E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (49 page)

The most enraged of the E Streeters was the one who perhaps feared he had the least future as a jobbing musician on other artists’ albums and tours—Max Weinberg. That he had enjoyed ten times the career and a hundred times the rewards of the men he replaced in the E Street Band counted not a jot. He even phoned Dick Wingate, who had not worked for Bruce since 1979: “He was fucking furious. He was really pissed! I guess there was some financial offer he wasn’t very happy with. He felt the way it went down was really bad.” And three years later, he had still not quite calmed down. Talking to
Backstreets
in the winter of 1992, Weinberg spoke of a deep and debilitating disappointment:

But Springsteen had simply faced up to the inevitable truth. The E Street Band—America’s finest live rock band in their day—had become an anachronism; a way of ensuring he could fill arenas, but only if he wanted to be a nostalgia act. He had arrived at a different shore. As he said, shortly after Weinberg let rip, the music he was making now was “about somebody walking through that world of fear so that he can live in the world of love.” It just happened to come from a man who once spit in the face of these badlands with a band of brothers who for fifteen years never stopped feeling the self-same way.

Ten years of intermittently burning down the reunion road had brought the E Street shuffle to Buffalo in upstate New York at the end of another marathon year of touring. After nigh on ninety dates promoting the third E Street Band album of the 21st century,
Working on a Dream
—and a decade after a 1999 reunion tour turned inexorably into the second E Street era—Bruce had decided to return to the starting point, “the miracle…the record that took everything from way below zero to One.” He and a reconstructed E Street Band, including both Miami Steve
and
Nils Lofgren, were going to play
Greetings from Asbury Park
, for “one time only.” And, completing the circle, he had asked Mike Appel to join them for this symbolic moment of closure:

For the past month, Springsteen had been selectively performing each of the six first-era E Street albums in their entirety—even
The River
—as a way of making these final shows, after three years of almost continuous recording and performing, something special. (Of the six, the attempt to replicate
The Wild, the Innocent
proved the most hit and miss.) It was a tacit acknowledgment from an older, wiser Springsteen of the E Street Band’s central importance to those genre-defining records: “As I said when I inducted U2 into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, one of the rules of rock & roll is, ‘Hey asshole, the other guy’s more important than you think he is!’ It can take time away from people to get a [real] view on that.”

It was also a logical extension of the “let’s present the past in modern dress”
modus operandi
Springsteen adopted the minute he brought the band back to life in the winter of 1999—when the album they were primarily promoting was a four-CD retrospective of (mainly) songs left off the E Street Band albums: legendary lost songs like “Hey Santa Ana,” “Seaside Bar Song,” “Zero and Blind Terry,” “Thundercrack,” “Rendezvous,” “Don’t Look Back,” “Restless Nights,” “Roulette,” “Loose Ends,” “I Wanna Be With You,” “Cynthia,” “My Love Will Not Let You Down,” “Frankie” and “The Promise,” every one of which he would perform at some point in the ensuing decade—“Restless Nights” excepted. That one he saved for his 2009 shuffle off to Buffalo.

By this time, the brand-name backing band contained just two members who had played on that original 1973 artefact—Garry Tallent and Clarence Clemons. Danny Federici’s death in 2008 had robbed this newly revamped E Street combo of an irreplaceable original member. And by November 2009 Clarence Clemons was not a well man, either. Another E Street tour for him looked increasingly unlikely. But the Big Man had a big heart, even if it looked at times like he was gonna leave part of it in Buffalo. As Appel wrote after that final public performance, “It ain’t easy blowing a saxophone all night…when you’re sick.”

Thankfully, the
Greetings
album had only ever required Clarence’s clarion blasts on two songs, “Blinded By The Light” and “Spirit In The Night”—though “Growin’ Up” and “Does This Bus Stop” followed suit in concert. It was an album much of which had been written at, and for, piano; containing
some of Springsteen’s most personal songs. And so it was that, on this November night, Roy Bittan got to put years of musical virtuosity into the parts of “Lost In The Flood,” “The Angel” and “For You” Springsteen wrote for and by himself.

The greatest challenge for Springsteen and Bittan in Buffalo was to make “The Angel,” the one
Greetings
song the E Street Band had
never
manhandled, rise from its “marble dome.” Somehow, with Soozie Tyrell’s violin effortlessly slipping into the cracks ’twixt vocal and piano, they made this wordy work a little more heavenly. “Lost In The Flood” was also given a wailing guitar coda by the ex-Steel Mill lead guitarist, while “For You” was transported back in time to the Roxy, and a younger Greg Kihn copycat. Somehow the elements of a rekindled E Street Band were setting off sparks and bridging the years—their failing flesh willing to fuel fans’ fantasies one last time.

But
Greetings
was just the starting point for a night of rock ’n’ roll reconciliation. By 2009 Springsteen had eight more albums to add to the eight he had made in the first E Street era. And so, although he acknowledged the audience’s desire to hear the “old stuff”—even when drawn from 1999’s
Tracks
, as “Restless Nights” and “My Love Will Not Let You Down” were—he was “still try[ing] to keep a schematic that remains centered around our newest material.” Even if he knew this was a losing battle. And had been ever since the band reformed in 1999 without a new record to promote, and only three fair-to-middling albums of Springsteen originals (
Lucky Town, Human Touch
and
The Ghost of Tom Joad
) separating them from their decade-old dissolution. But still, he liked to think, “On any given night I’m playing to many of my audiences out there. There’s the
Tom Joad
audience, there’s the “Dancing In The Dark” audience, but hey, they’re all there at that particular moment.”

In upstate New York—which had last seen Springsteen before
Magic
and
Working On A Dream
tripled the count of 21st century E Street albums—he chose to play as many covers as second-era originals. All were certainly familiar to any serious Bruce taper: “Merry Christmas Baby,” “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,” “I Don’t Wanna Hang Up My Rock & Roll Shoes” and—as final encore—“Higher And Higher” and “Rockin’ All Over The World;” each a song Springsteen had claimed for his own three decades earlier. All affirmed the promise he had often spoken about, at a time in his life when everything was at stake and there was all to play for. The nights when miracles were commonplace. Back in the glory days.

•  •   •

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This book—though it comes relatively quickly on the heels of my
All the Madmen
(Constable, 2011)—has been a long time coming. I have always wanted to do a history of the E Street Band era, but in the immediate aftermath of their 1989 disbandment the climate did not seem right; and after catching the first rays of reunion, I have to admit I listened to Bruce’s music—old and new—less and less. What first set me thinking along these lines again were the performances Springsteen & the E Street Band gave of the albums they had made between 1972 and 1984 in their sequential entireties at the end of the 2009 tour—performances so fresh and committed that they made me look again at those songs. Hard on the heels of the general circulation of these shows (in what I like to call their “hearing aid” versions) came Springsteen’s own 2010 recasting of the
Darkness
sessions, the 2–CD
Promise
and—altogether more enticing and authoritative—the
Darkness On The Edge of Town
boxed-set, a triple-DVD, triple-CD extravaganza housed in a remarkably well-executed facsimile of one of Bruce’s 1977 notebooks. I dived in.

Immediately, I wanted to know more about the sessions, and in particular whatever happened to some of the things he still saw fit to omit from his official oeuvre—could he really have decided “Preacher’s Daughter” was less deserving of release than “Outside Looking In?” What about all those songs he demoed the first night at Atlantic (1 June 1977)? My good friend Glenn Korman, archivist extraordinaire, showed me just how much
Darkness
material was catalogued in the Sony database. And a book-idea was born. So my first and most fulsome thanks go to Glenn, who once again couldn’t have been more generous with his time and expertise,
helping me to construct—for the first time, I believe—an authoritative studio chronology of the E Street era using Sony’s own documentation.

The next candidate I wish to put forward for Saint in New York City status is Mike Appel. I had always thought that Appel’s role in the rise of Bruce Springsteen had been somewhat muddied by the Marsh-man. With no love lost between Springsteen’s ex-manager and rock scribe Dave Marsh, the latter’s two-pronged bios,
Born To Run
and
Glory Days
, were bound to minimize the Appel contribution to Springsteen’s climb to the top. And with the field of Brucebiography to himself until the nineties, Marsh lore became rocklore. Marc Elliott’s
Down Thunder Road
(1992) gave Appel’s side of the story for the first time, but Elliott was himself hamstrung by a poor sense of Springsteen’s musical graph and the seventies music industry’s own workings (despite once writing a book called
Rockanomics
). Thankfully, Appel graciously agreed to sit down and answer all the questions I couldn’t find the answers to in previous tomes. And when, after three hours, the hubbub of the Roosevelt Hotel bar got too much, he allowed me to persevere with my queries via e-mail and even unto the diners of Brooklyn. I found a man as generous with his opinions as he was with his time. Thank you, Mike.

If Mike Appel’s role in the formulation of the E Street sound and live reputation has gone under-recognized, so has the contribution of Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez. Though he had been interviewed a number of times previously, again the one man who had been an integral part of Child, Steel Mill, Dr. Zoom, the Bruce Springsteen Band and the first two incarnations of the E Street Band gave up an afternoon to answer my questions and allow me to pry into his painful removal from the band that had been his life. He remains, for me, the most sympathetic stickman Springsteen ever had.

Another aspect of the E Street history that I felt had been lacking in previous accounts was the whys and wherefores of his relationship with label and management, i.e. the general “branding of Bruce” in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Appel management set-up. Tying the strands together required the unstinting help of the redoubtable Debbie Gold, the urbane Dick Wingate and the garrulous Paul Rappaport, all of them mainstays of Springsteen’s transformation from
Newsweek
cover to bona fide rock star between 1975 and 1980, and none of them interviewed in depth before. Between them, they gave me my own golden triangle.
God bless y’all. Leo Hollis, Andreas Campomar and Kevin Doughten were my estimable E Street editors. Fanx ta-ra.

Others who talked to tape included Lenny Kaye, wearing both his rock scribe hat and PSG guitarist, as he regaled me with his own Bruceian anecdotes; Joel Bernstein, wearing his sometime-rock photographer hat, and equally forthcoming about his brief sojourn in Springsteen’s inner circle in 1979–80; and Alan Vega, who recalled his experiences at Power Station in the year he and Springsteen were each engaged on making their first statement of the eighties.
Muchas gracias
.