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

by Clinton Heylin

  It was not until he sat down at home at the end of March 1979 to read the newspaper that he finally found a thematic starting point for Darkness’s successor. For the very first time, Springsteen responded to a public event by immediately writing a song with “an appropriately paranoid lyric.” “Roulette” was the riveting result. Directly inspired by the Three Mile Island near-nuclear meltdown on March 28 1979, the song was in the can by April 3 (a partial acoustic home demo exists, showing how quickly he formulated the song’s basic components). Faster and fiercer than Dylan’s 1971 response to the murder of black militant George Jackson, “Roulette” would be the neon beacon which would light the way to Springsteen’s future as a politicized singer-songwriter.

  Never before had he contextualized a first-person narrative inspired by an actual event in real time. This time his narrator was “a fireman at the reactor” who’s treated like he’s “the big expendable.” His faith in the status quo disappears after he loses everything (“I got a house full of things that I can’t touch”), until he defiantly roars, “I left behind the man I used to be/ Everything he believed and all that belonged to me.” All the while the chorus demands answers from the gamesters playing Russian roulette with his life, his wife and his kids. And on this rockin’, reelin’ ride it is a rejuvenated Weinberg who propels the whole thing to the edge of the precipice. “Roulette” was an E Street special and, after a year away from the studio, a much-needed reminder of their full arsenal of sound. Only in the final verse does Springsteen’s imagination get the better of him, as he constructs a scenario that owes more to Close Encounters of the Third Kind than The China Syndrome.

  A week later, they returned to the studio and captured a song he had been playing since November, “The Ties That Bind.” Again, it was done in a day, “with the band playing in a wood-paneled studio with open mikes over the drumkit to get that live resonance.” Maybe this was the way to do things. A song a week. Rehearse it, record it, release it. In Songs, he claims this was indeed the intent underlying said methodology: “I knew I wanted more of the roughness and spontaneity of our live show…I was determined to let the band play live and let the music happen.” And in the resultant downtime he could really enjoy the company of girlfriend Joyce, while his ex-marketing manager brought by people he admired to pay their respects:

  Dick Wingate: Joyce was a buxom brunette, comely, very attractive. The day I went to Bruce’s house with Robin Williams and his then-wife, Vicky, Joyce was there. That day was unforgettable. Robin Williams was in town recording his first album at the Copacabana. My brother introduced me to Robin in Aspen the [previous] winter. He was running a nightclub. We end up skiing together one day—a lot of blow. Now fast forward, Robin gets signed, he’s recording three-four nights. I tell him what I’m doing, and he says, I would really like to meet Bruce Springsteen. I talk to Landau, and on a Sunday afternoon Barry Bell and I take Robin and his wife in a limo down to the farmhouse [in New Jersey]. We’re pulling up the driveway when we see Bruce is on an [off-road tricycle] with Joyce behind him, with her arms around him, and by the time he comes up to the house, he’s limping. I go, “Are you okay?” He says, “I’m okay.” Joyce says, “He kinda sideswiped a tree.” [Maybe] our arrival distracted him, but he’d pinned his leg against the tree. He didn’t let on that he was in a lot of pain, and we went on with the day. Robin and Bruce really hit it off, [but] Bruce was keeping his leg raised on the coffee table, trying to keep the swelling down, and had taken some Tylenol, or maybe just some aspirin. The day ended and we leave, and the next day Landau calls me and says, “You know, Bruce was immediately taken to the hospital as soon as you left. He was in a lot of pain.” He just insisted he was fine. [But] he had some internal bleeding and he’s [been told] to stay off his feet for [the next] ten days. He was on crutches.

  Though not quite as portentous as Dylan’s fabled crash fourteen years earlier, Springsteen’s motorcycle accident seems to have led him to rethink his whole approach to the forthcoming sessions. And it applied the brakes after a highly promising start to proceedings. When rehearsals resumed in May, he was making Album #4 again, starting with two songs included on scribbled lists for that album but never realized: “Bring On The Night” and the still alive ’n’ kicking “Janey Needs A Shooter.”

  The former made it to Power Station, the latter did not. And yet the May 1979 rehearsal take of “Janey”—bootlegged on the famous Son You May Kiss The Bride LP—remains one of the great unreleased performances of the E Street era. A seven-minute assault on the senses, Springsteen just gets more and more wound up as he ticks off the rivals to Janey’s affections; doctor, priest and cop. The cop is no longer a Peeping Tom, but he still uses his badge to try and put the fear of God in the pair of lovers as he “checks on her every night…outside her house his siren roars/ when he knows that I’m inside.” This time, though, the narrator-lover spits the lyrics back with a venom the singer would have been well advised to bottle for the sessions to come. He did not. In fact, before he had even got back to work, he had donated this song to another willful singer-songwriter, Warren Zevon:

  Warren Zevon: During the time that Bruce was prevented from recording by a court injunction, his producer Jon Landau happened to mention to me a whole string of songs Bruce had written but couldn’t record. I suddenly latched on to one of the titles mentioned, “Jeannie Needs A Shooter” (in fact, it was Janie, but I’d misheard). I became obsessed with the line and every time I saw Springsteen…I asked him about it and pleaded to hear the song…On the one day Springsteen takes off from recording The River [sic], [I play] him…[my] interpretation of Jeannie and her shooter. Bruce loves the arrangement, and likes the first verse…[but then] realizes the real reason I invited him over. [We] sit down and write the next five verses [together], unfolding a romantic saga of an outlaw pursuing a maiden whilst her father tries to gun him down. Then he played me the original [song], and it was done in completely the opposite way…the line wasn’t important at all.

  Having allowed Zevon to mangle something that fully matched “Roulette” in intensity, Bruce resumed work at the Station on May 22, concentrating not on any of the songs band-rehearsed that week, but rather ones from dusty old notebooks, the best of which—like “Janey Needs A Shooter”—he ended up rewriting till they changed from black to blue. By May 29 1979, “Point Blank” had undergone wholesale lyrical revisions that provided a clearer narrative of loss and regret, but at the expense of its former, noirish realism: “I dreamed I saw you standing on the porch off the house where you grew up…You were staring out on the highway like you were waiting for someone…And I’ll never forget the way you looked when I walked away/ You just stood there waiting, waiting to get blown away.” A rethink was in order if the in-concert classic wasn’t to suffer the same fate as “The Promise.”

  Between May 22 and June 13, Springsteen devoted large chunks of time at Power Station to “Sherry Darling,” “Independence Day,” “I Wanna Be With You,” “Ramrod” and “Bring On The Night,” all songs he’d turned his back on in the summer of 1977. Just two new songs vied with these nostalgic nods to the album Darkness could have been. And, although “Jackson Cage” and “Be True” would both be released in The River era, these original versions were as distinct from their distant River cousins as the 1978 prototypes for “Ties That Bind” and “Point Blank.” This time songs were getting away from him. The honing process could no longer be relied on to stumble toward some archetypal expression. Sometimes, it just ripped out a song’s guts.

  “Jackson Cage” was actually the first track recorded on May 22. Originally a song of self-recrimination that demanded change from within, it was some way from the “trapped by circumstance” lyric it became: “You take the chances that you’ve got to take/ You drive hard and you stay awake/ You…get used to being bought and sold…You learn to cool your temper and collect your rage/ To use it well, down in Jackson Cage.”

  “Mary Lou,” a song that would become a cent
erpiece of The Ties That Bind in its “Be True” guise, was an attempt to write both a “really catchy three-minute pop tune,” and something “that moved lyrically, that linked together in a certain way.” To Springsteen’s mind, “this fellow…is trying to say, ‘Hey, don’t sell yourself cheap.’ It’s saying, be true to yourself in some fashion. He’s talking to a woman he’s interested in, but actually that’s a device to address, just how do you find yourself through the falseness of some of those things.” It was a theme he would drive into the ground at these sessions. “Mary Lou” herself would enjoy three distinct incarnations: “Mary Lou,” “Little White Lies” and, finally, “Be True.” Of these, the still-unreleased “Little White Lies” is closest to that “English-style stuff,” its shameless “Paint It Black” intro and another dynamic performance from Weinberg driving his boss to the brink of self-actualization.

  Slowly, and surprisingly unsurely, Bruce was clearing the decks before unleashing the wave of songs which would send a strong current through the still-projected single LP as well as its more overblown successor, The River. It was June 13 before he finally got the backward-looking album he had been working on for the past two months out of his system. That was the day he ran through “White Town,” “The Man Who Got Away,” “Night Fire” and “Bring On The Night,” songs he had expended a great deal of (cassette) tape demoing that winter.

  Through the rest of 1979, he never looked back. The following day he cut “Hungry Heart;” the day after that, “The Price You Pay;” and when that was done to his satisfaction, he introduced “Stolen Car.” The album, after two months spent largely down cul-de-sacs, was back on main street. He would later claim these “wasted” sessions were all a necessary part of the process: “It was in struggling to reconcile my previous and present recording approaches that the album found its identity.” But still he clung to the idea of a pop album, albeit one which took as a key point of reference an early seventies Cleveland combo of marginal repute:

  Bruce Springsteen: One of my favorite records that summer [of 1979] was The Raspberries Greatest Hits…I loved the production, and when I went into the studio [initially] a lot of things we did were like that. Two-, three-, four-minute pop songs coming one right after another…Steve Van Zandt was [now an important] part of the production team, and we finally learned how to capture the kind of dynamics, the explosiveness that we always felt on stage…It was the first time that we really caught some of the rawness and excitement of the live show on record. [1999]

  “Hungry Heart” was one track whose pop sensibility was set in opposition to the lyrics, with the twin motifs that informed all the key songs recorded that summer—the dead-end relationship (“We took what we had and we ripped it apart”) and the river of life leading straight down to death (“Like a river that don’t know where it’s flowing,” a direct reference to The Byrds’ death-ridden “Ballad of Easy Rider”). The river motif cropped up again on “The Price You Pay,” where he tells a young single mother of how he “could not enter the chosen land/ On the banks of the river he stayed, to face the price you pay.” If he stayed on the banks this time, he went down to the river on “Stolen Car,” the darkest song of his career to date and one which would ultimately lead on to its sister-song, “The River:”

  Bruce Springsteen: [“Stolen Car”] was concerned with those [relationship] ideas for the first time: that if you don’t connect yourself with your family and to the world, you feel like you’re disappearing, fading away. I felt like that for a very, very long time. Growing up, I felt invisible. And that feeling is an enormous source of pain for people. [1999]

  “Stolen Car” was another of those songs, like “Hungry Heart,” that he wrote “in a half hour, or ten minutes, real fast.” In fact, it may have begun as a continuation of that song, initially adopting the self-same phrase to explain why things fell to bits: “We got married and promised never to part/ Then I fell a victim to a hungry heart.” But this time he took it all to heart. In its original guise, “Stolen Car” was a “ghost story” told by a spirit in the night, as a spoken intro at the New York December 18 1980 show made abundantly clear, “Some people make that connection and some people don’t, you know…and when you don’t, it’s like you end up like a ghost, it’s like…nobody sees you or nobody can feel you. [So] this is a ghost story, this song.”

  He even describes the revenant’s end: “There’s a river that runs by that little town down into the sea/ It was there in the shade I laid my body down, as she flowed by so effortlessly.” In other words he surrenders to the river, much like the boy in the Flannery O’Connor short story of the same name—which Springsteen had evidently already read, though it would be some years before she got namechecked: “He intended…to Baptize himself and to keep on going this time until he found the Kingdom of Christ in the river. He didn’t mean to waste any more time. He put his head under the water at once and pushed forward…He plunged under once [more] and this time, the waiting current caught him like a long gentle hand and pulled him swiftly forward and down…All his fury and his fear left him.”

  The ghost in this stolen car is a close cousin of the spirit Robert Johnson invoked at the end of “Me and the Devil Blues”: “You may bury my body down by the highway side/ So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.” It also consciously evoked the classic “I dreamed a dream” motif of many an Anglo-American ballad for its haunting coda:

  Last night I dreamed I made the call

  I promised to come home forever more

  Once again we stood on the wedding steps at Victory Hall

  And walked arm in arm through the chapel door

  I remember how good I felt inside

  When the preacher said “Son, you may kiss the bride.”

  He knew he had pulled off something special; and wisely took time out to reevaluate the album’s direction. In the next three weeks there would be just two sessions and one finished song (the uncirculated “Time That Never Was”). But when work resumed in earnest on July 11, with a retake of the newly-composed “I Wanna Marry You,” he had decided his new collection would be a relationship record. And “I Wanna Marry You,” one of his least convincing songs, was to provide a necessary counterbalance to the again-encroaching darkness. Indeed, for a period in 1979 Springsteen seemed very much in love with the idea of marriage, while continuing to shy away from the reality (as Joyce was learning), something he admitted only after he found, late in life, a marriage that worked:

  Bruce Springsteen: [Marriage] is very different than just living together. First of all, stepping up publicly—which is what you do: you get your license, you do all the social rituals—is a part of your place in society and in some way of society’s acceptance of you. [1997]

  Everywhere he looked, friends and family were settling down and he wondered what he was missing out on. As he told a Boston audience, there was one particular speech at his lighting man Mark Brickman’s wedding that really got to him: “The rabbi got up and he started to talk about how [as] long as you’re alone, that your dreams, they just remain dreams. It ain’t until you reach out…[and] you take a chance with somebody…that [you take] the first step to making all the things that you’re dreaming about a reality.” “I Wanna Marry You” idealized that very idea: “A time comes when two people should think of these things/ Having a home and a family/ Facing up to their responsibilities.” But the feeling didn’t last and he was soon back at the river’s edge:

  Bruce Springsteen: I’m in the dark as far as all that [relationship] stuff goes. It took me five albums to even write about it…On [this] album the characters are wrestling with those questions—the guy in “Stolen Car,” the guy in “Wreck On The Highway,” “Drive All Night,” the guy in “Sherry Darling” even. It is a puzzle and a question…Everybody seems to hunger for that relationship. [1981]

  The songs he completed in the immediate aftermath of “I Wanna Marry You” rather suggested this was a hunger which slowly ate away at one. I
n “Cindy,” Springsteen once again portrayed himself as the fool for love, out of his depth, drowning in desire: “In this world there ain’t another like you/ My little candy girl, so hard-hearted and cruel.” At the very same time, the equally terrific “Loose Ends” laid bare the dreams of some little candy girl on the shore longing to settle down, leaving the narrator literally at the end of his tether: “It’s like we had a noose, and baby without check/ We pulled until it grew tighter around our necks.” He was writing the kinda pop songs that came from the edge of oblivion. And when “Mary Lou” became “Be True,” he had all but completed the set. Yet it was August 26 before he completed the song needed to round everything out, and it was one inspired by Hank Williams’s deliciously mordant “Long Gone Lonesome Blues”:

  Bruce Springsteen: “The River” took a while. I had the verses, I never had any chorus, and I didn’t have no title for a long time…I had these verses, and I was fooling around with the music. What gave me the idea for the title was a Hank Williams song…where he goes down to the river to jump in and kill himself, and he can’t because it dried up. [1981]

  He had certainly taken his time getting to the river’s edge. Back in March he had demoed its prototype, “Oh Angelyne.” Addressing the same failing marriage as “The River,” it was set against the backdrop of a failing economy (“The Man don’t need me, so good-bye”), but its burden suggested a possible way out: “Oh Angelyne, I run to you, I’m running to you…you walk the line.” Melodically distinct, “Oh Angelyne” was a whine before its time. Only in August 1979, when Springsteen gave it another kick-start, did he know where the story needed to lead—“down to the river.” Initially, this river served as a reminder of good times (“At night on them banks I’d lie awake/ And pull her close just to feel each breath she’d take”), but in the end it reminded him of everything he had lost. He heads there again to drown himself, but “the river is dry.” Even that redemptive baptism has been denied him.