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InterMedia Arts Center 2/2/08
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Springsteen, Bruce
Listen to Bruce Springsteen:
Whether it was restlessness or an extremely focused personal vision is uncertain, but Bruce Springsteen changed bands and musical directions quite often before he was finally signed with Columbia Records. A stint with a Jersey Shore bar band called the Castiles led him to organize his own group, called Steel Mill. Despite their steadily increasing recognition, including a promotional offer from concert promoter Bill Graham, Springsteen left the group with little warning. He temporarily fronted an experimental outfit called Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom, then formed the Bruce Springsteen band, only to quit that line-up as well. Afterward, he took a hiatus from playing with bands and concentrated on polishing his songwriting.
It was around this time that he was introduced to Mike Appell, an employee of a music publishing firm who once fronted a top 40 band called the Balloon Farm ("A Question Of Temperature", #37 in 1968). Appell had extraordinary faith in Springsteen's talent and must have sensed his commitment to the spirit of rock and roll, as well as his passion for its raw power of communication. They eventually signed contracts that gave Appell control over Springsteen’s recording, publishing and management. It was a move that one day would cause immense legal difficulties, but for the time being, it got Springsteen what he had always wanted. Appell arranged an audition with the legendary John Hammond at Columbia Records, and thus began Springsteen's long-term affiliation with his only record label. To say that this sort of instantaneous acceptance is a rarity is a gross understatement. Label executives are constantly barraged with requests for auditions and receive enough tape to fill a series of airplane hangars, so the fact that Springsteen was even able to get in the door, no less be signed immediately by the first person who heard him, is astounding. It serves as a testimony both to Appell's confident selling power and to Springsteen's raw talent.
Appell himself produced the sessions for the first album, entitled Greetings From Asbury Park, New Jersey, which sold poorly when it was first released in 1973. While the public largely ignored him, the rock press buoyed Springsteen's career through these early years. The Wild, The Innocent, And The E Street Shuffle fared only slightly better. Constant touring helped to increase his core audience while letting everybody else know that Springsteen was much more than the Bob Dylan-influenced clone he was being touted as. Nevertheless, Columbia grew increasingly uncertain of Springsteen's salability and paid an advance for his third album only after much hesitation. Pulling out all the stops, Springsteen and Appell spent the lion's share of the advance on one specific recording. Emulating Phil Spector’s kitchen-sink approach to production, while incorporating a maniacally anal-retentive attention to detail, they completed one song, "Born To Run," in half a year. When they finally presented the belated recording to Columbia, the label executives shrugged indifferently, said it was inappropriate for single release (!) and announced their intention to withhold any additional advance. Worse, the immense number of overdubs that were crammed onto sixteen tracks meant that the song was virtually impossible to edit. With his biggest supporters gone (Hammond was semi-retired, and label chief Clive Davis was removed from his position under scandalous circumstances), Springsteen's career was hanging in the balance. It wasn't until the college-age son of the label's new chief executive, Irwin Segelstein, chided his father that they reconsidered their position.
It was around this time that two of rock and roll's most pertinent critics, Dave Marsh and Jon Landau, began promoting Springsteen vigorously. Landau had gotten close enough to his subject to actually enter the recording studio during the making of Born to Run and earned a production credit in the process. Before he saw it coming, Appel's tenuous hold on Springsteen's career was wrested from him. Springsteen had become increasingly dissatisfied with Appel's management techniques and was simultaneously becoming more reliant on Landau. After a prolonged legal battle, Appel was out and Landau was in.
Amid this craziness, Springsteen's career burst wide open. Born To Run was a hit. His face graced the covers of both Time and Newsweek for their October 27, 1975 issues. Unfortunately, the lawsuit would destroy whatever precious momentum this attention generated. It would be three years before he released a fourth album, and by then, the record industry had changed sufficiently to suggest that Springsteen might not fit in as well as he once had. The album Darkness On The Edge Of Town did well enough, as did its follow-up, The River, but it wasn't until 1984 that Springsteen's career would meet, then eclipse, the recognition he received back in 1975.
Springsteen's struggle for control seemed to have taken a personal toll on his songwriting. Whereas his previous work had been buoyant and uplifting, his songwriting now reflected his realization that things might not always be what they seem. In short, he sounded like a glass-is-half-empty kind of guy. By the time he released the stirringly emotional and chillingly stark performances of the Nebraska album, a record that contains nothing but undoctored tapes of haunting demo recordings, Springsteen left no doubt that there was "a (great) meanness in this world." In comparison, his next album, Born In The U.S.A., seemed positively brilliant - not to say that Nebraska wasn't a work of genius, but that it was all shadows, gloom and dead ends, while Born In The U.S.A. seems to reassert that a bright light still might lie at the end of every tunnel. One lingering effect of Springsteen's legal wrangling may have been his coming to terms with imperfect solutions. Some damage can be irreversible, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to wake up every morning and be overwhelmed by our problems. Springsteen seems to have adopted a philosophy that was something like this, and in Born In The U.S.A., he applied it to the national spirit of America during the Ronald Reagen years.
With such a complex vision, coupled with his newfound ability to express himself in terms of national concerns, Springsteen's songwriting well seemed to have become bottomless. The homespun wisdom of his characters contains the simple profundity that can only come from hard-earned experience. On "Born In The U.S.A.", the title song from the album, Springsteen's lyrics are graphically realistic in their portrayal of a spurned Vietnam veteran. The song hovers on the brink of despair, but the martial beat of the music betrays an underlying strength and sense of pride that are desperately trying to rise to the surface. The music contains one endless chord, a drone that is as unchangeable as the righteous rage of the song's protagonist, and which can be interpreted to symbolize the momentum of a nation besieged by its collective ignorance. The song's visceral effect might well have provided some of the impetus for the government to classify Vietnam veterans as a socially disadvantaged group.
On Nebraska, Springsteen summarized his darkened vision by concluding that it was unbelievable how, with so much injustice in the world, every person can still manage to "find some reason to believe." In its despair, Nebraska comes dangerously close to chastising an entire nation for what Springsteen saw as its blind faith and ignorance. "Born In The U.S.A." confronts that self-imposed blindness by forcing us to open our eyes. What we see might not be so pretty, but if we look straight ahead, we'll have to admit that awareness is infinitely better than ignorance. Maybe, if we can adapt to what we see, we will realize that the glass is actually half full.
 
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