Bruce Springsteen

Alfred Publishing Company

Excerpt

Chapter One

In 1971, after years of playing music in high school gyms, beach clubs, and bars up and down the New Jersey Shore, I found myself at a crossroads. The local music scene was overflowing with Top 40 cover bands. There wasn't a lot of interest in hearing original music, which is what I mainly played. At twenty-one, I already had a good deal of local success, playing to as many as three thousand people at my own shows. My band Steel Mill and I had done it all without a recording contract. But my first trip to California with the band had opened me up to new musical ideas. Upon returning home, I changed musical direction and began to perform under my own name. But now it'd gotten hard to find steady work playing my own songs with a band. I decided I was going to write some music to survive on with just myself and the guitar.

One day a former manager and friend, Carl "Tinker" West, drove by my house in Highlands, New Jersey. I was sitting on the front steps. He shouted through the car window that he was going up to New York City. He had met a music publisher named Mike Appel and why didn't I take the ride with him and play him a few songs? I grabbed my guitar and hopped into Tinker's car and a couple of hours later met Mike. After he heard some music, he said he was interested in working with me, wanted to publish my songs, and together we'd see where it might lead.

I'd been going through some hard times in New Jersey for a while, and I planned, once again, to leave the state. Plus, I had heard plenty of promises before. So I left that day telling Mike I was interested, but without making a commitment. That Christmas, Tinker and I drove cross country to California. I visited my folks and spent several months trying to make a living as a musician in the Bay Area. It didn't work out. There were too many good musicians, and I'd left my rep as "bar band king" in Jersey. So it was back home for me. I did a few gigs at the Shore with the band for seed money and made a call to Mike Appel in New York City. I met Mike's partner, Jim Cretecos, and they signed me to an exclusive recording, publishing, and management deal.

Though I'd never known anyone who had made a professional record, I knew two things: one, I wanted to sign to a record company as a solo artist-the music I'd been writing on my own was more individual than the material I'd been working up with my bands. The independence of being a solo performer was important to me. And two, I was going to need a good group of songs if I ever did get the chance to record.

I went home and started to work on the songs for Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ They were

written in a style that had developed out of my earlier acoustic writing. From the late '60s on, I always had a notebook full of acoustic songs. I'd do the occasional coffeehouse, but mostly that material went unused. The songs required too much attention for a crowded bar on a Saturday night.

I did most of my writing in the back of a closed beauty salon on the floor beneath my apartment in Asbury Park. There I had an Aeolian spinet piano my aunt had given me, and amidst the old hairdryers and washing sinks, I wrote the songs that comprised Greetings.

Greetings was the only album where I wrote the lyrics first, setting them to music later. I'd write the verses, then pick up the guitar or sit at the piano and follow the inner rhythm of the words. I traveled to New York City on the bus, trying whatever I'd written latest out on Mike and Jimmy. They were enthusiastic, so I kept on plugging.

Most of the songs were twisted autobiographies. "Growin' Up," "Does This Bus Stop," "Blinded by the Light," "Spirit in the Night," "For You," "Lost in the Flood," "Saint in the City" found their seed in people, places, hang-outs, and incidents I'd seen and things I'd lived. I wrote impressionistically and changed names to protect the guilty. I worked to find something that was identifiably mine.

After a few disappointing auditions, Mike talked his way into Columbia Records, and I was signed by the legendary A&R man John Hammond and Clive Davis, president of the label. We cut Greetings in three weeks. But Clive handed it back and said there was nothing that could be played on the radio. I'm glad he did; I went home and wrote "Blinded by the Light" and "Spirit in the Night." With the previously missing Clarence Clemons on saxophone, these songs were recorded, and the record was finished.

I never wrote in that style again. Once the record was released, I heard all the "new Dylan" comparisons, so I steered away from it. But the lyrics and spirit of Greetings came from a very unselfconscious place. Your early songs come out of a moment when you're writing with no sure prospect of ever being heard. Up until then, it's just you and your music. That only happens once...

Continues...

Excerpted from Bruce Springsteenby Bruce Springsteen Copyright © 1996 by Bruce Springsteen. Excerpted by permission.
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