by Jeff Burger
Leaving their relationship no more or less tentative than it was when the song began, he whispers a farewell: “Goodnight, it’s all right Jane / I’m gonna meet you tomorrow night on Lover’s Lane.” Not quite sure why he is going, what he is looking for, or whether he will discover it, he adds: “We may find it out on the street tonight, baby / Or we may walk until the daylight, maybe.”
“Fourth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” similarly balances the emotions of its central character against the outer situation that helps mold them. In this vignette, some of the imagery recalls Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl,” but Bruce builds a much richer environment than does Morrison.
By the time Bruce tells Sandy that “for me, this boardwalk life’s through,” the listener has been transported by the lyrics to Asbury’s arcades, beaches, and casinos. And one perceives that, for the singer, this “carnival life on the water” is a colorful, fascinating film, but one that has become stuck at a single frame.
“I just got tired of hangin’ in them dusty arcades,” he sings, “bangin’ them pleasure machines.” And later: “That tilt-a-whirl down on the south beach drag … they kept me spinnin’, I didn’t think I’d ever get off.” When the song ends, one realizes that it has not dealt so much with the “scene” as with its main protagonist, because everything is described so completely through his eyes.
Is Bruce singing about himself here? “I don’t know,” he says, pausing for a long moment. “I’ll tell ya the truth. I really don’t want to talk about it. I really don’t want to touch on the songs at all, because I’ll screw them up. As soon as you start talking about it, you’re messing with the magic, you know?”
While he himself is reluctant to discuss his songs, Bruce seems glad that other people are beginning to do just that. “I got talking with a cop last night who knew all the music, all my tunes, and it blew my mind! You know, it was an amazing thing. He was talking about ‘Sandy’ and ‘Rosalita.’ He knew all the songs.”
Visions of stardom have been known to dance in the head of a young artist as his work starts to become popular. But, says Bruce, “I don’t think about it. I can’t get involved in that. ’Cause I learned, don’t ever expect anything. I got my hopes, you know, but my hopes are completely based in reality, in what I know I can do.”
For example? “Well, for one thing, I hope to be makin’ a little more money than I am right now. I want to be able to take care of people a little better than I can right now. ’Cause if you don’t have a sufficient amount of money where people can be comfortable, they’re always going to be sweating it out, worrying whether they’re gonna make it or not.
“That’s very hard for the people in the band, ’cause there are pressures. Guys in the group gotta pay alimony, rent, food bills. And a guy may just want to go out for the evening to relax, go to a bar or something and buy a drink, you know?
“The older people get, the harder it is for them to hang on to an unprosperous thing. Even though this is a very together band. You start thinkin’, ‘Maybe I ought to go into a different profession, fix TVs, become an electrician or something.’ You start thinking a little bit more seriously, you know.”
Does Bruce find that happening to himself? “Oh, no, not to me.” He laughs. “This is it for me, you know. I got no choice. I have to write and play. If I became an electrician tomorrow, I’d still come home at night and write songs. If you can choose, you might as well quit. But if you have to, you have to.”
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: IT’S HARD TO BE A SAINT IN THE CITY
JERRY GILBERT | August 1974, Zigzag (UK)
While Bruce Springsteen was little known in his home country in early 1974, he had made even less of a mark in Europe. Hoping to change that situation in advance of Springsteen’s first foray onto the Continent, Columbia Records offered to fly a writer for Sounds in London to the States to do a story. The assignment went to Jerry Gilbert, an editor at the newspaper, who was already a fan.
“The second Springsteen show I saw was on March 3, 1974, at Georgetown University [in Washington, DC],” Gilbert told me. “The show was held at the university’s 750-seat Gaston Hall. I think Springsteen had a throat infection, which had caused several dates to be pulled. Mike Appel stepped in to try and prevent the interview after the gig on account of Bruce’s state of health. It was around 2 AM, and it was Bruce himself who insisted on doing the interview.”
That he did is a testament to how much he liked to talk with people, or to how eager he was to promote his music, or both, because he certainly wasn’t well: “You play all the time half sick, but it got to the point where I couldn’t play piano,” he told Gilbert. “I was spitting up blood. I don’t get sick a whole lot but this year we have been. I mean, we’ve done so many gigs this past year that it just starts to collect … the fatigue.”
Despite this—and the fact that it was 2 AM—Springsteen talked enthusiastically about his recent writing and his plans. He mentioned that “The Angel” was “written in fifteen minutes and that’s one of my favorites because it’s one of the most sophisticated things I’ve written.” He said, “I want to get some girls into the band for the next album because I’ve got some good ideas which add up to more than just background vocals. But right now I don’t have the money to do it.” And as the hour grew later and the coughing continued, he sat down at the piano to play Gilbert a piece that he was in the process of completing.
Springsteen appeared healthier and just as loquacious when Gilbert talked with him again only months later for Zigzag, which at the time was a leading British fanzine. “They needed a cover story and I was a regular contributor,” he told me, “so they asked if I had any suggestions. I said I’d try calling Springsteen at home and he picked up right away. It was an extremely cathartic interview, I recall, as he sounded the demise of the E Street Band under the weight of alimony payments due by band members.”
The article finds Springsteen looking ahead to the album that became Born to Run but, as Gilbert noted, still complaining about tight finances. —Ed.
All Dressed Up and No Place to Go
“When his two-hour set ended, I could only think, ‘Can anyone really be this good? Can anyone say this much to me, can rock and roll still speak with this kind of power and glory?”
These questions, which he then went on to answer, were posed by Jon Landau in a May issue of Rolling Stone. [The review Gilbert cites actually appeared in Boston’s Real Paper on May 22. —Ed.] His five-hundred-word eulogy provided a head-and-shoulders vignette of a New Jersey street poet called Bruce Springsteen. “I racked my brains but simply can’t think of a white artist who does so many things so superbly,” went on Landau, stretching out in uncustomary fashion. “There is no one I would rather watch onstage today …” Jeeez.
Announcing the second coming of the man who first appeared from the pens of the scribes as the brother Messiah of Bob Dylan. One way and another, American critics have laid a heavy onus on Springsteen, but I guess it’s easier to live up to a placing in just about every US writer’s 1974 playlist than to efface the charlatan connotations that accolades pertaining to Dylan invariably conjure up in the eyes of the beholder.
It just so happens that I agree with all Mr. Landau’s comments, and I’m glad that he, too, can detect the power of Springsteen’s band ringing in his tired old bones just as I’m glad that Mr. Springsteen can quote dismissively that “Dylan influenced me as much as anyone, I guess … when I was fourteen maybe … but I don’t think about the comparison too much.”
A couple of years after it started, CBS’s attitude in building Springsteen into the star the critics say he already is remains bewildering. He’s never been to England and currently waits for his new single to be completed with the desperation of a man who’s flat broke, pinning his final hopes on the record, wondering whether his band will survive, and feeling fit to qualify only that he doesn’t feel he’s written AM station lyrics. When did he ever?
I’ve traveled eighteen thousand m
iles to see Springsteen twice, courtesy of CBS London, and shared my enthusiasm with other foreign journalists as the Springsteen band have disseminated waves of ecstasy across theatre auditoriums. And yet he maintains that Columbia has been constantly cool in dealing with its wonder talent.
Peter Jay Philbin, a friend of Springsteen’s long before joining CBS International press department in New York, claims that it isn’t until sales really start to look good that CBS throws the full weight of the heavy artillery into the game, and right now Springsteen may be the critics’ fave but he ain’t selling albums. All dressed up and no place to go.
“We’re at the lowest we’ve ever been right now,” he told me last month. “It means that if we don’t play every week of the year then we don’t have money. Right now, we’ve just come off the road and the guys are getting thrown out of their houses.
“Hopefully, I’ll be getting some money from Columbia and maybe with David Bowie doing some of the songs that’ll be good.
“But that’s the only problem right now … it’s sort of a shame … I’d just like to be a little more secure, that’s all,” he said in a vain attempt to make light of the problem.
Physically, Bruce Springsteen has all the hallmarks of a guy who’s spent his life being dragged through the gutter. He’s of frail build, sports a scrubby beard and matted, tousled hair, has an uneven gait (stumbles), uneven speech (mumbles). Shirttails hang beneath an old leather jacket that’s followed him around a thousand gigs and religiously been thrown from his shoulders at some point during the 120 minutes’ worth of music that his band is guaranteed to pound out whether the contract says so or not.
Such was the case at Georgetown University, Washington, in March 1974—a Jesuit college whose only claim to fame is being the centerpiece of Blatty’s Exorcist. My second visit to the Springsteen show.
The first show opens, and to my delight it belongs to John Hall’s band, Orleans. Springsteen does his couple of hours. They take a break. Orleans opens the second show and the audience bitch for an encore. Springsteen wanders onstage … the city orphan who has just canceled two gigs because he’s been throwing up blood. Homes in on his regular showstoppers, and with all that out of the way, starts pulling up these old R&B classics like “Walking the Dog” and “Let the Four Winds Blow” with total disdain of the fact that we’re living in the seventies. The show takes on a strange atmosphere that only nocturnal energy can generate, and when this spirit in the night staggers offstage, beads of sweat dripping from the huge black frame of number-one sideman Clarence Clemons, it’s way past three. In the dressing room, a grand piano awaits his call and he starts to rework a theme that he’s been trying to mold into a song.
“Many False Impressions Were Drawn”
He has this knack of being able to make himself totally unobtrusive, quietly waiting for the band to wander out into the approaching dawn before settling down to an interview with more commitment than you’d dare expect at 4:30 AM.
Springsteen emerged out of rhythm and blues and rock and roll and the whole legacy of Chuck Berry and people like Gary “U.S.” Bonds. “All those old R&B-type people—Bonds had a great feeling on all his records, a feeling that everyone was singing, you know, thirty guys all playing and singing in the studio at the same time on things like ‘Quarter to Three’ and ‘School Is Out’.”
It explains his obsession for a loose backup band with a honking sax, and the same confusion, the same party chaos, that he carries through so well in “E Street Shuffle” and more especially, “Rosalita.” As a bar musician, he had little use for lyrics that delved beyond the accepted demarcation lines of rhythm and blues sentiment. “I used to write straight rock stuff, because the situation was such that whether we were playing in a bar or in a club the general conditions and PA were so bad you had to communicate on the most basic level you could and I was just never in a position to do more.
“But after that, the ten-piece band went down to seven-piece and then five-piece and then just me, so that’s when I really started to write some different types of lyric. The thing is, I’d been fronting a band for nine years, but when I walked in to the record companies, there was just me by myself with a guitar, and from that many false impressions were drawn.”
It’s an important point, and this fact, plus Columbia’s dilatory behavior in getting Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. onto their schedules, resulted in Springsteen’s debut being about half as auspicious as it might have been. “The album was so old by the time it got released, and I write songs fast, that I was doing all kinds of different material by the time it got released.
“I mean, I like to be doing new material, but that record reflects the mood I was in at that particular time. You know, the fact of having to come into the city from where I was living, and I didn’t have a band, so it all contributed to that kind of down feel. But towards the end of the record I started pulling out of it with songs like ‘Spirit in the Night,’ which started to get into a whole different feel.”
Asbury Park was recorded at 914 Sound Studios in Blauvelt, New York. It was coproduced by Mike Appel (Springsteen’s manager) and Jim Cretecos, and featured the collective talents of Vini Lopez, Clarence Clemons, Garry Tallent, David Sancious, Harold Wheeler, and Richard Davis, of which the first four became regular members of the band and all but Lopez remain. Those are the bare facts. The album, fronted by a picture postcard of Asbury Park, painted a somber picture of city life and its victims—characters portrayed in the shadow of death. The production and some of the playing often leave room for improvement, but it is impossible to deny the power and feeling that Springsteen’s words and song structures exude, just as it’s impossible to deny the presence and strength of his imagery even when it threatens to dictate or obscure a song rather than carry it along.
Of such paranoia, Springsteen chooses to remain on the periphery and merely record it journalistically. “I can rise to an occasion … like with that album. The rest of the time I’m kind of laid back because there’s too much going on to get excited about, too many people running around crazy. I just prefer to let it go.”
In New Jersey, he prefers the incongruous … like water sports. He left the boardwalk life portrayed so vividly by Jack Nicholson in The King of Marvin Gardens and misses the rundown environment of his adolescent period, living over a drugstore or whatever it was. The road is no place to write your new album. Back in Asbury Park, things were different.
“I see these situations happening when I sing them and I know the characters well. I use them in different songs and see them in shadows. They’re probably based on people I know or else they’re flashes that just appear there. There’s a lot of activity, a whole mess of people. It’s like if you’re walking down the street, my songs are what you see, only distorted. A lot of songs were written without any music at all. It’s just that I do like to sing the words.”
Springsteen’s picture book of city street life is a nightmare vision. “My songs are supposed to be bigger than life,” he claims, but he insists he has not been blessed with any greater powers of insight than the next person.
“Jersey was so intense you couldn’t even walk down the street, so I used to go to New York and hang out in the Village mostly, but also uptown a little bit.
Greenwich Village Folk Urchin
“I was mostly by myself with no particular place to go, but sometimes I’d hang out with this other guy.”
So, paradoxically, when Springsteen made it with Columbia, it was as a Greenwich Village folk urchin. Totally out of context. “I’d written my first batch of songs, and if nothing had come of it I’d probably have been back in the bars by now,” he quipped at the time.
CBS went with “Blinded by the Light” for the single, Springsteen twisting as much distorted lyric into the meter as possible and hanging a catchy chorus at the end of each verse. A good ensemble legacy from his rock-and-roll days.
The best songs on that album, says Bruce, were those written over a
short period of time. Like the incredible suicide ballad “For You,” which remains one of Springsteen’s greatest achievements as he recounts the final minutes of life, drawing back to the final chorus with its emotive cry. “The Angel,” says Springsteen, is one of his great favorites—conceived, constructed, and completed inside of fifteen minutes. “It’s the most sophisticated thing I’ve done,” he says, referring to the sex-power-death trip of the Angel astride his chopper. He hipped up the same theme in his trilogy of death in “Lost in the Flood,” where he portrays death as a sort of macabre disappearing point.
More recently, David Bowie pulled “Growin’ Up” and “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” from the same album to record; one a pop song, the other perhaps a little too ambitious and expansive, but both preordained for Bowie; in any event, by the time Springsteen was set to record his second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, he’d ironed out all his problems. Same studio, same producers, but this time a band that had been knocked into shape on the road, largely through the experience of veteran horn player Clarence Clemons, who once worked with James Brown. [Actually Clemons did not work with Brown; instead, his first band, the Vibratones, was known for its James Brown covers. —Ed.]
“The mistake,” Springsteen reflects, “is in thinking that you are those songs,” in an obvious allusion to the self-destructive influence the presence of his ego in those songs was having. “To me, a song is a vision, a flash, and what I see is characters in situations.
“I mean, I’ve stood around carnivals at nights when they’re clearing up and I was scared [“Wild Billy’s Circus Story,” still one of the highlights of the show with Garry Tallent playing tuba and Danny Federici accordion. Just that.] As for Spanish Johnny’s situation [“Incident on 57th Street”], well, I’d never get into that kind of situation but I know people who have lived that life.”