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

that made Appel sit up and take notice: “Saint In The City,” and the one which shook a metaphorical stick at every nun who’d ever tried to get this novice apostate to toe the line, “If I Was The Priest.”
    Springsteen had not been idle in the six weeks since he finally signed on the dotted line, but neither had Appel. Having talked strategy with Appel, the singer was astonished when “about three weeks later” Appel told him, “We’ll start at the top. I got you an appointment with John Hammond.” As Bruce later described it, “It was amazing to me, reading [Scaduto’s] book, and then…find myself sitting there in
that
office.” But rather than speak for himself, he again allowed a third party to do the talking, almost with catastrophic results.
    He described the scene to Nelson a few months later: “In we go, and Mike, who is a funny guy, he gets into it, he jumps up and here we are with John Hammond and Mike starts hyping John Hammond, ‘I want you to know, John, this guy’s heavy.’” Hammond subsequently informed Springsteen “that he was ready to hate me.” From that moment forth, Hammond viewed his relationship with Appel as essentially combative. Appel, though, insists Hammond never lost his cool:
    Mike Appel : When we went in, he had his sunglasses set on top of his flattop crew cut. He was very cordial. We walked in and Bruce sits down with his guitar, and I feel it’s incumbent upon me to say something. I say to him, “I’ve grappled with lyrics myself. This guy makes it seem like it’s nothing to write reams and reams of poetry.” And [Hammond is] nodding, you know, okay, okay. Then I said, “I can’t believe he’s written as many things as he has in such a short period of time, at such a high degree of quality.” He started to look at me like he thought I was starting to hype [him]. But he didn’t say anything, he was just looking. And I said to him, “In short, you’re the guy who discovered Bob Dylan for the right reasons. You won’t miss this.” He said to me, “Please sit down.”
    By the time Springsteen was ushered into the plush offices of the A&R man with the Vanderbilt bloodline coursing through his veins, he was left with precious little time to make his mark. Appel, though, knew what worked and had prepped him to start with “Saint In The City.” From that opening couplet they had Hammond on board: “I had skin like leather and the diamond-hard look of a cobra/ I was born blue and weathered but I burst just like a supernova.” It was now Springsteen’s turn to nearly blow it. The next song he played Hammond was a new one, the turgid “Mary Queen of Arkansas,” for which Springsteen continued to maintain a mystifying admiration. As Hammond later related, “I thought that was a little pretentious, and that’s when I asked him if he had anything that was outrageous…and then he played me ‘If I Was The Priest.’ [It was] then I knew that he had that whole natural gift that you can’t learn.” He also knew for sure that “he could only be a Catholic.”
    According to Hammond, “I [then] arranged for him to come down to the studio…the next day, but my stipulation was that I didn’t want Appel there. Bruce and I worked about two hours together. Alone.” Appel andSpringsteen did a victory jig outside the old CBS building on 57th Street, and spent the rest of the day deciding what other songs they should spring on the CBS scout. However, this was 1972, and the word of John Hammond had long stopped being law at the label. He would need the okay from above to sign anyone, let alone a kid with a guitar, a pushy manager and no track record (unlike in September 1961, when he signed Dylan without any demo lest
that
voice scared the suits off!). On May 3 Springsteen arrived promptly at two, and was ushered into the in-house demo studio, the very one that had served CBS, and Columbia before it, for the past quarter of a century. But, whatever Hammond’s