Manhattan. February 14, 1984. Valentine’s Day.
Bruce Springsteen is thirty-four years old and is sitting in his hotel room with seventy new songs.
Jon Landau, his manager and the one who declared Springsteen “the future of rock and roll” a decade earlier, asks: “So listen. What do you think the first single is? The first single being the launch of the project? The all important?”
“Now that’s about the last thing in the world that I want to hear. You know, I have no interest whatsoever in writing anymore. I said, ‘if you want another song, you write it,'” said Springsteen.
Landau leaves. Springsteen picks up his guitar. “In about 30 or 40 minutes I write ‘Dancing in the Dark,'” said Springsteen. “‘Dancing in the Dark’ was written under duress. All I could do is think about is to write another song about not wanting to write another song. So it’s really just a song about being tired, exhausted and finding your way around that.”
“Twenty seconds into it, I knew it was the song that we had been talking about,” recalled Landau on hearing the song.
“Dancing in the Dark” became his biggest single. Springsteen had spent a decade being compared to others, mainly Bob Dylan. By the summer of 1984, the only name anyone was using was his. The Boss.
A Kid From Freehold
Bruce Springsteen was not always “The Boss.”
In the 1950s, the Springsteen family struggled to make ends meet in Freehold, New Jersey. As Springsteen later recalled, “We were pretty near poor, though I never thought about it. We were clothed, fed and bedded.”
Bruce’s father, Douglas, quit school at sixteen to work at the Karagheusian Rug Mill in Freehold, what Springsteen would later describe as “a clanging factory of looms and deafening machinery that stretched across both sides of Center Street.” At eighteen he sailed to war on the Queen Mary out of New York City, serving as a truck driver at the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he came home and went to work on the line at the Ford Motor plant in Edison, and later drove trucks, buses, and taxis. His mother Adele worked as a legal secretary and provided most of the family’s income. During Bruce’s earliest years, the family lived with his grandparents, along with his younger sister Virginia.
“My mother was bright, happy, she’d merrily make conversation with a broom handle, she believed that there was good faith, good heart, good hope in all citizens. She gave the world a lot more credit perhaps than it deserves, but that was her way,” said Springsteen. “My mother was someone who pressed every day to make herself visible, to present herself, and to have impact upon even the limited world that she was a part of. And she took great pride in that. She was a very, very inspirational presence. A source of a lot of my own ideas about the way to go about approaching my job and the kind of combination of seriousness and joyfulness.”
“My father felt his invisibility very extremely, very intensely,” said Springsteen. “Work is such a big part of people’s lives. If you feel like things are sailing away from you and you’re left standing on the dock, I think you end up living in the shadow of a dream. I think that’s how my dad felt a lot of times.”
“I’d seen gods turn into devils at home. I’d witnessed what I felt was surely the possessive face of Satan. It was my poor old pop tearing up the house in an alcohol-fueled rage in the dead of night, scaring the shit out of all of us. I’d felt this darkness’s final force come visit in the shape of my struggling dad. Physical threat, emotional chaos and the power to not love,” recalled Springsteen. A man who would be diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.
“Our house was old and soon to be noticeably decrepit. One kerosene stove in the living room was all we had to heat the whole place. Upstairs, where my family slept, you woke on winter mornings with your breath visible. One of my earliest childhood memories is the smell of kerosene and my grandfather standing there filling the spout in the rear of the stove,” said Springsteen. “We had a small box refrigerator and one of the first televisions in town.”
On September 9, 1956, two weeks before his seventh birthday, Springsteen watched what he called “The Big Bang”: Elvis Presley’s debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. What he saw on that TV came from “ANOTHER WORLD… the one below your waist and above your heart… A world that had been previously and rigorously denied was being PROVEN TO EXIST!”
He was “transfixed” with his “mind on fire.”
“The next day I convinced my mom to take me to Diehl’s Music on South Street in Freehold. There, with no money to spend, we rented a guitar. I took it home. Opened its case. Smelled its wood, felt its magic, sensed its hidden power. I held it in my arms, ran my fingers over its strings, held the real tortoiseshell guitar pick in between my teeth, tasted it, took a few weeks of music lessons . . . and quit,” said Springsteen. “It was TOO FUCKIN’ HARD! Mike Diehl, guitarist and owner of Diehl’s Music, didn’t have any idea how to teach whatever Elvis was doing to a young shouter who wanted to sing the elementary school blues.”
In school, Springsteen never felt like he fit in. “I was invisible in school,” he recalled. “Wasn’t even the class clown. I had nowhere near that much notoriety.”
“On school mornings I hated getting up. My mom had perfected this technique where she’d stand over my bed with a glass of ice water and give me thirty seconds… ‘Five, four, three, two,’ boom! Niagara Falls. I would get dressed, drift downstairs to breakfast where I would feast daily on a huge bowl of sugar pops… with a buzz on, and a kiss from my mom, I was off, with my sister, lumbering up the street with our book bags, as my mom’s high heels clicked lightly in the other direction toward Lawyer’s Title Insurance Company,” recalled Springsteen.
In 1962, his younger sister Pamela was born. In 1964, at age fourteen, Springsteen was in the car with his mother when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” came through the radio. It was the year Beatlemania swept America.
“It was a very raucous sounding record when it came out of the radio. It really was the song that inspired me to play rock and roll music — to get a small band and start doing some small gigs around town. It was life-changing,” said Springsteen. “That was going to change my life because I was going to successfully pick the guitar up and learn how to play.”
The fire he felt with Elvis returned with the Beatles. Now all he needed was a guitar.
“My parents had no money for a second shot at the guitar, so there was just one thing to do: get a job. One summer afternoon my mom took me to my aunt Dora’s, where for fifty cents an hour I would become the ‘lawn boy.’ My uncle Warren came out and showed me the ropes. He demonstrated how the lawn mower worked, how to cut the hedges, and I was hired. I went immediately to the Western Auto store, an establishment in the town’s center specializing in automotive parts and cheap guitars. There amongst the carburetors, air filters and fan belts hung four acoustic guitars, ranging from the unplayable to the barely playable. They looked like nirvana to me and they were attainable. Well, one was attainable. I saw a price tag hanging off of one funky brown model that read ‘Eighteen dollars.’ Eighteen dollars?”
By mid-summer 1964, Springsteen earned enough money from lawn care and painting a neighbour’s house that he could finally afford his guitar.
“It was done. Me and my twenty dollars went straight downtown. The salesman pulled my ugly brown dream out of the window and snipped off the price tag, and it was mine. I skulked home with it, not wanting my neighbors to know of my vain and unrealistic ambitions. I hauled it up to my bedroom and closed the door like it was some sex tool (it was!). I sat down, held it in my lap and was utterly confused. I had no clue about how to begin,” said Springsteen. “I stood up, went to the mirror on the back of my bedroom door, slung the guitar across my hips and stood there.”
“The first day I can remember looking in a mirror and being able to stand what I was seeing was the day I had a guitar in my hand,” said Springsteen.
“Bob Dylan is the father of my country”
“For me, my education was those records. That was it. There’s more to life than what you see around. And that was something that they couldn’t teach me in school. You couldn’t learn it from people you were hanging with out on the street or anything,” said Springsteen.
Music gave Bruce Springsteen an identity. He described it as something that “provided me with a community, filled with people, and brothers and sisters who I didn’t know, but who I knew were out there. We had this enormous thing in common, this ‘thing’ that initially felt like a secret… a home where my spirit could wander… Music gave me something. I was running through a maze… It was a reason to live.”
“Five months later, I’d beaten my Western Auto special half to death. My fingers were strong and callused. My fingertips were as hard as an armadillo’s shell. I was ready to move up. I had to go electric. I explained to my mother that to get in a band, to make a buck, to get anywhere, I needed an electric guitar. Once again, that would cost money we didn’t have. Eighteen dollars wasn’t going to cut it this time,” said Springsteen. “If I’d sell the pool table, she’d try to come up with the balance for an electric guitar I’d spotted in the window of Caiazzo’s Music Store on Center Street. The price was sixty-nine dollars and it came complete with a small amplifier. It was the cheapest they had but it was a start.”
Springsteen sold his pool table for $35, and on Christmas Eve, he and his mother bought a Kent guitar. “It looked beautiful, wondrous and affordable. I had my thirty-five dollars and my mother had thirty-five dollars of finance-company money… Sixty-nine dollars would be the biggest expenditure of my life and my mother was going out on a limb for me one more time… In the living room I plugged in my new amp. Its tiny six-inch speaker ‘roared’ to life. It sounded awful, distorted beyond all recognition. The amp had one control, a volume knob. It was about the size of a large bread box but I was in the game,” said Springsteen.
In 1965, at age fifteen, Springsteen was in the car with his mother when Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” came through the radio.
“The first time that I heard Bob Dylan I was in the car with my mother… and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind from ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ I knew that I was listening to the toughest voice that I had ever heard. It was lean and it sounded somehow simultaneously young and adult, and I ran out and I bought the single,” said Springsteen. “Then I went out and I got Highway 61 and it was all I played for weeks. Looked at the cover with Bob with that satiny blue jacket and the Triumph motorcycle shirt. And when I was a kid, Bob’s voice somehow—it thrilled and scared me. It made me feel kind of irresponsibly innocent, and it still does. But it reached down and touched what little worldliness I think a 15-year-old kid in high school in New Jersey had in him at the time. Dylan, he was a revolutionary. The way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind. And he showed us that just because the music was innately physical did not mean that it was anti-intellect. He had the vision and the talent to expand the pop song until it could contain the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound. He broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve, and he changed the face of rock and roll forever.”
“Bob Dylan is the father of my country… He inspired me and gave me hope. He asked the questions everyone else was too frightened to ask, especially to a fifteen-year-old: ‘How does it feel… to be on your own?’ A seismic gap had opened up between generations and you suddenly felt orphaned, abandoned amid the flow of history, your compass spinning, internally homeless. Bob pointed true north and served as a beacon to assist you in making your way through the new wilderness America had become,” said Springsteen.
With six months of guitar playing under his belt, Springsteen auditioned for his first band.
“One summer afternoon I heard a knock on my front door and it was George Theiss, a school pal of mine who was coming to see my sister. But she had told him that I played the guitar, which I had for about six months, and he said he wanted me to come over and audition for his band. So that weekend I followed him to a part of town where the rug mill was and in a little shotgun shack they cleared out a tiny little dining room and there was some band equipment set up. And it was there in that little room… that I embarked on the greatest adventure of my life. And we named ourselves after a bottle of shampoo,” said Springsteen.
Springsteen joined Theiss and the Castiles, which consisted of Paul Popkin on guitar and vocals, Frank Marziotti on bass, and Bart Haynes on drums. Haynes later enlisted in the Marine Corps and was sent to Vietnam, where he was killed in action. Vinny Maniello replaced him on drums.
The band rehearsed at space given to them by Gordon “Tex” Vinyard and his wife Marion, who were friends of Theiss. The Vinyards took them under their wing. Tex eventually managed the band while Marion, whom Springsteen called the “house mother,” supplied meals, guitar strings, and whatever equipment the band needed.
The Castiles performed cover songs at junior high school dances, roller rinks, drive-in theatres, supermarket openings, and clubs throughout New Jersey and New York, decked out in white pants, Beatle boots, and Beatle haircuts.
On May 18, 1966, Tex helped arrange a studio session at Mr. Music Inc in Bricktown, New Jersey. Springsteen and Theiss co-wrote two original songs, “Baby I” and “That’s What You Get,” in the back of Vinyard’s 1961 Ford Mercury on the drive to the studio. The band had saved for months to afford the session. When they arrived, the studio could not handle the noise of a rock band. The speakers were turned to the walls and covered up. The guitar amp was dialled down to one. Springsteen broke an E string and had no spares. Seven or eight acetates were pressed from the session. “It was a big deal,” recalled Springsteen. “‘Cause it was the first time you heard yourself coming back on tape.”
By 1967, Springsteen had long hair and a Yamaha motorcycle. On his way home up South Street, he was T-boned on his motorcycle by a 1963 Cadillac. “The bike crunched and slid under the car’s front end. I went sailing twenty feet into the air, landing on the hard-ass blacktop on the corner of Institute and South Street. I was knocked out cold for thirty minutes,” recalled Springsteen. At the hospital in Neptune, the staff made jokes about the length of his hair. Doctors declined to give him follow-up treatment for his head injury. Back home, unable to move, his father had a barber come in. “That was the last straw. I screamed and swore at him. It was the only time I told my dad I hated — HATED — him,” recalled Springsteen.
“I couldn’t work with my band for the rest of the summer for fear the volume of the garage assault of the Castiles might create complications from my concussion,” he said.
Over three years and more than 115 performances, the Castiles developed Springsteen into a capable guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter, which he called “an incredibly long time for teenagers to stay in one place.” The band disbanded in late 1968. Springsteen briefly performed with Earth, a local band of college students.
On February 14, 1969, Lopez saw Springsteen perform with Earth at an Italian American Club in Long Branch, New Jersey. He already knew the name. “Bruce used to come see Sunny play,” recalled Lopez. He walked up to Springsteen after the set. “Hey Bruce, I’m Vinnie Lopez.” Springsteen looked at him. “Yeah, you used to play with Sunny, right?”
Lopez asked him one question. “Do you write any songs?”
Springsteen said he had written a couple. Lopez invited him to jam.
Nine days later, on February 23, Springsteen on guitar and vocals, Lopez on drums, Danny Federici on keyboards, and Vinnie Roslin on bass took the stage at the Upstage Club for the first time.
“As soon as we got on that jam,” recalled Lopez, “we went downstairs and made a band.”
They called themselves Child. Their base of operations was Challenger Eastern Surfboards, a brick building in an industrial park in Bradley Beach, run by a man named Carl “Tinker” West. Tinker had found Springsteen at the Upstage Club. “Springsteen,” he told him, “you got the goods and you don’t fuck around like all these other assholes.” He offered them a concrete room at the back of the factory to rehearse in. Springsteen and Lopez moved in. Lopez slept on a mattress in the bathroom, his head inches from the toilet. Springsteen slept in the same room as Tinker, their mattresses in opposite corners.
Springsteen did not drink. He did not use drugs. “I was afraid of myself, what I might do or what might happen to me,” he recalled. “Music was going to get me as high as I needed to go.”
On July 20, 1969, the night Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, Child played their first night at the Pandemonium Club. Half the crowd wanted to watch the landing. Half wanted the band to play. Springsteen, Lopez, and Federici voted to play. Vinnie Roslin put down his bass and walked off stage.
During this time, America was at war, and so was the Springsteen household.
“There wasn’t any kind of political consciousness down in Freehold in the late Sixties. It was a small town, and the war just seemed very distant. I mean, I was aware of it through some friends that went,” said Springsteen. “When I was nineteen, I wasn’t ready to be that generous with my life. I had tried to go to college, and I didn’t really fit in. I went to a real narrow-minded school where people gave me a lot of trouble and I was hounded off the campus — I just looked different and acted different, so I left school.”
“My father, he was in World War II, and he was the type that was always sayin’, ‘Wait till the army gets you. Man, they’re gonna get that hair off of you. I can’t wait. They gonna make a man outta you.’ We were really goin’ at each other in those days,” recalled Springsteen.
On August 19, 1969, Springsteen was called up for his military draft physical and boarded a bus to Newark. “When I got on the bus to go take my physical, I thought one thing: ‘I ain’t going,'” he recalled. The United States government classified him 4-F, making him ineligible for military service due to a brain concussion from his motorcycle accident. He went home and told his parents. His father sat there, did not look at him, looked straight ahead, and said: “That’s good.”
Child soon became Steel Mill, the name change forced by another band that had already registered it. During this period, Steel Mill became a fixture at the Upstage Club in Asbury Park, where Steven Van Zandt was also a regular performer. Van Zandt eventually joined Steel Mill.
Steel Mill built a following on the Jersey Shore, opening for Grand Funk Railroad, Chicago, Iron Butterfly, and Ike & Tina Turner at the Virginia War Memorial in Richmond. The band drew up to three thousand people in Virginia with no album to their name, becoming, as Springsteen put it, “authentic neighborhood superstars while remaining totally unknown outside of our given areas.”
Steel Mill had spent a year opening for national acts. Tinker had been telling them about San Francisco. They were, as Springsteen said, “cocky as hell.” Tinker set his terms: save a hundred dollars each, copyright the originals, and he would take them west. They held one final concert for seed money.
Seven people and a dog named J.T. Woofer left at dawn in the winter of 1969. Two vehicles: Tinker’s forties flatbed and Danny Federici’s sixties station wagon. No motels. No camping gear. Three days to reach California. They had a New Year’s Eve gig at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. None of them, with the exception of Tinker, had ever been out of New Jersey.
“We nailed down a Tuesday slot and, nerves a-jingle-jangle, we headed down to stand on that stage and make our mark. You were one of five or six bands that would play for an hour or so to a paying crowd seated on the floor. Everybody there was good — you had to be to simply get an audition — but I didn’t see anybody very exciting. Many simply droned on, playing in that very laid-back San Francisco style. When the workingmen from New Jersey took the stage, all that changed. We rocked hard, performing our physically explosive stage show, which had the crowd on its feet and shouting. We left to a standing ovation and some newfound respect, and were asked back for the following Tuesday,” said Springsteen.
“We went home satisfied, counting the days ’til the following Tuesday. We came back one week later and did it one more time to the same tumultuous response, then were offered a demo recording session at Bill Graham’s Fillmore studios. Finally, just what we’d come three thousand miles for: our shot at the gold ring,” said Springsteen.
“One crisp California afternoon, Steel Mill pulled up to the first professional recording studio we’d ever seen,” recalled Springsteen. “We cut three of our best originals, ‘The Judge Song,’ ‘Going Back to Georgia‘ and ‘The Train Song,’ as a demo for Bill Graham’s Fillmore Records… The demo was as far as we’d get. The deal never happened. We were offered some sort of retainer fee but nothing that showed any real interest.”
Steel Mill’s final performance was on January 23, 1971. Springsteen said, “I learned. I went some place I hadn’t been. I went into a bigger environment musically, and I learned that we were very good, but not quite as good as I thought we were. I had to think what I was going to do about that.”
In the early weeks of 1971, Van Zandt, Federici, bassist Garry Tallent, and keyboardist David Sancious held weekly Monopoly games in a chilly apartment on the edge of downtown Asbury Park. The real gaming took place between turns: alliances, bribes, coercion, and sacks of candy bars. The others dubbed Springsteen the “Gut Bomb King.” That did not last. He came up with something better. “The Boss.” It stuck.
“Play me something”
In the fall of 1971, Tinker introduced Springsteen to Mike Appel, a songwriter and producer who had co-written “Doesn’t Somebody Want to Be Wanted” for the Partridge Family.
“Bruce Springsteen, when he first walked into our offices, it was November ’71. He played two songs, he sat down at piano bench. He came up with a fellow by name of ‘Tinker,'” said Appel. “After the two songs, they were lyrically nothing to write Mother about. He sang them with great intensity. In fact, the intensity was almost too much for the value of the song. But he was better than the song. And so when he finished them, he said, ‘Well, that’s it.’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, that’s not going to be enough. I mean, you’re going to have to do better songs than this.’ And he said, ‘No, don’t worry. I’ve got plenty of songs, and I’ll have more songs.'”
Appel suggested he work on new material and come back when he was ready. “I also had the confusion of hearing a voice in my own head say, ‘This kid’s a superstar,'” said Appel.
Springsteen returned in February with more songs.
“He comes up and he starts playing songs. First song he played blew me right out the door,” said Appel. “It was ‘If I Was the Priest.’ And then ‘Does This Bus Stop’ and ‘Saint in the City.’ And it was like, ‘My God.’ He sang maybe, I don’t know, maybe five or six songs all together.”
“It seemed like this was someone who saw value in me, and he was connected to the music business. This was sort of as close to the real music business as I’d ever seen,” said Springsteen.
Springsteen signed a management contract with Appel and started to secure auditions.
“Our first audition was at Atlantic Records. All I remember is going up to an office and playing for somebody. No interest. The next thing Mike finagled — and I couldn’t believe it — was an audition with John Hammond. John Hammond! The legendary producer who signed Dylan, Aretha, Billie Holiday — a giant in the recording business. I’d just finished reading the Anthony Scaduto Dylan biography and I was going to meet the man who made it happen!” said Springsteen.
On May 2, 1972, at the office of John Hammond at Columbia Records in New York City, Springsteen, about to perform, said to himself, “I’ve got nothing, so I’ve got nothing to lose. I can only gain should this work out. If it don’t, I still got what I came in with.”
“Poised and ready to hate us,” said Springsteen. “But he just leaned back, slipped his hands together behind his head and, smiling, said, ‘Play me something.’ I sat directly across from him and played ‘Saint in the City.’ When I was done I looked up. That smile was still there and I heard him say, ‘You’ve got to be on Columbia Records.’ One song — that’s what it took. I felt my heart rise up inside me, mysterious particles dancing underneath my skin and faraway stars lighting up my nerve endings.”
“That was wonderful, play me something else,” said Hammond. Springsteen played “Growin’ Up,” “Mary Queen of Arkansas,” and “If I Was the Priest.” Impressed, Hammond knew that Clive Davis, Columbia Records’ president, had final approval on all signings. He gave Springsteen guidance for the Davis audition, then asked to see him perform live that same night. The Bitter End, Max’s Kansas City, and Kenny’s Castaways were all approached but none could accommodate Springsteen on such short notice. Appel secured a slot at Gerde’s Folk City on MacDougal Street. Hammond came. “John was beaming. I could perform,” said Springsteen.
“Things started to happen…slowly. A few weeks after I met John, he ushered me into Clive Davis’s office, where I was warmly welcomed. I played Clive a few songs and with gentle fanfare, I was invited to join the Columbia Records family,” said Springsteen.
While Appel described Springsteen as “the new Bob Dylan,” Davis said, “I saw him as a real original, someone who was not just the new Bob Dylan or another Bob Dylan, that was the kiss of death in those days. And so, I was excited and I signed him.”
At the age of 22, Springsteen signed a deal with Columbia.
“I didn’t have a chance to even call other labels and try to get him into a bidding war. It was like so fast. I wasn’t gonna tempt the gods. When Columbia Records calls and you got both Clive Davis, both John Hammond on your side, you want to make a deal. You’re not going to be petulant and cute. So we did, and it was great,” said Appel.
“Twisted autobiographies”
“I got back and for the first time in my life I stopped playing with a band and concentrated on songwriting. At night in my bedroom with my guitar and on an old Aeolian spinet piano parked in the rear of the beauty salon, I began to write the music that would comprise Greetings from Asbury Park,” said Springsteen.
By mid-1972, he was at 914 Studios in Blauvelt, New York, recording songs for what would become Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. with Vini Lopez on drums, David Sancious on keyboards, and Garry Tallent on bass. Clarence Clemons joined the sessions on saxophone to complete the album, which was finished that October.
“We cut the whole record in three weeks. Most of the songs were twisted autobiographies. ‘Growin’ Up,’ ‘Does This Bus Stop,’ ‘For You,’ ‘Lost in the Flood’ and ‘Saint in the City’ found their seed in people, places, hangouts and incidents I’d seen and things I’d lived. I wrote impressionistically and changed names to protect the guilty. I worked to find something that was identifiably mine,” said Springsteen.
“We turned it in and Clive Davis handed it back saying there were ‘no hits,’ ‘nothing that could be played on the radio,'” recalled Springsteen. “I went to the beach and wrote ‘Spirit in the Night,’ came home, busted out my rhyming dictionary and wrote ‘Blinded by the Light,’ two of the best things on the record.”
Released on January 5, 1973, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. was received with enthusiasm from the press. Cash Box called it “a side of Dylan, some Van Morrison and the Band mixed in, but mostly a completely original vision and a work of genius.” Record World called it “part Dylan, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, and the Band, but mostly a completely original vision and a work of genius.”
Not everyone agreed.
Columbia promoted the album with ads announcing they had the “new Bob Dylan.” The cover letter on the records sent to DJs said the same thing. It backfired. “I didn’t even bother to listen to it. I didn’t want Columbia to think they got me,” said Dave Herman, the early-morning DJ for WNEW-FM in New York. “He was just another media hype that failed. He was already a dead artist who bombed out on his first album.”
“Bruce makes a point of letting us know that he’s from one of the scuzziest, most useless and plain uninteresting sections of Jersey. He’s been influenced a lot by the Band, his arrangements tend to take on a Van Morrison tinge every now and then, and he sort of catarrh-mumbles his ditties in a disgruntled mushmouth sorta like Robbie Robertson on Quaaludes with Dylan barfing down his neck. It’s a tuff combination, but it’s only the beginning,” wrote Lester Bangs of Rolling Stone. “Bruce Springsteen is a bold new talent with more than a mouthful to say, and one look at the pic on the back will tell you he’s got the glam to go places in this Gollywoodlawn world to boot. Watch for him.”
“If ‘Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ.’ had borne the name Bob Dylan instead of that of Bruce Springsteen, what would the reviews have been like? I’ll tell you. They’d have raved,” wrote Ian MacDonald in the New Musical Express. “If this is really where we’re at, we’re in trouble.”
Springsteen said the album “sold about twenty-three thousand copies; that was a flop by record company standards but a smash by mine.”
Springsteen and the band went on tour. The first official gig was a free show at a Pennsylvania college opening for Cheech and Chong. “I came out, and we played about five songs. I thought it was going really good, I was sitting at the piano and someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘That’s enough,'” recalled Springsteen.
“We drove, we played, we drove, we played, we drove, we played. We opened for Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Sha Na Na, Brownsville Station, the Persuasions, Jackson Browne, the Chambers Brothers, the Eagles, Mountain, Black Oak Arkansas. We shared bills with NRBQ and Lou Reed and did a thirteen-day arena tour with brass-section hit makers Chicago,” said Springsteen. “We were top billed, with Bob Marley and the Wailers opening on their first US tour, in the tiny 150-seat Max’s Kansas City. On stages across America we were cheered, were occasionally booed, dodged Frisbees from the audience, received rave reviews and were trashed.”
Cash Box sent a reviewer to Max’s Kansas City and declared him “THE performer of the 70s.”
Somewhere on that stretch of shows, the band still had no name. On a long drive back from a gig, they brainstormed for hours without landing on anything. By the time they reached the Jersey shore it was daylight. They pulled up to the house where David Sancious’s family lived, where the band sometimes rehearsed. Springsteen saw the street sign and started saying it over and over. “E Street. E Street. E Street Band.”
Springsteen was under contract to Columbia for a new album every six months and the pressure was on. His second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, took three months to record at 914 Studios and was released on September 11, 1973. Record World called it “super funky rock and roll” and predicted it “should spring onto the charts.” It did not. Springsteen recalled that “few even knew it had been released” and those who did hear it said the songs were too long.
John Hammond had taken a leave from Columbia in March 1973 following a heart attack. Clive Davis had been fired in May 1973, just four months after Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. hit shelves. The men who had believed in Springsteen were gone and there was talk that the label would drop him.
“I was trying to come up with the first song in my new record,” said Springsteen. “I had two records out, they hadn’t done that well, and I had only had a three record deal, so this is my last shot. So I was going to have to give it everything I had. It was definitely make or break at the time. I was held in very low esteem at my record company. The guys that signed me had all gone and moved to other places, so I wasn’t a feather in anybody’s cap. If I was successful it didn’t matter, so I was really kind of at the bottom of their barrel.”
“I saw rock and roll future”
On May 9, 1974, Springsteen opened for Bonnie Raitt at the Harvard Square Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the audience was Jon Landau, a music critic for Rolling Stone and the Real Paper.
“I saw my rock ‘n’ roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time,” wrote Landau. “When his two-hour set ended I could only think, can anyone really be this good; can anyone say this much to me, can rock ‘n’ roll still speak with this kind of power and glory? And then I felt the sores on my thighs where I had been pounding my hands in time for the entire concert and knew that the answer was yes.”
“Springsteen does it all. He is a rock ‘n’ roll punk, a Latin street poet, a ballet dancer, an actor, a joker, bar band leader, hot-shit rhythm guitar player, extraordinary singer, and a truly great rock ‘n’ roll composer,” wrote Landau.
Some songs Springsteen played that night were “The ‘E’ Street Shuffle,” “New York City Serenade,” “Rosalita,” and what may have been the first-ever performance of “Born to Run.”
After the show, Landau reached out to Springsteen. Recording on the third album was already underway but going nowhere. “But with ‘Born to Run’ it reached a point where it was a nightmare, we were not getting close,” said Springsteen. “Then Jon came in and he was able to say, ‘Well you’re not doing it because of this, and this, and these are factual things which in reality are blocking what you’re doing.’ Me, you know, I just want to hear it, I don’t want to know. I have no desire to work the knobs, run the soundboard, none. I don’t care what I know or not, so I’m dependent on someone who’s there to get me the sound I want.” Landau joined the sessions as co-producer alongside Mike Appel. The result was Born to Run.
On August 25, 1975, Springsteen released Born to Run, which he described as sounding like “Roy Orbison singing Bob Dylan, produced by Spector.” Columbia Records invested $150,000 to ensure “this time around, everyone gets the message.”
By October, Springsteen became the first rock artist to appear on the covers of both Time and Newsweek in the same week, an “honour” normally reserved for newly-elected presidents. It was something that had not happened to Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, or the Beatles at the height of Beatlemania.
“I spoke to my dad. I was going to be on the cover of Time and Newsweek, and it’s a problem. Me, the cover of Time and Newsweek, which was like saying, ‘Yeah, I’m taking Santa Claus’s job at the North Pole this year,’ you know? I mean, it was just as fantastical, you know?” said Springsteen. “Well, he says, you know, ‘Better you than another picture of the president.'”
In the Newsweek cover story, Hammond reflected on the night they first met. “I only hear somebody really good once every ten years,” he told the magazine, “and not only was Bruce the best, he was a lot better than Dylan when I first heard him.”
Born to Run peaked at number three on the Billboard 200. Richard Williams of Melody Maker wrote that “‘Born To Run,’ by Bruce Springsteen, became My Favourite Record Of All Time. It was — how can I describe it? — like seeing Nadia Comaneci scoring a maximum 10 points on the beam, only to be crushed by some new kid busting the computer with an over-the-limit 10.5.”
The Boss of the USA
After Born to Run, Springsteen sued his manager Mike Appel, alleging fraud and breach of trust over contracts he had signed years earlier without legal counsel. Appel obtained a temporary restraining order preventing Springsteen and Jon Landau from entering a recording studio. New York State Supreme Court Judge Arnold Fein confirmed the injunction in September 1976. Springsteen could not record.
Columbia moved to overturn the injunction. The attempt failed.
“We’d suddenly made all this money and contracts we’d signed three years before became important. It wasn’t so much the money. I wanted my songs. Mike had the publishing rights to all my songs. When I signed those contracts I didn’t even know what publishing was,” said Springsteen. “That whole period was just a time in my life that seemed completely out of my hands.”
He kept performing. He kept writing. For nearly two years, he could not record. The legal dispute was settled in May 1977. A two-sentence item in Cash Box summed it up: “All legal disputes between Bruce Springsteen and former manager Mike Appel have been settled out of court. Springsteen is presently recording his fourth album for Columbia Records, co-produced by Jon Landau.”
Darkness on the Edge of Town was released in June 1978. Cash Box opened its review with: “It’s been three years since ‘Born To Run,’ but The Boss proves he hasn’t just been spinning his wheels in the interim.”
The album was certified platinum within six weeks. The songs were spare, direct, and angry. “The characters on the new album ain’t kids, they’re older — you been beat, you been hurt — but there’s still hope, there’s always hope,” said Springsteen. “They throw dirt on you all your life and some people get buried so deep in the dirt that they never get out. The album’s about the people who’ll never admit they’re buried too deep to get out.”
The tour that followed ran eighty-six dates in its first leg alone, drawing more than 500,000 people. That was more people in live attendance than had bought his first two albums combined. “Prove It All Night,” the first single from Darkness on the Edge of Town, failed to break into the Top 40. Springsteen was filling arenas and still could not crack mainstream radio.
In November 1980, The River reached number one on the Billboard 200, his first chart-topping album. “Hungry Heart” became his first Top 10 single. For the first time, the audience in the arenas and the audience on the radio were the same people. Springsteen told Musician magazine what the studio had cost him across all of it: “I never feel as low, playing, as I do in the studio.”
After the two-year River tour, Springsteen retreated to a farmhouse in Colts Neck, New Jersey. He set up a four-track cassette recorder in his bedroom. The machine was a $1,200 TEAC Tascam Series 144 porta-studio. Playing all instruments himself, he recorded what would become Nebraska.
“The songs of Nebraska were written quickly, all rising from the same ground. Each song took maybe three or four takes to record. I was only making demos,” said Springsteen. “These songs were the opposite of the rock music I’d been writing. They were restrained, still on the surface, with a world of moral ambiguity and unease below.”
Nebraska reached shelves in September 1982. Cash Box called it “an intensely personal, passionate work” with “arresting visions of American inequities, violence and dreams.” Radio found it difficult. In Edmonton, one AOR programmer said it was “not the kind of thing we would normally play, but he is too big a name to ignore.” Springsteen did not tour.
He had already returned to the studio with the E Street Band. The sessions had begun in January 1982, months before Nebraska was released. “We just went in without ever really running the songs down and recorded everything live,” said drummer Max Weinberg. “Sometimes the band didn’t even know the chords. They’d be looking at Bruce’s hands.”
By May 1983, Columbia told Cash Box the record “could be ready in the morning,” but Springsteen was still rewriting. By November, Columbia sources confirmed there was little chance of a release that year. Seventy songs had been recorded across two years.
Guitarist Steven Van Zandt had left to pursue a solo career. “It was real emotional, him going,” said Springsteen. “But he had to. He had written a lot of real good songs; he had something to say.”
His replacement was Nils Lofgren. The two had auditioned at the Fillmore West on the same night in 1969. When word reached Lofgren that Van Zandt might not be able to stay, he quietly told Springsteen to keep him in mind. “I just said it and dismissed it,” said Lofgren. Around the same time, Patti Scialfa joined on backing vocals. Springsteen had met her the summer before, sitting in with a bar band in Asbury Park. What neither of them knew yet was that she had auditioned for the band nine years earlier, when Born to Run came out. She had never told him.
“‘Born in the U.S.A.,’ ‘Working on the Highway,’ ‘Downbound Train,’ ‘Darlington County,’ ‘Glory Days,’ ‘I’m on Fire’ and ‘Cover Me’ were all basically completed in the very early stages of the record. Then brain freeze settled in,” said Springsteen. “I was uncomfortable with the pop aspect of my finished material and wanted something deeper, heavier, and more serious. I waited, I wrote, I recorded, then I waited some more. Months passed in writer’s block, with me holed up in a little cottage I’d bought by the Navesink River, the songs coming like the last drops of water being pumped out of a temporarily dry well.”
“The wait was worth it. Those last songs were important pieces of my record’s final picture. ‘Bobby Jean’ and ‘No Surrender’ were great tributes to the bonding power of rock and my friendship with Steve. ‘My Hometown’ would be an important bookend to ‘Born in the USA,’ capturing the racial tension of late-sixties small-town New Jersey and the post-industrialization of the coming decade,” said Springsteen.
And then, in New York on Valentine’s Day, Landau walked into his hotel room.
Lyrically: Dancing in the Dark by Bruce Springsteen
“Then, very late to the party came ‘Dancing in the Dark.’ One of my most well-crafted and heartfelt pop songs, ‘Dancing’ was ‘inspired’ one afternoon when Jon Landau stopped by my New York hotel room. He told me he’d been listening to the album and felt we didn’t have a single, that one song that was going to throw gasoline on the fire. That meant more work for me, and for once, more work was the last thing I was interested in. We argued, gently, and I suggested that if he felt we needed something else, he write it,” recalled Springsteen. “That evening I wrote ‘Dancing in the Dark,’ my song about my own alienation, fatigue and desire to get out from inside the studio, my room, my record, my head and… live. This was the record and song that’d take me my farthest into the pop mainstream.”
I get up in the evenin’
And I ain’t got nothin’ to say
I come home in the mornin’
I go to bed feelin’ the same way
I ain’t nothin’ but tired
Man, I’m just tired and bored with myself
Hey there, baby, I could use just a little help
The song opens with a confession. The days repeat. Day by day. Morning and evening flow into each other without distinction. Springsteen had told Musician magazine that he never felt as low as he did in the studio. He had been living inside that feeling for years before he wrote about it. The call for help at the end of the opening verse is the need for someone to pull him back into the world.
You can’t start a fire
You can’t start a fire without a spark
This gun’s for hire
Even if we’re just dancin’ in the dark
When Landau told him the album needed one song that would throw gasoline on the fire, Springsteen took it literally. The spark becomes the central image. He is a hired gun, asked to produce something specific for a commercial purpose, and he writes that fact directly into the lyric. “This gun’s for hire” is a field report from the moment he wrote it. “You can’t start a fire without a spark” states that nothing changes without action. “Even if we’re just dancin’ in the dark” reveals that even movement without knowing where you’re going is better than doing nothing. The spark does not require a plan.
Messages keeps gettin’ clearer
Radio’s on and I’m movin’ ’round my place
I check my look in the mirror
Wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face
Man, I ain’t gettin’ nowhere
I’m just livin’ in a dump like this
There’s somethin’ happenin’ somewhere
Baby, I just know that there is
The radio is on and he is now writing directly for it. He wants a new identity and can see who he wants to become, but cannot reach it alone. “There’s somethin’ happenin’ somewhere” is the pull toward a life that is not the one he is living.
You sit around gettin’ older
There’s a joke here somewhere and it’s on me
I’ll shake this world off my shoulders
Come on, baby, the laugh’s on me
He is not complaining about getting older. He is laughing at himself for it.
Stay on the streets of this town
And they’ll be carvin’ you up alright
They say you gotta stay hungry
Hey baby, I’m just about starvin’ tonight
I’m dyin’ for some action
I’m sick of sittin’ ’round here tryin’ to write this book
I need a love reaction
Come on now, baby, gimme just one look
Staying still has a cost and it will come in the form of the world wearing you down. The hunger he describes is an artist’s ambition. He is starving for something, dying to get himself into action. The strength of the song arrives with the line that he’s “sick of sittin’ ’round here tryin’ to write this book.” He is speaking his own frustration. The album he is trying to finish is the book he cannot write. And at the end of all of it, after the exhausting, repetitive days, what he asks for is the simplest thing in the world: one look. Acknowledgement.
You can’t start a fire
Worryin’ about your little world fallin’ apart
The final chorus delivers the song’s message. Worrying about how things might turn out stops you from finding out. You cannot start a fire by worrying about whether the spark will hold.
“A songwriter writes to be understood,” said Springsteen.
The Spark
“Sometimes records dictate their own personalities and you just have to let them be. That was Born in the U.S.A. I finally stopped doing my hesitation shuffle, took the best of what I had and signed off on what would be the biggest album of my career. Born in the U.S.A. changed my life, gave me my largest audience, forced me to think harder about the way I presented my music and set me briefly at the center of the pop world,” said Springsteen.
“Dancing in the Dark” was released to radio on May 9, 1984. Billboard reviewed the single as “uptempo (but far from upbeat) — single of exceptional power; passionate and moving.” Cash Box called it “classic Springsteen: gutsy vocals set to a hard-driving backbeat.”
Springsteen hired Brian De Palma, director of Scarface, to direct the music video. “We’d spent the afternoon filming ‘Dancing in the Dark,’ our first formal music video,” recalled Springsteen. “I’d always been a little superstitious about filming the band. I believed the magician should not observe his trick too closely; he might forget where his magic lay. But MTV had arrived.”
On June 29, 1984, at the Civic Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, De Palma filmed it with a pre-selected audience member pulled to the stage to dance with Springsteen. That audience member was Courteney Cox, later of Friends and Scream.
“I did not want to be the one. I don’t want to dance in front of 30,000 people! It was a full concert, and we performed the song twice, back-to-back,” recalled Cox. “God. Did you see my dance? It was pathetic. I’m not a bad dancer, but that was horrible. I was so nervous.”
“We did that video in about three or four hours,” said Springsteen. “That video was great, though, because I noticed that most of the people that would come up and mention it to me were people who hadn’t heard my other stuff. Very often, they were real little kids.”
“Dancing in the Dark” peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 because Prince’s “When Doves Cry” got there first. In July 1984, Billboard‘s Paul Grein wrote the column “Prince Keeps Springsteen Humble.” The song won Springsteen his first Grammy for Best Male Rock Performance. The video won Best Stage Performance at the 1985 MTV Video Music Awards.
In February 1973, Billboard had asked whether Bruce Springsteen might become “the Dylan heir of the ’70s.” By 1984, he had not become the Dylan heir. He had become something else entirely. He was the thing that happened after. The Boss.
