E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (25 page)

If donating the song was a sop of sorts to Smith, he was responding just as much to a suggestion of Smith’s producer Jimmy Iovine, who, in his own words, “was engineering
Darkness
and producing
Easter
at the same time. Now, Bruce was very understanding and very flexible, because he realized that this was my first real break as a producer. Anyway, one night whilst we were lounging around the Hotel Navarro in New York I told Bruce I desperately wanted a hit with Patti, that she deserved one. He agreed. As he had no immediate plans to put ‘Because The Night’ on an album, I said why not give it to Patti. Bruce replied, ‘If she can do it, she can have it.’”

In the recent
Darkness
documentary, Springsteen claimed “I [already] knew that I wasn’t gonna finish [‘Because The Night’], because it was a love song, and I really felt that I didn’t know how to write them at the time.” Actually, he had recorded half a dozen terrific love songs at those early Atlantic sessions before deciding this was not the kinda album he was going to make. Early sequences centerd around songs like “The Fast Song,” aka “God’s Angels” (in which the capricious candy-girl was characterized as, “She who is everything/ There’s a fever that she brings…Sometimes I feel like I’m walking the dead/ The blood rushes through my veins”), “Candy’s Boy,” “Drive All Night,” “Because The Night,” “Talk To Me” and “Spanish Eyes,” songs of desire, frustrated by circumstance. All
were worked on in those first six weeks, as were the likes of “Frankie,” “I Wanna Be With You” and “Our Love Will Last Forever.”

However, only a hybrid of “The Fast Song” and “Candy’s Boy”—the composite, “Candy’s Room”—would make
Darkness,
at the expense of all God’s chosen, even the “avenging angels of Eden, with them white horses and flaming swords/ [who] can blow this whole town into the sea.” (Two images from “Frankie” and/or “Drive All Night” would also be co-opted to Candy’s cause, “There’s machines and there’s fire on the outside of town,” and, “In the darkness there’ll be hidden worlds that shine.”) Evidently a close cousin of Janey, this Candy still retained her “mink fur coats and diamond rings” and “men who’ll give her anything she wants/ But…what she wants is me.”

But “Candy’s Room,” for all its lyrical sophistication, had none of the epic grandeur of a live “Frankie.” Or the Atlantic “Drive All Night,” which may have emerged out of the long, improvised mid-section to the 1977 live “Backstreets”—the so-called “God’s Angel” sequence. Slight as the “Drive All Night” lyrics are, Springsteen (correctly) rated the raw-voiced epic, which appears on a number of provisional sequences for the album, timed at eight minutes (so clearly the “full” version). Like “Frankie,” though, in the end he decided it was too much of a vehicle for the Big Man: “The sax is a very warm instrument, and these songs have a little harder, cooler edge.”

As if to prove his point, Springsteen even initially recorded “Badlands” as a guitar song, at Atlantic, when it was still a conversation between Robert Mitchum and a pulp-fiction cover-girl. At this point its refrain, “Badlands, tear your little world apart/ You gotta walk it, talk it, man, deep down in your heart,” he was singing to another crazy chick who wanted to let rip. Indeed, he initially slipped into a semi-familiar, half-whispered bedside plea when the music dropped on down, later chopped from the song: “Baby, don’t cry now, don’t waste your tears/ Baby, don’t cry now, we’re taking it on the road/ We’re taking you on the road, driving till the air turns/ In the evening fields, we’ll burn it all and then we’ll let go.”

It was only after they actually
mastered
the record that Springsteen decided he “didn’t think we had enough sax on the record, took the guitar out, and Clarence played over that.” It was a belated recognition that Clemons had been almost frozen out of the recording process, not as a sleight to his old friend, but because its
auteur
wanted something very different. As he explained to a number of interrogators on tour, “The [guitar]
leads fit better into the tone of
Darkness
than the saxophone did…so consequently there was more [guitar] on the album.” Landau’s view was that Springsteen was always “look[ing] for what [the solo] does for the single cut and for the album as a whole. The sax makes the thing more urban, and I think he wanted to keep more of a small-town ambience.”

When, or if, Bruce explained his reasoning to Clemons at the sessions is unclear, but generally he didn’t
explain
. As Landau observed, “In the studio Bruce tends to do things, and you figure out what he’s doing. He doesn’t announce, this is what we’re going to try.” He demanded much of his coworkers, even if it took hindsight—and happiness—to reveal just how demanding a boss he had been: “I didn’t have a life, [so] it was easy for me [laughs]. But everyone else had to suffer with me…It was both self-indulgent and the only way we knew how to do it.” He was right. He “didn’t have a life.” And it showed in the characters who filled these songs:

The onset of an existential dark night of the soul was probably the direct result of the end of his relationship with an emotionally drained Darvin. Although he soon embarked on another fiery relationship with another “rock ’n’ roll chick,” photographer Lynn Goldsmith, his inability to hang onto Darvin—the paradigm for every spirited lover to date—and time spent with his sister and her husband, seeing them “living the lives of my parents,” had made him reevaluate a life which still repeated patterns set in his youth. As he said in 1996 of these years, “I was locked into a very specific and pretty limited mode of behavior…I had no capability for a home life or an ability to develop anything more than a glancing relationship.” It was a journey’s end of sorts for the ex-innocent:

“Darkness on the Edge of Town,” written early in 1976 and attempted at that first week of sessions, was absent from all the early sequences, perhaps because he was still some way from figuring where it fit. On the only circulating alternate take—a slower version with rockabilly undertones, probably from the June 6 session—Springsteen has the first verse but largely bluffs his way through the remaining two. It seems he was still “laying down demos.”

At this stage, it was “Racing In The Street” that generally formed the centerpiece of rough sequences. As Landau told Nelson, this potential classic “was [also] written before the album. We hadn’t actually rehearsed ‘Racing In The Street’; but we knew we were going to do it, and it was from ‘before.’ It was written around the time of ‘The Promise.’ ‘Something in the Night,’ ‘Candy’s Room’ (sic), ‘Racing In The Street’ were [all] part of the original concept of the album. And ‘Darkness’ was, too.” “Racing In The Street” was the song where he did get the girl, but things still turned to shit. It was a point he would embellish on the
Born In The USA
tour when the song was prefaced with a powerful “walk a mile in my shoes” monologue:

This evocative rap was clearly a way of explicating the song’s final couplet, “Tonight my baby and me we’re gonna ride to the sea/ And wash these sins off our hands,” lines he apparently inserted to make “sense of the journey the guy’s taking…How do you carry your sins? That’s what the people in ‘Racing in the Street’ are trying to do.” If the expiry date on residual Catholic guilt was still a way off, these lines were intended to suggest some hope in the darkness:

It is true that the first take recorded at Atlantic—the so-called “dying in the street” version—lacks any such redemptive coda. But redemptive codas would generally be in short supply on a final album that lacked a “Frankie,” and turned the once-affirmative “Something In The Night” into a wreck on the highway. In fact, finding “some value in the search” became the veritable key to an album that shifted focus with every new song Bruce brought to Atlantic.

Having been inspired for so long in the months leading up to the sessions, Springsteen seemed reluctant to take such largesse at face value. Instead, he worked on songs that took the album somewhere that, for all its hothouse intensity, was monochromatic. At the center of this whirlpool, there was precious little light and no shade. He would also be guilty of denying fans—at least those without access to bootlegs—evidence that there had been a missing link, a
Basement Tapes
to his very own
John Wesley Harding
, an intermediary “Album #4:”

A song he began at the last Atlantic sessions in August gave the first real inkling that he was finally coming to terms with a difficult upbringing. Sung as one side of a conversation with his Dad (“Papa, go to bed now, it’s getting late”), “Independence Day” was the start of a dialogue-in-song that remained one step removed for some time to come, largely because, as Springsteen said in 1992, “[My Dad] was never a big verbalizer, and [so] I kinda talked to him through my songs. Not the best way to do that…but I knew he heard them.” At the same time as he was singing “Independence Day”—and, indeed, “Factory” and “Adam Raised A Cain” for Doug—he seemed to be making the whole album as a statement to his sister, who was struggling to keep her head above water in her Jersey shore home:

The sense that he was the one who got away imbued a number of songs written between sessions, of which “Adam Raised A Cain”—which did not enter the equation until November—was the most angst-ridden. Originally called “Daddy Raised A Cain,” it owed more of a debt to the famous 1956 movie of John Steinbeck’s
East of Eden
, starring James Dean, than to the original story in Genesis, to which he seems to have paid very little attention as a child (or as an adult, if his interpretation of original sin was, “You’re born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else’s past”). Likewise, his depiction in an early take of his father’s ghost “haunt[ing] these empty rooms rattling his chains” seemed to owe more to Alastair Sim’s
A Christmas Carol
than any section of the Old Testament.

According to Springsteen, when he started writing this song he “went back [to The Bible], trying to get a feeling for it.” But he still expressed dismay after he attended a family funeral at this time, and “all my relatives were there…They’re all in their thirties, my sister and all, and they all feel the same way I do. But [still] their kids go to Catholic school and to church every Sunday. They’re really under the gun to this Catholic thing.”

“Adam Raised A Cain” finally brought out the gunslinger in the ex-lead guitarist. Landau recalled it being one song where “we did a lot of takes—every take another fantastic guitar solo…[But in the end] we made the right selection…Everything that was left out, there was a good reason for leaving it out.” Meanwhile, Landau argued long and hard for the inclusion of “Independence Day” on
Darkness
. In the end, though, he found Springsteen adamant: “He didn’t want that weight…The only problem with the way we work is that it…cuts no ice with him, the argument, ‘Jesus, this deserves to be heard’…His attitude is, they become other songs.”