E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (23 page)

Too late to stop listening to Them now. Standing there onstage in all his revelation, Springsteen remembered how it felt to be on his own, a complete unknown. “The machines and the fire” had already appeared in “Frankie” as well as another song rehearsed the summer of 1976, “Candy’s Boy;” while the image of God’s angels coming to blow this whole damned town into the sea would spawn a whole song, “God’s Angels.” Yet even as he continued to refrain from playing “Darkness on The Edge of Town,” “’32 Ford” (aka “Racing In The Street”), “Candy’s Room,” “Independence Day,” “The Night Belongs To Lovers” (aka “Because The Night”) in the east-coast heartland of Brucedom, a press release for the spring tour
promised fans: “Bruce and the band will be performing a series of his newly-penned tune[s] which will probably appear on his next album.”

What they mainly got was the frat-rock of “Rendezvous,” already an old song; the call to arms, “Action In The Streets;” and his anthem to Lot’s wife, “Don’t Look Back”—none of which would make the “next album.” In fact, the emphasis at these shows was more on talismanic songs from his youth like “Raise Your Hand,” “It’s My Life,” “You Can’t Sit Down” and “Higher and Higher” than “newly-penned tunes.” R&B remained on the welcome table, even as Springsteen was insisting, “We do some, but it’s not where the heart of the thing is…That’s more Miami’s thing, you know…working with the horns. But I dig it, it’s exciting, it’s rock & roll.” He still brought out the appositely named Miami Horns to a few fall 1976 and spring 1977 shows, just to show off his band’s adaptability. However, “Something In The Night,” the only song performed in 1976–77 that would
actually
make the next album, got dropped off somewhere in the swamps of Florida.

Four sell-out dates at Boston’s Music Hall wrapped things up for another year. The final show, on March 25, ended with the Miami Horns honking away on an exquisite cover of Jackie Wilson’s “(Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher and Higher.” But the Jersey devil was in disguise. He had a wealth of songs which told a quite different tale. And for the first time, it seems he was worried he might be giving bootleggers the heads up on the next album if he played them.

The radio broadcasts also dried up, a reflection perhaps of Appel’s lessening influence at a time when Springsteen seemed determined to drop below the radar. Low-key was the order of the day. In fact, prior to the spring tour, a letter from Springsteen’s lawyer, Michael Tannen, to CBS’s new publicist, Dick Wingate, instructed the label: “The emphasis in these [press] ads is to be Bruce’s scheduled performance and not his albums…Bruce wants these ads to be informational; there is no need for ‘hype.’” In his own mind, he was just another anti-rock star plying a trade. A steady stream of bootlegs, the ultimate status symbol for seventies rock stars, suggested otherwise; especially those from the Bottom Line and Roxy radio broadcasts, which duly confirmed he had yet to deliver a studio album that came close to emulating the E Street live experience.

Even his best efforts, though, could not keep his songs off the radio. Throughout the winter of 1977 AM stations blasted out “Blinded By The Light” to
the housewives of Jersey and beyond, the song steadily rising to number one on the
Billboard
charts while Springsteen hid himself away on the road to somewhere else. A song he last played live in April 1976, the track had been tested on the UK singles market that August, before being released Stateside in January 1977. The new single, though, was not by Springsteen, but by one of his sixties heroes, Manfred Mann, hot on the comeback trail with his Earth Band.

Appel remembers an advance acetate of the Mann version arriving at the office, but neither he nor Springsteen thought it amounted to much: “[Our UK music publisher] Adrian Rudge got Manfred Mann to cover ‘Blinded By The Light.’ He says, ‘Mike, I’m gonna send you the record.’ It just so happens Bruce is in the office, around eleven in the morning, and says, ‘Let’s put it on.’ And he goes like this [holds his nose]. Of course, it went right to number one.” In fact, Mann’s inspired revamp of the leaden album version showed just how to construct a
pop
song, starting with the chorus and chopping the three wordiest (and weakest) verses, the kind of lesson Springsteen preferred not to take on board. It was everything Mann’s previous cover of “Spirit In The Night” was not. It was surely this earlier botch which caused Springsteen to hold his nose, at a time when he still made occasional calls at the office.

By the summer of 1976—when “Blinded” began providing some much needed revenue for the beleaguered music publisher—Springsteen was a stranger at Laurel Canyon. Preparing to take Appel on in court to retrieve his songs and negate their production deal, if Springsteen had known a bit more about litigation and a little less about pop history he might have proven more accommodating. The Who were still paying off Shel Talmy, producer on their debut album and a handful of singles, as late as
Tommy
; David Bowie, who fired manager Tony Defries shortly before recording “Saint In The City,” would pay him a share of everything he earnt through 1980. And in each case the contracts had been considerably less clear-cut than Appel’s.

But neither Springsteen nor his record label seemed to treat Appel’s claim seriously, at least not initially. As the deposed Appel recalled, “A few days after the papers were served, Walter Yetnikoff called me up and told me CBS didn’t care what the lawsuit said, they were going to go ahead and record the fourth album, produced by Landau. I guess they expected me to roll over and die.” Appel’s attorney, Leonard Marks, responded with
an interlocutory injunction forbidding Springsteen from entering the studio, and by deposing Yetnikoff, a trained lawyer who was not used to being attached to any such legal leash:

Cast in the blustering image of its then-president, CBS had also overplayed its hand. The simple fact of the matter was, they did not have a legally binding relationship with Bruce Springsteen; they had a
licensing
contract with Appel’s production company, Laurel Canyon, to which he was signed directly. Nor was this unheard of. Brian Epstein struck a similar deal with EMI, tying The Beatles to his own company, NEMS, but only indirectly to EMI; and Defries emulated Epstein, licensing RCA each Bowie album for a period of seven years (and eventually making Bowie a very wealthy man). Meanwhile, The Rolling Stones, after finally extracting themselves from the claws of Allen Klein in 1971, only ever licensed product to the labels that distributed their post-Decca catalogue. As for that quick legal victory, Judge Fein, granting the initial injunction, gave a summation that was a damning indictment of Springsteen’s team of legal advisers and their whole strategy:

As Appel likes to note, “Even though the contracts that we had were rinky dink, they held up.” In fact, he was in a position to release a wealth of unreleased material without seeking Springsteen’s okay or approval. And, as he well knew, they had material—strong material—to spare. A letter from Appel’s personal attorney, Jules I. Kurz, to Martin Gold, the day after the injunction was granted, dared to ask, “Since Mike has all the tapes, should we offer to present CBS with an album pursuant to the terms of our agreement?” Fortunately for Springsteen, Appel was not prepared to remove the gloves. He still hoped against hope that the damage to their relationship might not prove permanent. The artist himself did not waver, “The moment came when it all could have worked out, [but] I looked around and saw all these people who should have been getting something…guys who’d been with me for years now.” Appel was no longer perceived to be one of the deserving poor. Springsteen, though, had found himself in a situation where he was neither judge nor jury:

If the upholding of the injunction had any effect on Springsteen, it merely made him regress again, throwing the pissy-fits of a put-upon teenager. The first thing he had done was fire Myron Mayer, the man Landau had brought in to advise on the contracts. (Mayer later told Fred Goodman, “We hadn’t prepared Bruce with the realities of litigation that sometimes you win, sometimes you lose…We lost that [initial] motion, but litigation goes that way…He was upset about that.”) Annoyed at not getting his way, he was plainly not used to being asked to explain his own actions under oath. When he was finally deposed by Leonard Marks, the springs came off that inner lid, and a bellicose Bruce blew his stack:

And so on. Every time Marks got him to calm down, he just as quickly steamed up again. Finally, Marks hauled him up in front of Judge Fein, who took Springsteen aside and gave him a short, sharp lesson his own legal team had failed to provide, informing him that a deposition was like being on the stand. Fein later told Marks, “Springsteen was horrified, and said he had no idea that any of this material was going to be used at the
trial in front of the jury…He thought it was just an exercise for the lawyers.” [DTR] Marks reported back to Appel that the case was going well, but he couldn’t vouch for the mental state of his former friend:

The following year, Springsteen admitted the strain had got to him: “You know [that] you’re gonna fight someone for a year. Every day, toe-to-toe…You’re gonna wanna kill him and he’s gonna wanna kill you. That’s what it’s all about, depositions. And it takes its toll.” It had certainly taken its toll on him. Appel, though, kept his cool, and although he didn’t attend Springsteen’s depositions, “Bruce and Jon came to mine—to put extra pressure on me…And I was saying things and pointing at [Bruce] and saying, ‘He knows it!’ And he put the yellow pad up in front of his face. He was [that] embarrassed. I thought I’d die laughing.” By the time Springsteen came off the road at the end of March, it was clear the only way forward was to broach a settlement—to put a price on his loss of faith and breaking of his word. As Appel told Charles Cross, “It didn’t go to trial for a lot of reasons…the main reason being…they were losing so bad, they didn’t dare.”