E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (31 page)

Was he seriously planning to produce a lightweight pop album—based around some of the lesser songs cut for “Album #4”—as
Darkness
’s successor? Perhaps the relative failure of
Darkness was
already preying on his mind? But what about “Point Blank” and “Independence Day,” major works that every night garnered standing ovations, even though they were known only to those who collected 1978 radio broadcasts or caught multiple shows? If, as he later claimed, he wanted to make an album that “accept[s] the fact that the world is a paradox, and that’s [just] the way it is,” then there needed to be more of heaven and earth on it than could be contained by the philosophies of “Rendezvous,” “Ramrod” and “Sherry Darling.”

He had another problem, of his own making. He had already aired “Point Blank,” “Independence Day,” “The Ties That Bind” and “Sherry Darling” in widely-taped live radio broadcasts, which even now were being pressed to bootleg disc: something which, as of July 1978, Springsteen had insisted “doesn’t really bother me.” His introduction to “Sandy” at the December 15 Winterland show, suggesting the Jersey girls would get to hear this particularly fine version “through the magic of bootlegging,” rather implied he still didn’t.

But by 1979 he was no longer so keen on these clandestine copyists. Or more accurately, perhaps, Jon Landau on behalf of Bruce Springsteen was less keen on them. And once Springsteen realized the next studio album was as far away as ever, he was prepared to sign off on the pursuit of the two most redoubtable of these Californian brigands, Vicki Vinyl (née Andrea Waters) and her sidekick, Jim Washburn. They had taken Springsteen at his on-air word and had pressed up the Winterland show in its three-hour entirety. When that three-disc set sold well, they issued the Passaic FM broadcast too, as the memorable
Piece De Resistance
; while CBS held back from issuing either of the two Passaic shows they, and they alone, had.

A Roxy double—pruned of some of its V8 moments—also appeared, prompting Jon Landau’s old friend, Greil Marcus, to attempt in a
New West
feature the difficult juggling act of suggesting that the show itself was a
must-hear slice of rock history, but that one mustn’t buy “any of the Roxy bootlegs…[which] are badly mastered and pressed off-center on second-rate vinyl.” Instead, one should, “call, write or picket KMET and get them to broadcast the show again, and then, as Springsteen has suggested, roll your own tapes.” Fans simply waited until the bootleg was re-pressed, not off-center, and bought that. When CBS’s lawyers went after Vicki and Jim, the latter was stunned, and attempted to engage with the artist in a futile attempt to get him off his back, based on a misguided idea of the corelationship between onstage and offstage personae:

Actually, it was what he had Landau for. It was Landau who, after an LA court awarded Springsteen and CBS $2,150,000 in damages from Vicki and a disillusioned Washburn, gave
Rolling Stone
the requisite quote. It was a master class in how to make the argument an artistic one, while an inner voice screams, “Where’s my
fucking
money?:” “Bruce spends a year of his life conceiving and executing an album so that it will perfectly reflect the musical statement he wants to make. Then these people come along and confiscate material that was never intended for release on an album, sell it, and make a profit on it without paying anyone that’s involved.”

There was, of course, no money. Vicki and Jim had already filed for bankruptcy, and anyway Vicki had already plowed most of the profits into a series of Rolling Stones bootlegs, a band she actually cared for. Springsteen may have ducked Washburn’s questions, but he couldn’t duck and dive forever, and finally in 1981 he was queried about his
volte face
in attitude to bootlegs by the still zinelike
Creem
:

By then, both Landau and Springsteen had learned the hard way that they were pissing in the wind—and would continue to be soaked just as long as the latter refused to release a live document of the E Street Band, preferably after each tour. They had just spent further futile sums, running to several thousand dollars, pursuing someone who had leaked tapes from the sessions for
Darkness
’s successor. As Gold recalls, “Some tapes got out. They were playing the rough mixes at like 45th and Broadway. Well, we hired one of the best detectives. It was fascinating. He’d interview [all these] people. There were three or four Bruce fanatics [we suspected]. I take this guy to the Power Station—I learned more in five minutes than I had learned in three years [in the studio]…It turned out it was a 14–year-old runner, and we had to go tell his mother!” So much for Mr. Big.

The premium Springsteen placed on product still played directly
into bootleggers’ hands. If CBS wasn’t going to put out a new studio album in 1979, a bootlegger—this one safe in his European home in Camden Town—was happy to oblige.
Fire On The Fingertip
finally released studio versions of “Hey Santa Ana,” “Zero and Blind Terry,” and “Seaside Bar Song,” and Max’s versions of “Bishop Danced” and “Thundercrack.” It might have been better called
Tip of the Iceberg
. For that is what it proved to be. Alongside
E Ticket
, an early U.S. bootleg of 914 outtakes which was certainly “made by fans”—helping to subsidize the first Springsteen fanzine,
Thunder Road
, where production standards far exceeded subscriber numbers—
Fire On The Fingertips
proved that Springsteen’s current trouble deciding what tracks to release hardly represented an about-turn in methodology.

By the end of the decade, his indecision in the studio would seem like a full-blown pathology. Yet work on the successor to the anti-commercial
Darkness
started promisingly enough. Determined to be fully prepped before checking in at Power Station, he had been demoing songs on a small cassette-recorder for three months, first in LA, where he had been spending time post-tour getting to know Joyce, and then back in Jersey. Sometime in March 1979, he recalled the band for a series of rehearsals designed to whip the best songs he now had into shape ahead of clock-ticking, money-dripping studio time. He seemed like a man in a hurry, the same person who told Ed Sciaky the previous August, “Because of the lawsuit, I’m a little behind. I got records I gotta make, a lot of songs I wanna get out…I got a lot of catching up to do.”

However, although he seemed to have plenty of song scraps, he didn’t have a lot in his locker that could sit comfortably alongside the songs he’d brought to the June 1977 sessions. Of the songs he thought worthy enough to transfer to band rehearsals in mid-to-late March, “Chain Lightning,” “Night Fire,” “The Man Who Got Away” and “Under The Gun” all made the transition to sessions (though in “Chain Lightning”’s case, not until February 1980). But only “The Man Who Got Away” made any kind of album shortlist (and that for the aborted 1979 single LP,
The Ties That Bind
). It was time he found a new vein to call his own:

There was a strong sense that the imagery he was mining that spring had already been thoroughly excavated, and not just in the ephemeral sense of a car, a girl, on the outskirts of town. Thus, on “Find It Where You Can,” a song known only from a solo demo, the girl Bruce is urging to wise up had been addressed this way many times: “I didn’t ask for this conversation/…I’m just another desperate man/ In this world you don’t pick and choose, girl,/ You just find it where you can.” Billy also returns, as the whole “world is tougher than tough” shtick gets another working over in “Under The Gun,” “Some nights, Billy, I just lie awake/ I pull her a little closer, feel every breath she takes/ I want to go downtown and get me a gun/ You take what you’re given when your living, Billy, under the gun.” The best of the new songs initially rehearsed was “Chain Lightning,” another promethean display of pyrotechnics, à la “Fire.” This time the portents are there for all to hear: “There’s a rumble in the park, there’s a thunder in the dark/ A night so quiet—chain lightning.” With a riff lifted clean off Link Wray’s “Pipeline,” “Chain Lightning” suggested his new-found love of rockabilly could have yielded real dividends—if only sessions had proceeded smoothly.

It was not until he sat down at home at the end of March 1979 to read the newspaper that he finally found a thematic starting point for
Darkness
’s successor. For the very first time, Springsteen responded to a public event by immediately writing a song with “an appropriately paranoid lyric.” “Roulette” was the riveting result. Directly inspired by the Three Mile Island near-nuclear meltdown on March 28 1979, the song was in the can by April 3 (a partial acoustic home demo exists, showing how quickly he formulated the song’s basic components). Faster and fiercer than Dylan’s 1971 response to the murder of black militant George Jackson, “Roulette” would be the neon beacon which would light the way to Springsteen’s future as a politicized singer-songwriter.

Never before had he contextualized a first-person narrative inspired by an actual event in real time. This time his narrator was “a fireman at the reactor” who’s treated like he’s “the big expendable.” His faith in the status quo disappears after he loses everything (“I got a house full of things that I can’t touch”), until he defiantly roars, “I left behind the man
I used to be/ Everything he believed and all that belonged to me.” All the while the chorus demands answers from the gamesters playing Russian roulette with his life, his wife and his kids. And on this rockin’, reelin’ ride it is a rejuvenated Weinberg who propels the whole thing to the edge of the precipice. “Roulette” was an E Street special and, after a year away from the studio, a much-needed reminder of their full arsenal of sound. Only in the final verse does Springsteen’s imagination get the better of him, as he constructs a scenario that owes more to
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
than
The China Syndrome
.

A week later, they returned to the studio and captured a song he had been playing since November, “The Ties That Bind.” Again, it was done in a day, “with the band playing in a wood-paneled studio with open mikes over the drumkit to get that live resonance.” Maybe this was the way to do things. A song a week. Rehearse it, record it, release it. In
Songs
, he claims this was indeed the intent underlying said methodology: “I knew I wanted more of the roughness and spontaneity of our live show…I was determined to let the band play live and let the music happen.” And in the resultant downtime he could really enjoy the company of girlfriend Joyce, while his ex-marketing manager brought by people he admired to pay their respects: