E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (36 page)

Thanks to the recent change in Springsteen’s set-up, Burchill’s review would signal an end to easy relations between press and star. According to Nick Kent, “Julie Burchill’s negative response to
The River
created quite a
stir in the Springsteen camp. Delicate negotiations between CBS and
NME
to arrange an interview were abandoned, apparently after Bruce’s management made their feelings toward the paper clear.
NME
most certainly would not have access to Springsteen during his Euro-tour.”

Barely had her cheeks settled into the still-warm chair of the departing Gold before Barbara Carr was applying her “for me or against me” brand of PR, and in the process cold-shouldered the most important music weekly in the world. Not bright. And very unBruce-like. But Carr was cut from a different cloth—she genuinely believed Bruce was already too big to need the music press. From now on, one required a clean CV if wanting access to the big boss man.
Creem
’s Dave DiMartino got in under the wire—interviewing Bruce on the eve of the album’s release, before s/he saw what Billy Altman thought—but from here on interviews were promotional, not confessional.

Not that Carr was entirely misguided in her analysis. There were sections of the
American
media for whom Springsteen was so totemic that any criticism needed to be spun with candy-cotton. Through the fall of 1980, Springsteen toured the arenas of America as if on a series of homecoming parades—while the reviews (again,
NME
and
Sounds
excepted) obligingly printed the legend. Even the normally level-headed Greil Marcus spoke of the approaching concerts in overtly mythic terms: “The implicit promise of a Bruce Springsteen concert is that This Is What It’s All About—This is The Rock. Whether the promise is more than a night’s happy illusion is, at the time, less important than whether Springsteen can live up to it.”

The shows themselves were only very good in comparison with what other arena acts were offering in the name of entertainment that season, whether it be
The Wall
money-mart or the final descent of Led Zeppelin. By any Bruceian benchmark, they were a long way off
Darkness
standards, let alone the E Street Band’s mid-seventies heyday. And a key problem was that Springsteen had decided to all but dispense with the pre-
Darkness
set-list. The 1980 shows were all about
The River
, with the odd, obligatory nod to its predecessor (four of the new album’s concert highlights were from
Darkness
’s discard-pile).

And Bruce was quite unapologetic about his stance: “The fans wanna hear everything. I know when I get to a concert, I wanna hear the hits…But you can’t be afraid to play the new stuff, too. What’s to fear—that they’re not gonna clap as much?” What there was to fear was that the new songs would not measure up; that a stack-of-trax approach to
a twenty-song double album—whatever its stronger moments contained—might just turn a three-hour performance into a promotional tool first, and a live experience second. But Springsteen was thinking about himself, and
he
couldn’t wait to play the new songs:

Failing to heed Wayne King’s summer storm-warning—“creating rock and then playing it to an audience has proven to be dangerous to [both] creativity and communication”—Springsteen now constructed a set-list which almost demanded proof of purchase of his new album before one got an E-ticket. Owners of
Greetings
and
The Wild, the Innocent
were sent to the back of the line, with “Rosalita” as their sole companion. Large parts of the song-canon to date—as impressive as that of any seventies American rock artist—were airily dismissed, and when interviewers asked what gives, he replied “I have very little to do anymore with my first two, even three LPs. I was much too young when I made those. I just talked a lot of nonsense.”

He even seemed to have it in for his 1978 LP, insisting he “consider[ed] the
Darkness
LP a failure.
The River
, that’s me. That’s the best I can do.” He was dismissing The Album, not the songs—two-thirds of which continued to garner favor. As he told
Darkness
devotee Dave Marsh, “I like the ideas. [But] I’m not crazy about the performances. We play all those songs ten times better live.” And he set out to prove it, recording shows in Tempe, Arizona in early November (from which the “anti-Reagan” version of “Badlands” on
Live 75–85
would later be pulled) and three nights at Nassau
Coliseum, at year’s end, which all featured at least six from
Darkness
, along with the now-ubiquitous “Fire,” usually “Because The Night,” and between three and four
Darkness
outtakes masquerading as songs from the new album. Of these, an eight-minute “Drive All Night” was usually a highlight; along with a recast “Point Blank,” which proved there was such a thing as life after studio-death, and that “creativity and communication” was still possible in cattle-barns, ice-hockey arenas and airplane hangars. The shows proved gruelling for everyone. Playing anywhere between thirty-five and forty songs, sometimes spending three and a half hours onstage, Springsteen made the shows about stamina first, superlatives second.

And still he continued to talk in familiar tones about his enduring compact with the fans: “There’s a promise made between the musician and the audience. When they support each other, that’s a special thing. It goes real deep, and most people take it too lightly. If you break the pact or take it too lightly, nothing else makes sense. It’s at the heart of everything.” However, the occasional, nominal resurrection of a “Spirit In The Night,” a “For You,” or an “Incident on 57th Street”—all songs which helped make his “rep”—did not a rock messiah make. His idea of set-rotation had become
which
fifteen songs from
The River
to inflict on audiences.

After three months of sold-out arena shows, he concluded the year with three nights at Nassau’s cavernous Coliseum. These sets were, on the face of it, everything longstanding fans yearned for. The final night, New Year’s Eve, ran to 225 minutes and forty-three songs—a record-breaker in every sense. With unique 1980 performances of “Rendezvous” and “Held Up Without A Gun,” cover versions of the Creedence classic “Who’ll Stop The Rain,” Spector’s “Merry Christmas Baby” and Wilson Pickett’s “In The Midnight Hour” and a seven-song rock ’n’ roll encore, it seemed he had once again pulled out all the stops. But, in truth, he was at times running on empty, putting heart and soul into songs from the new album, some of which barely deserved the time of day, but failing to raise his game on more worthy fare. Even a cursory comparison with the three September 1978 Capitol Theater shows—also recorded for a possible live album—finds precious few Nassau performances brooking comparison with their Passaic predecessors.

Nor did a three-week pit-stop in January fully recharge the batteries, and by the start of March he was on his last legs. With just twelve days separating his final U.S. show in Indianapolis on the 5th from the start
of his European tour in Brighton, he simply had to admit he was physically and mentally exhausted. The European tour would have to be delayed a fortnight, while the British shows which had been supposed to ease him into this potentially alienating experience, were moved to tour’s end. It proved a smart move—the all-important London and Birmingham arena shows now became a fitting finale to proceedings, not a European appetizer. It also gave him time to rethink his approach, and even demo a couple of new songs he might spring on followers across the ocean.

In fact, the one song he worked into any kind of shape in those weeks had ideas enough for two. “Fistful of Dollars” played with the idea that “some gonna stand, man, some gonna fall/ And some ain’t gonna get to play the game at all/ Well, they give you the worst and they take the best/ For a fist full of dollars and a little bit less.” The bulk of the song focused on a gamblin’ man who is “frightened of the dice they roll/ Where the highway ends and the sand turns to gold;” and though Atlantic City is not mentioned, its opening image was already penciled in: “Well, they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night/ Now that town sets in for a fight.”
*
Elsewhere he turned a self-conscious nod to Chuck Berry’s “Bye Bye Johnny”—“Well, I drew my money from the Central Trust/ And I hopped with my guitar on a greyhound bus”—into a belated tribute of sorts to Elvis: “Johnny Bye Bye.” But one verse is all he had, for now.

Presley was very much on Bruce’s mind in the early weeks of the European tour, so much so that at his first ever show in Paris—between “The Promised Land” and Woody Guthrie’s rather more ironic “This Land Is Your Land”—he talked about “the last time…I’d seen Elvis in concert. My two favorite songs he sang was one called ‘How Great Thou Art,’ and ‘American Trilogy’…and I remember [this] ’cause I went hoping to see him do all old stuff, all the rocking stuff, but in the end it seemed like the songs that were closest to him, and that he sang with the most heart, was a song that was about the land that he grew up in and a song just about the God that he believed in…This is a song about freedom, it’s…about not having to die when you’re old in some factory, or about not having to die in some big million-dollar house with a lot of nothing pumping through your veins.”

The following night he opened the set—which had previously begun with the unremitting “Factory”—with “Follow That Dream,” which was actually a hybrid of the 1962 Elvis original, a couple of phrases from Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” and a Bruceian glossary on how to avoid the fate that befell Elvis: “I need someone with a love I can trust/ And together we’ll search for the things that come to us/ Baby in dreams, baby in dreams…You got to follow that dream wherever it may lead.” It was an audacious moment, setting things up nicely for a series of shows that reflected more the risk-taker of yore. He even talked like that man. As he said of this surprise opener the following week, “I see it as catching a deep breath, before making the big jump…At the opening of a show, people don’t expect intimacy, they want to get excited together, they want to jump up. So if you start calm, you take the people close to you from the beginning.”

It was a special night, which concluded with a first encore that included another favorite Elvis “Hollywood” hit, “Can’t Help Falling In Love,” a song he had recorded for
Darkness
and considered for the 1978 tour, telling Ed Sciaky, “I really wanted to do [it] but we didn’t get a chance to run it down…It was his theme song, which everyone relates to his Las Vegas period.” This was the Elvis the young Bruce had grown up with. It also reminded him of the Elvis he saw that night in Philadelphia, when it served as Presley’s set-closer but delivered in the most desultory manner possible, connecting it to a parable Springsteen began to tell to press
and
punters alike:

Finally, on May 13, another special night, this one at Manchester’s intimate Apollo Theater, the parable became a pop song. On one level little more than a rewrite of the “funeral” version of 1977’s “Come On (Let’s Go Tonight)” with the opening couplet to “Bye Bye Johnny” tacked on, “Johnny Bye Bye” was also the first song since “The Ties That Bind” he’d debuted in concert, not in the studio. The line he had used in the Paris “This Land Is Your Land” rap had become the basis for a devastating closing verse: “They found him slumped up against the drain/ With a whole lot of nothin’ runnin’ through his veins/ Well, bye bye Johnny, Johnny bye bye, you didn’t have to die, you didn’t have to die.” He was telling everyone that night, and throughout both legs of
The River
tour, that
he
wasn’t gonna end up that way:

One could easily get hooked on the star-trip. But not him. As he let
Rolling Stone
know after “Johnny Bye Bye” finally received an official release, “The type of fame that Elvis had…the pressure of it, and the isolation that it seems to require, has gotta be really painful…[But] I wasn’t gonna get to a place where I said, ‘I can’t go in here. I can’t go to this bar. I can’t go outside.’” For Springsteen, it was still all about performing. And as he repeatedly insisted, “I’m gonna perform as long…as I don’t change into a parody of myself; and if I ever end up doing that, then I count on my good friends to tell me so.”