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

E STREET SHUFFLE

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E STREET SHUFFLE

The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen
& the E Street Band

CLINTON HEYLIN

VIKING

For Erik, keeper of the faith

last of the true believers.

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

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:

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”:

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.