Sometime in 1984, When E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg saw a bunch of potential covers for Bruce Springsteen's next album, he immediately noticed Annie Leibovitz's shot of his behind in jeans. “My comment, jokingly, was, 'I like that because that's the view I've always had,'” Weinberg says in the new episode of our show. Rolling Stone Music now podcast. “They all laughed and then chose that shot. And after that it was a steamroller.”
In the new episode, Weinberg and E Street Band keyboardist Roy Bittan take an in-depth look at the making of Bruce Springsteen's greatest album. He was born in the USA — released on June 4, 1984 — and the Brucemania that followed, including the making of the “Dancing of the Dark” video with Courteney Cox. I am going here for your podcast provider of choice, listen Apple Podcasts the Spotifyor just press play below — here are some highlights from the interviews.
Bittan prides himself on the simplicity of the album's title track. “The song is just two chords,” he says. “Sometimes you can't be afraid to be primitive, so to speak… To be able to get right down to your gut, and just lay on two chords and a riff, that's quintessential rock and roll. Now that I was using a synthesizer is almost irrelevant. I could play it on the piano the same way.”
Steve Van Zandt's acoustic rhythm parts were more important to the album than it seemed. “I can't stress enough how important Steve was to the rhythmic thrust of the songs that ultimately didn't make it,” says Weinberg. “His acoustic guitar, which I heard a lot while we were recording, provided a very similar context to Keith Richards, for example, on 'Street Fighting Man.'
The band was convinced that the best outtakes from the album – songs like “My Love Will Not Let You Down” – were potential smashes. “We used to be like, 'Oh, these are all number one songs,'” says Bittan. “I think Bruce would write in one direction and then something else would come out and he'd write in it [other] direction. And then he would finally find what he wanted to say and dime the rest of the songs, whether they were number one hits or not.”
Weinberg was the first person to ever hear “My Hometown.” “One of the times I stayed at his house,” he recalls, “there were two bedrooms and mine was next to his. Late at night. I remember him writing and I could literally hear him through the door writing 'My Hometown' on his acoustic guitar. And I remember that clearly. But when he came to record it, he had done it with a Linn drum, just the beat that ended up on the record. But he wanted me to replace the drum machine. And I transcribed what he had more or less put in his house.”
It's nearly impossible to accurately replicate the exact keyboard sounds on the album, due to the quirks of the Yamaha CS-80 analog synthesizer Bittan was using (though he switched to a digital synth on “Dancing in the Dark”). “In a way it was a crude instrument,” says Bittan, “because it had these toggle switches. I think there were four switches and it turned filters on and off. And that's how you adjust or change your sound. The funny part of it, it wasn't a gradual toggle switch. You just moved it and good luck getting it back to where it was the day before because there was no way of knowing. It's really quite funny what they did. I'll never understand how they could create an instrument that was so advanced, but still couldn't figure out how to make the dial work.”
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