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 History (“Bridge Over Troubled Water” Hits #1)

March 7, 1970—“Bridge Over Troubled Water,” the title track of Simon and Garfunkel’s latest studio album, hit #1 on the U.S. charts. The critical and popular acclaim for the song and LP (for the title tune alone, 85 weeks on the U.S. charts and five Grammys) justified the duo’s desire to be permitted more time and creative freedom by their studio.

But Columbia Records could only feel limited joy in the biggest-selling LP in its history, because their two perfectionist musicians had turned from finding fault with their work to finding fault with each other. In bruised feelings and fan heartache, their breakup was only exceeded that year by that of the Beatles.

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel are as close as brothers…and, just as often, capable of driving each other crazy as only brothers can. Their mutual admiration for each other’s abilities had gotten them through much, but it had also introduced additional tensions that eventually proved difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. Garfunkel, an astonishingly inveterate reader, had just completed Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. The title could have stood for the feelings the two men had about continuing their professional relationship.

I can’t trace the full course of their love-hate relationship—I don’t have all day, and I’m not trained as a psychiatrist. The period immediately before the creation of the LP is enough to narrate.

Of late, Garfunkel had taken to exploring another career option. No, not architecture and mathematics, which is what he studied at Columbia University between his “Tom and Jerry” period with Paul and their later spectacular success starting with “The Sounds of Silence.” No, I mean acting.

Director Mike Nichols, who used the pair’s work to such brilliant effect in the soundtrack for The Graduate, had cast Artie in his adaptation of Joseph Heller’s anti-war satire, Catch-22. In another year, Art would snag one of the two principal male roles in Jules Feiffer’s saga of sexual exploitation, incompatibility, and neurosis, Carnal Knowledge (or, as Edith Bunker termed it in one of the more brilliant malapropisms in TV history, “Cardinal Knowledge”).

Columbia Records had gotten in the habit of pestering the boys for product churned out constantly. Simon & Garfunkel had been hard-pressed enough already to meet that demanding production schedule. It wasn’t helped now by the months-long delay while Artie shot Catch-22. And Paul, already chafing over the slowdown, surely felt his pride bruised when his walk-on role in the same film was cut.

Then what are often euphemistically termed “creative differences” emerged. As New York DJ Pete Fornatale notes in Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends, the two were unable to agree on the 12th cut that musicians usually had in those pre-CD days. Simon looked askance at Garfunkel’s choice of a Bach chorale (a tune that Artie later recycled and rearranged for his first solo LP, Angel Clare).

If Simon disputed Garfunkel’s sense of what would fly with the public, his partner disputed the songwriter’s common sense. Garfunkel was not averse to politically tinged songs per se (see the pair’s “Seven O’Clock News/Silent Night,” a Vietnam protest song on Parsley Sage Rosemary & Thyme). But he drew the line at one of the most overtly political songs of the rock era, “Cuba Si, Nixon No.”

Naked political sloganeering in song seldom proves of enduring value (how many requests does the band Chicago get these days for their Nixon-era “Song for Richard and His Friends”?). Simon would not have won much cachet (except, perhaps, with the far left) with such lines in “Cuba Si, Nixon No” as “You know the Spanish-speaking people got a different way of running the show” (many Cubans, of course, had become—and would continue to become—refugees because the Castro dictatorship insisted that its “different way of running the show” was the only one in town).

Simon’s simplistic lyrics reflected the kind of binary politics that has made the cultural wars so fraught in this country. (Why did it have to be “Cuba Si, Nixon No” or “Cuba No, Nixon Si”? Why couldn’t it be “Cuba No, Nixon No”?). He was on far firmer footing later with the less explicit, more majestic “American Tune” which achieved a kind of grandeur in evoking “the age’s most uncertain hour.”

Sometimes a collaborator not only spurs you to greater creativity, but saves you from serious mistakes. The addition of “Cuba Si, Nixon No” would have added nothing artistically to Simon and Garfunkel’s fifth—and, it turned out, final—studio album and would only have attracted needless controversy. Its deletion allowed the audience to concentrate on perhaps the greatest of Simon and Garfunkel songs, as well as other tunes from the LP that have gained a deserved following of their own over the years (including “The Boxer,” “El Condor Pasa,” “Cecilia,” and “The Only Living Boy in New York”).

Why did the Paul Simon-penned tune become such an enormous hit? Over the years, several explanations have been offered. I don’t think this is a case of one rationale accounting for everything (though the last cause—one that relates to zeitgeist, or the spirit of the age—seems indispensable to me, at least):

* It was the product of laborious studio craftsmanship. Most fans of know of Simon and Garfunkel’s original formative influence as a singing duo, the Everly Brothers. Less well-known is that they looked to more direct contemporaries in planning the sound for their tribute to friendship: the Righteous Brothers’ version of the Hammerstein-Kern standard from Show Boat, “Ol’ Man River.”

Alfred Kazin once bemoaned that Ernest Hemingway “brought a major art to a minor vision of life,” bemoaning Papa’s fixation on bullfighting, hunting, and fishing. It must have crossed the mind of more than one rock-‘n'-roll producer in the Sixties and Seventies that the same thing applied to Phil Spector, the “Wall of Sound” producer responsible for the Righteous Brothers’ smash hit, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.” (See my prior post about the evolution of that song.) Most of Spector’s work involved grandiose, almost operatic-level arrangements surrounding teen-dream lyrics.

But Simon and Garfunkel, along with co-producer Roy Halee, saw what Spector had done with Hammerstein and Kern’s certified pop epic. In an interview with music journalist Rush Evans for Goldmine, Garfunkel recalls how "Bridge Over Troubled Water" emulated the build-up of “Ol’ Man River.” Just as Righteous Brother Bill Medley sang nearly all of the song alone before being joined by Bobby Hatfield and every instrument Spector could muster together for the dramatic finale, so Garfunkel sang over simple piano accompaniment through the first two verses, only to be joined by Simon and thunderous accompaniment in the third and final verse.

* The studio got behind the record in a big way. Does Clive Davis have the golden touch that so many in the industry believe? Depends on whom you ask. Eric Carmen, for one, might beg to differ. Davis tried to pigeonhole Carmen as another Barry Manilow after the success of Carmen’s first solo, pop-oriented LP. And, in a previous post on Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, I related how Davis was decidedly ambivalent about the LP that stands at the center of the entire Cash discography.

But it is also indisputably true that if Davis really, really liked you, you might as well take a rocket to the moon. Such was the case with Whitney Houston in the mid-1980s, and such was the fate of Simon and Garfunkel nearly 15 years before. He made sure "Bridge Over Troubled Water" was the title of the album, its first song, and its first single. The strategy worked, indisputably.

* The song caught the baby-boomer yearning for spiritual transcendence. Like another pop tune from a musical partnership on the skids that year, the Lennon-McCartney composition “Let It Be,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water” became a metaphor for refuge in an age of turbulence. The Vietnam War was only the most obvious divisive issue of the day. The pace of change had grown so fast—and the reaction against it so hard—that everyone desperately wanted a breather. Though not explicitly religious, “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Let It Be” convey such a desire for release from pain that they have been interpreted over the years by gospel singers.

Both Simon and Garfunkel were so insecure in their own ways—and so annoyed with each other’s idiosyncrasies—that, except for a few short reunion appearances and one magnificent single (“My Little Town”), their breather from each other has turned out to be permanent. But the two musicians—now, like the two “Old Friends” in their song, on the park bench, contemplating how “memory brushes the same years”—ended their full-time partnership with an out-and-out pop masterpiece.

This Day in Country Music History (Johnny Cash Performs at Folsom Prison)

January 13, 1968 – The legend of Johnny Cash, a part of the rockabilly and country-music scene since his first recordings for Sun Records in the mid-1950s, grew larger with his concert at Folsom Prison in Northern California. The subsequent Columbia recording, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, released that summer, went on to appear on the country music charts for 90 weeks – and, even more amazingly on Billboard’s Top 200 for 122 weeks.

The explosive popularity of the concert and record took nearly everyone by surprise. The late Sixties were an era when, in the words of the 1981 Barbara Mandrell song, it wasn’t easy being country “when country wasn’t cool.” Psychedelic rock was filling more and more corners of the airwaves. 

Particularly nettlesome, in an era when rising crime was causing daily headlines – and in a year marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy – was Cash’s decision not only to perform in a prison but to record a live album there. Studio exec Clive Davis – an industry guru fabled then and now for shrewd business instincts – even warned that it would destroy the singer’s career.

But the concert was a triumph, filled with stark moments such as Cash singing the stunning line, “I shot a man in Reno / Just to watch him die" or performing "Greystone Chapel," a song written by Folsom inmate Glen Sherley, serving a five-to-life term for armed robbery. 

But inevitably, myth has grown around much of the concert, notably around the song “Folsom Prison Blues.” Though Cash did have several run-ins with the law (chiefly over drugs) and the image he cultivated as an “outlaw” with buddies Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, Cash was inspired to write the latter song not out of personal experience but after watching the film Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison (1951).