E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (22 page)

It had taken Van Morrison a series of bitter disputes with managers who had signed him to far more egregious contracts than anything Appel produced, plus an extended spell away from his hometown, to produce the majestic
Astral Weeks
. And now Springsteen, in the early months of 1976, also began writing songs which looked back in anger
and
regret. Even before he began “Frankie,” he had penned a prototype “Darkness On The Edge of Town” that addressed lost promises: “Billy, remember when we were younger, seemed like there was some strange kinda magic out there/ Me and you, we was always runnin’, not worrying, didn’t care/ You got a good life but Billy I’m still foolin’.” It would eventually become the last piece of the jigsaw-puzzle, a whole album about home (“When I wrote ‘Racing In The Street,’ that’s like home. And ‘Darkness On The Edge Of Town.’ ‘The Promise,’ too”):

These growing pangs had been set in motion by the simple expedient of “making it.” Already in September 1975 he was describing his hometown thus, “It’s like
desperate faces
. You seen all these guys in Asbury Park and [it’s] like, there’s
nothing
else.” By May 1976, he was taking time to seriously think about such things: “I had all that time off, and I spent a lotta time home…[and saw] what my old friends were doing, what my relatives were doing. How things were affecting them, and what their lives were like…/…During the lawsuit, I understood that it’s the music that keeps me alive, and my relationships with my friends, and my attachment to the people and the places I’ve known. That’s my lifeblood.”

He had found a subject matter close to his heart. From hereon it would become the central joist to his life’s work. In the only interview he gave during the lawsuit, he insisted: “I can take anything that’s thrown in my direction…[and] not be abused by it, just take it, channel it, put it in perspective, and then turn it into some kind of thing…that’ll give me the strength to go the next mile.” That is certainly what he was doing now. The immediate result was some of the most potent songs of his career. One of these, “The Promise,” the highlight of many shows between August 1976 and July 1978, changed everything.

It is the song on which, in a sense, Springsteen’s whole songwriting pivots. From his past he drew on the triumphalist “Thunder Road,” but now he turned its central motif to a darker purpose in a repeated refrain (“Thunder Road, we were gonna take it all and throw it all away”).
*
The promise itself was an ideal; the ultimate expression of the integrity he set such store in, which could still be found in the music. As he told a Stockholm audience in 1981, “In the rock and roll music that I heard [on the radio], there was a promise that there was a meaning in life, a meaning in living…but it’s a promise that gets easily broken today. There’s nobody but yourself, I guess, that can make that promise come true.” The promise was also something greater. As he said at this time, “The promise as such is connected with human nature, and everyone’s longing for redemption. It’s about proving your own possibilities.”

There were, however, some who interpreted the song to be “about” the lawsuit, finding layers of meaning in the sign-off couplet, “When the promise was broken/ I cashed in a few of my own dreams.” In fact,
the voicing of this interpretation in print led to wholesale rewrites, which seemed at least partly designed to remove any reference to the psychological scars from the Great Hype: “I won big once and I hit the coast, oh but somehow I paid the big cost/ Inside I felt like I was carrying the broken spirits of all the other ones who lost.”

“Something In The Night,” the other new song Springsteen debuted at a Red Bank August residency, itself referenced the early live versions of “The Promise” at least twice—“Sleeping with a stranger in the backseat of a borrowed car” and “There’s something dying on the highway tonight”—confirming they were of a piece. In the original 1976 version he picks up another “crazy chick” in verse two—probably a cipher for current crazy love, Karen Darvin—trying in a single night, an endlessly rewritten final verse and a single act of copulation, to capture that “something in the night:” “I pick this chick up hitch-hiking, she just hung her head out the window and she screamed,/ She was looking for someplace to go, to die or be redeemed/ For all the ones caught laughin’ in the face of the devil, waitin’ ’till the moment is right/ Somewhere we’ll surrender to the beauty of something in the night.”

That version, captured in still-life perfection from an August ’76 Red Bank show on the 2010
Thrill Hill Vault
DVD, may be the single most evocative moment of Springsteen onstage on film. The song would even fleetingly acquire an exquisite horn arrangement, for the October ’76 New York Palladium shows, along with a lyric rewrite which shattered the lovers’ cozy dream—“When we found the things we loved, they were crushed and dying in the dirt”—leaving the singer alone, contemplating death and redemption.

He’d been thinking a lot about both in the past nine months. And at moments such as these, even his girlfriend couldn’t get inside. As he informed Peter Knobler in an unguarded moment the previous fall, “Karen says, ‘Sometimes I don’t know you,’ and then other times she knows me real well. There must be times when you say, hey, yeah, that’s you, and other times when there’s a side of me that, like, you would not know.”

That secretive side had always been there. It was something the observant Michael Watts noted as early as 1974, when fame was a goal, not a reality: “In pursuing this self-discovery, away from the stage he’s grown self-contained, untouched by people in the final analysis. Although easy and friendly, not a bit aloof, he’s still a lone star, moving on his own,
independent trajectory.” It was a trait the rock-singer now embraced, even as he admitted, “It gets harder as it goes along. I guess it’s because you got to fight your way through more and more of the bullshit. You have to go a little farther than you went the last time. Go a little deeper down into yourself.” He was also discovering that a little distrust of his fellow man might be a healthy thing:

As he lost control of the things he held to be most precious—his girlfriend, his music, his career—he tightened down that inner lid, allowing any personal confusion to come out only in song. Even the traditional refuge of the working stiff—a local bar and drinking buddies—he denied himself. As he revealed to a journalist on the
Darkness
tour, “I suppose if I wanted to get drunk I’d go to a bar—on my own—with the precise intention of getting right out of it. But I wouldn’t want anybody else to see [me].”

He didn’t even seem to relate particularly well to fellow futurists in modern music. When he ended up cruising Cleveland in a rustbucket, the day after a triumphant April 1976 show at the Allen Theater, with
Creem
’s Robert Duncan and Pere Ubu’s Peter Laughner, he only dimly realized that the man at the wheel was as out of control as he was in control; or that the hyper Laughner, who frequented working men’s bars with the precise intention of “getting right out of it,” would drink himself to death within fourteen months, age 24. While the lugubrious Laughner drove like a dervish, a frazzled Springsteen regaled the pair with stories of the great Frat-rock bands, a passion he never quite abandoned. It was as close as Springsteen ever got to Cleveland’s nascent punk scene.

Another punk scene had also been sprouting wings in New York while he had been at the wheel on E Street. And after his own successful Bottom Line radio broadcast, he and Landau took in Patti Smith’s end-of-year Bottom Line gig-cum-broadcast on the back of her own LP triumph,
Horses
. She feigned disinterest: “He’s never really entered my consciousness…That
night at the Bottom Line all anyone was whispering was that Bruce Springsteen was there. So what? If John Lennon was there I might have a heart attack.” Bruce felt they shared a common bond, even if she didn’t. When Patti and her boyfriend, Blue Öyster Cult’s Allen Lanier, took in the last two shows at the Palladium in November 1976, Bruce dedicated the highly appropriate Animals anthem “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” to the pair. When Patti returned to The Bottom Line for more end-of-the-year shows, he strapped on a guitar and joined in. But Patti remained aloof, and Springsteen gleaned this was another scene to which he was not invited.

The only time he really felt like he belonged to a band of brothers was onstage with the E Street Band. He fully meant it when he said, at this time, “I play because I don’t have a choice. If you have a choice then you should quit. If I wasn’t playing at the Palladium I’d be playing at home in Asbury Park. I can’t be stopped. I can’t stop myself.” This obsession, real and all-consuming, excluded even those nearest and dearest. As he openly admitted the following March, “Nothing means as much to me…I can’t tell anyone that they’re the most important thing in my life, because nothing in my life could ever be as important as
this
.” It was a realization he had arrived at when just a teenager, and he still felt the exact same way: “If you’re dealing with people who say…‘I don’t know if I want to play, or if I want to get married;’ if you have to decide, then the answer is don’t do it. If you have a choice, then the answer is no.” It was even dawning on Darvin that he meant these things he was saying; especially after she caught a number of shows in the fall of 1975 when Springsteen prefaced Ike and Tina Turner’s “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” with a telling tale:

After one such show he admitted to one scribe, “I couldn’t bring up kids. I couldn’t handle it. I mean, it’s too heavy, it’s too much…I just don’t see why people get married.” What had brought him to this place of inner certitude was spending time with his sister Virginia and her husband Micky. Indeed, one night he dedicated the above song to them, “Ginny, you can tell me if this was the way it was when he proposed to you.” On the penultimate night of the spring 1977 tour, he became more expansive on the subject of relatives as people with not the least idea how to live or when to die:

When he started thinking ’bout such things, he set about writing. But these new songs were the exact opposite of “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” and “Then She Kissed Me,” the two direct nods to Spector in the 1975 set. They were more like those bands like Belfast’s Them or Newcastle’s The Animals once performed. As he subsequently informed Will Percy, “The Animals’ ‘We Gotta Get Out Of This Place’ or ‘It’s My Life’…said something to me about my own experience of exclusion…[which is] a theme that runs through much of my writing.” Such songs initially substituted for Springsteen’s expositions on his “own experience of exclusion.” But by the winter of 1977 he was writing songs that made Eric Burdon’s gritty Geordie realism seem positively life-affirming. He just wasn’t ready to spring them on the faithful fans. The only hint as to the true direction his songwriting was heading in came during a lengthy spoken section he added to “Backstreets” at the start of the spring 1977 tour: