Born to Run (27 page)

To move forward, we’d have to willingly wear the weight of our unreconciled past. A day of personal and historical accountability
had arrived.

I started out with cliché, cliché, cliché and then I caught a piece of myself and the moment. “In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream . . .” It’s a “death trap,” a “suicide rap.” “I want to guard your dreams and visions . . . I want to know if love is real.” This is what is at stake, your dreams, your visions. “Together, Wendy, we can live with the
sadness, I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul . . . ,” because that’s what it’ll take. “Someday . . . I don’t know when, we’re gonna get to that place where we really want to go and we’ll walk in the sun . . . ,” but ’til then all we have is this road, this ever-present
now
that is the fire and marrow of rock ’n’ roll . . . “Tramps like us, baby we were born to run . . .”

Over months,
I could feel the story I was aching to tell seep into my lyrics. Slowly, I found words I could stand to sing, always my first, last and only criteria to move ahead. Slowly . . . it felt real. Then there it was, my touchstone, my blueprint for my new record all wrapped up in a hot-rod
rumble of sound and a low-budget movie setting that brought the trash and undercut the song’s pretensions perfectly.

While the lyrics were being written we struggled with the recorded sounds of the instruments, the drum sounds, the guitar sounds. We layered instrument upon instrument, mixing down and down, track to track, combining sections of instruments until we could fit our seventy-two tracks of rock ’n’ roll overkill on the sixteen available tracks at 914 Studios. It would be Boom Carter’s only recorded
E Street appearance on drums. He picked a good one. It would be the last recording I’d do with Davey Sancious. He’d soon be offered his own solo deal on Columbia and together they’d leave the band. Right before the gravy train! It would be the last record we’d make at 914 Studios and the only recording with just Mike and me as a production team. As we sat in the studio at eight a.m., beat from being
up all night trying to get a final mix, the next session was pounding on our locked studio door. In those days, there were no automated or computerized mixing boards. It was all hands on deck. Our engineer, Louis Lahav, would have his left hand riding the guitar faders, his right riding the keyboards; Mike might ride the voice, the acoustic guitars in the final verse, while I’d be reaching over
their shoulders to nudge the sax solo as it peaked and the guitar riff in the outro. One take, all the way through, no cutting, splicing or editing. As the sound of shouting and knocking on our studio door rose, we took one more pass. We had it, we thought; really, we were way too tired to tell. I brought it home and played it to wake up to every morning with the sun beaming through my bedroom window.
It sounded great. I’d returned home with the
exact
record I’d wanted to make. That doesn’t happen often.

The record company wanted more vocal. We took it to a New York studio one evening and in a half hour realized the impossibility of our task. We would never corral that sound again; we couldn’t even come close to the musical integration, the raging wall of guitars, keys and drums. Out of deference
to the bigwigs we listened to other takes from the original session. Some had more voice but they didn’t have . . .
the magic
. The singer was
supposed
to sound like he was fighting to be heard over a world that didn’t give a damn. No, there was only one that had that 747-engine-in-your-living-room rumble, the universe hanging, for one brief moment, in balance as the cosmic chord goes
twang
. Then
the getaway. We had it. We only did it once . . . but once is all you need.

With Boom and Davey gone, we placed an ad in the
Village Voice
for a new drummer and pianist. We played with thirty drummers and thirty keyboard players for thirty minutes each. People came in to audition who just wanted to sit in for a while with the band. Guys brought double bass drum kits and tried to Ginger Baker
their way through “Spirit in the Night.” An “avant-garde” violinist came in with fingernail-on-the-blackboard atonal voicings and tortured us for half an hour. Whether you were bad or good you got your thirty minutes and a handshake.

In the end, Max Weinberg, a South Orange New Jerseyan, took the drum seat as Roy Bittan, from Rockaway Beach, slipped in behind the keys. They were heads above all
the others and would bring a new professionalism to our sound that we would carry into the studio. They were the first guys who weren’t from the neighborhood to play with the E Street Band.

With “Born to Run” blasting from FM radio stations (we’d handed it over assuming our LP would soon follow, a brilliant mistake!), we headed back into the studio. After several failed sessions at 914, we could
not move the record forward. The most obvious problem was that shit just wasn’t working. The piano pedals, recording equipment and sundry other things regularly went on the fritz. We were trying to record “Jungleland”—it had been a staple of our live show for a while and the band had it cold—but with all the technical glitches, you just couldn’t build any momentum to get anything done. Something
was wrong. After a stretch of bum recording dates, we sat dead in our tracks, my last-chance “masterpiece” going nowhere. We were stuck. We needed help.

THIRTY

JON LANDAU

It was a winter’s night in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I stood on the street in front of our gig, Joe’s Place, hopping side to side, trying to stay warm. I was reading a review of our second album; the owner had taped it to the club’s front window in hopes of luring in some breathing customers. Then two men walked up on my left. One was writer Dave Marsh, the other was the review’s
twenty-seven-year-old author, Jon Landau. He sidled over to me and asked, “Whaddaya think?”
Whaddaya think
 . . . those were the first and probably most recent of the ten billion words Jon and I have thrown each other’s way over a lifetime of ruminating, navel-gazing, philosophizing, analyzing and making music.
Whaddaya think?
Those words have bracketed our friendship for forty years.

The heart
of rock will always remain a primal world of action. The music revives itself over and over again in that form, primitive rockabilly,
punk, hard soul and early rap. Integrating the world of thought and reflection with the world of primitive action is
not
a necessary skill for making great rock ’n’ roll. Many of the music’s most glorious moments feel as though they were birthed in an explosion
of raw talent and creative instinct (some of them even were!). But . . . if you want to burn bright, hard
and
long, you will need to depend upon more than your initial instincts. You will need to develop some craft and a creative intelligence that will lead you
farther
when things get dicey. That’s what’ll help you make crucial sense and powerful music as time passes, giving you the skills that
may also keep you alive, creatively and physically. The failure of so many of rock’s artists to outlive their expiration date of a few years, make more than a few great albums and avoid water treading, or worse, I felt was due to the misfit nature of those drawn to the profession. These were strong, addictive personalities, fired by compulsion, narcissism, license, passion and an inbred entitlement,
all slammed over a world of fear, hunger and insecurity. That’s a Molotov cocktail of confusion that can leave you unable to make, or resistant to making, the leap of consciousness a life in the field demands. After first contact knocks you on your ass, you’d better have a plan, for some preparedness and personal development will be required if you expect to hang around any longer than your fifteen
minutes.

Now, some guys’ five minutes are worth other guys’ fifty years, and while burning out in one brilliant supernova will send record sales through the roof, leave you living fast, dying young, leaving a beautiful corpse, there
is
something to be said for living. Personally, I like my gods old, grizzled and
here
. I’ll take Dylan; the pirate raiding party of the Stones; the hope-I-get-very-old-before-I-die,
present live power of the Who; a fat, still-mesmerizing-until-his-death Brando—they all suit me over the alternative. I would’ve liked to have seen that last Michael Jackson show, a seventy-year-old Elvis reinventing and relishing in his talents, where Jimi Hendrix might’ve next taken the electric guitar, Keith Moon, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and all the others whose untimely deaths
and lost talents stole
something from the music I love, living on, enjoying the blessings of their gifts and their audience’s regard. Aging is scary but fascinating, and great talent morphs in strange and often enlightening ways. Plus, to those you’ve received so much from, so much joy, knowledge and inspiration, you wish life, happiness and peace. These aren’t easy to come by.

Youth and death
have always been an intoxicating combination for the myth makers left amongst the living. And dangerous, even violent, self-loathing has long been an essential ingredient in the fires of transformation. When the “new self” burns to life, the twins of great control
and
recklessness are immutably linked. It’s what makes life interesting. The high tension between these two forces often makes a performer
fascinating and fun to watch, but also a white-cross highway marker. Here, many who’ve come this way have burned out hard or died. The rock death cult is well loved and chronicled in literature and music, but in practice, there ain’t much in it for the singer and his song, except a good life unlived, lovers and children left behind, and a six-foot-deep hole in the ground. The exit in a blaze
of glory is bullshit.

Now, if you’re not one of the handful of musical revolutionaries—and I was not—you naturally set your sights on something different. In a transient field, I was suited for the long haul. I had years of study behind me; I was physically built to endure and by disposition was not an edge dweller. I was interested in what I might accomplish over a lifetime of music making,
so assumption number one is you are going to keep breathing. In my business, the above case studies prove, no matter who you are, that’s not as easy as it sounds.

Enter the king (Small “k”)

Jon Landau was the first person I met who had a language for discussing these ideas and the life of the mind. He had the rabid fan’s pure love of music and musicians while retaining his critic’s ability to
step back and analyze the
very thing he loved. In Jon, one impulse did not dampen the other. He was a natural, and together we shared a belief in the bedrock values of musicianship, skill, the joy of hard work and the methodical application of one’s talents. These things had resulted in some of our favorite records. Muscle Shoals, Motown and the Beatles’ early recordings showed how revolutionary
music could flow from a down-home but disciplined studio approach. That was our plan and who we were.

Jon and I related both as conspiratorial music fans and as young men in search of something. Jon would serve me as a friend and mentor, someone who’d been exposed to and held information I felt would augment my creativity and deepen the truth seeking I was trying to make a part of my music. We
also had that instant chemical connection that says, “I know you.” Jon was better educated than most of my homeboys. I was interested in doing my job better and being great. Not good . . . great. Whatever that took, I was in. Now, if you don’t have the raw talent, you can’t will yourself there. But if you have the talent, then will, ambition and the determination to expose yourself to new thoughts,
counterargument, new influences, will strengthen and fortify your work, driving you closer to home.

In the early days of our relationship, I remember visiting Jon’s apartment in New York. We talked music and played records for hours. It was the same kind of intense connection I had with Steve . . . but different. In 1974, I was a young and developing musician. I was interested in forefathers,
artist brothers in arms, people who’d thought like this who’d come before me. Jon knew who and where they were, in books, in films and in music. It was all very casual, just friends talking and throwing around ideas about the things that inspired them, moved them, late-night conversations about the things that opened up your world and made you hunger for life. I was moving off my first two records
and already developing a new voice. I’d begun to pare down my lyrical style. When we began to work on
Born to Run
together, Jon followed suit with the music. He was a very astute arranger and editor
who was particularly excellent at shaping the bottom of the record, the bass and drums. He guarded against overplaying and guided our record toward a more streamlined sound. I was ready to give up
some eclecticness and looseness, some of the street party, for a tighter punch to the gut. We simplified the basic tracks so we could stack up dense layers of sound without lapsing into sonic chaos. It made
Born to Run
simultaneously steeped in rock history and modern. We made dense, dramatic rock ’n’ roll.
Born to Run
is his greatest production work on one of my greatest records.

Above and beyond
production, Jon was the latest in a long line of fans, friends and freaks who subbed as a papa figure. It was a lifetime project, finding someone to pick up the slack for my MIA old man. It was a big and unfair burden to lay on anyone, but that didn’t stop me.
Somebody
had to do it. I think Jon needed something himself at that point. He was coming off a debilitating illness, a long hospital stay
and a painful divorce. I was a good comrade, perhaps the physical embodiment of some part of his rock ’n’ roll dream, and I aided his own development in subtle ways. He’d already produced the MC5’s
Back in the USA
; I presented Jon with a venue to continue the hands-on application of his own talents, and those talents in turn made me a more effective and probing songwriter and musician.