E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (15 page)

It seems the deal Springsteen and Appel had reached with Siegelstein came with strings attached. As Springsteen now told a British paper, “They want me to put out a new single before they let me do the album.” The idea of a nonalbum single was actually a good one (it was still the norm on the other side of the pond), but Springsteen wanted to get on with building castles in his own conceptual sky. On July 12 1974 he decided to show CBS his vision could not necessarily be contained by seven inches of vinyl. He was back in New York for a three-night residency. This time he had moved up in the downtown world, as far as The Bottom Line. He decided it was high time he debuted his latest spin on
West Side Story
, “Jungleland.” At the same time he had a new lighting man, Marc Brickman, who could sell his songs like no other lightman could:

“Jungleland” was the apotheosis of everything Springsteen had been working toward since he “got more interested in how the thing was going to function as an ensemble.” And it was what more critical fans had been anticipating. One of them,
Playback
’s Lorraine O’Grady, had predicted in a February 1974 overview of his career to date that
The Wild, the Innocent
’s successor might be “a rock opera based on the characters in it, that [is] even more magnificent than
W, I & E
.” She also noted, “He’s become more actor than singer.” “Jungleland” soon became this method actor’s nightly audition. In fact, the song at this juncture was essentially of a piece with the jazzed-up NYC songs from
The Wild, the Innocent
, with Sancious still playing the role of Bruce’s bag-man. The song even resolved itself with an “extra” verse that, like “Incident on 57th Street,” held out the hope everything could work out fine:

Few who witnessed any of the Bottom Line shows left unimpressed. Clive Davis, in the midst of setting up Arista, took time out to check out his former signing; and shook his head at what an opportunity CBS were missing. In fact, just as Springsteen—after nine months of writer’s block—had again unlocked his muse, CBS were finally delivering on their promise to give his latest album the big push. That fortnight’s issue of
Rolling Stone
carried a full-page ad on page three which reprinted most of Landau’s
Real Paper
rave, with the famous “I saw rock & roll future…” line in 36–point type emblazoned across the top of the page, and a photo of the second-album sleeve at the bottom of the page. They had lived up to their part of the bargain. Now all Bruce had to do was produce an album that delivered on the fulsome promise of the shows that spring. It was time to roll tape again. And again.

^*
There has been much dispute about what was played on King Biscuit at the time, but certainly broadcast at some point in 1973 were “Spirit In The Night,” “Bishop Danced,” “Mary Queen of Arkansas” and “Song To The Orphans.”

On August 1 1974 Springsteen, the E Street Band, producer Mike Appel and engineer Louis Lahav returned to 914 to commence work on that difficult third album, a make or break effort for all concerned. Despite all the protestations, Springsteen had dutifully recorded the single CBS said they wanted back in May, and the plan now was to use these sessions to put the finishing touches to the two tracks already recorded, “Born To Run” and “So Young And In Love,” to maybe lay down the already-debuted “A Night Like This,” and to secure a usable basic track for “Jungleland,” already earmarked as the centerpiece of the album. The August 1 tape box suggests they cut two takes of “Jungleland,” the second complete. A show in Central Park on the third—the infamous Anne Murray show, when most of a five thousand strong crowd came to see “support act” Springsteen, and many that stayed did so only to heckle the presumptuous Murray—called a temporary halt to the sessions, but when all shows for the next ten days were canceled to continue recording it seemed they were finally getting down to things in earnest.

In fact, a certain urgency had been injected into these sessions with the news, relayed to Springsteen first, that Sancious and Carter were leaving the band forthwith to form their own jazz-rock combo, Tones, who had their own record deal in the offing. Sancious’s departure was a prospect which had never been too far away. Springsteen had talked about the possibility after the Brown gig in April, openly admitting, “Davey is
very jazz-oriented [and] I’m sure he’ll have his own band in years to come, whenever he feels he’s ready.” But he clearly did not expect it to happen quite so soon and when Sancious did break the news, he took it badly:

Any headache Sancious caused Springsteen was compounded by taking Carter, too. The gamble the frontman had taken when replacing the fiercely loyal Lopez with a man who had little investment in the E Street ethos had not paid dividends. As Carter openly admitted to Brucezine
Backstreets
, “I was closer with David than Bruce. He was someone I grew up with. And when he decided to leave the band, I felt I should go too. Plus, we had this music that we always wanted to do, and [now] we had the chance to do it…It was always there that David wanted to leave and that I’d probably go with him.” Clemons, for one, was nonplussed: “‘Boom’ was living with me, and he didn’t tell me he was leaving. I didn’t understand [why].”

One immediate result was hot August nights at 914 putting “finishing touches” to the three tracks they thought they nearly had in usable form. Of these, “Born To Run” was almost there. Having recorded a basic track live with the band in May, Springsteen had added his vocal (probably on June 26). But now he had all these grandiose ideas for overdubbing instrument on instrument until the whole thing was buried beneath sonic strata. The initial idea was a good one. As he says, he had written “and conceived [the song] as a studio production. It was connected to the long, live pieces I’d written previously by the twists and turns of the arrangement.” In other words, he was trying to jam all the “twists and turns” of the ten-minute “Thundercrack” into a four-minute track. And the song’s live “debut” at The Bottom Line in July suggested he was onto something. The air positively crackled with electricity when the song ended; and then
came sustained whoops of affirmation. But he had forgotten that less is sometimes more. As Sancious says on the
Wings For Wheels
DVD, “Lotsa, lotsa stuff [was overdubbed]—all of which wasn’t used; there was synthesizer stuff, horns, all kinds of stuff.”

Driven to distraction by Springsteen’s demands, engineer Louis Lahav refused to give up: “It was more than just cutting a song. It was this
thing
you believed in so much—like a religion…It was [done on] a sixteen-track, but it was packed, like a thirty-two track today. You couldn’t relax in the mix for a second.” In the process they abandoned several mixes with strings, clearly Springsteen’s attempt to emulate one avowed inspiration, the instrumental track “Because You’re Young.” (Recorded by Duane Eddy in 1960, though the song “was made into a real trashy old movie…he had a great sound to his guitar.”) There was also a belief that he could somehow capture a Spectoresque sound appropriate to the seventies:

Production values were not all Springsteen was trying to emulate. The other song cut back in May, “So Young And In Love,” seemed like a pastiche of a mid-sixties Philly single, a self-conscious reaction of sorts to that modern rock sound. Here was Springsteen’s response to the ever-increasing number of recordable tracks available in a studio yielding ever thinner-sounding records: pressing rewind. Shortly after these August sessions he informed
Melody Maker
’s Michael Watts that “it was the genuine, horny old stuff he dug. The Beatles were [too] pop, the Stones he stopped buying after
December’s Children
. Something to do with the fancy production.” He wanted a sound that was as broad and wide as the songs he had started writing:

Principle and practice, though, would prove reluctant bedfellows. When Appel delivered a rough mix of “Born To Run” to the record company in early August, they were underwhelmed. (He would tell Springsteen in a typed memo that month, “CBS has taken the single that we worked on for three months, to be frank, lightly.”) The recording of “Jungleland” was not going any better. Peter Knobler’s 1975
Crawdaddy
profile describes one evening at 914 when “they spent until 4 a.m. playing ‘Jungleland’…fourteen times straight through. Inevitably, someone would blow a line and the entire take would be shot.” Even after they got it right, Springsteen decided to rewrite the last two verses—determined to prove the maxim that no lyric was ever finished, only abandoned. As the departing Carter concluded, “Recording was like trial and error. Bruce had so many different ideas about how the songs should sound. I think we tried them all, and then some.” The problem went deeper: he needed the final say, but didn’t know what he wanted to say.

In the end, they had to call time on the sessions and return to the road just to keep this whole rickety venture afloat. The departures of Sancious and Carter couldn’t have come at a worse time. As Appel spelled out to Bruce in the above memo, “We’ve only worked twenty nights out of a possible 123 nights in the last four months…[And] the record company is already annoyed for having advanced us the money for an LP that they won’t receive for months yet.” In fact, the situation was so bad that Appel’s partner, Jim Cretecos, announced he wanted out, allowing himself to be bought out for a bargain-basement $1500:

The outfit’s financial worries even managed to permeate Springsteen’s thick hide. When English rock journalist Jerry Gilbert called that summer, he caught him in an uncharacteristically talkative mood: “We’re at the lowest we’ve ever been right now. It means that if we don’t play every week of the year then we don’t have money…Hopefully I’ll be getting some money from Columbia; and maybe with David Bowie doing some of the songs, that’ll be good…I’d just like to get some income, because in the last two years we’ve just managed to make ends meet. And sometimes we don’t.” Bowie had been threatening to use at least one Springsteen song on his next album. Paul Nelson would tell the full story in the original draft to his 1975
Village Voice
Springsteen feature, but then cut it at the last minute: