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

by Clinton Heylin

  According to Hammond, “I [then] arranged for him to come down to the studio…the next day, but my stipulation was that I didn’t want Appel there. Bruce and I worked about two hours together. Alone.” Appel and Springsteen did a victory jig outside the old CBS building on 57th Street, and spent the rest of the day deciding what other songs they should spring on the CBS scout. However, this was 1972, and the word of John Hammond had long stopped being law at the label. He would need the okay from above to sign anyone, let alone a kid with a guitar, a pushy manager and no track record (unlike in September 1961, when he signed Dylan without any demo lest that voice scared the suits off!). On May 3 Springsteen arrived promptly at two, and was ushered into the in-house demo studio, the very one that had served CBS, and Columbia before it, for the past quarter of a century. But, whatever Hammond’s wishes, Springsteen and Appel were still joined at the hip:

  Bruce Springsteen: Columbia was very old-fashioned: everybody in ties and shirts; the engineer was in a white shirt and a tie and was probably fifty, fifty-five years old. It was just him and John and Mike Appel there, and he just hits the button and gives you your serial number, and off you go. I was excited…This was my shot, I had nothing to lose. [1999]

  Four of the twelve songs demoed that day would eventually be released on 1998’s Tracks, including the still-turgid “Mary, Queen,” with which he opened the afternoon session. He also had the steel-cold nerve to play Hammond two songs on which the ink was still wet, “Growin’ Up” (a superior spin-off from the earlier “Eloise”) and “Does This Bus Stop At 82nd Street?.” Among the seven songs which never made the passage from demo to debut LP (or Tracks) were some that shone a brighter light into the recesses of this recidivist’s mind. Notably, “Two Hearts In True Waltz Time,” which concerned itself with an illicit affair between a cop and a frustrated wife, “the ultimate crime/ two hearts locked in true waltz time.” Among forty-plus lines were two that exposed an unvarnished inner reality: “She needs to be real/ He needs to conceal,” though the rhyming dictionary was again overused (“She swings on a vine across the state line”—oh dear). “If I Was The Priest” also received its definitive rendering, though it would not even make it to the first-album sessions, a month hence. Hammond knew he had found a diamond in the rough. In fact, over the years he would come to insist that their demo was “better than any tape Bruce has made since, because Bruce is [now] so uptight about perhaps overshadowing somebody else in the band.” (In 1981, he would send Springsteen a copy of the tape as a reminder of what might have been. Springsteen’s “response” was Nebraska.)

  For now, Hammond had a more important recipient in mind, Clive Davis, head of the label and a persistent champion of Dylan in the days when he had needed label support, and not the other way around. Five days later, he sent Davis the dub and a memo: “Here is a copy of a couple of the reels of Bruce Springsteen, a very talented kid who recorded these twelve songs in a period of around two hours last Wednesday…I think we better act quickly because many people heard the boy at The Gaslight so that his fame is beginning to spread.” Davis responded the next day, “I love Bruce Springsteen! He’s an original in every respect. I’d like to meet him if you can arrange it.” The meeting evidently transpired. Davis told Frederic Dannen, “Springsteen came to my office for a final audition [my italics]. I heard his material, I believed in him. I signed him.” For now, Springsteen (and Appel) had the most powerful man at the label on their side. So much so that the singer would later send up this surreal situation in his intro to assorted 1976 performances of “Growin’ Up”:

  “I get to the CBS building with my manager. We get in the audition elevator, a special elevator marked ‘X’. We shoot up to the clouds, passing the stars, passing all the planets. We finally get up [there], the doors open up, they frisk me a few times, and there at this big, solid gold desk, in a long, white robe, with a little wreath around his head was Clive Davis. I said, ‘Mr. Davis…I wanna be a rock ’n’ roll star.’ But first he heard my confession. And [then] he said, ‘Sign here.’”

  Unfortunately for Hammond, he quickly discovered he was going to have to go through Mike Appel. He nobly proclaimed some years later, “I didn’t want to deal with Mike Appel at all, but I have a sort of loyalty—if someone brings me an artist I feel I have to deal with them. It’s not right to go behind the guy’s back.” In fact, he did everything he could to extract Springsteen from his prior legal arrangement with Appel: “I asked [Appel] what kind of agreement he had [with Springsteen], and he said, ‘Oh, don’t worry. I’ve got him signed.’…I said, ‘Mike, would you do me a favor? There’s a lawyer I’d like you to talk to. He’s a lawyer I trust and…I’d like him to see the contract.’ Mike replied, ‘Well, if you say so.’ Reluctantly, he went to see this lawyer and the lawyer said, ‘Mike, this is a slave contract. If you’re smart, you won’t go through with it, because your artist—if he makes it—is going to hate you.’”

  The lawyer Hammond had referred Appel to was William Krasilovsky, someone familiar with the music business and copyright law but not affiliated with Columbia. Nevertheless, it was a highly dangerous thing to do. Appel would have been well within his rights to refer the matter to Davis. Krasilovsky would later claim, three decades on and with hindsight to spare, that “he knew right away…Springsteen would one day be sorry he had agreed to Appel’s terms.”

  In fact, Appel had done Springsteen a huge favor, one that would reap Springsteen (as opposed to Appel) millions in the fullness of time. He had signed Springsteen to a production deal which meant that CBS would have to license the recordings from Laurel Canyon, rather than signing Springsteen directly to the label. He thus retained control of all unreleased masters. The standard “slave-contract” that CBS required of its new artists still talked in terms of “delivered masters,” as if this were the days of the 78 rpm record; and in many ways it still was.

  Even the contract Appel and Springsteen signed in early June required two albums a year, a patently absurd demand that was still there because it could then be invoked when artists (inevitably) fell behind on their delivery dates to either a) drop them from the label or b) extend the term of the contract, depending on how they were doing commercially. Hammond, of course, had no problem with this contract. It was pretty much the same one he had cajoled Dylan into signing without independent counsel when he was still a legal minor, a ruse which nearly backfired disastrously when six months later Dylan got himself a manager in a mold Mike Appel could only aspire to: Al Grossman, to whom Hammond also took an immediate dislike. Hammond also seemed to think that Springsteen might be better off on the altogether less prestigious Epic subsidiary. Appel, again, interceded:

  Mike Appel: [Hammond] decided that Bruce should be with those younger people up at Epic and not with the stodgier, older people at Columbia—and he got this in his head. I always felt that Columbia was the classiest label on the planet. I just always saw [Bruce’s] record going round on that red label, just like Dylan’s did, and I couldn’t get that out of my head. I had it out with Hammond…Hammond was a stubborn, arrogant, enthusiastic guy. But he was like everybody that was great at what they do—he thought he was right on everything.

  Appel and Hammond did not, however, disagree always. On one issue, they were as one. That was their belief that Bruce Springsteen should be marketed as a solo artist, and that the first album should be as close to the demo tape Hammond had made back in May as possible. Springsteen was left in no doubt that this was their preference. But he was less convinced, and once he realized Clive Davis and Jim Cretecos had their doubts too, he quickly aligned himself with their camp:

  Mike Appel: Hammond and I were on the same side [of the acoustic argument]. And Clive Davis and Jim Cretecos were not. And Bruce was the arbiter in the middle. I said, “Your songs are so great. You don’t need a band.” Hammond was like, “Mike, did he buy it?” “No, he did not buy it.” [The album] was a hodgepodge. There was no order in advance. It wasn’t like all these
songs are going to be acoustic, and all these are going to be electric. In the end, what he decided is what we did. Davis is pushing for the band all along…I was a purist and Hammond was a purist. We were outvoted…I was so impressed by Bruce’s lyrics I said, “Who needs a band when you can write lyrics like that?”

  Bruce Springsteen: The record John Hammond would have liked would have been one that the first four or five cuts from Tracks sound like…And, listening back, he may have been right…The music [on that first record] was an abstract expression of my direct experience where I lived in Asbury Park at the time and the kinds of characters that were around; they call them twisted autobiographies. Basically, it was street music…Mike and his partner Jimmy [Cretecos] were always very production-oriented;…[so] everything was…compressed for a slightly hyped sound. And that’s the direction Greetings…went in. [But] I wanted a rhythm section…So what we ended up doing was an acoustic record with a rhythm section, which was the compromise reached between the record company, everybody else and me. [1999]

  If the battle lines were drawn early, the result was not a foregone conclusion. Springsteen in later years has suggested he had to work hard in order to firmly tilt the album off its acoustic axis. Initially, as he has said, “You listen to people whose ideas and direction may not be what you want. But you don’t know that. [After all,] you just stepped off the street and walked into the studio…/…I wasn’t in the position where I was going to say, ‘No, I want to do it like this.’ I was just saying, ‘Let me do it.’” Though compromise—aka fudge—would eventually become the order of the day, the first studio session on June 7 was a strictly acoustic affair, Springsteen cutting “Lady and the Doctor,” “Arabian Night,” “Growin’ Up” and “Street Queen,” the best thing he cut that day, with him playing a Fender-Rhodes, a nod to the Stax sound of the late sixties. It never even figured in early handwritten song-sequences for the album. As it was in the beginning…

  Even when sessions resumed on June 26, the emphasis still seemed to be on Springsteen the solo artist as he cut acoustic renditions of “Does This Bus Stop,” “Mary Queen of Arkansas,” “Saint In The City” and “The Angel,” all songs demoed in similar form with Hammond. But the following day it was all change. For the first time, Springsteen brought along some friends from the Jersey shore; specifically, Vini Lopez, David Sancious and Garry Tallent. And the trio had already been prepped. According to Lopez, “One day I get a call from Bruce, ‘You wanna make a record?’…A couple of weeks rehearsing with the fellas, then we did the album. [But] Danny was on the outs. He had problems with ‘stuff.’ There were [also] other keyboard players on the album.” (Specifically, Harold Wheeler.) Tallent wisely didn’t have the nerve to challenge Hammond when he suggested bringing in stand-up jazz bassist Richard Davis, of Astral Weeks fame, to play on a couple of tracks: probably “Two Hearts In Waltz Time,” certainly “The Angel.”

  At this juncture, the intention seems to have been to make an album divided equally between all-acoustic and semi-electric excursions; five apiece—a presumably-conscious replication of Bringing It All Back Home’s half-electric, half-acoustic format. Of the partially plugged-in songs, three were also recorded acoustically—“Does This Bus Stop,” “Growin’ Up” and “Saint In The City”—whereas “Lost In The Flood” and “For You” seemingly exist only in electric configurations.

  The latter pair also happened to be the two most realized tracks on this original album, lyrically and musically. (Even if, for the next five years, Springsteen regularly encored with a solo piano version of “For You” that sent chills through those lucky enough to catch it.) “Lost in the Flood,” in particular, raised the bar on his songwriting to date. When he claimed that, in this period, “I let out an incredible amount of things at once—a million things in each song,” the paradigm of this approach is “Lost In The Flood,” where “nuns run bald through Vatican halls, pregnant, pleadin’ Immaculate Conception/ And everybody’s wrecked on Main Street from drinking unholy blood,” leaving “the whiz-bang gang from uptown…shooting up the street.” No one this time was gonna be saved. In fact, there is so much going on it would take Bruce until 1975 to truly get to grips with the song.

  The sound recording copyrights (i.e. the “mechanicals”) for a ten-song album were transferred from Laurel Canyon to CBS on August 10, suggesting it had got the green light and was geared up and ready to go. Something, though, stopped the presses from rolling. Instead, Springsteen and friends returned to the studio on September 11 to cut three more songs: “Blinded By The Light,” “Spirit In The Night” and “The Chosen;” taking the knife to three songs where a thesaurus vied with the rhyming dictionary for dominion: “Jazz Musician,” “Arabian Nights” and “Visitation at Fort Horn.”

  The change of heart was partly due to Clive Davis sticking his oar in, convinced that the album needed a more contemporary sound. According to Springsteen, in Songs, they gave Davis a copy of the August 10 “album,” “Clive handed it back and said there was nothing that could be played on the radio…I went home and wrote ‘Blinded By The Light’ and ‘Spirit In The Night.’” Appel, too, was left in no doubt what Davis thought, after he phoned the producer up to tell him, “I firmly believe [the album] should be with a band. We’re not going to get radio play without it.”

  There may also have been other factors at work. For one, Springsteen had barely played some of the songs he’d just recorded to a paying audience, and therefore lacked any real sense of which songs might hold a crowd and which might not. A short residency at The Gaslight Au Go Go in May had by his own admission been a bust: “At the time there was no presentation. I played there two nights and [there was] no response at all.” He also subsequently claimed to have played his old haunt the Cafe Wha, when he “was on the verge of having a record deal, and…was scrubbing away to make some kind of living.” But a six-night residency at the fabled Max’s, beginning August 9, was a step up. Upstairs at Max’s was the hip joint for all jive-ass songwriters from the Village. Suddenly, Springsteen felt like he was part of a scene:

  Bruce Springsteen: It was a funny time, ’72. I used to come down to Max’s Kansas City and play by myself. Paul Nelson would bring some people down. I used to open for Dave Van Ronk, Odetta, all those people were still around. David Blue came down one night and as I was walking offstage he said, “Hey man, that was great! Come with me.” We got in a cab and went downtown to The Bitter End where I met Jackson Browne. He had his first album out…And then late at night the New York Dolls would play at Max’s. They’d play at 2 a.m. Max’s was still really thriving at the time, the whole downstairs scene was going on. It was the cusp of those two things. [1992]

  He couldn’t help but be influenced by the energy and indeed the slightly “retro” feel of The New York Dolls, especially after he was obliged to return to Max’s to crash late one night after missing his bus back to Jersey, only to find the Dolls “banging away at two in the morning upstairs.” Nor were they the only ones who knew The Cadets’ “Stranded In The Jungle,” a song Springsteen namechecks in “Jazz Musician.” Paul Nelson, in his precarious A&R position at Mercury Records, would successfully sign The New York Dolls to the label before year’s end, having been too late to sign Springsteen himself. Nothing if not generous with his recommendations, he was the very dude who in a former life challenged Dylan to drop protest songs, edited Sing Out, and championed Dylan’s switch to folk-rock, before becoming chief rock critic at Hullabaloo and a regular Rolling Stone reviewer. He was in a strong position to champion Springsteen to all and sundry in the enclosed world of east-coast-based rock critics:

  Bruce Springsteen: Before I had an album…[Nelson] was bringing a lot of people down to see me…He would always have somebody with him…Then there was a fellow, Paul Williams, who had Crawdaddy magazine before it was the magazine, when it was just the mimeographed sheets of paper that you would buy in the Village, which was the first piece of serious rock criticism I’d ever laid my eyes on…So
there was this small group of people who were sorta at the core of a different kind of writing about rock music…Those were the kind of people you hooked up with at the time. You felt like, this guy needs this thing as much as I do. [2007]

  One of those critics had been noting Springsteen’s progress ever since he caught him in Child, covering Donovan in power chords. Lenny Kaye, though, was underwhelmed by the new Bruce: “I’d already made the transition into being a rock writer…[when] I heard that Bruce was giving a solo performance down at Max’s; it was like a residency. Anyway, I went to see him, and he’s there playing piano, playing guitar…I remember thinking, ‘What happened to this wild rocker I remember on the steps [of Monmouth College]?’ I remember feeling a [sense of] disappointment that this guy who could really turn it up, there he is [now] behind the piano…I heard a lot of Van Morrison in it. I never saw any Dylan in him at all, ’cept these run-on sentences, but [even] the way he ran them on…was [more] Van Morrison. There was a direct line of influence. But I was moving toward avant-rock and noise, so my attention was more toward the Dolls or The Stooges. By then, I just wanted to hear the amps howl.”

  Nelson, too, remembered “there was a lot of writers down that [first] night; and the [general] reaction was, ‘Boy, he’s been listening a lot to middle[-period] Dylan records.’ Because it came off a lot like that without the band. [But] by the third song it was [clear] there were a lot of other things going on in there.” If Springsteen himself baulked at the Dylan comparisons, he was equally unhappy to be compared to another fellow east coast song-poet, insisting, “I’m not Lou Reed. He has some good stuff, and there are some of the same subjects, but we take them at different angles.”