E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (42 page)

Songs like “Wages of Sin,” “Your Love Is All Around Me,” “A Good Man Is Hard To Find (Pittsburgh),” “Stop The War,” “Baby I’m So Cold” and “Fade To Black,” stockpiled during home sessions in February–March, represented the “new
Nebraska
stuff.” Springsteen also had a ready supply of E Street-friendly rabble-rousers. The first (and best) of these they spent most of May 3rd recording. It was the point at which
BITUSA
became an album project in its own right. “Murder Incorporated” in it’s author’s words, “dealt with the paranoia and compounded violence of life in America: gated communities, the loss of freedom and the mistrust of your own neighbor.”

If “Born In The USA” was an angry song, “Murder Inc.” took that fury to another level and a whole other demographic. The setting is urban America, the mood—from the opening couplet—murderous: “Bobby’s got a gun that he keeps beneath his pillow/ Out on the street your chances are zero;” but it could just as easily be Saigon (“So you keep a little secret down deep inside your dresser drawer/ For dealing with the heat you’re feelin’ down on the killin’ floor”). He never explicitly states Bobby is running from the mob—for whom the original Murder Inc. carried out “hits” in the thirties and forties—but such is clearly the case. In the final verse, they get their man: “Now the cops reported you as just another homicide.” As a counterpoint to “Born In The USA,” following that anthemic opener in the July 1982 sequence, it hit its target.

It was two days later that they next departed from songs considered for
the
Electric Nebraska
, though the way Bruce talked about “Glory Days” one could easily be misled into thinking it was something left over from the former project: “What I wanted to do was to make it feel like you meet somebody and you walk a little while in their shoes and see what their life is like. And then what does that mean to you? That’s kind of the direction my writing’s going in, and in general it’s just the thing I end up finding the most satisfying. Just saying what somebody had to say, and not making too big a deal out of it.”

Based on a real-life encounter with an old school friend in the summer of 1973—as Bruce confirmed to a fellow classmate at their 1997 school reunion—“Glory Days” first showed up on the winter 1982 home demos. Over eight years had passed since he, then a struggling recording artist with a single flop album, ran into ex-classmate Joe DePugh at The Headliner. DePugh had indeed been a star Little League pitcher and a teammate of Springsteen’s in the Babe Ruth League “back in high school.” After a try-out for the LA Dodgers, he ended up playing college basketball before becoming a self-employed contractor.

But 1973 was a long time ago. Something else must have triggered the song; and it was probably a movie Springsteen saw in November 1980 with a fan he met on the street, Woody Allen’s
Stardust Memories
. In that underrated film, there is a memorable scene where the grouchy film director returns to his hotel after a long day only to be confronted by someone from his old high school, who has clearly been waiting all evening in the lobby. When he asks if the director remembers him, Allen replies, “Sure, we used to play stickball together.” He asks what his school buddy is doing. The guy replies, “I drive a cab.” “There’s nothing wrong with that.” “Yeah, but look at me compared to you…the broads, you know.” It’s a priceless scene and, although Springsteen told the fan who accompanied him to the Allen film he didn’t feel this way, one can’t help suspecting it reminded him of a similar incident from his own life.

In fact, when he first demoed the song, all he had was this scene with the baseball buddy, “just talking about them glory days,” and a verse about a father who at fifty-nine got put on the scrapheap after twenty years working “in production on the Ford plant assembly line/ Pluggin’ in them, slappin’ in them firewalls and windshields.” But by May 5 he had a song that walked the full mile with a skip and a beat. It was part of a highly productive session, resulting in “Gun In Every Home,” “Stop
The War,” an even better “Downbound Train,” and two songs it would take him seventeen years to release, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” and “My Love Will Not Let You Down.”

The former of these, logged simply as “Pittsburg,” took its full title and another reference to the meanness in this world from Flannery O’Connor’s most famous short story. But the song itself is concerned with a broken-hearted woman who realizes that someday she’s gonna have to tell her own daughter the facts of life: “Now there’s a little girl asleep in the back room/ She’s gonna have to tell about the meanness in this world/ And how a good man is so hard to find.” Lyrically at least, “My Love…” was something of a natural successor to “On The Prowl,” with lines like, “At night I walk the streets lookin’ for romance/ But I always end up stumblin’ in a half trance.” Like in that song, he is primarily concerned with physical potency—love as a four-letter word spelt l-u-s-t. He even adopts a suitably sacrilegious image to depict the virgin he is planning to deflower tonight: “I see you standin’ across the room watchin’ me without a sound/ But I’m gonna push my way through that crowd, I’m gonna tear your holy walls down.”

By the end of that first week of sessions he had the makings of a weighty eighties E Street album. They weren’t hanging around. As Weinberg would inform
Musician
, “There was very little rehearsal. We just went in without ever really running the songs down and recorded everything live…Sometimes the band didn’t even know the chords.” Springsteen was determined to get the band’s first instincts—and to hell with second-guessing. His own memory of these sessions certainly chimes with Weinberg’s: “We didn’t do any more than five takes on any one song. If it got any more than that we’d choose an earlier take…We put some more guitar on some of the tracks and some backing vocals, but they were all done real live and quick.” Could it be this was how they made all those great records he had heard growing up?

But when the band returned to Power Station on the following Monday (the 10th), he was preparing to take them down the dark end of the street. Over the next two days, he would summon forth “Johnny Bye Bye,” “Your Love Is All Around Me,” “Fade To Black,” “Baby I’m So Cold,” “Wages of Sin” and something logged as “Stay Hungry (Common Ground)”—all songs with the kind of wind-chill factor that came whistling straight from
Nebraska
.

He also brought with him the freshly-minted “I’m On Fire.” Actually, according to the man himself, the latter came to him “one night in the studio when [he] was just goofing around with a Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three rhythm.” “I’m On Fire” may have pared its imagery to the point of parsimony, but it communicates its dirty little secret just fine. A straightforward song of adulterous desire, the narrator’s ardent professions of lust again mask a secret sorrow: “Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife baby, edgy and dull/ And cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my soul.”

Finally, on the 12th, after reviving “Cover Me” and overlaying it with bongos, he produced the ultimate anti-relationship song, “Down, Down, Down” (issued as “I’m Going Down”), a cut he would preface in concert with a humorous but oh-so-telling summation of relationships—the gospel according to Bruce:

Already, in just eight sessions, they had recorded enough world-weary world-beaters for a three-sided album. Judiciously pruned, it could have been potentially the equal of
Darkness
, returning him to the road he spun off when heading down to
The River
. But after a series of bold steps forward in the first eight sessions, he took two steps back at the last two. First, he returned to an idea originating in a song called “Stay Hungry,” which now became “This Hard Land” (the final line of which reads, “If you can’t make it stay hard, stay hungry, stay alive if you can”). A song
conceived from a stray couplet in an early version of “Open All Night,” it was a ponderously self-important résumé of every
Bound For Glory
cliché that had ever captured the Jersey boy’s heart. Evidence he thought he’d stumbled onto the set of some John Ford movie comes thick and fast: “We’re ridin’ in the whirlwind searchin’ for lost treasure/ Way down south of the Rio Grande/ We’re ridin’ ’cross that river in the moonlight/ Up onto the banks of this hard land.”

The session on the 13th then ended with an unexpected revival of a song he originally wrote for
Darkness
, “Darlington County.” Perhaps he really was looking to connect the dots. Conclusive evidence was provided the following day, when he wrapped up “Another Side of the E Street Band” with a reinterpretation of the song that in 1976 changed everything, always, “Frankie.” However, a few lyrical changes were intended to demonstrate a shift in perspective. In the 1982 version, possibilities have been shut down. Escape is no longer an option as Springsteen penned the chilly couplet, “Well, everybody’s dyin’, this town’s closin’ down/ They’re all sittin’ down at the courthouse, waiting for ’em to take the flag down,” to replace the fieriest image in the original, a summation of a greater
Darkness
, “There’s machines and there’s fire on the outside of town.”

Other lyrical tweaks suggested a similar failure of nerve. That glorious original-sin image, “Living and dying like I was born to do,” has been replaced with the anodyne, “Now and forever, my love is for you,” while the transcendent, “In the darkness there’ll be hidden worlds that shine” has become enclosed in four walls: “I don’t know what I’m gonna find…maybe a world I can call mine.” In keeping with the austere vibe of recent songs, there was not even a sax coda to convince us it’s still gonna work out fine. Whatever its lapses, though, this former classic gave him a second album in less than six months. If only Springsteen were willing to allow himself to be convinced:

That was not quite the whole truth. Throughout June, Plotkin, Springsteen and co., worked on mixing
both
albums. The one with the E Street Band received the following sequence:

The other LP took nine demos from the January 3 tape (having decided, once and for all, that three of them belonged to an E Street album), and added something equally home-grown but more recent to the mix. He initially intended to prepare both artefacts for release—after which, he would toss a coin. (As he told
Mojo
at the time of
Tracks
, “I was going to put out [
Nebraska
and
Born In The USA
] at the same time as a double record. I didn’t know what to do.”) Slowly, though,
Nebraska
began to take precedence over the E Street Band’s answer-album.

Perhaps, rather than putting out another double record, he could issue the two in close succession. The E Street LP could wait. And wait. The end result would be, as Geoffrey Himes suggests, all “those extra songs, products of the most fertile songwriting period of his career, [which] could have reached the public as fresh fruit, contemporary commentaries on the world of the mid-80s, instead petrifying into historical artefacts, released in the late 90s on various anthologies.”

By mid-July,
BITUSA
was on semi-permanent hold. The sequencing of
Nebraska
was, thankfully, a lot more straightforward. After all, he only had twelve tracks—the eleven original January demos (minus “Born In The USA,” “Downbound Train” and “Working On The Highway”) and a song he had recorded with the same Portastudio setup in two takes on May 25, eleven days after time was called on E Street duties. “My Father’s House” was partly a reworking of a song he had spent the whole of May 10 working up with the band, “Wages of Sin,” and wholly the creative by-product of recent therapy sessions: