E Street Shuffle by Clinton Heylin

Author:Clinton Heylin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780335803
Publisher: Constable & Robinson Ltd

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* David Gahr was still taking shots for an album cover on October 16, suggesting a release was still on the cards.

* The line partially dates the recording by referencing the bombing of Philip Testa on March 15, 1981, a hit man for the mob known universally as ‘The Chicken Man’.

Chapter 8: 1981–82 – Reasons To Believe

I have the impression that I have only just begun to write since ‘The River’; that I have [now] touched upon matters which will never leave me without inspiration: love, hate, sex, hypocrisy in marriage, adultery. Matters about which . . . very little . . . ha[s] been said in rock n roll. – Bruce Springsteen, 1981

[The albums] after Born To Run . . . through Nebraska . . . were kind of my reaction, not necessarily to my success, but to what . . . I was feeling – what I felt the role of the musicians should be, what an artist should be . . . So I just dove into it. I decided . . . to move into the darkness and look around and write about what I knew, and what I saw and what I was feeling. I was trying to find something to hold onto that doesn’t disappear out from under you. – Bruce Springsteen, 1984.

As Ralph and Carter Stanley harmonically pointed out, the darkest hour is just before the dawn. Well, throughout the fall of 1981 Springsteen spent all his time penning song after song with that four a.m. feeling, and when he wasn’t doing this he was listening to Hank Williams, Robert Johnson and Suicide. (Thankfully, he excluded any British antidote to melancholy, as one spin of Richard Thompson’s ‘I’ll Regret It All In The Morning’ might just have tipped him over the edge.) He was shutting others out, repeating well-worn patterns of interpersonal behaviour again – in a partly-conscious attempt to drive another long-time girlfriend away:

Bruce Springsteen: There’s people who feel, ‘I get what I need when I go onstage and I don’t need the rest.’ I felt like that for a long time. I always got to a point in relationships where if it got too complicated or there was too much pressure, whether it was right or not, I’d say, ‘Hey! I don’t need this!’ . . . My fear of failure always held me back in dealing with people and relationships. I always stopped right before I committed to the place where, if it failed, it would really hurt. [1992]

The very person who had once proclaimed, ‘I eat loneliness, man. I feed off it,’ had again reached the place he would describe so convincingly in a 1984 introduction to ‘Racing In The Street’, ‘It´s hard to understand what brings people together and then what pulls ´em apart. You meet somebody, you think that they can take away all of your loneliness, when in the end nobody can take away the loneliness. You just hope that you can find somebody maybe that you can share it with.

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