Sometime in 1984, When E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg was looking at potential covers for Bruce Springsteen’s next album, he immediately recognized an Annie Leibovitz photo of his butt in jeans. “I jokingly said, ‘I like this one because that’s the view I see all the time,'” Weinberg says in a new episode of Us. Rolling Stone Music Now Podcast. “Everybody laughed and I picked that shot, and it was a dominating win after that.”
In the new episode, Weinberg and E Street Band keyboardist Roy Bittan offer an in-depth look at the making of Bruce Springsteen’s biggest album yet. Born in the USA — released on June 4, 1984 — and the subsequent production of the “Dancing of the Dark” video with blues aficionado Courteney Cox. Tune in here with your favorite podcast provider, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or press play below. Here are some highlights from the interview:
Bittan and Weinberg fondly recall the full-band version, which they have yet to hear. Nebraska In a session intertwined with the recording of the song Born in the USA “What’s interesting about the legend that’s developed around this material is that it wasn’t very good,” Weinberg says. “In fact, Unbelievably “It was a great song! It was nothing like what Bruce wanted to do. I remember recording the whole thing. It was very close to the E Street Band style and very similar to what we play now. It was awesome, and it was a rock record.” (That said, Weinberg clarifies that there was certainly no hard rock version of the ballad, performed in a restrained style like Bob Dylan’s “My Father’s House.”) John Wesley Harding.
Bittan is proud of the simplicity of the album’s title track. “This song is just two chords,” he says, “so to speak, don’t be afraid to be primitive… From the bottom of my heart, I just play two chords and a riff, and that’s the origin of rock ‘n’ roll. The fact that I used a synthesizer is almost irrelevant; I could have played it just as well on the piano.”
Steve Van Zandt’s acoustic rhythm parts were more important to the album than they might appear. “It’s hard to emphasize enough how important Steve was to the rhythmic drive of the final song,” Weinberg says. “I listened to his acoustic guitar a lot during the recording, which provided a framework very similar to what Keith Richards did on ‘Street Fighting Man.'”
The band was convinced that the album’s best outtakes, such as “My Love Will Not Let You Down,” had the potential to become big hits. “We were like, ‘Oh, these are all No. 1 songs,’” Bittan says. “I think Bruce writes a song in one direction, and then another song comes along and he writes a song in that direction. [other] He decided on a direction and finally found what he wanted to say. Fuck The rest of the songs, whether they were number one hits or not.”
Weinberg was the first person to hear “My Hometown.” “I was staying over at his house,” he recalls, “and it had two bedrooms, and my room was next to his. It was late at night, and I remember him writing songs. I could literally hear him writing ‘My Hometown’ on acoustic guitar through the door. I remember that so clearly. But when he came to record, he was on Linn drums, and he was just using the beats that were on the record. But he asked me to take over as the drum machine, and so I overdubbed on what he’d pretty much recorded at home.”
The album’s exact keyboard sounds are nearly impossible to accurately recreate due to the quirks of the analog Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer Bittan used (though he did switch to digital synths for “Dancing in the Dark”). “In a way, it was a crude instrument,” Bittan says, “because it had toggle switches — I think there were four toggle switches — that opened and closed the filters, and you adjusted and changed the sound with them. The interesting thing was, they weren’t stepped toggle switches. You just moved the switches, and it was hard to get them back to where they were the day before, because there was no way of knowing. It’s actually quite interesting what they did. I don’t understand how they could make such an advanced instrument, and they had no idea how to make the dials work.”
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