E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (44 page)

On March 9 he was back again at Thrill Hill West, his jokey name for this LA home setup, working through April 23. This go-round the songs were mostly reworked older ones. “Johnny Bye Bye” was done again, as were “Don’t Back Down,” “Jim Deer” and, surprisingly, “The Losin’ Kind.” Two of the songs he reexamined, “Jim Deer” and “Fugitive’s Dream” (both recorded at the January 20 session) were transformed into “Richfield Whistle” and “Unsatisfied Heart” respectively, as Springsteen continued to point his songs in a Nebraskan direction.

“Richfield Whistle” intricately wove a number of
Nebraska
’s strands—the man who never had a chance, the dreams he shared with a loving wife, the single misjudgment, the senseless murder, the comeuppance—in a six-and-a-half minute narrative that was another nod to
Executioner’s Song
: “Well, that night me and Pat, we had a fight/ I was out drivin’ ’round in the rain/ With a fifth of gin and a half-tank of gas and ten dollars to my name/ I passed a deserted liquor store way out on Highway One.” But by April 1983 everyone knew how the story ends.

“Unsatisfied Heart” also plowed over-cultivated territory, beginning with a man who “was respected and satisfied/…had two beautiful children and a kind and loving wife.” Then, “one day a man came to town, a man with nothing and nowhere to go/ [Who] came to my door and mentioned something I’d done a long time ago.” It ends with that all-too-familiar dream of how it used to be: “Night after night the same dream keeps comin’ round/ I’m standing high on the green hills on the outskirts of town.”

Good as both songs were, it was time to return to
The River
’s edge.
Even if he had to do it circuitously, he needed to write some band-friendly material they could record. By now, Springsteen had decided if there was to be an E Street Band album after
Nebraska
, it wouldn’t be
Murder Inc
. Talking to
Rolling Stone
in April about the (non)prospect of a tour, he struck an ominously familiar note, “We’d like to…but it depends on the record. I don’t have much control over that myself. I just gotta wait till the record feels right.” For this to happen, his songwriting would need to maybe lighten up.

So he wrote the shamelessly nostalgic “County Fair,” about a Carol who was presumably as fictional as the fabled Chuck Berry heroine, recalling the time he pulled her “close to my heart/…I wish I never had to let this moment go.” After which, his next heroine-in-song would be the anti-Carol. Cynthia was the name he gave to this modern-day Pretty Flamingo. And like that mythical figure, “Cynthia” will never be his: “Cynthia, when you come walkin’ by, you’re an inspiring sight/ Cynthia, you don’t smile or say hi, but baby that’s all right…I just like knowin’, Cynthia, you exist in a world like this.”

Before the spring was through, both songs would receive the E Street stamp of approval. First, though, Landau sat him down for a long chat. What he told him was the result of hearing the songs Springsteen had spent the past three months recording. And it distilled down to a single point: “The problem with the
Nebraska
thing as a permanent approach…is that…you have so many capabilities that are not utilized, that it seems like it’s less than you can be.” [GD] It was time to submerge the whole wrecking crew in studioland again:

In an almost exact replication of the previous spring’s trials and tribulations, Springsteen recalled the E Street Band to Power Station May 23 and began recording a bunch of songs he’d already demoed solo, a fair few of
which—like “Richfield Whistle” and “Sugarland”—did not obviously lend themselves to the E Street ethos. Finally, he turned to the kind of songs which actually suited them. And after they stockpiled enough songs for a whole new album and mixed and sequenced it, he scrapped the whole thing and started again. However, this time there was a significant change in the dynamic. Two of the key contributors—Chuck Plotkin and Steve Van Zandt—were becoming exasperated by Springsteen’s working methods. And in Plotkin’s case this meant that by the end of proceedings they were barely speaking:

Van Zandt, too, had his mind on other things. The previous year, he had taken advantage of another lull in E Street activities to record a decent solo album,
Men Without Women
. Not surprisingly, when he ventured out to promote the record live, he was asked about his status in Springsteenland. He answered unambiguously, “I haven’t left the E Street Band, and I don’t see any serious reasons why I should unless it conflicts with what I’m currently doing.” Nonetheless, those intimate gigs reminded him why he did this in the first place.

He may well have been having a go at his old friend when he told a journalist on his second solo tour, “Rock ’n’ roll has never stopped being the most important art-form of our time. It’s never changed, it’s never lost the power to
communicate
, the power to affect people, it’s just that nobody’s using it.” By the time of the 1983 E Street sessions, Van Zandt had started a second solo album,
Voice of America
, where he finally found his own voice, having been as inspired by Guthrie’s scoundrel-free version of patriotism as his friend. Songs like “I Am A Patriot” and “Vote (That Mutha Out)” were stripped of ambiguity, raising a clarion call for change. And though he lent a hand to the May–June E Street sessions, they would be his last this side of the millenium:

Springsteen seems to have been fully aware of the shift in dynamic, though he made light of Plotkin’s despair in typically humorous fashion during his 1998 Rock n Roll Hall of Fame induction speech, thanking Plotkin and engineer Toby Scott for remaining “in the saddle as often the years went by, wondering if we’d ever get the music or if they’d ever get a royalty check. They kept their cool and their creativity…Of course, they’re basket cases now.”

His response to Van Zandt’s imminent defection was more immediate. He wrote one of his great songs of camaraderie, “None But The Brave,” ostensibly to a girl: “These nights I see you, my friend, the way you looked back then/ Ah, on a night like this, I know that girl no longer exists/ Except for a moment in some stranger’s eyes…In my heart you still survive/ None, baby, but the brave.” If the girl herself was a fiction, all the people he was celebrating were wholly real. As he admits in the
Essential
liner-notes, the song was “set in the bars and 70s circuit in Asbury Park.”

Even as he wrote this farewell to former brothers- and sisters-in-arms, he was still convinced the E Street Band gave him some X factor otherwise missing from his studio work. Recalling these sessions, he talked about the process in comradely terms, “We get together and the band plays and sometimes we get something and sometimes we don’t, but we do have a feeling that everybody’s chipping in and working on a project…[that] something[‘s] going on.” He clung to this garage-band mentality even when his was the last gang in town, tellingly stating the following year, “The people that I’m fortunate enough to have around me have been there since I was young, they’re the same guys…It’s hard…just holding onto relationships.” As he knew only too well, a good band is hard to find. And these guys still could make things happen in the most unpropitious circumstances:

Yet none of the songs from that highly productive night would make the 1983 sequence, let alone the 1984 album. In fact, the series of E Street sessions which ran from May 23 through June 16 would not produce a single song on the latter, multi-platinum smash. The one song from this long hot summer of sessions which
did
make the final cut would be an afterthought. (“My Hometown” was cut on June 29, when Plotkin had already started mixing tracks for the July 26–27 sequence.)

Predictably, there were a number of ripsnorters cut in these weeks that never made the light of day. These included a song logged as “Just Around The Corner To The Light of Day,” which would last longer in the live set than most of
Born In The USA
. It represented an overdue return to writing about cars and girls (“Been driving five hundred miles, got five hundred to go/ I got rock and roll music on the radio”). Equally enduring was a song logged as “Gone Gone Gone,” about those “people who came down from up north looking for work in the oil fields and the refineries; then when the price of oil went bad, they were shutting down the refineries…[and] they [were] just telling ’em to move on.” The final lines said it all: “You ain’t gonna find nothin’ down here friend/ Except seeds blowin’ up the highway in the south wind/ Movin’ on, movin’ on, it’s gone, gone, it’s all gone.” Neither track even made the July 1983 sequence, though the latter was belatedly introduced into the live set the following July under the title “Seeds.”

Those that
did
make the twelve-song shortlist included “None But The Brave,” “Drop On Down and Cover Me,” a recast “Cynthia” and a reunion with an old friend in need of a shooter, “Janey, Don’t You Lose Heart.” Both “None But The Brave” and “Cynthia” would be bootlegged to Betsy and back, before being released on
The Essential
and
Tracks
respectively. Yet the also bootlegged “Drop On Down and Cover Me”—which reworked “Cover Me,” a song Springsteen had never been convinced about—was probably the best of the lot. It remains unreleased, even though it took the architectural outline of the original song—and its first two verses—and immeasurably improved it with a less-clichéd catchphrase and a sturdier
musical structure which lent it some of that E Street electricity. With the band rebounding off every phrase, this time Springsteen’s plea for understanding sounds heartfelt, not histrionic: “Inside I feel the pain/ The hatred and the sorrow/ I wanna shut the light, baby…Drop on down and cover me/ I just wanna close my eyes and let your love surround me.”

Initially, Springsteen seemed to wholly realize which songs from the 1983 sessions played to everyone’s strengths, compiling an album on July 26–27 that was part-
Murder Inc.
, part
Nebraska Mk.2
, part-return to form:

Just three songs from the 1982 sequence had survived thus far, outnumbered by the four from the winter 1983 solo sessions (asterisked) and five from the recent E Street sessions. But it was another multi-layered album, which fully acknowledged his development as a songwriter post-
Nebraska
. It was also apparently just another work in progress. Just as with
The Ties That Bind
, four years earlier, poor Plotkin had barely sequenced a releasable artefact when Springsteen was back in the studio working on a new song—in this case the day
after
they agreed the “final” sequence for a sixth E Street album, July 28.

On the face of it, “Bobby Jean” was just an inferior “None But The Brave,” addressing another gal who “liked the same music…liked the same bands…liked the same clothes…[and] told each other that we were the wildest.” But with Little Steven’s imminent departure from the band still secret, the song was another coded message, with Bruce waving farewell to Bobby
and
Jean: “Now there ain’t nobody, nowhere, no-how, gonna ever understand me the way you did.” Unfortunately, “Bobby Jean” was one of the worst things recorded that summer—a misguided snapshot on a rose-tinted past. Even more unfortunately, it convinced its author he should keep going:

In truth, he had long stopped making sense when working at optimum level with the E Street Band in the studio. Working solo on
Nebraska
and in the winter of 1983 he had worked quickly and efficiently toward a clear goal. (Even if the latter sessions yielded just four tracks on the album he scrapped in 1983, and none for the album he released in 1984, they were a necessary bridge from
Nebraska
to
Tunnel of Love
.) He had reached a point where surrendering the slightest element of control short-circuited
any
decision. As he told Dave Marsh after
BITUSA
appeared, “I enjoy having control over what I’m gonna say…I work somewhat collaboratively but not nearly as much as, say, a video, with a director…On the records I’m the director.”