I didn’t understand it at the time. Now, I realize he was reaching for something new. A theme for the album he couldn’t articulate. He was on a roll, and he was going to see where it led.
He was so determined to find a new identity, he began to separate the songs by genre, Art lyrics over here, Pop lyrics over there. No one had ever made that distinction before, and I felt strongly (and wrongly, as it turned out) that it was a mistake.
Songs got discarded, including some of the best ones. There was an entire album of Pop Rock greatness that was shelved for decades, finally emerging on collections of unreleased material and deluxe reissues like Tracks, The Promise, and The Ties That Bind.
Every outtake a lost argument.
Looking back, it’s obvious now that any song resembling a love song or a Pop song wouldn’t have made any sense.
With one exception. Early on, we had worked on a song called “Because the Night.” It was a different kind of love song, something special, something darker because of its minor key. We spent far more time on it than any other song, and I contributed considerably to the tricky arrangement. I thought it would be our breakthrough.
One day, when Bruce and Jon went to talk, Jimmy motioned to me. “I want you to hear something,” he said. I followed him down the hallway and he put me in the Producer’s chair. And on came my arrangement of “Because the Night,” sung by Patti Smith. That’s how I found out it wasn’t going on our record. A week’s worth of work!
I was happy for Jimmy. The minute I stopped wanting to kill him.
Bruce did what he had to do. And you have to respect the discipline required to throw away songs other artists would build their careers on.
But here’s the thing. Bruce didn’t just throw away great songs. He changed his entire persona. Born to Run, the culmination of his first three albums, not only yielded his signature song but established what should have been his lifetime identity.
The Jersey kid, the ragamuffin rebel underdog, crossing the river and conquering the big city, saving the girl on the back of his motorcycle and riding off to…
Well, it was all romantic fiction.
The only remotely autobiographical song, “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” immortalized his relationship with Clarence and fantasized conquering the Big City! Which hadn’t happened yet.
Bruce had painstakingly constructed an identity over the previous three years… and then realized he couldn’t live there.
Born to Run had been an album about hope in the midst of despair, about escaping a dead-end life. It was all there in the last line of “Thunder Road”: “It’s a town full of losers / And I’m pulling out of here to win.”
On Darkness, Bruce realized that escape was impossible, that he had been running from himself.
He decided to stay and fight.
To confront reality. Yes, the average working life was a struggle, but instead of denying his connection to it, he would stand with the working class. He would speak for them. It might have been a town full of losers, but it wasn’t their fault. The game was rigged against them. He was gonna even up the odds.
Darkness was about Bruce accepting that he was his father’s son and winning one fight for him. It’s a premise I would revisit with the Jukes on “All I Needed Was You,” a song I wrote about Johnny and his father based on Somebody Up There Likes Me.
The entire setting would flip from Born to Run to Darkness. From urban / suburban to rural / small town.
Throwing away songs? Try throwing away an entire identity! Try throwing away success! Every entertainer dreams of an audience defining you and liking you. When it happens, you wrap your arms around that miracle, embrace it with all your might, and pray it lasts forever.
It takes some big balls to say, Thank you, folks, I know I asked you to fall in love in with this guy I introduced you to, but I’m still evolving. We’re making a U-turn here, and I hope you follow.
I realize now the gestation was so difficult because in many ways, Darkness on the Edge of Town was Bruce’s first true album.
The first three albums were development in public. Good as they were (and Born to Run was magnificent), the identity he found on Darkness remained the core of his being from then on.
That’s what all those long conversations with Jon Landau were all about, I bet.
But could that same meaningful conversation take place with thousands of strangers? We were about to find out.
Darkness was the beginning of a new template. Say it with the record, sell it with the tour.
From that moment on, we would never again go onstage without the intention of saying something. Bruce made sure the shows engaged the entire spectrum of emotions, from confidence to confession, catharsis to comedy, and all of it entertaining. And the soundtrack to that epic movie included a big part of the history of Rock every night.
Those shows required a support system that began with the management of Jon Landau and Barbara Carr and the crew, including exceptional members like Marc Brickman and George Travis.
But the stage was the front line. That was where the battle was waged, where we won or lost, where our job was to inspire and motivate and convince the masses that Rock was more than entertainment.
And we did.
We felt for the first time, after a few false starts, we were in sight of actually becoming Rock stars, which gave the tour a new intensity. After years of being off the road, we were like seven lions released from captivity.
Before that, we were still very much in the bar-band tradition, and graduating to Rock star meant new responsibilities, including finding a signature look, Rock and fashion being married from the beginning.
I had recently seen a triple feature of Sergio Leone’s classic spaghetti Westerns and thought, That’s it! I had a full-length duster made. No one had ever used that look in a Rock show.
In Saint Paul, the Promoter told me that a young local musician who had just released his debut album was at the show. The name made an impression: Prince. He left before I had a chance to meet him, but you know he was taking notes on my coat!
Every night, Bruce balanced out the darkness of the record with his own exploding exuberance. We transformed “Prove It All Night” into a two-guitar, show-stopping rave-up, among other things. The shows were marathons of ferocity and determination, sometimes stretching past the four-hour mark.
Radio had abandoned us, the industry had forgotten us, and the press had moved on, but we were gonna make sure you remembered that live show for the rest of your life.
Cocaine may have helped keep me going at first, during those months when I had to fly home from the Darkness Tour to record the Jukes’ third album, Hearts of Stone, but ultimately the drugs started to burn me out.
The third Jukes record continued my evolution of the Rock and Soul hybrid, especially in my writing. I managed seven tracks before I fried, but they were good ones. My influences were beginning to become more integrated, and my songs felt like something new. Even though I was still recording in the ’70s and hated the studio I was told had a great room sound but didn’t.
I followed the pattern I used on This Time It’s for Real by opening with an autobiographical song, “Got to Be a Better Way Home.” Funny how the story went from “Here we come, breaking all the rules, and we’re gonna win anyway” to “Geezus Fuck, the music business really sucks!” over just one year on the road. Musically it was pure Otis Redding.
“I Played the Fool” was all Smokey.
“Take It Inside” borrowed a bit of the Animals but was mostly original, as was “Next to You,” which drew on Sam and Dave and the Temptations.
“This Time Baby’s Gone for Good” was… Gene Pitney meets the Shangri-Las with a variation on a Townshend lyric and a Beatles bridge?
“Trapped Again,” a fave I would eventually use myself, was a nod to blaxploitation. Johnny had the title, Bruce picked up a guitar and sang the chorus spontaneously, I did the rest.
Finally, there was “Lig
ht Don’t Shine.”
The other autobiographical number, along with the opener.
That is one fucking depressing song.
Self-pity personified.
I was feeling abandoned by everybody. It could have been the drugs taking their toll, but there was more. Popovich had left to start his own label, Cleveland International Records. Lennie Petze, who had taken over, didn’t have the faith. And the big boss, Ron Alexenburg, had his own problems, with his life being threatened by black activists who blamed him for the Jacksons leaving Motown for Epic.
I don’t think I realized until that moment how important Steve Popovich had been as a supporter of our whole thing. Who else would have encouraged us to include ’60s artists, a completely unfashionable thing to do?
The song reflected my first musical manifestation of unrequited infatuation. After wanting to be in the business my whole life, the business was not returning my love. I needed some commercial success to propel my dreams to the next level. But I kept getting stuck at first base.
Bruce gave me two final songs, “Talk to Me” and “Hearts of Stone,” which I made the title track because it summed up the central emotion of the album. (My first thought for the album title was Broken Hearts of Stone, but Bruce thought it was too negative, so I left it more vague.)
The Jukes were ready to rerecord Bruce’s songs, which we had cut with the E Street Band, but the budget was gone. Amazing how we went through $250,000 per album without a second thought in those days. We make fifty albums for that price at Wicked Cool Records these days. Literally fifty.
So I said fuck it and kept the E Street Band tracks for those two songs. We were one big family anyway, and since the Jukes were between drummers, Max was already playing drums on the album.
Thirty years later we would complete the circle when I gave the tapes to Bruce’s Engineer, who took my horns off “Talk to Me” and put them back on his vocal version for The Promise.
Hearts of Stone ended up being our most acclaimed album. The Jukes were inches away from breaking through.
But there were obstacles.
The band got very little airplay because Rock radio, having discovered that profit could result from consistency, introduced into Paradise a virus called consultants. The first symptom of this virus was deciding that no bands with horns would be played on FM Rock stations.
Blood, Sweat, & Tears and Chicago didn’t have to worry because they made their living in the Pop world, on AM radio. But the Jukes were Rock and Soul, which meant we needed FM radio, which meant we were fucked.
The good news was that even without airplay, we had gotten to the point where we were grossing a million dollars a year on the road. The Godfather was proud of that. I foolishly didn’t take any commission as Manager, which I totally deserved, wanting Johnny and the band to make what they could.
But the lack of label support took its toll. After three increasingly acclaimed records, with one of the great live shows in the business, Epic dropped the Jukes to concentrate on Boston, the Jacksons, and “Play That Funky Music, White Boy!”
It was hard to blame them.
But I managed.
Still, Hearts of Stone had set the band up nicely for a new record deal, and it seemed like I might get back what I had put in.
At that point, Bruce wanted me with him in a hotel in New York while the Darkness drama unfolded, so I had no bills. Everything I made went into the Jukes, and when you added in the management commissions not taken, I was owed a couple hundred grand by then.
Since I hadn’t been able to make up my mind on a Manager, I thought the safe thing for the band, and the safest way to get my money back, was to give the band to someone I could really trust, my personal lawyer. That way I could stay involved for management and production advice.
They made a nice new deal and took the money and ran.
I let it go but stayed pissed off for about fifteen years until the Better Days reunion in the ’90s.
Which brings up the subject of the great train robberies of Rock. Here are three:
1. It remains one of the great sources of wonderment how Allen Klein ended up owning the first ten Rolling Stones albums. I asked Peter Parcher, who was involved, to explain it to me. He did, in great detail. I still don’t get it.
2. The Animals got their first two singles from Bob Dylan’s debut album. “Baby Let Me Take You Home” was derived from “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” (a folk song credited to Eric Von Schmidt but actually written by Reverend Gary Davis, Blind Boy Fuller, or who knows who). And then there was “House of the Rising Sun,” which was public domain, which means whoever adapted or arranged it got the publishing royalties. Because there wasn’t room for all the band’s signatures, only keyboard player Alan Price’s name was on the record. When the song became a worldwide hit, Price took the cash and split!
3. Jack Ely, the lead singer of the Kingsmen, sang the classic version of “Louie Louie.” Meanwhile, the mother of Lynn Easton, the drummer, registered the band’s name. For herself. As the record hit, Easton declared himself the lead singer and Ely and guitar player Mike Mitchell quit. Easton is the only one anyone has ever seen perform it, and he didn’t sing it.
Like Nick Tosches said, showbiz—the dirty business of dreams.
We closed out 1978 still on the road with Darkness, still fighting for our lives onstage.
We really became a band on that tour. Longevity, if you can survive it, brings unexpected rewards. That’s why bands should stay together. It’s not just talent, it’s loyalty and, over time, history. Four of us originals left.
You can maybe find the talent. You can probably buy the loyalty. But you can’t replace the history. And believe me, when it’s a bad night—tough conditions, new audience, rainy and cold—or even a particularly good one, you don’t want to look to your left and see a gun for hire.
You want to see me.
thirteen
Baptism
(1979–1980)
We essentially do three things. We learn, we teach, we practice our craft. Any day we do all three of those things is a good day.
—THE UNWRITTEN BOOK
The first time I quit the E Street Band was in 1979, just as The River sessions were beginning.
We were sitting on amplifiers in Studio A at the Power Station, Bruce and me.
“Listen,” I said. “I know your capacity to withstand suffering is infinite. And the songs keep getting better and better. But I believe in something called quality of life. For me the journey is as important as the destination. I can’t do this thing again. You don’t need me around.”
He thought for a minute and said, “Produce it with me.”
Just like that. Maybe he had it in mind already.
“For real?” I said.
“For real,” he said.
He knew I was a band guy, and it was time to make a band record. For real. And that’s what we did.
The River started the same way as Darkness, with the band working out material at Bruce’s house in Holmdel. He would come in every day with ideas, sometimes just a chorus and a groove, sometimes a verse, rarely more than that.
One of my gifts is the ability to finish songs other people start. Give me thirty seconds and I can hear the whole thing. As satisfying and important as writing can be, my favorite craft is still Arranging.
I won’t bore you too much, skip ahead if you want to, but I’ll do a quick summary of the four aspects of Arranging.
The configuration of a song. This runs dangerously close to the grey area of composition. Do you repeat a verse? Double the chorus? Add a bridge? A solo? Where do you put them? Do you modulate to add the element of audio surprise?
Choosing which instruments to use. Does a song need an organ? Which kind? B-3? Farfisa? An acoustic guitar? Doubling the electrics? Congas? Tambourine?
What parts do individual rhythm instruments play on the basic track? What’s the bass drum beat? The bass line? Should the piano play eighth no
tes in the chorus? How much distortion should the guitar have?
And the typical horn and string charts.
I loved it all. I sang or played the parts, since like most Rock musicians I don’t read or write music.
I took the rough sketches and fed back a bunch of ideas, many of which Bruce used. At worst, my suggestions stimulated another round of ideas. Incredible as it seems, he maintained this pace for months at a time, bringing in three or four new ideas a day.
One day at rehearsal, he played a circular chord pattern in a medium groove. We all fell in. He told Danny to play the Four Seasons riff on the glockenspiel (from “Dawn”) and started singing, “Everybody’s got a hungry heart.”
Then he got his daily Jon call. Everybody was tired, and the call usually meant the day was over. (They’re probably still talking right now!) But there was something about the groove. “Let’s keep it going,” I said.
We got it cooking, and when Bruce came back he was a bit surprised that we were still there and still jamming on what he must have felt was just another chord change.
It was more than that. It was a hook, part of a chorus, and a title. Half the battle, at least. There was something about that phrase, “everybody’s got a hungry heart,” that felt like the perfect marriage of the personal and the universal. I wasn’t going to let it get away. Bruce liked to finish some of the day’s songs as homework. “Hey,” I said. “Find a few more words for that baby.”
As we moved from rehearsal to studio, I stayed fixated on the sound of the record. I had finally figured out why virtually all the drums of the ’50s and ’60s sounded great and why they all sucked in the ’70s.
It began with the way drums were tuned. The older drummers took lessons from jazz drummers, who knew how to tune their drums, but the craft was in the process of being lost.
Then came the way they were struck. Older drummers played with a lighter touch, left wrist up, which allowed the wrist to snap and thereby pop the loosely tuned snares and make them resonate. What most Rock drummers didn’t understand was that the harder they hit the snare drum, the smaller it sounds.
Unrequited Infatuations Page 13