E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (6 page)

Equally surprisingly, rebel-child Springsteen seemed more interested in catching up with his parents than establishing Steel Mill as San Francisco’s latest successful import. He was learning something he only articulated a decade later, “Your family’s a funny thing, they will never go away…[so] you gotta deal with ’em sometime.” If he was sharing some of his growing pangs with Doug and Adele, he kept a separate set of concerns from his traveling companions. If the three-song demo they cut for Graham one day in February sounded like a band hitching its gear to the nearest bandwagon, it took a 1976 deposition for Bruce to confirm that he “didn’t have the confidence in the band that other people seemed to have.” This was the real reason he didn’t take Graham up on his chiseling offer. (He has consistently refused to release any Steel Mill material, and when asked why by Vini Lopez—whilst compiling a 4–CD career retrospective!—claimed it was because, “I don’t look back.”) One of the other bands on that audition night was Grin, and the minute Springsteen saw child-prodigy Nils Lofgren wield his ax, he knew he still had a way to go:

In fact, Springsteen stuck with Steel Mill for a whole year more, uncertain of direction and unwilling to broach his concerns to Tinker, the band’s cheerleader-manager. When Springsteen finally revealed his doubts, the following Christmas, Tinker agreed to accompany him to California a second time. Again, the loner felt in need of a mother and child reunion.
This seems to have been the occasion Springsteen described at a gig in December 1980, ten years later to the day:

This trip represented the first time Springsteen tried to sell himself as a solo artist. But, as he told Paul Nelson two year later, “Everything was [all] flowers, [as] if something was happening to your mind…[So] that fell apart.” He soon realized he was just another ten-a-penny troubadour: “I was worthless in California, because I had no reputation. But in New Jersey I could make that twenty dollars down at The Upstage on a Friday night.”

Though the trip proved a bust musically, something happened in San Francisco that convinced him to change tack. However, no-one knows what. He certainly would have found the FM airwaves of San Francisco full of the latest Belfast-cowboy songs from the pen of George Ivan Morrison. Perhaps he caught one of Van the Man’s rare performances at the Fillmore West that December. Lopez, for one, is sure “he saw Van Morrison. Maybe in San Francisco…Bruce [decided], ‘We’re gonna do that.’ He came to me and he said, ‘Vin, I’m gonna stop Steel Mill. But I want you to play drums in this new thing I’m gonna get together. Gonna get Garry [Tallent] on bass, we’re gonna have horn players, I’m gonna audition girl singers.’ It just took on this different feel, Motownish, soul. Tinker didn’t like it—he believed in Steel Mill.”

Barely twenty-one, Springsteen realized he was already running out of time. It was high time he found himself a place in modern rock by making music rooted in the previous decade. Though he once again initially insisted the new band would play only originals, this time he had dissenters in the ranks. As Garry Tallent told
Musician
, “When I started playing with him the idea was, ‘Strictly originals.’ And we didn’t work…We
were together nine months, rehearsing in the garage, working just once in a while. Then we decided to…learn some Rolling Stones songs and some Chuck Berry songs.”

The (initially unnamed) band still needed a place to play in order to build a new audience, the old Steel Mill audience having taken their ball and gone home. Springsteen was learning a valuable lesson: “[Having] moved from hard rock to rhythm & blues-influenced music…I began to write differently. We’d built a very large audience…[But] a lot of that audience disappeared and I couldn’t keep it going.” He was saved by a change of owners at a bar across the way from The Upstage, called The Student Prince:

It’s a lovely little story, one Springsteen has liberally embellished over the years. However, it would appear he was not the first Shoreline scenester to see the potential of “the Prince.” The version Southside Johnny told Springsteen-zine
Thunder Road
had “Bruce…putting together what is known today as his Big Band, with two horns and two girl singers, and no money was coming in and nobody had any money. [Meanwhile,] Steve and I had put together the Sundance Blues Band, while Bruce went to California for a couple of weeks. It was a real good band and we played at the Student Prince and did fairly well there. And then when Bruce came back he played in the band for a while to make a little extra bread. He played rhythm guitar and we let him sing one song a night…But he dug it, and [finally] he said, ‘Let’s put together a band of everybody who doesn’t have any money and play a few dates.’”

That short-lived ensemble was the legendary Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom, whose claim to at least local fame was two shows in mid-May, one at the Sunshine Inn, the other an open-air affair in Union, that served as open auditions for the still not fully conceived Bruce
Springsteen Band. As Springsteen now says, “We had a big chorus, people’s wives and girlfriends sang…it was just an outgrowth of the little local scene.” It certainly reflected a musical grandiosity on Springsteen’s part that was never going to be economically viable. Even after the Bruce Springsteen Band itself was unveiled, it was always on a crash diet at the expense of either a horn player or a backing singer. As he later put in, mid-song, “We had a seven-piece band at the time, we had a big band and we brought the band in the first week and we played and…we split $13.75 between us, and a few guys quit, you know. The next week I was there with a six-piece band, threw some cat out, next week a five-piece band, this went on for a few weeks.”

The winnowing process actually occupied about three and a half months, by which point the Bruce Springsteen Band essentially comprised the nucleus of the E Street Band for the next half-decade—Vini Lopez, Garry Tallent, Danny Federici, David Sancious, Steve Van Zandt—plus two girl singers, Delores Holmes and Barbara Dinkins who, according to Lopez, “came right out of the church.” In the interim, Springsteen renounced his prog-rock recidivism, to rediscover the delights of those sixties starlights that had lit his way in high school, thanks largely to his new girlfriend Diane and her Dansette:

He thus found himself in the summer of 1971 rediscovering the excitement of that first epiphany: “I had to go back…I started really getting into it, go[ing] back, dig[ging] out all the old singles and stuff and see[ing] what I’d missed.” (A similar, contemporary experience prompted Tom Verlaine to form a prototypical Television.) One thing he seemingly missed on its first appearance, January 26, 1967, was Stax singer Eddie Floyd’s defining LP
Knock On Wood
, with its drip-feed of soul classics: the title track, “Something You Got,” “Raise Your Hand” &c. But now he got it.
As he told Paul Nelson the following year: “Ever since I got that Eddie Floyd record, ‘Raise Your Hand,’ there ain’t nothing like it. I really got involved with [soul] after that. That feel. To where I [was inspired to] put together a big band.”

A big band meant not only girls, but also saxophone. If he was going to succeed in blending those Memphis and Caledonia soul strains and bring them to the Shore he was going to need someone who could make the four winds blow out of his sax. A big man. In keeping with the mythic nature of the Big Man’s contribution to the E Street story, Springsteen by 1975 had a regular spiel about the first time he met the mighty Clemons, “There I was in Asbury Park on a dark, rainy night. A hurricane just came in, I’m walking down the street at three in the morning…had my jacket bundled up around me…walking through the monsoon, I seen this big figure dressed in white, walking with a cane, walking like there was no rain and the wind wasn’t blowing; just walking like it was a beautiful summer day.”

Lopez remembers it a bit differently: “Tinker’s girlfriend, Carey, was in the Joyful Noise. She says to me, ‘You gotta hear this sax player, Clarence.’ So one night me and Tinker and Danny and Bruce pack up in the car, go down to Bayville and see him in The Spirits…Said hello…I don’t know about all those stories ’bout the door blew open, all that stuff. It was at a Spirits Gin Mill down in Bayville.” Nor did Clarence leap at Bruce’s offer of mutual penury. As he said in his autobiography, “I [already] had a gig, and Bruce didn’t hear horns in his music yet.”

It might be nearer the truth to say that Clarence couldn’t hear any place for himself in the Bruce Springsteen Band. Springsteen was still indulging in lengthy guitar workouts on originals like “You Mean So Much To Me,” “She’s Leaving” and “The Band’s Just Boppin’ The Blues,” all songs which survived into the E Street era in modified form. “She’s Leaving,” which got the full stretch-out-and-busk treatment, was a rare exercise in autobiography. When he sang lines like, “Yes I’m bitter, oh how I’m bitter/ And it feels good to say it out loud.” he presumably knew their target would hear the message loud and clear but was too inflamed to care. But then, you can’t start a fire without a spark. Indeed, according to Lopez, he also “wrote ‘Fire’ so Delores had something to sing. ‘Driving in my car…’ came from them days. [But] Tinker didn’t exactly get behind it. We didn’t get any gigs, we were starving. There was no clubs. There was nothing.”

Not surprisingly, the bandleader was growing increasingly frustrated by the parochial nature of Asbury Park’s music scene: “One hour out of New York City and you were in the nether world. Nobody came to New Jersey looking for bands to sign. That didn’t happen…I did shows in my late teens and early twenties when I was playing to thousands of kids, but nobody really knew about that…They were just local events.”

By this time it was December again, the traditional time for Bruce to break up a band and go visit the folks. He still harbored some half-assed idea he might make it as a solo singer-songwriter in northern California, even though he had just been told that he simply did not have the sorta material to make it in that notoriously cut-throat area of the industry. The observation had come from none other than Mike Appel, a successful songwriter-producer who was looking to extricate himself from the Wes Farrell organization and strike out on his own. Appel knew Tinker, or vice-versa, and through Tinker’s auspices a meeting was arranged at which Springsteen told Appel, “I’m tired of being a big fish in a little pond.” He then played him what he presumably thought were his two best songs, one of which was certainly “Baby Doll,” a song he later demoed for Laurel Canyon: