E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (38 page)

The very person who had once proclaimed, “I eat loneliness, man. I feed off it,” had again reached the place he would describe so convincingly in a 1984 introduction to “Racing In The Street,” “It’s hard to understand what brings people together and then what pulls ’em apart. You meet somebody, you think that they can take away all of your loneliness, when in the end nobody can take away the loneliness. You just hope that you can find somebody maybe that you can share it with.”

He still couldn’t decide how much of his essential self he was willing to share with another person. It wasn’t like he didn’t know by now he was a difficult person to live with, or that he “tend[ed] to be an isolationist by nature. And it’s not about money or where you live or how you live. It’s about psychology. My Dad was…the same way.” For Joyce, though, missing Karen Darvin’s phone number from her address book, it was increasingly hard to bear. Barely had he returned from the road when he made it clear in gesture and deed that he wanted to be alone. She left her ex-boyfriend with no secrets to conceal, and a new notebook to write them in:

He needed to find another route out. Even before he began writing the songs that would form the cornerstones of
Nebraska
(and, ultimately,
Born In The USA
), he started searching for a new outlet from his inner turmoil. For the
first time he decided to stop bottling up these neuroses, the self-same ones which had led him to quit a psychology course in college, and turn to a qualified therapist to help him address those “moments when it was very confusing. Because [although] I realized that I was a rich man…I felt like a poor man inside.” Having pursued his singular goal—to be rich, successful, famous and
good
—with unswerving dedication for a decade or more, he found there were still more questions than answers. His new-found success merely raised ever more questions about who he was, and wanted to be. Experiencing an existential crisis of the soul, he sought outside help:

It took a great deal of personal courage to admit, as he did first in therapy and then in a number of 1984 interviews, that “you’re just somebody who plays guitar, and you do that good…but the rest of the time, you’re scramblin’ around in the dark like everyone else.” This process of personal development would ultimately take his songwriting in a more self-aware—though not necessarily such an abidingly creative—direction. For now, he was feeling the birth pangs of a born-again songwriter who, perhaps for the first time, was “growin’ into the particular shoes I was wearing.” And the songs flowed.

He was writing (and demoing on cassette) like there was no tomorrow. Like, indeed, it was 1976–77 all over again. As he later revealed to Chet Flippo, “I just locked in, and it was real different for me. I stayed in my house, I just worked all the time…I realized that this was different from stuff I’d done before and I didn’t know what it was.” Once again, his way of reclaiming the night was staying up late, writing. According to Springsteen, “Mansion On The Hill,” which he “had the beginning of for some time,” was the first song finished. Nodding to another major influence in its title—and perhaps finding at least one line in the Hank Williams original which struck home,
“I know you’re alone with your pride…in that loveless mansion on the hill”—it was the first time he had written in such a nakedly autobiographical way since “Randolph Street,” a decade earlier. He yearned to experience those feelings in the here and now, still fearing the ghost of Johnny Bye-Bye:

To call “Mansion” the earliest song written for
Nebraska
, though, would be untrue. There were at least two songs he worked on now which were lyrical recastings of 1979
River
outtakes: “Baby I’m So Cold,” a reworking of “Loose Ends” which he now set to the “Follow That Dream” tune debuted the previous April, and “Open All Night,” originally “Living On The Edge of The World.” A snatch of the latter appears at the end of the April 1981 home demos. Though lyrically it is still “Living on the Edge of the World” (with a snippet of “This Hard Land” thrown in for good measure: “What happened to the seeds I’ve sown/ in this hard land?”), musically he has already made the switch to “Open All Night.” Inspired by a William Price Fox short-story, it updated the sentiments of “Drive All Night,” with “the hero brav[ing] snow sleet rain + the highway patrol for a kiss from his baby’s lips.”

However, as he knew all too well, there
were
no “baby’s lips” waiting for him back home. His response was to turn the jagged “Loose Ends”—written when Heiser was around—inward. A new verse now made the track sound right when reaching for those razor blades: “We both made promises we couldn’t keep/ Now last night, I found you crying in your sleep/ Baby, we used to walk on nights just like this/ And I would hold you in my arms, fill you with my kisses.” (By the time he was rehearsing the song for the
Electric Nebraska
, this pair of star-crossed lovers had also become “like strangers who know too much about each other.”)

Another song which directly addressed a failed relationship that fall was the claustrophobic “Fade To Black”—another component of spring ’82 E Street sessions. Demoed when the emotions were red-raw, he pared its lyrics to the
bone to provide his first film-treatment in song: “Sunday matinee in a one-dog town/ You’re two seats away, I move two seats down/ And the lights cut off, I walk out from my seat/ I walk you home, as the credits rise.” Skillfully using cinematic shorthand to advance the fateful narrative—“Wipe the tears from your eyes, the first kiss I stole/ I walk you home, the credits roll/ Fade to black”—the song fits its author’s description of the
Nebraska
material perfectly: “The…record had that cinematic quality, where you get in there and you get the feel of life…some of the grit and some of the beauty.”

However, “Fade To Black” was not destined to constitute part of
that
fabled demo tape. Nor was another of his Biblical mock-parables, “Love Is A Dangerous Thing,” which had a cast of characters including Eve, who “tempted Adam with an apple/ You know the story in the end,” and Delilah, who “took on Samson/ And left him slowly twisting in the wind.” Just no Jezebel.

Other songs demoed that fall—“Johnny 99,” “The Losin’ Kind” and the rock formation “Born In The USA”—perhaps suggested a more enticing direction. In each case, he had created convincing characters caught in a moral bind. On the first two occasions they acted without thinking, while on the last occasion the protagonist went from one existential wasteland (home) to another (Vietnam) and back. Each song he was writing served to address, even embrace, the darkness, but the narration became almost exclusively third-person as Springsteen attempted to separate himself from invidious feelings of impotence and self-loathing, applying them to far more dysfunctional individuals than any previous singer-narrator. Rather than indulging in the kind of lachrymose self-pity found in most modern country music, he revisited its hillbilly roots and the traditional story-songs that were its bedrock, adopting a persona that was a cross between Luke the Drifter—the name Hank Williams gave himself when he wanted to spin parables-in-song—and the stoic Sun-era Johnny Cash, ever caught somewhere between heaven and hellraisin’:

Like many who came before (and after), Springsteen’s introduction to the works of Woody Guthrie had opened up an Anglo-American musical backdrop he had been blithely unaware of (even if Dylan had been mining it to the core for twenty years). It was a tradition which suggested that what happened at the Sun studios was as much an end as a beginning; that something unearthly went down south which changed the parameters of song forever, ultimately taking some of the traditional mystery out of the process. (Hence, presumably, why Springsteen recently described driving “past Sun Studios. I just wanted to know it was there, that it was real. That all of that stuff
really happened
.”) By fall 1981 Springsteen was in fast rewind when it came to the influences he allowed to impact on his songwriting craft:

What he says he found in many pre-rock ’n’ roll reference points was a “sense of consequences” that “rock & roll didn’t pick up from country and rhythm & blues.” And it was to country he now leaned. As he put it in 2012, “Country’s fatalism attracted me. It was reflective. It was funny. It was soulful. But it was quite fatalistic. Tomorrow looked pretty dark…If rock and roll was a seven-day weekend, country was Saturday night hell-raising, followed by heavy ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down.’ Guilt, guilt, guilt, I fucked up. Oh, my God.” And one of the things he now set out “to do was provide that set of consequences”—though, in truth, most of the story-songs he was writing seemed more about
comeuppance
than consequence. The arbitrary nature of most punishments meted out on
Nebraska
reflected a worldview culled more from the works of Alan Vega rather than those devout sinners, Williams and Cash.

For Springsteen had not entirely surrendered his interest in modern music, or one of its more cutting edge cult-artists. He had only dug deeper since bonding with Vega at those Power Station sessions the previous year. And if few at the time would have considered Vega an obvious
brother-in-song, Springsteen was keen to acknowledge his influence in a 1984
Rolling Stone
interview: “I like the band Suicide…They had that two-piece synthesizer-voice thing. They had one of the most amazing songs I ever heard. It was about a guy that murders [his family]…That’s one of the most amazing records I think I ever heard.”

The song he was referring to was the psychotic centerpiece of Suicide’s eponymous debut, “Frankie Teardrop,” which if it hadn’t just reached the shops under its own steam, would have slotted right on
Darkness On The Edge of Town
: “Twenty year old Frankie, he’s married, he’s got a kid/ And he’s working in a factory/ He’s working from seven to five…just trying to survive.” Frankie, though, “can’t make it, ’cause things are just too hard,” and so he decides to kill himself, though not before he has “picked up a gun/ Pointed [it] at the six month old in the crib,” and then at his wife. But if Frankie is convinced he has escaped a world of existential terror, he awakes to find himself “lying in hell.” The “moralizing” coda is as unsparing as it gets: “We’re all Frankies/ lying in hell.”

A “Hollis Brown” for the post-punk world, “Frankie Teardrop”
literally
caused riots across Europe when Suicide were invited to support the likes of The Clash and Elvis Costello in 1977–78. It also provided Springsteen with a fictional role model for
Nebraska
’s most impenitent mass murderer, Charlie Starkweather; to go with the nonfictional role models of Starkweather himself, and the Gary Gilmore whom Norman Mailer had just epically depicted in his “nonfiction novel,”
Executioner’s Song
. Because, as Springsteen openly admitted in 1987, “In the end, I was probably using Charlie Starkweather to write about myself.” (Intriguingly, he once suggested in a 1975 interview that if he hadn’t become a rock singer, he’d “probably [have] done something crazy. Maybe robbed stores or something. That always appealed to me, robbing things.”) Like the Dylan who saw something of himself in Lee Harvey Oswald, and nearly got metaphorically lynched at an Emergency Civil Liberties Committee dinner for saying so, Springsteen had come to feel just like Frankie and Charlie: