Read E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Online
Authors: Clinton Heylin
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
message 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]
At this juncture, he still “believed that it was good for the artist to remain distant from the seat of power, to retain your independent voice.” And that “independent voice” continued to express itself between songs at the shows, even if less and less of the downbeat songs written between 1977 and 1982 were permitted entry to the three-hour sets. The most powerful of the nightly raps probably came before “Racing In The Street,” when he talked of a time “I took the car out, and when I won that it was the only time I really felt good about myself…to have just one thing that you do that makes you feel proud of yourself, I don’t think that’s too much for anybody to ask.” Such stories operated as parables, not personal insights.
Not that this was the only modern parable at shows which were at times akin to a revivalist meeting. For an ex-Catholic like Springsteen, the parable form itself remained ripe for parody, as he did rather memorably in the long intro to “Pink Cadillac” that began to assume epic proportions just as he realized he had left another rockabilly rocket off an album of his. What had begun as a spoof on the “commie” scare-stories of the fifties—in which “Russian infiltrators [hope to] have so weakened the morals of American society that by 1985 they’re planning to have sex on the streets of every street corner coast to coast and the music that they’re playing to ruin the morals of an entire generation is that dirty filth, rock and roll”—by the first stadia shows in January 1985 had become his own blasphemous account of the Garden of Eden. Whatever would the nuns of Freehold think?:
Now, the Garden of Eden was originally believed to have been located in Mesopotamia, but the latest theological studies have provided conclusive evidence that its actual location was ten miles south of Jersey City, off the New Jersey Turnpike. That’s why they call it the Garden State. In the Garden of Eden, there were none of the accoutrements of modern living…you didn’t go get your Pop-Tarts and put ’em in the toaster and jump in the sack and watch Johnny Carson—no Sir! In the Garden of Eden there was no sin, there was no sex. Man lived in a state of innocence. Now, when it comes to no sex, I prefer the state of guilt that I constantly live in. But before the tour I decided to make a spiritual journey to the location of the Garden of Eden to find out the answer to some of these mysteries and so I hitchhiked on out there and I found out that that spot was now taken up by Happy Dan’s
Celebrity Used Car Lot. I walked in, I said, “Dan, I wanna know the answer to some of this conflict, I wanna know what temptation is all about, why does my soul pull me one way and why does my body pull me the other all the time?” He said, “Well, Son, in the Garden of Eden there were many wondrous things: there was a Tree of Life, there was a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, there was a man, Adam, there was a woman, Eve, and let me tell you she looked so fine and when Adam kissed her, it was the first time that a man had ever kissed a woman. And she had legs that were long and soft to the touch, and when Adam touched her, it was the first time that a man had ever touched a woman. And then they went out into the green fields and they lay down and…well, let’s just say it was the first time. But there was something else in the Garden of Eden on that day, old Satan came slithering up on his belly and somehow he turned their love into a betrayal and sent them driving down into the darkness below. But that’s all right because if you’ve got the nerve to ride, I’ve got the keys to their getaway car…the first…pink…Cadillac.”
The “Pink Cadillac” rap slowly but surely took over from the more jaundiced portrayal of relationships with which Springsteen had been prefacing “I’m Going Down” the previous fall. In these raps, the sexual dynamic had begun with, “Every place you go, you can’t keep your hands off ’em, you’re touching ’em all the time and you wanna make love to ’em all the time,” only to end thus, “If you come back about six months later…it’s like, ‘Ain’t I gonna get a goodnight kiss?’”
At the same time, he insisted, “I’m just not really looking to get married at this point. I’ve made a commitment to doing my job right now.” But by the time of the 27th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony, on February 26 1985, his point of view had switched 180 degrees. The reason was Julianne Phillips, a young actress who could have stepped right out of a Chuck Berry song. American Pie-pretty, she came from good solid Catholic stock. She was also someone to hang onto when the world started spinning. But what she had on Karen or Joyce was anybody’s guess. Whatever it was, in the matter of a couple of months bad-boy Bruce had gone from on the prowl to looking to settle down. Inside, though, the process had taken somewhat longer:
Bruce Springsteen
: For a long time there were a whole lot of things I was trying to avoid. Part of it [was] because I thought, “If I don’t do this and I don’t
do that, well, maybe I won’t get any older.”…[But] for quite a few years previous to when I got married, I was going in that direction. Not necessarily that marriage is the only thing that puts you in that place, but it is one of the things. And I realized that you can’t live within that rock ’n’ roll dream that I had in my head…/…When I was young, I had this idea of playing out my life like it was some movie, writing the script and making all the pieces fit. And I really did that for a long time…And it’s bad enough having other people seeing you that way, but seeing yourself that way is really bad. It’s pathetic…I had locked into what was pretty much a hectic obsession, which gave me enormous focus and energy and fire to burn, because it was coming out of pure fear and self-loathing…[Finally,] I realized my real life is waiting to be lived. All the love and the hope and the sorrow and the sadness—that’s all over there, waiting to be lived. And I could ignore it and push it aside, or I could say yes to it. [1987/1992]
In fact, the (re)introduction of his favorite Elvis tune, “Can’t Help Falling In Love” at the January 10 Louisville show—with an extra notch of vocal commitment—probably signaled a newly besotted Springsteen; so in love that the words to that Percy Sledge classic, “Take Time To Know Her” temporarily slipped from his mind. Springsteen and Phillips tied the connubial knot on May 13 at Our Lady of the Lake, the parish church of Julianne’s family, set in Lake Oswego, an affluent suburb of Portland, OR. Springsteen now looked forward to a life as far removed from his songs’ heroes and villains as possible: “The night that I got married, I was standing at the altar by myself, and I was waiting for my wife, and I can remember standing there thinking, ‘Man, I have everything. I got it all.’ And you have those moments.” The feeling didn’t even last through 1987. Because, as he later ruefully observed, “You end up with a lot more than you expected.”
If the groom entered matrimony with his eyes wide shut, his bride evidently kept her 20/20 vision throughout. Just a few months later, she informed an entertainment journalist, “I don’t feel I married a superstar. He’s my husband and I love him very much, but he’s a normal human being with faults.” By then, she was advancing her short-lived film career, and Bruce was back in the stadia of America.
The second installment of her honeymoon had been an all-access pass to
a series of stadia shows across Europe, beginning in the bucolic setting of Slane Castle in Ireland on June 1, somewhat spoiled by 150,000 Irish drinkers holding their second annual convention, this year to an E Street Band soundtrack. Springsteen did his best to inject some much-needed romance into the proceedings, singing a solo version of Brian Wilson’s “When I Grow Up (To Be A Man),” prefaced by an admission that “I’m thinking a lot of different things standing here today. I guess this song kind of sums it up.” Intended as an affirmation of a grown-up Bruce, lines like: “Will I look for the same things in a woman that I dig in a girl?” would soon enough look like a double-edged query.
If there were moments when the Slane show became more about crowd control than crowd-pleasing, there was no turning back. The course was set. Over the next four months he would play forty-five stadia shows, reaching more folk than in all his seventies odysseys. Sadly, by the time he played three nights at London’s Wembley Stadium in early July the set was hopelessly out of kilter. Pick the right night and you might get two
Nebraska
songs. In fact, he was doing as many
BITSUSA
outtakes. (“Seeds” and “Pink Cadillac” were now nightly highlights.) As for the ten
BITUSA
tracks he performed nightly, they had become an excuse to Singalonga-Springsteen.
On September 27, the traveling band rolled into LA’s 90,000–seater Coliseum for the final four
BITUSA
shows, and again the tapes would be rolling. He even produced a couple of surprises that first night: a live debut for “Janey Don’t You Lose Heart,” the song originally supposed to close the 1983
BITUSA
, and a cover of Edwin Collins’ 1969 antiwar anthem, “War”—because “the values from that time are things that I still believe in. I think that all my music, certainly the music I’ve done in the past five or six years, is a result of that time and those values.” He was apparently “looking for some way to reshape that part of the show to make it as explicit as [possible], without sloganeering.” But his lung-busting performance merely stripped the paint from the walls of the Coliseum, and the scales from the eyes of anyone with ears. He was done. And he sorta knew it: