At a New York studio called the Power Station, Bruce Springsteen kept recording until he had more than 50 songs. The New Jersey rock singer had been at it since March 1979, trying to capture something that kept slipping away. It was meant to be one album, a single record called The Ties That Bind, but he shelved it. Bruce Springsteen released The River on October 17, 1980.
Chasing a live band sound
Springsteen wanted the sound of his band, the E Street Band, playing live in a room. Not polished, not layered, but raw like a group in a bar. He, his manager Jon Landau, and band member Steven Van Zandt produced the sessions together. The problem was that too many microphones made the picture muddy, so the recording dragged on for a year and a half.
The answer turned out to be more, not less. The River came out on 17 October 1980 as a double album with 20 tracks, running well over an hour. Its style mixed heartland rock with rock and roll, R&B, folk, and country. The lyrics dealt with love, marriage, and family, and the characters were inspired by the writer Flannery O'Connor. The finished record was mixed by Chuck Plotkin and Toby Scott at Clover Studios in Los Angeles, a process that took about five months. Ken Perry then mastered it at Capitol Studios in Hollywood. By the time the album reached stores, it had passed through several hands and studios on both coasts.
Hungry Heart and the number one
One song almost never made it. Springsteen had written "Hungry Heart" for the Ramones, but Jon Landau convinced him to keep it for himself. Flo & Eddie, the duo from The Turtles, sang backup vocals. The single went into the US top 10, and the album itself became Springsteen's first to hit number one on the Billboard chart.
The cover photograph was taken by Frank Stefanko, the same photographer who had shot the cover of Darkness on the Edge of Town. Inside, the music sounded like a band playing together in one take, with a garage feel that critics later praised. Springsteen had finally gotten the live sound he wanted, and it paid off commercially faster than anything he had released before. Some of the songs recorded during those sessions pointed toward a quieter, sparer future. Tracks like "Independence Day" and "Point Blank" hinted at the direction Springsteen would take on his next solo album, Nebraska, released in 1982. The River carried the seeds of that later work inside its louder, full-band arrangements.
Mixed reviews, fastest-selling record
Not everyone agreed on the result. Some reviewers felt he was reworking old ideas, and the album's coherence is still debated. But The River gave Springsteen his first chart-topping record in the United States, and it became the fastest-selling album of his career up to that point.
The road from a scrapped single album to a double LP was not a straight line. Springsteen recorded far more than he could release, and the leftovers later appeared as B-sides and on compilations. The River itself became one of his most praised works, even as critics argued about whether it held together as one statement. Not every song stayed with Springsteen. He wrote "Roulette" as a response to the Three Mile Island accident, and he gave "From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)" to Dave Edmunds, who released it in 1982. He also passed "Dedication" and "Your Love" to the singer Gary U.S. Bonds. Springsteen later admitted he had left behind a whole album of three- and four-minute pop songs in the archive.
What began as a frustrating attempt to bottle a bar-band energy ended with a number one album and a hit single. The River proved that abandoning a finished record could be the right move, and it set Springsteen up for the decade ahead.
The River proved that abandoning a finished record could be the right move, and it set Springsteen up for the decade ahead.