E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (48 page)

Proving that some things never change, he still “thought about things” way too much. What he most needed was some downtime, and some tlc. from Mrs. Springsteen. But if Ms. Phillips thought her husband was about to take a break from all that jazz, she didn’t know her man. He wasn’t listening to her importunings. Maybe all those stadium shows had done some permanent damage to his hearing. Certainly, on the evidence of his 1986 listening sessions, he could no longer tell the difference between strong singing and shouting. Starting in the new year, he began drawing up plans for the greatest live album ever made. They were first formulated after Landau sent him a four-song sample from the final Coliseum show:

Things like how to
really
over-PROJECT. What Springsteen didn’t do was ask his label to pull tapes from Max’s January 31 1973 as a point of comparison. Or Joe’s Place, a year later. Or give a serious listen to the Main Point the following February. In fact, it would appear he chose not to listen to any show before 1978 (except the first five minutes of the Roxy ’75, before the band played). It was a point maybe lost on a post-stadia Springsteen
but it was not lost on reviewers of the resultant artefact,
Live 1975–85
, certainly not on
Sounds
’ Billy Mann:

In fact, what Landau and Springsteen—with due diligence—set out to produce was the exact opposite of the May 1974 show that once convinced the former he had seen “the future of rock ’n’ roll.” For Springsteen, the pressure to do such a set had become overwhelming. As far back as 1981, he gamely admitted, “I have this live reputation and I cannot allow myself anything less than to produce the best live LP ever. Perhaps I have to make another five LPs like
The River
, and then compile the best songs from those.” He had made five LPs, but only released two of them. Then in 1984 he spoke about how he particularly wanted to find definitive live readings of the songs on
Darkness
: “I always felt it was a little dry recording-wise. I felt like I oversang…I’d be interested in getting different versions of a lot of those songs…just the best of that stuff.” Yet of the six
Darkness
songs on
Live 75–85
, only “Adam Raised A Cain” came from the requisite era. As for oversinging, nothing from
Darkness
came close to those Coliseum concerts. One-two-three HUH!!!

But there was now a commercial imperative underlying the gesture. A multi-volume set on the back of Dylan’s surprisingly successful five-LP
Biograph
was no longer such a scary prospect for Sony (who had their eye on CD sales as much as vinyl). As Mike Appel noted at the time, his former client had finally “realized he couldn’t follow
Born In The USA
with anything but a live album for the…same [reason] I’d offered ten years ago: that it would be impossible to immediately follow up a studio
album as strong as either of the
Born
s with another studio album.” Landau meanwhile assured fifteen million fans said collection did “not detract in any way from your memories of Bruce live.” Assuming said memories were as short as his, or as shot as his ears.

Plotkin was back on board, too, and had more of an excuse for omitting all evidence of the pre-
Darkness
band. He wasn’t there then. But he was now, as he and Bruce “spent about six hours a day, five days a week, essentially trying to come up with the right songs to use, come up with little segments of sequences, and to come up with the right takes of the songs.” Yet there was precious little evidence of such deliberation in the set released, which blithely disregarded every show pre-1978, with even multitrack tapes from a dozen shows in that peak year—from Berkeley in July to two San Francisco shows in December—discounted, save for half a dozen full songs and a mutilated “Backstreets” from the Roxy, and a solitary “Fire” from the second Winterland.

The remaining 43 songs were all culled from eighties shows, with those from
Born In The USA
and the sparsely-represented
Nebraska
largely taken from summer ’85 stadia shows. If, as Springsteen claimed on its release, “We started with the idea that there was a certain amount of [good] material from each phase of the band,” most of it was caught between the grooves. He had managed a rare coup—using only the finest ingredients, he’d produced a turkey few could finish just in time for Christmas 1986. The initial rush of sales, fed on the hype-to-end-all-hypes and fans starved of living proof of the live E Street experience, sent the album to the top of the charts, with three million shipped. But by new year boxes were piling up in the warehouses of Tower Records &c., prompting
Rolling Stone
to suggest as many as 750,000 copies were gathering dust.

As paydays go, it was a bonanza for the band, who had been twiddling their thumbs for the past fifteen months. But then news reached the musicians that Springsteen was back in the studio, as of January 20, 1987, without making the requisite call to former brothers-in-arms. Landau may have just told a French reporter “the E Street Band can play everything Bruce writes,” but his client was no longer reading from the same book. He was out in LA, looking to repeat the winter 1983 experiment.

Sure enough, on day one an inspired Springsteen cut three songs, “Walk Like A Man,” “Spare Parts” and “If You Need Me,” the latter pair first and second takes respectively. A second session four days later was even
more productive, with five songs recorded (two of which—“Pretty Baby, Will You Be Mine” and “Things Ain’t That Way”—would go unused). A rough idea for a song listed as “Is That You?” at a February 5 session became “Brilliant Disguise” by month’s end. In just eighteen sessions he had enough songs to leave off the resultant album the most personal, “The Wish,” addressed to the woman he loved most—his Mum. What was on there suggested he had yet to find a bridge across troubled marital waters, even if he tried putting his best spin on things in interviews:

Only when the album was all but done, on May 25, did he invite the entire E Street Band (Federici excepted) to add some musical color to the recently-written “Tunnel of Love” and, while they were at it, “Valentine’s Day.” Initially, though, “Tunnel of Love” was the title track to an album it nearly didn’t appear on. (“Lucky Man” occupied its slot.) Finally, though, he went with the catchier option, incorporating two songs the band knew should he decide to play with them again after the record appeared. That the album would need some promotion became immediately apparent on its October 6 release, when it spent just a single week in the top spot and the lead single, “Brilliant Disguise,” even with another nonalbum B-side, failed to emulate “Dancing in the Dark’s” cross-generational appeal. Although initial reports suggested he might tour solo, he changed his mind and made that SOS call to his trusty sidekicks:

Actually, he needed to get away; and what better excuse was ever invented than, “I gotta go on tour with the band (y’know, the one with that hot, single, redhead backing singer).” But he already knew this route contained one road he had to walk alone. Indeed, it was a surprisingly sanguine Springsteen who inducted his musical mentor, Bob Dylan, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that January with a speech describing how the elder statesman’s music had helped this boy grow up to be a man: “When I was fifteen and I heard ‘Like A Rolling Stone,’ I heard a guy like I’d never heard before, a guy that had the guts to take on the whole world and make me feel like I had to, too. Maybe some people mistook that voice to be saying somehow that you were going to do the job for them, and as we know as we grow older, there isn’t anybody out there that can do that job for anybody else.”

The weight of expectation, which had proven such a burden to Dylan through the sixties and seventies, now weighed as heavily on the last of the New Dylans. But with the
Tunnel of Love Express
, he was determined to throw it off. As he informed
Rolling Stone
on the opening week of the tour: “The idea on this tour is that you wouldn’t know what song was gonna come next. And the way you do that is you just throw out all your cornerstones, the stuff that had not become overly ritualized on the
Born In The USA
tour, but would have been if we did it now.”

Certainly opening night at Worcester’s Centrum contained its share of left-field inclusions. Of the two songs entirely new to Bruce fans, “I’m A Coward (When It Comes To Love)” and “Part Man Part Monkey,” and those resurrected
River
outtakes, “Be True” and “Roulette,” it was the professions of abiding faithfulness in songs one and three which cut the least mustard.
BITUSA
also contributed its share of outtakes—“The Light of Day” and “Seeds”—to the mix, while a belatedly acoustic “Born In The USA” was another part of a process he later called “taking the whole thing down, making it feel more human-scaled, less iconic and more about everyday issues; which I [also] thought the
Tunnel of Love
record…dealt with.”

Perhaps the most telling set changes, though, were the substitution of “Can’t Help Falling In Love” with “Have Love, Will Travel” midway through the five-month tour, and a belated switch from “Ain’t Got You” to “Who Do You Love?” as precursor to “She’s The One.” It was a message his baby back home did not receive right away, but the redhead sharing his mike nightly did. When the paparazzi snapped Bruce and Patti
canoodling on a hotel terrace, it was evident some E Street members were more equal than others. It wasn’t just the end of the marriage, it was time’s up for this band of blood brothers.

As a final gesture, and one more way of avoiding going home, Springsteen agreed to share nineteen stadium dates in September and October with Sting and Peter Gabriel, raising money for Amnesty International. It was a strangely muted end to the E Street era. The sets themselves lasted barely long enough to raise steam, let alone hands. And the set-lists—save for an E Street arrangement of “Chimes of Freedom” almost as powerful as 1975’s “I Want You”—were entirely predictable. And the backlash kept raining down, John Lombardi in
Esquire
delighting in depicting the crowd as “louder than the band because it apparently needs to be…For Bruce and his fans, noise ha[s] replaced action in the modern scheme of things.”

Springsteen, to his credit, remained stoic in the face of deserting crew members, a disaffected wife and an alienated critical consensus. As he philosophically observed on his return in 1992, “As far as the whole myth thing goes…it ends up being dismantled for you anyway. It doesn’t matter whether you do it or not, somebody’s going to do it.” He did at least now have a woman, in Patti Scialfa, who understood him
and
his music. (And wanted kids, pronto.)

For his band, though, the future was decidedly uncertain. Lombardi’s December 1988
Esquire
“Saint Boss” piece quoted an anonymous inside source who had heard “Bruce [was] breaking up the band because it ‘was no longer efficient.’” Some of the band felt it was about time. Federici, for one, opined that what had “started out as a band…turned into a super, giant corporate money-making machine.” But even Federici thought that a year of silence and then a single phone call was not the way to go about it: “I thought the way the band broke up was really crappy. It left a sour taste in everybody’s mouth; we really didn’t know what happened, if we were “‘ired’ or ‘let go’—any of those words are not good. They don’t sound nice.” “Busy hands” Bittan also thought it was handled badly, although he was the one band member Springsteen recalled when starting work on another solo album in January 1990: