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

by Clinton Heylin

  In fact, when he returned to New York on May 30 to sign the legally-binding agreement which would sever his professional relationship with Appel, it seemed like all the fight had gone out of him. He was as sad to see it end this way as his old mate. Appel recalls, “We were in a lawyer’s office. We were at this big conference table. He signed his and initialed every page and then I came in and signed mine. We weren’t even in the same room at the time. I had run into him in the lobby…Bruce said, ‘What’s the word?’ I said, ‘Not much.’…It was the end of it.”

  Springsteen had gotten what he (thought he) wanted—a new producer, a new contract with CBS which bumped up his royalty rate (which would have happened anyway) and control of his publishing. Appel retained his financial share in the work to date. So what was the financial cost of freedom? Would it prove just another word for nothing left to lose? Well, Appel was to receive around $800,000 over the next five years, paid for by CBS, set against the advances Springsteen would receive directly. Meanwhile, his cut on all future sales of the first three albums was reduced from six to two percent, while retaining a 50% interest in the twenty-seven songs that Springsteen had recorded and released whilst he had served as his music publisher.

  Springsteen had put himself in hock to CBS for the foreseeable. Not only was he again in the red but was likely, at his current work-rate, to stay that way for some time to come. The label had also succeeded in getting him to sign directly to them, making him the first major artist in history to go from licensing product to the slave contract that still passes for the average record deal; in which the artist pays all his own recording costs yet the label owns all copyrights in perpetuity. In fact, Appel remembers, “After the lawsuit I was in Mr. Chow’s in California…and I heard these lawyers talking about ‘The Springsteen Clause.’ [According to them,] there would be no more production companies to assign the rights.” He at least understood the price someone had to pay:

  Mike Appel: The record company must take a position. They can’t sit on the sidelines. So they must side with the artist, even if they end up paying off Mike Appel, which they did, because they lost the lawsuit. They still had to take that position. Yetnikoff and I were friends before the lawsuit and after the lawsuit. [But] the artist would then think, “Well, at least the record company sided with me. They advanced me the money to pay for the lawyers [&c.].” It gave [Bruce] every incentive to kick ass, and get out of debt.

  Springsteen stated his own view back in March 1977, “I feel like you pay and you pay and you pay…[then] there’s the big payoff.” If Appel’s lawyer was claiming “complete victory,” so was Springsteen’s, who suggested “that the press observe who’s producing Bruce’s next LP; whether or not Laurel Canyon Music or Management has anything to do with it; and who now controls the entire catalogue of previous songs.” But then, as Appel informed Marc Elliot, “It didn’t seem to matter to anybody that the courts had always ruled completely in my favor, and that Bruce Springsteen lost in the Court of Appeals five-nothing. That never fazed anybody. To the general public, and the industry, I was always guilty.”

  Finally, Springsteen and Landau could start work in earnest on those “seventeen clear-cut song ideas” he’d mentioned in a March interview, and any others that had come along in the interim. Surely this time it would be plain sailing, now that Mike Appel was no longer there to constantly remind him of what Duke Ellington always used to say, “I don’t need more time, I need a deadline.”

  * This refrain was not, however, included in the earliest live performance of the song, August 3 1976, where Springsteen sings the line “It’s a loser” instead.

  Chapter 5: 1977–78—Chasing Something In The Night

  I enter the studio with virtually millions of scattered ideas to which [Jon] Landau, through his unique ability to communicate with me…has been able to provide the focus and direction necessary to shape my thoughts into finished musical compositions.—Bruce Springsteen’s affidavit, quoted in Rolling Stone, 8/11/77

  The studio Springsteen entered on June 1, 1977, less than forty-eight hours after the final resolution of his rift with his now former producer-manager, was new to him and his wrecking crew. Atlantic Studios had a history few could match, but this was not the place where Jerry Wexler and Tom Dowd had once weaved their magic. This was a new studio with a nice big recording space. Of the Born To Run graduates, just Appel was missing. Iovine, two years older and wiser, was back as recording engineer, and this time Jon Landau was sole producer, though Miami Steve’s duties still included co-sounding board. Bruce described this particular dynamic the following year: “I have an overall idea for the power and stuff that I want to get, and [Jon] has a particular idea for various techniques. Plus there’s Steve Van Zandt, my guitar player, and…he sorta stands on the raw side of things.”

  That first night at Atlantic is the stuff of legends; Marshy legends. On page 207 of his bestselling pop-bio, Born To Run (1979), Dave Marsh described how “the first evening was spent laying down demos of about twenty songs.” It’s an enticing description, but a cassette inlay card (reproduced in the 2010 boxed-set) lists ten songs, only eight of which were cut that night: “Our Love Will Last Forever,” “Breakaway,” “Don’t Look Back,” “Rendezvous,” “Outside Looking In,” “Something In The Night,” “Because The Night” and “I Wanna Be With You”—still quite a result for a night’s work. But, as Marsh correctly points out, “laying down demos” was the order of the night. Landau described the session to Paul Nelson the following June, providing background to a Rolling Stone cover story, probably revealing more than he meant to about the process: “The very first thing we did was record all the songs we’d rehearsed in one night, in whatever state they were in. We were all having a great time, real sloppy. ‘Something In The Night’ just really caught fire and sounded great.”

  In fact, that first take of “Something In The Night” would make it all the way to the released album, a year later. Nor was it the only song demoed that first night which “caught fire and sounded great.” “I Wanna Be With You” shoulda been a keeper as the band rose to the occasion riding waves of aggression and a lust for life with musical muscle to spare. Springsteen even allowed himself to poke fun at his song-persona in the lyric (a rare lapse), explaining how he lost his job and home because of her: “Now I lost my job at the Texaco station/ Instead of pumping gas I’d dream of you/ I got thrown out of my house, I got such a bad reputation/ ’Cause all I wanna do is be seen with you.” Sung with a grin, the whole song gave libidos a good name. But already he was self-conscious about what side of him should be represented on this record, after driving himself nuts these past few months obsessing about each and every tiny detail:

  Bruce Springsteen: I was living on a farm in Holmdel, New Jersey. I went out and I played in the bars at nights, and we toured a little when we could, to try and keep everything going. And I thought a lot about what kind of record I was gonna make when I had the chance to record again. That is probably why some…songs got left off [Darkness], because they were a lot of fun, but there was a moment when I said, “I need to identify myself [in a certain way] at this particular moment.” [1999]

  The omission of “I Wanna Be With You” from even the earliest rough sequences was a portent. The long layoff had changed his whole approach to recording, one he could explicate in 1996, but not in 1977: “My idea wasn’t to get the next ten songs and put out an album and get out on the road. I wrote with purpose in mind, so I edited very intensely the music I was writing. So when I felt there was a collection of songs that had a point of view, that was when I released a record.”

  Van Zandt, for one, didn’t see this coming. As he says in the 2010 documentary on the making of Darkness, “Basically, the first good ten songs you write, you[‘re supposed to] put them out. Well, that process would end—forever.” The stockpiling of song upon song began on night one, and at no point did Landau intercede in the perfectionist’s progress, or explain the economics of what Sp
ringsteen was doing to him. His view was that an artist needed license, and he for one was going to give him enough rope:

  Jon Landau: There was no deadline. In fact, it was explained to CBS not to attempt to schedule a release date. My attitude was, “Why is that a problem?” I knew just from being in there every day, we were working in a very intelligent, meaningful fashion. I had no sense that we were wasting time. [It was] very businesslike. Very, very intense. You don’t make a record like [Darkness] in three, four months. The complete lack of waste on the finished [record], it’s a distillation process. He gets all the ideas out there and then it’s a constant editing and re-editing, carving away. Other people it’s such difficult work to come up with an album’s worth of material. [Whereas] Bruce creates so many choices for himself. [1978]

  How ironic then that Springsteen should spend much of his downtime that summer listening to a record which was recorded in just three weekends at a cost of £4,000, at what was effectively CBS’s London demo studio, and still had more raw anger and attack than what he was producing at Atlantic. The Clash would go on to become CBS-US’s best-selling import, after they spent eighteen months trying to decide whether they would be sowing the seeds of sedition if it got a domestic release.* As Springsteen recently revealed, “I always felt a great affinity for not just The Clash, but [all those bands]. When the punk rock movement started, though I was probably technically outside of it here in the States, I felt a deep connection.” And if The Clash had energy to spare, the Sex Pistols had the chops. They, too, made their impact felt across the pond:

  Bruce Springsteen: Darkness was…informed by the punk explosion at the time. I went out and I got all the records, all the early punk records…I bought “Anarchy in the UK” and “God Save the Queen,” and the Sex Pistols were so frightening…They made you brave, and a lot of that energy seeped its way into the subtext of Darkness. Darkness was written in 1977, and all of that music was out there, and if you had ears you could not ignore it. [2012]

  How doubly ironic that when The Clash attempted to emulate that debut’s impact by recording a proper-sounding album—one their US label would release—with their own rock critic turned producer, they merely bored the USA rigid. At least they spent the eighteen months between that eponymous debut and Give ’Em Enough Rope issuing some of the best punk anthems ever, on a series of classic nonalbum 45s that established them as one of the great singles bands of the seventies.

  Springsteen, on the other hand, seemed to have developed an aversion to having hits. And yet, he had written some of the decade’s best pop songs in the interim, recording the likes of “Rendezvous,” “Fire,” “Because The Night” and “Don’t Look Back”—all songs he ultimately gave away—at the first dozen Atlantic sessions. At the time Landau had an explanation for this, too: “He didn’t want to have one song that could be taken out of context, and interfere with what he wanted the album to represent…Bruce was very suspicious about success…/…If success was what it was like with Born To Run, Bruce didn’t want that.” Goddamn those career-defining anthems.

  The first song from these sessions he gave away was “Fire,” which he claimed to have written for Elvis, before donating it to a singer on the periphery of the downtown CBGBs scene: “I sent [Elvis] a demo of it, but he died before it arrived. Then I decided to give the song to Robert Gordon because his voice is a little like Elvis’s. When I hear him, I kinda get the impression that Elvis is singing it.” Gordon loved it, and cajoled Springsteen into contributing guitar, even though he had the legendary Link Wray to call on. But Springsteen had to work a tad harder to get a second CBGBs refugee to record another of his cast-offs. In fact, it was only after he stopped trying to write a song “for her,” and just gave her one of those he had lying around, that Patti Smith deigned to deliver him the hit by proxy he refused to allow himself:

  Lenny Kaye: He gave us a great song, and Patti made it her own, and we played it like a showband; and Jimmy Iovine saw it and opened the door, which is the thing a great producer [does]. We were offered two songs, at least. We’re recording in adjacent studios, and we’re friendly, we’re both from Jersey, we’re both in Record Plant. Jimmy’s been in there for months and Bruce, who’s very fertile in this period, wrote either one song or two, but he kinda wrote them in our style, and I would listen to them on the phone with Patti, and we’d be, “They’re all right, but…” They weren’t bad, but they were like quirky mongrels. And [then] I remember I was at home and she called me up. She had the cassette Bruce had made of “Because The Night,” and she played it to me and the chorus came on. And we’re both lovers of the immortal hit single, and there’s no way that chorus could be missed, it was so anthemic. Patti just took them [words] and created the [eventual] verses. Then we brought it into the studio, and Bruce’s original demo had a kinda Latin feel, and we just rocked it up. It was bigger. All of a sudden, an unmistakeable, exciting moment in time.

  If donating the song was a sop of sorts to Smith, he was responding just as much to a suggestion of Smith’s producer Jimmy Iovine, who, in his own words, “was engineering Darkness and producing Easter at the same time. Now, Bruce was very understanding and very flexible, because he realized that this was my first real break as a producer. Anyway, one night whilst we were lounging around the Hotel Navarro in New York I told Bruce I desperately wanted a hit with Patti, that she deserved one. He agreed. As he had no immediate plans to put ‘Because The Night’ on an album, I said why not give it to Patti. Bruce replied, ‘If she can do it, she can have it.’”

