The River

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The following notes, written by Bruce, are taken from the book "Songs".

The sound and song content of The River was both a reaction to and an extension of the ideas explored on Darkness on the Edge of Town. Darkness had been a modern, technically produced studio album, less eccentric sounding and more conventionally recorded than Born to Run. On The River I knew I wanted more of the roughness and spontaneity of our live show. I was concerned about moving too close to the sterility of '70s record production. Steve Van Zandt, my good friend and guitarist, had joined the production team, which included Jon Landau and Chuck Plotkin. As veterans of the local New Jersey club scene, Steve and I enjoyed a strong, close relationship. Now together, we began to steer the recording of The River in a rawer direction.

This was the album where the E Street Band really came into its own in the studio. We struck the right balance between a garage band and the professionalism required to make good records. Plus, I had a clear idea of what I wanted to hear. I wanted the snare drum to explode and I wanted less separation between the instruments. Also, after the seriousness of Darkness, I wanted to give myself a lot more flexibility with the emotional range of the songs I chose. Our shows had always been filled with fun and I didn't want to see that left out this time around.

The first song we cut for The River was "Roulette," which I'd written on the tail of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. It had an appropriately paranoid lyric and an exciting track, but it never made it to the record. Next, we cut "The Ties That Bind," with the band playing in a wood paneled studio with open mikes over the drum kit to get that live resonance. Everything was splashing around. We weren't in complete control of the way everything sounded, but that was the idea.

Minus -at the moment- any grand strategy, I was just trying to write some good songs. If anything, I wanted to create songs that would sound good played by a bar band. To me, that was basically what we remained. All the years I'd been performing, I'd often start the show with something that sounded like it came out of the garage. In the past, these were the kinds of songs that fell by the wayside when we went into the studio to record. For The River, I wanted to make sure this part of what I did wouldn't get lost.

After some recording we prepared a single album and handed it in to the record company. When I listened to it later on, I felt that it just wasn't good enough. The songs lacked the kind of unity and conceptual intensity I liked my music to have. So we went back into the studio and another year went by. Many songs were cut, and many were judged not up to par. Part of the problem might have been the less meticulous, more instinctive way that I approached songwriting this time around. Once you have a few successful records under your belt, you become more aware of people's expectations. You can become too cautious. On The River I was determined to let the band play live and let the music happen. Some nights it worked, and some nights it didn't. It was in struggling to reconcile my previous and present recording approaches that the album found its identity. We decided to make The River a double record. I'd try for the best of both worlds: more pop songs in a looser conceptual framework.

The River got its emotional depth from its ballads. "Point Blank," "Independence Day," "The River," "Stolen Car" were all song-stories. "Stolen Car" was the predecessor for a good deal of the music I'd be writing in the future. It was inner-directed, psychological; this was the character whose progress I'd soon be following on Tunnel of Love. He was the archetype for the male role in my later songs about men and women.

The album got its energy from "Cadillac Ranch," "Hungry Heart," "Two Hearts," "Ramrod," and the other club rockers. This was the music I wrote to provide the fuel for our live show and to create a counterbalance to the ballads that began showing up more and more in my work. These songs provided an emotional release and an external point of view before the ballads returned you to the internal lives of the characters.

The River also was my first attempt to write about the commitments of home and marriage. Country music, once again, continued to be important. One night in my hotel room in New York, I started singing Hank Williams's "My Bucket's Got a Hole In It." I drove back to New Jersey that night and sat up in my room writing "The River." I used a narrative folk voice-just a gut in a bar telling his story to the stranger on the next stool. I based the song on the crash of the construction industry in late '70s New Jersey and the hard times that fell on my sister and her family. I watched my brother-in-law lose his good-paying job and work hard to survive without complaint. When my sister first heard it, she came backstage, gave me a hug, and said, "That's my life." That song crystallized my concerns and was a style of writing I'd develop in greater depth and detail on Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad.

The album closes with a title stolen from a Toy Acuff song. "Wreck on the Highway" is about confronting one's own death and stepping into the adult world where time is finite. On a rainy highway the character witnesses a fatal accident. He drives home, and lying awake that night next to his lover, he realizes that you have a limited number of opportunities to love someone, to do your work, to be a part of something, to parent your children, to do something good.