E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (7 page)

In his introduction to the highly-selective 1999 collection,
Songs
, Springsteen suggests, “I always had a notebook full of acoustic songs. I’d do the occasional coffeehouse, but mostly that material went unused. The songs required too much attention for a crowded bar on a Saturday night.” The evidence that he had started to write in this new vein came just before he met Appel that first time in late November 1971. He apparently performed “If I Was The Priest” first at The Student Prince some time that fall.

Perversely, he elected not to play this important cut to Appel, a fellow
Catholic. Yet here was a song which would have shown a potential surrogate father that this son had a whole new bag. Rarely has there been a more heartfelt cri de cœur from a fallen angel, the most telling couplet being: “Me, I got scabs on my knees from kneeling way too long/ It’s about time I played a man and took a stand where I belong.” Indeed, it would be this cut that the young Bruce would reveal when legendary CBS producer John Hammond Snr. later asked him if he had any songs he dared not play. But that life-changing moment was still six months and a few dozen songs away. For, true to his word, Springsteen was heading for California on a mission, and he wasn’t going to return until he was a singer-songwriter who could make Mr. Appel sit up and take notice.

^*
The spoken intro to “If You And I Could Be As Two” is as follows: “’Twas on a Sunday and the autumn leaves were on the ground. It kicked my heart when I saw you standing there in your dress of blue. The storm was over, my ship sailed through.”

^*
Sydney 3/23/85.

If the 22-year-old Springsteen had a stock of coffeehouse songs to take with him to California in December 1971—which I somehow doubt—then very few survived the trip. He returned a fully-fledged singer-songwriter, with a gift for wordplay and a notebook full of songs. But they were all songs that followed the template of “She’s Leaving” and “If I Was The Priest,” the two scraps he did transfer from his Bruce Springsteen Band songbook. Nothing in the original songs he played with Steel Mill, and almost none of those he played with the BSB, lead on to this landslide. Inspiration came fast, and it came hard. And it came from nowhere. Ain’t that always the way!

Not in the rock world. Precious few seventies rock artists spent seven years scuffling around the vortex of creative fusion, barely dipping a toe in the void, only to dive in head first. The one obvious comparison from an artist of comparable stature would have to be the young David Bowie, né Jones, who a year later would respond to the songs that now flowed from Springsteen’s pen with barely contained zeal. Bowie himself had been a recording artist for six years, in styles anachronistic and uncharacteristic, when in 1969 he wrote “Space Oddity,” a song that was a quantum leap on everything which came before.

So it was with Springsteen. And in his case, the breakthrough song was probably “For You,” which he almost certainly wrote “for” Diane Lozito. As one witness to their relationship put it, “Diane was very feisty,
very wild, and pretty as hell.” [DTR] If “She’s Leaving” was Springsteen’s first post-breakup song to strike the right note, then “For You” was his “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” a fare-thee-well disguised as a return. In this case he had seemingly walked in on an on-off girlfriend’s attempted suicide—“It’s not that nursery mouth I came back for/ It’s not the way you’re stretched out on the floor.” This summons up a kaleidoscope of memories of the woman in question and their frenzied relationship, good and mad; along with the realization that this ain’t gonna work out because, “Your life was one long emergency.” The final words, “My electric surges free,” make it clear that the singer has, or is about to, split; in Springsteen’s case, to California. (He would tell counsel in 1976, “I was having personal problems at the time with girls and things. It was just a good time to get away.”)

He would later tell an enquiring English journalist, “Some songs, I’m down in them more…It varies, I guess, depending on how close I was to that particular situation at the time. [But] a song like ‘For You,’ I’m right down in it.” And anyone who questions the autobiographical nature of this song should check out his spoken preface to one of the first full-blown E Street versions, in Uniondale NY on June 3, 1978:

By the time of that
Darkness
tour, such a starkly personal song was the exception. But in those first few months of 1972, songs of this kind were the rule. And it was probably these lyrical looks in the mirror that broke the dam, releasing a torrent of word-tripping songs. He had also evidently been disinterring old Dylan records, because “For You” very obviously copied one of Dylan’s most regular lyrical tricks in those amphetamine years, using a noun as an adjective: “Princess cards,” “barroom eyes” (a close cousin to “warehouse eyes” in “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”), “Cheshire smile,” “Chelsea suicide,” “nursery mouth”
*
&c. It was presumably the
recent publication of the first Dylan biography, by Anthony Scaduto, that had prompted such a reimmersion. After all, he needed some reading matter for that long drive to San Mateo. Maybe he hoped to pick up some tips on how going from manic rocker to solo folkie could be a route to fame.

“For You” was not the only song of this period to dissect the same relationship, or awfully similar ones, but it was one of only two Californian self-examinations to survive the first-album cull. There was “Marie,” another song in this vein about “another” masochistic relationship. Full of violent images, one of which provides its burden—“Marie, she skins me alive/ Burns her initials in my hide, and then leaves me all alone/ Branded to the bone”—this was one instance where the scars were not merely mental. One doubts it is mere coincidence that this “queen of all the stallions” took her name from the Mother of God (via another pre-Diane girlfriend). Another song transferred to the so-called “London demo-tape”
*
was “No Need,” which took this confessional tone to new heights, admitting, “I’m one of those people who measure love in pain,” a realization it would take him fifteen years to relocate. There are yet further Dylanisms—“She’s my queen and I’m her tramp;” “She’s a broken winged angel refugee”—as he fumbles for a voice he could call his own.

One imagines he took a great deal of time honing and toning these wordy lyrics as he drove to and from the west coast. This time he was traveling that lonely road alone, his only companion a sense of obligation: “[My parents] didn’t have any money to buy me a bus ticket, much less an airplane ticket. So I’d drive out to the West Coast maybe once a year to see them.”

Later, he would describe spending “several months trying to make a living as a musician in the Bay Area. It didn’t work out. There were too many good musicians, and I’d left my rep as ‘bar band king’ in Jersey. So…I drove back to New Jersey and did some bar gigs and I started to think that I needed to approach the thing somewhat differently. I began to write music that would not have worked in a club, really. It required too much attention…But I felt…I was going to have to do something very distinctive and original. I wanted the independence, the individuality of a solo career.” Which rather sounds like a conflation of two separate trips
to San Mateo, the Christmases of 1970 and 1971. Or maybe it took him a year, and a confirmatory trip, to see his original plan through.

He certainly could not have spent “several months” there in 1971–72 as he was still in New Jersey in mid-December, and was back east by late January. And it was a week’s drive either way. But in the
weeks
he was there he did finally decide—after much toing and froing—to go down the solo route. Initially at least he seemed to think such a change of tack required he bare his soul. As he put it in 1974, “I had to write about me all the time, every song, ’cause in a way you’re trying to find out what that ‘me’ is…[But] y’know, you [also] have to be self-contained. That way you don’t get pushed around.” He would later testify, during a 1998 UK court case designed to bury once and for all these very songs (after a UK company threatened to release them in quasi-official guise), “The music that you come up with when you are sitting in your room alone with your guitar late at night is one of the most personal things in your life.” These certainly were.

Among the songs he wanted kept out of the official canon were “Randolph Street” (see previous chapter), the sacrilegious “If I Was The Priest” and a song known as “Family Song” aka “California, You’re A Woman.” The last of these ostensibly addressed the coastal state itself, but was really directed at his still-demanding parents, verbalizing for the first time the inner hurt he felt growing up: “Ya know how when you’re young, there’s such a distance between you and your family/ You can’t ever see things from the same point of view/ Papa wants a lawyer and mama she wants an author/ And all you want is for them to want you.” Another line positively drips with the blood of Cain, “My papa turned away when I needed him the most.” Finally, the singer expresses the hope, “When I grow up and have my own kids/ I’ll love them all I can and let ’em make their own minds.”

Demoed for Laurel Canyon on his return east, this song was hastily buried with trowel and shovel, never even being copyrighted at the time. Yet its overarching theme would continue to infuse the songs he felt possessed to pen in the next six months, though by the time he began crafting the likes of “Lost In The Flood”—a song he fully admits was a case of him “trying to get a feeling for…the forces that affected my parents’ lives…the whole thing of the wasted life, [which] was very powerful to me”—the meaning was sometimes lost in the obfuscatory imagery of a New Dylan. Which is what, for a while, he seemed to want to be (later protestations notwithstanding). In
Songs
, he would insist, “
I wrote impressionistically and changed names to protect the guilty…to find something that was identifiably mine.”

If so, the process was decidedly hit and miss. The opening couplet of a song like “Arabian Nights,” “Shrieks of sheiks as they run across the movie screen/ A thousand sand-dune soldiers led by an Arabian queen” almost begs to be parodied. At the same time, there are hints of later widescreen epics which would bear the Springsteen imprimatur: “Outside my window I hear another gang fight/ It’s Duke and the boys against the Devil’s best men/ And both sides have drawn their knives.”

Wholly enthralled by the process, quality control was not his primary concern. As he told
Crawdaddy
’s Peter Knobler the following January: “About a year ago, I started to play by myself…[and] just started writing lyrics, which I never did before. I would just get a good riff, and as long as it wasn’t too obtuse I’d sing it. So I started to go by myself and started to write these songs.” For now, a fair number retained some attempt at self-analysis. Lines like, “The lady feels it’s enough to just be good/ But the doctor has this need to be understood,” or the not-so-assured, “The lady feels the doctor’s made of stone/ But the doctor’s heart, it just ain’t fond of home”—both from “Lady and the Doctor,” once shortlisted for
Greetings from Asbury Park
—seem like candid descriptions of Doctor Zoom. Disconcertingly, he also described “the Doctor” visiting “the animals in their stalls, shoot[ing] them full of juice.” Not quite ready to lie on a couch and spill the beans, he preferred to let songs do the talkin’, even as his days as a guitar-totin’ gunslinger drew to a close:

Excited by all he had achieved in the six weeks he’d been away, he couldn’t wait to play his new songs to the men who, back in November, told him they needed work. And so it was that on February 14, 1972, he returned to the offices of Mike Appel and Jim Cretecos and played them and their
gofer office boy Bob Spitz, “If I Was The Priest” and six songs he had penned in the last few weeks: “Cowboys of the Sea,” “The Angel,” “It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City,” “Hollywood Kids,” “Arabian Nights” and “For You.” But it was not the still-unfinished “For You” that hit the stunned trio square between the eyes. It was “Saint In The City.” Appel asked the nervous songsmith to sing it again, so he could catch all the words:

What he didn’t tell the two producer-publishers was that he was still hedging his bets. The Bruce Springsteen Band had just returned from a residency at The Back Door in Richmond, Virginia, where he had debuted an eleven-minute
electric
“Cowboys of the Sea.” Only after a similar short residency, later the same month, when he and/or another band member got into a contretemps with some other musician/s, did he finally decide to formally call time on this prototype for a big band.