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

some drug rehabilitation center [to crash for the night], and then someone comes up to them and says, ‘The confederate angels are coming down tonight and we’re all gonna fight together.’ Needless to say, it all erupted the next day, so I got rid of the horn section after that, ’cause I figured I was gonna have to start playing clubs. It was the only way to make it.”
    Ken Viola suggested that what actually happened was “Mad Dog” Lopez got into a fight with one of the trumpet players, a not-uncommon occurrence. The band limped through March, even as Springsteen secretly signed on the dotted line, tying himself to Appel and Cretecos as producers and publishers for the next five albums. He had seemingly now committed himself to the idea of being a songwriter, not a Jersey bandleader. But if later comments can be believed, he never intended to stay in this solo wilderness for long:
    Bruce Springsteen : It got to the point where I couldn’t afford a band any more, and [so] I split up the band I had. I wrote a mess of songs by myself, on acoustic guitar and I went up and I auditioned for CBS, so everybody thought I was an acoustic folk singer. I put my band back together when I got a record deal. [1975]
    Appel, for now, remained wholly in the dark about Bruce’s band-plans. Not that it mattered a great deal at this stage. His first concern was getting Springsteen to sign that production deal, and then to secure him a record deal. Simple. As Spitz told music-biz historian Fred Goodman, his boss was a true believer: “He never thought he was rolling the dice: he knew what he had.”
    Springsteen, though, was innately suspicious. Intimidated by any business matter, he initially played dumb. Not everyone was taken in. Spitz, for one, knew a front when he saw one: “He was nothing in a social situation…He had a mousy girlfriend who did all his talking for him, and he had a different one every week. But they were all the same variety: very mousy, very New Jersey, very Gentile, very uneducated.”[MOTH]
    Finally Appel called him out on all his stalling, forcing a response. As Springsteen later told Appel’s counsel: “It was a basic deal, [Appel] said. I took it, looked at it once, and brought it back. I told him I didn’t know. He said, like, ‘Come on.’” What was he holding out for? Other alternatives were less than zero, and both parties knew it. In the end, Springsteen signed his name—and not in an unlit parking lot, as legend suggests—to a contract that was, in Appel’s own words, “boilerplate. It was always 12% of retail, the producer gets 3%, the artist gets nine.” At the very time Marty Thau was trying to get the New York Dolls to sign a fifty-fifty deal with him and his business partners, Appel was the one risking the shirt from his back, not the kid from Freehold.
    In order to try and recoup some of the upfront costs they were about to incur, Appel and Cretecos were looking to demo some of the better songs they had heard their protégé play with a view to placing them with artists who let others write their material, a dying practice ever since Dylan plugged in at Newport but for now the only viable way to get Springsteen’s songs out into the world. It was also already apparent that Springsteen had way too many songs for a single record. And the pile was growing bigger by the day. As Appel fondly recalls, “He would come upfrom Asbury Park in the morning, and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got some new songs I want to play you.’ He’d come up, pour his heart out. We loved everything…He was fully formed. It was so original; we were all just thunderstruck.” Their prodigal surrogate-son was equally amazed, but showed no interest in locating the source of all this analysis-in-song:
    Bruce Springsteen : Last winter I got so hyped up, almost getting a guilt complex if I didn’t write. A lot of these songs came out all at once—like “The Angel”…Because people had more or less requested I play