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

pushing for the band all along…I was a purist and Hammond was a purist. We were outvoted…I was so impressed by Bruce’s lyrics I said, “Who needs a band when you can write lyrics like that?”
    Bruce Springsteen : The record John Hammond would have liked would have been one that the first four or five cuts from
Tracks
sound like…And, listening back, he may have been right…The music [on that first record] was an abstract expression of my direct experience where I lived in Asbury Park at the time and the kinds of characters that were around; they call them twisted autobiographies. Basically, it was street music…Mike and his partner Jimmy [Cretecos] were always very production-oriented;…[so] everything was…compressed for a slightly hyped sound. And that’s the direction
Greetings
…went in. [But] I wanted a rhythm section…So what we ended up doing was an acoustic record with a rhythm section, which was the compromise reached between the record company, everybody else and me. [1999]
    If the battle lines were drawn early, the result was not a foregone conclusion. Springsteen in later years has suggested he had to work hard in orderto firmly tilt the album off its acoustic axis. Initially, as he has said, “You listen to people whose ideas and direction may not be what you want. But you don’t know that. [After all,] you just stepped off the street and walked into the studio…/…I wasn’t in the position where I was going to say, ‘No, I want to do it like this.’ I was just saying, ‘Let me do it.’” Though compromise—aka fudge—would eventually become the order of the day, the first studio session on June 7 was a strictly acoustic affair, Springsteen cutting “Lady and the Doctor,” “Arabian Night,” “Growin’ Up” and “Street Queen,” the best thing he cut that day, with him playing a Fender-Rhodes, a nod to the Stax sound of the late sixties. It never even figured in early handwritten song-sequences for the album. As it was in the beginning…
    Even when sessions resumed on June 26, the emphasis still seemed to be on Springsteen the solo artist as he cut acoustic renditions of “Does This Bus Stop,” “Mary Queen of Arkansas,” “Saint In The City” and “The Angel,” all songs demoed in similar form with Hammond. But the following day it was all change. For the first time, Springsteen brought along some friends from the Jersey shore; specifically, Vini Lopez, David Sancious and Garry Tallent. And the trio had already been prepped. According to Lopez, “One day I get a call from Bruce, ‘You wanna make a record?’…A couple of weeks rehearsing with the fellas, then we did the album. [But] Danny was on the outs. He had problems with ‘stuff.’ There were [also] other keyboard players on the album.” (Specifically, Harold Wheeler.) Tallent wisely didn’t have the nerve to challenge Hammond when he suggested bringing in stand-up jazz bassist Richard Davis, of
Astral Weeks
fame, to play on a couple of tracks: probably “Two Hearts In Waltz Time,” certainly “The Angel.”
    At this juncture, the intention seems to have been to make an album divided equally between all-acoustic and semi-electric excursions; five apiece—a presumably-conscious replication of
Bringing It All Back Home
’s half-electric, half-acoustic format. Of the partially plugged-in songs, three were also recorded acoustically—“Does This Bus Stop,” “Growin’ Up” and “Saint In The City”—whereas “Lost In The Flood” and “For You” seemingly exist only in electric configurations.
    The latter pair also happened to be the two most realized tracks on this original album, lyrically and musically. (Even if, for the next five years, Springsteen regularly encored with a
solo
piano version of “For You” thatsent chills through those lucky enough to catch it.) “Lost in the Flood,” in particular, raised the bar on his songwriting to date. When he claimed that, in this period, “I