E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band

by Clinton Heylin

  As of the summer of sixty-eight, Bruce Springsteen considered himself a working musician. Which meant, one, he hung out with other musicians and, two, he stopped absorbing influences from the radio and began experiencing them directly, sometimes from seeing successful acts in person (when The Doors came to the Convention Hall in August 1968, Bruce made sure he was there); other times, by sitting and watching the competition at the local afterhours clubs where time did not hang so heavy on his hands. He would later claim his infatuation with Dylan also stopped right about then, telling Paul Williams “I was into John Wesley Harding. [But] I never listened to anything after John Wesley Harding.” (He was not alone.)

  At around the same time he tuned out the AM radio station/s that had served as mentor and muse for his entire time as a teenager: “AM radio was fine right up until about 1967, when FM came in and started to play long cuts, without any commercials, and you could see the disappearance of the really good three-minute single.” Springsteen did not immediately mourn this loss. In fact, he seems to have embraced the new gestalt, making his new combo, Earth, the FM equivalent of the strictly-AM Castiles. Modeled along the lines of great British three-piece bands like The Who (sic), Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Earth may have been devised to make Springsteen its all-singing, all-playing focal point, but the songs of Cream, Hendrix and the Yardbirds would be its credo. (The one surviving set-list contains three Hendrix songs and no less than seven drawn from Cream’s repertoire.)

  That he was not quite ready to take on such a heavy burden of musical responsibility was evidenced by the rapid recruitment of a keyboard player, none other than former Castile Bob Alfano. Unfortunately for Bruce, the summary dissolution of that band had led Alfano to make other arrangements, forming Sunny Jim with fellow Castile, Vinny Manniello, so Springsteen could not always rely on Alfano being available. Sometimes he had to make do with a three-piece point of view.

  If this arrangement was an unsatisfactory one, so was having to stick to songs Asbury Park audiences knew if he wanted to maintain a live presence on the Jersey shore. And Asbury Park audiences remained an identifiable type, as this homeboy knew only too well. His 1978 description of it as “the only beach-greaser town…it was like Newark by the sea,” just about summed it up. (As he often joked, “If you got enough gas in your car you carry on to Atlantic City, if not then Asbury will just have to do.”) The loner’s own priorities, though, had not greatly changed: “I wanted to play the guitar, wanted to have a good band, and I devoted most of my energy to that. I had a few friends.”

  At this point the one and only thing that set him apart was his dedication. Even the idea of getting a job and settling down gave him the jitters. (When his friend George Theiss got married in 1969, Bruce apparently told him straight out “You’ll never make it now.”) Boadwalk habitué Ken Viola told Marc Eliott “He was…the first person from that scene who never really worked a ‘day’ job. Everybody else did, but not him. He never ate much, he’d crash at people’s places, he’d sleep on the beach. He was always saying he was going to make it as a musician, that was his big thing, ‘I’m going to make it, I’m going to make it.’” Springsteen subsequently insisted he did have “a few small jobs before I started playing, but when I picked up that guitar, that was when I could walk down my own path.” [DTR]

  All he needed now was some fellow travelers who wanted to share the journey. And, much to his surprise, it turned out there were many like-minded people along the shore. They just needed a place to mingle, and to call their own. That place was The Upstage. It was founded by a local couple with an interest in music themselves, Margaret and Tom Potter (she was the Margaret in Margaret & The Distractions). When they ran into drummer Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez at The Pixies Inn in Farthingdale, one evening in the winter of 1969, they told him straight out, “We’re gonna start this club in Asbury, it’s for jamming.” It was a remarkably visionary ambition. To make the place even less lucrative, they didn’t serve booze, and so had no need of a license:

  Vini Lopez: The Upstage had two segments: it had an eight to twelve thing, for kids; and then, the one to five segment: you had to be 21 to get in, but there was still no alcohol. It was just a coffeehouse…It was just downstairs, then they put the upstairs in which was more of a rock-oriented room. Downstairs was more acousticy. It just evolved. It was a place for all the guitar players to knock each other off. When Bruce was there, there wasn’t anything else like that going on. [But] he just commanded the audience. In them days he was a guitar slinger. He just wanted to play music.

  Bruce Springsteen: The Upstage Club was an anomaly…They served no booze. It was open from eight until five in the morning. I’m not sure how they did it!…[But] it was a place where bands came from Long Island, from Pennsylvania, all over, in the summertime—at the end of their gigs, they would go to the Upstage…So you saw everybody get up and play, just people from all over. And everyone [wondered] who was gonna be the next gunslinger…There were no amps; the amplifiers were in the walls…You would plug in, basically, to the wall, and this huge sound would come roaring out…No one had to bring any equipment. That was the point…You picked up whoever was there and played, and demonstrated your wares for whoever was around…I met most of the E Street Band there; and Southside Johnny. So it was a very pivotal place…/…When I walked in the first night Vini Lopez was on drums, Danny was on organ and it was a revelation because we had good musicians and there were people playing some original music. [2010/1999]

  Up until the moment he found The Upstage, Springsteen had been just another lost soul looking for a scene. As he put it in 1975, “Straight…was all there was at the time. There were groups like the Rah Rahs and the Greasers, and I jumped back and forth, trying to figure out where I fit in, ’till I found out I didn’t fit in. I didn’t dig the scene that either [band] had happening. So consequently I didn’t do anything. I just kinda was.” Hence the covers bands. It took The Upstage to convince him he could get away with playing his own material; that he would be allowed to stretch out and show everyone his self-loading pistol; and that there were musicians on tap who could play follow the leader.

  As Springsteen suggests, the first night there he met Vini Lopez and Danny Federici, two key components in every band he formed between 1969 and 1974. According to Lopez, he had already introduced himself to the Earth frontman at a local Italian-American club, IAMA, when Springsteen enthused about the drummer’s spell in Sonny & The Starfires, a much-vaunted local covers band who regularly triumphed in those ubiquitous battles of the bands. (As Springsteen fondly recalled in a 2012 speech, these comprised “twenty bands at the Keyport Matawan Roller Dome in a battle to the death—so many styles…overlapping…You would have a doo wop singing group with full pompadours and matching suits, set up next to our band, playing a garage version of Them’s ‘Mystic Eyes,’…next to a full thirteen-piece soul show band.”)

  Lopez told the young Bruce about this new club, “and ’bout a month later me and Danny walk in and there he is playing, and we got up and jammed and we made a band.” It would seem Springsteen probably went to The Upstage looking to make a specific connection. But even he can’t have imagined that pretty much every musician of consequence he would work with between then and 1975, Clarence Clemons excepted, would be found congregating at this altar to extemporization. Everyone in the place seemed to be in a band, or playing musical chairs between bands.

  David Sancious, a local whizz-kid at the keys, captured the flavor of the place describing the night he went there with his friend, Carl Hughes, who already knew Springsteen. As Sancious remembers it, Bruce asked Carl “if he wanted to jam. Bruce had been going there to jam for a while…Carl told him I played keyboards, could I play too? Bruce said, Sure. So we ended up there for hours…After that night, Garry [Tallent] came up to me and asked me if I was in a band. I had just quit school…He had a band together with Bill Chinook, so I played with them…[Then] Steve Van Zandt, [Southside] Johnny Lyon and I h
ad a blues band for a while…Just the three of us.” (Ironically, the one band Sancious and Van Zandt would never play in at the same time was the E Street Band.)

  “Southside” Johnny was another character with whom Springsteen liked to swap notes. Though they rigorously maintained separate destinies, each would happily bitch to the other about how hard it was to find regular paying gigs. And it was a struggle. As Johnny recalls, “You’d go into one bar and the people would really like you and treat you fairly. You’d go to another bar four miles away, the next night, and the crowd would hate you, the guy wouldn’t pay you, and they’d threaten your life…[But] you always had the Upstage Club to go to when you finished the bar work.”

