E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (46 page)

But proof that he could be the exception to the rule, could buck the trend and stay hungry, stay true, would as ever have to be provided down on the acoustic killing floors of those American astrodomes which threatened to become rock music’s final resting place. It was here Landau had booked shows all through the summer of ’84 and into the fall, with record-breaking extended residencies at New Jersey’s Meadowlands, Philadelphia’s Spectrum and LA’s Sports Arena all selling out in record time. But before Bruce could reaffirm his vows, the E Street Band needed to assimilate two new members into a set-up which had gone unchanged in nine years. The most significant change—musically—was the addition of Nils Lofgren, ex-Crazy Horse and Grin, replacing Miami Steve. It was a change that had long been in the offing, but was only confirmed the June night Nils took to the Stone Pony stage with the E Street Band to run down a dozen songs from the nascent set:

Springsteen had found a pedigree replacement for his old friend, someone he “knew…felt about music and rock & roll the way I did.” The other addition was more of a gamble, and the one that ultimately turned his life around. Patti Scialfa, a local girl who had attended Asbury Park High School, had been a singer in Cats On A Smooth Surface and had worked with Southside Johnny, so knew the lie of Bruceland. And unlike Bruce she had a music degree. Letting a girl into the all-male E Street Band was a risk he had to take because Lofgren had contracted mononucleosis, which meant backing-vocal duties were out of the question. If Lofgren had just three or four weeks to learn the ropes, Scialfa had three or four days. Much was expected of them both.

It had been three long years since the last tour; a hiatus so extensive it prompted Springsteen to joke, after song #4 on opening night, “I should’ve wrote, right?” That first show, St. Paul’s Civic Center on June 29, suggested Springsteen was determined to strike some kinda balance between old and new—just not one that included anything save “Rosalita” from his first two albums. In a 32–song set, eight songs from
BITUSA
vied with five from
Nebraska
and seven from
The River
, every one of which—save the title track—was a crowd-pleasing pastiche-rocker. Already he was fighting to maintain light and shade when playing to vast audiences of party animals and, by the second week, picnic-goers.

The acid test was how well
Nebraska
’s songs played to the madding crowd. On that first night, where four of its five tracks were judiciously placed in the first half of the show, it was “Johnny 99” and “Atlantic City” which were received best. But he still felt the need to punctuate them with explanatory raps. Some of these were genuinely illuminating; some were just there to get the audience to settle down and pay attention; the pithier, the better. (“This is a song about family and trying to do the right thing;” “The factories close down but the mansion on the hill remains.”)

The second night in St. Paul saw a show coalesce around half a dozen
Nebraska
songs, including the title track, chillingly introduced as “about being so lonesome you could cry.” But it would be the last time he played more songs from his 1982 LP than
BITUSA
. After the show he acknowledged that integrating this more difficult material into an arena show was proving his greatest challenge: “There’s a good amount of the audience that has [
Nebraska
], but I don’t think it compares to the percentage that has the other records. But I felt that the audience [tonight] was real responsive…It’s just a trick of getting in and getting out of it.”

That second show was also the first to open with “Born In The USA,” which very soon became the defining moment to each night’s performance. Self-consciously imposing himself against a backdrop of an American flag—on album and $10 program—had none of the frisson of Dylan in Paris in 1966, when a similar gesture riled the anti-American French crowd. It merely served to obscure the message of the song and its contextual counterparts. But to the crowds, and particularly new fans, it promised a very special night, even if Springsteen was now setting his sights somewhat lower than in the E Street Band’s seventies heyday:

With Landau’s help, he was becoming reconciled to the gulf separating the polarities of crowd-pleasing and performance art. Looking back in 1987, he addressed this duality: “When I walk out on stage I’ve got to feel like it’s the most important thing in the world. Also I got to feel like, well, it’s only rock ’n’ roll. Somehow you got to believe both of those things.” Once the fiercest believer on the planet in the power of rock to
redeem
its recipients, he had become besieged by doubt at the exact point when he had the music-world in the palms of his hands. He even suggested that moments like when the audience sang over the singer on “Thunder Road” made it “more powerful. It’s like songs [like] that are little touchstones. That’s when the rock ’n’ roll thing is really happening, it’s realized.”

The Springsteen of old—the man who insisted in February 1975, “I’m
not into people screamin’ at me, like Bowie. Once they do that, it’s over…I’m there for me, y’know, that’s all. If they can dig it, cool; if not, they don’t have to come”—would never have dreamed of allowing such moments to interfere with such a singular vision. Now there were several such stage-managed displays of showmanship, down to the lucky girl pulled up from the audience to schmooze with the boss on “Dancing In The Dark.” It replicated a “live” video shot at the first St. Paul show to promote the single, but too late to stop it stalling just short of the number one spot, held off by the incomparable “When Doves Cry.” Even turning the song over to mixmaster Arthur Baker to make a disco-mix of it—the more apposite setting—failed to claim the Prince audience; though it certainly riled his more purist fans. His response to the inevitable criticism suggested such fans shouldn’t be so precious about songs
he
spent two solid years working and reworking till they were exactly how he wanted them: “I figured…that the people that didn’t like it would get over it.”

The album suffered no such setback. It entered the Top Forty the week before St. Paul and hit the number one spot on July 7, where it stayed for the four weeks it took
Purple Rain
to repeat the success of “When Doves Cry.”
BITUSA
remained in the Top Forty for 96 weeks, even returning to number one after Prince’s twenty-four week stint; aided and abetted by the relentless slog of shows and a steady stream of spin-off hit singles, à la
Thriller
. In fact, the carefully-orchestrated Springsteen hype managed to produce seven Top Ten singles from an album on which Landau had initially heard only two.

But it was the response to the shows that would decide the album’s long-term fate worldwide, and this time he was determined to give it a genuinely global sweep, taking in Japan and Australia as well as Europe. Perhaps surprisingly, given past E Street performance history, the shows very quickly settled into a pattern. The one regular cover was an encore version of “Street Fighting Man” that seemed to have been included for a single reason; the line, “What can a poor boy do ’cept to sing in a rock & roll band.” The outstanding cover in the 1984 sets, Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away,” was performed just twice. The first of these was the final night of a ten-date residency at the Meadowlands Arena, where Miami Steve brought his horn section to the party, but Springsteen had only arranged to tape the first two shows for a possible live album, so missed the tour highlight to date.

Also not recorded to multitrack was the version of “Man At The Top” he debuted at Alpine Valley the second week in July. Here he found himself at one of those out-of-town, open-air venues America favors, with a lawn stretching to the horizon, wondering what he had let himself in for. With more punters lugging picnic chairs, tables, hampers and coolers than hard core Boss fans, this was a party with full catering. Meanwhile, Springsteen had been in full damage-limitation mode for the past two weeks, telling Chet Flippo he ain’t changed: “I could easily go out and do just what I did before. But now we’re playing outdoors on this tour, which I hadn’t done before…I want to just step out and see what works.”

Well, two-thirds of the way through his first show on the picnic circuit, he was fighting to be heard. Abandoning the second
Nebraska
slot, he instead declaimed a strident acoustic arrangement of “No Surrender” (a song he’d attempted this way in the studio), and when that didn’t do the trick, decided to show how the American Dream looked from the other side of the mirror, “Been going on forever, it ain’t ever gonna stop/ Everybody wants to be the man at the top.” Rather than appreciate the moment, Alpine Valley rang to the sound of twenty thousand hands clappin’. In such a setting, it wasn’t just the
Nebraska
songs’ days which were numbered:

In fact, Springsteen had been sold on stadia even before he considered descending the mountain to the valley below. If seeing The Who at his hometown Convention Hall in 1967 had shown him the virtues of a good education in maximum r&b, catching them at a stadium show in 1982—when very much on their last legs—somehow convinced him such a transition need not have a downside. Having, by his own admission, “agonized tremendously over it when we were moving from theaters…this time out, we planned from the beginning, before the tour started, that we’d end up in the stadiums.”

But if Springsteen did not realize the toll it was taking, those who had
just joined the organization saw the change. As video operator Arthur Rosato—fresh from working five years for Dylan—recalls, “Bruce got more remote as the gigs and entourage got bigger.” It wasn’t only new members of the entourage who found it increasingly hard to recognize the firebrand of yore. By tour’s end, the disaffected would be as rodents on a sinking ship. Marc Brickman, who had been doing the lighting since 1974, left first, supposedly “over personality clashes with Landau and George Travis, Springsteen’s authoritarian road manager.” Doug Sutphin quit after being docked a week’s pay for touching Nils Lofgren’s guitar. Mike Batlan joined the exodus when he was similarly fined for not mooring Bruce’s canoe properly. (The latter two would subsequently attempt to sue Springsteen for overtime payments and constructive dismissal.) Bruce’s blue-collar credentials were beginning to look ever-so-slightly frayed.

If he’d lost his ability to communicate with his coworkers, though, Springsteen continued to claim that “if there happen to be sixty thousand out there…I’m basically trying to reach as many of them as I can, in as personal a fashion as I can.”
Ce n’est pas possible
. Such was his dislocation from his former redeemed-by-rock Self that he even refused to rock the boat when he found himself at the center of a political storm entirely of his own making. It was one that had been brewing ever since he turned “Born In The USA” into an Anthem first, and an antiwar song a poor third. Initially, he continued his well-worn strategy of directing critics toward his songs, and away from any personal declaration of political allegiance, telling
Musician
that summer: “I don’t know that much about politics…My politics are in my songs, whatever they may be…I feel that I can do my best by making songs. Make some difference that way.” The concert raps continued speaking in terms familiar to any audience member who attended the
River
tour. But at a September show in Pittsburgh he prefaced “The River” by alluding to a severed bond between electorate and politician: