E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (43 page)

A new-found maturity here invaded his songwriting, albeit mining images familiar to any long-time fan: “My father’s house shines hard and bright, it stands like a beacon calling me in the night/Calling and calling, so cold and alone/ Shining ’cross this dark highway where our sins lie unatoned.” Co-opting the last verse of “Wages of Sin”—with its image of a young boy running home “with the devil snappin’ at my heels”—Springsteen crafted a song which was deliberately and self-consciously “meant to evoke emotion—to individualize personal emotion in the listener.” He did this by relating a story “that came directly out of my experience with my family” in the form of a dream. He instinctively knew he required this one song to remind himself you can’t go home again, and to intersect “Open All Night” and “Reason To Believe.” Now he just needed to lose a coupla others:

The losers in this lottery were “Pink Cadillac” and “The Losin’ Kind,” though both had been transferred to four-track half-inch tape on June 10, when work began in earnest on turning this “crappy cassette” into a proper album. This took over two months—longer than it took to write and record the record—because, as Springsteen noted, “It was hard to get on an album; that took us some time, because the recording was so strange that it wouldn’t get onto wax…/…It’s amazing that it got there, ’cause I was carrying that cassette around with me in my pocket without a case for a couple of weeks, just draggin’ it around.”

By 1982, bootleggers had been transferring acoustic demos from cassette to vinyl for thirteen-plus years. But Springsteen wasn’t prepared to just put the tape out “as is” (as an Italian bootlegger did in 1996, when he got his hands on that original 14–track “master” cassette). Even with just a four-track cassette to work with, he did nine separate mixes of “Used Cars,” with “more slap,” “more echo,” “brighter;” and added a synthesizer to “My Father’s House.” A synthesizer was also added to “State Trooper,” making its Suicide nomenclature explicit—a decision he wisely reversed. As such, it was August 16 before there was a production master for a ten-song edit of a cassette demo.

Now they just needed to market a non-E Street Bruce Springsteen album of solo demos in bootleg sound quality to a mass audience. Again, they relied on the no-hype template of
John Wesley Harding
, issued eighteen months after the kaleidoscopic
Blonde on Blonde
. They even took a leaf from Columbia’s old Dylan press ads, turning the famous “Nobody Sings Dylan Like Dylan” into “Nobody But Springsteen Can Tell Stories Like These.” Nonetheless, the label was heavily reliant—in a way they hadn’t been since 1973—on good reviews to help sell fans on this daring departure. Springsteen professed not to give a damn:

In fact, Greil Marcus had predicted a corelationship between Dylan’s 1967 album and Springsteen’s 1982 offering some eighteen months earlier: “As Jon Landau…wrote in 1968, an awareness of the Vietnam War could be felt all through Bob Dylan’s
John Wesley Harding
; it is an almost certain bet that the songs Springsteen will now be writing will have something to do with the [election] of November 4. Those songs likely will not comment on those events, [but rather] reflect those events back to us, fixing moods and telling stories that are, at present, out of reach.” He was bang on. But even as
Nebraska
directly addressed Reagan’s America, Springsteen was insisting he still saw himself as an apolitical man in a political world:

Just about every review commented on the social and political climate in which
Nebraska
had been made. The reviews themselves, though, were decidedly mixed, even if Robert Hilburn later claimed the album “was instantly hailed by the critics as a masterpiece of boldness and individuality.” Hilburn himself certainly hailed it as such, suggesting that in its “best moments, Springsteen combines a captivating sense of cinematic detail with an endearing sense of America that we have not approached in pop music (sic) since the early works of John Prine and The Band.”

Another old-time advocate, Paul Nelson, had larger doubts: “Initially,
Nebraska
sounded so demoralized and demoralizing, so murderously monotonous, so deprived of spark and hope that, in comparison, the gloomy songs from
Darkness on the Edge of Town
and
The River
seemed not altogether unhappy.” Gradually, though, over the course of his
Musician
review, he allowed those doubts to dissipate (though not wholly fade away) as he “found a road map that took me to the right places.”

Richard C. Walls, in
Creem
, was another one who damned with faint praise: “I like this album. Its singular gloom seems appropriate to the times and its underlying compassion is restrained and moving, though I suspect that most people will find it more admirable than likable.” With
Rolling Stone
’s review predictably uncritical, it was left to English music weekly
Sounds
to crack the kernel and rub the nub: “The whole deal sounds like a return to basics, capturing the rough, natural feel of the songs with no embellishment. Or depending on your view, it sounds like a bunch of demos.”

What wasn’t on the cards was any kind of promotional tour or bout of interviews. As Springsteen himself noted in 1996,
Nebraska
was “enough of an accident that I didn’t really think that [it] was something I was going to tour with.” In fact, he pretty much disappeared from view in the months after
Nebraska
’s September 1982 release. Even the stylized promo video
for “Atlantic City” failed to feature the song’s
auteur
. He was busy relocating operations to Los Angeles, where he could further cut himself off from the humanity he professed to embrace in song:

It was there, in January 1983, that Springsteen resumed work on
Nebraska
Mk.2. Or, as he later put it, “When I stopped the
Nebraska
record, I just continued [recording] in my garage, in Los Angeles. I improved the recording facilities somewhat; I just got an eight-track board. I drove across the country and I got to Los Angeles and I just set up…[and] continued [recording], because I was excited about the fact that I felt the
Nebraska
stuff was my most personal stuff.” With only Mike Batlan and personal assistant Obie Oziedzic on hand, Springsteen began experimenting with the drum computers and digital synthesizers that had been Suicide’s private domain until The Human League nabbed the idea and sold it to the masses:

At least one E Street Band member was seriously worried—the one most directly affected by Springsteen’s flirtation with drum machines, Max Weinberg. He called Batlan up for reassurance “that Bruce wasn’t preparing to release a sophisticated 24–track recording with machines standing in for the E Streeters.” With a fine E Street album already in the can the boss had no need to make another, and anyway, as Landau later observed, “He was[n’t] ready to suddenly switch back into the
Born In The USA
mode.”

Yet almost the first thing Springsteen did that winter was complete the sister-song and flipside of “Born In The USA,” “Shut Out The Light.” Finally, the songwriter had figured out what to do with that evocative opening to “Vietnam Blues.” He has come home but not to a homecoming parade, and the first thing he needs is a drink. Meanwhile, the girl he left behind fixes herself up for her returning hero. But he ain’t the man she knew before. The segue from first verse to chorus uses cinematic shorthand to make its point: a close-up of a man in bed, it is four a.m., he is staring at the ceiling wondering why he can’t move his hands—cue chorus, “Oh mama, mama, mama come quick/ I’ve got the shakes and I’m gonna be sick/ Throw your arms around me in the cold dark night/ Hey now mama, don’t shut out the light.” For in that darkness he knows he will see the same recurring vision: “Deep in a dark forest, a forest filled with rain/ Beyond a stretch of Maryland pines, there’s a river without a name.”

Like “Born In The USA,” the song was then trimmed of some fat pre-release. In this case it lost lines which made the debt to John Prine’s “Sam Stone” explicit—depicting him locking the back bedroom door each evening before lying back to indulge in “a few habits he’d brought back from over there.” All in all, “Shut Out The Light” showed the new-found lyrical sophistication of “My Father’s House” was no fluke. Nor was it the only idea dating back to 1981 worked on that winter. “Johnny Bye Bye”—the only other song from these sessions officially released in the eighties—and “Follow That Dream” were both demoed a number of times, in the former’s case beefed up with a cryptic last verse that later got the chop: “In the Nevada desert a young boy travels alone/ Walking five thousand miles trying to get home/ Stars rising in the black and endless sky/ He stares up into the darkness, he looks down and walks on.”

And still the question remained: what was he intending to do with these tracks? All twenty-two of them? A curious document from the time suggests he still planned to release his 1982 E Street Album—now provisionally entitled
Murder Incorporated
—with a single change, “Johnny Bye Bye” for “Darlington County.” Five songs, all recorded at these January home-sessions, were down as potential B-sides: “Sugarland,” “Follow That Dream,” “Don’t Back Down,” “One Love” and “Little Girl Like You.” But “Shut Out The Light,” recorded at the January 19 session, was tellingly absent from this list, probably because he had already earmarked
it (and other weightier songs recorded between January 18 and February 17) for a more serious-minded project.

After all, neither “One Love” nor “Little Girl (Like You)” were about to change the parameters of popular song. The former was little more than a cut-up of every rock-chick cliché he could recall that day, “Come on baby, rock me all night long/ I been searchin’ for you for so long/ You’re the one, yeah, you’re the one for me;” and no amount of vocal commitment was ever gonna raise it higher. “Little Girl” was the proclamation of an infamous prowler, claiming those days are done: “Seen a lot of girls, had a lot of fun/ Ran around a lot, now my runnin’s done,” which he wisely left unreleased (given its condescending lines about how he’s “got a plan, but it’s one made for two/ So I need a little girl like you.”) Likewise, “Don’t Back Down” may have raised Cain, but he was still working with less than earth-shattering material (“A time comes and you just gotta…make a stand somewhere.”)

Of the five potential B-sides just “Sugarland” had real potential, with its well-honed sense of despair that many a contemporary American farmer would have recognized: “They’re grazin’ the field covered with tar/ Can’t get a price to see my way clear/ I’m sitting down at the Sugarland Bar/ Might as well bury my body right here.” Of the other songs demoed that month, just one would make
BITUSA
. “Your Hometown” aka “My Hometown” was a song “about the place where you live, and sharing the responsibility in it; and how you can run, but you can’t hide.” On the initial demo the lonely rock star even embraced a more ordinary life: “Now there’s a hill outside of town where me and my wife/ Watch the stars rising brightly in the black endless sky/ I’m thirty-five, we got a boy of our own.”

But he had not quite relinquished those Nebraskan narratives, penning a new song about the Ku Klux Klan as seen through a child’s blinkered eyes: “I was ten years old when my Pa said, Son, some day you will see/ When you grow to wear the robes like your brother and me.” But compelling as “The Klansman” may be, it was a curio, something written as if this were the late fifties and Springsteen was channelling Guthrie, rather than addressing his own generation.

Two other songs created characters straight out of an O’Connor short-story, “Delivery Man” and “Betty Jean” (who is described in
both
songs as having “eyes like a jack rabbit starin’ dead in your high beams.”) The
former song ends in riotous fashion, with the narrator and his sidekick Wilson chasing the chickens they lost on a low bridge across the road as the highway patrolman pulls up; at which point the song abruptly ends. “Betty Jean,” sung in his best Robert-Gordon-meets-Buddy-Holly voice, was probably one he intended to rev up, too, with its share of good one-liners—“We were married in the Spring out on 531, had fifteen kids and I hate every single one;” “Stretched out on the hood of my GTO/ she’s filin’ her nails shoutin’, Go, Bobby, go!”—placing us firmly in trailertrashland. But after sessions on February 15th and 17th gave Springsteen three more songs to lose—“Seven Tears,” “I Don’t Care” and “The Money We Didn’t Make”—he called a three-week hiatus on the sessions; probably in part to decide whether to release
Murder Inc.
as is. He chose to just say no.