E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (33 page)

He had certainly taken his time getting to the river’s edge. Back in March he had demoed its prototype, “Oh Angelyne.” Addressing the same failing marriage as “The River,” it was set against the backdrop of a failing economy (“The Man don’t need me, so good-bye”), but its burden suggested a possible way out: “Oh Angelyne, I run to you, I’m running to you…you walk the line.” Melodically distinct, “Oh Angelyne” was a whine before its time. Only in August 1979, when Springsteen gave it another kick-start, did he know where the story needed to lead—“down to the river.” Initially, this river served as a reminder of good times (“At night on them banks I’d lie awake/ And pull her close just to feel each breath she’d take”), but in the end it reminded him of everything he had lost. He heads there again to drown himself, but “the river is dry.” Even that redemptive baptism has been denied him.

He cut the song in a single session, witnessed by photographer Joel Bernstein who had been shooting Bruce and the band (along with Landau, at Springsteen’s insistence) outside Power Station, after informing Landau he thought
Darkness
was a great album but a terrible cover. Given his Neil Young and Joni Mitchell cover credits, Landau knew enough to take him seriously; and after the shoot invited him to the session which began with Springsteen teaching the band “The River,” before they ran through different arrangements. By two a.m., they had the finished song. Bernstein was impressed. So was Springsteen when he saw the contact sheets of the photo-shoot, inviting Bernstein, an accomplished musician in his own right, to spend a few days at his house when the snapper returned to shoot the “No Nukes” benefits in September.

Bernstein found Springsteen wrestling with the sequence to another album he had invested heart and soul in; a process he had already experienced first-hand with Neil Young. Even before he had written “The River,” Springsteen had constructed a sequence for
The Ties That Bind
, which ran as follows:

But by the time Bernstein arrived, the second week in September, “Ricky Wants A Man Of Her Own” and “The Man Who Got Away” had been replaced by “Cindy” and “The River.” When Bruce played Bernstein the nine-track album, ending with “Ramrod”—“to inform what I was going to shoot”—it was clear “it wasn’t finished.” Nonetheless, Bernstein came away with “a copy of [that] single album of songs: I [always] preferred it to the released album.” He thus became the first recipient of the legendary
Ties That Bind
LP.

Yet barely had Bernstein returned west before Springsteen pulled “Ramrod,” restored “Loose Ends” and resurrected the rockabilly “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch).” The result was another “flawed masterpiece;” one that still shone a light on “Hungry Heart” and “I Wanna Marry You” at the expense of “Roulette” and “Independence Day.” But even with these lightweight tracks, it developed on
Darkness
without allowing itself to be enveloped by the bleak nightscape. Embracing a gamut of genres from rockabilly (“You Can Look”) to prototypical alt-country (“The Price You Pay”), it returned the E Street Band to stage center, and gave AM stations hooks to hang their programming on. After spending almost a month at the outset reworking songs from “Album #4,” not a single track composed before September 1978 had made it to
The Ties That Bind
. He had moved on. But barely had he delivered the finished album the first week in October than he was sticking his shiny new car in reverse:

He was still looking for a bridge that could span Albums #4 and #6. Landau, like the band, was in despair, but knew he’d be wasting his breath trying to change Springsteen’s mind. Instead, he found a most unlikely ear to bend. During the fall, for the first time since the lawsuit, he (and Bruce) met up with Mike Appel. They had decided the sums on the latest CBS statement/s simply did not add up and had demanded an audit of their
accounts, to which Appel as an interested party and potential beneficiary was invited. Whilst there, Landau confided in Appel, “Mike, I almost had it. We finished, we had this record done, I walked it in. And [then] Bruce gave me a call and said, ‘I’m not sure about this and that.’” Appel pithily responded, “Rather you than me, Jon.”

After
The River
ultimately emerged, Springsteen told Robert Hilburn he made his decision not because the original single album wasn’t good enough—something Hilburn couldn’t have challenged—but rather because “it wasn’t
personal
enough.” Whereas he told Dave Marsh it was scrapped because “the exuberance of the audience at MUSE had just made the album seem inadequate,” a reference to the two shows he gave at Madison Square Garden on September 21–22 to raise awareness of the dangers of nuclear energy—the so-called “No Nukes” concerts. If the sell-out audiences seemed pleased to see him, and even responded well to the live debut of “The River,” it was not their energy and appreciation but his own mortality that seemed to weigh most on his mind.

On night two, his thirtieth birthday, he again showed that displays of petulance were his default response to anyone who openly defied his
diktats
: in this case an instruction to his ex-paramour Lynn Goldsmith that she not take photos at an event to which she had a photo-pass, and at which he was merely one of a number of headliners. When she continued to snap away even after he gave her “the look,” he dragged her up on stage and publicly humiliated her—and, as it turned out, himself. He then attempted to turn the blame on her, telling the ever-receptive
Rolling Stone
: “She was doing something she said she wouldn’t do. I tried to handle it in other ways, but she avoided them. So I had to do it myself,” thus showing a man who, even in the cold light of day, was incapable of seeing when he was the one blundering in the dark; or who was the likelier to end up shot dead “on a sunny Florida road…[because] she couldn’t stand the way he drove,” to quote his latest song, “From Small Things, Big Things One Day Come.”

He remained as far away as ever from making “the greatest rock ’n’ roll record ever made.” So when the EQ’d master of
The Ties That Bind
—the one that turned up at a Pasadena swap-meet in the early nineties, where it was snapped up for $200—came back from the studio on October 4, Bruce exercised his veto. He decided, mid-life crisis or not, he would return to Power Station and immerse himself in the process all over again.
And maybe, this time, he could make a record that would encompass all that the world might allow:

Having got over the disappointment of another aborted album, Landau took Bruce’s change of mind on the chin, determined to convince himself that Springsteen’s “fear of completion” was not some full-blown pathology; it just reflected someone for whom a perfect plan tomorrow was always better than a good plan today. Perhaps the erudite manager could again help the autodidact Springsteen realize his goal. He informed Nick Kent in 1981 that at this point he gave his friend a play he thought might show him how it was possible to include all things in heaven and on earth in a popular piece of entertainment. No longer was he content to let his charge be the new Dylan. Maybe he could be the new Shakespeare:

A pattern emergeth, methinks. The result would be a lot closer to a comedy of errors than all’s well that ends well, the narrator falling between two stools, neither of them solid enough to stand the strain. That outcome, though, was six months and another hundred thousand in studio bills away.

^*
The Roxy version of “Backstreets” on
Live 75–85
unforgivably edited the long spoken section out.

^*
Passaic 9/20/78.

^†
Montreal 11/8/78.

The decision not to release
The Ties That Bind
as-is was nothing new. The one to make a double album was. Initially, he may simply have intended to reconfigure the album (again) to achieve that chimerical “balance” he was searching for. Four days of sessions the week after the master was made, saw him working again on “Independence Day” and three new tracks, all of which were in the pop vein: “Crush On You,” “Where The Bands Are” (which did at least explicate what he was looking for: “I want something that’ll break my chains/ Something to break my heart/ Something to shake my brains”) and “Party Lights” (in which the partner of a girl who married at fifteen sits at home wondering, “Do you miss the party lights?”). Perhaps he still thought he could find a slot for one of his most important songs if he counterbalanced it with a pastiche Clash or Knack B-side. After all, the album to date was only thirty-nine minutes, and when he told
Hilburn in 1980 he scrapped an album the previous September, he suggested it contained
thirteen
songs.
*

But if that was the new plan, it didn’t last long. Seven weeks later he was back at Power Station, now firmly set on stockpiling more songs. The December sessions—also lasting four days—produced one untitled effort; three with nomenclatures but no fixed abode—“Dedication,” “Living On The Edge of The World” and “I’m A Rocker”—and one that was the real deal, “Take ’Em As They Come.” This rousing call to face down the future was all very affirmative on the surface, but once again it was the singer’s way of breaking it to some gal it’s over (“All the promises we made/ Lie shattered and broken in the morning light”). At least he was now pastiching New Wave
A
-sides. However, two months down the line, a single worthy addition to
The Ties That Bind
was hardly cause for celebration for either his coproducers or accountant.

It was almost as if he had come to revel in the legend that had formed around his studio excursions, brazenly boasting the following year: “I stopped feeling bad about…spending a long time in the studio…I said [to myself], That’s me, that’s what I do. I work slow, and I work slow for a reason: To get the results that I want.” (The anonymous employee who said of Landau and Bruce, “Put them in a studio, and they’re like two kids in a sandpit,” probably came closer to the truth.) His ex-marketing manager Dick Wingate, who came by one day, found plentiful evidence of that pathology: “I had been at the Record Plant and I had an idea of how many boxes of tape there were [for
Darkness
]; and there were even more boxes for
The River
…At one time, one of the tape ops took me in the back room and showed me this mountain of 2 Springsteen tapes. It was literally a mountain.”

Wingate himself had a new act to push, an English band, one of Bruce’s favorites. And they had just finished a double album that was already drawing comparisons with
Exile On Main Street
. In mid-November The Clash had finally delivered to a flustered CBS the ultimate twofer,
London Calling
, not in time to make a 1979 US release, but in time to give the import shops of New York a much-needed Christmas present. One suspects that Springsteen, if he did not prize an advance pressing out of Columbia, was one of their first customers. In the New Year, he would set about making his very own
New Jersey Calling
. Again, The Clash had shown him it didn’t have to be this way.
In a year when they managed two nonalbum singles and two U.S. tours, they had found time to cut a double album that retained all the angular attack of punk but gave those amphetamine-rushes a welcome respite.