This Day in Rock History (Springsteen’s ‘E Street Shuffle’ Released)

November 5, 1973—Bruce Springsteen’s second album, The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, featured rambling song structures and sometimes ragged sounds that at first didn’t attract enough buyers, putting him on the brink with label Columbia Records. 

But the LP from the New Jersey rocker generated adherents over the years, especially for tunes that became showcases for all-stops-out interplay with his backup group, the E Street Band.

Springsteen and his musicians trooped up to 914 Studios in Blauvelt, NY, a good ride up from their Jersey Shore homes. 

Recording often took place after midnight, when it could be done for free, when the studio owner was asleep (a particular brainstorm of chief engineer Louis Lahav). The hope was that the album would fulfill the promise of the rookie effort by The Boss, Greetings From Asbury Park.

In some ways, it did. The new album (which took the first two-thirds of its long name from a 1959 Audie Murphy western) was more of a straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll LP than its predecessor (which, beneath the veneer of its rhythm section, evinced its acoustic folk origins). 

The songs Springsteen brought into the studio were already, to some extent, road-tested, as he had tried them out on audiences. 

The style of the new work was richly idiosyncratic, too, with lyrics rooted in Springsteen’s Jersey Shore milieu and musicians who could be jazzy (pianist David Sancious) or just listening to their own drummer (the appropriately named Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez).

Problems remained, however:

*Not one of the songs was single-ready: The shortest, “The E Street Shuffle,” was four and a half minutes, and four of the remaining six songs ran over seven minutes.

*Springsteen continued to be painstaking in the studio: A perfectionist, he tossed aside entirely serviceable tunes (notably “Thundercrack,” later to show up on Tracks in 1998) because they did not fit with his concept for the album: what Peter Ames Carlin, in his biography Bruce, termed “a series of songs about liberation: through music, through friends, through lovers.” Just when it seemed finished, he’d want to make more changes.

*Springsteen refused to print the lyrics to the LP: Eric Alterman, in It Ain’t No Sin To Be Glad You’re Alive, ascribed it to “a fit of ‘stop comparing me to Dylan’ pique." Whatever. It still left many listeners scratching their heads over what he was singing.

*Springsteen lost his biggest boosters: Legendary talent scout John Hammond had reached retirement age, and Columbia President Clive Davis lost a power struggle over allegations of financial wrongdoing.

Sales continued to be lackluster, then, and now Springsteen would be placed in a position vis-à-vis Columbia where his next LP had to be a homer, or he would be dropped by the label. 

The following year would witness the departures of Lopez (who tangled one too many times with saxophonist, Springsteen foil and “Big Man” Clarence Clemons), Sancious (who preferred jazz to rock ‘n’ roll), and Jim Cretecos, the producer partner of Springsteen’s bulldog manager, Mike Appel (for reasons never really explained). 

They were replaced, respectively, by Max Weinberg, Roy Bittan, and when Springsteen and Appel found themselves making little progress in the studio on what came to be Born To Run, Jon Landau.

But we come back to the crux, and the glory, of the matter in regard to The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle: those songs. 

Two were recognized as classics, by his growing fan cohort, as soon as they were heard: “Fourth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” a kaleidoscopic valentine and farewell to his boardwalk life, and “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),” which Springsteen has viewed as a kind of musical autobiography (not to mention a rejoinder to anyone who tries to step on someone else’s dreams).

In a way, the musical textures from The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle found their way onto the tighter Born To Run (e.g., when she briefly joined the band in the fall of 1974, violinist Suki Lahav’s lyrical work on “Incident on 57^th Street” would be echoed in the opening of “Jungleland”).

The rest of the LP has remained, over the years, like buried treasure, delighting anyone who rediscovers it, either on CD or in concert, when The Boss brings it to the surface again, all fresh and new.

I was reminded of this in the last year, when he and the E Street Band—now enlarged with a full horn section—played a blistering version of “Kitty’s Back” on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. (You can get a rough approximation of the full-bodied sound in this clip from 2012.) In Ireland this summer, he even played perhaps the most obscure cut from the LP, “Wild Billy’s Circus Song.”

In recent years, Springsteen and his band of brothers have even taken to playing the whole album through. In one of the first times he did this, he announced: 

“This was the second record that I made. It didn't do that well, but it was an interesting record. Half of the songs are set in New Jersey, around our little street corner. The other half was sort of my romantic ideas and fantasies of New York City."

“An interesting record.” Many fans have thought it’s a whole lot more.

This Day in Rock Music (Springsteen Inks Irksome Deal With Manager, Columbia)

June 9, 1972—A month after auditioning for a legendary record executive, Bruce Springsteen, through an interlocking set of agreements, entered into what has turned out to be a 40-year relationship with Columbia Records. While that part of the deal proved enduring, another—stipulating the relationship among the singer, the label, and the company owned by Springsteen’s producer-manager of the time—led to a protracted legal struggle several years later.

In Stephen Sondheim’s musical, Merrily We Roll Along, a bitter lyricist is asked how he works with his slick, money-obsessed composer collaborator: “Which comes first generally — the words or the music?” “Generally, the contract,” the lyricist answers. All too true. This time, however, we’re going to talk first about the audition—specifically, the one that took place at Columbia on May 2, 1972.

At 10:30 in the morning, a 22-year-old rock ‘n’ roller from New Jersey, carrying a borrowed acoustic guitar with no case and accompanied only by his bulldog manager who had been unable to secure a meeting with Columbia Records exec Clive Davis, arranged an informal private audition with the next best thing: legendary talent scout John Hammond. Hammond, impressed, arranged a longer, more formal audition the next day, and the musical journey of Springsteen had begun.

Tom Greenwade earned undying gratitude among New York Yankee fans as the scout who discovered Mickey Mantle, Bobby Murcer, Elston Howard, Hank Bauer, Clete Boyer, and Ralph Terry. (Before joining the Bombers’ organization, he had also strongly urged Branch Rickey to sign Jackie Robinson for the Dodgers.) Hammond’s achievement as a music scout was even longer and more diverse, as he was responsible for discovering, besides Springsteen and Dylan, the likes of Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, Aretha Franklin, and Pete Seeger.

The above list, you’ll notice, was dominated before the 1960s by jazz musicians. But Hammond’s discovery of Franklin, Seeger—and especially Dylan, who originally had been derided as “Hammond’s Folly” at Columbia when his first album didn’t sell well—had served notice that he still had an eye for the musical mainstream, even as it had shifted more to rhythm and blues, folk and rock ‘n’ roll. (See my prior post on what Hammond had to face at the studio in signing Dylan.)

Springsteen knew this history all too well as he sat down at the piano—not his best instrument anyway—and began banging out chords with more feeling than skill. Nevertheless, after listening to the young man’s first three songs (“Growin’ Up,” “Mary Queen of Arkansas,” and “It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City”), Hammond was impressed enough to ask if the singer-songwriter had any others that he would play in concert but not record. Springsteen then launched into “If I Was the Priest.”

You can listen to that song on Springsteen’s boxed set of rarities, Tracks, but for the purposes of this discussion, we’ll note that in the song the Holy Ghost is a brothel-owner and the Virgin Mary, who “runs the Holy Grail Saloon,” is:

“…a stone junkie, what's more she's a boozer

And she's only been made once or twice

By some kind of magic.” 

Remembering the meeting several years later, Hammond chuckled: “It seemed unlikely he was Jewish. But when he played the song, I knew he could only be Catholic.”

Springsteen would not be the only baby-boom entertainer from New Jersey in rebellion against his parochial school upbringing. So was John Travolta, who went for several years to the elementary school that I myself attended, St. Cecilia in Englewood, N.J. But, like James Joyce, Catholicism left an indelible mark on Springsteen's use of language and themes. "The Boss" didn’t simply announce, “It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City.” In the opening title of his breakthrough album, Born to Run, he’s calling for “redemption” and “faith.”

Springsteen would need plenty of faith, even if not in the style he grew up with, over the next couple of years. During that time, one of the few music professionals demonstrating any belief in him was his manager, Mike Appel. Unfortunately, Appel had crafted his own agreement with Springsteen in such a way that the two fell out over it. 

As outlined in Dave Marsh’s Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts: The Definitive Biography, 1972-2003, one month before the Columbia deal, Springsteen had signed a management agreement and another agreement ceding to Laurel Canyon exclusive rights to his recordings for one year, followed by four one-year options. 

That deal called for Laurel Canyon to receive royalties of 3% of the retail selling price. While that pact called for Springsteen to make five albums, a second one, between CBS and Laurel, required that he make 10. In that case, Laurel would make about 9% of the retail price, about three times what Springsteen would receive.

Even on the surface, the deal sounds lopsidedly against Springsteen, yet at this point in his life and career he was without serious prospects or even a place of his own. He was so unsophisticated that he not only didn’t submit the agreement to an attorney, but, if the legend is to be believed, signed it on the hood of a car. All that mattered to him now was that he’d receive a $25,000 advance and a $40,000 recording budget—the chance, finally, to make the record he wanted.

For the next four years, Appel compiled a mixed record for his client. On the one hand, he was so aggressive in promoting Springsteen that a number of people were turned off by his approach. On the other hand, he was the original believer in The Boss—not just recognizing his brilliance as a songwriter and his electrifying concert performances, but supporting his desire for recordings centered around the E Street Band rather than studio musicians. His drumbeat of promotion for the single Born to Run in the Philadelphia market, for instance, kept interest alive in the artist while Springsteen was still struggling to come up with hsi desired Spectorian "wall of sound" in the studio.

The blog Your Friday Bruce Fix (love that title, but...why stop at Fridays????) has a fine post about the denouement of the relationship: the growing friendship between the singer and the outsider he brought in as a producer for Born to Run, Jon Landau, followed by Springsteen’s discovery, after the album's release, that not only was he making less than he should have from record sales and airplay, but that Laurel rather than himself owned publishing rights to his first three albums. Therein followed suit and countersuit between the singer and his now-fired manager. The litigation ended in mid-1977 with Appel out and Springsteen able to record with Landau.

The relationship between Springsteen and Appel would remain icy until the release of a documentary about the making of Born to Run a few years ago, when the singer and the manager-producer reconciled.

This Day in Pop Music History (1st Dylan Album: ‘Hammond’s Folly‘)

March 19, 1962—The first album by a folk singer-songwriter from Minnesota, released on this date, gave virtually no inkling that he would become part of the bedrock of his label, let alone part of the great legacy of the talent scout who signed him. Not only did Bob Dylan compose only two of the 13 tracks on his self-titled LP, but the record’s abysmal sales—less than 5,000 copies in its first year—seemed to justify the naysayers who questioned what John Hammond heard in the nasal voice of the scrawny 20-year-old in his office.

A half-century later, with Dylan having helped recoup the original investment of Columbia Records many times over, it’s easy to see why Hammond—who had discovered such jazz greats as Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Lionel Hampton, among many others—wanted to sign Dylan. “You’re a talented young man,” Dylan remembered Hammond’s conversation 40 years afterward. “If you can focus and control that talent, you’ll be fine.”

Already, Dylan was showing the same insouciant disregard for convention that would lead him to cross genres repeatedly over the next couple of decades. (After signing the contract Hammond gave him, he obeyed his new mentor’s request that he visit a studio publicist, then fed the flack a lot of biographical hooey: “I hated these kind of questions,” Dylan wrote in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume I. “Felt I could ignore them.”) But even he sensed the immensity of what Hammond had done for him:

“Columbia was one of the first and foremost labels in the country and for me to even get my foot in the door was serious. For starters, folk music was considered junky, second rate and only released on small labels. Big-time record companies were strictly for the elite, for music that was sanitized and pasteurized. Someone like myself would never be allowed in except under extraordinary circumstances. But John was an extraordinary man. He didn’t make schoolboy records or record schoolboy artists. He had vision and foresight, had seen and heard me, felt my thoughts and had faith in the things to come.”

Hammond would need that faith, and then some. When other Columbia execs heard the album—recorded by Hammond himself for only $400—they put up such a stink that they ended up delaying its release till four months after it was originally taped. Hammond hadn’t been able to hold onto Joan Baez, they sneered, and now he had signed this? No obvious singles sprang out at David Kapralik, Hammond’s boss.

Eventually, Hammond appealed to CBS president Goddard Lieberson to get the album released. Lieberson agreed, but his support didn’t make much of a difference in the album’s sales, anyway: With just about no advertising or promotion, the LP was virtually dead on arrival.

Several years later, Dylan would sing that “Tomorrow is a Long Time,” but it came to him rather swiftly later that year. Within a month after the release of Dylan’s album, another folksinger, Gil Turner, would perform a new song by his friend at Gerde’s Folk City, and that summer Dylan would record it himself for his next LP. A year later, Peter, Paul and Mary’s cover version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” made him, whether he liked it or not, the voice of the younger generation. Except for a couple of years in the Seventies, he has remained at Columbia Records ever since.

As for Hammond, having survived tough in-fighting at the label, he went on to sign other non-jazz musicians who would only further burnish his reputation as an uncanny judge of talent, including Stevie Ray Vaughn, Aretha Franklin and a twentysomething singer-songwriter from New Jersey that many hailed as the “New Dylan,” Bruce Springsteen. A year before his death in 1987, Hammond was inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Fame of Fame for his contributions to the industry.