E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (34 page)

Springsteen had a message as unpalatable as that of The Clash, but he wanted it wrapped in the audio equivalent of a neat ribbon bow. His own confused state of mind was duly reflected in the music he was now making. As he told
Rolling Stone
in 1987, when everything he had built in the past decade was beginning to crumble and fall, “From
Darkness
to
The River
, I was attempting to pull myself into what I felt was going to be the adult world, so that when things became disorienting, I would be strong enough to hold my ground. Those were the records where I was trying to forge the foundation and maintain my connections.” But no matter how hard he tried, things still failed to add up and he didn’t know why:

Contradictions abound in the material he was writing. He liked the idea of marriage, but every song he wrote about such folk ended in recrimination, divorce and/or suicide. He wrote longingly about home and the family, but had no proclivity to embrace either. He saw rock as an affirmative, life-enhancing form but all the best songs he had written in the past year were replete with negativity and faithlessness. He wanted to make music that was as commercial as a TV message, but real as a rifle-shot.

And on top of all this he really wanted to get onto record “the need for community…which is what ‘Out In The Streets’ [is] about. Songs like ‘The Ties That Bind’ and ‘Two Hearts’ deal with that, too. But there’s also the other side, the need to be alone.” It was “the need to be alone” which had driven him thus far and provided an impressive private soundtrack; whereas songs of “community” were not his forte—and never had been. “The Ties That Bind,” good as it was, had been a better song when it was about escape. Whereas “Out In The Streets” and “Two Hearts”—two songs written that winter—were greeting-card standard. (In the former’s case, he took a perfectly decent rocker, “I’m Gonna Be There Tonight,”
and made it about someone who worked “five days a week…loading crates down on the dock”—an experience as divorced from his own life as that of a Thai hooker.)

He was increasingly inclined to idealize the people he grew up around—the self-same folk he once disparaged in interview and lyrics as narrow-minded and uptight. It was like he could no longer delineate the corelationship between good and bad, hope and despair (themes which imbue everything Flannery O’Connor wrote, and which—with her help—he would locate again). What began as a laudable attempt to write about “people trying to do that deal with their friends, their lovers and their jobs, trying not to let life drag them down,” had become instead an explicit romanticization of the lives of friends and family, obviating “the need to be alone” as the prime subject-matter for the songs:

Where there was a narrator to such “songs of community,” he resembled Springsteen’s father refracted through the eyes of an all-seeing son. Yet his real father had moved 3,000 miles away from the godforsaken place Springsteen continued to call home; which in 1984 he admitted was an attempt on his part, “to maintain connections with the people I’d grown up with, and the sense of the community where I came from. That’s why I stayed in New Jersey. The danger of fame is in forgetting or being distracted.” In reality, he remained rootless; a contradiction not always lost on him:

The very fact that he continued to rent rather than buy a place rather suggested he still felt like a rolling stone (by now he knew the next line
in the Hank Williams song Dylan stole the image from was, “All alone and lost”). He informed Michael Watts the following spring how he disliked “dragging too much stuff around. I guess that’s…why I’ve avoided buying a house: things just clutter up your life.” He was equally frank to a
Rolling Stone
reporter: “I don’t like to sit at home. I spent years sitting at home. And my family’s not there anymore…No reason to go home.” If home was where the heart was, it was where the band was (though this may be a sentiment he had yet to share with Joyce).

Having being “very distant from my family for quite a while in my early twenties,” he finally turned the authority-figure with whom he had spent his entire youth locking horns into the hero of a thousand songs. The trait father and son had most in common was that neither was ever “a big verbalizer” (to use Bruce’s own term). Which is why the son spoke to him through his songs.Though he ultimately realized, “It’s probably not the best way to find your way through the woods on those sorts of things, it was part of the way it happened for me and him.” Even in some songs that did not directly address Doug, there was a sense that it was him who was narrating. “The River,” for one. Meanwhile, the raps which prefaced the desultory “Factory” on
The River
tour would achieve what earlier songs singularly failed to do, they made Doug a sympathetic figure:

This new-found empathy at least allowed Springsteen to retain his connection to “Independence Day,” the one 1977 composition he didn’t do a disservice to in rerecording it for
The River
. He was still putting finishing touches to it in late April 1980, two years and eight months after they first recorded it. (The April 25 tape-box reads “Take 53.”) At least he wisely resisted rewriting this lyric, though this was not the case with “Point Blank,” which he also returned to that spring, determined to put it right.
He later told Dave Marsh the latter was one of those songs that, “right up until the very last two weeks, when I rewrote the last two verses…didn’t exist in the form [it is] on the record.”

At least the song again emulated its 1978 arrangement; as did two more songs from the Atlantic locker he reintroduced to the band at the February 1980 sessions, “Sherry Darling” and “Drive All Night.” He had seemingly revived his original plan to make the new record a composite of Albums #4 and #6 (“Ramrod” had already been earmarked for duty). Whether this was because by late February it was plain to him that the new songs he’d written and recorded over the past four months were simply not up to scratch, or because he no longer wrote songs with the same maudlin magnitude as “Drive All Night,” “Independence Day” and “Point Blank,” he wasn’t about to say.

What was certain was that after a promising restart to proceedings in the New Year, things had stalled badly in the past few weeks. The first night back, January 14, they had roared through the best song he had penned since “The River,” “Restless Nights,” and even found time to lay down a terrific cover version of the Cajun classic “Jole Blon” (to which Gary US Bonds would overdub vocals for his own E Street Band LP,
Dedication
). “Restless Nights” saw Bruce once again railing at those who think life’s a movie, pouring hot verbal oil down on those poor deluded fools locked to “late-night movie screens [where] young lovers look so sure/ Lost in wide-wake dreams that they can’t afford.”

But if the finished studio take was another powerful reminder of what made this band tick, it paled in comparison with some of the versions the sextet summoned up on Telegraph Hill three or four days earlier. In that rehearsal space, the song on a number of occasions genuinely entered “Prove It All Night” territory (and length). Barely contained by the band’s undoubted instrumental prowess, it found enough oxygen in that rehearsal room to explode into life. At Power Station, though, Springsteen stuck to his remit—even though containing the whole wide world in three/four-minute pop songs actually meant stopping the band from doing what it did best, stretching the parameters of the American pop song. The rehearsal “Restless Nights” also confirmed that the earlier version of “Janey Needs A Shooter” was no fluke, and that the recording equipment should have caught them in rehearsal not record mode if it wanted to capture the “true” Bruce Springsteen
and
the E Street Band.

Through January and February, this would become their routine. A day or two rehearsing a new song or arrangement. Then (if lucky) into the studio to capture the moment after the fact. Rehearsed the same day as “Restless Nights” was a fastish, countrabilly arrangement of a new song, “Wreck On The Highway,” that sounded real interesting. But in the three more months it would take him to haul this song’s raggedy ass into the studio, it became a near-cataleptic coda to “Drive All Night.” (On its release, he had the gall to claim it was an example of “an automatic song…that you don’t really think about or work on.”)

In some cases, even the drive to the studio rendered a song unrecognizable. In the case of “Stolen Car,” rehearsed five days after “Restless Nights,” Springsteen committed an act of self-sabotage, removing the ghost from his own song, as well as its “dreamed a dream” reverie, giving it a whole new arrangement to ensure it fit the same notch as other “downers” he was accumulating. Nor was it the only once-handsome song recorded the previous year given an unnecessary facelift. “Jackson Cage” was also prepared for a second tour of duty, in the process losing the couplet, “There is something I must say/ That you’ve been left to fade away” to another new song, before becoming another case of rattling the Jersey cage.

If some of the latent energy of “Jackson Cage” still carried over to Power Station, the other song rehearsed the same day, the strident “Slow Fade,” really did fade away. He seemed to have lost the invaluable gift of knowing when to leave something well alone and when to persevere. A promising idea for a song demoed the previous fall, called either “Mr. Outside” or “Looking After Number One,” was recorded mid-March in ersatz reggae form as “Down In White Town.” By then, he had introduced a helpless dancer from another torch ballad, who “disappears like the scenery in another man’s play/ [Though] at night she dances, oh, to the beat.” The greedy Mr. Outside is about to find out, “Your money and your power…won’t help you come The Hour/When your kingdom falls to your feet, and you’re left like any other thief out on the street.” From somewhere deep in his subconscious he had dredged up this classically Christian conception of the End Times, proving once again that you can take the boy out of the Catholic church, but you can’t take the church out of the boy.

“White Town” was at least a welcome thematic departure. But too many of the other songs trod over-familiar ground, swapping lines at will. “Chevrolet Deluxe”—another song he demoed, rehearsed and then
abandoned—not only told us the name of the “stolen car,” but shared its opening scenario: “I had a wife and kid, and I tried to settle down/ I just wanted to live an honest life on the edge of an honest town/ But in the end they left me dangling in the night.” “Stockton Boys” revisited “Come On (Let’s Go Tonight),” describing working men who like “acting tough, making noise/ Man, they just want to get wrecked.” One couplet would make it to record, just not until 1984: “They wear it in their eyes, they wear it on their shirts/ They come down here looking to get hurt.”

It was only when he took time out to write consciously lightweight material that he rediscovered his gift for combining the deft phrase and the right hook. Thus, on “Dedication,” a song he recorded in December 1979 before donating it to Gary US Bonds, he gave a new slant to the canonical account of the Great Flood, his first humorous reinterpretation of the Book of Genesis, but not his last: “Well, way back in the Bible time/ A cat named Noah built an ocean liner/ Everybody laughed when they told him why/ But when the rain came, Noah was high and dry.”

The best love song he wrote that winter, “Your Love,” was also given to Bonds, who was keen to play to the E Street Band’s strengths. The highlight of his wrought rendition would be that crushing crescendo as realization dawns on the poor misguided fool who has seen “something new in her eyes”—just as Bonds’ voice drops to a despairing whisper, “Lately you been walking the streets at night/ Like an empty shadow in the morning light.” Another minor classic the bossman gave away.

And yet when Springsteen wrote similar songs for himself, the results put the self in self-conscious. This was perhaps because, as he told
NME
the following June, “I didn’t want to neglect the rock & roll songs, so we put them all on, as well as the slower stuff…[But] I don’t want to make records like the Fifties or Sixties. There’s always got to be some Eighties in there, too.” Some of the results gave Pastiche a bad name. And the worst of the lot was “Cadillac Ranch.” After six sessions working on this rustbucket, one wonders how he kept a straight face when singing lines like, “Hey little girlie, in the blue jeans so tight/ Drivin’ alone through the Wisconsin night/ You’re my last love baby, you’re my last chance/ Don’t let ’em take me to the Cadillac Ranch.” If there was ever a Sprucesong that deserved to go straight to the scrapheap, this was it.