E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (18 page)

Yet Landau and Springsteen remained united in their primary goal, “To make the greatest rock & roll record ever made.” All they needed was the know-how. But as Bruce admitted in 1977, “We [soon] reached a point where what we knew wasn’t enough.” It took an outside voice, that of Little Steven, to finally call a spade a spade, and not a long
blunt instrument: “I didn’t have the sophistication to be diplomatic…[To me], it was [just] like, ‘This is not working.’” Appel gamely admits, “Miami Steve stepped in and…gave the record order. They needed direction and he gave it to them. There was finally a way out. It might not have been the best way, but it was a way out. He didn’t bring in tasteful riffs—or at least [not] in my mind…—but he got them done.”

When on May 5 Springsteen brought in a sassy new song, “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out,” it was Van Zandt who after multiple incomplete takes told the horn musicians to throw away their charts, and then simply hummed them the part he suggested they play. Bruce loved it. Nor were the horns the only addition to the E Street sound Springsteen was keen to introduce. Suki may have flown the coop, but all his previous talk of strings, horns, violins &c. wasn’t just idle chatter. Days were spent working on a string arrangement for “Jungleland.” Ditto for “Backstreets,” another mini-movie where Springsteen initially equated strings with capturing the cosmos. Yet every layer added seemed to only diminish its impact. How could that be?

As a result of Springsteen’s inner frustrations and generally darkening mood, what began as an album supposedly about this overwhelmingly joyous feeling, “I wanted to bring forth—a feeling of enormous exhilaration and aliveness,” began to assume a darker side; and it brought along the last few songs that completed the song-cycle. Dredged up from some deep reservoir of betrayal were songs like “Lonely Night In The Park,” “Backstreets” and “Meeting Across The River.”

Having, by his own admission, spent an enormous “amount of time…honing the lyrics” he “ended up writing most (sic) of the songs in about a three-week period…Originally, my mistake was in attempting to write
in a particular way I had written before, instead of looking to go a slightly different way…In the end, I took a different approach toward some of the lyrics in the songs. If you read them on paper, sometimes they don’t look that good, but when you hear them, they’ve got [just] the right feel. Like some of the sixties songs.”

In the 2005 DVD documentary, he revealed just how self-conscious he decided his earlier songwriting had been: “I was very aware that I was messing with classic rock & roll images that easily turn into clichés…The initial lyric [to some songs] would have been like bad B-picture, whereas the end product was supposed to be…imbued with a certain spiritual thing.” This process was rather drawn out. As he told Paul Williams in October 1974, “I work a lot on the lyrics before we record a song. I get self-conscious about them. So I change them.” Back then he had no idea he would still be working on the lyrics to “Jungleland” six months later. Only his song-notebook revealed the truth: “You would take the first page and see a line or two, and fifty pages later you’d get something close to the finished song.” (Thus, only in the studio would he come up with “Jungleland”’s coruscatingly cinematic climax: “In the tunnels uptown, the Rat’s own dream guns him down.”)

Not for the last time, the artistic process took over every waking minute. Despite his best efforts, though, very little was left over which was usable—in his eyes, anyway. He informed
Rolling Stone
in 1984, “It’s the only album where I wrote only one more song than we recorded,” presumably a reference to “Linda Let Me Be The One,” the one Record Plant outtake included on
Tracks
, and a song Landau and Springsteen set surprising store in. An adjunct to “Janey Needs A Shooter” (which was also apparently considered at one point), the song depicted an array of lost boys waiting for Linda at midnight, “Talking fast cars and chrome parts, hidden worlds and strange girls/ Empty homes, busted hearts, ending up with Linda in the dark.”

There was at least one other near miss. As Springsteen told Peter Knobler on the album’s completion, “I was going to have a song about back home on there, but I didn’t get to it…Most of the songs are about being like
nowhere
. Just being out there in the void…and trying to make heads and tails out of it, you know, trying to figure it out.” He is referring to “Lonely Night In The Park,” a song included on the first
Born To Run
sequence in early July, then yanked. This song “about home” also had its
shady side, explicated in its final verse, “And you’re thinking of making it home/ Oh, but your Mom can’t see you like this.” No wonder he informed one journalist: “All the heavy personal stuff in my songs comes from spending time further up the beach. Up there, they have a boardwalk you can run under.”

But the real deal, and affirmation of a unique vision, was “Backstreets,” a monolithic moment in modern rock that gave the album another perfectly-crafted cornerstone, and Bruce a career-defining cut. Having begun life as “Hidin’ On The River”—listed on a couple of early sequences, but for now confined to those notebooks—Bruce started “Backstreets” in earnest on April 25 1975. On the earliest known take he is looking to “blame it on that town,” no name necessary, this take also depicting nights spent “running…down the boardwalk, waiting on the corner at the lights.” Boardwalk life writ small. When she takes the only way out, the New Jersey Turnpike, he stays behind to fester in fear: “I hated you when you went away.” The gung-ho sentiments of “Thunder Road” and “Born To Run” are put in reverse. He has closed down every escape route. Originally the album-closer, it indicated the direction his songwriting was now heading in, that darkness on the edge of his hometown.

However, it was not the last song recorded for the album. This appears to have been “Meeting Across The River,” on May 28. Sometimes called “The Heist,” this was another departure for the boardwalk bard. Its characters may have stepped straight out of the grooves of
The Wild, the Innocent
, but they are now trapped in circumstances beyond their control. Perhaps for this reason, Appel loved it and pushed for its inclusion on the album, even if the track ultimately failed to achieve that requisite noirish feel.

Even with every song in the can by the end of May, they were not done, not by a long chalk. Springsteen thought being “tight, bare, [initially,] allowed us to put stuff on top of it and make it sound big, while still streamlined.” Or not. Unfortunately, he ultimately discovered, “The sound I heard in my head was not one that was physically reproducible.” Access to a superior studio, and a budget far in excess of anything to date, was having the opposite effect to the one hoped for by those to whom he was contractually bound. Appel, for one, was fast becoming convinced it was an almighty waste of money—
their
money:

By the end of June, everyone was approaching the end of their tethers, and visibly fraying at the edges. The following year Springsteen depicted the resultant ennui, describing one particular moment at the death: “I was sitting there at the piano in the studio, trying to get down the last cut, ‘She’s The One,’ and Landau’s in the booth and we’ve been at it for hours and hours. I just lean my head down on the piano. It just won’t come. And everybody’s tryin’ to tell me how to do it…The whole thing was like that.”

With a tour booked to start on July 20, things were threatening to get out of hand. He was rehearsing with the band in one studio, overdubbing a vocal to “She’s The One” in another and mixing “Jungleland” in a third. And at the end of the day he was trudging back to his midtown Holiday Inn room, where his new girlfriend was waiting not-so-patiently for her weary warrior:

This “crazy chick” was not just some Texan cowgirl, as the above quote implies. Springsteen was head over heels about the gal, whom
he
invited to New York from the Lone State. Her name was Karen Darvin (later Mrs. Todd Rundgren), and although she was initially understanding about the situation, in the end even Springsteen realized, “She was in this hotel room for hours and she was seeing me only at night…She didn’t know anybody else. So, of course, she’d get mad at me.”

It only added to the pressure of the situation until, by his own (post-therapy) admission, “I couldn’t separate the things that were frightening me from the things that were beneficial. I was feeling all of a sudden the pull of that loss of self-determination.” For a man who was all about control, such a “loss of self-determination” was bound to tear him apart. As the sessions themselves reached the pulling-teeth stage, his drive for perfection crossed over into an obsessiveness more commonly found in the local psych ward:

It was time for big decisions. Like, what to do about the strings. He wisely decided, “Once we got the guitars, I think I just wanted the thing more grittier, and the strings kinda took away some of the darkness.” But still he insisted on micro-managing every little overdub, whether it was his own guitar overdub on “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” or Clemons’ sax solo on “Jungleland,” which the Big Man had been playing nightly for the past year.

Appel, for one, was taken aback: “Clarence was always capable of doing a solo without Bruce’s instructions up to that point, but on ‘Jungleland,’ every note, Bruce was going [hand signals], note by note, until the solo was complete.” Clemons recalled this one overdub taking sixteen hours, and all the time “he was telling me, ‘More warmth, more movement, I like that note there, let’s work around that.’ We had to find those passages that go to the bone.” Losing control in his private life, Springsteen was over-obsessing at his workplace. By the end of it, he was only going back
to the hotel to sleep, further aggravating that psycho-sexual situation.

It finally came time to sequence the record. For once, there was no great surfeit of potential classics he would discard. Yet there remained dissension in the ranks. As Independence Weekend approached, Springsteen ordered Appel from the studio, preferring to construct a sequence of his and Landau’s choosing. Of course, he didn’t do this in person. He phoned Landau at five in the morning and asked him to break the news to Appel. According to Landau, “Bruce was very upset” by Appel’s intransigence. But on some things, the manager-producer simply refused to back down: