One imagines he took a great deal of time honing and toning these wordy lyrics as he drove to and from the west coast. This time he was traveling that lonely road alone, his only companion a sense of obligation: “[My parents] didn’t have any money to buy me a bus ticket, much less an airplane ticket. So I’d drive out to the West Coast maybe once a year to see them.”
Later, he would describe spending “several months trying to make a living as a musician in the Bay Area. It didn’t work out. There were too many good musicians, and I’d left my rep as ‘bar band king’ in Jersey. So…I drove back to New Jersey and did some bar gigs and I started to think that I needed to approach the thing somewhat differently. I began to write music that would not have worked in a club, really. It required too much attention…But I felt…I was going to have to do something very distinctive and original. I wanted the independence, the individuality of a solo career.” Which rather sounds like a conflation of two separate trips to San Mateo, the Christmases of 1970 and 1971. Or maybe it took him a year, and a confirmatory trip, to see his original plan through.
He certainly could not have spent “several months” there in 1971–72 as he was still in New Jersey in mid-December, and was back east by late January. And it was a week’s drive either way. But in the weeks he was there he did finally decide—after much toing and froing—to go down the solo route. Initially at least he seemed to think such a change of tack required he bare his soul. As he put it in 1974, “I had to write about me all the time, every song, ’cause in a way you’re trying to find out what that ‘me’ is…[But] y’know, you [also] have to be self-contained. That way you don’t get pushed around.” He would later testify, during a 1998 UK court case designed to bury once and for all these very songs (after a UK company threatened to release them in quasi-official guise), “The music that you come up with when you are sitting in your room alone with your guitar late at night is one of the most personal things in your life.” These certainly were.
Among the songs he wanted kept out of the official canon were “Randolph Street” (see previous chapter), the sacrilegious “If I Was The Priest” and a song known as “Family Song” aka “California, You’re A Woman.” The last of these ostensibly addressed the coastal state itself, but was really directed at his still-demanding parents, verbalizing for the first time the inner hurt he felt growing up: “Ya know how when you’re young, there’s such a distance between you and your family/ You can’t ever see things from the same point of view/ Papa wants a lawyer and mama she wants an author/ And all you want is for them to want you.” Another line positively drips with the blood of Cain, “My papa turned away when I needed him the most.” Finally, the singer expresses the hope, “When I grow up and have my own kids/ I’ll love them all I can and let ’em make their own minds.”
Demoed for Laurel Canyon on his return east, this song was hastily buried with trowel and shovel, never even being copyrighted at the time. Yet its overarching theme would continue to infuse the songs he felt possessed to pen in the next six months, though by the time he began crafting the likes of “Lost In The Flood”—a song he fully admits was a case of him “trying to get a feeling for…the forces that affected my parents’ lives…the whole thing of the wasted life, [which] was very powerful to me”—the meaning was sometimes lost in the obfuscatory imagery of a New Dylan. Which is what, for a while, he seemed to want to be (later protestations notwithstanding). In Songs, he would insist, “I wrote impressionistically and changed names to protect the guilty…to find something that was identifiably mine.”
If so, the process was decidedly hit and miss. The opening couplet of a song like “Arabian Nights,” “Shrieks of sheiks as they run across the movie screen/ A thousand sand-dune soldiers led by an Arabian queen” almost begs to be parodied. At the same time, there are hints of later widescreen epics which would bear the Springsteen imprimatur: “Outside my window I hear another gang fight/ It’s Duke and the boys against the Devil’s best men/ And both sides have drawn their knives.”
Wholly enthralled by the process, quality control was not his primary concern. As he told Crawdaddy’s Peter Knobler the following January: “About a year ago, I started to play by myself…[and] just started writing lyrics, which I never did before. I would just get a good riff, and as long as it wasn’t too obtuse I’d sing it. So I started to go by myself and started to write these songs.” For now, a fair number retained some attempt at self-analysis. Lines like, “The lady feels it’s enough to just be good/ But the doctor has this need to be understood,” or the not-so-assured, “The lady feels the doctor’s made of stone/ But the doctor’s heart, it just ain’t fond of home”—both from “Lady and the Doctor,” once shortlisted for Greetings from Asbury Park—seem like candid descriptions of Doctor Zoom. Disconcertingly, he also described “the Doctor” visiting “the animals in their stalls, shoot[ing] them full of juice.” Not quite ready to lie on a couch and spill the beans, he preferred to let songs do the talkin’, even as his days as a guitar-totin’ gunslinger drew to a close:
Bruce Springsteen: On the guitar I never felt I had enough of a personal style where I could pursue being a guitarist. When I started to write songs I seemed to have [found] something where I was communicating better…/…I think I’d [finally] decided that if I was going to create my own point of view, my own vision, it wasn’t going to be instrumentally—it was going to be…through songwriting…I had no band for a while, [so] I just wrote a group of songs that felt unique to me. [1978/1992]
Excited by all he had achieved in the six weeks he’d been away, he couldn’t wait to play his new songs to the men who, back in November, told him they needed work. And so it was that on February 14, 1972, he returned to the offices of Mike Appel and Jim Cretecos and played them and their gofer office boy Bob Spitz, “If I Was The Priest” and six songs he had penned in the last few weeks: “Cowboys of the Sea,” “The Angel,” “It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City,” “Hollywood Kids,” “Arabian Nights” and “For You.” But it was not the still-unfinished “For You” that hit the stunned trio square between the eyes. It was “Saint In The City.” Appel asked the nervous songsmith to sing it again, so he could catch all the words:
Mike Appel: “Saint In The City” was the song that devastated me. I made him repeat the lyrics, ’cause I wasn’t sure he’d said what he said. ’Cause I’d never heard anybody sing these kind of lyrics before. He went right through it again. I [just] went, “Jesus, I thought that’s what you said!” I didn’t expect that, especially from where I left off with the guy [two months ago]…What God anointed him in the interim?
What he didn’t tell the two producer-publishers was that he was still hedging his bets. The Bruce Springsteen Band had just returned from a residency at The Back Door in Richmond, Virginia, where he had debuted an eleven-minute electric “Cowboys of the Sea.” Only after a similar short residency, later the same month, when he and/or another band member got into a contretemps with some other musician/s, did he finally decide to formally call time on this prototype for a big band.
The version of events as he related them to Paul Nelson sounded like the idea for another song: “We were doing this benefit in Virginia and they took the girls to some drug rehabilitation center [to crash for the night], and then someone comes up to them and says, ‘The confederate angels are coming down tonight and we’re all gonna fight together.’ Needless to say, it all erupted the next day, so I got rid of the horn section after that, ’cause I figured I was gonna have to start playing clubs. It was the only way to make it.”
Ken Viola suggested that what actually happened was “Mad Dog” Lopez got into a fight with one of the trumpet players, a not-uncommon occurrence. The band limped through March, even as Springsteen secretly signed on the dotted line, tying himself to Appel and Cretecos as producers and publishers for the next five albums. He had seemingly now committed himself to the idea of being a songwriter, not a Jersey bandleader. But if later comments can be believe
d, he never intended to stay in this solo wilderness for long:
Bruce Springsteen: It got to the point where I couldn’t afford a band any more, and [so] I split up the band I had. I wrote a mess of songs by myself, on acoustic guitar and I went up and I auditioned for CBS, so everybody thought I was an acoustic folk singer. I put my band back together when I got a record deal. [1975]
Appel, for now, remained wholly in the dark about Bruce’s band-plans. Not that it mattered a great deal at this stage. His first concern was getting Springsteen to sign that production deal, and then to secure him a record deal. Simple. As Spitz told music-biz historian Fred Goodman, his boss was a true believer: “He never thought he was rolling the dice: he knew what he had.”
Springsteen, though, was innately suspicious. Intimidated by any business matter, he initially played dumb. Not everyone was taken in. Spitz, for one, knew a front when he saw one: “He was nothing in a social situation…He had a mousy girlfriend who did all his talking for him, and he had a different one every week. But they were all the same variety: very mousy, very New Jersey, very Gentile, very uneducated.”[MOTH]
Finally Appel called him out on all his stalling, forcing a response. As Springsteen later told Appel’s counsel: “It was a basic deal, [Appel] said. I took it, looked at it once, and brought it back. I told him I didn’t know. He said, like, ‘Come on.’” What was he holding out for? Other alternatives were less than zero, and both parties knew it. In the end, Springsteen signed his name—and not in an unlit parking lot, as legend suggests—to a contract that was, in Appel’s own words, “boilerplate. It was always 12% of retail, the producer gets 3%, the artist gets nine.” At the very time Marty Thau was trying to get the New York Dolls to sign a fifty-fifty deal with him and his business partners, Appel was the one risking the shirt from his back, not the kid from Freehold.
In order to try and recoup some of the upfront costs they were about to incur, Appel and Cretecos were looking to demo some of the better songs they had heard their protégé play with a view to placing them with artists who let others write their material, a dying practice ever since Dylan plugged in at Newport but for now the only viable way to get Springsteen’s songs out into the world. It was also already apparent that Springsteen had way too many songs for a single record. And the pile was growing bigger by the day. As Appel fondly recalls, “He would come up from Asbury Park in the morning, and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got some new songs I want to play you.’ He’d come up, pour his heart out. We loved everything…He was fully formed. It was so original; we were all just thunderstruck.” Their prodigal surrogate-son was equally amazed, but showed no interest in locating the source of all this analysis-in-song:
Bruce Springsteen: Last winter I got so hyped up, almost getting a guilt complex if I didn’t write. A lot of these songs came out all at once—like “The Angel”…Because people had more or less requested I play acoustic, I wrote [like that]. The words come out rhythmically…/…My songs are very mysterious to me…I’ll sing a line and I’ll know exactly what I mean…for that one line! But then I’ll go on to things where I’m not quite sure what I meant…[Sometimes] you got the universe to think about, but you [also] need something that rhymes with night…/…I don’t dig going into the songs or why I write them, or what I’m trying to do, because I want people to find out for themselves. They should search out the songs. That’s what I’m doing. [1972–74]
As he recalled in 1974, the songs at this stage generally came quick, or not at all: “I got a lot of things out in that first album [period]…They were written in half-hour, fifteen-minute blasts. I don’t know where they came from. A few of them I worked on for a week or so, but most of them were just jets.” His writing technique, such as it was, lent itself to this grapeshot of images: “I would sit there with a rhyming dictionary…and just pour forth with whatever the images were in my head.” For the first time, he was starting with the words and adding the music later, “because I imagined myself as being some sort of a poet at the time.” Again, he could have taken his cue from Dylan, who wrote the whole of John Wesley Harding that way.
If the new songs came in a flash, they generally told the same story in different settings: “To me a song is a vision…and what I see is characters in situations.” What set Springsteen’s songs apart at this point were the familiar characters he put in situations often so incongruous they seemed to be misplaced in space and time. The most wildly ambitious of these, “Visitation at Fort Horn,” appeared on every provisional track-listing for that debut album, but in the end made way for “Spirit In The Night” and “Blinded By The Light.” The story of The Captain, The Magician, The Sergeant and an angel, the visitation in the song title is the result of the Captain hanging Merlin the Magician because “his magic…must be broken,” which invokes a storm of epic proportions (“the lightning cracked and the sky was hacked/ By dagger rain it was torn”). Another Madonnaesque captive, who “commands the light ships that patrol the sea around the rainbow tips,” disappears from the song before the storm rips the fort apart, to reappear elsewhere in similar angelic disguise. On a song like this, he was trying a little too hard to “present something that was a fully realized world with just myself and the acoustic guitar.”
Another song shot through with similar ambition (and concomitant lyrical lapses) was “Prodigal Son,” a seven-minute epic with a touch of “Desolation Row” about it: “And the mercury men with hydraulic joints/ They bribe with a smile and hold you up in the alley at pinpoint/ And ask you to bend over that they may anoint/ You with the holy water of your profession.” With a Zane Grey element from the outset, “In a place where outlaws are banned from the range,” the father patiently awaits the return of the prodigal son. However, it would never make it beyond demo status, washed away by an inspired flood of superior songs with a similar love of wordplay.
Perhaps surprisingly, songs about cars and girls were in short supply at this juncture, though two of the tracks he demoed for John Hammond in May showed he retained the ability to switch gears. There was “The Angel,” a song about a fallen angel with a fetish for cars redeemed by a girl “in a trainer bra with eyes like rain.” And then there was “Street Queen,” Springsteen’s “Terraplane Blues,” where he successfully fused Dylan, Chuck Berry and (unconsciously) Robert Johnson for the very first time: “Cadillac hips, she’s the best on the strip/ She knows how to use a clutch.” But the two songs that really tickled John Hammond’s talent-scout bones that day in May when they first met were the one that made Appel sit up and take notice: “Saint In The City,” and the one which shook a metaphorical stick at every nun who’d ever tried to get this novice apostate to toe the line, “If I Was The Priest.”
Springsteen had not been idle in the six weeks since he finally signed on the dotted line, but neither had Appel. Having talked strategy with Appel, the singer was astonished when “about three weeks later” Appel told him, “We’ll start at the top. I got you an appointment with John Hammond.” As Bruce later described it, “It was amazing to me, reading [Scaduto’s] book, and then…find myself sitting there in that office.” But rather than speak for himself, he again allowed a third party to do the talking, almost with catastrophic results.
He described the scene to Nelson a few months later: “In we go, and Mike, who is a funny guy, he gets into it, he jumps up and here we are with John Hammond and Mike starts hyping John Hammond, ‘I want you to know, John, this guy’s heavy.’” Hammond subsequently informed Springsteen “that he was ready to hate me.” From that moment forth, Hammond viewed his relationship with Appel as essentially combative. Appel, though, insists Hammond never lost his cool:
Mike Appel: When we went in, he had his sunglasses set on top of his flattop crew cut. He was very cordial. We walked in and Bruce sits down with his guitar, and I feel it’s incumbent upon me to say something. I say to him, “I’ve grappled with lyrics myself. This guy makes it seem like it’s nothing to write reams and reams of poetry.” And [Hammond
is] nodding, you know, okay, okay. Then I said, “I can’t believe he’s written as many things as he has in such a short period of time, at such a high degree of quality.” He started to look at me like he thought I was starting to hype [him]. But he didn’t say anything, he was just looking. And I said to him, “In short, you’re the guy who discovered Bob Dylan for the right reasons. You won’t miss this.” He said to me, “Please sit down.”
By the time Springsteen was ushered into the plush offices of the A&R man with the Vanderbilt bloodline coursing through his veins, he was left with precious little time to make his mark. Appel, though, knew what worked and had prepped him to start with “Saint In The City.” From that opening couplet they had Hammond on board: “I had skin like leather and the diamond-hard look of a cobra/ I was born blue and weathered but I burst just like a supernova.” It was now Springsteen’s turn to nearly blow it. The next song he played Hammond was a new one, the turgid “Mary Queen of Arkansas,” for which Springsteen continued to maintain a mystifying admiration. As Hammond later related, “I thought that was a little pretentious, and that’s when I asked him if he had anything that was outrageous…and then he played me ‘If I Was The Priest.’ [It was] then I knew that he had that whole natural gift that you can’t learn.” He also knew for sure that “he could only be a Catholic.”
E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Page 6