Bruce Springsteen: To me, The Animals were a revelation. The first records with full blown class consciousness that I had ever heard. “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” had that great bass riff, that…was just marking time. That’s every song I’ve ever written. That’s all of them. I’m not kidding, either…It was the first time I felt I heard something come across the radio that mirrored my home life, my childhood. And the other thing that was great about The Animals was there were no good–looking members…They put [Burdon] in a suit, but it was like putting a gorilla in a suit…Then they had the name…unforgiving and final, and irrevocable…the most unapologetic group name until the Sex Pistols came along. [2012]
He was also, by his own admission, “nuts about” Manfred Mann and The Searchers. And, though he only namechecked ’em once in those seventies interviews, he was clearly an early fan of Them, Van Morrison’s band of Belfast bruisers who gave American garage bands three of their most essential anthems, “Gloria,” “Baby Please Don’t Go” and “I Can Only Give You Everything.” Springsteen’s initial singing duties in his first proper band, The Castiles, would be on a Them U.S. A-side (“Mystic Eyes”). And at 1978 concerts he managed to namecheck one Them classic (“Lonely Sad Eyes”) while parodying the spoken intro of another (“If You and I Could Be As Two”), during the positively Morrisonesque “Sad Eyes” sequence to “Backstreets”: “I remember you standing on the corner, with your hair all up, in that pretty new blue dress that your baby bought you…Standing there with your sad eyes, your lonely, lonely, lonely, sad eyes…”* For now, though, the young Bruce was content to learn the three chords to “Gloria,” only mimicking the guttural snarl of an Eric Burdon, a Paul Jones or a Van Morrison in the isolation of his own bedroom.
When he did attempt to join his first high-school band, around 1965, it was as a guitarist, pure and simple. Apparently called The Rogues, they gave him a harsh lesson in economics: “I got thrown out of my first band because they told me my guitar was too cheap.” But it was all he—or, more accurately, his mother—could afford. He certainly couldn’t afford to smash up a guitar at the end of a gig. Imagine then his shock when he saw his first British rock band in the flesh, if it really was The Who at Asbury Park. He later claimed how sometimes onstage he would “remember being at a Who concert at Convention Hall in Asbury Park in ’65…Maybe there’s a fifteen year-old kid who’s [also] thinking of playing the guitar…I want to inspire that guy.”
Actually, the first documented time The Who played the Convention Hall was in the summer of 1967, by which time Springsteen had found an all-American hero to replace Elvis in his pantheon of inspiration, and had embraced all three electric albums with which Bob Dylan revolutionized popular music and turned lightweight pop into solid rock. Bruce famously recalled his introduction to the nasal tones of Electric Bob when personally inducting the great man into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in January 1988:
Bruce Springsteen: The first time that I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother and we were listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind…“Like a Rolling Stone.” And my mother, she was no stiff with rock ’n ’roll, she used to like the music, she listened, she sat there for a minute and she looked at me and she said, “That guy can’t sing.” But I knew she was wrong. I sat there and I didn’t say nothin’, but I knew that I was listening to the toughest voice that I had ever heard. It was lean and it sounded somehow simultaneously young and adult. And I ran out and I bought the single and I ran home and I put it on, the 45, and they must have made a mistake in the factory because a Lenny Welch song came on. The label was wrong. So I ran back, got it and I came back and I played it. Then I went out and I got Highway 61 [Revisited] and that was all I played for weeks; looked at the cover with Bob in that satin blue jacket and the Triumph motorcycle shirt. And when I was a kid, Bob’s voice somehow thrilled and scared me, it made me feel kind of irresponsibly innocent, and it still does, when it reached down and touched what little worldliness a fifteen-year-old kid in high school in New Jersey had in him at the time. [1988]
This vivid account of that day is slightly at odds with versions previously given on The River tour. At a November 1980 show he claimed that, because all he had in the car was “this junky speaker, I couldn’t hear what all the verses were. I couldn’t hear all the words. But I remember when he got to the chorus, I always remember that line that just asked, ‘How does it feel to be on your own?’” It articulated in one cogent phrase the rebellious spirit of the music he’d been listening to since he turned into his teens:
Bruce Springsteen: If you were young in the sixties and fifties, everything felt false everywhere you turned. But you didn’t know how to say it…Bob came along and gave us those words…Man, “How does it feel to be on your own?” And if you were a kid in 1965, you were on your own. Because your parents—God bless them—they could not understand the incredible changes that were taking place. You were on your own, without a home. [2012]
“Like a Rolling Stone” (and the album it introduced, Highway 61 Revisited) certainly had as pronounced an effect on American popular song, and culture, as had Elvis and The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. For one, as Bruce went on to explain at Dylan’s induction, it demonstrated someone who “was a revolutionary. The way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind and showed us that just because the music was innately physical, did not mean that it was anti-intellect. He had the vision and the talent to make a pop song so that it contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve, and…changed the face of rock ’n’ roll forever and ever.”
For the next year and a half Bruce immersed himself in All Things Dylan. He also undoubtedly soaked up the various Byrds cover versions that AM disc jockeys generally found easier to stomach; and presumably Them’s stunning recasting of “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue,” to which he later tipped a hat with the Bruce Springsteen Band’s February 1972 rendition. But, as he fully admitted to Crawdaddy founder and Dylan authority Paul Williams, he never felt the slightest inclination to venture back into Dylan’s preelectric phase. His reneging from folk music was the point at which this apostate tuned in:
Bruce Springsteen: I listened to Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61, Blonde on Blonde. That’s it. I never had his early albums and to this day I don’t have them, and I never had his later albums. I might have heard them once, though. There was only a short period of time when I related; there was only that period when he was important to me, where he was giving me what I needed…I was never really into the folk or acoustic music thing. The one thing I dug about those [electric] albums was…the sound. Before I listened to what was happening in the song, you had the chorus and you had the band and it had incredible sound, and that was what got me. [1974]
By the time he was picking up the likes of Blonde On Blonde, an expensive double-album in a fold-out sleeve, Bruce finally had a little money of his own, which he’d earned from playing locally as the rhythm guitarist in The Castiles, named after a dodgy brand of cigarillos. He had apparently reached at least some kind of rapprochement with his bemused parents, one that enabled him “to play weekends somewhere and make a little extra dough…which is what my parents used to say that I could do. That was allowed.” At the same time he had started doing some intensive homework, though not the kind his parents still hoped for: “I remember going to see bands when I was a kid, watching the musicians from real close up, studying the way they moved their hands, then going home and trying to copy them.” He had got himself into The Castiles after he spent an intensive forty-eight hours learning how to replicate the guitar on “The Last Time,” the Rolling Stones’ breakthrough single—which was in itself quite a trick, because the guitar had been double-tracked.
The Castiles were the quintessential high-school band, with Springsteen the junior member content (for now) to stay in the backgrou
nd. But that diffident demeanor was revealed to be largely a front the minute they stepped out to perform. As bassist Curt Fluhr has recalled, “Put him onstage with a guitar and he lit it up. It was like somebody had plugged him in.” They provided him with his first band of brothers; though the Castiles’ frontman, George Theiss, was more interested in impressing Bruce’s elder sister than becoming his blood brother.
Remarkably, given how such bands rarely retained their shape for very long when cars and girls entered the frame, The Castiles lasted from 1965 right through August 1968. In May 1966 they even cut a record; albeit just for themselves. The two-sided single, “Baby I” b/w “That’s What You Get,” meant to demonstrate the something they’d got, was a curiously half-assed affair. Both songs, according to their indulgent manager Tex Vinyard, were “written in the backseat of a car…on the way to the studio…at the Bricktown Mall shopping center. George and Bruce wrote those. It was a rainy Sunday. [And] we had no extra strings, so through two-thirds of the songs there’s no E string.” Further compromises were required when they got there, as Springsteen himself recently revealed:
Bruce Springsteen: It was a tiny little room…and they couldn’t stand any volume whatsoever going into the microphones. We had to turn all our amps to the wall and literally put covers over them…The recording studio was not set up in those days for any kind of overdrive; they just simply weren’t ready to record rock bands in Bricktown, New Jersey in 1965 [sic]. But it was a big deal. [2010]
It has to be said that even in the unprepossessing pantheon of first formative efforts by later legends, The Castiles’ offering is particularly wretched. And if it convinced a young Springsteen that maybe they should get more serious, he was always fighting an uphill battle. He did at least convince the others to let him sing some songs: “Everybody in the band felt that I couldn’t sing at all. I think I got to sing one Dylan song. Over the years I started to sing a little bit more, [until] eventually…we ended up splitting…the vocals.” It proved a wise move, because as Vinyard notes, “Soon, we let Bruce sing ‘Mystic Eyes’ and The Who’s ‘My Generation’. That’s how we got the booking in New York.” He is referring to a brief residency at the fabled Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village, which was probably the full extent of the others’ musical ambitions. For Bruce, though, it was just a beginning:
Bruce Springsteen: When I started I wanted to play rhythm guitar in a local band. Just sit back there, play rhythm guitar…I didn’t wanna sing, just get a nice band and play rhythm. But I found out…that I just knew more about it than other guys that were in the band. So I slowly just became the leader. [1975]
The Castiles had run their natural course by the spring of 1967, as the prospect of graduation loomed and real life could begin. But still they persevered. By now, it was clear that Springsteen had no intention of giving up on his dream, even when he became a target for conformists to rag on, verbally or physically. As he informed The Advocate in 1995, “I was brought up in a small town [where] anybody who was different in any fashion was castigated and ostracised, if not physically threatened…Me and a few other guys were the town freaks—and there were many occasions where we were dodging getting beaten up ourselves.”
Unfortunately, he was ill-equipped to defend himself, something he had learned at the tender age of ten, as he revealed to a Berkeley crowd one night in June 1978: “You usually stop fighting by the time you’re 18 or 19, I stopped when I was about 10 ’cause I got beat all the time, these hands just were not dangerous weapons, you know. I remember I got in a fight with this guy, I beat the hell out of his hood with my forehead, you know (chuckles). Put dents into the thing.”
The troubled teenager was increasingly drawn to the bright neon lights of the Big City—where this boy could be free—and after those nights at the Wha (and possibly before) he began to bunk off school, hopping a bus to midtown. As he told one audience in January 1985, “I grew up in this small town. When I was sixteen, man, I hated that town; it seemed so narrow-minded and small-minded. I used to get on the bus, take Lincoln Transit to New York City. It used to feel so great when I got out at Port Authority. It was like, ‘Oh, man, nobody owns me up here.’” He was invisible. No secrets to conceal.
To preserve that new-found sense of autonomy he would sometimes stay out all night, even after he took the bus back from the city: “I used to have a sleeping bag stashed out in these woods, under these rocks…and sometimes if it got too late, I’d go out there and just unroll it and sleep in my friend’s car, sleep out there under the trees. That spot, sometimes it felt more like my home did than my house did. I guess, everybody needs someplace to go when they can’t go home.” *
If he was ill-prepared for a father’s fury, or fisticuffs with one of Jersey’s more conformist thugs, he was even less ready for military service. Unfortunately for smalltown America, the battle outside a-ragin’ was not only in their homeland, but also in the badlands of Vietnam. The specter of war loomed over all of his generation, and for him a college education, the one cast-iron way to beat the draft, seemed unlikely. Yet beating the draft was something he knew he had to do—“When I was seventeen or eighteen, I didn’t even know where Vietnam was. [I] just knew [I] didn’t wanna go and die!”
The first thing he needed to do was graduate high-school, which he did. His band even played the Seniors Farewell Dance ten days before graduation. But then he began the actual day, June 19, 1967, by skipping the graduation ceremony altogether, only for it to end with his father making one last, futile attempt to bring his son under his command:
Bruce Springsteen: By the end of high school I didn’t have much to do with anybody. I almost didn’t graduate because the kids in my class wouldn’t let me…They weren’t gonna let me graduate unless I cut my hair. So on the day of graduation, I left the house and didn’t come back. I went to New York and stayed with a friend in the Village, a guy who dealt drugs…So the phone rings and it’s my mother. Don’t ask me how she found out where I was. She’s saying there’s a graduation party over at my house, which I had totally forgotten about, and she wants me to come home. I say, “No way. I’m only coming home if there’s gonna be no big fight; I don’t want to come back and go at it all over again with my father. If he’ll promise no big fight, I’ll come home.” So, she says OK, no fight. Now, I show up with a girl. I don’t know what I could’ve been thinking of, but I show up with this girl and my father opens the screen door. He pulls me inside by the collar with one hand, leaves her outside…drags me up to the [bed]room, and takes out all the lightbulbs so I’ve got to sit there in the dark by myself. [1978]
Though he had shown absolutely no aptitude for formal education—perhaps because he never quite saw the point, once churlishly complaining “they always talked to your head, they could never figure out how to talk to your heart”—by September 1968 he had enrolled himself at the Ocean County Community College “in a liberal arts course,” a situation of which the Jersey Selective Service Board were promptly advised. He was off the hook for now, but as he related in his first-ever interview as a CBS artist, he no more fit in at Ocean County than he did in Freehold:
Bruce Springsteen: I was gonna get drafted and my parents wanted me to go to college. I got there and tried to take psychology, and I kept opening a book and seeing myself in all these different -isms. I thought, I can’t get into that. I realized you go into class and everyone would start talking about what the norm was, and I figured out I didn’t fit into that. So I said, “Well, I’ll try something else”…It’s not like it is today, where everyone has long hair. This was long ago. [So] I got sent down to the psychiatrist’s office. He [had] said, “I wanna see ya,” and he said, “I gotta tell ya the students been complaining about ya. Tell me what’s the matter.” “Nothing’s the matter.” He didn’t believe me, so I quit. [1972]
He preferred to castigate his fellow students and their conformist outlook rather than address his own failure to knuckle down and learn. He was still blaming them in 1984 wi
th the world at his feet, “I didn’t really fit in. I went to a real narrow-minded school where people gave me a lot of trouble and I was hounded off the campus—I just looked different and acted different, so I left school.” His parents must have despaired. His father, who had served in World War II, knew only too well that his son was not cut out for “fighting off the Vietcong.” And once the Jersey Selective Service Board were notified of his absence from college, he was summoned to a conscription exam in Trenton. Fortunately for him, the reckless side of his character had recently resulted in a “roadside jam” between his motorbike and another vehicle, and he had come off worse. He was judged 4–F, a physical wreck, unfit to serve. He returned home to give his parents the bad news. All his father said was, “Good.”
The summer before he arrived at Ocean College the other members of The Castiles finally accepted the inevitable. They had always seen the band as an enjoyable hobby, while their now-leader increasingly viewed music as his Mission in life. They also seemed slightly uncomfortable with the type of material he had started introducing into the set after they all, save the younger Bobby Alfano, graduated from high-school. Covers of Moby Grape’s “Omaha” and The Blues Magoos’ “One By One” sat uneasily with the likes of “See My Friends” and “Eleanor Rigby,” two of a handful of songs George Theiss now sang at their shows. In August 1968, the band played two farewell shows in Red Bank and Shrewsbury, and that was that. As George Theiss informed Backstreets, by that time “a couple of the guys were going to go to college. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Bruce was already working on his next thing. He was already jamming with the guys he would form Earth with. So…he just took on what bookings we had and went on.”
E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Page 3
