Born to Run (34 page)

At bottom, we were amateur producers and simply failed to understand the basic physics of getting sound to tape. Recorded
sound is relative. When the drums are forceful but moderate, they leave room for a big guitar sound. When the guitars are powerful but lean, you can have drums the size of a house. But you can’t feature
everything
, for in effect you’re featuring
nothing
. Phil Spector’s records aren’t sonically big. The technology wasn’t there. They just
sound
bigger than your world. It’s a beautiful illusion.
I wanted everything, so I was getting nothing. We kept on, exhausting ourselves in the process, but exhaustion has always been my friend and I don’t mind going there. Near the bottom of its fathomless pit I usually find results. We failed until we didn’t.

I began to find some inspiration in the working-class blues of the Animals, pop hits like the Easybeats’ “Friday on My Mind” and the country
music I’d so long ignored. Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie: here was music that emotionally described a life I recognized, my life, the life of my family and neighbors. Here was where I wanted to make my stand musically and search for my own questions and answers. I didn’t want out. I wanted in. I didn’t want to erase, escape, forget or reject. I wanted to understand. What were the social forces that
held my parents’ lives in check? Why was it so hard? In my search I would blur the lines between the personal and psychological factors that made my father’s life so difficult and the political issues that kept a tight clamp on working-class lives across the United States. I had to start somewhere. For my parents’ troubled lives I was determined to be the enlightened, compassionate voice of reason
and revenge. This first came to fruition in
Darkness on the Edge of Town
. It was after my success, my
“freedom,” that I began to seriously delve into these issues. I don’t know if it was the survivor’s guilt of finally being able to escape the confines of my small-town existence or if, as on the battlefield, in America we’re not supposed to leave anybody behind. In a country this rich, it isn’t
right. A dignified decent living is not too much to ask. Where you take it from there is up to you but that much should be a birthright.

Finally, the piece of me that lived in the working-class neighborhoods of my hometown was an essential and permanent part of who I was. No one you have been and no place you have gone ever leaves you. The new parts of you simply jump in the car and go along
for the rest of the ride. The success of your journey and your destination all depend on who’s driving. I’d seen other great musicians lose their way and watch their music and art become anemic, rootless, displaced when they seemed to lose touch with who they were. My music would be a music of identity, a search for meaning and the future.

Closing In

Party songs, love songs, Brill Building
pop, absolute top ten smashes (“Fire,” “Because the Night”) all came and went. It was my way. I wasn’t sure what I wanted but I smelled something in the air and knew when I didn’t have it. As with
Born to Run
, it was the subtle shaping of the times and the work of creating an identity, an immediate “me” I could live with, that kept me moving toward what I hoped was light. I eventually cut the
massive block of songs I had down to the ten toughest. I edited out anything that broke the album’s mood or tension. The songs I chose wore big titles—“Badlands,” “Prove It All Night,” “Adam Raised a Cain,” “Racing in the Street,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town”—and were filled with will, resilience and resistance. “Adam” used biblical images to summon the hard inheritance handed down from father to
son. “Darkness on the Edge of Town” proposed that the setting for personal transformation is often found at the end of your rope. In “Racing in the Street”
my street racers carried with them the years between the innocent car songs of the sixties and the realities of 1978 America. To make “Racing” and those big titles personal, I had to infuse the music with my own experience, my own hopes and
fears.

Out went anything that smacked of frivolity or nostalgia. The punk revolution had hit and there was some hard music coming out of England. The Sex Pistols, the Clash and Elvis Costello all were pushing the envelope on what pop could be in 1977. It was a time of great endings and great beginnings. Elvis had died and his ghost hovered over our sessions. (I’d written “Fire” especially for
him.) Across the sea there were raging, young, idealistic musicians looking to reinvent (or destroy) what they’d heard, searching for another way. Somebody somewhere had to start a fire. The “gods” had become too omnipotent and had lost their way. The connection between the fan and the man onstage had grown too abstract. Unspoken promises had been made and broken. It was time for a new order, or
maybe . . . no order! Pop needed new provocations and new responses. In ’78 I felt a distant kinship to these groups, to the class consciousness, the anger. They hardened my resolve. I would take my own route, but the punks were frightening, inspirational and challenging to American musicians. Their energy and influence can be found buried in the subtext of
Darkness on the Edge of Town
.

Darkness
was my samurai record, all stripped down for fighting. My protagonists in these songs had to divest themselves of all that was unnecessary to survive. On
Born to Run
a personal battle was engaged, but the collective war continued. On
Darkness
, the political implications of the lives I was writing about began to come to the fore and I searched for a music that could contain them.

I determined
that there on the streets of my hometown was the beginning of my purpose, my reason, my passion. Along with Catholicism, in my family’s neighborhood experience, I found my other “genesis” piece, the beginning of my song: home, roots, blood, community, responsibility, stay hard, stay hungry, stay alive. Sweetened by cars, girls and fortune, these are
the things that guided my musical journey. I
would travel far, light-years from home, and enjoy it all, but I would never completely leave. My music began to have more political implications; I tried to find a way to put my work into service. I read and I studied to become a better, more effective writer. I harbored extravagant ambition and belief in the effect of popular song. I wanted my music grounded in my life, in the life of my family
and in the blood and lives of the people I’d known.

Most of my writing is emotionally autobiographical. I’ve learned you’ve got to pull up the things that mean something to you in order for them to mean anything to your audience. That’s where the proof is. That’s how they know you’re not kidding. With the record’s final verse, “Tonight I’ll be on that hill . . . ,” my characters stand unsure
of their fate but dug in and committed. By the end of
Darkness
, I’d found my adult voice.

THIRTY-EIGHT

THE DROP

After a solid year of endless studio hours, many sleepless nights in my shoe box of a room at the midtown Navarro Hotel and a city in darkness (the great NYC blackout of 1977 found me in Times Square, the world’s biggest pinball machine; when the lights exploded back on, whoa!), my first record in three years was complete. It would be Steve Van Zandt’s first record as an
E Street Band member. It would be the beginning of a long and wonderful relationship with producer Chuck Plotkin and the end of a short but fruitful one with my good friend Jimmy Iovine. It would be the first record on which we recorded our tracks live in studio, as a full band, and my first without Mike. Jon and I were at the production helm and this record continued and deepened our work and friendship.
All we needed was an album cover.

I’d gotten to know Patti Smith a little through our work together on “Because the Night.”
When I visited her during one of her performances at the Bottom Line, she gave me the name of a South Jersey photographer and said, “You should let this guy take your picture.” One winter afternoon I drove south to Haddonfield, New Jersey, and met Frank Stefanko. Frank had
photographed Patti at the beginning of her career. He worked a day job at a local meatpacking plant and continued to practice his craft in his spare time. Frank was a rough-edged but easygoing kind of guy. My recollection is he borrowed a camera for the day, called a teenage kid from next door to come over and hold up his one light and started shooting. I stood against some flowery wallpaper in
Frank and his wife’s bedroom, looked straight into the camera, gave him my best “troubled young man,” and he did the rest. One of these photos ended up on the cover of
Darkness on the Edge of Town
.

Frank’s photographs were stark. His talent was he managed to strip away your celebrity, your artifice, and get to the raw you. His photos had a purity and a street poetry to them. They were lovely
and true, but they weren’t slick. Frank looked for your true grit and he naturally intuited the conflicts I was struggling to come to terms with. His pictures captured the people I was writing about in my songs and showed me the part of me that was still one of them. We had other cover options but they didn’t have the hungriness of Frank’s pictures.

When
Darkness
was released it was not an instant
success and few made it out for the fan favorite it would become. Gun-shy to the max from my
Born to Run
experience, I actually started out insisting there be
no
advertising for my new record at all. Jon explained, “No one will know the record exists,” and said we needed to at least have the cover photo, album title and release date advertised in the papers. Well, okay. I caught on quick. I wasn’t
ready to disappear. I’d just recently vanished for three years, had felt barely visible most of my life, and if I could help it, I wasn’t going back. Without some promotion, folks wouldn’t have a clue as to what the fuck we’d been doing. This music held everything I had, so pronto I started to glad-hand
and make nice with every deejay from the East to the West Coast in hopes of getting what was
proving to be a tough record for my fans on the radio. Then we played our ace.

Touring

With the burden of proving I wasn’t a has-been at twenty-eight, I headed out on the road performing long, sweat-drenched rock shows featuring the new album. These were the first shows where the night was split by a brief intermission into two halves. It allowed us to play the favorites we knew our fans wanted
to hear and the new music we were haughty enough to believe they needed to hear. We did a variety of radio broadcasts from clubs in Los Angeles, New Jersey, San Francisco and Atlanta. Anything to get heard. Show after show we drove hard, expanding our new songs to their limits until they hit home, until the audience recognized them as their own. Again, the live power, the strength, of the E Street
Band proved invaluable and night after night, we sent our listeners away, back to the recorded versions of this music, newly able to hear their beauty and restrained power.

The songs from
Darkness on the Edge of Town
remain at the core of our live performances today and are perhaps the purest distillation of what I wanted my rock ’n’ roll music to be about. We remained in North America for the
entire tour and finished in Cleveland on New Year’s Eve, where an exploding firecracker tossed by an inebriated “fan” opened up a small slash underneath my eye. A little blood’d been drawn, but we were back.

After years of reading “flash in the pan,” “Whatever happened to . . .” articles, I began to read reviews in city after city about how we delivered. No, you can’t tell people anything, you’ve
got to show ’em.

THIRTY-NINE

DOWNTIME

Off the road, life was a puzzle. Without that nightly hit of adrenaline the show provided, I was at loose ends, and whatever it was that was always eating at me rose up and came calling. In the studio and on tour, I was a one-man wrecking crew with a one-track mind. Out of the studio and off the road, I was . . . not. Eventually I had to come to grips with the fact that
at rest, I was not at ease, and to be at ease, I could not rest
. The show centered and calmed me but it could not solve my problems. I had no family, no home, no real life. It’s not news; a lot of performers will tell you the same thing. It’s a common malady, a profile of sorts, that floods my profession. We’re travelers, “runners,” not “stayers.” But each man or woman runs or stays in their own
way. I finally realized one of the reasons my records took so long to make was I had nothing else to do, nothing else I felt comfortable doing. Why not, as Sam Cooke sang, take “all night . . . all night . . . all night”? My recordings were a return to that three-block walk to school I’d try to stretch into an eternity each morning. “Get in the groove and let the good times roll, we gonna stay here
’til we soothe our soul.”

’Til we soothe our soul . . .
that could take a while.

Family was a terrifying and compelling thought for me in 1980. Since I’d been a young man, I was sure it was going to be a suitcase, guitar and tour bus ’til the night drew down. At some point every young musician thinks so. We beat the game; the rest was for “suckers” strapped into the straight life. Yet on
Darkness
I’d begun to write about that life. A part of me truly admired it and felt it was where real manhood lies. I just wasn’t any good at it. On my
Darkness
songs, I’d presented that life as a dark, oppressive and sustaining world, a world that took but also provided. “Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life.” That scared me. I only had my father’s experience to go by and no intimate knowledge
of men who were at ease with family life. I didn’t trust myself to bear the burden of, the responsibility for, other lives, for that all-encompassing love.

My experience with relationships and love to that point all told me I wasn’t built for it. I grew very uncomfortable, very fast, with domestic life. Worse, it uncovered a deep-seated anger in me I was ashamed of but also embraced. It was the
silent, dormant volcano of the old man’s nightly kitchen vigil, the stillness covering a red misting rage. All of this sat nicely on top of a sea of fear and depression so vast I hadn’t begun to contemplate it, much less consider what I should do about it. Easier to just roll.