E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (41 page)

Elsewhere, he reexamined failed relationships in the cold light of night, honing both “Baby I’m So Cold” and “Fade To Black” till they shone in the dark, and writing the equally arresting “Your Love Is All Around Me.” It was an intentionally ironic title (à la “Reason To Believe”) for a song about a long-gone lover: “I wake up in the morning and your picture’s there/ The closet’s filled baby with the clothes you used to wear/ I still got that ring baby on my finger/ Although you’ve gone away, your memory lingers.” The singer unashamedly proclaims, “I’d rather live like this than let you go,” suggesting a real edge of desperation. How desperate is only revealed at song’s end: “Oh, somebody turn out the light on me now/ Oh, let the darkness come in.” Rehearsed in April—with that clichéd “ring on finger” rhyme superseded by the stark realism of “Over in the corner sits your perfume/ As the first rays of sun hit this darkened room”—it was recorded at the May
BITUSA
sessions. But this was one song that went down, down, down and kept going.

At times, those April rehearsals—one of which has recently emerged—seem to have been more about introducing the band to the songs written in the interim than working up arrangements for those he’d demoed
in January (only “Reason To Believe” features on the known rehearsal). That was probably a mistake. Certainly, when sessions started for real at Power Station on April 26, they instantly hit a problem:

They actually spent the whole first day recording “Atlantic City,” which, according to Landau, both Springsteen and himself had agreed “sounded like it was gonna really lend itself to the band…[Yet]
that
was goin’ nowhere. No way was it as good as what he had goin’ on that demo tape. Then we tried ‘Nebraska’…Bruce had a whole little arrangement for it that had been rehearsed.” [GD] In fact, they tried a couple of other songs before attempting “Nebraska:” “Johnny Bye Bye” and “Born In The USA.” The latter track worked just fine. In fact, it seemed nobody wanted to stop playing when they finally hit that blasting gelatine groove:

Clearly, the problem was not the band’s still razor-sharp chops but rather the fact that these songs—or some of them, anyway—did not suit the most rock-oriented musicians this side of the Rockies. Actually, Weinberg’s account of the moment they nailed “Born In The USA” is belied by the tape of the full
eight
-minute version. Not so much “Hey Jude” as “It’s All Too Much,” the additional four minutes proved this ain’t the E Street Band Sancious quit. Pruned of its repetitious rump, though, the track was a lean, mean rockin’ machine.

There were other magical moments at these sessions, which ran through April 30. Tellingly, the two other tracks which carried over to the 1984 E Street album—“Working On The Highway” and “Downbound Train”—were also songs Springsteen had rebuilt from the ground up since they were demoed. If on “Working On The Highway” the whole underage element was quietly Tippexed out, leaving the listener to wonder exactly what crime left the narrator breaking rocks in the hot sun, the result was as much “I Fought The Law” as “Child Bride.” And it seemed to work. As for “Downbound Train,” I don’t think I can improve on what Geoffrey Himes wrote in his excellent monograph on
BITUSA
:

When it came to the rest of the January demos, though, Landau and Springsteen were in full agreement: “We’re not [even] in the ballpark.” Chuck Plotkin concurred: “Our treatment of the
Nebraska
stuff in the studio [was]…less meaningful…less emotionally compelling…less honest; we were reducing the stuff.” [GD] Springsteen proferred his own explanation in 1984, “The minute [the E Street Band] start learnin’ to play [a song], they start figurin’ out parts and they get self-conscious. But the first two takes when they’re learnin’ it, they’re worried about just hangin’ on. So they’re playing right at the edge, and they’re playing very intuitively, which in general is how our best stuff happens.” He applied this lesson to the majority of E Street sessions from May 1982 to March 1984.

It may also explain why, after spending a whole day on “Atlantic City,” Springsteen and the band roared through twelve of the remaining fourteen songs on the January demo (the only exceptions being “Pink Cadillac” and “State Trooper”) in just three days. There was even time for four Nebraskan afterthoughts: “Jesse James & Robert Ford,” “William Davis,” “A Gun In Every Home” and “On The Prowl.” The last two they cut on April 30, the last day the Streeters devoted to the so-called
Electric Nebraska
. When sessions resumed, the following week, they were working on an E Street Album, leaving Springsteen to decide what to do with these dirty dozen demos.

Maybe it was time to get back to writing about things which actually related to
him
. In which case, “On The Prowl” was as good place to start as any. A song he later donated to Cats On A Smooth Surface—a favorite local rockabilly band—it delved deep in the dark forest that passed for Springsteen’s psyche. The first anyone knew of such a song was when he dropped a portion of the lyrics into the middle of “Lucille,” during an August onstage jam session with the “Cats” at Asbury Park’s Stone Pony. Even divorced from its original context, that mid-song rap almost recalled his “Sad Eyes” monologues, such was the intensity with which it was delivered:

At another Stone Pony guest appearance with the “Cats,” six weeks later, he unveiled the song itself—the only stand-alone performance it ever received. How apposite that he should (only) perform it at the place, and in the very town, where he really was a predatory polygamist on the prowl for pussy. Because the song was a first-person narrative which walked a mile in his actual shoes, as casual liaisons became the name of the game, a substitute hobby until the real thing came along. “On The Prowl” is a portrait of the 1982 Bruce Springsteen, single, successful and looking to get screwed.
Lines like, “In the morning I check my mirror/ And I hang my head and cry/ But at night I get a burning, burning, burning deep inside/ I’m on the prowl,” were delivered at the only confessional he currently recognized, the stage of The Stone Pony, a stone’s throw from the boardwalk.

Again, though, he looked to give the song away, perhaps because its subject matter was a little too close to the mark (no matter how humorously framed). But he also wasn’t sure it suited the current E Street set-up. Rockabilly was another style of American popular music they had not fully mastered—which may explain why he also put “Pink Cadillac” on the back burner.

As of April 30 the
Electric Nebraska
became another lost album, to go with “Album #4” and
The Ties That Bind
. (Save that in this case no tape has ever leaked—partly because the New York-based collector Mike Batlan sold these tapes to in the late eighties was not as willing to share his booty as the party who bought the
Lost Masters
material.) Springsteen had arrived at the same point Dylan reached after four months of work with The Hawks on the successor to
Highway 61 Revisited
had yielded a single usable cut. As he told Robert Shelton on a flight from Lincoln, Nebraska (really!) in March 1966, “It was the band. But you see, I didn’t know that. I didn’t want to
think
that.” Dylan acted decisively, hiring a set of hep Nashville cats to help him record
Blonde On Blonde
in just seven studio days. The Hawks would remain Dylan’s live backup outfit for the next eight years, but it would be seven and a half more years before they joined him in the studio again, and only after they had proven their worth by making five frequently-superb studio albums of their own. As The Band.

It would take Springsteen a similar period to decide which direction home to take in the long run. Meanwhile, he would record the eight other songs needed for the last E Street studio album of the twentieth century, a handful of B-sides and at least forty songs not “needed.” Between making and scrapping at least two “alternate” E Street Band albums in 1982 and 1983, he would also record a solo successor to
Nebraska
. But, like both E Street “albums,” the
Nebraska
“sequel” he spent the first three months of 1983 recording would go the way of all flesh and most post-1977 Springsteen/E Street Band projects. Thankfully, this was not the fate of the songs he had demoed back in January. These he had now decided to release—just not in the form he had spent the last six days trying to electrify.

^*
St. Paul 6/29/84.

^*
All ten
Nebraska
songs were performed during the
Tom Joad
tour, and a triple bootleg-CD on the Godfather label, called
Broken Dreams & Reasons To Believe
, collects versions of all ten songs from said tour on disc two. (It does the same for the
BITUSA
and
Devils & Dust
tours, too.)

^*
The take information on the fifteen songs is as follows:

Nebraska (Tk. 4); State Trooper (Tk. 5); Open All Night (Tk. 2); Johnny 99 (Tk.3); Highway Patrolman (Tk. 4); Pink Cadillac (Tk. 2); Downbound Train (Tk. 3); Mansion On The Hill (Tk. 1); Atlantic City (Tks. 2+4 were shortlisted, released take is one of these); Born In The USA (Tk. 1); Losin’ Kind (3 takes—Tk. 2); Used Cars (Tk. 4); Reason To Believe (2 takes—Tk.1); Child Bride (no take info.). + My Father’s House (2 takes, recorded May 25).

This would also appear to be the order in which the tracks were recorded, save for “Child Bride,” which was not backed-up on June 1 1982 and may have been recorded independently, i.e. earlier or probably later than the other thirteen January tracks. Peter Carlin repeats the recorded in-one-day legend in his biography.

^*
Tacoma, WA 10/17/84.

What happened next would prove to be a startling affirmation of both Springsteen’s abiding creativity and the E Street Band’s ability to raise its game when it mattered most. It had been nine years since they had cut
The Wild, the Innocent
in just a dozen sessions, and every album since had become exponentially more difficult. And yet in just ten sessions, over a thirteen-day period in May 1982 [3rd-14th], Springsteen and his band would record some twenty songs. From these they would cull an eleven-track album with real commercial clout, a rough-mix sequence being readied on July 5. Only for him to, you guessed it, change his mind.

The bulk of that album—seven from eleven—
would
eventually be released on an 18–million seller in June 1984, at which point Springsteen sought to explain what happened two years earlier: “We initially went in the studio to try to record
Nebraska
with the band. [Instead,] we recorded the first side of
Born In The USA
…[In fact] if you look at the material, particularly on the first side, it’s actually written very much like
Nebraska
—the characters and the stories, the style of writing—except it’s just in the rock-band setting.”

The
Electric Nebraska
had not been entirely abandoned. Rather it was made to fit the proven E Street model. “Born In The USA,” “Downbound Train” and “Working On The Highway”—the three songs on that demo tape which suited both settings—were held over from the late April
sessions and worked on some more, though they already knew the fourth take of “Born In The USA” from April 27 was a keeper. Also retained was “Gun In Every Home.” There was even time for another hit-and-hope electric “Johnny 99” on day one. Nor was he inclined to let other songs rehearsed with the band go to waste. “Baby I’m So Cold,” “Fade To Black” and “Your Love Is All Around Me” were all brought to the studio for the first time. And yet he would later claim there was no specific plan when recording began: