E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (27 page)

As it came time to create his own totality, he began to see the album as an audio noir-movie, a reference-point he made repeatedly following
Darkness
’s release: “There comes a point where the song becomes more and more like a movie. And when that happens you cease to become its creator and assume the role of director…My songs have a kinda drive-in quality about them…I’m just there, quietly directing…/…The songs I write [now], they don’t have particular beginnings and they don’t have endings. The camera focuses in and then out.”

What he now says he got from Ford at that time was “that elegiac view of history—warmth, fidelity, duty—the good soldier’s qualities…[because] people [like him] had [an] interest in the undercurrents, the underbelly, an interest in peering behind the veil of what you’re shown every day.” It also made him consciously seek “out forties and fifties film
noir such as Jacques Tourneur’s
Out of the Past
. It was [this] feeling of men and women struggling against a world closing in that drew me to those films. Even the title,
Darkness On The Edge of Town
, owed a lot to American noir…[But] I always liked the flash and outlaws of B-pictures—Robert Mitchum in
Thunder Road
and Arthur Ripley’s
Gun Crazy
.”

He had already namechecked
Thunder Road
in “The Promise,” though at no point does he ever seem to have considered calling the LP after the song which permanently shifted the parameters of his songwriting; and which, as of January 16, was the designated album-closer, bookending an LP that began with “Badlands.” But even at this juncture Springsteen had his doubts about the recorded version. Sometime around September, he had rewritten the “paid the big cost” couplet, after a
Rolling Stone
reporter suggested the song was actually “about” the lawsuit. The new lines suggested someone a hair’s breadth away from
Nebraska
: “Well, my daddy taught me how to walk quiet and how to make my peace with the past/ I learned real good to tighten up inside and I don’t say nothing unless I’m asked.” It was this version, recorded with the full band, which was on the January 16 sequence. Yet eight days later he was back at the Record Plant, recording the song solo at the piano, planning to add strings (according to Landau, a “string” version
was
cut). But as he would suggest in 1999—when he had just cut the song solo for a second time, hiding its battered corpse on
18 Tracks
—“I just didn’t have a take of [‘The Promise’] I was happy with.”

Even with a sequence that seemed to work, Springsteen allowed doubts to creep in and they centerd on three songs, “The Promise,” “The Way” and “Candy’s Room.” As a result, he expended thirteen sessions over the next seven weeks to applying yet more vocal overdubs and instrumental tweaks to the first two. By March 8, he was ready to throw up his hands and walk away. But he didn’t. Instead, at the end of that day’s session he went back to a song he last explored the previous June, “Darkness On The Edge of Town.” He returned the following day and resumed where he left off, though not before running down a take of Them’s highly apposite “I Can Only Give You Everything.”

The day after that, he dug out “Come On, Come On (Let’s Go Tonight),” another song he originally cut that first week at Atlantic—possibly even at the first “demo” session (Note: there is an undated Sony reel marked “take one, complete, with Vox [organ]”). As its title indicates, this was originally a guy ’n’ girl song and an important benchmark, at
least as far as subject matter goes. The implicit threat of violence in earlier songs had been made explicit—not least in its subtitle, “Let’s Go Tonight.” The platitudinous pop opening—“Hey little girl with the red dress on/ There’s a party tonight ’till the early dawn”—is a bum steer belying its true subject matter: getting into a fight. When in the second verse the singer declaims, “The new world will beat you, on the beach you’ll hide,” he is not in the land of metaphor, but
On The Waterfront
.

In a number of interviews in 1978 Springsteen talked about the underlying aura of violence he had felt growing up, telling one reporter, “You go into the bars and you see the guys wandering around in there who got the crazy eyes. They just hate. They’re just looking for an immediate expenditure of all this build-up” and another, “Most of those guys don’t go to the bar looking to hit somebody. They go looking to get punched.”

But the song he was ostensibly discussing was one that took “Come On”’s last verse as its
starting
point. Called initially “The Factory Song,” later just “Factory,” this new song focused on the build-up of frustration that would inexorably lead to a fistfight (“And you just better believe, boy/ Somebody’s gonna get hurt tonight”). Unfortunately, the song itself was a dreary monologue about the drudgery of a daily existence Springsteen himself had never experienced, save second hand. (“I remember my old man was working in this plastics factory [and] my mother, if he forgot his lunch, she used to have to bring it down to him…and all I remember, when we used to go in that place, was him standing near ’em loud fucking machines.”)

Even if his intention was to suggest he now understood something of the sacrifices his father had made for his family, choosing “Factory” over “Independence Day” made some of Dylan’s contemporary album choices look positively measured. “Come On, Come On” wasn’t the only song considered from the outset, only to appear on the final album in a form that was a fudge. “Candy’s Room” made it to the January 16 sequence still in a guise more “Candy’s Boy” than “The Fast Song.” Starting on March 3, he spent three solid days trimming the track and dubbing a new vocal, until he had successfully pruned the song of its avenging angels and at least one naked profession of desire, “Our love they cannot destroy/ I will forever be Candy’s Boy.”

And still they were not done. It would be April 18 before Springsteen approved a second sequence, even though, as Landau says, “We were
working on [just] the eleven [tracks] for the last two months of the record. We basically mixed twelve songs.’ The last-minute casualties were “The Way” and “Don’t Look Back,” both stronger statements than either “Factory” or “Streets of Fire,” the latter tracks making it to the April 18 sequence, taking the album into fifty-minute territory. That would never do if he was hoping to get the requisite sonic intensity. As for “The Promise,” he still “felt too close to it.”

With a twelve-song shortlist, no-one in situ seemed entirely sure how to get that barragelike sound, and with Iovine off making someone else a star it was time to bring in another set of ears. The person they brought in was Landau’s suggestion, Chuck Plotkin, currently head of A&R at Elektra and a producer in his own right. When Plotkin heard the tapes that first time, it seemed to him that all “the players [were] fighting for space inside the music.” As for Springsteen’s vocals, he felt they needed to “keep the voice tucked in, so that you feel like you could understand the words if you wished to try hard enough,” while not making them wholly or instantly intelligible (i.e. the Marcusian dialectic). He quickly realized his would be a two-fold task, mixing the record
and
tutoring the artist himself about the art of mixing. Because Bruce not only lacked the technical knowledge to do it himself, he also lacked the self-awareness to relinquish control to someone who did:

Even if it meant saddle sores. The combination of levels of paranoia that made Watergate look like a high-school prank, and a relentless, obsessive quest for musical perfection that proved Landau wasn’t joking when he told
Rolling Stone
in 1975, “Bruce is determined before he dies to make the greatest rock & roll record ever made,” served to make every “outsider” who entered the Record Plant the subject of deep suspicion. When record company runner Debbie Gold had a message to convey to Plotkin, she was expected to sit there and wait/rot:

What Debbie didn’t know was that the basic track she’d just heard had been recorded in a single take on day one—and this was now day one-o-one, and they were still tinkering with it. Nonetheless, Gold was more privileged than anyone who worked for the record company picking up the eye-watering tab for this twelve-month tutorial on the ways of the studio. It was the third week in April when just two invites were extended to CBS staff for a playback session. What they heard had even a Bruce zealot like his marketing manager slightly worried:

Springsteen had made a difficult album, and spent a fortune into the bargain. So it goes without saying that he wanted it released with no publicity, and with a lead single that sounded like, well, one of eight beefy, wordy album tracks (as opposed to one of two clunkers). But “Prove It All Night” was not a leap-out-and-grab-ya 45. As he almost boasted in
Songs
, “There was a lot of variation in the material we recorded, but I edited out anything I thought broke the album’s tension.” He could equally have
said, “Or might generate AM airplay.” He fervently believed there was this great big audience for the new, serious Springsteen, who would welcome the lack of frivolity and embrace the darkness, and he was prepared to prove it, night after night:

It wasn’t like it was
his
money he was laying on the line for his beliefs. It was CBS’s bottom line he was endangering, at least until he cleared a million dollars’ worth of debt from the Appel suit and eleven months of more or less solid studio time. And still he insisted that
Darkness
should receive the most muted fanfare for any album by an established rock artist since Columbia released Dylan’s first post-motorcycle accident effort,
John Wesley Harding
, the week after Christmas 1967:

Back in the day,
John Wesley Harding
had indeed “just appear[ed] in the stores one day;” and although Bruce might not have remembered this, Landau surely did. His most famous, nonpredictive piece of rock journalism was his
Crawdaddy
review of that landmark LP. What he may not have known, or had clean forgotten, was that
JWH—
an unalloyed
masterpiece—initially sold less than either its predecessor, an expensive double-album, or its successor, the countrified
Nashville Skyline
, stalling at number three in the album charts. Wingate meanwhile put on a brave face, sending a memo to the rest of CBS’s marketing department that in no way sold the album’s manifold qualities short: