The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
November 15, 2005
In the spring of 1974, Bruce Springsteen was a skinny, tousled 24-year-old Jersey Shore songwriter about to make his third album. He was under pressure. Although he was an East Coast club sensation and a rock critics' favorite, his first two albums hadn't sold enough to convince his label, Columbia, that he wasn't a flop. It could have been his last chance.
Yet he went into the studio not to make a commercial hit, but to make a masterpiece. "We had ambition to burn," said Jon Landau, who is now Mr. Springsteen's manager. He produced the album with Mr. Springsteen and his manager at the time, Mike Appel."We knew exactly what we wanted," Mr. Landau recalled in an interview last week. "We were not in it do something average. We were not in it to get any particular song on the radio. We were in it to do something great."
The result - after 15 months of writing and rewriting, relentless 18-hour recording sessions and the replacement of half the E Street Band - was "Born to Run," released on Aug. 25, 1975. It would transform Mr. Springsteen from a local sensation into an American rock archetype.
Thirty years later, Mr. Springsteen is rereleasing "Born to Run" in a box set (list price $39.98) that Mr. Landau described as a "victory lap." It includes a remastered CD of the original album and two DVD's: "Wings for Wheels," a documentary on the making of the album, and "Hammersmith Odeon, London '75," a two-hour concert film of Mr. Springsteen and the E Street Band going all out to win over a skeptical audience at his first concert in England. Tucked at the end of "Wings for Wheels" is another performance: Mr. Springsteen leading his 1973 band in Los Angeles, playing three songs, including "Thundercrack," which wouldn't surface until Mr. Springsteen released his collection of outtakes, "Tracks," in 1998.
The documentary, including video shot during the recording sessions that has not surfaced until now, shows some of the trauma of the recording process. Film of the London concert, which sat unwatched for three decades in Mr. Springsteen's archive, presents a heady, rambunctious triumph: unabashed Jersey guys running on nerves, adrenaline and virtuosity.
"Wings for Wheels" draws on video shot by Barry Rebo, who was then a Jersey Shore fan and friend of Mr. Springsteen and is now the chairman of Emerging Pictures, a national network of digital movie theaters. Mr. Rebo shot his first film of Mr. Springsteen on Super-8 in 1970, and went on to videotape Mr. Springsteen in the studio and onstage for a decade.
"If I wanted to be a cameraman, which was my goal, he was the most perfect subject I could have," Mr. Rebo said in a telephone interview on Sunday, before heading to Atlantic City to see Mr. Springsteen perform. "He was shy, but onstage he would change into this unbelievably charismatic musician."
Mr. Rebo amassed more than 100 hours of video and film of Mr. Springsteen, including his celebrated club shows at the Bottom Line in Manhattan and the Roxy in Los Angeles. "Either it was going to find its way to the public or it was going to be the ultimate home movie," Mr. Rebo said. Mr. Springsteen bought Mr. Rebo's material earlier this year, and the new box set offers the first public glimpse of it.
In 1974, Mr. Rebo brought an early black-and-white video camera into 914 Sound Studios in Blauvelt, N.Y., where Mr. Springsteen began recording "Born to Run." Mr. Landau politely described 914 as "a beat-up old funky studio"; among other things, the piano, which was at the core of the songs, would not stay in tune. Mr. Springsteen labored there for months, between playing club dates, over the four-and-a-half minutes of the song "Born to Run."
Thom Zimny, who directed "Wings for Wheels," said that virtually all of the music on the DVD is not from the finished album, but from the innumerable outtakes. (The DVD menus use snippets of studio conversation.) One fascinating section shows how the layers of the song "Born to Run" were stacked up, highlighting tracks within the song's dense mix. "There's no way to tell how many overdubs there were," Mr. Zimny said. When the song was complete, the E Street Band keyboardist David Sancious and drummer, Ernest (Boom) Carter, quit. Their replacements, Roy Bittan on piano and Max Weinberg on drums, are still in the band.
Mr. Springsteen also struggled in Blauvelt with the album's epic closing song, "Jungleland," which he would not finish for another year. "They were stuck," Mr. Rebo said. "It was Bruce trying to hear something and articulate it to people who had never made a record like that."
Using a camera modified with the tubes from a security camera so he could shoot in low light - sometimes just the light of the meters on the control-room console - Mr. Rebo captured an exhausted-looking but determined Mr. Springsteen, dissatisfied with the sound and calling for endless retakes. Yet when Mr. Springsteen got behind a microphone to sing "Jungleland," he had clearly thought through every dramatic inflection, from whisper to howl.
Mr. Springsteen invited Mr. Landau, a rock journalist who had proclaimed Mr. Springsteen "rock and roll future,"to the recording sessions, and Mr. Landau started offering advice. He convinced Mr. Springsteen to leave Blauvelt and move to a first-class recording studio, the Record Plant in Manhattan, where the album was finished.In "Wings for Wheels," Mr. Springsteen describes the album as the most theatrical songwriting of his career. He says he strove to make the songs cinematic, complete with scene-setting introductions, larger-than-life characters and atmospheric interludes. "The initial lyric would have been like a bad B picture," he observes. "The end product was supposed to be like a good B picture imbued with a certain spiritual thing.""Born to Run" is "the dividing line" between his adolescent and adult work, Mr. Springsteen says. It is also as much an endpoint as a beginning. Suitelike songs like "Thunder Road" and "Jungleland" have more in common structurally with elaborate, multipart songs like "Rosalita" than with Mr. Springsteen's later songs.
"He didn't want to make a sequel," Mr. Landau said. "And he's never made a sequel. There was a culmination of part of his writing that he doesn't repeat."
Longtime fans of Mr. Springsteen may be surprised to see Mr. Appel appearing prominently in the documentary. He was the manager who helped Mr. Springsteen get his recording contract and who pushed the reluctant label to keep pouring more money into the making of "Born to Run." Mr. Landau said, "Mike was very good at just knocking down doors and, you know, beating people up till he got what he had to have."
Mr. Appel and Mr. Springsteen produced the song "Born to Run" before Mr. Landau began working with them. But Mr. Landau came to supplant Mr. Appel as Mr. Springsteen's main adviser. After the album was released - and beyond the period covered by the documentary - Mr. Landau and Mr. Appel would grapple over Mr. Springsteen's career.
The long-term contract that the young Mr. Springsteen had signed with Mr. Appel's production company, Laurel Canyon, gave the company control of Mr. Springsteen's publishing rights and gave it more royalties per album than Mr. Springsteen would receive.
In 1976, when Mr. Springsteen wanted to begin work on his next album, with Mr. Landau producing, Mr. Appel refused permission and later got an injunction to prevent them from working together. Mr. Springsteen had his contracts audited, and one accountant's report described them as "unconscionable exploitation." After nearly a year of lawsuits and countersuits, Mr. Springsteen and Mr. Appel reached an out-of-court settlement. Mr. Springsteen got his publishing rights, and he and Mr. Landau began recording "Darkness on the Edge of Town."
Still, Mr. Appel might have inadvertently helped Mr. Springsteen finally complete "Born to Run." Mr. Appel had booked a tour assuming that the album would be finished. According to Mr. Landau, the last possible day of recording before the band hit the road was a marathon in which Mr. Springsteen and the saxophonist Clarence Clemons pondered every note of Mr. Clemons's saxophone solo in "Jungleland" for some 16 hours.
"That was a nightmare," Mr. Landau said. "He had a vision in his head. And the only way he could work it out was through a certain amount of trial and error with Clarence. And he was in a very obsessive endgame on the album."
Mr. Landau recalled: "He was finishing with Clarence in one room. The band was in another room. They were mixing 'Jungleland' without the sax, waiting to put it in, in another room. And at 7 o'clock, 8 o'clock in the morning they just rolled out of the studio, got in a van and drove up to Providence and began the tour."
The full theatricality of Mr. Springsteen's songwriting for "Born to Run" comes through in the Hammersmith Odeon concert DVD. The show was filmed and recorded in 24-track sound. Mr. Springsteen had almost forgotten about it until he started looking through his archives recently. "I was told, 'He's going to be sending over some footage,' " Mr. Zimny said. "It was 16 cans, unlabeled, from 1975." The films were silent, separated from the recording, so Mr. Zimny had to do some lip-reading to connect images to songs.
Onstage, Mr. Springsteen wears a floppy knit cap that gets nearly as much of a workout as he does; band members have wide-brimmed hats and loud suits with bell-bottom pants. They tear through the songs: "Born to Run" has probably never been played as fast before or since, while "She's the One" starts with Mr. Springsteen's lone harmonica and builds its Bo Diddley beat into a syncopated jackhammer. And if Mr. Springsteen was nervous - he had spent the afternoon rampaging through the theater getting rid of promotional fliers that seemed like too much hype - it barely shows as he struts and clowns and emotes and sweats. "We were seeking that spotlight out, we were trying to do something that would be noticed," he says in the documentary. "You wanted something that was explosive." He was just a Jersey guy, ready to take on the world.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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