no point did either Landau or Springsteen ever consider making
Darkness
a double album. Bruce certainly would have had enough clout at CBS to demand it, but as Landau stated at the time, “I never thought we were [working on one]. [Sure,] we have enough material for a double record, but we don’t
have
a double record. The reason the material was removed was because it was not a part of the unity of what he was doing.” (Springsteen was terser still: “It’s much easier to centralize on one record.”)

Actually, by the time they began to switch from Atlantic Studios to the Record Plant at the end of August, they probably had enough for
three
records.
*
Yet still he refused to produce a working sequence, or begin mixing this album of strong songs. Even as the sessions stretched into September, Springsteen continued using the two expensive New York studios as his very own private rehearsal room, even allowing superfan Barry Rebo to capture the interminable sessions on open-reel video (for a documentary that would remain forever “in the works”). Springsteen later described his then-regime thus: “I can remember working really hard on [
Darkness
]…
I just used to sit in my room eight hours a day and…I just worked out each song, verse by verse, real specifically.” Nor was Landau offering the dissenting voice. His view was that, “[Although] we rehearsed for quite a while before we actually started recording the album…it makes more sense to be in the studio: to work these things through to their logical conclusion.” So much for providing “focus and direction”:

Not only were songs worked on multiple times, but in almost every case they would spend precious studio time (and tape) recording tracks that were really not finished. It was 914 all over again. As an unnamed band member told one biographer, “Bruce [was] coming in most afternoons with a new first draft…It was like painting the fucking George Washington Bridge.” Yes, he had previously “work[ed] a lot on the lyrics before we record[ed] a song,” but he was then recording these rough drafts. Given that he had spent eighteen months preparing for these sessions—and rehearsed the band extensively beforehand—the approach smacked of indulgence, openly encouraged by Springsteen’s latest surrogate father figure:

By the time they had definitively switched the sessions to the Record Plant in mid-September, Springsteen had fully abandoned “Album #4” and
was working on Album #5. When he arrived at work on September 12 he had two new songs: “Prove It All Night” and “Ramrod.” The first of these began life by using band arrangement of an old song. On the first take of “Prove It All Night,” he sang the lyrics to “Something In The Night,” save for the refrain, “Prove it all night, I’ll prove it all night for you,” and one “new” element from a draft lyric he’d scrawled in his notebook, “Well, baby wants a Cadillac, and wants a dress of blue/ And honey, if I can I’d get these things for you/ Girl, I got a hunger, I hunger I can’t resist/ There’s so much that I want, right now I want one kiss/ To seal our fate tonight.” It would take him four more sessions to really prove it all night.

After another short break, sessions resumed on September 26. Again, though, he spent most of the time working on songs written in the interim, even as he continued to play the likes of “The Promise,” “Because The Night” and “Independence Day.” Of the five new songs, “Someday (We’ll Be Together),” “Breakout,” “Down By The River (Say Sons)” and “Ain’t Good Enough For You” all had the mark of Outtake on them (although he worked on “Someday” and “Breakout” for
days)
. The one song that suggested real promise was “The Promised Land,” nodding to Chuck Berry in its title, but nowhere else. If Berry used the term ironically, referring to the California he was vainly trying to reach throughout his 1964 classic, Springsteen displayed no such irony. Nowhere in the song was he celebrating “
the
promised land.” Another ditty of defiance, this one literally spat in the face of a portent of biblical proportions—“I’m heading straight into the storm”—having taken its cue from a single stray line in his lyric notebook, “Hot rod angels rumblin’ through a promised land.” Now that did sound like a Chuck Berry line. (It ended up in “Racing in the Street.”)

At the end of September another ten-day break was called; but again he returned not with some cogent idea of what to do with the forty-plus songs he already had, but with four more songs—“City of Night,” “The Ballad,” “English Sons” and “I’m Going Back,” all of which he cut in a single session and then promptly forgot for three decades. A further fortnight sojourn from the studio resulted in still more new songs, one of which he set to the same “Bo Diddley” riff as “I’m Going Back” (and, indeed, “She’s The One”), “Preacher’s Daughter.” Then there was the chilling “Iceman.” Each was an inspired addition to this relentless accruing process.

“Preacher’s Daughter,” one of the most atmospheric things recorded at the Record Plant, was a five-minute-plus exhortation of love for a preacher’s
daughter in the teeth of parental disapproval, and as such ticks just about every psychoanalytical box a good Catholic boy could. But rather than being wracked by feelings of fear and loathing, the boy has developed a sense of humor (“It’s a long walk to heaven on a road filled with sin/ They’d better open up the freeway to let me in”), and a cinematic gift for visual imagery: “Well, just as I got the preacher’s daughter ready for a light/ There’s a V-8 on fire and something ain’t right/ And like a she-devil howlin’ from the gates of hell/ Goddamn! Here come the preacher in his Coupe De Ville.”

“Iceman” displayed the other side of the coin, a case of Springsteen drawing back the curtain on a troubled psyche only to quietly retire the results. And who can blame him with lines like, “Once they tried to steal my heart, beat it right outta my head/ But, baby, they didn’t know that I was born dead/ I am the iceman, fighting for the right to live.” Maybe the stress from months of sessions was finally getting to him. At least this time he has a girl by his side. It is the “preacher’s girl” again, and the pair are literally hellbent: “We’ll take the midnight road right to the devil’s door/ And even the white angels of Eden with their flamin’ swords/ Won’t be able to stop us.” In the end, though, “The Iceman” became one more memory he chose to suppress.

These killer cuts—both destined for the scrapheap (where “Preacher’s Daughter” still resides)—were realized in a single inspired October night when the album returned to the main road. At the same time, Springsteen finally got the right coordinates to “The Promised Land” and attempted something called “New Fast Song.” He had finally found room for Candy. Now he just needed Adam to raise Cain, which he duly did a fortnight later—after spending equal time on “I Want To Be Wild” and “Give The Girl A Kiss,” the kinda songs he’d “bring in…to break the tension in the studio”—and he had an album that fit an increasingly bleak worldview:

“Intensity” became the mantra Springsteen would adhere to even when the wheels fell off on the promotional road—“I drew from things that I liked on my last album, the drums and the power: I wanted a certain intensity,”—as he set about crafting an album out of solid Rock. For all their repeated discussions about direction, he and Landau kept coming back to a punklike aesthetic. As Landau told Nelson, “We [often] used to discuss the sound of the record as it evolved…What kind of sound-picture was the record suggesting? We did want an unglamorized sound. There was [to be] no sweetening. We wanted the coffee black.”

Springsteen wanted it to be a double espresso sonic shot, “to be just relentless…a barrage of the particular thing I had in mind,” as he explained the following July. What they ultimately got, or so Landau insisted, was something which was “clear without being too clean—without being too studio, [or] too neat. A real strong middle, real strong bass drum, real good highs…What we tried to do this time was get the
Born To Run
excitement, but at the same time [something] a little more concise-sounding.”

That might have been how it sounded in the studio—a notoriously misleading environment, with its state-of-the-art speakers, ideal acoustics and deafening volume—but it was not how the songs came across on tape. And that was a transition for which Landau was ill-equipped. Not that his forte was ever “producing” the sound. As he informed a European monthly in 1986, “In the recording studio, I represent the audience. When you read on a record-sleeve ‘co-producer Jon Landau’ it means I helped Bruce to know if the song delivered the wanted effect. I am never involved in the technical side of recording.”

Although Springsteen always listened to Landau, he gave equal credence to Van Zandt, as someone who now had the experience of producing the first two Southside Johnny albums behind him. But Jon and Steve’s ideas of how a record should sound were at opposite ends of the spectrum. Springsteen knowingly played the pair off against each other: “I didn’t want any one person to have too much control over what direction the music was taking—so I would yin-yang a little bit. It was the way that I played it.”

He still thought he could get by without the requisite technical input. Just before the sessions commenced, he had insisted in print, “You can’t let the technical side of it get it in the way—you’re looking for a complete
marriage of structure and spirit.” And he clung to this ideal in the face of all the audio evidence coming out of Atlantic and the Record Plant that the sound on tape was—yet again—
not
the one in his head:

Actually, there was a terrific sounding record being made just across the hall at the Record Plant. The album was called
Easter
, and its producer was on an extended sabbatical from engineering the E Street Band’s latest opus. Lenny Kaye, guitarist on those sessions, believes that by the time the Patti Smith Group were building an album around “Because The Night,” Jimmy Iovine “wasn’t working on
Darkness
that much. He was more in our world.” In reality, Iovine had grown increasingly frustrated by the engineering job, perhaps because, as Landau subsequently stated, “Engineers take a great deal of pride in what they do [technically]…[but] Bruce requires an ability to adjust. ‘It can’t be done’…never gets said. The only rule.” The final straw came when it became apparent Iovine was not going to be doing the mix on Bruce’s record. So he gave Patti the mix he would have given Springsteen—bequeathing her the most AOR-friendly studio sound she ever had.

Before Springsteen himself could produce a statement to match, he would need a final sequence. Through December 1977 he worked on a shortlist of thirteen songs, some lucky, some not. They included Atlantic tracks like “Come On (Let’s Go Tonight),” “Independence Day,” “Don’t Look Back” and “The Promise.” Also in the mix was “The Way,” a torch ballad he cut back in August, and would still be working on come 12 February 1978 (by which time he was on take sixty-six). Listing the many ways “you belong to me,” “The Way” culminated in a surprisingly pantheistic version of fidelity, “The way the river belongs to the sea/ That’s the way you belong to me.” Also still a candidate for inclusion was “Streets of Fire,” a song which was, as Landau put it, “something that happened in the studio.”

By January 16, they had a sequence—and a strong one.
*
But for the second album in a row, this initial sequence was missing its eventual title track. Not only was “Darkness on the Edge of Town” absent, it had been since June. At no stage had it been a potential title of the album. A number of provisional titles
were
considered that fall; the two favorites,
Badlands
and
American Madness
, both derived from famous film titles. Indeed, throughout the making of
Darkness
Springsteen had been in the grip of the American madness that was film noir.

It had all begun when Landau suggested the two of them watch John Ford’s adaptation of Steinbeck’s
Grapes of Wrath
. It had a profound effect. Interviewing Bruce the following year, Paul Nelson, by this juncture more film buff than rock critic, commented on the change: “He talked for the first ten minutes of the interview about how much he’d been influenced by [movies]. And how, like [in] John Ford, the real story [in these songs] is underneath the action.” To another reporter, Springsteen went so far as to describe Ford’s
Grapes of Wrath
as “part of the [album’s] production for me. Like, I’m sitting there and I’m watching something that I never watched before…and it has an influence, it has an effect on me.”