  Springsteen had chanced upon a galaxy of musical possibilities, all orbiting around this one club where drugs and drink played no part. Which suited Springsteen just fine. He was a one-man drug-free zone. Not even “weed.” As he stated in 1996, “I didn’t trust myself…putting myself that far out of control. I had a fear of my own internal life.” And so, while other key players in later musical configurations formed less abstemious musical gangs, Springsteen set about riveting components to Steel Mill into place. Only later would he realize what a unique place The Upstage had been, eulogizing its spirit in his 1976 sleeve-notes to Southside Johnny’s I Don’t Wanna Go Home; which followed Born To Run into the shops, though not the charts:

  “You will never see most of these names on another record besides this one, but nonetheless, they’re names that should be spoken in reverence at least once, not ’cause they were great musicians (truth is, some of them couldn’t play nothin’ at all) but because they were each in their own way a living spirit of what to me rock ’n’ roll is all about. It was music as survival and they lived it down in their souls, night after night. These guys were their own heroes.”

  The Indian summer of 1976 woulda seemed a long way off in the winter of 1969, when Springsteen first visited the surf factory that would serve as communal home, rehearsal space and management office for the longest lasting and most fondly remembered of his pre-E Street bands, first called Child, and then Steel Mill. The factory in question was owned by Tinker West, who fancied managing a band that played the kinda music he liked, Heavy. Originally from California, he had been putting out feelers ever since he saw Vini Lopez and Garry Tallent in a band called The Moment of Truth early in 1968. According to Lopez, Tinker approached him to say, “You guys are great. If you ever do anything original, look me up.” And so, when Lopez first sat down with Bruce, almost the first question he asked was, “Do you write any music?” “Yeah, I’ve got a few things written.” Another Upstage regular, bassist Vini Roslin (known to everyone as “Little Vini”), was also of one mind: “I wanted to play in a band that was going to do original songs in a style that was close to what Cream and Jimi Hendrix were doing at the time. And that’s what Bruce was about back then.”

  But Lopez, Federici and Roslin were all amazed when their frontman turned up with so many songs already written. Federici later complained: “Bruce was writing a song a day. It was crazy. It got so I was dreading going to rehearsals, knowing that there was going to be a bunch of songs to be learned every time. And all that material is gone now. Bruce is the kind of guy who just says, ‘Oh—that was yesterday,’ and throws it all away.”

  Springsteen would unconvincingly claim: “The main reason I started doing my own arrangements and writing my own songs was because I hated to pick them up off the records. I didn’t have the patience to sit down and listen to them and figure out the notes and stuff.” Yet he displayed extraordinary patience crafting his own stuff. As Roslin recalled “No one [in Child] worked outside jobs, so basically all we did was practice. We spent a lot of hours in a surfboard factory; it was there we’d rehearse all day long.” Which isn’t to say that they didn’t play any covers. That would be a recipe for extinction. And Child did wanna play. In fact, Springsteen suggests they “played for the Fireman’s Ball…We’d get there and just blow everybody’s mind…played for the Boy Scouts once, did every kind of gig. High school dances, clubs, anything, we did it. Played in the mental institutions for the patients.” They even “did a benefit to bus protesters to Washington to protest against the Vietnam War.”

  They also played a free gig at Monmouth College, one of their first gigs as Child. It was there that guitarist Lenny Kaye first caught them: “All I remember about the set was that the lead-singer was a really great guitar-player, he played a black Les Paul and he took command of the stage. They finished their set with a ten-minute version of [Donovan’s] ‘Season of the Witch,’ which was pretty much all solo. And I thought, this guy’s great! I found out his name was Bruce Springsteen.” Their paths would cross again just before Kaye became Patti Smith’s long-term guitarist and sidekick in the fall of 1973.

  Even after the band changed its name to Steel Mill (someone else claimed dibs on the Child moniker), the ethos remained the same. Lopez articulates it thus: “It was a jam session when we played a lot of times. Never did the songs go twice the same way. Bruce would start it, you pick it up. It was coming from that Upstage [vibe].” Steel Mill became life, the universe and everything to the young colt; especially after his parents snipped the straggling remains of any metaphorical umbilical cord by moving to California that spring. Lopez even thinks the band “moved into the house on South Street for a little while, but that didn’t last because we didn’t have any money. So we went back to the surf factory.”

  In an early account of his parents’ transcontinental relocation, Springsteen blamed the decision to head there on his then-girlfriend, who had “been to Sausalito, and suggested they go there…So they got to Sausalito and realized this wasn’t it. My mother [told me] they went to a gas station and she asked there, ‘Where do people like us live?…’ and the guy told her…the peninsular. And that was what they did. They drove down south of San Francisco and they’ve been there ever since. My father was forty-two at the time.” Looking back in 2010, Springsteen couldn’t help wondering what the hell Doug and Adele had been thinking: “My parents did a strange thing…they moved away from me in 1969. Usually you leave home—my parents left home! My sister and I remained in Freehold…I was financially independent at that time, to the tune of twenty or thirty bucks a week…[But] my parents had nothing. When they left for California, they had $3,000.”

  For the next nine months Springsteen harnessed the band’s energy and steadily developed a reputation that stretched as far as Richmond, Virginia, but no further. If he had plenty of songs, there was lotsa room in each of them. Most nudged the ten-minute mark. One particularly relentless version of “The Wind and The Rain” clocked in just shy of nineteen minutes. Thankfully, this was the era when prog-rock stalked the land, and no-one called time on a song or a set. But anyone looking for a direct lineage to the E Street Band sound in Steel Mill would search in vain. A humbler Humble Pie, with a touch of Ten Years After two years too late, the four-piece might have been a shoreline sensation but in middle America they would have been stoned alive. Even the guys in the band were convinced they were plying their wares on the wrong coast, and when Tinker revealed that he still had a few good contacts out west, a plan was cooked up to hit the other Asbury, Haight-Ashbury:

  Vini Lopez: We went out to California…Christmastime 1969, Tinker knew some people. ’Course, when we went, we visited Bruce’s parents…Tinker was friends with Quicksilver [Messenger Service], so we stayed at their house, and then we met girls, and stayed at their house[s]. We were out there for like two months. Tinker just said, “Let’s go to California and play this stuff.” Bill Graham [had this regular audition gig. He] called it Hootenanny night. Every Tuesday night. It was like a jam session. It was the Carousel Ballroom. Here we are, we’re in Oakland, somehow Bill Graham got the phone number of where Steel Mill was, and I answer the phone, it’s Bill Graham. It’s like four-fifteen. He says, “Can you be here for seven and be the first band on?” The place has got like two thous
and people in it, over here is regular people, over here is Hell’s Angels and their girlfriends. So [after the set] Danny and I have to go to the bathroom, and we have to go through the Hell’s Angels to get there, and in walks the guy who was in Life magazine beating people with a pool cue at Altamont, and he goes, “Hey, you’re that band from New Jersey, aren’t you? New Jersey soul sounds good out here in California!” He liked it, so they had to like it. Then Bill Graham invited us back next week, then…he wanted to sign us to some record contract. Johnny Winter had just been signed to a $300,000 contract and Bill Graham offers us a thousand. And then he wanted all the publishing. That wasn’t gonna happen. Tinker said, “What are you, nuts?”…[But] when that happened it caused a little schism between Tinker and certain guys in the band. I didn’t care. I didn’t write the songs.

  Equally surprisingly, rebel-child Springsteen seemed more interested in catching up with his parents than establishing Steel Mill as San Francisco’s latest successful import. He was learning something he only articulated a decade later, “Your family’s a funny thing, they will never go away…[so] you gotta deal with ’em sometime.” If he was sharing some of his growing pangs with Doug and Adele, he kept a separate set of concerns from his traveling companions. If the three-song demo they cut for Graham one day in February sounded like a band hitching its gear to the nearest bandwagon, it took a 1976 deposition for Bruce to confirm that he “didn’t have the confidence in the band that other people seemed to have.” This was the real reason he didn’t take Graham up on his chiseling offer. (He has consistently refused to release any Steel Mill material, and when asked why by Vini Lopez—whilst compiling a 4–CD career retrospective!—claimed it was because, “I don’t look back.”) One of the other bands on that audition night was Grin, and the minute Springsteen saw child-prodigy Nils Lofgren wield his ax, he knew he still had a way to go: