by Jeff Burger
You have to remember that it ain’t easy to commute between Asbury Park and the Cafe Wha? down in the Village and hang onto your sanity. And it takes a lot of guts to blow your record advance on putting together a band—a band that Bruce calls “a really spacey bunch of guys … but a pretty regular band.” There’s been only one personnel change in two years, Ernest “Boom” Carter having replaced Vini Lopez on drums.
“Vini’d been around for years,” Bruce qualifies vaguely. “There’d been various pressures … it was a difficult decision to make.”
In truth, Asbury Park had a lot to do with the feel of the first album. “Jersey’s a dumpy joint,” Springsteen had said. “I mean it’s OK, it’s home, but every place is a dump.”
“Every Syllable Adds Something to His Ultimate Goal”
“Springsteen does it all. He’s a rock-and-roll punk, a Latin street poet, a ballet dancer, an actor, a poet joker, a bar-band leader, hot-shit rhythm guitar player, extraordinary singer, and a truly great rock-and-roll composer. He leads a band as if he’s been doing it forever … Bruce Springsteen is a wonder to look at: Skinny, dressed like a reject from Sha Na Na, he parades in front of his all-star rhythm band like a cross between Chuck Berry, early Bob Dylan, and Marlon Brando. Every gesture, every syllable, adds something to his ultimate goal—to liberate our spirit while he liberates his by baring his soul through his music.” Another sizable chunk from Jon Landau’s Rolling Stone review [As noted earlier, this was actually from Boston’s Real Paper. —Ed.] that pretty much sums up the impact of a Springsteen show. But having looked at the lyrics, some qualifications of the musicians in the band.
Bruce looks as if he’s appeared out of thin air, but he’s a regular old-timer and he was just a straightforward rhythm guitarist in a band before coming out as a front man. He led a ten-piece in the bars and rough houses of New Jersey, and it was an experience that ultimately brought him down. But in the last and best bar band, he had built up quite a following in the Southern states. “Over about four years, I played mostly down South—for some reason I got popular around Virginia, Tennessee, and Carolina, and I played in a lotta different towns with the ten-piece band.”
His band today may lack the sophistication of Van Morrison or Tim Buckley, but the versatility is indisputable. A longtime admirer of Bruce’s, watching the Georgetown gig and taking note of the amorphous nature of his songs, was moved to comment that he’d never heard Springsteen play or sing a song the same way twice. “New York City Serenade” has changed beyond belief while “Kitty’s Back” (one of the best kinetic compositions) was stretched across a super-long embellished piano solo from David Sancious.
“There was more of the band in the second album and the songs were written more in the way I wanted to write, but I change the arrangements all the time in order to present the material best and to suit the style of the band. I just try to update the arrangements a bit to keep everyone interested. ‘Sandy,’ for instance. I like the way it is on the record, but it was entirely different right up until the night I recorded it and then I changed it.”
For this next album, Bruce plans to incorporate chick singers and horns. He would do the same onstage but for the economics of it all.
The road has really taken its toll on Springsteen’s health. When I’d seen him in Washington he’d been bemoaning the lack of good food and swigging cough mixture from a bottle. Some months later, talking to him on the phone to New Jersey, he could find little cause for optimism. The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, far more of an energy, band-participation album, he said, had generally been better received and sold in larger quantities than the first album, although Peter Philbin reckons the composition already shows signs of him being sucked away from his native environment.
Technically, it’s a far better album. The tracks are longer and go through more mood changes, and yet it doesn’t reveal the same highs that the first had, though on reflection I think it would have been impossible to paint as vivid a picture as Springsteen had managed first time around. In the light of this, the lyrics on the second album lack the same monolithic grace as the first; no further qualification necessary—just cop a listen to the finished product.
“I’m still fooling with the words for the new single, but I think it’ll be good,” said Springsteen, taking up the story once again. “I’ve written a lot of stuff for the new album, but when I get into the studio I’ll have a clear picture—but it’s a different assortment of material and most of it relates pretty much not to touring or playing in a band because we haven’t played much at all this summer—but lately I’ve been getting a rush to write new songs and I’ve got quite a few, some short and some long.”
Mike Appel will again be producing. “I haven’t met anyone else who understands the situation any better and he’s very involved; besides, I don’t like too many outside people involved. It just gets too impersonal. That’s why I never pick session musicians.”
He believes his band is improving and tightening all the time, but as to whether his next album will outsell the previous two he’s reluctant to say. “I do sell records … but real slow and not many … about five hundred or a thousand each week. I don’t think too many people listen to reviews and articles with regard to spending the bucks.”
He is particularly eager to tour his current band in Britain before the lineup changes—and changes are very much in the cards. “It’s a very open situation right now. I’m definitely going to add people, possibly a horn section and people who can double on instruments like a violin and trumpet maybe.”
“Rents Are Due and Alimony and We Just Don’t Have the Money”
At last, Bruce Springsteen realizes he is on the verge of a breakthrough, and by constant touring he has managed to “erase false images that people have.”
But on a serious note, he underlines his financial problem. “I’d like to get out of this situation where I haven’t paid the band for three weeks. Rents are due and alimony and we just don’t have the money. At this stage of the game, it’s really a shame, and I’d just like to get some income because in the last two years we’ve just managed to make ends meet and sometimes we don’t. So we’re at the lowest we’ve ever been right now, and if we don’t play every week we don’t have money … it’s as easy as that.”
But he clearly visualizes the theme of his third album in the light of the first and second. “Those were two very different albums,” he appraises. “The second is more popular and it’s sold more—I guess it’s more musical, but the first one has a certain something for me. I tended to do two totally different things—the first album was a very radical album whereas the second wasn’t quite so much. I’m surprised it didn’t do better than it did because it sounded very commercial to me. This new album will possibly be something of a balance between the two—I’ll try and hit somewhere between.”
There we have it then. Bruce Springsteen, the city punk with a disparate bunch of bar boys he calls his band. Just a bunch of lost souls striving to recover and release theirs through the music, or as [American singer] Jimmy Spheeris once described his own urban paranoia, like a “surfer boy stranded with city sand in my shoes.”
But for all his shambolic appearance, weird stage drawl that makes him relatively unintelligible, Bruce Springsteen has used the legacy of the fifties more comprehensively than anyone, from his rough, tough R&B approach to the vivid documentation of his experiences. Maybe he is Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, and James Dean all rolled into one, but if that’s true then there’s also a lotta James Brown and Gary Bonds tucked in there, too.
LOST IN THE FLOOD
PAUL WILLIAMS | October 13, 1974, Long Branch, New Jersey
Paul Williams played a major role in the development of rock criticism. While he was still a college student at Swarthmore, before the advent of Rolling Stone or Creem, he founded Craw-ddaddy!, America’s first magazine of rock criticism. Bruce Springsteen was among the early regular readers of the publication, which f
eatured many of the writers who came to dominate the field, including Jon Landau, who went on to become Springsteen’s manager and coproducer.
Williams may have been nearly as important to Springsteen’s career as he has been to rock journalism. He praised the singer’s work early on and was one of a handful of critics who helped keep his career alive until the masses caught on to just how much he had to offer.
Williams, who left Crawdaddy! in 1968, spent weeks on tour with Springsteen in 1973 and 1974, working on an article for New Times magazine, the national biweekly that folded in 1979. As part of this work, Williams interviewed Springsteen on October 13, 1974, in the singer’s New Jersey apartment.
The piece never ran in New Times. The book Backstreets: Springsteen: The Man and His Music, which published the interview fifteen years later, quotes Williams as saying that the magazine nixed the article because the editors “weren’t sure anybody would be interested in Bruce.”
The conversation New Times passed on offers a fascinating glimpse of the young Springsteen. His love of rock and roll comes across loud and clear in his discussion of his tastes and influences. So does his pride in his own work, when he recites lyrics from “Jungleland,” which would be a highlight of 1975’s Born to Run.
The interview also conveys his circumstances at the time, which were dramatically different from what they would be even a year later. Springsteen repeated to Williams what he’d said to me about not owning a record player. He also complained about his debts and vowed never to play for large audiences. —Ed.
Paul Williams: What Dylan influenced you musically?
Bruce Springsteen: In 1968, I was into John Wesley Harding. I never listened to anything after John Wesley Harding. I listened to Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61, Blonde on Blonde. That’s it. I never had his early albums and to this day I don’t have them, and I never had his later albums. I might have heard them once, though. There was only a short period of time when I related, there was only that period when he was important to me, you know, where he was giving me what I needed. That was it.
PW: That was really true for a lot of people.
BS: Yeah, it was the big three. I never was really into him until I heard “Like a Rolling Stone” on the radio, because it was a hit. FM radio at the time was just beginning, but even if there was FM at the time, I never had an FM radio. In 1965 I was like fifteen and there were no kids fifteen who were into folk music. There had been a folk boom, but it was generally a college thing. There was really no way of knowing because AM radio was really an incredible must in those days. The one thing I dug about those albums was—I was never really into the folk or acoustic music thing—I dug the sound. Before I listened to what was happening in the song, you had the chorus and you had the band and it had incredible sound and that was what got me.
PW: What about the Stones?
BS: Yeah, I was into the Stones. I dug the first few Stones albums, the first three or four maybe. After that I haven’t heard any of it lately except the singles, “Tumbling Dice” and stuff like that—it was great. There was December’s Children and Aftermath …
PW: And Between the Buttons and …
BS: Between the Buttons was when I started to lose contact with the Stones. It was right around there. What came after Between the Buttons?
PW: First Their Satanic Majesties, then Let It Bleed …
BS: See, I never had a record player for years and years. It was a space from when my parents moved out west and I started to live by myself, from when I was seventeen until I was twenty-four, and I never had a record player. So it was like I never heard any albums that came out after, like ’67 [laughs]. And I was never a social person who went over to other people’s houses and got loaded and listened to records—I never did that. And I didn’t have an FM radio, so I never heard anything. From that time on, from around ’67 until just recently when I got a record player, I lived with Diane [Rosito] and she had an old beat-up one that only old records sounded good on. So that’s all I played. Those old Fats Domino records, they sounded great on it. If they were trashed, they sounded terrific. A lot of those acts lost what was important after they could really be heard—it just didn’t hold. They didn’t seem to be able to go further and further. They made their statement. They’d make the same statement every record, basically, without elaborating that much on it.
PW: How about the Yardbirds? Did you listen to them?
BS: Oh yeah. I listened to the Yardbirds’ first two albums. And the Zombies, all those groups. And Them.
PW: That’s funny for the people who talk about your Van Morrison influence, that it really came from the Them records.
BS: Yeah, that was the stuff I liked. There’s some great stuff on those records. When he was doing stuff like [James Brown’s] “Out-a-Sight.”
PW: But mostly your contact has been through jukeboxes and AM radio?
BS: I guess, yeah. I stopped listening to AM radio, too, because it got really trashy and I didn’t have a car. I got a classic example right here [reaches down and picks up a record]. You’ve got your Andy Kim records.
PW: And you’ve got stuff like “The Night Chicago Died.” Those are the same guys who wrote “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero.”
BS: Oh God. If somebody shot those guys, there’s not a jury in the land that would find them guilty [laughs].
PW: But it was like that in the sixties prior to the Beach Boys.
BS: Yeah, a wasteland.
PW: Yeah, “Poetry in Motion.” But maybe there’s hope. It’s all cyclical. I sometimes wonder, though, if what the record business is like these days could stop things from happening. I mean at least on the radio.
BS: Only to a certain degree. I don’t want to get into specifics because I know some things that have been done to me. I don’t want to sound like—I don’t want to whine—but at least to a degree they can’t stop you from going out there and playing every night. They can’t stop you from being good if you’ve got it. They can keep it off the radio. They can make sure it gets little airplay, or no airplay, which, really, it hurts you.
Like look at us: We’ve been going for two years and the second record is at seventy thousand. That’s nothing.
That really is nothing. That’s zero. It depends on who they’re dealing with, who they’re messing with. It depends on the person. It’s like anything—some people can be stopped and other people can’t be stopped. It’s just like me—I can’t stop, they can’t make me stop ever, because I can’t stop. It’s like once you stop, that’s it—I don’t know what I’d do. But it’s like that, though—if you’re dealing with people who say, “Ah, hell, I gotta go back to hanging wallpaper,” or who say, “Ah, I’m gonna go back to college and forget this stuff”—that’s what people always say—“I don’t know if I want to play or if I want to get married.” If you have to decide, then the answer is don’t do it. If you have a choice, then the answer is no, don’t do it. If you have a choice, then the answer is no. I like to use the term “the record company” because they always get painted as the bad guys. But the pressures of the business are powerless in the face of what is real.
It’s like what happens when they push you to make a hit single. Then you get a hit and they push you to go on the road because now you can make ten thousand dollars a night and you might only be able to make ten dollars a night five years from now. It happens to a lot of people, most people. Then you get out on the road and you can’t write anymore, and then you can’t figure out what the hell else is happening besides.
What happens is there are certain realities that force you into things right now. We got a band; we got a blue bus; we got a sound man; we got an office in New York. Those are the sort of things that influence my decisions. We have to play, because if we don’t everything falls apart. We don’t make any money off records. We have to go out and play every week, as much as we can. If not, nobody gets paid. In order to maintain and raise the quality of what we’re doing, we gotta play all the
time.
PW: At this point you’re on salary?
BS: Yeah.
PW: And is that it? Does everything else go back into it?
BS: Everything else pays for the blue bus and everything else.
PW: And you got debts, I bet?
BS: Oh, we owe like a mint.
PW: Some people don’t realize that the economic remuneration at this point is like working in an office.
BS: At best. Diane came in and said, “Oh, this is terrific. I just got a raise working at my newspaper job in Boston.” She said, “Now I’ll be getting this much.” And I realized that was how much I was making. There’s no money saved at all. You can’t sell eighty thousand records and have any money saved. Unless you’re totally by yourself and you’re your own manager. Then you can make a thousand dollars and stick it all in your own pocket and go home and put some in the bank. But when you’re trying to do what we’re trying to do, there’s no way.
PW: The thing that bothers me, that you seem to have gotten around, is that there seems to be nowhere to play except arenas, new acts or old acts.
BS: What you gotta do is, like … I did the Chicago tour. I did that tour because I had never played big places. And I said, “I ain’t gonna say no because I don’t know what they’re like.” So we went and played it, about fourteen nights in a row. I went crazy—I went insane during that tour. It was the worst state of mind I’ve ever been in, I think, and just because of the playing conditions for our band. The best part of the tour was the guys in Chicago—they are great guys. They are really, really real. But I couldn’t play those big places. It had nothing to do with anything, but I couldn’t do it. It had nothing to do with anything that had anything to do with me, those big arenas. So I won’t go to those places again. That was it. Usually we won’t play anyplace over three thousand—that’s the highest we want to do. We don’t want to get any bigger. And that’s even too big.