E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (17 page)

As is the nature of such things, what seemed like a mistake proved a masterstroke, putting pressure on the label to throw their weight behind Bruce even as work on that third album ground to a halt. A further set of sessions in October had produced only a series of in-house demos. Certainly logged then was “A Night Like This,” a song written at a time when he still wanted the whole record to feel “like it could all be taking place in the course of one evening, at all these different locations.” The setting of the song, debuted that June in Toledo, was a familiar one—a
topless bar at the Coral Inn, from where the stripper and her lover run “off in the night/ You catch up with her, you take her hand/ You lay your jacket down on the sand/ And she tries to make it all right.” The sleazier aspects of boardwalk life—a constant source of fascination for our one-time altar boy—are never far away. “The fags come in to drink and dance” at the Shady Bell, while the “lost boys hide beneath the pier, getting hard, drinking beer.” Finally, the song pans back to reveal this is the night to end all nights: “Because night after endless night, up and down the boardwalk we search for romance/ But on a night like this, with one last kiss, we die.”

Also recorded at 914 at this time—if not in late October, then later in the fall at an undocumented 914 session—was the still-vengeful “She’s The One.” There was also “Walking In The Street” aka “Lovers In The Cold,” which Springsteen later claimed he wanted on
Tracks
but could not find the master. And then there was another song, so personal only a solo version would suffice, “Chrissie’s Song”—which should have been released years ago and let “Walking In The Street” take a hike. All three would appear on the very first bootleg of Springsteen studio outtakes,
E Ticket
, evidently culled from 914 tapes circa 1973–74, compiled for purposes unknown.
*

But Bruce didn’t think
any
of these songs were ready to be released. “A Night Like This” would morph into “Lonely Night In The Park,” which would itself become a Record Plant refugee, while parts of the 914 version of “She’s The One” would splinter into the shadier “Backstreets.” “Thunder Road” would take its tune—and a single image, “Babe, I can’t lay the stars at your feet/ Oh, but I think we could take it all, just you and me”—from “Walking In The Street,” and its lyrical thrust from “Chrissie’s Song” (at the expense of the line, “When you’re born with nothing in your hands, baby, it’s your only chance”). The birth pangs of a new Bruce were proving problematic and painful:

Frustrated at himself, Springsteen chose to turn on Appel. Yet Paul Nelson correctly suggested in his 1975
Village Voice
piece, “It was Springsteen himself who was responsible for the technical agony and ecstasy.” Nor was Nelson alone in noticing his dissipation of focus in the studio. A CBS rep, on hearing
Born To Run
, remarked, “It’s true that his recordings have been rather poor, but I have yet to meet anyone who knows more about what he’s after than Springsteen does…The problem is that he’s not interested in documenting what he’s learned.” [BTR]

Acquiring such a “rep” in such short shrift, Springsteen was clearly as stubborn as a mule with a bull’s head to match. Even his new best buddy Landau told
Newsweek
, after finally getting together in the studio, “Underneath his shyness is the strongest will I’ve ever encountered. If there’s something he doesn’t want to do, he won’t.” Like the Orson Welles who made
Citizen Kane
when he was not even twenty-five, the Springsteen who turned twenty-five that September had “the confidence of ignorance,” and he was not about to settle for second best; and he had yet to give up on attempting perfection.

He was convinced “writing these mini-epics…were meant to make you feel something auspicious was gonna occur.” Central to this conceit was still “Jungleland.” In fact, as Clemons wrote in
Big Man
, “In the beginning, I think Bruce was going for a rock opera kind of thing about this character called the Magic Rat. He had lots of songs and themes that were built around this narrative he had in his head. Eventually he let that go, but I know it frustrated him.” A handwritten track-listing for Album #3 dating from spring 1974 devoted a whole side to a four-part “Jungleland” suite—divided into “From The Churches To The Jails,” “The Hungry & The Hunted,” “Between Flesh & Fantasy” and “Jungleland” itself—with “Zero and Blind Terry” inserted at mid-point.

He was going to have to (re)learn about record-making if they were
ever gonna get out of 914 alive. Unfortunately, the man he turned to in his confusion was not Appel, but rather Jon Landau, who later stated (under oath) that in one of their first conversations that spring “He asked me about the concept of production. He said, ‘I noticed in your [album] review you mentioned production. I don’t really know what
production
means. What is it that producers do?’”

By then, Springsteen had aimed an ill-conceived dig in Appel’s direction: “In the studio I want somebody who can help me where my weaknesses are, rather than anyone ordering me around. That’s not where it’s at for me. If I didn’t know how to play or arrange or do nothing, then it would be different. [But] I know what I want to hear.”

Between October 1974 and February 1975, the third album lay in limbo. What work was done—and it was minimal—failed to discernibly advance the process. Finally, sometime in February—according to Landau’s later deposition—Springsteen asked the critic to join them in the studio to see if he could identify the problem. Some of the issues were essentially practical—Weinberg was desperately in need of a little drumming direction. But mainly Springsteen needed to settle on an arrangement and stick with it. Landau told Springsteen he could provide some answers:

Perhaps the real problem was breaking in a band parts of which had minimal studio experience. As Garry Tallent says, “When we started [
Born To Run
] we were still trying to find out exactly what we did together and how that all worked.” Springsteen, though, did not want “a strictly professional set-up, because I did not want to contain my talents in that box.” Bringing in session musicians was a nonstarter. They would have to work with what they had.

Landau would later suggest there was a fundamental aesthetic difference in approach, telling Michael Watts in 1978, “I didn’t think there was
any real point of view, a focus to the sound, on the albums Mike Appel produced. The sound was not integrated into the total aesthetic.” As it presumably was on
Back In The USA
. Yet Appel was as anxious as anyone to break the logjam. If Springsteen wanted Landau to come on board, Appel was prepared to go along with him, even if a producer-critic with nominal studio experience and a high opinion of his musical instincts did not seem like the answer:

What Appel did not fully appreciate was how high a value Landau would place on what he could bring to the process—demanding “points” on the finished product, half of which would come from CBS, half from Laurel Canyon. But he had more pressing matters to deal with. The E Street Band was again wracked with division at the end of February as Suki Lahav took leave of the band and, along with husband Louis, of the USA. According to Appel, “Quite simply, Bruce fell in love with Suki and she with him. She then had to get out to try and save the marriage.”[DTR] This was presumably the fraught situation that prompted Louis to comment in 2010, “I prefer not to say [why I left the States]…[but] I felt a Mack truck might have run me over if I’d stayed one more day.”

The Lahavs departed for Israel, Louis’s homeland, just as Springsteen seemed to have got a handle on another song which took his songwriting somewhere potentially exciting. In February 1975—as “Born To Run,” “Jungleland” and “She’s The One” continued to live and breathe onstage—“Wings For Wheels” aka “Thunder Road,” a hybrid of “Walking In The Streets” and “Chrissie’s Song” he had been working on for months, made
its live debut. Initially Lahav’s levitating bow vied with Bruce’s lovelorn lyrics as they metaphorically lay together on a night like this: “Now the season’s over and I feel it getting cold/ Well, I wish I could take you to some sandy beach, where we’d never grow old/ Ah, but baby, you know that’s just jive, tonight’s bustin’ open and I’m alive/ Oh, do what you can do to make me feel like a man.”

Just as Bruce was looking “to capture the Cosmos in a [single] note”—as revealed to another lady that month—Suki’s gypsy violin was departing E Street, leaving a single hint of what might have been (on the released “Jungleland,” dropped in from an earlier 914 version). On April 18, with Landau’s terms having been met, the new regime reassembled at the Record Plant to start again with a keen young engineer in situ, Jimmy Iovine. Iovine had just finished working on John Lennon’s
Rock & Roll
, so foolishly believed he already knew the meaning of torturous when it came to making albums with a “retro” feel. But that experience would be as nothing to this. As he recalled in 1987, by which time he had made a name as a producer in his own right, “God, it was hard. We worked very slowly, and [Bruce] had a picture in his head of what he wanted. But all of us were very young and inexperienced, so we had to go the long way to do anything.”

Landau’s first suggestion was to record the songs as a basic three-piece, and then build from there. He thought “the sound would be tighter if we cut the record initially as a trio: bass, drums and piano.” But he had picked the least confident and experienced member of the band to lay down its first marker, the not-yet-mighty Max. Van Zandt, who had been brought in to provide Springsteen with another sounding board, and himself some studio experience, was distinctly unimpressed: “It was all record the drums, record the bass, record fourteen guitar parts, separate everything, layer on layer, everything that’s bad for rock & roll.” He was already setting himself in opposition to Landau’s studio shtick—a war of attrition that would rage until 1983, culminating in Van Zandt’s departure from the E Street Band.

At least he outlasted Appel. In 1992, Springsteen asserted that he and Appel were, in fact, already “a dead-end street. [When] Jon came in…he had a pretty sophisticated point of view, and he had an idea how to solve some very fundamental problems, like how to record and where to record.” In his 1976 deposition, fighting for the right to name Landau his
de facto producer, he was rather more specific about Landau’s contribution: “He just made me aware…that I could be better than I was…He came to rehearsals. He taught my drummer…how to play drums in a rock band…He changed the tide of the whole thing…Things were getting done and things were happening, and we weren’t laying in the quicksand anymore. We were coming out of it.”

If Bruce overstates his contribution, even Appel admits Landau brought one trick to the party: “He was able to analyze each song and break it down into its component parts, and make it seem not such a big thing.” But it was the ever-perceptive Paul Nelson, an old Springsteen supporter and an older friend of Landau, who made the more astute analysis of the Record Plant dynamic, writing after
Born To Run
’s completion: “If Landau was somewhat in awe of the kind of instinctual genius who could resolve aesthetic problems by compounding them, Bruce had no less respect for someone who invariably got to ten by counting out nine individual numbers, one at a time.” Unfortunately, Landau was not really prepared for the demands placed on him in the psychological battleground to which he had forced entry: