E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (12 page)

“New York City Song” also lost its own reference to wife beating in the coupling process: “She got a dirty Big Daddy whose fist pump like gears/ He’s kept her in hope, supplied her in fear.” But it is the proto-“Jungleland” ending to “New York City Song” that is the greater loss, hinting at something ground-breaking to come: “Some people say he was the holder of the cosmic keys/ Oh, and his throat was choked with lightning from some childhood disease/ And with a tommygun blast he got the people screamin’, till he falls helpless in Times Square, just like street scum/ Cryin’, New York City kill their young [x2]/ And from a tenement window I heard sighing.” Through the spring of 1973 “New York City Song” regularly opened a set which, even before
Rolling Stone
condescended to review Springsteen’s slightly-stilted debut album, was moving at warp speed away from that tentative template.

With “Thundercrack” the other bookend to every ballroom blitz, a callow Springsteen seemed positively fearless about the type of song he would perform; the newer and obscurer, the better. Probably the most lyrically ambitious of the songs
no one
in the audience knew was “Hey Santa Ana,” using as it did the idea of a town waiting on the appearance of its own personal saviour, in this case Santa Ana, “he who could romance the dumb into talkin’.” While “the giants of Science” start out fighting for “control over the wild lands of New Mexico,” in the end they “spend their days and nights…searching for the light…just to be lost in the dust and the night.”

Chancing again on that newfound lyrical sophistication, the song’s narrator-observer describes each character in the song with an eagle eye: Kid Cole, Kansas, Max (“some punk’s idea of a teenage nation”) and, of course, Contessa, the object of his lust, who runs the Rainbow Saloon. The song ends in classic Springsteen fashion, with a plea to dance the night away “’cause only fools are alone on a night like this!,” the perfect coda to a song which ultimately proved too “Dylanesque” for his liking:

He already knew it was one thing to play with audience expectations in a club. It was another thing entirely to attempt the same when you’re the no-name support act for someone else’s tour, as happened that spring with the likes of Blood, Sweat & Tears, Black Oak Arkansas and Chicago, none of them suitable bed-partners. The show with Black Oak Arkansas was further soured by that band’s decidedly southern attitude to Springsteen’s saxman. (Lopez recalls, “We get done playing, me and Clarence are backstage and one of the band guys comes up to Clarence and says, ‘You can’t be back here.’ We were a bunch of skinny white kids from New Jersey with a big black guy in our band. I guess some people didn’t like the black man thing.”) Such slots obliged them to promote product. And, indeed, the one extant soundboard tape of these “support” slots (Berkeley, March 2) shows the E Street Band slowly coming to grips with the
Greetings
songs, with a stunning “Lost In The Flood” and a knockout “Blinded By The Light” the highlights of a seven-song, forty-minute set.

Three months later, they found themselves even more at odds with audiences on an east-coast stint with the bombastic Chicago, an arena act if there ever was one. Almost from the opening night in Richmond, Va., a clear line was being drawn. Ironically, that was the night Springsteen got heckled by
former
fans because, as Lopez says, “They wanted to hear Steel Mill stuff.” On a radio phone-in the previous afternoon, Springsteen had actually been asked to do “Resurrection,” an old Steel Mill song, but preferred to play the brand-new “New York City Song.” Which was pretty much the case at all the Chicago shows.
Greetings
barely got a look in. Springsteen preferred to spring the likes of “Tokyo,” “Hey Santa Ana,” “Thundercrack,” “Rosalita” and “E Street Shuffle” on mystified attendees. At The Spectrum in Philadelphia, they even ran tape on live versions of the last two (and maybe captured the definitive “Rosalita” into the bargain). But even these soon-to-be concert classics failed to rouse the cataleptic Chicagoans as the band played on. As Lopez sarcastically notes, “When you’re on stage at a Chicago concert and you’re looking off the stage, there’s nuns, priests, people in wheelchairs for the first ten rows. You’re not seeing anything past that.”

Arriving at Madison Square Garden for the last two nights of the tour—knowing CBS execs would be there checking on their investment—Springsteen finally made a concession to promoting his latest fab waxing,
performing “Spirit In the Night,” “Blinded By The Light” and “Lost In The Flood,” the three most dynamic cuts from the album at this point, on night one as part of a full, one-hour set. When the audience demanded an encore, and got a ten-minute “Thundercrack” for their pains, Appel had to cross swords with the Garden management. Lopez takes up the story: “We actually got in trouble…because we did an encore song—shouldn’t have done it. The next night they took us off the [video] screen; half an hour, that’s it. ’Cause it was overtime. We went three minutes over time and it cost them [like] $10,000.” Appel suspects it was Chicago who took umbrage: “Bruce really did great that night. He knocked them dead. So the next night the guys from Chicago wouldn’t let us use their video.” Either way, it was both a promising end to the tour, and the start of a solid policy on Springsteen’s part that he would not play arenas
ever
again, one he cogently articulated the following year to a nodding Paul Williams:

There was another problem with support slots. They didn’t give Springsteen time to build momentum. Hence, his description of these Chicago shows to another long-time supporter the following year: “We got introduced, walked on stage, blinked and that was it. It’s hard to show an audience
what the band is about in that little time.” All he could do was hope anyone at CBS who did catch that first MSG show or heard the couple of tracks from Philadelphia was converted. Because by the time he decamped to 914, the third week in June, he needed all the label help he could get.

On May 29, Clive Davis had been summoned to the office of CBS president, Arthur Taylor, and told to clear his desk immediately. At the front door he was “met by two CBS security men and served with the company’s civil complaint against me, alleging $94,000 worth of expense-account violations.” Davis would rise again at his own label, Arista, but Bruce had just lost his one powerful ally at CBS. Hammond, too, was effectively dead in the water, any hands-on relationship he had with his protégé ending the night he caught one of the Max’s shows and had a heart attack in mid-set, his third in the past few years. Though, according to a
Rolling Stone
report, Hammond’s doctor blamed the heart attack on his “enthusiasm at the Springsteen” show, he was simply not a well man. And when sessions for a second Springsteen album started in June, again at 914 Sound Studios in Blauvelt NY, a small hamlet near the New Jersey border, Appel decided the night time was the right time. A paranoid Hammond was convinced that “Mike had the sessions start at midnight so I couldn’t come.” In fact, Appel bent over backward to accommodate Hammond, while also trying to balance the books:

On the one time Hammond went to 914 and Appel
was
there, the A&R man wasn’t shy of offering an opinion: “I noticed that Bruce was having a beautiful time listening to the band. He’d lock himself up in a sound-proof booth, then sing to the tracks. So I said to Mike,…‘This is no way for Bruce to record. Bruce has got to be stimulated by live performance. He has to get his kicks from the band…When you’re doing this thing with the headphones and being locked up in an isolation booth, you’ve lost the battle.’” But Appel wasn’t interested in “having a beautiful time,” he was there to make a record.

Thankfully, Hammond soon realized he was a spare wheel, leaving Appel to it, though he couldn’t resist a last parting shot in his 1977 autobiography: “Once Bruce was signed with Columbia, Appel wanted no part of me, or of what Columbia could contribute to the development of his star.” The exact opposite was true. Without Davis, and with Hammond’s enmity toward Bruce’s business manager/producer plain to see, Appel’s only recourse was to blow everyone at the label away with Springsteen’s second album. Which would also be the E Street Band’s first.

The sessions began in earnest on June 22, a week after their Chicago commitments came to an end—dry runs in mid-May resulting only in the slow-burn “Fever” and a prototype “Circus Song”—and would be extremely businesslike. Just nine sessions were required to produce
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
, Springsteen’s most realized album of the seventies, along with another album’s worth of ambitious cowboy-mouth shuffles. Predictably, he began by recording five songs in a single day, all of which were worthy of release (though none would be till the nineties): “Thundercrack,” “Phantoms,” “Hey Santa Ana,” “Seaside Bar Song” and “Evacuation of the West.”

Of these, only “Evacuation of the West” had yet to receive its live debut. Instead, Springsteen reserved one of his most emotive vocals for the studio version. When he sings that final couplet, “Good God, I think they’re dying/ In the wind you can hear them sighing,” it feels like he’s saying good-bye to every wild-west figure conceived in the past year and a half, and a bunch of childhood dreams, too. He indubitably was.

If “Thundercrack” and “Hey Santa Ana” were both proven crowd-pleasers, “Seaside Bar Song” and “Phantoms” had only been road-tested at the end of the Chicago run, and were still unknown quantities. “Seaside Bar Song,” with that “squeaky little keyboard figure straight from Johnny & The Hurricanes country” (to quote Giovanni Dadomo), for all its innate sense of fun addressed the price paid for trying to “live a life of love.” When the morning comes, the singer is sure the protagonist’s “papa’s gonna beat you, ’cause he knows you’re out on the run.” But for now, the main aim was to not “let that daylight steal your soul.”

The two protagonists in “Phantoms,” Jamie, who “rides down a broken highway…[his head] filled with crazy visions of negroes and white women in evening gowns,” and Jessie, who is “calling to him in the hills,” have even more pressing problems. “Fly[ing] in strict formation over the hills of St. Croix,”
the Phantoms are looking to save Jamie from “the Christian army” waiting for him in them thar hills. Neither song lasted the distance as inch by inch, track by track Springsteen edged toward his wildly innocent goal:

Three days later, he returned to work some more on these songs—as well as the already-debuted “Circus Song” and “New York City Song,” each about to evolve into the more identifiable “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” and “New York City Serenade.” Meanwhile, “Phantoms” was
devolving
into “Zero and Blind Terry,” which he set to the self-same backing track. Gone were the Catholic soldiers and the cowboy-outlaws as “Zero & Blind Terry” announced the second stage of Springsteen the songwriter. From now on, “There was more of the band…and the songs were written more in the way I wanted to write.” “Zero & Blind Terry” tells the tale of two eloping lovers, Zero and Terry (who is never described as blind in the song), caught in the crossfire of a gangland confrontation: “The Skulls met the Pythons down at the First Street station/ Alliances had been made in alleyways, all across the nation…” Terry seems to share the same Dad as Rosalie. To him, Zero is “no good/ A tramp, a thief and a liar,” so he hires some state troopers “to kill Zero and bring Terry back home.”

How it ends is left for the listener to decide, or would have been if he hadn’t decided to hold the song over for the next album. Appel tried his best to steer Springsteen right, and he had no doubt “Zero” was a winner, but, as he openly admits, by the time of the second album Springsteen “was the final arbiter, always, about everything. We never even tried to ride roughshod over Bruce. Bruce was the boss about everything to do with his recordings.” And Bruce had acquired some hard and fast ideas about making each album a Statement: