E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band

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E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Page 5

by Clinton Heylin


  Bruce Springsteen: We auditioned at the Family Dogg, which was a well-known ballroom in San Francisco at the time. There was three bands, another band got the job and we thought we were robbed, blah blah, but we really weren’t. They were just better than us. I’d played a lot locally, and for a long time hadn’t seen anybody better than I was, and I walked into that ballroom that afternoon, there was somebody better than we were. We played a few more shows but I knew that I was going to do something else. [1999]

  In fact, Springsteen stuck with Steel Mill for a whole year more, uncertain of direction and unwilling to broach his concerns to Tinker, the band’s cheerleader-manager. When Springsteen finally revealed his doubts, the following Christmas, Tinker agreed to accompany him to California a second time. Again, the loner felt in need of a mother and child reunion. This seems to have been the occasion Springsteen described at a gig in December 1980, ten years later to the day:

  “Me and this friend of mine decided we were gonna drive across the country, it was right around the Christmastime…and we got into this little station wagon and in about three days we drove out to California…We were, like, in Arizona on Christmas night…and there’s nothing as lonely as if you’re ever out on an interstate highway on Christmas night…We got there the day after and had Christmas dinner with my folks. You always gotta go back, even if it’s just to see that it ain’t there no more for you.”

  This trip represented the first time Springsteen tried to sell himself as a solo artist. But, as he told Paul Nelson two year later, “Everything was [all] flowers, [as] if something was happening to your mind…[So] that fell apart.” He soon realized he was just another ten-a-penny troubadour: “I was worthless in California, because I had no reputation. But in New Jersey I could make that twenty dollars down at The Upstage on a Friday night.”

  Though the trip proved a bust musically, something happened in San Francisco that convinced him to change tack. However, no-one knows what. He certainly would have found the FM airwaves of San Francisco full of the latest Belfast-cowboy songs from the pen of George Ivan Morrison. Perhaps he caught one of Van the Man’s rare performances at the Fillmore West that December. Lopez, for one, is sure “he saw Van Morrison. Maybe in San Francisco…Bruce [decided], ‘We’re gonna do that.’ He came to me and he said, ‘Vin, I’m gonna stop Steel Mill. But I want you to play drums in this new thing I’m gonna get together. Gonna get Garry [Tallent] on bass, we’re gonna have horn players, I’m gonna audition girl singers.’ It just took on this different feel, Motownish, soul. Tinker didn’t like it—he believed in Steel Mill.”

  Barely twenty-one, Springsteen realized he was already running out of time. It was high time he found himself a place in modern rock by making music rooted in the previous decade. Though he once again initially insisted the new band would play only originals, this time he had dissenters in the ranks. As Garry Tallent told Musician, “When I started playing with him the idea was, ‘Strictly originals.’ And we didn’t work…We were together nine months, rehearsing in the garage, working just once in a while. Then we decided to…learn some Rolling Stones songs and some Chuck Berry songs.”

  The (initially unnamed) band still needed a place to play in order to build a new audience, the old Steel Mill audience having taken their ball and gone home. Springsteen was learning a valuable lesson: “[Having] moved from hard rock to rhythm & blues-influenced music…I began to write differently. We’d built a very large audience…[But] a lot of that audience disappeared and I couldn’t keep it going.” He was saved by a change of owners at a bar across the way from The Upstage, called The Student Prince:

  Bruce Springsteen: We started to play clubs in Jersey—no club would book us [initially]. I had to go [find] this club. I went to a club on a Saturday night and this place was empty, so this guy had nothing to lose. There was maybe ten people sleeping on the bar. We said, “Listen, we’ll come in, charge a dollar and play for the door.” It got to be a really nice scene, but still when you’re in a club which holds 150 people, if it’s packed you make $150, we had seven pieces. [1972]

  It’s a lovely little story, one Springsteen has liberally embellished over the years. However, it would appear he was not the first Shoreline scenester to see the potential of “the Prince.” The version Southside Johnny told Springsteen-zine Thunder Road had “Bruce…putting together what is known today as his Big Band, with two horns and two girl singers, and no money was coming in and nobody had any money. [Meanwhile,] Steve and I had put together the Sundance Blues Band, while Bruce went to California for a couple of weeks. It was a real good band and we played at the Student Prince and did fairly well there. And then when Bruce came back he played in the band for a while to make a little extra bread. He played rhythm guitar and we let him sing one song a night…But he dug it, and [finally] he said, ‘Let’s put together a band of everybody who doesn’t have any money and play a few dates.’”

  That short-lived ensemble was the legendary Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom, whose claim to at least local fame was two shows in mid-May, one at the Sunshine Inn, the other an open-air affair in Union, that served as open auditions for the still not fully conceived Bruce Springsteen Band. As Springsteen now says, “We had a big chorus, people’s wives and girlfriends sang…it was just an outgrowth of the little local scene.” It certainly reflected a musical grandiosity on Springsteen’s part that was never going to be economically viable. Even after the Bruce Springsteen Band itself was unveiled, it was always on a crash diet at the expense of either a horn player or a backing singer. As he later put in, mid-song, “We had a seven-piece band at the time, we had a big band and we brought the band in the first week and we played and…we split $13.75 between us, and a few guys quit, you know. The next week I was there with a six-piece band, threw some cat out, next week a five-piece band, this went on for a few weeks.”

  The winnowing process actually occupied about three and a half months, by which point the Bruce Springsteen Band essentially comprised the nucleus of the E Street Band for the next half-decade—Vini Lopez, Garry Tallent, Danny Federici, David Sancious, Steve Van Zandt—plus two girl singers, Delores Holmes and Barbara Dinkins who, according to Lopez, “came right out of the church.” In the interim, Springsteen renounced his prog-rock recidivism, to rediscover the delights of those sixties starlights that had lit his way in high school, thanks largely to his new girlfriend Diane and her Dansette:

  Bruce Springsteen: From when I was seventeen until I was twenty-four I never had a record-player. So it was like I never heard any albums that came out after ’67…I lived with Diane [Lozito] 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…I listened to the Yardbirds’ first two albums. And the Zombies, all those groups. And Them. [1974]

  He thus found himself in the summer of 1971 rediscovering the excitement of that first epiphany: “I had to go back…I started really getting into it, go[ing] back, dig[ging] out all the old singles and stuff and see[ing] what I’d missed.” (A similar, contemporary experience prompted Tom Verlaine to form a prototypical Television.) One thing he seemingly missed on its first appearance, January 26, 1967, was Stax singer Eddie Floyd’s defining LP Knock On Wood, with its drip-feed of soul classics: the title track, “Something You Got,” “Raise Your Hand” &c. But now he got it. As he told Paul Nelson the following year: “Ever since I got that Eddie Floyd record, ‘Raise Your Hand,’ there ain’t nothing like it. I really got involved with [soul] after that. That feel. To where I [was inspired to] put together a big band.”

  A big band meant not only girls, but also saxophone. If he was going to succeed in blending those Memphis and Caledonia soul strains and bring them to the Shore he was going to need someone who could make the four winds blow out of his sax. A big man. In keeping with the mythic nature of the Big Man’s contribution to the E Street story, Springsteen by 1975 had a regular spiel about the first time he met the mighty
Clemons, “There I was in Asbury Park on a dark, rainy night. A hurricane just came in, I’m walking down the street at three in the morning…had my jacket bundled up around me…walking through the monsoon, I seen this big figure dressed in white, walking with a cane, walking like there was no rain and the wind wasn’t blowing; just walking like it was a beautiful summer day.”

  Lopez remembers it a bit differently: “Tinker’s girlfriend, Carey, was in the Joyful Noise. She says to me, ‘You gotta hear this sax player, Clarence.’ So one night me and Tinker and Danny and Bruce pack up in the car, go down to Bayville and see him in The Spirits…Said hello…I don’t know about all those stories ’bout the door blew open, all that stuff. It was at a Spirits Gin Mill down in Bayville.” Nor did Clarence leap at Bruce’s offer of mutual penury. As he said in his autobiography, “I [already] had a gig, and Bruce didn’t hear horns in his music yet.”

  It might be nearer the truth to say that Clarence couldn’t hear any place for himself in the Bruce Springsteen Band. Springsteen was still indulging in lengthy guitar workouts on originals like “You Mean So Much To Me,” “She’s Leaving” and “The Band’s Just Boppin’ The Blues,” all songs which survived into the E Street era in modified form. “She’s Leaving,” which got the full stretch-out-and-busk treatment, was a rare exercise in autobiography. When he sang lines like, “Yes I’m bitter, oh how I’m bitter/ And it feels good to say it out loud.” he presumably knew their target would hear the message loud and clear but was too inflamed to care. But then, you can’t start a fire without a spark. Indeed, according to Lopez, he also “wrote ‘Fire’ so Delores had something to sing. ‘Driving in my car…’ came from them days. [But] Tinker didn’t exactly get behind it. We didn’t get any gigs, we were starving. There was no clubs. There was nothing.”

  Not surprisingly, the bandleader was growing increasingly frustrated by the parochial nature of Asbury Park’s music scene: “One hour out of New York City and you were in the nether world. Nobody came to New Jersey looking for bands to sign. That didn’t happen…I did shows in my late teens and early twenties when I was playing to thousands of kids, but nobody really knew about that…They were just local events.”

  By this time it was December again, the traditional time for Bruce to break up a band and go visit the folks. He still harbored some half-assed idea he might make it as a solo singer-songwriter in northern California, even though he had just been told that he simply did not have the sorta material to make it in that notoriously cut-throat area of the industry. The observation had come from none other than Mike Appel, a successful songwriter-producer who was looking to extricate himself from the Wes Farrell organization and strike out on his own. Appel knew Tinker, or vice-versa, and through Tinker’s auspices a meeting was arranged at which Springsteen told Appel, “I’m tired of being a big fish in a little pond.” He then played him what he presumably thought were his two best songs, one of which was certainly “Baby Doll,” a song he later demoed for Laurel Canyon:

  Mike Appel: I was so unimpressed. They didn’t seem to have any hooks, they weren’t cohesive songs really, in the true sense of trying to craft a pop song; I just remember the intensity. It almost seemed like it was too intense for what the results were. [But] he was very humble and very polite. I told him, “You want an album deal?” “Well, yes, I would.” “Well, you’re gonna have to have a lot more songs than two songs.” So he said, “Well, I’m going to San Mateo to see my parents for the Christmas holidays and I’ll write.” I said, “All right, the door’s always open.” That’s the way we left it.

  In his introduction to the highly-selective 1999 collection, Songs, Springsteen suggests, “I always had a notebook full of acoustic songs. I’d do the occasional coffeehouse, but mostly that material went unused. The songs required too much attention for a crowded bar on a Saturday night.” The evidence that he had started to write in this new vein came just before he met Appel that first time in late November 1971. He apparently performed “If I Was The Priest” first at The Student Prince some time that fall.

  Perversely, he elected not to play this important cut to Appel, a fellow Catholic. Yet here was a song which would have shown a potential surrogate father that this son had a whole new bag. Rarely has there been a more heartfelt cri de cœur from a fallen angel, the most telling couplet being: “Me, I got scabs on my knees from kneeling way too long/ It’s about time I played a man and took a stand where I belong.” Indeed, it would be this cut that the young Bruce would reveal when legendary CBS producer John Hammond Snr. later asked him if he had any songs he dared not play. But that life-changing moment was still six months and a few dozen songs away. For, true to his word, Springsteen was heading for California on a mission, and he wasn’t going to return until he was a singer-songwriter who could make Mr. Appel sit up and take notice.

  * The spoken intro to “If You And I Could Be As Two” is as follows: “’Twas on a Sunday and the autumn leaves were on the ground. It kicked my heart when I saw you standing there in your dress of blue. The storm was over, my ship sailed through.”

  * Sydney 3/23/85.

  Part I

  Born With Nothing

  Chapter 1: 1971–72—Songs About Cars & Girls

  I’d always had a band but I also wrote acoustically on the side quite often, and occasionally I’d play that music in local coffee houses. But [in 1972] I focused on it and committed to it in a way that I hadn’t before.—Bruce Springsteen, 1999

  If the 22-year-old Springsteen had a stock of coffeehouse songs to take with him to California in December 1971—which I somehow doubt—then very few survived the trip. He returned a fully-fledged singer-songwriter, with a gift for wordplay and a notebook full of songs. But they were all songs that followed the template of “She’s Leaving” and “If I Was The Priest,” the two scraps he did transfer from his Bruce Springsteen Band songbook. Nothing in the original songs he played with Steel Mill, and almost none of those he played with the BSB, lead on to this landslide. Inspiration came fast, and it came hard. And it came from nowhere. Ain’t that always the way!

  Not in the rock world. Precious few seventies rock artists spent seven years scuffling around the vortex of creative fusion, barely dipping a toe in the void, only to dive in head first. The one obvious comparison from an artist of comparable stature would have to be the young David Bowie, né Jones, who a year later would respond to the songs that now flowed from Springsteen’s pen with barely contained zeal. Bowie himself had been a recording artist for six years, in styles anachronistic and uncharacteristic, when in 1969 he wrote “Space Oddity,” a song that was a quantum leap on everything which came before.

  So it was with Springsteen. And in his case, the breakthrough song was probably “For You,” which he almost certainly wrote “for” Diane Lozito. As one witness to their relationship put it, “Diane was very feisty, very wild, and pretty as hell.” [DTR] If “She’s Leaving” was Springsteen’s first post-breakup song to strike the right note, then “For You” was his “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” a fare-thee-well disguised as a return. In this case he had seemingly walked in on an on-off girlfriend’s attempted suicide—“It’s not that nursery mouth I came back for/ It’s not the way you’re stretched out on the floor.” This summons up a kaleidoscope of memories of the woman in question and their frenzied relationship, good and mad; along with the realization that this ain’t gonna work out because, “Your life was one long emergency.” The final words, “My electric surges free,” make it clear that the singer has, or is about to, split; in Springsteen’s case, to California. (He would tell counsel in 1976, “I was having personal problems at the time with girls and things. It was just a good time to get away.”)

  He would later tell an enquiring English journalist, “Some songs, I’m down in them more…It varies, I guess, depending on how close I was to that particular situation at the time. [But] a song like ‘For You,’ I’m right down in it.” And anyone who questions the autobiographical
nature of this song should check out his spoken preface to one of the first full-blown E Street versions, in Uniondale NY on June 3, 1978:

  “This is a song I wrote back in, I guess, 1971. I was living on top of this drugstore in Asbury Park and I didn’t have a band, I was playing by myself. I was doing some gigs…at the old Gaslight Cafe and Max’s Kansas City by myself, and I remember I was breaking up with this girlfriend and I went away for a week; and I came back and she’d painted all the walls to my room black. That’s not true, actually she’d painted ’em all blue.”

  By the time of that Darkness tour, such a starkly personal song was the exception. But in those first few months of 1972, songs of this kind were the rule. And it was probably these lyrical looks in the mirror that broke the dam, releasing a torrent of word-tripping songs. He had also evidently been disinterring old Dylan records, because “For You” very obviously copied one of Dylan’s most regular lyrical tricks in those amphetamine years, using a noun as an adjective: “Princess cards,” “barroom eyes” (a close cousin to “warehouse eyes” in “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”), “Cheshire smile,” “Chelsea suicide,” “nursery mouth”* &c. It was presumably the recent publication of the first Dylan biography, by Anthony Scaduto, that had prompted such a reimmersion. After all, he needed some reading matter for that long drive to San Mateo. Maybe he hoped to pick up some tips on how going from manic rocker to solo folkie could be a route to fame.

  “For You” was not the only song of this period to dissect the same relationship, or awfully similar ones, but it was one of only two Californian self-examinations to survive the first-album cull. There was “Marie,” another song in this vein about “another” masochistic relationship. Full of violent images, one of which provides its burden—“Marie, she skins me alive/ Burns her initials in my hide, and then leaves me all alone/ Branded to the bone”—this was one instance where the scars were not merely mental. One doubts it is mere coincidence that this “queen of all the stallions” took her name from the Mother of God (via another pre-Diane girlfriend). Another song transferred to the so-called “London demo-tape”* was “No Need,” which took this confessional tone to new heights, admitting, “I’m one of those people who measure love in pain,” a realization it would take him fifteen years to relocate. There are yet further Dylanisms—“She’s my queen and I’m her tramp;” “She’s a broken winged angel refugee”—as he fumbles for a voice he could call his own.

 

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