E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band by Clinton Heylin

wishes, Springsteen and Appel were still joined at the hip:
    Bruce Springsteen : Columbia was very old-fashioned: everybody in ties and shirts; the engineer was in a white shirt and a tie and was probably fifty, fifty-five years old. It was just him and John and Mike Appel there, and he just hits the button and gives you your serial number, and off you go. I was excited…This was my shot, I had nothing to lose. [1999]
    Four of the twelve songs demoed that day would eventually be released on 1998’s
Tracks
, including the still-turgid “Mary, Queen,” with which he opened the afternoon session. He also had the steel-cold nerve to play Hammond two songs on which the ink was still wet, “Growin’ Up” (a superior spin-off from the earlier “Eloise”) and “Does This Bus Stop At 82nd Street?.” Among the seven songs which never made the passage from demo to debut LP (or
Tracks
) were some that shone a brighter light into the recesses of this recidivist’s mind. Notably, “Two Hearts In True Waltz Time,” which concerned itself with an illicit affair between a cop and a frustrated wife, “the ultimate crime/ two hearts locked in true waltz time.” Among forty-plus lines were two that exposed an unvarnished inner reality: “She needs to be real/ He needs to conceal,” though the rhyming dictionary was again overused (“She swings on a vine across the state line”—oh dear). “If I Was The Priest” also received its definitive rendering, though it would not even make it to the first-album sessions, a month hence. Hammond knew he had found a diamond in the rough. In fact, over the years he would come to insist that their demo was “better than any tape Bruce has made since, because Bruce is [now] so uptight about perhaps overshadowing somebody else in the band.” (In 1981, hewould send Springsteen a copy of the tape as a reminder of what might have been. Springsteen’s “response” was
Nebraska
.)
    For now, Hammond had a more important recipient in mind, Clive Davis, head of the label and a persistent champion of Dylan in the days when he had needed label support, and not the other way around. Five days later, he sent Davis the dub and a memo: “Here is a copy of a couple of the reels of Bruce Springsteen, a very talented kid who recorded these twelve songs in a period of around two hours last Wednesday…I think we better act quickly because many people heard the boy at The Gaslight so that his fame is beginning to spread.” Davis responded the next day, “I love Bruce Springsteen! He’s an original in every respect. I’d like to meet him if you can arrange it.” The meeting evidently transpired. Davis told Frederic Dannen, “Springsteen came to my office for a
final audition
[my italics]. I heard his material, I believed in him.
I
signed him.” For now, Springsteen (and Appel) had the most powerful man at the label on their side. So much so that the singer would later send up this surreal situation in his intro to assorted 1976 performances of “Growin’ Up”:
    “I get to the CBS building with my manager. We get in the audition elevator, a special elevator marked ‘X’. We shoot up to the clouds, passing the stars, passing all the planets. We finally get up [there], the doors open up, they frisk me a few times, and there at this big, solid gold desk, in a long, white robe, with a little wreath around his head was Clive Davis. I said, ‘Mr. Davis…I wanna be a rock ’n’ roll star.’ But first he heard my confession. And [then] he said, ‘Sign here.’”
    Unfortunately for Hammond, he quickly discovered he was going to have to go through Mike Appel. He nobly proclaimed some years later, “I didn’t want to deal with Mike Appel at all, but I have a sort of loyalty—if someone brings me an artist I feel I
have
to deal with them. It’s not right to go behind the guy’s back.” In fact, he did everything he could to extract Springsteen from his prior legal arrangement with Appel: