E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (45 page)

To maintain that unswerving self-belief it took not only extraordinary willpower—which he had in spades—but also unerring judgment as to what works, and what doesn’t. That was not something he had regularly displayed at eighties E Street sessions. Even when lightning now struck, he didn’t know what to do to conduct it. Hence, by the eleventh summer of the band, they were often just riding the wave of electricity till exhaustion set in.

With Van Zandt’s mind elsewhere, and Plotkin not even sure what he was doing there, the boss turned to that audience-cipher, Landau, for an opinion as to what album they should release. Landau’s response shocked him. Two of his suggestions—“Protection” and “Cover Me”—had been recorded in the winter of 1982, pre-
Electric Nebraska
. And just three tracks came from the recent E Street sessions, “My Hometown,” “Bobby Jean” and “Janey, Don’t You Lose Heart.” The rest—“Follow That Dream” excepted—all came from May 1982. Landau’s vision shaped Springsteen’s, but as the singer said in 1984, he still “just wanted it to feel like an everyday ‘Darlington County’ kind of thing.” And he started by restoring that lost 1977 song to the equation. He just needed one or two more songs to round things off, set to the sound of a band and two coproducers smashing their heads against the studio wall. He had worn his perennial themes clean through, but he refused to accept this—for now:

He—and he alone—thought they had more work to do. In mid-September the Van Zandt-less band spent three more days in the studio, cutting “Glory of Love” and “Brothers Under The Bridges.” With the latter, he went back to “the edge of town” (he even throws in a second use of “trestles”) as two brothers “watched from the tall grass as the challenges were made and the duels went down.” Hiding on the backstreets, they long to belong: “Yeah, someday [we’ll] run with the brothers under the bridges.” But then the dream ends and we are in the bleak present, as the haunted narrator hears “a cry in the distance and the sound of marching feet come and gone.” Evidently, his brother died in Vietnam, leaving the narrator sitting down “by this highway figuring just where I belong.” Perhaps he was looking for a song to bookend an album that contained only one song for certain, the opener “Born In the USA.”

With fifty-plus songs already in the can, he worked on through the fall.
Another three days of sessions the last week in October produced two more lost songs—“Shut Down” and “100 Miles from Jackson”—and another affirmative anthem which fell short of “None But The Brave.” “No Surrender” subtextually suggested Van Zandt thought his old friend was losing his way, a view Springsteen challenges lyrically, addressing his friend’s concerns in martial terms: “There’s a war outside still raging/ You say it ain’t ours anymore to win,” before laying claim to a grander vista, “A wide open country in my eyes/ And these romantic dreams in my head.” It was a defiant statement, but not one he was sure he wanted fixed to disc. Ironically, it was Van Zandt who ultimately persuaded him to include the track, arguing “that the portrait of friendship and the song’s expression of the inspirational power of rock music was an important part of the picture.”

November was almost over when Springsteen called the band back for
another
three days of sessions. These proved equally productive, resulting in five new songs
*
and yet more work on “Sugarland,” “No Surrender” and “Bobby Jean.” But still, he refused to put the album to bed. Even Landau felt alienated by the process now: “I felt like, ‘Let’s get on with it now.’ So I started to behave somewhat differently than I have in the past.” But he was still up against “the strongest will [he’d] ever encountered;” a comment made in 1975, when Paul Nelson first suggested that in the studio, “it was Springsteen himself who was responsible for the technical agony and ecstasy…[because he] was astigmatic and short-sighted, a perfectionist who frequently took the long way around simply because he didn’t know the short one.”

Unable to get any handle on what he was now trying to say, Springsteen did what he had learned to do in such a situation—he just kept recording. New year brought a new start on an album he near-as-dammit finished eighteen months earlier. On January 12 1984 he brought two terrific songs to the studio, neither of them needed, “Rock Away The Days” and “Man At The Top.” The former took a number of elements from other “wrong side of the tracks” songs demoed previously, including the prison record, the ubiquitous bar-fight that turned nasty (Billy pulls out a razor), the car crash that may or may not have killed Billy, the little lady who stands by her man, before sticking on a happy ending of sorts: “Well, rich man want the power and the seat on the top/ Poor man want the money that the rich man got/ Honey, tonight I’m feeling so tired and unsure/ Come on in Mary, shut the light, close the door.”

It seemed intended to segue into a song written about the greasy pole that leads to stardom. For the big boss man had arrived at this session with a perfect album-closer, a summation of all the doubts he fought so hard to overcome: “Here comes a kid with a guitar in his hand/ Dreamin’ of his record in number one spot/ Everybody wants to be the man at the top.” At the same time, he seemingly welcomed the opportunity to drain the poisoned chalice: “Man at the top says it’s lonely up there/ If it is man, I don’t care.” But “Man At The Top” was not to be taken at face value. As he said the first time he played the song live, “This is a song for election year.” His target was everyone who bought into a perverted version of the American Dream “from the big white house to
the parking lot,” written by someone whose lifeblood remained “my relationships with my friends, and my attachment to the people and the places I’ve known…To give that up for, like, the TV, the cars, the houses—that’s not the American dream. That’s the booby prize.” This was one chastened man, returning from the wilderness:

As Clemons let slip in his resolutely unopinionated autobiography, “Bruce…was a very reluctant star. He never wanted to be Elvis. He saw himself more like Dylan. But the power of the songs made the pull of giant stardom irresistible.” But rather than addressing these fears on record, Springsteen spent the next month worrying about writing a hit single. Landau had told him he couldn’t hear one on the album they had almost finished sequencing. He says he wanted “the type of single…that would truly represent what was going on.” What he got was
“Dancing In The Dark,” a song that addressed Springsteen’s mental bind by wrapping it in a seductive synthesizer-wash and setting it to repeat spin:

The following day he brought the song to the studio, even as “final” mixes were being prepared for the likes of “Johnny Bye Bye,” “Pink Cadillac,” “Man At The Top,” “Invitation To The Party” and “My Love Will Not Let You Down,” none of which made the album. (Even the mixing of “Dancing In The Dark” was interrupted by attempts to record two new songs, “Refrigerator Blues” and “Ida Rose (No One Knows.)”) It was the twelfth anniversary of the day a young Bruce turned up at Mike Appel’s office for a second time and played him seven songs. They included “If I Was The Priest,” “For You” and “Saint In The City.” Now he was laying down the final song on an album he had started recording more than two years earlier, with “Cover Me.”

And still Sony were breathing down his neck, sending out at least one copy of the album without “I’m Going Down,” one of a number of throwaway songs Springsteen had penned back in May 1982 for a pop album, and now decided to throw back into the mix. The 46–minute LP he finally okayed showed all the marks of an exhausted director who was over budget and had to face an impatient studio head. As he wrote in his
Songs
essay, “I put a lot of pressure on myself over a long period of time to reproduce the intensity of
Nebraska
on
Born In The USA
. I never got it. [Yet] there was something about the grab-bag nature of…the album that probably made it one of my purest pop records.” First and last track excepted, it was as random a selection of songs from these sessions as any simian, taking a tea-break from work on Beethoven’s Fifth, woulda made. It was destined to sell eighteen million copies worldwide.

^*
Meadowlands 8/17/84 + Hartford 9/7/84.

^*
The five new songs were as follows: “Shut Down,” “100 Miles From Jackson,” “Swoop Man,” “Roll Away The Stone” and “Under The Big Sky.”

Five years after a completed
Born In The USA
sent Springsteen and the E Street Band into the commercial stratosphere, the leader finally disbanded the group which had been such an integral part of his glory days. By the end of the
Born In The USA
tour, on October 2 1985, they had already achieved everything they ever set out to do. Not perhaps quite realizing that they were only marking time, they would fill the ensuing four years with issuing the most extravagant testimony to their live prowess imaginable, the misnomic five-LP set,
Live 1975–85
, and the completion of another lengthy world tour and an abbreviated Amnesty tour that served to confirm they were done as a force in rock.

In truth, the band had been living on borrowed time ever since
Nebraska
gave Springsteen full control of the album-making process. Once Springsteen began “writing about men and women—their intimate personal lives,” he no longer needed that communal spirit and integrated purpose the E Streeters had brought to every session since August 1972. In fact, the E Street Band would never again put
themselves through the punishing regime demanded by their boss on their last four albums. Instead, Springsteen confirmed all Weinberg’s worst fears by making an album in 1987 that was solo in every sense of the word,
Tunnel of Love
, before asking the E Street Band to make the songs come alive in their increasingly part-time hands, in venues that removed all the intimacy from said material. It was a doomed attempt to replicate the strategy from the
Born In The USA
tour, but with a non-E Street, un-bombastic album.

The military precision with which that earlier album and attendant fifteen-month world tour had been marketed was something to behold: every single, every broadcast of a UK TV special, every incremental stage from arenas to stadia strategized in advance. And, like all good armchair generals, Landau had learned well from recent history. If he had a campaign plan, it was closely modeled on the one another repeatedly inventive solo artist of the seventies, David Bowie, adhered to for his 1983 album/tour,
Let’s Dance
, which spawned three major hit singles and gained a whole new audience for an artist whose critical reputation Stateside had always exceeded his second-league album sales. That audience was even prepared to trek out to hockey arenas to hear their favorite songs ricochet off asymmetrical walls. Like Bowie, Bruce had shaken off the influence of an ex-cheerleader-manager and was entering these accursed arenas with both eyes open:

Even as he was okaying the release of “Johnny Bye Bye” (one of five
BITUSA
outtakes issued as B-sides on a steady stream of
BITUSA
45s), he was aiming to have a similar “impact on the way people lived.” Yet he remained wary of becoming the man at the top. Crossing paths with his
old mentor, John Hammond shortly after he delivered
BITUSA
, he informed the now-retired producer, “When you start to get real popular, you have to be careful that there isn’t a dilution into some very simplistic terms of what you’re doing.” Very careful.