E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (32 page)

Though not quite as portentous as Dylan’s fabled crash fourteen years earlier, Springsteen’s motorcycle accident seems to have led him to rethink his whole approach to the forthcoming sessions. And it applied the brakes after a highly promising start to proceedings. When rehearsals resumed in May, he was making Album #4 again, starting with two songs included on scribbled lists for that album but never realized: “Bring On The Night” and the still alive ’n’ kicking “Janey Needs A Shooter.”

The former made it to Power Station, the latter did not. And yet the May 1979 rehearsal take of “Janey”—bootlegged on the famous
Son You May Kiss The Bride
LP—remains one of the great unreleased performances of the E Street era. A seven-minute assault on the senses, Springsteen just gets more and more wound up as he ticks off the rivals to Janey’s affections; doctor, priest and cop. The cop is no longer a Peeping Tom, but he still uses his badge to try and put the fear of God in the pair of lovers as he “checks on her every night…outside her house his siren roars/ when he knows that I’m inside.” This time, though, the narrator-lover spits the lyrics back with a venom the singer would have been well advised to bottle for the sessions to come. He did not. In fact, before he had even got back to work, he had donated this song to another willful singer-songwriter, Warren Zevon:

Having allowed Zevon to mangle something that fully matched “Roulette” in intensity, Bruce resumed work at the Station on May 22, concentrating not on any of the songs band-rehearsed that week, but rather ones from dusty old notebooks, the best of which—like “Janey Needs A Shooter”—he ended up rewriting till they changed from black to blue. By May 29 1979, “Point Blank” had undergone wholesale lyrical revisions that provided a clearer narrative of loss and regret, but at the expense of its former, noirish realism: “I dreamed I saw you standing on the porch off the house where you grew up…You were staring out on the highway like you were waiting for someone…And I’ll never forget the way you looked when I walked away/ You just stood there waiting, waiting to get blown away.” A rethink was in order if the in-concert classic wasn’t to suffer the same fate as “The Promise.”

Between May 22 and June 13, Springsteen devoted large chunks of time at Power Station to “Sherry Darling,” “Independence Day,” “I Wanna Be With You,” “Ramrod” and “Bring On The Night,” all songs he’d turned his back on in the summer of 1977. Just two new songs vied with these nostalgic nods to the album
Darkness
could have been. And, although “Jackson Cage” and “Be True” would both be released in
The River
era, these original versions were as distinct from their distant
River
cousins as the 1978 prototypes for “Ties That Bind” and “Point Blank.” This time songs were getting away from him. The honing process could no longer be relied on to stumble toward some archetypal expression. Sometimes, it just ripped out a song’s guts.

“Jackson Cage” was actually the first track recorded on May 22. Originally a song of self-recrimination that demanded change from within, it was some way from the “trapped by circumstance” lyric it became: “You take the chances that you’ve got to take/ You drive hard and you stay awake/ You…get used to being bought and sold…You learn to cool your temper and collect your rage/ To use it well, down in Jackson Cage.”

“Mary Lou,” a song that would become a centerpiece of
The Ties That Bind
in its “Be True” guise, was an attempt to write both a “really catchy three-minute pop tune,” and something “that moved lyrically, that linked together in a certain way.” To Springsteen’s mind, “this fellow…is trying to say, ‘Hey, don’t sell yourself cheap.’ It’s saying, be true to yourself in some fashion. He’s talking to a woman he’s interested in, but actually that’s a device to address, just how do you find yourself through the falseness of some of those things.” It was a theme he would drive into the ground at these sessions. “Mary Lou” herself would enjoy three distinct incarnations: “Mary Lou,” “Little White Lies” and, finally, “Be True.” Of these, the still-unreleased “Little White Lies” is closest to that “English-style stuff,” its shameless “Paint It Black” intro and another dynamic performance from Weinberg driving his boss to the brink of self-actualization.

Slowly, and surprisingly unsurely, Bruce was clearing the decks before unleashing the wave of songs which would send a strong current through the still-projected single LP as well as its more overblown successor,
The River
. It was June 13 before he finally got the backward-looking album he had been working on for the past two months out of his system. That was the day he ran through “White Town,” “The Man Who Got Away,” “Night Fire” and “Bring On The Night,” songs he had expended a great deal of (cassette) tape demoing that winter.

Through the rest of 1979, he never looked back. The following day he cut “Hungry Heart;” the day after that, “The Price You Pay;” and when that was done to his satisfaction, he introduced “Stolen Car.” The album, after two months spent largely down cul-de-sacs, was back on main street. He would later claim these “wasted” sessions were all a necessary part of the process: “It was in struggling to reconcile my previous and present recording approaches that the album found its identity.” But still he clung to the idea of a pop album, albeit one which took as a key point of reference an early seventies Cleveland combo of marginal repute:

“Hungry Heart” was one track whose pop sensibility was set in opposition to the lyrics, with the twin motifs that informed all the key songs recorded that summer—the dead-end relationship (“We took what we had and we ripped it apart”) and the river of life leading straight down to death (“Like a river that don’t know where it’s flowing,” a direct reference to The Byrds’ death-ridden “Ballad of Easy Rider”). The river motif cropped up again on “The Price You Pay,” where he tells a young single mother of how he “could not enter the chosen land/ On the banks of the river he stayed, to face the price you pay.” If he stayed on the banks this time, he went down to the river on “Stolen Car,” the darkest song of his career to date and one which would ultimately lead on to its sister-song, “The River:”

“Stolen Car” was another of those songs, like “Hungry Heart,” that he wrote “in a half hour, or ten minutes, real fast.” In fact, it may have begun as a continuation of that song, initially adopting the self-same phrase to explain why things fell to bits: “We got married and promised never to part/ Then I fell a victim to a hungry heart.” But this time he took it all
to
heart. In its original guise, “Stolen Car” was a “ghost story” told by a spirit in the night, as a spoken intro at the New York December 18 1980 show made abundantly clear, “Some people make that connection and some people don’t, you know…and when you don’t, it’s like you end up like a ghost, it’s like…nobody sees you or nobody can feel you. [So] this is a ghost story, this song.”

He even describes the revenant’s end: “There’s a river that runs by that little town down into the sea/ It was there in the shade I laid my body down, as she flowed by so effortlessly.” In other words he surrenders to the river, much like the boy in the Flannery O’Connor short story of the
same name—which Springsteen had evidently already read, though it would be some years before she got namechecked: “He intended…to Baptize himself and to keep on going this time until he found the Kingdom of Christ in the river. He didn’t mean to waste any more time. He put his head under the water at once and pushed forward…He plunged under once [more] and this time, the waiting current caught him like a long gentle hand and pulled him swiftly forward and down…All his fury and his fear left him.”

The ghost in
this
stolen car is a close cousin of the spirit Robert Johnson invoked at the end of “Me and the Devil Blues”: “You may bury my body down by the highway side/ So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.” It also consciously evoked the classic “I dreamed a dream” motif of many an Anglo-American ballad for its haunting coda:

He knew he had pulled off something special; and wisely took time out to reevaluate the album’s direction. In the next three weeks there would be just two sessions and one finished song (the uncirculated “Time That Never Was”). But when work resumed in earnest on July 11, with a retake of the newly-composed “I Wanna Marry You,” he had decided his new collection would be a relationship record. And “I Wanna Marry You,” one of his least convincing songs, was to provide a necessary counterbalance to the again-encroaching darkness. Indeed, for a period in 1979 Springsteen seemed very much in love with the
idea
of marriage, while continuing to shy away from the reality (as Joyce was learning), something he admitted only after he found, late in life, a marriage that worked:

Everywhere he looked, friends and family were settling down and he wondered what he was missing out on. As he told a Boston audience, there was one particular speech at his lighting man Mark Brickman’s wedding that really got to him: “The rabbi got up and he started to talk about how [as] long as you’re alone, that your dreams, they just remain dreams. It ain’t until you reach out…[and] you take a chance with somebody…that [you take] the first step to making all the things that you’re dreaming about a reality.” “I Wanna Marry You” idealized that very idea: “A time comes when two people should think of these things/ Having a home and a family/ Facing up to their responsibilities.” But the feeling didn’t last and he was soon back at the river’s edge:

The songs he completed in the immediate aftermath of “I Wanna Marry You” rather suggested this was a hunger which slowly ate away at one. In “Cindy,” Springsteen once again portrayed himself as the fool for love, out of his depth, drowning in desire: “In this world there ain’t another like you/ My little candy girl, so hard-hearted and cruel.” At the very same time, the equally terrific “Loose Ends” laid bare the dreams of some little candy girl on the shore longing to settle down, leaving the narrator literally at the end of his tether: “It’s like we had a noose, and baby without check/ We pulled until it grew tighter around our necks.” He was writing the kinda pop songs that came from the edge of oblivion. And when “Mary Lou” became “Be True,” he had all but completed the set. Yet it was August 26 before he completed the song needed to round everything out, and it was one inspired by Hank Williams’s deliciously mordant “Long Gone Lonesome Blues”: