E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (37 page)

He had come dangerously close at various points the previous fall. Thankfully, he now remembered one element of those groundbreaking seventies shows he paid mere lip service to these days—doing great covers. They once provided both a point of reference and a way for Springsteen
to embrace elements of popular songs he loved, but could not emulate in his own songs no matter how hard he tried. They remained all-important reminders of what got him started and kept him going through the long years of obscurity, an explication of the whole E Street Band aesthetic. As he told Michael Watts before the London shows, “Some people say rock & roll is fun, others say it’s trite; to me, it’s everything. I hear [The Drifters’] ‘When My Little Girl Is Smiling’ and, wow, that’s something to live by…Those moments are real.” He didn’t attempt that one, but Arthur Conley’s “Sweet Soul Music” sometimes sufficed.

Starting on opening night in Hamburg—where every sixties Britbeat band once went to be blooded—Springsteen trimmed his own sails, giving half the songs from
The River
a rest; preferring to doff his cap to past travelers on this lost highway. In part, he felt unsure whether he was fully connecting with non-English speaking audiences. As he told a Belgian reporter later that month, “At the beginning of this tour…they really were staring at us as if we were Pink Floyd, and then I decided to force a breakthrough by doing a number of rockers, six or seven of them right after one another, at maximum volume and without any comment in between the numbers. This had a result, but it was kinda creepy, because when I later started doing some slower numbers, they screamed for more rockers.”

When it got to encore time in Hamburg, he decided against ending with “Devil In The Blue Dress,” driving straight into a Creedence Clearwater moment instead. Elements of the German audience may have thought “Rockin’ All Over The World” was a Status Quo song, but it was a rousing finale to a show that had previously become overlong and needed pruning. A return to theaters in a number of cities (the arena-less north of Britain got five theater shows: two each in Edinburgh and Manchester and one in Newcastle) signaled a general return to
Darkness
-length sets (25–30 songs) with a healthy smattering of covers, a handful of which became showstoppers.

If “Follow That Dream” was a great way to kick off proceedings, so was another Creedence cover, the positively spooky “Run Through The Jungle,” which he introduced in Rotterdam on April 29 and retained for the duration. “Can’t Help Falling In Love” also continued to gain sporadic favor, as did “Jole Blon,” the closest Springsteen came to promoting the E Street Band’s other 1980 vinyl offering, Gary US Bonds’
Dedication
(coproduced by Bruce and Stevie). But it was the stunning reinvention of Jimmy Cliff’s “Trapped,” dropped into the set from nowhere at the opening Wembley show (his first London gig since Hammersmith ’75), that really captured audiences’ imaginations. A song he found on cassette at an airport duty-free shop, it had evidently struck a chord, because the last time he had sung a cover with this much emotional undertow, he was singing “I Want You” to Suki Lahav.

One can’t help wondering what girlfriend Joyce Heiser, who accompanied Bruce throughout the European jaunt, made of this paean to a suffocating relationship—“Well, it seems like I’ve been playin’ the game way too long/ And it seems the game I played has made you strong/ Well, when the game is over, I will walk out of here again/ I know someday I will find the key”—especially as that last line was Bruce’s own lyrical addition. Fans didn’t care. They felt like they had got the old Bruce back again.

Perhaps, though, it was this “old Bruce,” and his outmoded view of rock as a force for good, which had got him caught in a trap. After a show in Brighton, in conversation with Nick Kent, the one rock critic Carr had worked so hard to keep away from him, Springsteen talked for the first time about how “rock has abused that ability to give that sense of
something better
to kids. A lotta kids in America and, I guess, here use a certain style of rock to just shut off. Completely! They just want to
forget
, to numb themselves from their existence. And that just horrifies me.” Could it be that Kent’s coworker, Julie Burchill, had been right all along; and his natural constituency really was country music’s
cognoscenti
? Landau shared Springsteen’s concerns, telling Kent, “Great rock not only defines what is, but suggests what
might be
. And it’s [that] sense…we’re in danger of losing.” He just didn’t expect Kent—who by May 1981 had substance abuse issues which made Elvis little more than a drugstore wannabe—to remember the conversation in the morning. Bruce, though, had only just begun having this little conversation with himself:

He saw no future in the rock dream at precisely the point when, for many, he fulfilled the “future of rock ’n’ roll” epithet, having proven definitively that London—and indeed the whole of Europe—was finally ready for him. If he benefited from fans and (most) critics having no point of comparison with former glories, even critical comparisons with Dylan’s own European arena tour barely three weeks later—to promote an album coproduced by Chuck Plotkin (at Debbie Gold’s recommendation)—were invariably cast in Bruce’s favor. In fact, the shows of born-again Bob were equally stamina-sapping, he had never been more committed to performing and his band was perhaps his most musical since The Band. Bruce’s live reputation, though, had achieved (un)critical mass and he could do no wrong.

Landau knew he was onto a good thing, hurriedly booking his all-American boy to do thirty-two summer shows at some of the largest arenas in America, starting with a week of shows which opened the doors on the 20,000–seater Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey. The six shows sold out in an instant, even before Springsteen decided to record the last four shows for that still-pending live album (he already had tapes of the last three London shows). By now, though, the sets were essentially set in stone. A “Jackson Cage” for a “Point Blank,” an “I Wanna Marry You” for an “Independence Day” were almost the extent of any variants. This was very much a victory procession, or as Landau chose to spin it, “The concept was to go back to cities that had been very special in Bruce’s career. Basically, come in and stay for a while and play a little bit in depth.” In the process they made more money in two months than on the whole
Darkness
marathon. It was almost as if, this time, Springsteen knew he needed to hoard a few nuggets for the coming hibernation.

So it might seem on the face of it a rather strange time to develop a political conscience. But develop one Springsteen now did. He later suggested it was his trip to Europe that first opened his eyes: “When you spend a good amount of time over [in Europe], you do have a moment to step out of the United States and look back with a critical eye…It’s very difficult to conjure up a real worldview from within our borders.” In fact, the first flowering of a wider awareness had come earlier. His introduction to “Badlands”
at Tempe the previous November—“I don’t know what you guys think about what happened last night, but I think it’s pretty frightening”—represented his first-ever political pronouncement onstage. I guess this was one vote Ronald Reagan didn’t get the night he took the presidency.

By the following February, Bruce was informing
Rolling Stone
, “The cynicism of the last ten years is what people adopted as a necessary defense against having tire tracks up and down their front and back every day.” No longer an innocent abroad, he was canvassing against arch-cynicism and advocating responsibility. As he subsequently said, “If you’re a citizen, and if you’re living here, then it’s your turn to take out the garbage.” On August 20, 1981 he signaled this new social awareness (and replacement belief-system) by donating all the proceeds from opening night at the unforgiving LA Sports Arena to the Vietnam Veterans Association, and prefacing his performance of “Who’ll Stop The Rain” that night with his first pre-scripted political speech:

If a movie of a book had inspired the noirish
Darkness
, it was the book of someone’s life which sparked this new concern. How ironic that the most famous New Dylan should alight on a biography of Woody Guthrie, seen through the prose of Joe Klein, as a way to reinvent himself. (There was a time, twenty years earlier, when Dylan was the New Guthrie.) In fact, Springsteen had been playing “This Land Is Your Land” since the first night at Nassau (12/28/80), as if he already knew he wanted it on any resultant live album. Reading Klein, he had discovered this was a song which had been misrepresented since the day it was conceived, and he decided to reclaim it. Hence introductions like, “This song was written a real long time ago…[It] was written to fight all the prejudice and all the hatred that gets passed on as patriotism or as nationalism.”

He finally sought to connect himself to that “long tradition of artist involvement in the nation’s social and political life. Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield…When they spoke, I heard myself speaking. I felt [that] connectedness.” And yet, he had admitted back in 1974 that he had never really listened to the protest songs of Dylan, only the electric Rimbaud. When the battle was outside a-ragin’, he’d been back home reading
Rolling Stone
. Now a galvanized Springsteen was enthusing about how “Guthrie and Dylan had the courage to comment on all that happened in America in the fifties and sixties…It’s time that someone took on the reality of the eighties.” He may not have discovered a new religion, but he
had
found a soapbox.

With the tour over by mid-September, and the band taking a well-earned rest, he returned to his New Jersey home determined to write a “This Land Is Your Land” he could call his own, one that would deal with “the reality of the Eighties” by addressing a war from the sixties. Again, he initially looked for that story in picture form: “I remember going to see
The Deer Hunter
with [the Viet-vet] Ron Kovic…he was looking for things that reflected his experience. The song came out of all that.” The song he was talking about was “Born In The USA.” But that was not the song which came out first. Rather, he began something called “Vietnam Blues” on his return east.

A “stranger in his own home town” saga, “Vietnam Blues” was neither “Born In The USA” nor “Shut Out The Light,” though elements of both appeared therein, notably the prototype for the latter’s first verse: “The runway rushed up at me, I felt the wheels touch down/ Stood out on the blacktop, and took a taxi into town/ Got off down on Main Street, to see what I recognized/ All I seen was strange faces watching a stranger passin’ by.” But “Vietnam Blues” was some way from either offspring, and its refrain lacked universal resonance—“You died in Vietnam, now don’t you understand.” No, he needed something with a more Guthriesque quality. Something which suggested, whatever he’d been told previously, that this land was made for him and them.

^*
David Gahr was still taking shots for an album cover on October 16, suggesting a release was still on the cards.

^*
The line partially dates the recording by referencing the bombing of Philip Testa on March 15, 1981, a hit man for the mob known universally as “The Chicken Man.”

As Ralph and Carter Stanley harmonically pointed out, the darkest hour is just before the dawn. Well, throughout the fall of 1981 Springsteen spent all his time penning song after song with that four a.m. feeling, and when he wasn’t doing this he was listening to Hank Williams, Robert Johnson and Suicide. (Thankfully, he excluded any British antidote to melancholy, as one spin of Richard Thompson’s “I’ll Regret It All In The Morning” might just have tipped him over the edge.) He was shutting others out, repeating well-worn patterns of interpersonal behavior again—in a partly-conscious attempt to drive another long-time girlfriend away: