E Street Band. - E Street shuffle: the glory days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band

E STREET SHUFFLE

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E STREET SHUFFLE

The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen
& the E Street Band

CLINTON HEYLIN

VIKING

VIKING

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First American edition

Published in 2013 by Viking Penguin,

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright Clinton Heylin, 2012

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Heylin, Clinton.

E Street shuffle / Clinton Heylin.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-1-101-60624-7

1. Springsteen, Bruce. 2. E Street Band. 3. Rock musiciansUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

ML420.S77H28 2013

782.42166092dc23

[B]

2012035454

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For Erik, keeper of the faith

last of the true believers.

Im always going to trust the art and be suspicious of the artist
because hes generallya stumbling clown like everybody else.
Bruce Springsteen, 2006

It fell out on a May evening

I find myself in the pit, a green band around my wrist, at the brand-spanking-new Prudential Center in Newark. New York muso Richard has opened the door and I have stepped in for my first E Street show since 2004s Vote For Change, when Springsteen had sounded hoarse from all that hectoring. Tonight, he is saying farewell to the arena leg of the Wrecking Ball tour. Stadia beckonagain. But for now, he has a home-state audience in a hyped-up state of mind, iPhones akimbo, ready to greet their returning hero. And suddenly there he is, declaiming to the rafters with the first surprise of the evening, No Surrender, the truest anthem on that mountainous multimillion seller, Born In The USA.

Alongside me are legionnaires of true believers, one of whom, Larry, had been telling me about seeing him at Joes Place, a cramped, crumbling Boston bar that had been the E Street Bands home away from home in 197374; when Rosalita came out every night and torched the place. A broad grin etches his face when the big boss man announces, half a dozen songs in, that he is gonna do a song hed never played, well, maybe once: Bishop danced with a thumbscrew woman/ Did a double-quick back flip and slid across the floor.

Bishop Danced had been the opening track on a classic seventies Springsteen LP, Fire On The Fingertips. Just not one that Bruce himself okayed for release. Rather, it was spawned among the stalls of Camden Lock. A bootleg. But for the hard core, this mattered not. It was a lost Bruce classic, transformed by the band arrangement it never got back in 1973. (He had done it more than onceand in Bostonbut the last documented version was in Berkeley, March 2, 1973.)

And then, as if reading our minds, Springsteen segues into Saint In The Cityanother blast from the past he rarely takes for a spin these daysand a thought flashes across my mind. May 2. It was forty years ago today that a callow kid from Freehold walked into the office of John Hammond, the legendary A&R man who discovered Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Aretha Franklin and Dylan, and played him a song that knocked his socks off. The self-same Saint.

After this, the show settles into its routine; but in my minds eye, I am already in rewind, back to the days when he spent his afternoons at WBCN, debuting the likes of Bishop Danced and Rosalita over the radio, and his evenings at Joes Place. Or Maxs. Or The Main Point. And Im thinking this is a surprisingly good facsimile of those moments and that band; but a facsimile, nonetheless. How he got thereand got from there to hereis the story of the E Street Shuffle. And quite a story it is. Because, as he told an expectant audience in Austin this very March:

I had nights and nights of bar-playing behind me to bring my songs homeThese skills gave me a huge ace up my sleeve. And when we finally went on the road, and we played that ace, we scorched the Earth.

Till I was thirteen, the body was presumed dead; and thats how I feel about my whole life up till then. I was just reeling through space and bouncing off the walls, and bouncing off people, and I didnt find anything to hold on to or any connection whatsoever; until the rock & roll thing and the guitar. When I found thatthe other stuff just didnt matter any more.Bruce Springsteen, 1978

When Jesus gently chastised his wealthy follower, Nicodemus, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God, he presumably did not have in mind the same born again experience which led thirteen-year-old Bruce Springsteen into apostasy. Here was someone who only found the Spirit when he cast aside the teachings of J.C., previously laid down with an iron hand by a series of matriarchal authority figures, from the nuns at the local convent school he attended prior to high school to the mother who presided over the Springsteens dilapidated leasehold in Freehold, New Jersey.