  In the recent Darkness documentary, Springsteen claimed “I [already] knew that I wasn’t gonna finish [‘Because The Night’], because it was a love song, and I really felt that I didn’t know how to write them at the time.” Actually, he had recorded half a dozen terrific love songs at those early Atlantic sessions before deciding this was not the kinda album he was going to make. Early sequences centerd around songs like “The Fast Song,” aka “God’s Angels” (in which the capricious candy-girl was characterized as, “She who is everything/ There’s a fever that she brings…Sometimes I feel like I’m walking the dead/ The blood rushes through my veins”), “Candy’s Boy,” “Drive All Night,” “Because The Night,” “Talk To Me” and “Spanish Eyes,” songs of desire, frustrated by circumstance. All were worked on in those first six weeks, as were the likes of “Frankie,” “I Wanna Be With You” and “Our Love Will Last Forever.”

  However, only a hybrid of “The Fast Song” and “Candy’s Boy”—the composite, “Candy’s Room”—would make Darkness, at the expense of all God’s chosen, even the “avenging angels of Eden, with them white horses and flaming swords/ [who] can blow this whole town into the sea.” (Two images from “Frankie” and/or “Drive All Night” would also be co-opted to Candy’s cause, “There’s machines and there’s fire on the outside of town,” and, “In the darkness there’ll be hidden worlds that shine.”) Evidently a close cousin of Janey, this Candy still retained her “mink fur coats and diamond rings” and “men who’ll give her anything she wants/ But…what she wants is me.”

  But “Candy’s Room,” for all its lyrical sophistication, had none of the epic grandeur of a live “Frankie.” Or the Atlantic “Drive All Night,” which may have emerged out of the long, improvised mid-section to the 1977 live “Backstreets”—the so-called “God’s Angel” sequence. Slight as the “Drive All Night” lyrics are, Springsteen (correctly) rated the raw-voiced epic, which appears on a number of provisional sequences for the album, timed at eight minutes (so clearly the “full” version). Like “Frankie,” though, in the end he decided it was too much of a vehicle for the Big Man: “The sax is a very warm instrument, and these songs have a little harder, cooler edge.”

  As if to prove his point, Springsteen even initially recorded “Badlands” as a guitar song, at Atlantic, when it was still a conversation between Robert Mitchum and a pulp-fiction cover-girl. At this point its refrain, “Badlands, tear your little world apart/
You gotta walk it, talk it, man, deep down in your heart,” he was singing to another crazy chick who wanted to let rip. Indeed, he initially slipped into a semi-familiar, half-whispered bedside plea when the music dropped on down, later chopped from the song: “Baby, don’t cry now, don’t waste your tears/ Baby, don’t cry now, we’re taking it on the road/ We’re taking you on the road, driving till the air turns/ In the evening fields, we’ll burn it all and then we’ll let go.”

  It was only after they actually mastered the record that Springsteen decided he “didn’t think we had enough sax on the record, took the guitar out, and Clarence played over that.” It was a belated recognition that Clemons had been almost frozen out of the recording process, not as a sleight to his old friend, but because its auteur wanted something very different. As he explained to a number of interrogators on tour, “The [guitar] leads fit better into the tone of Darkness than the saxophone did…so consequently there was more [guitar] on the album.” Landau’s view was that Springsteen was always “look[ing] for what [the solo] does for the single cut and for the album as a whole. The sax makes the thing more urban, and I think he wanted to keep more of a small-town ambience.”

  When, or if, Bruce explained his reasoning to Clemons at the sessions is unclear, but generally he didn’t explain. As Landau observed, “In the studio Bruce tends to do things, and you figure out what he’s doing. He doesn’t announce, this is what we’re going to try.” He demanded much of his coworkers, even if it took hindsight—and happiness—to reveal just how demanding a boss he had been: “I didn’t have a life, [so] it was easy for me [laughs]. But everyone else had to suffer with me…It was both self-indulgent and the only way we knew how to do it.” He was right. He “didn’t have a life.” And it showed in the characters who filled these songs: