E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (24 page)

Springsteen had boxed himself into a corner. Intransigent, ill-versed in the mechanics of litigation, he finally allowed those with more practical heads to cook up a deal which would satisfy both parties. While the terms were thrashed out at the end of May, Springsteen drove to Philadelphia to see Elvis Presley at The Spectrum. The last time he had seen Elvis play, it had been at Madison Square Garden in the company of Mike Appel,
a fellow believer. It had been June 1972, a couple of days after they signed to CBS, and Presley was still a magnetic performer with a command of the stage and a band he had made his own. Now, he was a shell of the former shell; a bulbous parody of that once-legendary performer. Springsteen couldn’t believe his eyes. Or his ears. Presley could barely hit (or hold) any note higher than middle C. Not surprisingly, he later blamed Presley’s long-term manager, Colonel Tom Parker, for the singer’s sad decline, claiming in 1981, “Elvis was destroyed by his manager…and damn it, I was almost destroyed by my manager. But fortunately I hit back in time.”

In fact, when he returned to New York on May 30 to sign the legally-binding agreement which would sever his professional relationship with Appel, it seemed like all the fight had gone out of him. He was as sad to see it end this way as his old mate. Appel recalls, “We were in a lawyer’s office. We were at this big conference table. He signed his and initialed every page and then I came in and signed mine. We weren’t even in the same room at the time. I had run into him in the lobby…Bruce said, ‘What’s the word?’ I said, ‘Not much.’…It was the end of it.”

Springsteen had gotten what he (thought he) wanted—a new producer, a new contract with CBS which bumped up his royalty rate (which would have happened anyway) and control of his publishing. Appel retained his financial share in the work to date. So what was the financial cost of freedom? Would it prove just another word for nothing left to lose? Well, Appel was to receive around $800,000 over the next five years, paid for by CBS, set against the advances Springsteen would receive directly. Meanwhile, his cut on all future sales of the first three albums was reduced from six to two percent, while retaining a 50% interest in the twenty-seven songs that Springsteen had recorded and released whilst he had served as his music publisher.

Springsteen had put himself in hock to CBS for the foreseeable. Not only was he again in the red but was likely, at his current work-rate, to stay that way for some time to come. The label had also succeeded in getting him to sign directly to them, making him the first major artist in history to go
from
licensing product
to
the slave contract that still passes for the average record deal; in which the artist pays all his own recording costs yet the label owns all copyrights in perpetuity. In fact, Appel remembers, “After the lawsuit I was in Mr. Chow’s in California…and I heard these lawyers talking about ‘The Springsteen Clause.’ [According to them,]
there would be no more production companies to assign the rights.” He at least understood the price someone had to pay:

Springsteen stated his own view back in March 1977, “I feel like you pay and you pay and you pay…[then] there’s the big payoff.” If Appel’s lawyer was claiming “complete victory,” so was Springsteen’s, who suggested “that the press observe who’s producing Bruce’s next LP; whether or not Laurel Canyon Music or Management has anything to do with it; and who now controls the entire catalogue of previous songs.” But then, as Appel informed Marc Elliot, “It didn’t seem to matter to anybody that the courts had always ruled completely in my favor, and that Bruce Springsteen lost in the Court of Appeals five-nothing. That never fazed anybody. To the general public, and the industry, I was always guilty.”

Finally, Springsteen and Landau could start work in earnest on those “seventeen clear-cut song ideas” he’d mentioned in a March interview, and any others that had come along in the interim. Surely this time it would be plain sailing, now that Mike Appel was no longer there to constantly remind him of what Duke Ellington always used to say, “I don’t need more time, I need a deadline.”

^*
This refrain was not, however, included in the earliest live performance of the song, August 3 1976, where Springsteen sings the line “It’s a loser” instead.

The studio Springsteen entered on June 1, 1977, less than forty-eight hours after the final resolution of his rift with his now former producer-manager, was new to him and his wrecking crew. Atlantic Studios had a history few could match, but this was not the place where Jerry Wexler and Tom Dowd had once weaved their magic. This was a new studio with a nice big recording space. Of the
Born To Run
graduates, just Appel was missing. Iovine, two years older and wiser, was back as recording engineer, and this time Jon Landau was sole producer, though Miami Steve’s duties still included co-sounding board. Bruce described this particular dynamic the following year: “I have an overall idea for the power and stuff that I want to get, and [Jon] has a particular idea for various techniques. Plus there’s Steve Van Zandt, my guitar player, and…he sorta stands on the raw side of things.”

That first night at Atlantic is the stuff of legends; Marshy legends. On page 207 of his bestselling pop-bio,
Born To Run (1979)
, Dave Marsh described how “the first evening was spent laying down demos of about twenty songs.” It’s an enticing description, but a cassette inlay card (reproduced in the 2010 boxed-set) lists ten songs, only eight of which were cut that night: “Our Love Will Last Forever,” “Breakaway,” “Don’t Look Back,” “Rendezvous,” “Outside Looking In,” “Something In The Night,”
“Because The Night” and “I Wanna Be With You”—still quite a result for a night’s work. But, as Marsh correctly points out, “laying down demos” was the order of the night. Landau described the session to Paul Nelson the following June, providing background to a
Rolling Stone
cover story, probably revealing more than he meant to about the process: “The very first thing we did was record all the songs we’d rehearsed in one night, in whatever state they were in. We were all having a great time, real sloppy. ‘Something In The Night’ just really caught fire and sounded great.”

In fact, that first take of “Something In The Night” would make it all the way to the released album, a year later. Nor was it the only song demoed that first night which “caught fire and sounded great.” “I Wanna Be With You” shoulda been a keeper as the band rose to the occasion riding waves of aggression and a lust for life with musical muscle to spare. Springsteen even allowed himself to poke fun at his song-persona in the lyric (a rare lapse), explaining how he lost his job and home because of her: “Now I lost my job at the Texaco station/ Instead of pumping gas I’d dream of you/ I got thrown out of my house, I got such a bad reputation/ ’Cause all I wanna do is be seen with you.” Sung with a grin, the whole song gave libidos a good name. But already he was self-conscious about what side of him should be represented on this record, after driving himself nuts these past few months obsessing about each and every tiny detail:

The omission of “I Wanna Be With You” from even the earliest rough sequences was a portent. The long layoff had changed his whole approach to recording, one he could explicate in 1996, but not in 1977: “My idea wasn’t to get the next ten songs and put out an album and get out on the road. I wrote with purpose in mind, so I edited very intensely the music I was writing. So when I felt there was a collection of songs that had a point of view,
that
was when I released a record.”

Van Zandt, for one, didn’t see this coming. As he says in the 2010 documentary on the making of
Darkness
, “Basically, the first good ten songs you write, you[‘re supposed to] put them out. Well, that process would end—forever.” The stockpiling of song upon song began on night one, and at no point did Landau intercede in the perfectionist’s progress, or explain the economics of what Springsteen was doing to him. His view was that an artist needed license, and he for one was going to give him enough rope:

How ironic then that Springsteen should spend much of his downtime that summer listening to a record which was recorded in just three weekends at a cost of £4,000, at what was effectively CBS’s London demo studio, and still had more raw anger and attack than what he was producing at Atlantic.
The Clash
would go on to become CBS-US’s best-selling import, after they spent eighteen months trying to decide whether they would be sowing the seeds of sedition if it got a domestic release.
*
As Springsteen recently revealed, “I always felt a great affinity for not just The Clash, but [all those bands]. When the punk rock movement started, though I was probably technically outside of it here in the States, I felt a deep connection.” And if The Clash had energy to spare, the Sex Pistols had the chops. They, too, made their impact felt across the pond:

How doubly ironic that when The Clash attempted to emulate that debut’s impact by recording a proper-sounding album—one their US label
would
release—with their own rock critic turned producer, they merely bored the USA rigid. At least they spent the eighteen months between that eponymous debut and
Give ’Em Enough Rope
issuing some of the best punk anthems ever, on a series of classic nonalbum 45s that established them as one of the great singles bands of the seventies.

Springsteen, on the other hand, seemed to have developed an aversion to having hits. And yet, he had written some of the decade’s best pop songs in the interim, recording the likes of “Rendezvous,” “Fire,” “Because The Night” and “Don’t Look Back”—all songs he ultimately gave away—at the first dozen Atlantic sessions. At the time Landau had an explanation for this, too: “He didn’t want to have one song that could be taken out of context, and interfere with what he wanted the album to represent…Bruce was very suspicious about success…/…If success was what it was like with
Born To Run
, Bruce didn’t want that.” Goddamn those career-defining anthems.

The first song from these sessions he gave away was “Fire,” which he claimed to have written for Elvis, before donating it to a singer on the periphery of the downtown CBGBs scene: “I sent [Elvis] a demo of it, but he died before it arrived. Then I decided to give the song to Robert Gordon because his voice is a little like Elvis’s. When I hear him, I kinda get the impression that Elvis is singing it.” Gordon loved it, and cajoled Springsteen into contributing guitar, even though he had the legendary Link Wray to call on. But Springsteen had to work a tad harder to get a second CBGBs refugee to record another of his cast-offs. In fact, it was only after he stopped trying to write a song “for her,” and just gave her one of those he had lying around, that Patti Smith deigned to deliver him the hit by proxy he refused to allow himself: