The Lahavs departed for Israel, Louis’s homeland, just as Springsteen seemed to have got a handle on another song which took his songwriting somewhere potentially exciting. In February 1975—as “Born To Run,” “Jungleland” and “She’s The One” continued to live and breathe onstage—“Wings For Wheels” aka “Thunder Road,” a hybrid of “Walking In The Streets” and “Chrissie’s Song” he had been working on for months, made its live debut. Initially Lahav’s levitating bow vied with Bruce’s lovelorn lyrics as they metaphorically lay together on a night like this: “Now the season’s over and I feel it getting cold/ Well, I wish I could take you to some sandy beach, where we’d never grow old/ Ah, but baby, you know that’s just jive, tonight’s bustin’ open and I’m alive/ Oh, do what you can do to make me feel like a man.”
Just as Bruce was looking “to capture the Cosmos in a [single] note”—as revealed to another lady that month—Suki’s gypsy violin was departing E Street, leaving a single hint of what might have been (on the released “Jungleland,” dropped in from an earlier 914 version). On April 18, with Landau’s terms having been met, the new regime reassembled at the Record Plant to start again with a keen young engineer in situ, Jimmy Iovine. Iovine had just finished working on John Lennon’s Rock & Roll, so foolishly believed he already knew the meaning of torturous when it came to making albums with a “retro” feel. But that experience would be as nothing to this. As he recalled in 1987, by which time he had made a name as a producer in his own right, “God, it was hard. We worked very slowly, and [Bruce] had a picture in his head of what he wanted. But all of us were very young and inexperienced, so we had to go the long way to do anything.”
Landau’s first suggestion was to record the songs as a basic three-piece, and then build from there. He thought “the sound would be tighter if we cut the record initially as a trio: bass, drums and piano.” But he had picked the least confident and experienced member of the band to lay down its first marker, the not-yet-mighty Max. Van Zandt, who had been brought in to provide Springsteen with another sounding board, and himself some studio experience, was distinctly unimpressed: “It was all record the drums, record the bass, record fourteen guitar parts, separate everything, layer on layer, everything that’s bad for rock & roll.” He was already setting himself in opposition to Landau’s studio shtick—a war of attrition that would rage until 1983, culminating in Van Zandt’s departure from the E Street Band.
At least he outlasted Appel. In 1992, Springsteen asserted that he and Appel were, in fact, already “a dead-end street. [When] Jon came in…he had a pretty sophisticated point of view, and he had an idea how to solve some very fundamental problems, like how to record and where to record.” In his 1976 deposition, fighting for the right to name Landau his de facto producer, he was rather more specific about Landau’s contribution: “He just made me aware…that I could be better than I was…He came to rehearsals. He taught my drummer…how to play drums in a rock band…He changed the tide of the whole thing…Things were getting done and things were happening, and we weren’t laying in the quicksand anymore. We were coming out of it.”
If Bruce overstates his contribution, even Appel admits Landau brought one trick to the party: “He was able to analyze each song and break it down into its component parts, and make it seem not such a big thing.” But it was the ever-perceptive Paul Nelson, an old Springsteen supporter and an older friend of Landau, who made the more astute analysis of the Record Plant dynamic, writing after Born To Run’s completion: “If Landau was somewhat in awe of the kind of instinctual genius who could resolve aesthetic problems by compounding them, Bruce had no less respect for someone who invariably got to ten by counting out nine individual numbers, one at a time.” Unfortunately, Landau was not really prepared for the demands placed on him in the psychological battleground to which he had forced entry:
Mike Appel: Any guy who’s new to a situation, like Jon Landau, for a while he has the magic, then the drudgery, the everyday commonplace recording grind wears him down. Therefore, whatever magic he has brought to the table has dissipated in short order, and you’re left with what Jimmy Iovine would call Bruce Springsteen’s drift into darkness. ’Cause Bruce would just sit there and we would talk to him and he wouldn’t answer us. He would just sit there. “Would you like us to bring in another amplifier?” “You wanna do another guitar part?” Nothing…. /…[It turned out] Landau’s personality wasn’t suited to this “perfect marriage” at all. He was a guy who was always nervous, intense and methodical. Here he was suddenly caught in a situation where he was forced to fight for his position…Everything, and everyone, bothered him.
Yet Landau and Springsteen remained united in their primary goal, “To make the greatest rock & roll record ever made.” All they needed was the know-how. But as Bruce admitted in 1977, “We [soon] reached a point where what we knew wasn’t enough.” It took an outside voice, that of Little Steven, to finally call a spade a spade, and not a long blunt instrument: “I didn’t have the sophistication to be diplomatic…[To me], it was [just] like, ‘This is not working.’” Appel gamely admits, “Miami Steve stepped in and…gave the record order. They needed direction and he gave it to them. There was finally a way out. It might not have been the best way, but it was a way out. He didn’t bring in tasteful riffs—or at least [not] in my mind…—but he got them done.”
When on May 5 Springsteen brought in a sassy new song, “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out,” it was Van Zandt who after multiple incomplete takes told the horn musicians to throw away their charts, and then simply hummed them the part he suggested they play. Bruce loved it. Nor were the horns the only addition to the E Street sound Springsteen was keen to introduce. Suki may have flown the coop, but all his previous talk of strings, horns, violins &c. wasn’t just idle chatter. Days were spent working on a string arrangement for “Jungleland.” Ditto for “Backstreets,” another mini-movie where Springsteen initially equated strings with capturing the cosmos. Yet every layer added seemed to only diminish its impact. How could that be?
Bruce Springsteen: I’d gotten into the idea of production and was interested in doing…what Phil Spector did…in some fashion. And that took a long time, because no-one really knew how to get the sounds. I liked to put everything on, but then I couldn’t understand why the guitar sounds so small. The guitar sounded small, because there were twenty other things on there competing for space. For a really big guitar sound, you just have a guitar with not many other things. It took about ten years to figure this out. [1999]
As a result of Springsteen’s inner frustrations and generally darkening mood, what began as an album supposedly about this overwhelmingly joyous feeling, “I wanted to bring forth—a feeling of enormous exhilaration and aliveness,” began to assume a darker side; and it brought along the last few songs that completed the song-cycle. Dredged up from some deep reservoir of betrayal were songs like “Lonely Night In The Park,” “Backstreets” and “Meeting Across The River.”
Having, by his own admission, spent an enormous “amount of time…honing the lyrics” he “ended up writing most (sic) of the songs in about a three-week period…Originally, my mistake was in attempting to write in a particular way I had written before, instead of looking to go a slightly different way…In the end, I took a different approach toward some of the lyrics in the songs. If you read them on paper, sometimes they don’t look that good, but when you hear them, they’ve got [just] the right feel. Like some of the sixties songs.”
In the 2005 DVD documentary, he revealed just how self-conscious he decided his earlier songwriting had been: “I was very aware that I was messing with classic rock & roll images that easily turn into clichés…The initial lyric [to some songs] would have been like bad B-picture, whereas the end product was supposed to be…imbued with a certain spiritual thing.” This process was rather drawn out. As he told Paul Williams in October 1974, “I work a lot on the lyrics before we record a song. I get self-conscious about them. So I change th
em.” Back then he had no idea he would still be working on the lyrics to “Jungleland” six months later. Only his song-notebook revealed the truth: “You would take the first page and see a line or two, and fifty pages later you’d get something close to the finished song.” (Thus, only in the studio would he come up with “Jungleland”’s coruscatingly cinematic climax: “In the tunnels uptown, the Rat’s own dream guns him down.”)
Not for the last time, the artistic process took over every waking minute. Despite his best efforts, though, very little was left over which was usable—in his eyes, anyway. He informed Rolling Stone in 1984, “It’s the only album where I wrote only one more song than we recorded,” presumably a reference to “Linda Let Me Be The One,” the one Record Plant outtake included on Tracks, and a song Landau and Springsteen set surprising store in. An adjunct to “Janey Needs A Shooter” (which was also apparently considered at one point), the song depicted an array of lost boys waiting for Linda at midnight, “Talking fast cars and chrome parts, hidden worlds and strange girls/ Empty homes, busted hearts, ending up with Linda in the dark.”
There was at least one other near miss. As Springsteen told Peter Knobler on the album’s completion, “I was going to have a song about back home on there, but I didn’t get to it…Most of the songs are about being like nowhere. Just being out there in the void…and trying to make heads and tails out of it, you know, trying to figure it out.” He is referring to “Lonely Night In The Park,” a song included on the first Born To Run sequence in early July, then yanked. This song “about home” also had its shady side, explicated in its final verse, “And you’re thinking of making it home/ Oh, but your Mom can’t see you like this.” No wonder he informed one journalist: “All the heavy personal stuff in my songs comes from spending time further up the beach. Up there, they have a boardwalk you can run under.”
But the real deal, and affirmation of a unique vision, was “Backstreets,” a monolithic moment in modern rock that gave the album another perfectly-crafted cornerstone, and Bruce a career-defining cut. Having begun life as “Hidin’ On The River”—listed on a couple of early sequences, but for now confined to those notebooks—Bruce started “Backstreets” in earnest on April 25 1975. On the earliest known take he is looking to “blame it on that town,” no name necessary, this take also depicting nights spent “running…down the boardwalk, waiting on the corner at the lights.” Boardwalk life writ small. When she takes the only way out, the New Jersey Turnpike, he stays behind to fester in fear: “I hated you when you went away.” The gung-ho sentiments of “Thunder Road” and “Born To Run” are put in reverse. He has closed down every escape route. Originally the album-closer, it indicated the direction his songwriting was now heading in, that darkness on the edge of his hometown.
However, it was not the last song recorded for the album. This appears to have been “Meeting Across The River,” on May 28. Sometimes called “The Heist,” this was another departure for the boardwalk bard. Its characters may have stepped straight out of the grooves of The Wild, the Innocent, but they are now trapped in circumstances beyond their control. Perhaps for this reason, Appel loved it and pushed for its inclusion on the album, even if the track ultimately failed to achieve that requisite noirish feel.
Even with every song in the can by the end of May, they were not done, not by a long chalk. Springsteen thought being “tight, bare, [initially,] allowed us to put stuff on top of it and make it sound big, while still streamlined.” Or not. Unfortunately, he ultimately discovered, “The sound I heard in my head was not one that was physically reproducible.” Access to a superior studio, and a budget far in excess of anything to date, was having the opposite effect to the one hoped for by those to whom he was contractually bound. Appel, for one, was fast becoming convinced it was an almighty waste of money—their money:
Mike Appel: Duke Ellington used to say, “I don’t need more time, I need a deadline,” and I subscribe to that. I don’t mean you rush it out; you’re not going to create Sgt Pepper in two weeks. But you’d be surprised how quick it can go with a gun to your head…/…Our budget for the first two albums was forty thousand dollars per album. With the third, we got a bump up to maybe fifty thousand dollars. That’s the reason I wanted to stay up at 914. We were able to get really good rates up there. However, [as soon as] we moved down to The Record Plant…we went over budget in about two seconds; money that…ultimately came out of our pockets. [CH/DTR]
By the end of June, everyone was approaching the end of their tethers, and visibly fraying at the edges. The following year Springsteen depicted the resultant ennui, describing one particular moment at the death: “I was sitting there at the piano in the studio, trying to get down the last cut, ‘She’s The One,’ and Landau’s in the booth and we’ve been at it for hours and hours. I just lean my head down on the piano. It just won’t come. And everybody’s tryin’ to tell me how to do it…The whole thing was like that.”
With a tour booked to start on July 20, things were threatening to get out of hand. He was rehearsing with the band in one studio, overdubbing a vocal to “She’s The One” in another and mixing “Jungleland” in a third. And at the end of the day he was trudging back to his midtown Holiday Inn room, where his new girlfriend was waiting not-so-patiently for her weary warrior:
Bruce Springsteen: For the whole last part of [Born To Run] I was living in this certain inn in New York over west. And the room there had this crooked mirror. And every day, before I’d go over to the studio, I’d straighten out this crooked mirror. And every day when I’d come home, that mirror was crooked again…After about a week, the room started to look like Nagasaki anyway. And then…this chick I was with one night in Texas calls up and says she’s in Jersey, and she doesn’t have any place to stay and she’s freakin’ out! And so finally I say, “Okay, you can stay here.” So every day I’d go into the studio and there was that [situation]; and then I’d come home and there’d be this crooked mirror and this crazy chick…And when I got home around ten in the morning…this chick says to me—she says it every night when I come home—“Is it finished yet?” And I say, “No.” [1976]
This “crazy chick” was not just some Texan cowgirl, as the above quote implies. Springsteen was head over heels about the gal, whom he invited to New York from the Lone State. Her name was Karen Darvin (later Mrs. Todd Rundgren), and although she was initially understanding about the situation, in the end even Springsteen realized, “She was in this hotel room for hours and she was seeing me only at night…She didn’t know anybody else. So, of course, she’d get mad at me.”
It only added to the pressure of the situation until, by his own (post-therapy) admission, “I couldn’t separate the things that were frightening me from the things that were beneficial. I was feeling all of a sudden the pull of that loss of self-determination.” For a man who was all about control, such a “loss of self-determination” was bound to tear him apart. As the sessions themselves reached the pulling-teeth stage, his drive for perfection crossed over into an obsessiveness more commonly found in the local psych ward:
Bruce Springsteen: The [sessions] turned into something I never conceived of a record turning into. It turned into this thing that was wrecking me, just pounding me into the ground. Every time you’d win a little victory over it, accomplish a little something, you’d say, “Well, the worst is over.” The next day you’d come back in and it would start pounding away at you again. [1975]
It was time for big decisions. Like, what to do about the strings. He wisely decided, “Once we got the guitars, I think I just wanted the thing more grittier, and the strings kinda took away some of the darkness.” But still he insisted on micro-managing every little overdub, whether it was his own guitar overdub on “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” or Clemons’ sax solo on “Jungleland,” which the Big Man had been playing nightly for the past year.
Appel, for one, was taken aback: “Clarence was always capable of doing a solo without Bruce’s instructions up t
o that point, but on ‘Jungleland,’ every note, Bruce was going [hand signals], note by note, until the solo was complete.” Clemons recalled this one overdub taking sixteen hours, and all the time “he was telling me, ‘More warmth, more movement, I like that note there, let’s work around that.’ We had to find those passages that go to the bone.” Losing control in his private life, Springsteen was over-obsessing at his workplace. By the end of it, he was only going back to the hotel to sleep, further aggravating that psycho-sexual situation.
It finally came time to sequence the record. For once, there was no great surfeit of potential classics he would discard. Yet there remained dissension in the ranks. As Independence Weekend approached, Springsteen ordered Appel from the studio, preferring to construct a sequence of his and Landau’s choosing. Of course, he didn’t do this in person. He phoned Landau at five in the morning and asked him to break the news to Appel. According to Landau, “Bruce was very upset” by Appel’s intransigence. But on some things, the manager-producer simply refused to back down:
Mike Appel: I would put up with an awful lot of nonsense to get to “Born To Run,” or things like “Born To Run.” My days were numbered no matter what. Because I think I set a really high standard for material recorded. Bruce was partially responsible for that. Just trying to make songs for pop radio—[songs like] “Linda,” “Lonely Night In The Park”—they seemed to be pandering a little bit to [that]. I thought they had no place on the album. So I would always be at odds with him on things like that. There were times when I said, “Over my dead body that song’s going on the record.”
E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Page 14