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

by Clinton Heylin

  Nils Lofgren: It was six or seven months prior to the release of BITUSA that I’d gone up to Jersey to spend a weekend with Bruce, just hanging out…It was the end of ’83 and that was the first time that I was actually out on the street without a record deal…I was talking to Bruce on the phone, and he could hear that I was down in the dumps, so he said, “Why don’t you come up and hang out?” I did, and he just happened to have pretty much the finished…BITUSA. We listened to it a lot, and I was amazed at what a great record it was. We jammed a lot in Jersey clubs and spent some time together…At that point MTV was announcing that there would be a replacement for [Little] Steven [which] was very premature. I could tell as I was watching MTV with Bruce that he was…upset with that…I just took the opportunity—even though Bruce said there wasn’t any truth to that at the time, and I don’t believe either he or Steve had made any decisions yet—I just said, “Well, if you ever needed a guitarist, I would certainly want an audition.” I think that was a little bit of a surprise, because Bruce had always known me as a solo artist…It was about six months later that he and Steve finally…came to the uncomfortable decision that Steve needed to go do his own music…Bruce called me and said, “Why don’t you come up, hang out, and we’ll do some jamming with the band.” Bruce is very low-key about things, and when he said “jam with the band,” I knew that he wasn’t going to put the E Street Band together just for fun to jam with me. I took that as meaning, “Let’s see how it feels with you playing with the band and me….” When I got up to Jersey, we went to Big Man’s West in Red Bank, which had closed prior to that, and we jammed for a few days…I got the job about four weeks from opening night.

  Springsteen had found a pedigree replacement for his old friend, someone he “knew…felt about music and rock & roll the way I did.” The other addition was more of a gamble, and the one that ultimately turned his life around. Patti Scialfa, a local girl who had attended Asbury Park High School, had been a singer in Cats On A Smooth Surface and had worked with Southside Johnny, so knew the lie of Bruceland. And unlike Bruce she had a music degree. Letting a girl into the all-male E Street Band was a risk he had to take because Lofgren had contracted mononucleosis, which meant backing-vocal duties were out of the question. If Lofgren had just three or four weeks to learn the ropes, Scialfa had three or four days. Much was expected of them both.

  It had been three long years since the last tour; a hiatus so extensive it prompted Springsteen to joke, after song #4 on opening night, “I should’ve wrote, right?” That first show, St. Paul’s Civic Center on June 29, suggested Springsteen was determined to strike some kinda balance between old and new—just not one that included anything save “Rosalita” from his first two albums. In a 32–song set, eight songs from BITUSA vied with five from Nebraska and seven from The River, every one of which—save the title track—was a crowd-pleasing pastiche-rocker. Already he was fighting to maintain light and shade when playing to vast audiences of party animals and, by the second week, picnic-goers.

  The acid test was how well Nebraska’s songs played to the madding crowd. On that first night, where four of its five tracks were judiciously placed in the first half of the show, it was “Johnny 99” and “Atlantic City” which were received best. But he still felt the need to punctuate them with explanatory raps. Some of these were genuinely illuminating; some were just there to get the audience to settle down and pay attention; the pithier, the better. (“This is a song about family and trying to do the right thing;” “The factories close down but the mansion on the hill remains.”)

  The second night in St. Paul saw a show coalesce around half a dozen Nebraska songs, including the title track, chillingly introduced as “about being so lonesome you could cry.” But it would be the last time he played more songs from his 1982 LP than BITUSA. After the show he acknowledged that integrating this more difficult material into an arena show was proving his greatest challenge: “There’s a good amount of the audience that has [Nebraska], but I don’t think it compares to the percentage that has the other records. But I felt that the audience [tonight] was real responsive…It’s just a trick of getting in and getting out of it.”

  That second show was also the first to open with “Born In The USA,” which very soon became the defining moment to each night’s performance. Self-consciously imposing himself against a backdrop of an American flag—on album and $10 program—had none of the frisson of Dylan in Paris in 1966, when a similar gesture riled the anti-American French crowd. It merely served to obscure the message of the song and its contextual counterparts. But to the crowds, and particularly new fans, it promised a very special night, even if Springsteen was now setting his sights somewhat lower than in the E Street Band’s seventies heyday:

  Bruce Springsteen: Somebody comes out, they shout and yell, they have a great night, it’s a rock & roll show. It [also] makes…them think about something different…I think it can do that…At the same time it could be just a good date…Whatever they want to take from it. [1984]

  With Landau’s help, he was becoming reconciled to the gulf separating the polarities of crowd-pleasing and performance art. Looking back in 1987, he addressed this duality: “When I walk out on stage I’ve got to feel like it’s the most important thing in the world. Also I got to feel like, well, it’s only rock ’n’ roll. Somehow you got to believe both of those things.” Once the fiercest believer on the planet in the power of rock to redeem its recipients, he had become besieged by doubt at the exact point when he had the music-world in the palms of his hands. He even suggested that moments like when the audience sang over the singer on “Thunder Road” made it “more powerful. It’s like songs [like] that are little touchstones. That’s when the rock ’n’ roll thing is really happening, it’s realized.”

  The Springsteen of old—the man who insisted in February 1975, “I’m not into people screamin’ at me, like Bowie. Once they do that, it’s over…I’m there for me, y’know, that’s all. If they can dig it, cool; if not, they don’t have to come”—would never have dreamed of allowing such moments to interfere with such a singular vision. Now there were several such stage-managed displays of showmanship, down to the lucky girl pulled up from the audience to schmooze with the boss on “Dancing In The Dark.” It replicated a “live” video shot at the first St. Paul show to promote the single, but too late to stop it stalling just short of the number one spot, held off by the incomparable “When Doves Cry.” Even turning the song over to mixmaster Arthur Baker to make a disco-mix of it—the more apposite setting—failed to claim the Prince audience; though it certainly riled his more purist fans. His response to the inevitable criticism suggested such fans shouldn’t be so precious about songs he spent two solid years working and reworking till they were exactly how he wanted them: “I figured…that the people that didn’t like it would get over it.”

  The album suffered no such setback. It entered the Top Forty the week before St. Paul and hit the number one spot on July 7, where it stayed for the four weeks it took Purple Rain to repeat the success of “When Doves Cry.” BITUSA remained in the Top Forty for 96 weeks, even returning to number one after Prince’s twenty-four week stint; aided and abetted by the relentless slog of shows and a steady stream of spin-off hit singles, à la Thriller. In fact, the carefully-orchestrated Springsteen hype managed to produce seven Top Ten singles from an album on which Landau had initially heard only two.

  But it was the response to the shows that would decide the album’s long-term fate worldwide, and this time he was determined to give it a genuinely global sweep, taking in Japan and Australia as well as Europe. Perhaps surprisingly, given past E Street performance history, the shows very quickly settled into a pattern. The one regular cover was an encore version of “Street Fighting Man” that seemed to have been included for a single reason; the line, “What can a poor boy do ’cept to sing in a rock & roll band.” The outstanding cover in the 1984 sets, Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away,” was performed just twice. The
first of these was the final night of a ten-date residency at the Meadowlands Arena, where Miami Steve brought his horn section to the party, but Springsteen had only arranged to tape the first two shows for a possible live album, so missed the tour highlight to date.

  Also not recorded to multitrack was the version of “Man At The Top” he debuted at Alpine Valley the second week in July. Here he found himself at one of those out-of-town, open-air venues America favors, with a lawn stretching to the horizon, wondering what he had let himself in for. With more punters lugging picnic chairs, tables, hampers and coolers than hard core Boss fans, this was a party with full catering. Meanwhile, Springsteen had been in full damage-limitation mode for the past two weeks, telling Chet Flippo he ain’t changed: “I could easily go out and do just what I did before. But now we’re playing outdoors on this tour, which I hadn’t done before…I want to just step out and see what works.”

  Well, two-thirds of the way through his first show on the picnic circuit, he was fighting to be heard. Abandoning the second Nebraska slot, he instead declaimed a strident acoustic arrangement of “No Surrender” (a song he’d attempted this way in the studio), and when that didn’t do the trick, decided to show how the American Dream looked from the other side of the mirror, “Been going on forever, it ain’t ever gonna stop/ Everybody wants to be the man at the top.” Rather than appreciate the moment, Alpine Valley rang to the sound of twenty thousand hands clappin’. In such a setting, it wasn’t just the Nebraska songs’ days which were numbered:

  Bruce Springsteen: I’ve had some beautiful nights outside with the moon coming up and people having a great time, but it’s a different kind of experience…The bigger the place gets, the more you concentrate on focusing people, getting their attention in the first place…In a club you have everybody’s attention and so you can change a string, tell a story and they’ll watch. [1992]

  In fact, Springsteen had been sold on stadia even before he considered descending the mountain to the valley below. If seeing The Who at his hometown Convention Hall in 1967 had shown him the virtues of a good education in maximum r&b, catching them at a stadium show in 1982—when very much on their last legs—somehow convinced him such a transition need not have a downside. Having, by his own admission, “agonized tremendously over it when we were moving from theaters…this time out, we planned from the beginning, before the tour started, that we’d end up in the stadiums.”

  But if Springsteen did not realize the toll it was taking, those who had just joined the organization saw the change. As video operator Arthur Rosato—fresh from working five years for Dylan—recalls, “Bruce got more remote as the gigs and entourage got bigger.” It wasn’t only new members of the entourage who found it increasingly hard to recognize the firebrand of yore. By tour’s end, the disaffected would be as rodents on a sinking ship. Marc Brickman, who had been doing the lighting since 1974, left first, supposedly “over personality clashes with Landau and George Travis, Springsteen’s authoritarian road manager.” Doug Sutphin quit after being docked a week’s pay for touching Nils Lofgren’s guitar. Mike Batlan joined the exodus when he was similarly fined for not mooring Bruce’s canoe properly. (The latter two would subsequently attempt to sue Springsteen for overtime payments and constructive dismissal.) Bruce’s blue-collar credentials were beginning to look ever-so-slightly frayed.

  If he’d lost his ability to communicate with his coworkers, though, Springsteen continued to claim that “if there happen to be sixty thousand out there…I’m basically trying to reach as many of them as I can, in as personal a fashion as I can.” Ce n’est pas possible. Such was his dislocation from his former redeemed-by-rock Self that he even refused to rock the boat when he found himself at the center of a political storm entirely of his own making. It was one that had been brewing ever since he turned “Born In The USA” into an Anthem first, and an antiwar song a poor third. Initially, he continued his well-worn strategy of directing critics toward his songs, and away from any personal declaration of political allegiance, telling Musician that summer: “I don’t know that much about politics…My politics are in my songs, whatever they may be…I feel that I can do my best by making songs. Make some difference that way.” The concert raps continued speaking in terms familiar to any audience member who attended the River tour. But at a September show in Pittsburgh he prefaced “The River” by alluding to a severed bond between electorate and politician:

  “There’s a promise getting broken and I think that in the beginning the idea was we all live here like a family, where the strong can help the weak ones, the rich can help the poor ones…I don’t think it was that everybody was gonna make a billion dollars, but it was that everybody was gonna have the opportunity and a chance to live a life with some decency and some dignity and a chance for some self-respect, and I know you gotta be feeling the pinch here where the rivers meet.”

  Few of those hollering throughout this rap realized he was having a go at the President, but he was. It was in response to a remark Reagan had made at a Jersey reelection rally three days earlier, suggesting it was his job to “help make those dreams” Springsteen sang about “come true.” Already, the previous night in Pittsburgh, in an intro to “Johnny 99,” Springsteen had suggested the old ham check out his last but one album: “The President was mentioning my name in his speech the other day, and I got to wondering what his favorite album of mine must’ve been, you know…I don’t think it was the Nebraska album.” But if he thought that was the end of the matter he was sorely mistaken. A number of nonbelievers in the media had been looking for a reason to wield the rod of rhetoric, and it came when his sole response to Reagan’s opportunistic namecheck was a coupla prefatory raps. It brought a vat of well-seasoned scorn from part-time rock critic and full-time curmudgeon Richard Meltzer down on him—part of a ten-page moratorium on “The Meaning of Bruce” in Spin:

  “A couple weeks left till the election—remember?—and Reagan starts quoting Bruce. But instead of saddling his sturm und drang, riding out and yelling,…‘Our President wants us dead!’…the little cocksucker passes it on to his publicist Barbara Carr, who passes it to her wonderful husband David…[who] did an outstanding hem-haw on page one of the respected news-sheet I happened to catch. Something to the effect that if the President would only look at such and such a Springsteen album cut, he clearly would see that au contraire blah blah blah. Don’t say anything, don’t stir anything, don’t lose a single customer! Fuck these people!!”

  In fact, Springsteen did respond; informing Rolling Stone he thought Reagan’s comments felt like “another manipulation…I had to disassociate myself from the President’s kind words;” before going on to discuss how “the social consciousness that was a part of the Sixties has become old fashioned…you go out, you get your job, and you try to make as much money as you can and have a good time on the weekend. And that’s considered okay.” The fact that his own concerts had become merely another way to “have a good time on the weekend” went unremarked. All in all, it was a mealy-mouthed retort from someone who when he got steaming mad had been known to cuss out the world.

  But Meltzer’s was only the first lash to be applied to Saint Bruce’s increasingly broad back. An equally steamed James Wolcott in Vanity Fair targeted all the apologists who refused to accept their boy was sending mixed messages, scrambling communication between artist and audience: “Critics have…fretted over the fact that audiences react to ‘Born In The USA’ as a rouser rather than take heed of its whipped-dog lyrics. It seems to me that the fans have the saner response. The thunderboom beat of ‘Born In The USA’ is more compelling than its case history about a small-town loser being sent to ’Nam to ‘kill the yellow man,’ just as the saloon esprit of ‘Glory Days’ carries more conviction than its ironic message.”

  Springsteen insisted he didn’t see it that way. His response to Wolcott and his kind was, “If somebody doesn’t understand your song, you keep singin’ the song.” He was drilling the wrong mes
sage home; a view to which he only acceded after opening the paper one day in 1987 and seeing “where they had quizzed kids on what different songs meant, and they asked them what ‘Born In The USA’ meant. ‘Well, it’s about my country,’ they answered.” He finally came to realize that “in order to understand [‘Born In The USA’]’s intent, you needed to invest a certain amount of time and effort to absorb both the music and the words. In fact, he had constructed a song whose martial music set itself in counterpoint to the message—his fault, his mistake—and rather than driving its essential point home by reverting to its original, Guthriesque guise and stop opening with it, became the anthemic introduction to every BITUSA show from August 1984 on, save Independence Day at Wembley Stadium. Appeasing understandable feelings of guilt by donating a small part of every night’s takings to “good causes,” he seemed to think this laudable gesture retained a grassroots connection to “his” kind:

  Bruce Springsteen: When rock music was working at its best, it was doing all those things looking inward and [also] reaching out to others…At your best, your most honest, your least glitzy, you shared a common history and you attempted both to ask questions and answer them in concert…[But] there was a point in the mid-eighties where I wanted to turn my music into some kind of activity and action, so that there was a practical impact on the communities that I passed through while I traveled around the country…Those meetings and conversations kept me connected so that I remember the actual people that I write about. [1997]