E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Read online

  E STREET SHUFFLE

  Also by Clinton Heylin

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  Revolution In The Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan vol. 1 (1957–73)

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  Babylon’s Burning: From Punk to Grunge

  From The Velvets To The Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk

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  Bob Dylan: Behind The Shades

  Dylan’s Daemon Lover: The Tangled Tale of a 450–Year-Old Pop Ballad

  Dylan Day By Day: A Life In Stolen Moments

  Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols

  Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions 1960–94

  The Great White Wonders: A History of Rock Bootlegs

  The Penguin Book of Rock & Roll Writing [editor]

  Gypsy Love Songs & Sad Refrains:

  The Recordings of Sandy Denny & Richard Thompson

  Rise/Fall: The Story of Public Image Limited

  Joy Division: Form & Substance [with Craig Wood]

  E STREET SHUFFLE

  The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen

  & the E Street Band

  CLINTON HEYLIN

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First American edition

  Published in 2013 by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Clinton Heylin, 2012

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Heylin, Clinton.

  E Street shuffle / Clinton Heylin.

  pages ; cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-60624-7

  1. Springsteen, Bruce. 2. E Street Band. 3. Rock musicians—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  ML420.S77H28 2013

  782.42166092—dc23

  [B]

  2012035454

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For Erik, keeper of the faith

  last of the true believers.

  Contents

  Ad Card

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  May 2, 2012—Mama Knows ’Rithmetic

  Prehistory: 1964–72—Kicked Open A Door To Your Mind

  Part I—Born With Nothing

  Chapter 1: 1971–72—Songs About Cars & Girls

  Chapter 2: 1973—Hammond’s (Other) Folly

  Chapter 3: 1974–75—Trading In Wings For Wheels

  Chapter 4: 1975–77—Cashed In A Few of My Dreams

  Chapter 5: 1977–78—Chasing Something In The Night

  Part II—Better Off That Way

  Chapter 6: 1978–79—The Ties That Bind

  Chapter 7: 1980–81—Take Me To The River

  Chapter 8: 1981–82—Reasons To Believe

  Chapter 9: 1982–84—Growin’ Up

  Chapter 10: 1984–88—None But The Brave

  Epilogue: November 22, 2009—Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  A Selective Bootleg CD Discography

  Index

  I’m always going to trust the art and be suspicious of the artist

  because he’s generally…a stumbling clown like everybody else.

  —Bruce Springsteen, 2006

  May 2, 2012—Mama Knows ‘Rithmetic

  It fell out on a May evening…

  I find myself in the pit, a green band around my wrist, at the brand-spanking-new Prudential Center in Newark. New York “muso” Richard has opened the door and I have stepped in for my first E Street show since 2004’s Vote For Change, when Springsteen had sounded hoarse from all that hectoring. Tonight, he is saying farewell to the arena leg of the Wrecking Ball tour. Stadia beckon—again. But for now, he has a home-state audience in a hyped-up state of mind, iPhones akimbo, ready to greet their returning hero. And suddenly there he is, declaiming to the rafters with the first surprise of the evening, “No Surrender,” the truest anthem on that mountainous multimillion seller, Born In The USA.

  Alongside me are legionnaires of true believers, one of whom, Larry, had been telling me about seeing him at Joe’s Place, a cramped, crumbling Boston bar that had been the E Street Band’s home away from home in 1973–74; when “Rosalita” came out every night and torched the place. A broad grin etches his face when the big boss man announces, half a dozen songs in, that he is gonna do a song he’d never played, well, maybe once: “Bishop danced with a thumbscrew woman/ Did a double-quick back flip and slid across the floor.”

  “Bishop Danced” had been the opening track on a classic seventies Springsteen LP, Fire On The Fingertips. Just not one that Bruce himself okayed for release. Rather, it was spawned among the stalls of Camden Lock. A bootleg. But for the hard core, this mattered not. It was a lost Bruce classic, transformed by the band arrangement it never got back in 1973. (He had done it more than once—and in Boston—but the last documented version was in Berkeley, March 2, 1973.)

  And then, as if reading our minds, Springsteen segues into “Saint In The City”—another blast from the past he rarely takes for a spin these days—and a thought flashes across my mind. May 2. It was forty years ago today that a callow kid from Freehold walked into the office of John Hammond, the legendary A&R man who discovered Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Aretha Franklin and Dylan, and played him a song that knocked his socks off. The self-same “Saint.”

  After this, the show settles into its routine; but in my mind’s eye, I am already in rewind, back to the days
when he spent his afternoons at WBCN, debuting the likes of “Bishop Danced” and “Rosalita” over the radio, and his evenings at Joe’s Place. Or Max’s. Or The Main Point. And I’m thinking this is a surprisingly good facsimile of those moments and that band; but a facsimile, nonetheless. How he got there—and got from there to here—is the story of the E Street Shuffle. And quite a story it is. Because, as he told an expectant audience in Austin this very March:

  “I had nights and nights of bar-playing behind me to bring my songs home…These skills gave me a huge ace up my sleeve. And when we finally went on the road, and we played that ace, we scorched the Earth.”

  Prehistory: 1964–72—Kicked Open A Door To Your Mind

  Till I was thirteen, the body was presumed dead; and that’s how I feel about my whole life up till then. I was just reeling through space and bouncing off the walls, and bouncing off people, and I didn’t find anything to hold on to or any connection whatsoever; until the rock & roll thing and the guitar. When I found that…the other stuff just didn’t matter any more.—Bruce Springsteen, 1978

  When Jesus gently chastised his wealthy follower, Nicodemus, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God,” he presumably did not have in mind the same “born again” experience which led thirteen-year-old Bruce Springsteen into apostasy. Here was someone who only found “the Spirit” when he cast aside the teachings of J.C., previously laid down with an iron hand by a series of matriarchal authority figures, from the nuns at the local convent school he attended prior to high school to the mother who presided over the Springsteens’ dilapidated leasehold in Freehold, New Jersey.

  If Jesus’ own take on rebellion failed to lay a seed in Springsteen’s mind, the one true religion which by AD 325 garbled records of his pithy sayings had spawned wrapped its talons around the boy from the cradle. But not to the grave. Even if its primary message stayed with him until at least 1981, when he told one Belgian interviewer “My Catholic education taught me to have fear. This is a religious experience in which you don’t look up to heaven, but to the people around you.”

  A year later he would write “My Father’s House,” the first of several post-therapy compositions to address that time when he lived his whole life in fear. On introducing that song in concert, he struck the same keynote: “I remember when I was a kid, first thing I can ever remember being afraid of was the devil…I guess, my mother was taking me to church and all I heard was about the devil all the time.” As he grew older, that fear turned first to shame and then to anger; because, as he sagely put it in his early thirties, when his replacement religion was no longer fulfilling his deepest needs either, “That kind of fear is demolishing and shameful…It darkens the spirit of religion.”

  That resentment had already spewed forth in song: initially, in 1971–72, ones of blasphemous angels and irreverent messiahs. By 1981–82, the themes had become existential terror and endemic faithlessness. For now, it just made him want to vomit: “There’s this smell of religion, this smell that convents have, well, every time I went there I got sick. I just threw up.” What he perhaps failed to appreciate at the time was that his mother’s faith probably provided her only solace in a life without hope and a town without pity: Freehold, NJ. And it was there that the young Bruce spent his formative years, at first at his maternal grandparents’ house, as his parents scrimped and saved to try and raise enough money to strike out on their own. Bruce, meanwhile, was already developing a fascination with the radio—not the music it broadcast, but the thing itself. As he told a Michigan audience in September 1978, prefacing the unsparing “Factory”:

  We all lived at my grandparents’. It was a house that had the first church service and it had the first funeral in town in this house. My grandfather, he was an electrician, and he used to fix second-hand radios. And I remember when I was five years old, before we were to leave [there], he used to take me with him outside of town in the summer. They used to have mining workers, used to come off from the South and work in the fields outside of town, he used to sell ’em radios.

  In fact, he had already celebrated his grandfather, Mr. Zerilli, in song. One of the first compositions he presented to Mike Appel when signed to a production deal in the spring of 1972 was an autobiographical piece called simply “Randolph Street.” In it he sought to convey a world through the eyes of a child, one who sees his grandfather as “a master of the art of electricity” who “lectured on tubes and circuitry/ He was self-employed, but he could never see his way into the light/ He had a room full of switches and dials…/ And a head full of clouds and eyes full of sight.” If a penchant for imbuing ordinary people with magical powers was thus evident this early, songs of autobiography would not prove to be the way he would find himself.

  Like many a bright kid living in a cloistered, claustrophobic environment, he retired into the world of imagination when he was barely old enough for school, a form of escape he shared with fellow New Jerseyite Patti Smith, born three years earlier to similar circumstances: an agnostic ex-soldier father, a zealot of a Christian for a Mom, white-trash poor. Not surprisingly, he was quickly labeled a dreamer by his teachers, who failed to provide the intellectual stimulus he sorely needed, and most certainly wasn’t receiving at home; especially after the Springsteens finally flew the grandparents’ coop to set up home down on South Street.

  Barely had they changed homes than the Springsteens had another mouth to feed, and Bruce had a lil’ sister. Though it only made tough times still tougher, Springsteen remembered the period after Pamela was born in 1962 as “one of the best times I can ever remember…because it changed the atmosphere of the whole house for quite a while.” (Again an experience he shared with the young Patti, who later wrote the magnificent “Kimberly” about the night her younger sister was born.) But for the boy from the Jersey shore it seemed Life had already dissuaded Opportunity from making house-calls on the Springsteens. As he later told a St. Louis audience, “I grew up in a house where…there wasn’t a lot of things that make you aware of the possibilities that you have in life.” Even when it came to the realm of politics, it seemed the adults brooked no discussion—Bruce was informed he was a Democrat, and that was that:

  Bruce Springsteen: The only political discussion I ever remember in my house was when I came home from school when I was little…It must have been during an election season…I was probably…eight or nine. And I came home and said, “Mom, what are we?” And she said, “Oh, we’re Democrats. We’re Democrats because they’re for the working people.” And that was it—that was the [extent of] political discussion that went on in my house. [2004]

  After his pubescent rock ’n’ roll epiphany, he would not feel this lack of any intellectual stimulus so keenly. Only in full-blown middle age would he recognize how great the loss had been: “I didn’t grow up in a community of ideas—a place where you can sit down and talk about books, and how you read them, and how they affect you…I’m more a product of popular culture.” Fortunately, the popular culture he refers to was enjoying one of its most inspired epochs, which TV and radio ensured seeped into every U.S. household, no matter how close to the breadline. And the Springsteens never managed to do more than make ends meet for their growing family, and sometimes not even that:

  Bruce Springsteen: I lived in a household that was caught in the squeeze, endlessly trying to make ends meet. My mother running down to the finance company, borrowing money to have a Christmas, and then paying it back all year until the next Christmas and borrowing some more. So I know what that’s like. [2004]

  It was Bruce’s mother, Adele, who was often the only one who kept hungry wolves at bay. Though his father had once known job security at a plastics factory, in the years before he took his wife to California in 1969 the head of the household bounced from pillar to temporary post in a series of unskilled and unchallenging short-term jobs. The experience left an indelible mark on his son, captured in a couplet he would later cut from 1982’s “Glory Days”: “I
was nine years old when he was working at the Metuchen Ford plant assembly line/ Now he just sits on a stool down at the Legion Hall, but I can tell what’s on his mind.” By then, the not-so-young Bruce could admit, “There ain’t a note I play onstage that can’t be traced directly back to my mother and father.”

  The two parents themselves were very different in temperament. And of the two there was never any question whom Bruce most resembled, and therefore whose authority he set out to challenge. Like his father, Doug, Bruce was a lone wolf who tended to bottle things up, a comparison the Born To Run Bruce did not shy away from: “I’m pretty much by myself out there most of the time. My father was always like that. Lived with my father for twenty years. Never once saw a friend come over to the house. Not one time.” Nor did Doug tend to engage his family in stimulating conversation. Even after Bruce became the subject of press interest, he would describe his father (in the present tense) as someone who “never has much to say to me. But I know he thinks about a lot of things. I know he’s driving himself almost crazy thinking about these things.”

  Meanwhile, Doug’s stoic wife Adele was the one who bequeathed their only son the work ethic he espoused nightly on stage—“Her life had an incredible consistency, work, work, work every day, and I admired that greatly”—and when she could afford it, and even when she could not, she would indulge her son’s whims. When he was thirteen, his overriding obsession was to own an electric guitar. Forty years later, on the night he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Adele’s son acknowledged the enormous debt he owed her, specifically and generally:

  Bruce Springsteen: I’d like to thank my mother Adele for that slushy Christmas Eve…when we stood outside the music store and I pointed to that Sunburst guitar and she had that sixty bucks, and I said, “I need that one, Ma.” She got me what I needed, and she protected me and provided for me on a thousand other days and nights. As importantly, she gave me a sense of work as something that was joyous and that filled you with pride and self-regard, and that committed you to your world. [1998]