Indeed, of the thirteen songs on the post-Nebraska winter ’82 demos (later bootlegged from Batlan’s copy as Lost Masters X), no less than eight would receive the E Street heat-treatment that spring: “Downbound Train,” “Wages of Sin,” “Baby I’m So Cold,” “Jesse James and Robert Ford,” “Your Love Is All Around Me Now,” “True Love Is Hard To Come By,” “Fade To Black” and “Glory Days.” Also probably recorded in these weeks was a solo slice of rockabilly called “The Big Payback,” which would appear as a European B-side to “Open All Night.” Displaying a healthy regard for wordplay not always evident recently, it was another fine, but diversionary, howl: “Well, it’s a wham bam, thank you ma’am, god damn, look out Sam/ I took on that train rumblin’ down the track/ They got your neck in the noose, your hands are tied up in back/ And you’re a-workin’ and workin’ for the big payback.”
Many of the remaining songs he worked on represented a straight continuation of the Nebraska mindset, and so were in a sense already redundant. The most crafted of these—something he reworked the following year—was “James Lincoln Deer.” The 1982 demo certainly had a Nebraska zip code, James being one of those now-familiar father-figures whose “whole world went black” when he lost his job. He makes no apology when he shoots an innocent bystander in cold blood at a 7–Eleven hold-up: “I held my pistol to his face/ His eyes caught fire with fear/ I said, ‘Remember me before you die/ My name is James Lincoln Deer.’” Something of an overreaction to unemployment methinks, but certainly a good argument for gun control. The subject was more overtly addressed on “Ruled By The Gun,” with its startling opening verse setting out the songwriter’s societal stall: “Everywhere I go I see people crying/ Every step I take I see young men dying…/ They lay dead on the cathedral steps in the sun/ In a world ruled by the gun.” Neither song, though, would figure in Bruce’s plans come April, when the band reassembled for rehearsals and recording.
Elsewhere, he reexamined failed relationships in the cold light of night, honing both “Baby I’m So Cold” and “Fade To Black” till they shone in the dark, and writing the equally arresting “Your Love Is All Around Me.” It was an intentionally ironic title (à la “Reason To Believe”) for a song about a long-gone lover: “I wake up in the morning and your picture’s there/ The closet’s filled baby with the clothes you used to wear/ I still got that ring baby on my finger/ Although you’ve gone away, your memory lingers.” The singer unashamedly proclaims, “I’d rather live like this than let you go,” suggesting a real edge of desperation. How desperate is only revealed at song’s end: “Oh, somebody turn out the light on me now/ Oh, let the darkness come in.” Rehearsed in April—with that clichéd “ring on finger” rhyme superseded by the stark realism of “Over in the corner sits your perfume/ As the first rays of sun hit this darkened room”—it was recorded at the May BITUSA sessions. But this was one song that went down, down, down and kept going.
At times, those April rehearsals—one of which has recently emerged—seem to have been more about introducing the band to the songs written in the interim than working up arrangements for those he’d demoed in January (only “Reason To Believe” features on the known rehearsal). That was probably a mistake. Certainly, when sessions started for real at Power Station on April 26, they instantly hit a problem:
Bruce Springsteen: We went into the studio a couple of times to record those [Nebraska] songs with the band, but it just didn’t sound as good…/…The songs had a lot of detail so that, when the band started to wail away into it, the characters got lost. Like “Johnny 99”—I thought, “Oh, that’d be great if we could do a rock version.” But when you did that, the song disappeared…It needed that kinda austere, echoey sound, just one guitar—one guy telling his story. [1984]
They actually spent the whole first day recording “Atlantic City,” which, according to Landau, both Springsteen and himself had agreed “sounded like it was gonna really lend itself to the band…[Yet] that was goin’ nowhere. No way was it as good as what he had goin’ on that demo tape. Then we tried ‘Nebraska’…Bruce had a whole little arrangement for it that had been rehearsed.” [GD] In fact, they tried a couple of other songs before attempting “Nebraska:” “Johnny Bye Bye” and “Born In The USA.” The latter track worked just fine. In fact, it seemed nobody wanted to stop playing when they finally hit that blasting gelatine groove:
Bruce Springsteen: One night we did “Born In The USA.” We just kinda did it off the cuff; I never taught it to the band. I went in and said, “Roy, get this riff.” And he just pulled out that sound, played the riff on the synthesizer. We played it two times, and our second take is on the record. That’s why the guys are really on the edge…There was no arrangement. I said [to Max], “When I stop, keep the drums going.” [But] that thing in the end with all the drums, that just kinda happened. [1984]
Max Weinberg: [“Born In The USA”] absolutely grabbed us. We played it [a second time] and got an even better groove on it. At the end, as we were stopping, Bruce gave me the high sign to do all these wild fills, and we went back into the song and jammed for about ten minutes, which was edited out. I remember that night as the greatest single experience I’ve ever had recording, and it set the tone for the whole record…It was really something to live up to.
Clearly, the problem was not the band’s still razor-sharp chops but rather the fact that these songs—or some of them, anyway—did not suit the most rock-oriented musicians this side of the Rockies. Actually, Weinberg’s account of the moment they nailed “Born In The USA” is belied by the tape of the full eight-minute version. Not so much “Hey Jude” as “It’s All Too Much,” the additional four minutes proved this ain’t the E Street Band Sancious quit. Pruned of its repetitious rump, though, the track was a lean, mean rockin’ machine.
There were other magical moments at these sessions, which ran through April 30. Tellingly, the two other tracks which carried over to the 1984 E Street album—“Working On The Highway” and “Downbound Train”—were also songs Springsteen had rebuilt from the ground up since they were demoed. If on “Working On The Highway” the whole underage element was quietly Tippexed out, leaving the listener to wonder exactly what crime left the narrator breaking rocks in the hot sun, the result was as much “I Fought The Law” as “Child Bride.” And it seemed to work. As for “Downbound Train,” I don’t think I can improve on what Geoffrey Himes wrote in his excellent monograph on BITUSA:
Downbound Train’ was retrofitted with completely different music that liberated its lyric…Springsteen had overdubbed a heavily echoed, wordless moan onto the four-track demo. That moan, which echoed the lyric’s reference to the train’s “whistle whining,” captured the lyric’s mood of doom far better than the herky-jerky guitar figure. So he ditched the rockabilly guitar, slowed the tempo considerably, wrote an actual melody, and rebuilt the song around that moan, which now became a synthesizer riff.
When it came to the rest of the January demos, though, Landau and Springsteen were in full agreement: “We’re not [even] in the ballpark.” Chuck Plotkin concurred: “Our treatment of the Nebraska stuff in the studio [was]…less meaningful…less emotionally compelling…less honest; we were reducing the stuff.” [GD] Springsteen proferred his own explanation in 1984, “The minute [the E Street Band] start learnin’ to play [a song], they start figurin’ out parts and they get self-conscious. But the first two takes when they’re learnin’ it, they’re worried about just hangin’ on. So they’re playing right at the edge, and they’re playing very intuitively, which in general is how our best stuff happens.” He applied this lesson to the majority of E Street sessions from May 1982 to March 1984.
It may also explain why, after spending a whole day on “Atlantic City,” Springsteen and the band roared through twelve of the remaining fourteen songs on the January demo (the only exceptions being “Pink Cadillac” and “State Trooper”) in just three days. There was even time for four Nebraskan afterthoughts: “Jesse James & Robert Ford,�
�� “William Davis,” “A Gun In Every Home” and “On The Prowl.” The last two they cut on April 30, the last day the Streeters devoted to the so-called Electric Nebraska. When sessions resumed, the following week, they were working on an E Street Album, leaving Springsteen to decide what to do with these dirty dozen demos.
Maybe it was time to get back to writing about things which actually related to him. In which case, “On The Prowl” was as good place to start as any. A song he later donated to Cats On A Smooth Surface—a favorite local rockabilly band—it delved deep in the dark forest that passed for Springsteen’s psyche. The first anyone knew of such a song was when he dropped a portion of the lyrics into the middle of “Lucille,” during an August onstage jam session with the “Cats” at Asbury Park’s Stone Pony. Even divorced from its original context, that mid-song rap almost recalled his “Sad Eyes” monologues, such was the intensity with which it was delivered:
“Now, every night I have a dream. I get up out of bed and I go looking for my baby. I go looking for my girl. When the clock strikes midnight I tear off the covers and I put on my jacket and I gotta go out on the prowl. Well, night after lonely night, my head don’t touch the bed. I’m on a two-lane blacktop cruising in my rocket sled, I’m on the prowl…There’s only one thing that I’m certain every mile, keep searching for a wild child, I’m on the prowl…They got a name for Dracula and Frankenstein’s son, they ain’t got no name now for this thing that I become. I keep looking, I keep searching, but every morning I ended up with the same thing.”
At another Stone Pony guest appearance with the “Cats,” six weeks later, he unveiled the song itself—the only stand-alone performance it ever received. How apposite that he should (only) perform it at the place, and in the very town, where he really was a predatory polygamist on the prowl for pussy. Because the song was a first-person narrative which walked a mile in his actual shoes, as casual liaisons became the name of the game, a substitute hobby until the real thing came along. “On The Prowl” is a portrait of the 1982 Bruce Springsteen, single, successful and looking to get screwed. Lines like, “In the morning I check my mirror/ And I hang my head and cry/ But at night I get a burning, burning, burning deep inside/ I’m on the prowl,” were delivered at the only confessional he currently recognized, the stage of The Stone Pony, a stone’s throw from the boardwalk.
Again, though, he looked to give the song away, perhaps because its subject matter was a little too close to the mark (no matter how humorously framed). But he also wasn’t sure it suited the current E Street set-up. Rockabilly was another style of American popular music they had not fully mastered—which may explain why he also put “Pink Cadillac” on the back burner.
As of April 30 the Electric Nebraska became another lost album, to go with “Album #4” and The Ties That Bind. (Save that in this case no tape has ever leaked—partly because the New York-based collector Mike Batlan sold these tapes to in the late eighties was not as willing to share his booty as the party who bought the Lost Masters material.) Springsteen had arrived at the same point Dylan reached after four months of work with The Hawks on the successor to Highway 61 Revisited had yielded a single usable cut. As he told Robert Shelton on a flight from Lincoln, Nebraska (really!) in March 1966, “It was the band. But you see, I didn’t know that. I didn’t want to think that.” Dylan acted decisively, hiring a set of hep Nashville cats to help him record Blonde On Blonde in just seven studio days. The Hawks would remain Dylan’s live backup outfit for the next eight years, but it would be seven and a half more years before they joined him in the studio again, and only after they had proven their worth by making five frequently-superb studio albums of their own. As The Band.
It would take Springsteen a similar period to decide which direction home to take in the long run. Meanwhile, he would record the eight other songs needed for the last E Street studio album of the twentieth century, a handful of B-sides and at least forty songs not “needed.” Between making and scrapping at least two “alternate” E Street Band albums in 1982 and 1983, he would also record a solo successor to Nebraska. But, like both E Street “albums,” the Nebraska “sequel” he spent the first three months of 1983 recording would go the way of all flesh and most post-1977 Springsteen/E Street Band projects. Thankfully, this was not the fate of the songs he had demoed back in January. These he had now decided to release—just not in the form he had spent the last six days trying to electrify.
* St. Paul 6/29/84.
* All ten Nebraska songs were performed during the Tom Joad tour, and a triple bootleg-CD on the Godfather label, called Broken Dreams & Reasons To Believe, collects versions of all ten songs from said tour on disc two. (It does the same for the BITUSA and Devils & Dust tours, too.)
* The take information on the fifteen songs is as follows:
Nebraska (Tk. 4); State Trooper (Tk. 5); Open All Night (Tk. 2); Johnny 99 (Tk.3); Highway Patrolman (Tk. 4); Pink Cadillac (Tk. 2); Downbound Train (Tk. 3); Mansion On The Hill (Tk. 1); Atlantic City (Tks. 2+4 were shortlisted, released take is one of these); Born In The USA (Tk. 1); Losin’ Kind (3 takes—Tk. 2); Used Cars (Tk. 4); Reason To Believe (2 takes—Tk.1); Child Bride (no take info.). + My Father’s House (2 takes, recorded May 25).
This would also appear to be the order in which the tracks were recorded, save for “Child Bride,” which was not backed-up on June 1 1982 and may have been recorded independently, i.e. earlier or probably later than the other thirteen January tracks. Peter Carlin repeats the recorded in-one-day legend in his biography.
* Tacoma, WA 10/17/84.
Chapter 9: 1982–84—Growin’ Up
When I was doing Nebraska, people would come up to me and say, “Don’t be so bummed out!” Sometimes I’d start thinking maybe [I was], but [then] I realized I was just growing up.—Bruce Springsteen, 1984
What happened next would prove to be a startling affirmation of both Springsteen’s abiding creativity and the E Street Band’s ability to raise its game when it mattered most. It had been nine years since they had cut The Wild, the Innocent in just a dozen sessions, and every album since had become exponentially more difficult. And yet in just ten sessions, over a thirteen-day period in May 1982 [3rd-14th], Springsteen and his band would record some twenty songs. From these they would cull an eleven-track album with real commercial clout, a rough-mix sequence being readied on July 5. Only for him to, you guessed it, change his mind.
The bulk of that album—seven from eleven—would eventually be released on an 18–million seller in June 1984, at which point Springsteen sought to explain what happened two years earlier: “We initially went in the studio to try to record Nebraska with the band. [Instead,] we recorded the first side of Born In The USA…[In fact] if you look at the material, particularly on the first side, it’s actually written very much like Nebraska—the characters and the stories, the style of writing—except it’s just in the rock-band setting.”
The Electric Nebraska had not been entirely abandoned. Rather it was made to fit the proven E Street model. “Born In The USA,” “Downbound Train” and “Working On The Highway”—the three songs on that demo tape which suited both settings—were held over from the late April sessions and worked on some more, though they already knew the fourth take of “Born In The USA” from April 27 was a keeper. Also retained was “Gun In Every Home.” There was even time for another hit-and-hope electric “Johnny 99” on day one. Nor was he inclined to let other songs rehearsed with the band go to waste. “Baby I’m So Cold,” “Fade To Black” and “Your Love Is All Around Me” were all brought to the studio for the first time. And yet he would later claim there was no specific plan when recording began:
Bruce Springsteen: At the time we weren’t consciously making a record. The Nebraska record had just come out [sic], and we had the bunch of cuts from the studio Nebraska sessions. It was just sitting there, waiting to be mixed…We did [the BITUSA material] in two weeks, the same two weeks we spent trying to record some new Nebraska stuff. [198
6]
Songs like “Wages of Sin,” “Your Love Is All Around Me,” “A Good Man Is Hard To Find (Pittsburgh),” “Stop The War,” “Baby I’m So Cold” and “Fade To Black,” stockpiled during home sessions in February–March, represented the “new Nebraska stuff.” Springsteen also had a ready supply of E Street-friendly rabble-rousers. The first (and best) of these they spent most of May 3rd recording. It was the point at which BITUSA became an album project in its own right. “Murder Incorporated” in it’s author’s words, “dealt with the paranoia and compounded violence of life in America: gated communities, the loss of freedom and the mistrust of your own neighbor.”
If “Born In The USA” was an angry song, “Murder Inc.” took that fury to another level and a whole other demographic. The setting is urban America, the mood—from the opening couplet—murderous: “Bobby’s got a gun that he keeps beneath his pillow/ Out on the street your chances are zero;” but it could just as easily be Saigon (“So you keep a little secret down deep inside your dresser drawer/ For dealing with the heat you’re feelin’ down on the killin’ floor”). He never explicitly states Bobby is running from the mob—for whom the original Murder Inc. carried out “hits” in the thirties and forties—but such is clearly the case. In the final verse, they get their man: “Now the cops reported you as just another homicide.” As a counterpoint to “Born In The USA,” following that anthemic opener in the July 1982 sequence, it hit its target.
E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Page 32