E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (20 page)

Not everyone, though, bought into all this Bruce mania. When Springsteen arrived at Gold Star to meet the great Phil Spector, after a Roxy show that showed every CBS rep just how the west was won, Spector sarcastically shouted, “Okay fellas, Bruce Springstreet is here…Let’s show him how to make a record.” Even before
Time
and
Newsweek
joined the bandwagon, the contrary
New York Times
—early champions of the Asbury contender—ran a piece by Henry Edwards which suggested, “If
Bruce Springsteen didn’t exist, rock critics would invent him.” Springsteen later revealed, “That bothered me a lot.”

And if the American press had its contrary elements, the UK music press, which in 1975 had an influence on its readership that was a mere wet dream to the likes of
Rolling Stone
, was built on contrariness, particularly when it came to uppity colonials claiming, somewhat impertinently, that rock music was
their
music. Not in 1975, it wasn’t. When NME editor Nick Logan instructed Andrew Tyler to go see what the fuss was about, it was to the legendary Roxy he was sent. He returned to report that he found “a frontman for another good rock & roll band, composer of R’n’B-slanted material that tips a little in advance of the mean average,” whose lyrics were “cluttered,” and whose melodies and arrangements “are a patchwork of some of the more dubious R’n’R mannerisms of the sixties.” This was the cover story that ran in the UK’s premier music weekly the week before London found out if it was finally ready for this musical magpie. (Bruce shared that cover with Dylan, whose Rolling Thunder Revue he caught in person that month, before venturing backstage to meet the man, whose opening line was a peach: “I hear you’re the new Me!”)

The pressure was on even before Springsteen’s jet plane landed in London and he strolled onto the Heathrow tarmac. Also at the Roxy mini-residency had been
Old Grey Whistle Test
producer Michael Appleton and its presenter Bob Harris, both there to tie up details of a TV special. The sticking point was the lighting. As Appleton told Tyler, “The lighting is a very important part of the act, and I can understand his point of view. [So] we’re currently investigating the possibility of doing an outside broadcast from the Hammersmith Odeon gig on [November] 24th.”

In fact, the decision was made to shoot opening night (the 18th);
not
Springsteen’s return date, six days later (added after shows had already been booked in Stockholm and Amsterdam). While the concert footage they shot was simply too dark to be broadcast, a BBC radio broadcast from Hammersmith, intended to emulate the impact of those from The Bottom Line and The Roxy, was hastily canceled when Appel saw the mood his charge was in on landing (though he still ran tapes both nights):

Springsteen wasn’t the only one on the warpath the day of his London debut. Appel was equally angry, after “CBS, unbeknownst to me, decides to take all these arrogant ads, ‘Is London finally ready…?’ I was as blindsided as Bruce when I saw those things. Nobody asked my permission for that. I never wanted to be a manager in the first place, and now
I’m
having to deal with everything! And now it’s all business.” In the notes to the 2005 official DVD release of that show, Springsteen suggested he overreacted to the situation. Having “arrived at the theater [I] created pre-show chaos, stomping through the aisles, pulling promo flyers off the seats in a ‘The Man can’t steal
my
music’ frenzy. The record company, of course, was just doing its job, and I was just doing its job, and I was just learning mine…real fast…Later, all I remember is an awkward record company party, that ‘what just happened?’ feeling, and thinking we hadn’t played that well.”

Unlike Dylan and the Hawks in ’66, he simply refused to review the tapes to help understand why that night’s audience reacted the way they did. As it happens, the audience loved the show both nights. Audience tapes demonstrate them responding to every visual cue, each shift in musical style. Appel, for one, “loved the fact that the London audience got into him big-time, and the advertisements, all the shit, didn’t mean nothing.” But for Springsteen, the curse of Hammersmith would remain in his head long after he returned to the States with tapes of both nights in the hold. Even after returning to London six years later to a media hype that made 1975 look like a roast, he felt some explanation was in order:

He only revised his view of that first show in 2005 after reviewing the tapes: “I was wrong. With the keys to the kingdom dangling in front of us and the knife at our neck, we’d gone for broke.” Though his abiding memory of the second show as good “by any standards” was spot on. Two days before the weeklies ran their reviews of the supposed first-night debacle, Springsteen delivered a very different performance, one which represented the way forward for him and his band—if not rock ’n’ roll itself.

(Actually, only the agenda-driven
NME
gave a real thumbs-down to “a gutsy, energetic performer of restricted growth, who plays fair guitar; who makes the very most of his (actually limited) voice; who writes fair if wordy songs; who works tirelessly if not always effectively on stage; whose sense of drama is simultaneously incomplete and overdone; who can’t pick musicians; [and] who can’t seem to resist the hype put out in his name by Columbia.”)

The E Street Band of yesteryear was laid to rest somewhere over Stockholm. After six days on the road, Springsteen returned to play a set stripped of its wilder, more innocent moments. Out went “E Street Shuffle” and “Kitty’s Back,” the two regular concessions to the Sancious era. In their place came a checklist of Invasion influences any semi-educated Brit could relate to: Manfred Mann’s “Sha La La” and “Pretty Flamingo,” The Searchers’ “When You Walk In The Room.” And wrapping up proceedings in style were three fifties rockers known largely to seventies rock fans from the Beatles’ and Stones’ recastings, “Twist and Shout,” “Carol” and “Little Queenie.”

If much of the second album was sidelined, core first-album songs—“Saint In The City,” “Lost In The Flood,” “For You”—were stripped bare and, in the former two cases, reconditioned for r&b. “Lost In The Flood” was almost unrecognizable, with more twists and turns in its
new arrangement than “Born To Run” and “Thundercrack” combined. Weinberg finally came into his own on these numbers, where subtlety was for squares and the boss preferred the sound of broken foot-pedals.

In March 1977, Springsteen described that second night at Hammersmith as “one of the best shows we ever played…[and yet] when I walked out of that theater in London, I just wanted to go home…back to New Jersey.” How perverse then that he should release the first night—and
only
the first night—on CD in 2006 (both shows were in the vault and the first show had already been released as a DVD). But maybe such perversity was in his DNA. The Hammersmith shows weren’t the first
Born To Run
shows Appel had arranged to record. The Roxy radio show had also been taped by Jimmy Iovine, providing a club equivalent for many of the same footstompers (plus the Goffin-King classic, “Goin’ Back,” a delicious one-off). Appel was convinced a live record was the smart move now, an affirmation of the past three years of inexorable growth as a combo, a way of clearing the decks and replenishing much-depleted coffers:

For the first time, Appel and Springsteen were reading different pages. In fact, Springsteen was convinced Appel just wanted him to reread his back pages. But Appel still insisted on rolling tape at December shows in Toronto, C. W. Post, and Philadelphia, where the band saw out the year with four sell-out shows at one of the great rock venues, the Tower Theater. He thought if he could get Bruce to sit still long enough to check
out “Lost In The Flood” from Toronto, its high tide point; the life-affirming “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” from C. W. Post; or that new arrangement of “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” set to slow burn, those rap-infused takes of “It’s My Life” and “Pretty Flamingo,” or the final E Street-era outings of “Mountain of Love” and “Does This Bus Stop” (all from the New Year’s Eve show) then he just might reconsider, baby.

What Appel did not realize was that he had already crossed some ill-defined line in Springsteen’s suspicious mind. He did by 1978, by which time he concluded, “I guess I looked just as guilty to him as CBS. He lumped me in with
Time
and
Newsweek
. [Because] he wanted that fame and glory, but I guess he wanted it on his own terms.” Those terms were as unrealistic and unachievable as the sound in his head, something the singer himself acknowledged when pushing his next LP real hard: “I [had] worked a year—a year of my life—on [
Born To Run
] and I wasn’t aggressively trying to get it out there to people. I was super aggressive in my approach toward the record and toward makin’ it happen—you know, nonrelenting. And then when it came out, I went, ‘Oh, I don’t wanna
push
it.’”

Part of what preyed on his mind was an unnameable fear that
Born To Run
represented the summit of what he had in him. Great as the covers were at the fall 1975 shows, where were the new originals? Back in September, he had actually admitted to Knobler, “Things’ve gotten heavier lately…Just things starting to weigh in…I also haven’t written anything in two, three months.” He began to worry the two might be connected, voicing his concerns to Jay Cocks: “First you write about struggling along. Then you write about making it professionally. Then somebody’s nice to you. You write about that. It’s a beautiful day, you write about that. That’s about twenty songs in all. Then you’re out.” And though the good reviews meant nothing, the bad reviews hurt like a bitch. So what exactly was success “on his own terms?”

Such self-awareness was reserved for the future. The person he now turned on was
not
the one he saw in the motel mirror. He was sitting across that desk back at the office. The person who had sold his own future to ensure Springsteen had one. In 1978, after successfully extricating himself from the unwavering Appel, Springsteen implied he was the one left spinning: “At a certain point I realized I wanted to be true to myself, and I had to be tougher than I had been. They always know how to get you—they get you while you’re dancing.” As ever, “they” were attracted by the scent of money. For now, Appel was still the first line of defense. But already the whispering campaign had begun taking steps to remove this impediment: