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

by Clinton Heylin

  Appel has long insisted the argument he had with “Bruce and Jon” at this juncture came about because they “didn’t think that ‘Meeting Across The River’ should be on the album. I did and fought for it like heck. And it is in the album, and two of the songs that they wanted to be in there—‘Lonely Night In The Park’ and ‘Linda Let Me Be The One’—I thought that neither…was up to his standards, and I fought against [them].” But the sequence they arrived at by July 2 included all three songs. The one song cut was the title track. The album, as of Independence Day, would have run as follows:

  Side One: Thunder Road. Tenth Avenue Freeze Out. Lonely Night In The Park. Jungleland. Night.

  Side Two: Linda Let Me Be The One. Meeting Across The River. She’s The One. Backstreets.

  Never happy with how it had come out, Springsteen was seriously planning to leave off “Born To Run.” Thankfully, wiser counsel prevailed. Sometime during that weekend Appel received a call from Iovine, who told him “Mike, this is a disaster. Bruce is drifting into darkness. No one can talk to him, and he won’t answer me when I try.” Eventually Springsteen realized he needed Appel to give it to him straight, and rein in any last-minute acts of wanton perversity—like preferring the throwaway “Linda Let Me Be The One” to “Born To Run.”

  The following Monday, when Appel entered his office, Springsteen was waiting for him: “I want you back to the studio, Mike.” Appel insists, “I was never like, I told you so…He knew I was never lying to him, so when we clashed, he knew deep down [he should] check himself in the mirror.” Getting him to restore “Born To Run,” retain “Meeting Across The River” and drop the two lesser songs would become Appel’s last major contribution to Springsteen’s studio canon; and the last time anybody would stand up to the singer in quite that way. It would make for what is probably Springsteen’s most perfectly sequenced album, and the one that finally allowed him to achieve the goal he had set himself aged fifteen: “To play in my own ballpark.”

  It still took our man another two weeks to approve the final mix, the artwork and the mastering. But he would not “let go.” Even engineer Iovine was impressed by his dedication: “At the end we mixed the album in nine days straight, maybe leaving the studio for a few hours to go home. We even slept there. We had to get it finished, Bruce had shows booked. But he [still] had a picture in his head, and as tired as he was, he wouldn’t let go of that picture.” Even at the mastering stage doubts crowded in. As Springsteen recalled in 2005, “It was the last thing I was gonna have to decide before the record came out and I was simply paralyzed…I couldn’t let it go…but at the same time I was done. I had nothing else to give it.”

  It was time to check out of Holiday Inn Room 206, pack his bags and take Karen and the band up to Rhode Island for the weekend. Not for any kinda break, heaven forfend. Rather, their night in Providence represented the start of a tour scheduled to run through the end of the year, and would take in trips to London, Amsterdam and Stockholm and—if all went according to plan—prove Jon Landau to have been a visionary when he saw the future of rock ’n’ roll some fourteen months earlier. As it turned out, the question was not, was the world ready for Bruce Springsteen, but was he ready for the real world?

  * Just a single October session—and one song (“A Night Like This”)—are listed in the Sony logs. Clearly, their records of fall 1974/winter 1975 sessions at 914 are incomplete.

  Chapter 4: 1975–77—Cashed In A Few Of My Dreams

  In a concert you reach for something that one can’t describe. It’s in the air. It’s not how much you know, or who the band is, or what notes you’re playing. It’s something free and intangible. You reach for it the whole time, because it’s the most important thing to find…Now it’s easy for a band to be tight. It’s not easy for a band to be loose. To be tight it takes knowledge and work. To be loose…takes something else.—Bruce Springsteen, October 1975

  In the days of musical theater, a Broadway-bound show would open out of town, usually upstate, a Poughkeepsie or a Saratoga Springs, or if the wheelnuts needed more than mere tightening, they’d maybe shuffle off to Buffalo. The fifth incarnation of the E Street Band, after an unprecedented five months off the road, followed this time-honored example, making its debut at the Palace Theater, Providence RI on 20 July 1975, the first of thirteen shows designed to whip everyone into shape before a five-night, ten-set stint at The Bottom Line announced the new album to an expectant media, and either set the seal on a rosy future or left the latest pretender on the bus back to Jersey.

  The band was bound to have some road rust in their bones. They also had precious little time to work up a new set. As Weinberg recalled, “We went right from the last recording session to a rehearsal room at eight in the morning, we ran through the set and played that night.” They had even less time to teach their latest recruit his parts. Thankfully, soul stylist/guitarist Steve Van Zandt had spent years playing in bar bands, with and without Springsteen. When his buddy called out Manfred Mann’s “Sha La La” as second encore in Providence, it felt just like old times.

  This moment excepted, they hedged their bets opening night. Not taking any chance with Lady Luck, Springsteen sang just three songs from the new album, of which only “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” was new to the set. For the last time, six of The Wild, the Innocent’s seven songs formed its veritable backbone; including all four epics that for the past eighteen months had comprised half of the set and most of the drama. Proceedings opened with a Lahav-less “Incident On 57th Street,” performed with just Bittan’s piano accompaniment, followed by “E Street Shuffle,” “New York City Serenade” (making a fond farewell) and “Kitty’s Back.” By year’s end, all four would be trimmed of their sails and—“Incident” excepted—dry-docked for the duration.

  This was no longer the E Street Band of yore, a band built on an extravagant melange of styles as disparate as jazz, soul and r&b, one which allowed everyone to take turns upstaging everyone else just as long as they all remained servant to the song. Little, on the face of it, had changed. A part-time violinist and backing singer had been replaced by a second guitarist and backing vocalist who took on some of Springsteen’s parts, freeing the frontman to work on his method-singing. And there were just four new songs to assimilate into the set—two future perennials, “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” and “Backstreets,” and the less persuasive “Night” and “Meeting Across The River.” But the bandleader had passed through the fire, and come out a changed man:

  Bruce Springsteen: When you’re leading the band, singing, and writing the songs, eventually you’ve got to make some choices. I chose to go away from a long jamming sorta style, even though I did it for a long time…As I got older I wanted to be more direct, clear, immediate and not waste a lot of time. [1992]

  He no longer seemed content to let the band strike up its own rhythm. He wanted a drummer who imposed a beat, and left it at that. When he told a court transcriber in 1976 that Landau “taught my drummer…how to play drums in a rock band,” he meant it as a compliment. However, this more metronomic style of playing failed to complement much of the material on which a prodigious live reputation had been forged. In other words, this was not the band Landau recently proclaimed to be “the future of rock ’n’ roll,” making any ongoing promotional use of that review almost smack of misrepresentation. The reason so many journalists found it hard to equate that review with the Born To Run band had nothing to do with how well they played, or how strong the new material was. What surprised many who had already experienced the E Street Band live was just how orthodox they sounded now.

  The Springsteen who asserted earlier in the year, “We’re a real American band—there are practically no European influences,” could hardly keep a straight face. He was fronting an outfit who were a Jersey boardwalk amalgam of hungry hearts, taking a British Invasion aesthetic and feeding it a steady diet of Memphis stew. Once Miami Steve added some of his own arrangement ideas, and Weinberg stopped trying to emulate
Lopez and Carter, the (largely) British sixties sounds and American r&b they grew up on became brushstrokes added repeatedly to the mix, at the expense of any last vestiges of all that jazz.

  As the guitar had dominated the two key pre-E Street bands, so it returned to center stage 1975–77, sometimes in the hands of the ex-gunslinger himself, but much of the time left to Steve Van Zandt. Surprisingly, this significant shift of focus drew very little comment at the time, pro or con; save from Rolling Stone’s Dave Marsh, who rather witheringly opined: “The recent addition of Miami Steve is the [main] difference. Previously, when Springsteen had dropped his guitar to simply sing, the band was left with its focus on the keyboards. No great help since…Roy Bittan is inclined to over-embellish everything…[whereas] Van Zandt plays perfect Steve Cropper soul licks and great rock leads.”

  Of course, Marsh always liked his loud guitars. The trick was recasting the band and still retaining those elements which made them the hottest showband currently playing rock ’n’ roll music on the eastern seaboard. Thankfully, they still played like there was no tomorrow, with a no-holds-barred passion that took no prisoners, raising the stakes each and every time. When they rolled into town to play the first of ten sold-out-and-then-some shows back at The Bottom Line, even Bruce knew this was not gonna be like the year before:

  Bruce Springsteen: Even the first set we played at the Bottom Line…I got real “in,” man. I go “in” sometimes, instead of going “out”…There was a lot of tension and we were doing a lot of songs live for the first time. And I was really struggling with the material, struggling to get it across. A lot of the material on the new album is different. It’s a little darker than some of the other things. So that attitude, too, added to the mood. [1975]

  He need not have worried. Old and new converts alike championed the main contender come good. Leading from the front was a vindicated Nelson, who suggested in Village Voice that his opening show “makes practically any criticism obsolete…Springsteen fashions the kind of seamless, 150–minute performance that most artists can only dream about, never realize…Ironically, if he weren’t as good as he is—and he is close to being the best we have—no one would be concerned with such minor issues as pace and overreach.”

  Marsh chose to focus on the ensemble nature of the performances, feeling that “the E Street Band has nearly been lost in the shuffle. Which is ridiculous because this group may very well be the great American rock & roll band.” John Rockwell, having forgotten his watch, abandoned all pretense at critical objectivity to begin his Rolling Stone pro-Bruce puff-piece proclaiming, “Nearly three hours into the Friday late show…” (none of the shows topped two hours). In fact, Springsteen and the band needed to conserve their energies. Not only were they playing two shows a night, but on the third night there was a live radio broadcast on WNEW of the entire early set.

  Appel had smartly revived the practice of live radio broadcasts to spread the word, making the broadcast from The Bottom Line and a similar October coastal bulletin from LA’s equally intimate Roxy the twin beacons of a strategy built on the fervent belief that you had not really heard Springsteen till you heard him live. But for now Springsteen’s record company resisted—this time because of that great Music-biz bogey, bootlegs. It took Paul Rappaport to spell it out to his fellow reps: “I told them, ‘I guarantee you there’s gonna be a boot, and I can tell you who’s gonna make it. Do you really give a fuck! C’mon, This thing’s gonna explode, we’re gonna sell millions of records.’’’

  An ever-growing live reputation also smartly sidestepped the issue of whether the album “Rap” and co. were now promoting was overcooked at the edges and undercooked in the middle. Even NME’s Charles Shaar Murray—who suggested in print “the trouble with Springsteen’s new album is that it sounds as if he’d been told too often how important he is and as a result has set out to write important songs and make an important record”—placed such criticism in the context of a two-page rave live review.

  Bruce was stoking one set of expectations by quelling another. In the States, reviewers were less concerned with the album’s (patent) sonic deficiencies. Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone positively celebrated the fact that the lyrics “are buried, as they should be, hard to hear for the first dozen playings,” comparing the E Street Band to Dylan and the Hawks circa sixty-six, which might have been the ultimate compliment if only Dylan hadn’t fired the Hawks mid-sessions and made Blonde on Blonde with a bunch of Nashville cats instead.

  Even the curmudgeonly Lester Bangs, back home at Creem, seemed to have been infected by all this Bruceian bonhomie, almost apologising to regular readers of his reviews: “If I seem to OD on superlatives, it’s only because Born To Run demands them.” Quoting Kerouac, namechecking Dylan, Morrison and Reed, he celebrates “an American moment caught at last.” The hubbub even made its presence felt among the starched shirts of the American weeklies, where Time and Newsweek reigned supreme. When Jay Cocks, an early convert, convinced Time to run a cover story on the Bruce “phenomenon” (a gross overstatement for a man still playing clubs, while the lead single from his album stuttered to a halt just shy of the Top Twenty), Newsweek were playing catch-up. Their solution was to send the devoutly unhip Maureen Orth to interview a man for whom hype was Bowie’s ex-backing band.

  Yet all through the fall this hype had legs, not because Born To Run itself was breaking all records or the E Street Band were harbingers of a foretold future, but because the shows just got better and better. The pacing became steadily more pitch-perfect; Springsteen began to grow into his role even as he relinquished the guitar strap; and the band found a way to make the songs from the first two albums, and any A-list covers now substituting for earlier songs he was too embarrassed to perform, fit Springsteen’s new-found straitjacket of sound.

  Not everyone, though, bought into all this Bruce mania. When Springsteen arrived at Gold Star to meet the great Phil Spector, after a Roxy show that showed every CBS rep just how the west was won, Spector sarcastically shouted, “Okay fellas, Bruce Springstreet is here…Let’s show him how to make a record.” Even before Time and Newsweek joined the bandwagon, the contrary New York Times—early champions of the Asbury contender—ran a piece by Henry Edwards which suggested, “If Bruce Springsteen didn’t exist, rock critics would invent him.” Springsteen later revealed, “That bothered me a lot.”

  And if the American press had its contrary elements, the UK music press, which in 1975 had an influence on its readership that was a mere wet dream to the likes of Rolling Stone, was built on contrariness, particularly when it came to uppity colonials claiming, somewhat impertinently, that rock music was their music. Not in 1975, it wasn’t. When NME editor Nick Logan instructed Andrew Tyler to go see what the fuss was about, it was to the legendary Roxy he was sent. He returned to report that he found “a frontman for another good rock & roll band, composer of R’n’B-slanted material that tips a little in advance of the mean average,” whose lyrics were “cluttered,” and whose melodies and arrangements “are a patchwork of some of the more dubious R’n’R mannerisms of the sixties.” This was the cover story that ran in the UK’s premier music weekly the week before London found out if it was finally ready for this musical magpie. (Bruce shared that cover with Dylan, whose Rolling Thunder Revue he caught in person that month, before venturing backstage to meet the man, whose opening line was a peach: “I hear you’re the new Me!”)

  The pressure was on even before Springsteen’s jet plane landed in London and he strolled onto the Heathrow tarmac. Also at the Roxy mini-residency had been Old Grey Whistle Test producer Michael Appleton and its presenter Bob Harris, both there to tie up details of a TV special. The sticking point was the lighting. As Appleton told Tyler, “The lighting is a very important part of the act, and I can understand his point of view. [So] we’re currently investigating the possibility of doing an outside broadcast from the Hammersmith Odeon gig on [November] 24th.”

  In fact, the decision was made to
shoot opening night (the 18th); not Springsteen’s return date, six days later (added after shows had already been booked in Stockholm and Amsterdam). While the concert footage they shot was simply too dark to be broadcast, a BBC radio broadcast from Hammersmith, intended to emulate the impact of those from The Bottom Line and The Roxy, was hastily canceled when Appel saw the mood his charge was in on landing (though he still ran tapes both nights):

  Bruce Springsteen: I was in this big shadow, man, right from the start…I’m just getting over this [New] Dylan thing: “Oh, thank God, that seems to be fading away,” and…“Phwooeee, I have seen [the future]…” No, it can’t be…So like I’m always ten points down, because not only have you got to play, but you got to blow this bullshit out of people’s minds first…/…I can’t be put in a position of having to dig out of somebody’s idea of what I am…[But] CBS took this [quote], promoted it real heavy, and I was like SENSATIONAL! Cheap thrill time! You know it was a big mistake on their part…and I would like to strangle the guy who thought that up, if I ever get hold of him. [1975]

  Springsteen wasn’t the only one on the warpath the day of his London debut. Appel was equally angry, after “CBS, unbeknownst to me, decides to take all these arrogant ads, ‘Is London finally ready…?’ I was as blindsided as Bruce when I saw those things. Nobody asked my permission for that. I never wanted to be a manager in the first place, and now I’m having to deal with everything! And now it’s all business.” In the notes to the 2005 official DVD release of that show, Springsteen suggested he overreacted to the situation. Having “arrived at the theater [I] created pre-show chaos, stomping through the aisles, pulling promo flyers off the seats in a ‘The Man can’t steal my music’ frenzy. The record company, of course, was just doing its job, and I was just doing its job, and I was just learning mine…real fast…Later, all I remember is an awkward record company party, that ‘what just happened?’ feeling, and thinking we hadn’t played that well.”