4th of July, Asbury Park

by Daniel Wolff

  The song's alternative title could have been "Farewell from Asbury Park." Because this boardwalk is the opposite of a tourist attraction; it's a place to leave. Why exactly, Springsteen doesn't and maybe can't say. "I just got tired," he sings, "of hangin' in them dusty arcades, bangin' them pleasure machines." By the end of the song, he's made up his mind. "For me," he declares, "this boardwalk life is through." And almost as an aside, he adds softly, "You ought to quit this scene, too."

  Davey Sancious, who's playing the cascading keyboards, remembers that the whole band felt that way. "We all wanted to get out. Absolutely! . . . It was just: let's go. Let's go!" Springsteen has written that this Asbury Park is "a metaphor for the end of a summer romance." It could just as well stand for adolescence itself. Or, for the larger idea behind those pleasure machines: what the founding fathers called the pursuit of happiness. However large you want to make the metaphor of Asbury Park, the song says it's over. With Federici's oompah accordion behind him, you can hear Springsteen simultaneously kissing the past good-bye and holding it close. His nostalgia for the old American shore town— for summer romance, for the promised land that once was— makes this a declaration of independence, but not of freedom.

  Springsteen's second album turns, at the end, to New York City, which he calls "my getaway from small-town New Jersey." The rave-up, "Rosalita," announces that rock 6k roll is his ticket out, and his destination is the big time. But this record didn't get him there. Released in the summer of 1973, it earned good reviews and, again, few sales. "It was," recalls drummer Vini Lopez, "like they shelved it." This despite a fall and winter tour that extended the band's reputation for exhilarating, exhausting live shows. When they got back to Asbury, they were still playing The Sunshine In and The Student Prince.

  Asbury had entered what Sancious delicately describes as its "post-prime era." On the beachfront, the massive old hotels were getting razed. On the West Side, city fathers had decided to change Springwood Avenue's image by calling it Lake Avenue. The change didn't go much deeper than that despite the election of the city's first black councilman, Dr. Lorenzo Harris. Whether you called it Springwood or Lake, it remained what the New York Times described as "a vista of gray, lifeless buildings." The city's last public housing project had been completed in 1958. Almost sixty percent of the West Side's housing stock dated back to before 1940.

  With two not very successful records behind him, Springsteen was twenty-five. He was making he recalls, maybe $200 a week and living in a ratty shotgun apartment in West Long Branch. He spent his time listening to sixties pop artists like Roy Orbison and the Ronettes, changing the personnel of his band, and trying to discover that sound. He knew it was some mix of the old reliable chords and the contemporary reality of gas shortages and a president about to resign in the disgrace of Watergate. All around him, the music scene was fat with nostalgia. An Asbury club called The Magic Touch on Second and Ocean featured the Coasters, the Chiffons, and the Drifters, while Convention Hall would headline the pseudo-doo-wop band Sha Na Na and Frank Sinatra Jr.

  Springsteen's third record wouldn't come out for another year and a half. But he had the title track, "Born to Run," well enough in hand to premier it in the spring of 1974. Springsteen describes the song as a "turning point," and the album that would grow up around it as "where I left behind my adolescent definitions of love and freedom." Years later, Springsteen would perform acoustic versions of "Born to Run" that highlighted the doom built into it, but the song as first recorded is a raving, saxophone-driven roar of hope. By day, he's out on the streets of what he calls "a runaway American dream." Without naming it, he announces, "This town rips the bones from your back / It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap / We gotta get out while we're young." And then he rams into the one-line chorus: " 'Cause tramps like us, baby, we were born to run."

  Not till the break do we get to see where we are. Then, Springsteen focuses in on the boulevard by the Palace, the amusement park, the kids "huddled on the beach in the mist." As the song finishes— on a highway "jammed with broken heroes"— we expect this heartbreak of a town to disappear into the distance. Thanks to rock 6k roll, the lovers have broken free, right? They're about to find out, once and for all, "if love is real." But that moment doesn't come. Someday, maybe, they'll reach a better place. Till then— for now— forever?— they're born to run.

  Springsteen's tramps don't make it any farther out of Asbury than Stephen Crane's did in their horse and buggy. Instead, "Born to Run" sets up the parameters. These kids start with broken promises, with the future as a lie. Asbury Park personifies that collapse. It's a death trap. The only way out is down a road that, gauging by the revved-up nostalgia of this song, leads back through Ronnie Spector to the whisper of Frank Sinatra and beyond: back to the sacred heart of rock 6k roll. "Born to Run" set the standard. Then, as Springsteen says, he spent the next year trying to make the best rock & roll record ever.

  As Springsteen was creating music from the ruins of Asbury Park, its city fathers were looking for ways to rebuild. But they were caught in a kind of undertow. What economists called "the longest and deepest economic recession since the end of World War II" began late in 1973. While nineteen million new jobs would be created during the 1970s, ninety percent of them would be in the service industry. The irony was that the country as a whole seemed to be headed for the kind of make-nothing economy that Asbury was trying desperately to leave behind.

  Back in 1970, after the "urban unrest," the New Jersey state Assembly had proposed a new growth industry: legalized gambling. That bill died, but in 1974 the Assembly once again called for a public vote on establishing state-run casinos. Supporters included the mayor of Atlantic City and Mattice's successor in Asbury Park, Mayor Ray Kramer. Both old resort towns were on their last legs: their boardwalks collapsing, their pleasure domes out-of-date, their ghettos expanding. The only economy they'd ever known was the tourist trade. The only future they could imagine involved revitalizing their beachfronts. If gambling would do that, bring on the casinos.

  New Jersey governor Brendan Byrne led the movement. Legalized gambling, the argument went, would fight unemployment, which was at six percent nationally, nearly eleven percent for blacks. Plus, it would do so without raising taxes. And state overseers would make sure organized crime didn't get its foot in the golden door. That fall, a group calling itself the Tourism Development Council of New Jersey launched a half-million-dollar publicity campaign supporting the bill. Two weeks before the November vote, a poll showed almost sixty percent in favor. It looked as if New Jersey was about to become Las Vegas.

  But the pro-gambling forces hadn't factored in the strength of the moral opposition, which dated back to Prohibition and beyond. Religious and civic groups united in what they called the No Dice coalition. The church led the way. In Red Bank, a Baptist pastor worried that gambling would "create a carnival atmosphere . . . just like in Nevada." Honky-tonk towns like Atlantic City and Asbury might want that, but as a Methodist minister pointed out, nothing in the bill "contained" gambling to just the shore. "If it first came to Atlantic City, and then to Asbury Park," the papers quoted a Catholic spokesperson, "it would eventually spread throughout the state like a cancer." A leader of the Christian Scientists added, "We don't need the temptations of getting something for nothing."

  It sounded like Asbury's old battle against sin, and the Methodist Church weighed in heavily. On the Sunday before the vote, a letter from the bishop of the United Methodist Church was read from pulpits throughout the state. The bishop called on Methodists to telephone "out-of-town friends, relatives, and Christmas card lists and urge a no vote." By then, twenty of New Jersey's twenty-four newspapers had decided to oppose the bill. Though the Asbury Press could see the obvious economic advantages, the editors worried that the open-ended language meant the state was "handing the casinos to private interests, including mobsters." In the days just before the vote, that fear took over, fueled by the testimony of the U.S. attorney in ch
arge of investigating Jersey's organized crime: "The very same interests which have allowed Atlantic City to deteriorate will be the sole financial beneficiaries of casino gambling."

  In a last-minute moral stampede, New Jersey voters defeated the referendum by an overwhelming three-to-one margin. Asbury's Mayor Kramer was "frankly disappointed." So was the mayor of Atlantic City, who called on the state "to come to the aid of [its] resort towns." If gambling wasn't going to lead the revival, something had to.

  Asbury Park turned, as it always had, to its beachfront. City leaders came up with a proposal to extend the boardwalk inland to Cookman Avenue. The idea was to turn sunbathers into shoppers, even if there weren't many sunbathers anymore— or shops. Forty percent of the city's seventeen thousand residents were African-Americans; citywide unemployment was running at eighteen percent; thousands waited for low-income housing. Meanwhile, kids still roamed through the charred remains of Springwood Avenue without the recreation or jobs that had been promised decades before. And Asbury wanted to extend its boardwalk. At the hearing on the proposal, a resident described only as an "elderly black man" rose to speak: "All my life here, I've always heard 'boardwalk, boardwalk, boardwalk,' and never has there been any similar concern for the West Side." No response was reported.

  Springsteen built his third album, Born to Run, around the title track. It came out in the fall of 1975 to a wave of critical enthusiasm and publicity, including the singer appearing simultaneously on the covers of both Newsweek and Time. The Asbury Press ran a small item, but there's no indication the city felt that this tramp music had anything to do with Asbury's real-life problems, or its future. After all, this was only rock 6k roll: teenage talk about cars and guitars and girls.

  In some ways, that's right. As soon as you drop the needle on Born to Run, the narrator's asking his girl to come down off her porch, get in his car, and leave town. This is their "one last chance to make it real." And as the song "Thunder Road" rises and booms like the surf itself, Springsteen announces their destination: together, they'll drive into the night to "case the promised land." Where that is— where Thunder Road leads— he doesn't say. Except that it's elsewhere. "Mary climb in. / It's a town full of losers, and I'm pulling out of here to win."

  A triumphant sax solo follows, but the song ends before Mary ever actually leaves the porch. Soon, the next cut promises, they're going to "bust this city in half," and Springsteen knows just how it'll happen. Asbury's avenues run north to Eighth, followed by Deal Lake Drive, which means you could count the lake itself as the city's Tenth Avenue: the barrier to the outside world. Rock 6k roll is how you break what Springsteen calls the "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out." And the key to Springsteen's brand of rock 6k roll, the song declares, was found when Clemons— the "Big Man"— joined the band. "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" doesn't mention race; it doesn't have to. The cover of Born to Run shows Bruce leaning on Clarence's broad shoulder. With Sancious and interim drummer Ernest Carter departed to play jazz, Clemons is now the only black member of the E Street Band and carries the full weight of symbolism. During their live shows, Springsteen would famously slide the width of the stage on his knees to kiss the saxophonist full on the lips. The band was still playing to almost all-white crowds. But here was the world as it might be: rock 6k roll equality, the integrated boardwalk.

  At the same time, Springsteen's breakthrough album is also, as he says, full of dread. "Desperate lovers" park by the beach. "Sometimes," he sings, "it seemed you could hear the whole damn city crying." And at the end of "Backstreets," Springsteen's lovers realize they might not be able to walk free. "After all this time / to find we're just like all the rest / Stranded in the park / and forced to confess." When Robinson Crusoe was stranded, he'd turned to the Christian life; James Bradley had founded Asbury on that ideal. But in this twentieth-century version, the stranded want out. And because there weren't many legitimate ways to escape, people found illegitimate ones. "Meeting Across the River" is the black-market version of the one last chance: a hustler's dream of scoring a quick two grand and making everything all right. All a listener needs to hear is the slow, minor-key melody to know that this deal's not likely to go down. But it's the guy's only shot, and all through this collection of songs, Springsteen keeps putting hope next to disappointment like bars in a cage. He celebrates the ones who "reach for their moment / and try to make an honest stand"— then describes how they wind up "wounded / not even dead." This is Jungleland. "You're not necessarily on the Jersey Shore any­more," Springsteen says of his record. "You could be anywhere in America." The other way to put that is that anywhere in America has become Asbury Park.

  Born to Run rose to number three on the charts and carried Springsteen beyond Tenth Avenue once and for all. The heroic themes, high-octane music, and the small-town imagery struck a nerve. Springsteen might still be a cult figure— without a hit single or Top Forty radio play— but the cult was now huge and growing. A live show broadcast from New York City's Bottom Line helped spread the word. And with Springsteen's fame came Asbury Park's. A new club, The Stone Pony, opened on the boardwalk where the old Mrs. Jay's had once stood. The Pony quickly became the focus of the Shore Sound, which included Springsteen, South-side Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, and a handful of less well-known bands. "When the Upstage closed," as one musician put it, ". . . The Pony became that place." Fans started coming to Asbury to hear the music but also to find the promise in the songs. To see exactly where "the hungry and the hunted explode into rock & roll bands." They found a city that, officially anyway, seemed to ignore their local hero. The Asbury Press had a small item about Springsteen's old music teacher and how remarkable it was that this shy boy had ended up famous. But beyond that, even if it had wanted to, the resort town was too drained to capitalize on its growing fame.

  By the summer of 1976, Born to Run had sold a million copies. On the Asbury beachfront, most of the old hotels had closed and stood facing the ocean with plywood nailed over their windows. The big brick Berkeley-Carteret had shut down, and there was talk of making it a residential center for seniors. In the two years since the defeat of the gambling bill, New Jersey's unemployment rate had jumped to nine percent, one of the highest in the nation. As the state joined the rest of the country in celebrating the nation's bicentennial, there didn't seem to be any new ideas on how to restart the economy. So, the state Assembly turned once again to gambling. In this new proposal, the casinos would still be state-regulated, but there were two major changes. A percentage of the gaming revenues would now go to help "the elderly and disabled." And this bill proposed casinos in Atlantic City only.

  That didn't please Asbury Park. Mayor Kramer opposed the referendum. But the pro-gambling forces had soon amassed a war chest of $1.4 million. They took out ads arguing that gambling was not only a "painless" way of increasing revenues but "a unique tool of urban redevelopment." Atlantic City had a ghetto a lot like Asbury's. Casinos would provide hundreds of entry-level jobs. Working on the assumption that the majority of these would go to Atlantic City's underemployed blacks, forty branches of the state's NAACP came out in favor of the bill. For those worried about organized crime, proponents argued that legal casinos meant "undercutting" the Mob and reducing the "temptations" that corrupted state politicians. The governor repeatedly assured voters the state would oversee the whole operation. Finally, the state's Gambling Study Commission took the position that this bill was about freedom and democracy. To forbid gambling, the commission argued, was "puritanical, hypocritical, repressive and archaic."

  In what the Asbury Press called "a money-tight, job-tight state employment picture," the bill passed by 250,000 votes— a result that many felt was even more surprising than Jimmy Carter's successful presidential bid. Atlantic City was jubilant. Resorts International, which had largely bankrolled the publicity campaign, raced to be the first legal casino on the East Coast. By the Fourth of July, 1978, this most recent variation on the American dream was open for business. Atlantic City's old Ch
alfonte-Haddon Hotel had been totally remodeled, and seventy-five thousand people a day were rolling dice, playing poker, and pulling the slots. The local gambling industry was well on its way to creating over fifty thousand jobs and attracting billions of dollars in investment.

  But folks were already beginning to see the flip side. Nearly all of the investments were centered on gambling. In the new gold rush, ninety percent of local businesses failed. By 1985, casinos would own a quarter of Atlantic City's real estate. Plus, the gambling jobs didn't go to the city's poor. Cooks and croupiers were brought in from outside the community and, far from revitalizing the ghetto, tended to settle out in the suburbs. Atlantic City's unemployment rate stayed higher than both state and national rates, sometimes nearly twice as high.

  Part of the problem was that the casinos followed James Bradley's vision. Or was it Disneyland's? Visitors not only bet their money in the shiny new pleasure domes, they ate, drank, slept, shopped, exercised, and were entertained there. As one expert put it, "The laws that established casinos made them islands unto themselves." Prosperity on the beachfront didn't spread inland. As a study by the Twentieth Century Fund put it, "You don't see any spillover. The casinos are walled-off universes . . . In terms of revitalizing the city, it [legalized gambling] is a disaster."