E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (35 page)

Instead, it went straight on the album, which by the middle of April was definitely a double. The shortlist still included “Cindy,” “Ricki Wants
A Man Of Her Own”—a song recorded in July 1979 that reflected a brother’s alarm at the changes in a fast-maturing sister (“She don’t care to bring her boyfriends home to pass daddy’s inspection”)—“Held Up Without A Gun,” “Be True,” “Restless Nights” and a still-unreleased song called “Stray Bullet,” which he’d been working on since February. But Springsteen would take a degree of flak for omitting “Roulette,” claiming that he “just didn’t like the way it sounded…We might redo it and put it out later.” By 1999 he admitted, “I may have just gotten afraid…In truth it should have probably gotten put on. It would have been one of the best things on the record.” So what exactly was his problem?

By the end of April he had narrowed things down to twenty-two tracks, but he was still some way off done. As he said at the time of
Tracks
, “It’s never over until it’s over. Everybody’s telling you you’re done and you take it home and it’s just not right…[But] my life at the time [of
The River
] was extremely focused, probably to the detriment of the records.” He even tinkered with songs carried over from
The Ties That Bind
, starting with “The River.” Not content with take five from the original August 26 session, he assembled seventeen imperceptibly different mixes of a near-identical retake and played them to CBS A&R man Peter Philbin, asking him which one was better, “Which one is
better
??! Hey, flip a coin!” He was asking the wrong guy. He should have been talking to Plotkin. As one go-between put it, “He was the one guy who could talk for an hour about the difference between mix twenty-seven and mix forty-two.” But others experienced the same OCD behavior. In Springsteen’s mind, he was focused on just one thing, the prize:

Not surprisingly, elements of the music-media wanted to know what the hell was going on. His churlish response was, “Spontaneity…is not made by fastness. Elvis, I believe, did like thirty takes of ‘Hound Dog.’” (In fact, Presley recorded that song
plus
“Don’t Be Cruel” and “Any Way You Want Me” in just two three-hour sessions.) But no matter how often he reiterated the mantra, “You make your record like it’s the last record you’ll ever make,” every rock band since The Who knew if it took more than a month, they were doing something wrong. A Wayne King cover story in Anglophile music monthly
Trouser Press
that summer was among the first to seriously question whether the man still finishing up his fifth release in seven and a half years would be the same person who left the stage at Cleveland’s Coliseum on New Year’s Day 1979:

The dangers King outlined were all too real. Joel Bernstein ran into Bruce again at the Sunset Marquis that spring. Invited up to his poolside apartment, Bernstein found him there with a ghetto blaster and a bag full of tapes, one song per, flipping the cassettes in and out, supposedly sequencing
The River
(“I think he was doing it for weeks”). But if Springsteen was having a hard time making up his own mind, he also now had a number of other cooks who suggested he use
their
recipe.

The artist still took on board the opinions of Landau, as the person who “listens on the most gut level, and simultaneously will look at the record and see what it’s saying;” even if Landau had a protagonist with equal clout to contend with this time—Van Zandt. Landau later suggested, “The album where Steve’s influence was strongest was
The River
. [But] if Steve had had his way, there would have been only rockers on that album.” “Restless Nights” for one, a song which Springsteen described on its live debut in November 2009 as “Stevie’s very favorite song of all time.” (At the end of a creditable stab at this forgotten classic, a mildly chastened singer pointed at his friend and said, “Dammit, he might have been right all these years!”) Springsteen would suggest in
Songs
it was he and Stevie who, in tandem, “began to steer the recording of
The River
in a rawer direction.”

If so, any such rawness was lost in the transfer to vinyl. The record as released was his most thin sonic outing to date, sounding like something played on a Dansette even when put through a $1000 hi-fi. It sure as highwater didn’t sound like another album made at Power Station that spring, the second long-playin’ installment by the duo who originally coined the term punk rock (in 1971!), before disassembling the boundary between performance art and rock: Alan Vega and Martin Rev, aka Suicide. If Springsteen seemed a most unlikely disciple, the Suicide effect would not become fully apparent until the next notch on his CBS contract:

The voice’s own offering was not so “fucking great,” but as he observed in 2010, “Those were the days I’d second-guess…myself constantly, until I got [so] exhausted…[I] put it out.” What he left in the Station vault, as he duly admitted, was “an entire album…‘Restless Nights,’ ‘Roulette,’ ‘Dollhouse,’ ‘Where The Bands Are,’ ‘Loose Ends,’ ‘Living On The Edge of the World,’ ‘Take ’Em As They Come,’ ‘Be True,’ ‘Ricky Wants A Man,’ ‘I Wanna Be With You,’ ‘Mary Lou’—[that was] all three-minute, four-minute pop songs.” This didn’t even take account of the irreparable harm done to certain songs during the process of “second guessing;” or those that failed to make the transition from rehearsal room to recording studio. If it didn’t take him too long to realize that the likes of “Be True” and “Roulette,” “would have been better than a couple other things that we threw on there,” now was not the time to look back. The cupboard was bare. The process had not only worn away at his nerves, it had inexorably drained his not-so-plentiful bank account:

For all his rhetoric about entering the adult world, he continued to disdain the very idea of keeping an eye on business. As he would inform
Uncut
, “There was a lot of things I hated doing, business things…
I wasn’t even terrible at it, I just couldn’t have cared less. I just wanted to be able to do what I wanted to do…I had a long period of time when I was pretty estranged from [the business side], and [Landau] kept the boat afloat.” He did so even in areas where they hardly needed a full-time crew. Like publicizing the fact that Bruce had taken two years to make a record, and in that time had done two gigs, and no interviews. Fortunately for all concerned, Debbie Gold had had enough: “I was bored to death. I had an assistant. And this great office. And nothing to do.”

Her replacement was close at hand and a lot less ambitious; the wife of Dave Marsh, Barbara Carr. As Gold says, “He found the right person. Who was never gonna move, who just wanted that power. I didn’t have any interest in that. And it was time for me to go.” Meanwhile, Landau finally prevailed on Bruce to drop all this nonsense about theaters and agree to a full-blown US arena tour. Recalling their conversations on this topic in 2002, Springsteen described how Landau “would say, ‘Well, you can…play a hall this size and it can still be great.’ He was constantly pushing the boundaries out for me a little bit.” In truth, it was time to replenish the coffers. A more realistic rocker opened up to Carr’s husband on the ensuing tour:

By then, the cash from a number one album, a Top Ten single and a highly lucrative arena tour was rolling in.
The River
—the weakest set of Springsteen songs issued in the E Street-era—was the smash hit
Darkness
was supposed to have been. And Bruce reveled in the moment. At Madison Square Garden on November 27, the week the album hit the top spot, “Rosalita” got a new lyric: “Well, this is last chance to let his daughter have some fun/ ’cause my brand new record, Rosie, made it all the way to number one, one, one, one.” No longer afraid of a little hype, “Hungry Heart” was the lead-off single (with, for the first time, an
unreleased B-side, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it “Held Up Without A Gun”). It was an old-style pop 45 with “some eighties in there, too;” and the one song from
The Ties That Bind
left relatively unscathed. That he had perhaps unwittingly tapped into an audience unconcerned with content only became clear when these concert fans began to sing along to that despairing opening verse in a
celebratory
manner. “Born In The USA,” here we come!

Meanwhile, more astute reviewers—even those essentially positive about the album—were disturbed by the general drift in the lyrics toward repetition and cliché. That all-important
Rolling Stone
review—a Paul Nelson rave memorably headlined, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”—duly praised the “scope, context, sequencing and mood” of “his summational record.” But Nelson also noted “a few problems. Ever since he started conceptualizing and thinking in terms of trilogies, Springsteen has lost some of his naturalness and seemed more than a bit self-conscious.” Comparing it—as almost no-one else Stateside did—with
London Calling
, he suggested The Clash, in contrast, “sometimes seem very innocent…[because they] still believe in total victory.”

Creem
’s Billy Altman, never a confidant, was not so inclined to candy-coat it: “I really can’t think of any other major star in the whole history of pop music whose range of thought and whose expression of those thoughts has been as limited as Bruce Springsteen’s.” But it was
NME
’s pet iconoclast, Julie Burchill, who came closest to a grand slam. Finding the room to suggest “Independence Day” was “every bit as good as his fans will doubtless say it is,” she also highlighted the fact that Springsteen had made an album with a rock soundtrack, but a country sensibility. Unlike him, she didn’t think this was necessarily a good thing: