E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (40 page)

His rejection of the southern Catholic author’s moral universe made
Nebraska
a far darker experience than even the bleakest O’Connor short story. And still he told the media, “There was always hope…it’s [just] seeing the cards the way they’re dealt. If it’s real, it’s never depressing.” Perhaps he was remembering how
Darkness
had played in the wider world. Such “realism” would inform everything from this point forward—the search for transcendence was permanently on hold (or at least in abeyance until he told
Mojo
in 2006, “We live in a tragic world, but there’s grace all around you”). Now it was just a case of holding on and enjoying the ride:

The other iconic twentieth-century American artists he namechecked on
Nebraska
’s behalf—John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson—had more in common with their fellow songwriter as regards their ambivalent relationship to their supposed saviour. In Johnson’s case, it was a relationship he failed to resolve before the devil knocked on his door and told him it was time to go. Comparing oneself to these two iconic bluesmen set an awfully high bar, but set it Springsteen did. If, as he claimed in
Songs
, he was influenced by their records because they “sounded so good with the lights out,” how did he envisage making such an album with the E Street Band? Because when he started putting the
Nebraska
tape together—in late December 1981—it was still “merely” a demo for an E Street album, a way of ensuring they didn’t disappear down the same tunnel of drudgery for a fourth time:

What has never been satisfactorily resolved is just how long these fabled home “sessions” lasted. Springsteen, in the above interview, recalled that “there were maybe two or three takes of each…I mixed it through a
Gibson Echoplex, which is the sound of the echo on that record…onto another boom box. So the final mix came off the boom box you would take to the beach…I sat down, and in about three days I sang all the songs from
Nebraska
. I [already] had them written.” Dave Marsh, in his hagiographic
Glory Days
, implies it all came together in a single day—January 3, 1982 (the day it
was
put together); an assumption he may have taken from a usually-reliable source. In his November 1982
Musician
review of the album, Paul Nelson describes “one man, just sitting at home in front of a four-track cassette machine on the night of January 3, 1982, [who] felt he had to tell these stories…one take per tune.”

It was information Nelson could only have gotten from one of two sources. He or they wanted him to print this myth. Whereas the “roadie” Springsteen sent out to buy that TEAC Portastudio, Mike Batlan—on hand throughout—specifically told journalist David McGee, “Springsteen began organizing his work for
Nebraska
during the first week of December 1982—that’s when [I] was directed to buy the four-track…Actual recording began on the 17 or 18 December and ended around January 3.”

Batlan’s seems the more credible scenario, given that TEAC’s Portastudio was never the most user-friendly of tools, and “bouncing” between tracks—to overdub an additional instrument or double-track a vocal—on a 4–track cassette running at 3¾ ips raised a whole set of issues. Even leaving aside such technical difficulties, to record and mix fourteen tracks in three days would be going some, especially when it involved some thirty-nine takes.
*
What he sent to Jon Landau sometime in January was a fifteen-song tape—the fourteen demos, as well as seven alternate takes and five alternate mixes, prefaced by a version of “Johnny Bye Bye” which has long been assumed to be some lost outtake, but was probably a live take from Meadowlands. Accompanying the tape were three pages of notes.

In these notes Springsteen suggested “Atlantic City” “should probably be done with whole band + really rockin’ out;” “Born In The USA” should also “be done very hard rockin’;” and that “Downbound Train” was an “uptempo rocker [which] for full effect needs band.” But he was already expressing doubts about “Losin’ Kind”—“I like the verses but I can’t seem to find a better punch line”—and “The Child Bride”—“kind of a work in progress or more like without progress. I worked a real long time on this song and could never quite get it right.” Neither track would make the final cut. (In the latter’s case, he simply lopped off the last two verses and recast it as “Working On The Highway,” in the process sacrificing one of the best verses from a highly productive writing season: “There’s nights I can’t sleep, no matter how hard I try/ So from my window I watch the moonlight fall on the far hillside/ I imagine I put on my jacket, go down to this little roadside bar/ Pick a stranger and spin around the dance floor to a Mexican guitar.”)

The cassette sequence had evidently been thought out in advance. Just “Child Bride” changed places from the original 14–track cassette, and only “Highway Patrolman” (originally called “Deputy”) would be moved when the LP was sequenced in late May. On both Landau’s full copy—discounting the “live” “Johnny Bye Bye”—and the released LP, “Nebraska” opened proceedings, though Springsteen felt the song “may need editing.” He thus set the overall tone before engaging the listener with a more commercial track, the accessible “Atlantic City.”

“Atlantic City” had begun life nine months ago as part of “Fist Full of Dollars,” but he had struggled to resolve this well-crafted song even as he began demoing (hence, his inclusion of three different takes with slightly different lyrics in the copy he made for Landau, and the two alternates on the “album master” in June). But he certainly knew who he had in his sights—the underworld figures who had taken “this old beach resort, one of those places that’s fallen on hard times…[and] legalize[d] gambling…Now all they’ve got is big golden casinos next block away from the slums, and a mafia that fights for control.” The resignation in the singer’s voice is there for all to hear when he sings to his gal, “Put your make up on, fix your hair up pretty/ And meet me tonight in Atlantic City.”

“Reason To Believe,” which seemed to end the “album” on a note of hope, had no such vocal resignation, Springsteen bequeathing it a gutsy, devil-may-care delivery. Yet the singer questions the faith of each character, and in concert would sometimes preface the song with a statement
suggesting he thought these believers were blundering in the dark, looking for a candle: “This is about blind faith. Like, if your girlfriend comes home in the middle of the night and her clothes are all messed up; you see somebody pulling away from in front of your house, and you ask her where she’s been, she says she’s been with her girlfriends, you say, ‘Okay.’ That’s blind faith…Or when the president says he’s gonna do something about arms-control, that’s blind faith too.”
*

From the nihilism of “Nebraska” to this no less desperate vignette was but a walk around the block of Reagan’s America. The song asks of these folk—the man who can’t accept he killed a dog, the woman pining for a long-gone lover, the parent of a dead baby, the jilted groom—what is it that gets you up in the morning? Springsteen gave no answers, not even a moralizing coda. And yet, he was still insisting, “Maybe you’ve got to downsize some of your expectations…just in growing up, in accepting adulthood. My characters, I think that’s what they do. They say, ‘Man, I had some shit thrown at me, but here I still am.’”

That Springsteen himself had reached a point where he had lost any reason to believe was clear from other things he said, particularly when introducing it live: “Sometimes people need something to believe in so bad that they’ll believe in anything that comes along—just so that they got some reason to believe.” He later admitted this reflected his own mindset at this time: “From ‘Badlands’ through to ‘Reason To Believe,’ that’s kind of an investigation of that place…that point—well, that was the bottom.”

When he finished compiling the tape, both the “expanded” version he made for Landau and the one he carried around in his back pocket (and also copied for band-members), he was pleasantly surprised to find a consistency of tone and a near-seamless segue of styles that gave this demo tape a cohesiveness absent from the last E Street collection. Could it be that if you picked the right songs, the sequence would take care of itself?:

Landau was not so sure it
was
a demo tape. “Right from the beginning,” he was “somewhat skeptical…that some of this [
Nebraska
] material was gonna function better with a full rhythm-type thing…When you hear the
Nebraska
songs done even with a modest arrangement, in the [live] show…Bruce has to push harder…But on
Nebraska
, he’s almost singing to himself.” [GD] Springsteen, though, had a thousand reasons to believe. Never had this band failed him. And when he resumed work with the guys, just three weeks later, they did not fail him now.

These sessions were not, however, starting the potentially torturous process of turning said demos into album tracks. They were recording songs Springsteen could donate to Donna Summer, and Gary US Bonds (who was about to embark on his second E Street Album,
On The Line
). The song they initially recorded for Summer Landau insisted was too damn good and instructed his employer to go write her something else. He would keep “Cover Me” safe at home. Springsteen’s response was to write “Protection,” which was still wasted on Summer (though she actually makes a very good fist of it). The original version, cut with the E Street Band at the Hit Factory on February 23, has a touch of “Roulette” about it. It even shares that song’s sense of paranoia: “The phone rings in the middle of the night/ And when I pick it up, you won’t answer/ A knock on the door, I rush down the stairs/ When I open up, there’s no one there.” It proved that the E Streeters, even after a four-month break, could still cut up rough.

But rather than taking them straight into the studio to start work on an electrified
Nebraska
, Springsteen thought he needed another set of demos, now that he’d got the hang of TEAC’s new toy. Somewhat predictably, the net result was another dozen songs he had no need of, and which merely served to muddy these already-black waters. Naturally, there were also more rough-cut gems left lying on the riverbank, come April.

Indeed, of the thirteen songs on the post-
Nebraska
winter ’82 demos (later bootlegged from Batlan’s copy as
Lost Masters X
), no less than eight would receive the E Street heat-treatment that spring: “Downbound Train,” “Wages of Sin,” “Baby I’m So Cold,” “Jesse James and Robert Ford,” “Your Love Is All Around Me Now,” “True Love Is Hard To Come By,” “Fade To Black” and “Glory Days.” Also probably recorded in these weeks was a solo slice of rockabilly called “The Big Payback,” which would appear as a European B-side to “Open All Night.” Displaying a healthy regard for wordplay not always evident recently, it was
another fine, but diversionary, howl: “Well, it’s a wham bam, thank you ma’am, god damn, look out Sam/ I took on that train rumblin’ down the track/ They got your neck in the noose, your hands are tied up in back/ And you’re a-workin’ and workin’ for the big payback.”

Many of the remaining songs he worked on represented a straight continuation of the
Nebraska
mindset, and so were in a sense already redundant. The most crafted of these—something he reworked the following year—was “James Lincoln Deer.” The 1982 demo certainly had a
Nebraska
zip code, James being one of those now-familiar father-figures whose “whole world went black” when he lost his job. He makes no apology when he shoots an innocent bystander in cold blood at a 7–Eleven hold-up: “I held my pistol to his face/ His eyes caught fire with fear/ I said, ‘Remember me before you die/ My name is James Lincoln Deer.’” Something of an overreaction to unemployment methinks, but certainly a good argument for gun control. The subject was more overtly addressed on “Ruled By The Gun,” with its startling opening verse setting out the songwriter’s societal stall: “Everywhere I go I see people crying/ Every step I take I see young men dying…/ They lay dead on the cathedral steps in the sun/ In a world ruled by the gun.” Neither song, though, would figure in Bruce’s plans come April, when the band reassembled for rehearsals and recording.