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

by Clinton Heylin

  Vini Lopez: We were the graveyard shift, because Melanie was working [at 914] at the time, so we had to work around her. Louis Lahav was there. [Mike] was demanding. I used to go pick up John Hammond—we’d go to CBS, wait for him, drive to Blauvelt, do the session, put him in the car, drive him back, then go home. But…somehow, him and Mike never hit it off. So it got to the point where he said, “I’ll come, but only if he don’t come.” So Mike didn’t come.

  On the one time Hammond went to 914 and Appel was there, the A&R man wasn’t shy of offering an opinion: “I noticed that Bruce was having a beautiful time listening to the band. He’d lock himself up in a sound-proof booth, then sing to the tracks. So I said to Mike,…‘This is no way for Bruce to record. Bruce has got to be stimulated by live performance. He has to get his kicks from the band…When you’re doing this thing with the headphones and being locked up in an isolation booth, you’ve lost the battle.’” But Appel wasn’t interested in “having a beautiful time,” he was there to make a record.

  Thankfully, Hammond soon realized he was a spare wheel, leaving Appel to it, though he couldn’t resist a last parting shot in his 1977 autobiography: “Once Bruce was signed with Columbia, Appel wanted no part of me, or of what Columbia could contribute to the development of his star.” The exact opposite was true. Without Davis, and with Hammond’s enmity toward Bruce’s business manager/producer plain to see, Appel’s only recourse was to blow everyone at the label away with Springsteen’s second album. Which would also be the E Street Band’s first.

  The sessions began in earnest on June 22, a week after their Chicago commitments came to an end—dry runs in mid-May resulting only in the slow-burn “Fever” and a prototype “Circus Song”—and would be extremely businesslike. Just nine sessions were required to produce The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, Springsteen’s most realized album of the seventies, along with another album’s worth of ambitious cowboy-mouth shuffles. Predictably, he began by recording five songs in a single day, all of which were worthy of release (though none would be till the nineties): “Thundercrack,” “Phantoms,” “Hey Santa Ana,” “Seaside Bar Song” and “Evacuation of the West.”

  Of these, only “Evacuation of the West” had yet to receive its live debut. Instead, Springsteen reserved one of his most emotive vocals for the studio version. When he sings that final couplet, “Good God, I think they’re dying/ In the wind you can hear them sighing,” it feels like he’s saying good-bye to every wild-west figure conceived in the past year and a half, and a bunch of childhood dreams, too. He indubitably was.

  If “Thundercrack” and “Hey Santa Ana” were both proven crowd-pleasers, “Seaside Bar Song” and “Phantoms” had only been road-tested at the end of the Chicago run, and were still unknown quantities. “Seaside Bar Song,” with that “squeaky little keyboard figure straight from Johnny & The Hurricanes country” (to quote Giovanni Dadomo), for all its innate sense of fun addressed the price paid for trying to “live a life of love.” When the morning comes, the singer is sure the protagonist’s “papa’s gonna beat you, ’cause he knows you’re out on the run.” But for now, the main aim was to not “let that daylight steal your soul.”

  The two protagonists in “Phantoms,” Jamie, who “rides down a broken highway…[his head] filled with crazy visions of negroes and white women in evening gowns,” and Jessie, who is “calling to him in the hills,” have even more pressing problems. “Fly[ing] in strict formation over the hills of St. Croix,” the Phantoms are looking to save Jamie from “the Christian army” waiting for him in them thar hills. Neither song lasted the distance as inch by inch, track by track Springsteen edged toward his wildly innocent goal:

  Bruce Springsteen: On the second album I started slowly to find out who I am and where I want to be. It was like coming out of the shadow of various influences and trying to be me…Songs have to have possibilities. You have to let the audience search it out for themselves. You can’t say, “Here it is. This is exactly what I mean,” and give it to them. You have to let them search. [1974]

  Three days later, he returned to work some more on these songs—as well as the already-debuted “Circus Song” and “New York City Song,” each about to evolve into the more identifiable “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” and “New York City Serenade.” Meanwhile, “Phantoms” was devolving into “Zero and Blind Terry,” which he set to the self-same backing track. Gone were the Catholic soldiers and the cowboy-outlaws as “Zero & Blind Terry” announced the second stage of Springsteen the songwriter. From now on, “There was more of the band…and the songs were written more in the way I wanted to write.” “Zero & Blind Terry” tells the tale of two eloping lovers, Zero and Terry (who is never described as blind in the song), caught in the crossfire of a gangland confrontation: “The Skulls met the Pythons down at the First Street station/ Alliances had been made in alleyways, all across the nation…” Terry seems to share the same Dad as Rosalie. To him, Zero is “no good/ A tramp, a thief and a liar,” so he hires some state troopers “to kill Zero and bring Terry back home.”

  How it ends is left for the listener to decide, or would have been if he hadn’t decided to hold the song over for the next album. Appel tried his best to steer Springsteen right, and he had no doubt “Zero” was a winner, but, as he openly admits, by the time of the second album Springsteen “was the final arbiter, always, about everything. We never even tried to ride roughshod over Bruce. Bruce was the boss about everything to do with his recordings.” And Bruce had acquired some hard and fast ideas about making each album a Statement:

  Bruce Springsteen: I was always concerned with doing albums, instead of collections of songs. I guess I started with The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle…particularly the second side, which kind of syncs together. I was very concerned about getting a group of characters and following them through their lives a little bit. [1984]

  To realize this vision, he still lacked one component. It was one he felt he had been missing all along—David Sancious, “a man whose notes belong in quotes, whose groove has hung loose, twenty years old, [with] digits of solid gold.” Stalwart of the Bruce Springsteen Band, and habitué of the Upstage, his introduction into the band he always belonged in proved positively painless. As Lopez asserts, “He was The Dude. The way I play, I just fit right in with him. A couple of nights, we were doing this other stuff, Bruce turned around and said, ‘That’s it, that’s the stuff.’” He was also the reason “the band” became the E Street Band (The Band having already been taken as the name of another fabled “backing band”). But it wasn’t because of his musical contribution. It was because, to adopt Lopez-lingo, “When we were on tour, we’d get to his house [on E Street] and we’d wait forty minutes for him to come out of his house. We spent a lot of time waiting for David!”

  By the time Sancious punched the clock on June 28, “Zero and Blind Terry” was already recorded, but he still happily overdubbed a new part that made all the difference: “I came up with this one organ riff that Bruce really loved. There is one part that’s real slow, and I did a cathedral-type voicing.” He was also on hand when it came time to transform “Vibes Man” and “New York City Song” into the semi-symphonic “New York City Serenade.” He already knew Springsteen would give every E Streeter latitude musically, even as the sound in his head overrode all others:

  David Sancious: There were a couple of keyboard ideas I came up with [on The Wild, the Innocent], but I don’t think they constituted the arrangement of the songs. Bruce works in such a way that whenever he writes a song, he knows exactly how he wants it to sound. There’s space on there to interpret, but he’ll verbally tell you what kind of thing he wants, and then it’s up to you.

  After that first batch of sessions in late June, remaining sessions had to be slotted around live commitments; with a third landmark residency at Max’s in mid-July—this one in tandem with Bob Marley’s original Wailers—providing the perfect opportunity to break in both Sancious and
some new songs. These included an exquisite elegy to summer’s end on the Jersey boardwalk, “Fourth of July, Asbury Park,” known universally as simply “Sandy.” At the time of its live debut he was still honing the lyric. The original second line (“Sparkin’ an empty light in all those lonely faces, reachin’ up like bandits in the sky”) would make it to the initial studio recording, but not to the album. Likewise, a final verse finds “them northside angels…parked with their Harleys way south out on the Kokomo.”

  Even though he was still working on this so subtle song, he elected to open with it at a private bash in San Francisco just four days after the Max’s run came to an end. The shindig in question was the CBS Sales Convention, a three-day affair at which the E Street Band was expected to follow Edgar Winter’s White Trash, who restricted their set to fifteen minutes—which was how much good material they had—and let rip with smoke bombs and fireworks to hide the fact. Lopez thinks, “We were supposed to open the show, and Edgar Winter…insisted, ‘No, we’re opening the show,’ and we didn’t have pyrotechnics [like them]. And [then] we had to go on after them. We just did our thing.” John Hammond later suggested, “Bruce came on with a chip on his shoulder and played way too long.” So much for championing his own signing! But Springsteen made his point his way, “I followed Edgar Winter with his smoke bombs…You can’t compete with that. So Danny and I did ‘Sandy,’ which I had just written, just accordion and acoustic guitar.”

  He had actually been in a strange mood all day. West coast promotion man Paul Rappaport remembers: “He walked into the hotel, looking a little disheveled, and he said, ‘Rap, what day is it?’ ‘You mean, what time is it?’ ‘No, what day is it?’ So something was up…[But] in those days not all of Columbia was behind Bruce. There were three or four of us.” Aside from “Rap,” there was Ron Oberman, fresh from Mercury and a music man through and through. And Pete Philbin. Period.

  The band would soon need all their support, and then some, as they returned to New Jersey to put the finishing touches to an album whose overarching vision was quite unlike anything the past coupla years had produced in Rockville. At two sessions in August, Springsteen put the finishing touches to the studio “Sandy,” scrapping a children’s choir and making engineer Louis Lahav’s wife, Suki, multi-track her backing vocals instead. He also persevered with “Thundercrack” and “Zero and Blind Terry,” both of which fell at the final hurdle, in the former’s case because it never came close to the energy it generated in concert. There was another lost song, too, “Fire On The Wing” (later shortlisted for Tracks). It would be late September before they finally had the album in the can, after Springsteen decided he needed something which stamped this new ultra-confident songwriting self on the record. It took till then for Springsteen to pen, arrange and record his most ambitious song to date. Originally called “Puerto Rican Jane,” it would be released as “Incident on 57th Street.”

  Asked in 1975 if he ever felt self-conscious when writing about people and scenes from his own life, he suggested: “You don’t have to put it into words…You just write the songs and that’s what comes out,” citing “Incident” as an instance where he felt “more of an observer.” For the first time, the auteur inside was yelling “Roll ’em.” “Puerto Rican Jane” seems like a duskier Janey, still in need of a shooter; and in Spanish Johnny, she seems to have found him. Johnny himself is a chancer who can’t resist the importunings of the other “young boys” when they whisper “You wanna make a little easy money tonight?” He slips from his snug bed and sleeping lover to go off into the night. Though we are spared the bloody denouement, Spanish Johnny is a close cousin of the punk whose dreams will gun him down when the story climaxes in “Jungleland.”

  Now all he had to do was sequence such shuffles. A September shortlist for The Wild, the Innocent lists six of its seven eventual songs (the one missing, surprisingly, is “E Street Shuffle”), as well as “Thundercrack,” “Santa Ana,” “Zero and Blind Terry” and “The Architect Angel,” which could never have fitted onto a single album. It would have required a double set of Exile On Main Street proportions. “Seaside Bar Song,” one of the most spontaneous-sounding tracks from the sessions, had already been set aside, probably because, as Appel observed, “He never took a relaxed approach to music. He would find some cute little riff, or something, and he’d end up thinking it wasn’t important enough to put on the album.” It would, however, make Tracks at a time when he proffered an explanation for why such songs got the snip:

  Bruce Springsteen: Things didn’t get on because there wasn’t enough room, or you didn’t think you sang that one that well, or the band didn’t play that one that well, or you wanted to mess around with the writing some more. “Zero and Blind Terry” was a big song we played live all the time. [1999]

  There is almost as much unity among the material that didn’t make The Wild, the Innocent—including the likes of “Bishop Danced,” “Fever” and “You Mean So Much To Me,” all played live in the first half of 1973—as there is to those that made the grade. Springsteen even uncharacteristically expressed a desire to release such a record the night after opening the Born In The USA tour: “I do have an album of outtakes from The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle that feels just like that record. There may be a whole album’s worth of it…I’m singing all the crazy words, and it’s like those songs. Some time I’d like to get that out.”

  It would have made for a very different album from The Wild, the Innocent, which had the Sancious imprint in every nook and cranny, from the string arrangement on “New York City Serenade” to the jazz-funk of “Kitty’s Back” and “E Street Shuffle.” Of all the band members he was the one who now took Bruce’s license to improvise and ran with it, without ever blundering into a Weather Report-like jazz-fusion. As Sancious asserts, “Most people don’t understand what you’re doing when you say improvise. They think you just sit down and start riffing away, but it’s really a lot more refined than that.”

  And yet, for all its musical advances on Greetings, there was a sense in which The Wild, the Innocent was a premature bulletin from a band still coming to terms with such grand material. In a letter to a radio executive, John Hammond suggested that there was an air of disappointment at the label: “Bruce’s performances [on the LP] do not have the ease or the joy of his live appearances and have the feeling of material being far too carefully worked over. It’s all pretty embarrassing for Columbia, since most of us here have felt that this album doesn’t do him justice.”

  Sancious and co., though, were just warming up. The period between July 1973 and January 1974 saw this band in their onstage element, wending their way down E Street and straight into the likes of “Incident on 57th St,” “Kitty’s Back” and their namesake shuffle, with something magical happening nightly. It would even prompt a certain nostalgia from the man who broke the spell, Springsteen himself, twenty-five years later: “We had come out of a band that had jammed a lot, so when I put the band together as an ensemble, they had this tendency to want to play and play and play. [The band’s] style was quite beautiful and very responsive and just totally original. [But] it only lasted for a very brief period.”

  In that “brief period,” he revived “Something You Got” and “Walking The Dog” from the Bruce Springsteen Band repertoire, and “Let The Four Winds Blow” from Lozito’s collection of Fats Domino 45s. A coupla recast originals from that earlier “jam-band,” “Secret To The Blues” and “You Mean So Much To Me Baby” also found renewed favor. If the former was quickly dropped, the latter by January 1974 had assumed epic proportions, reflecting “this tendency to want to play and play and play.” Something unique was happening, and the whole band was instinctively attuned to it. Appel sensed it, too. When they returned to a familiar hunting ground, Joe’s Place in Boston, for a three-day residency (January 4–6, 1974), he decided it was high time they were captured on tape. Twenty-three days later, he rolled tape again at another intimate club show in Nashvi
lle, hastily arranged because CBS reps were in town for a convention, and Appel wanted to show them what they were missing:

  David Sancious: Sometimes you get a bunch of accomplished players together and it sounds stale, but with us it was like every note was tight in place, but with heart…That band was a real good thing for Bruce, because he was writing things at that time beyond the scope of normal rhythmic things. The songs were real funky, jazzy ballads that I felt achieved more mileage, [using] a different approach.

  Yet just a few days later Springsteen pulled the plug, removing the E Street Band’s central ballast, and making a mockery of all his talk of loyalty and blood brothers. He fired his oldest musical collaborator, Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez, supposedly because of an exchange of words and fisticuffs at ten paces with Appel’s brother, Steve, after a show. The argument, as per usual, was about money. Lopez believed, “We were being cheated. Well, Mike Appel’s brother and I had a few words. I pushed him and he went down.”