E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (8 page)

The version of events as he related them to Paul Nelson sounded like the idea for another song: “We were doing this benefit in Virginia and they took the girls to some drug rehabilitation center [to crash for the night], and then someone comes up to them and says, ‘The confederate angels are coming down tonight and we’re all gonna fight together.’ Needless to say, it all erupted the next day, so I got rid of the horn section after that, ’cause I figured I was gonna have to start playing clubs. It was the only way to make it.”

Ken Viola suggested that what actually happened was “Mad Dog” Lopez got into a fight with one of the trumpet players, a not-uncommon occurrence. The band limped through March, even as Springsteen secretly signed on the dotted line, tying himself to Appel and Cretecos as producers and publishers for the next five albums. He had seemingly now committed himself to the idea of being a songwriter, not a Jersey bandleader. But if later comments can be believed, he never intended to stay in this solo wilderness for long:

Appel, for now, remained wholly in the dark about Bruce’s band-plans. Not that it mattered a great deal at this stage. His first concern was getting Springsteen to sign that production deal, and then to secure him a record deal. Simple. As Spitz told music-biz historian Fred Goodman, his boss was a true believer: “He never thought he was rolling the dice: he knew what he had.”

Springsteen, though, was innately suspicious. Intimidated by any business matter, he initially played dumb. Not everyone was taken in. Spitz, for one, knew a front when he saw one: “He was nothing in a social situation…He had a mousy girlfriend who did all his talking for him, and he had a different one every week. But they were all the same variety: very mousy, very New Jersey, very Gentile, very uneducated.”[MOTH]

Finally Appel called him out on all his stalling, forcing a response. As Springsteen later told Appel’s counsel: “It was a basic deal, [Appel] said. I took it, looked at it once, and brought it back. I told him I didn’t know. He said, like, ‘Come on.’” What was he holding out for? Other alternatives were less than zero, and both parties knew it. In the end, Springsteen signed his name—and not in an unlit parking lot, as legend suggests—to a contract that was, in Appel’s own words, “boilerplate. It was always 12% of retail, the producer gets 3%, the artist gets nine.” At the very time Marty Thau was trying to get the New York Dolls to sign a fifty-fifty deal with him and his business partners, Appel was the one risking the shirt from his back, not the kid from Freehold.

In order to try and recoup some of the upfront costs they were about to incur, Appel and Cretecos were looking to demo some of the better songs they had heard their protégé play with a view to placing them with artists who let others write their material, a dying practice ever since Dylan plugged in at Newport but for now the only viable way to get Springsteen’s songs out into the world. It was also already apparent that Springsteen had way too many songs for a single record. And the pile was growing bigger by the day. As Appel fondly recalls, “He would come up
from Asbury Park in the morning, and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got some new songs I want to play you.’ He’d come up, pour his heart out. We loved everything…He was fully formed. It was so original; we were all just thunderstruck.” Their prodigal surrogate-son was equally amazed, but showed no interest in locating the source of all this analysis-in-song:

As he recalled in 1974, the songs at this stage generally came quick, or not at all: “I got a lot of things out in that first album [period]…They were written in half-hour, fifteen-minute blasts. I don’t know where they came from. A few of them I worked on for a week or so, but most of them were just jets.” His writing technique, such as it was, lent itself to this grapeshot of images: “I would sit there with a rhyming dictionary…and just pour forth with whatever the images were in my head.” For the first time, he was starting with the words and adding the music later, “because I imagined myself as being some sort of a poet at the time.” Again, he could have taken his cue from Dylan, who wrote the whole of
John Wesley Harding
that way.

If the new songs came in a flash, they generally told the same story in different settings: “To me a song is a vision…and what I see is characters in situations.” What set Springsteen’s songs apart at this point were the familiar characters he put in situations often so incongruous they seemed to be misplaced in space and time. The most wildly ambitious of these, “Visitation at Fort Horn,” appeared on every provisional track-listing for that debut album, but in the end made way for “Spirit In The Night” and “Blinded By The Light.” The story of The Captain, The Magician, The Sergeant and an angel, the visitation in the song title is the result of the
Captain hanging Merlin the Magician because “his magic…must be broken,” which invokes a storm of epic proportions (“the lightning cracked and the sky was hacked/ By dagger rain it was torn”). Another Madonnaesque captive, who “commands the light ships that patrol the sea around the rainbow tips,” disappears from the song before the storm rips the fort apart, to reappear elsewhere in similar angelic disguise. On a song like this, he was trying a little too hard to “present something that was a fully realized world with just myself and the acoustic guitar.”

Another song shot through with similar ambition (and concomitant lyrical lapses) was “Prodigal Son,” a seven-minute epic with a touch of “Desolation Row” about it: “And the mercury men with hydraulic joints/ They bribe with a smile and hold you up in the alley at pinpoint/ And ask you to bend over that they may anoint/ You with the holy water of your profession.” With a Zane Grey element from the outset, “In a place where outlaws are banned from the range,” the father patiently awaits the return of the prodigal son. However, it would never make it beyond demo status, washed away by an inspired flood of superior songs with a similar love of wordplay.

Perhaps surprisingly, songs about cars and girls were in short supply at this juncture, though two of the tracks he demoed for John Hammond in May showed he retained the ability to switch gears. There was “The Angel,” a song about a fallen angel with a fetish for cars redeemed by a girl “in a trainer bra with eyes like rain.” And then there was “Street Queen,” Springsteen’s “Terraplane Blues,” where he successfully fused Dylan, Chuck Berry and (unconsciously) Robert Johnson for the very first time: “Cadillac hips, she’s the best on the strip/ She knows how to use a clutch.” But the two songs that really tickled John Hammond’s talent-scout bones that day in May when they first met were the one that made Appel sit up and take notice: “Saint In The City,” and the one which shook a metaphorical stick at every nun who’d ever tried to get this novice apostate to toe the line, “If I Was The Priest.”

Springsteen had not been idle in the six weeks since he finally signed on the dotted line, but neither had Appel. Having talked strategy with Appel, the singer was astonished when “about three weeks later” Appel told him, “We’ll start at the top. I got you an appointment with John Hammond.” As Bruce later described it, “It was amazing to me, reading [Scaduto’s] book, and then…find myself sitting there in
that
office.” But rather than speak for himself, he again allowed a third party to do the talking, almost with catastrophic results.

He described the scene to Nelson a few months later: “In we go, and Mike, who is a funny guy, he gets into it, he jumps up and here we are with John Hammond and Mike starts hyping John Hammond, ‘I want you to know, John, this guy’s heavy.’” Hammond subsequently informed Springsteen “that he was ready to hate me.” From that moment forth, Hammond viewed his relationship with Appel as essentially combative. Appel, though, insists Hammond never lost his cool:

By the time Springsteen was ushered into the plush offices of the A&R man with the Vanderbilt bloodline coursing through his veins, he was left with precious little time to make his mark. Appel, though, knew what worked and had prepped him to start with “Saint In The City.” From that opening couplet they had Hammond on board: “I had skin like leather and the diamond-hard look of a cobra/ I was born blue and weathered but I burst just like a supernova.” It was now Springsteen’s turn to nearly blow it. The next song he played Hammond was a new one, the turgid “Mary Queen of Arkansas,” for which Springsteen continued to maintain a mystifying admiration. As Hammond later related, “I thought that was a little pretentious, and that’s when I asked him if he had anything that was outrageous…and then he played me ‘If I Was The Priest.’ [It was] then I knew that he had that whole natural gift that you can’t learn.” He also knew for sure that “he could only be a Catholic.”

According to Hammond, “I [then] arranged for him to come down to the studio…the next day, but my stipulation was that I didn’t want Appel there. Bruce and I worked about two hours together. Alone.” Appel and
Springsteen did a victory jig outside the old CBS building on 57th Street, and spent the rest of the day deciding what other songs they should spring on the CBS scout. However, this was 1972, and the word of John Hammond had long stopped being law at the label. He would need the okay from above to sign anyone, let alone a kid with a guitar, a pushy manager and no track record (unlike in September 1961, when he signed Dylan without any demo lest
that
voice scared the suits off!). On May 3 Springsteen arrived promptly at two, and was ushered into the in-house demo studio, the very one that had served CBS, and Columbia before it, for the past quarter of a century. But, whatever Hammond’s wishes, Springsteen and Appel were still joined at the hip:

Four of the twelve songs demoed that day would eventually be released on 1998’s
Tracks
, including the still-turgid “Mary, Queen,” with which he opened the afternoon session. He also had the steel-cold nerve to play Hammond two songs on which the ink was still wet, “Growin’ Up” (a superior spin-off from the earlier “Eloise”) and “Does This Bus Stop At 82nd Street?.” Among the seven songs which never made the passage from demo to debut LP (or
Tracks
) were some that shone a brighter light into the recesses of this recidivist’s mind. Notably, “Two Hearts In True Waltz Time,” which concerned itself with an illicit affair between a cop and a frustrated wife, “the ultimate crime/ two hearts locked in true waltz time.” Among forty-plus lines were two that exposed an unvarnished inner reality: “She needs to be real/ He needs to conceal,” though the rhyming dictionary was again overused (“She swings on a vine across the state line”—oh dear). “If I Was The Priest” also received its definitive rendering, though it would not even make it to the first-album sessions, a month hence. Hammond knew he had found a diamond in the rough. In fact, over the years he would come to insist that their demo was “better than any tape Bruce has made since, because Bruce is [now] so uptight about perhaps overshadowing somebody else in the band.” (In 1981, he
would send Springsteen a copy of the tape as a reminder of what might have been. Springsteen’s “response” was
Nebraska
.)

For now, Hammond had a more important recipient in mind, Clive Davis, head of the label and a persistent champion of Dylan in the days when he had needed label support, and not the other way around. Five days later, he sent Davis the dub and a memo: “Here is a copy of a couple of the reels of Bruce Springsteen, a very talented kid who recorded these twelve songs in a period of around two hours last Wednesday…I think we better act quickly because many people heard the boy at The Gaslight so that his fame is beginning to spread.” Davis responded the next day, “I love Bruce Springsteen! He’s an original in every respect. I’d like to meet him if you can arrange it.” The meeting evidently transpired. Davis told Frederic Dannen, “Springsteen came to my office for a
final audition
[my italics]. I heard his material, I believed in him.
I
signed him.” For now, Springsteen (and Appel) had the most powerful man at the label on their side. So much so that the singer would later send up this surreal situation in his intro to assorted 1976 performances of “Growin’ Up”: