E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (30 page)

As singular a breakthrough as “Frankie,” “Point Blank” became a staple of the 1978 shows almost from the minute he debuted it at that all-important Roxy show, addressing what appeared to be new subject matter: an ex-girlfriend’s descent into drug addiction on finding the world an unforgiving place. Each live version from July to December included a variant on the verse he sang at the Roxy that first time: “You hear their voices at night as you lock the door/ There’ll be no sleep tonight for baby, she don’t believe them lies anymore/ And she stumbles into the morning tryin’ for her usual fix/ But, baby, them old distractions, they just ain’t got the kicks no more.” The image of being shot point blank by a needle, not a gun, was a rare reflection on the dangers of drugs, addressed to a former girlfriend who went down that poisonous path.

But the song was primarily concerned with the need to escape a world in which “no-one survives untouched,” especially those people with “hearts full of anger, eyes filled with hate,” and was as such a natural development from “Factory” and “Badlands.” Hence, the various introductions he gave the song at 1978 shows, which varied from the purely cryptic, “You wake up one morning and you’re left staring…point blank”
*
to the familial, “This song is for my father. Forty-five years and you wake up to find out you’ve been shot in the back every day, point blank.”
^†

Other former (or fanciful) lovers were also on his mind that Roxy night. A frantic “For You,” in its first E Street guise, finally gave the music the same menace as the lyrics, being placed between the definitive “Candy’s Room” and “Point Blank.” His current girlfriend, though, was back east, which would prove to be a mistake on the photographer’s part:

The fish lady’s name was Joyce Heiser, and she certainly fit the Bruce bill. A model/actress with wholesome good looks and a willingness to subsume her identity if necessary, she turned up at the Sunset Motel that week often enough for Springsteen’s new publicist to nudge Jimmy Iovine, there to record the Roxy, and say, “She’s just the girl for you.” He astutely replied, “How much d’ya wanna bet she leaves with Bruce?” Heiser, though, was not the only one subsuming her identity for the greater good. Just shy of thirty, Springsteen was still living for the time he spent onstage. For him, every minute offstage was dead time.

Not only was he inspired every night, but he was hoping to inspire every night. As he told Robert Hilburn ahead of the Forum show, “The greatest thing is going out backstage after the show and seeing some kid there…whose face is all lit up. It’s like you’ve done something on stage to get things stirred up inside his head. That’s the whole idea—get excited…do something.” If
he
had crawled out of Jersey, then others could, too. It was a mantra Patti Smith had adhered to long before she climbed aboard
Horses
; and it made Springsteen an unlikely compadre of punk evangelists on both sides of the pond. In fact, when premier punk journo Tony Parsons caught a show at the New York Palladium in September—and was given the usual “let’s just chat” spiel, designed to ensure such backstage interviews never probed the depths—his
NME
cover-story almost single-handedly gave the boardwalk prophet honorary-punk status.

Not that Bruce was about to brave the British boards. He resolutely stuck to the domestic market for the duration. But if he was unwilling to go toe-to-toe with the dynamic bands of the UK new wave, the best would come to him. Throughout the year, Elvis Costello & The Attractions—who packed almost as much energy into their one-hour set as Springsteen and his cohorts managed across their two-and-a-half-hour marathons—
made regular sorties to the States, building an audience with pell-mell product and dynamite performances. If Costello, in his bug-eyed misanthropic guise, felt obliged to denigrate Springsteen in print (a fact Springsteen gently reminded him of when they recorded a fascinating two-part
Spectacle
in September 2009), he also nagged his CBS rep, Dick Wingate, to let him check out the competition at a rare college gig. That November Princeton show rocked even this jaundiced, ex-Hammersmith ’75 attendee’s world.

By this point, the shows had begun to nudge the three-hour mark, with twenty-five-song sets the nightly norm. As Springsteen sought to explain, “We originally started off with a two-hour set. But when the tour got underway, we found it impossible to keep it down to that.” This was in part because he quickly realized he needed to rebalance the set to accommodate more early seventies material. The early shows, where “Spirit In The Night,” “For You” and “Rosalita” were token Sancious-era admissions, made too few concessions to fans who had been there from the first. By the time he hit the loyal east coast in August he had begun to slip in the odd “Incident On 57th Street,” an occasional “Kitty’s Back,” and even a blue-moon moment like “Lost In The Flood,” sung solo at the piano in Detroit (and fully the equal of former “For You”s). He also introduced, initially just for Texan fans with long memories, a new arrangement of “The Fever”—only to find it got a response which reminded him his own judgments of a song’s merits were hardly infallible. The song intros also began to take on a life of their own, like when he sent up nuns and psychiatrists in a rap that preceded “Growin’ Up:”

“Growin’ Up” also received its own mid-song rap, which only amped up the blasphemy with him and Clarence driving out to the swamplands of Jersey for a conversation with God, whose message was “just three words, LET IT ROCK!” Meanwhile, “Backstreets” ventured into the slipstream of
Too Late To Stop Now
again, with its repeated references to the little girl with lonely sad eyes, who cried all night long. Finally he had to break the news to her, “You’ve been laughing and lying and now you’re back…Well, little girl, I’ve been out too, and I’ve seen some things and I know all about
you
. We gotta stop…if we could only stop…it’d be all right, if we could only stop…if we could only stop…if we could only stop…if we could only stop…stop, stop, stop, STOP.”

If he wisely refrained from referencing The Man directly onstage, he still found an occasional berth for early Stones (“The Last Time,” “Mona”) or The Animals (“It’s My Life” in Pittsburgh and Passaic, for the steeltown boys and Jersey girls). But mainly he preferred to remind these all-American audiences of those communal indigenous rock ’n’ roll roots. One innovation heralded at the Roxy was retained—opening most shows with a fifties rock ’n’ roll cover. “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” “Oh Boy,” “High School Confidential,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Ready Teddy,” even “Summertime Blues” received outings. Asked about this, he insisted, “I love that early rock & roll. That’s what I listen to while I go to sleep: Elvis, Buddy Holly.” But he was also broadening his cultural horizons. Tuning into country stations throughout his American odyssey, he discovered that there was more to the musical landscape than rock ’n’ roll. Slowly but surely, a whole wide world of music—and, indeed, literature and film—was opening up to him:

That August, talking to the trustworthy Ed Sciaky, he admitted, “What I’ve been listening to a lot now is Hank Williams.” What he found there would lead to his next stage of development as a songwriter. As he told Kevin Avery, three decades on, “I liked the toughness of country music and I liked the fact that there was so much of it that was about compromising…I was interested in getting that idea into my music.” But this was an epiphany he had to work at—he needed something that would take him further than just the dark end of the street:

Initially, he needed to resolve how to incorporate Hank Williams’ sensibility in the current shows. He tried the direct approach just once, a guitar/piano arrangement of “(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle,” sandwiched between “The Promised Land” and “Prove It All Night” at a show in Pittsburgh at the end of August, gamely assisted by Bittan, the most versatile band member. (In the past couple of years rather than twiddle his thumbs between E Street engagements, Bittan had contributed his musical skills to albums as important as Peter Gabriel’s solo debut and Bowie’s
Station To Station
, and as shamelessly Springsteenesque as
Bat Out Of Hell
.)

In that moment Springsteen probably knew neither his band nor the bemused audience were quite ready to embrace both kinds of music, country
and
western. But there were still the soundchecks, which could be as epic as the shows themselves, especially if Springsteen was uncertain about an arena’s acoustics, or there was some pressing reason he needed the sound to be just right. Such was the case the second night at the Passaic Capitol Theater in September. Springsteen knew they were taping the next two nights for a possible “home turf” live album, after a three-night warm-up stint at the equally intimate New York Palladium. He seemed to be gradually reintroducing some older songs into the set for just such an
occasion—hence the likes of “Incident on 57th Street,” “Kitty’s Back,” “The Fever,” “It’s My Life” and “Meeting Across The River,” all passionately recreated at these last two Passaic shows. Yet he spent much of the soundcheck on the 20th running down Hank Williams songs and Sun-era Johnny Cash covers, every one of which petered out, perhaps because the band refused to join in the fun.

They may have still been wondering when Bruce was gonna get back to the brand-new song they had run through at the start of the soundcheck. His first in months, it went by the name of “The Ties That Bind,” and it was a keeper. But if he
had
performed it at one of these shows, it would have baffled many a fan when a song of the same name appeared on record two years later. Because this was a very different song, and a magnificent one at that, with a great pop hook set to a strong, if undeveloped lyrical idea—“No-one at my side/ There’s just a cold dark highway and a thin white line/ [Which] will lead me to the ties that bind”—and the whole thing wrapped up by a guitar coda worthy of “Prove It All Night.” Though already ready to record, it would be stripped bare and rebuilt by November 1, its live debut.

What he wanted was the kinda song which would slot into the record he had already talked to Dave Marsh about: “I got an album’s worth of pop songs like ‘Rendezvous’ and early English-style stuff. I got an album’s worth right now…I wanna do an album that’s got ten or eleven things like that on it.” Hence, presumably, the reintroduction of “Rendezvous”—another Atlantic reject—to end-of-year sets, and the version of “The Ties That Bind” he introduced in November, which made an affirmative pop song out of its Passaic prototype. Two frat-rockers, “Sherry Darling” and “Ramrod,” also suggested he had in mind a more fun-filled successor; as did a lengthy intro the night he introduced “Sherry Darling” for the first time, in Charleston, Virginia: