Bruce
Page 4
Whatever they said, or maybe the hopeful way they said it, charmed the older man. And whether the bluff thirty-two-year-old was looking for something to keep himself busy during his downtime or wanted to add some youthful energy to his and Marion’s childless lives, he told the boys that he’d like to serve as their manager. They could use his living room as a rehearsal space, and he’d provide as much musical guidance as he could, while helping to keep them focused, improving, and, if everything went according to plan, working. “We were there all the time,” Theiss says. “More there than home.”
Back on South Street, Bruce threw himself into his guitar with a passion and determination far beyond anything he had ever experienced. “If I wasn’t in school, I was either playing my guitar or listening to records,” he says. Playing six, eight, sometimes ten hours a day, he improved quickly. “It’s like science in the twentieth century, you know. Suddenly there it is, bang, and it’s compounding itself on a daily basis. It was that kind of musical development—like the big bang, only twice as big.” It took Bruce only a couple of months to gain enough confidence in his guitar skills to go looking for a band to join. A friend from the YMCA, where Freehold kids could play sports and attend dances on weekends, pointed him to a group called the Rogues, whose members were searching for a rhythm guitarist. Bruce brought his Kent and played through enough songs to win the job and then rehearsed with the group for just a week or two before he played his first-ever paid performance at a teenage dance held in the Freehold Elks Club. The band opened its set with “Twist and Shout,” the first rock song Bruce had taught himself to play.5 But it must not have gone very well, at least not for the new rhythm guitarist. The rest of the band rescinded his membership a few days later, declaring his Kent guitar “too crappy,” and sent him back home. “I’m sure I was pissed,” Bruce says, recalling his long trek from that last practice session back to 68 South Street. “I went home that night and taught myself the solo to a Stones tune, ‘It’s All Over Now.’ And that was it.”
But not for long, as it turned out. Because Bruce’s de-Roguing took place at the same time that George Theiss started noticing this cute freshman girl in the halls of Freehold Regional. She had dark hair, a beguiling smile, and a wicked sense of humor. And once he came up and started chatting with her, Ginny Springsteen kind of liked Theiss, too. They started dating soon afterward. “So I knew Bruce well enough to say hi,” Theiss says. “But it wasn’t like we were friends.” Whether Theiss had a role in recruiting Bruce for the Castiles is unclear. What’s certain is that the band needed a lead guitarist, and one day Bruce knocked on Tex and Marion’s door at 39 Center Street, just a few doors away from Caiazzo’s Music, asking to audition. He plugged in with the band and knocked out two or three songs, only to be sent home for not knowing any others.
When he came back to the next rehearsal (which might have been the next day), Bruce had not only mastered half a dozen other songs but also played them with such ease and precision that Theiss, standing just to the right of the new guitarist, felt stunned. “I just remember that Tex looked up at us and said, ‘Well?’ and we all said okay,” Theiss says. “Then I went up to Tex and said, ‘I’m still the lead singer, right?’” Vinyard nodded, Theiss let loose a sigh of relief—and the Castiles started a new chapter in their nascent career.
• • •
Once they were bandmates, Theiss and Bruce also became fast friends. Theiss, by then broken up with Ginny, now made a habit of dropping by 68 South Street in the mornings to roust Bruce and haul him off to school. Most days, this meant cooling his heels in the Springsteens’ kitchen, waiting for Bruce to emerge from his room. “He was always late, or not dressed, or couldn’t find his shoes,” Theiss says. “Then I had to wait for him to eat his bowl of Cheerios.”
When they finally got to school, Bruce went back into drift mode, floating in and out of classes as his interest and patience dictated. Some days he brought his guitar with him, and when his academic motivation ebbed, he headed toward the school’s band room, where he set up in a remote hallway and worked through a song or riff for hours at a time. “He’d sit there with his guitar and play,” says then music teacher Bill Starsinic. “Every once in a while, I’d have to say, ‘Bruce, you’ve gotta go back to class now,’ but he was very intense. Very focused. He wasn’t interested in academics or participating in the school band, orchestra, or anything else. He was interested in his music and himself.”
When Bruce did get swept up in a class, it had less to do with the subject than his feelings for the teacher, such as a relatively young English teacher named Robert Hussey, whose outsider perspective came to influence the stories and poems Bruce wrote. Hussey also projected an intellectual dedication and emotional empathy that made a deep impact on his bright but academically adrift student. In Hussey’s yearbook one June, Bruce’s admiration came through in a chain of superlatives: “This page is too small for me to write a fraction of the complimentary things I would like to say to you,” he began. “You have taught me things I could not get from any book. You have helped me understand people so much more than I had previously. You have gained my utmost respect and appreciation.”
When the Castiles’ eventual line-up gathered for their regular rehearsal sessions in the Vinyards’ living room, they made a distinctive collage of style. Clad in his button-up madras shirts and tight black pants tucked into calf-high Dingo boots, Bruce tiptoed the line between rah-rah and greaser. The glower-y Theiss dressed tougher, while clean-cut singer-guitarist Paul Popkin could have been a yell leader. Drummer Bart Haynes, a bit older at seventeen, existed somewhere in the shadows of Marlon Brando and an old-fashioned New Jersey wiseguy. “He was a classic sharkskin pants, pointy-toed, spit-shined Italian shoes with black socks guy,” Bruce says. “He had a sloppy, casual cigarette hanging in the mouth, eyebrows up, hair kind of slicked back, but it would slip down as he was playing. He had a ton of attitude. And, looking back on it, a sweet sort of way.”
Tex Vinyard did his part to make the teenaged Castiles even more diverse by recruiting Frank Marziotti, the twenty-eight-year-old owner of the Triangle Chevron station on Route 33 in Freehold, to play bass. As Vinyard learned when he had become a regular at the station soon after it opened in 1962, Marziotti moonlighted as the bass player for the Rolling Mountain Boys country band. “One day I was sitting in the backroom picking a guitar,” Marziotti says. “Tex walked in and said, ‘I got a group of kids, and I could use you to guide ’em.’” Marziotti agreed to do it, more as a favor to Vinyard than a career move, and when he turned up at the next rehearsal, he was surprised to discover that his pint-sized bandmates were actually pretty good. “I just slid right in with them,” he recalls. “No problems at all, and I certainly wasn’t feeling they were amateurs.” Marziotti was (and remains, he insists) most impressed with Theiss, both for his strong vocals and his distinctive way with the rhythm guitar. “He’d use an open E tuning, and barre chord it. And he was so good at it; I never saw anyone as good as he was.”
The lead guitarist, on the other hand, required more assistance, particularly when it came to chords. “Bruce was always a fast learner. You showed him one thing, and he came back the next day and showed you three.” Credit the fact that Bruce had no ambitions that came close to rivaling the call of his guitar. “I guarantee you that once I had the job, I went home and started to woodshed like a mad dog,” Bruce says. “I was in a band. I’d taken some, I’d gotten tossed out of [the Rogues]. But oh yeah, after I got in the band, I just listened and played all night. Every available hour and minute. And it was never work for me.” As Marziotti recalls, the guitarist took enormous pride in his progress. “He’d come back and show off to Tex: ‘Hey, look what I did!’”
Vinyard landed a job as a machine operator on the floor of the Peter Schweitzer cigarette paper factory, but full-time employment did nothing to dampen his enthusiasm for the Castiles. Together Tex and Marion became de facto parents to the boys in the band, with Tex gui
ding the rehearsals with a confidence that belied the fact that his own hands-on musical expertise extended as far as the knobs of his own radio. But he knew what sounded good to him, and if the boys weren’t getting there, he’d hold up his hand and call for changes.
“He really did run the rehearsals when we played at his place,” Theiss says. “He’d yell, ‘Stop, that doesn’t sound good! Do this, do that!’ Even when he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.” What the Castiles knew was that Tex, unlike their own fathers, believed in what they were doing and wanted nothing more than to help. And if their own moms nagged endlessly about their hair, clothes, and grades, Marion was more than happy to be their uncritical den mother, busily whipping up platters of tuna fish and bologna-and-cheese sandwiches in her kitchen, laying out the spread with the case of Foodtown soda she kept on hand to ease the Castiles’ thirst.
The group’s growing repertoire leaned mostly on the AM radio hits of the day, with an emphasis on the harder-edged singles by the Rolling Stones (“[I Can’t Get No] Satisfaction” and “The Last Time”) the Kinks (“All Day and All of the Night”), Ray Charles (“What’d I Say”), and the Who (an instrumentally furious “My Generation,” with Bruce taking the lead vocal). They mostly steered away from the Beatles, unless you count the British group’s cover of “Twist and Shout,” to differentiate themselves from all the other teenage bands trying to scratch their way out of their parents’ garages and basements. Tex had his own commercial strategy, which was for the boys to master Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood,” Henry Mancini’s “Moon River,” and other jazz-pop numbers that would give the Castiles a cross-generational appeal. “Tex wanted us to get as many paid jobs as we could,” Bruce says. “But the [band’s] cards said Rock ’n’ Roll, Rhythm & Blues, so that was our image of ourselves.”
Vinyard also created—and paid for—the group’s onstage wardrobe, which began with black pants, shiny black vests, and white shirts buttoned up to the neck, then branched into frilly shirts and other showy garb. But it wasn’t long before the uniforms chafed against the Castiles’ rebellious skin.6 Bruce: “At some point, we just said [to Tex], ‘Yeah, we’re doing it like this.’ And the frilly shirts came off.”
Vinyard managed to book the band at a few teen dances starting in the midsummer, and drafted Marziotti’s gas station van to haul the amps and instruments while he drove the boys in his sky blue Cadillac. Tex monitored the sound from the back of the room during the set, using his thumb to signal “turn it up” or “turn it down” to each player. And when the show was over and the gear packed up, he piled everyone into the Caddy and took them downtown to Federici’s for pizza and the presentation of the night’s pay. Usually it came to about $5 a man, which was serious teenage money in those days. Vinyard took the same for himself, if only until the waitress came to pick up the bill for the boys’ pizza and soda. “Damn straight, we were making a living,” Bruce says. “Well, it was enough to not have to ask my folks for money anymore.”
The steady, if unspectacular, flow of cash also helped the Castiles (often with an assist from Vinyard’s wallet) to strengthen their sound with new amps, speakers, and microphones. They played about a dozen shows in the second half of 1965, the most memorable being a bizarre afternoon in a lockdown ward at the Marlboro State Hospital, where, according to Bruce, the master of ceremonies spent twenty minutes singing the group’s praises to the heights of the Beatles and beyond. “Then,” Bruce recalled, “the doctors came up and took him away.”7
But most of the shows were far more typical teen dance gigs held at the Woodhaven Swim Club, the Freehold Elks Club, the Farmingdale Mobile Home Park, and several weekend socials held for Bruce’s old classmates at the St. Rose of Lima School around the corner from his house. One night that fall, Adele put on her coat to walk her son down the block and to the door of the St. Rose cafeteria, where she paused to kiss him, and then watched as he stepped inside the door and toward his bandmates on the stage. Recognizing Freehold police officer Lou Carotenuto holding down a security post near the door, she went up to say hello. “She said, ‘Keep an eye out for Bruce, he’s going to be famous someday!’,” Carotenuto says. “I just thought, ‘Thank God for mothers. They’re the only ones who always believe in you.’” But then, Adele was a Zerilli, so her faith was automatically tripled by her sisters Dora and Eda, both of whom lined up with the high school kids to get tickets for the Castiles’ set at the opening festivities for the new ShopRite supermarket in Freehold. “Oh, I loved it,” Bruce’s aunt Dora says. “But even then he was pretty famous. To us, he was.”
• • •
And yet for Douglas Springsteen, it still sounded like noise. A screeching clamor from beyond the ceiling; the sound of his son’s tumble into the same trap his own life had become. When it bore down on him, Doug took the kitchen broom and used the handle to pound the ceiling beneath Bruce’s room to shut him up. “Because of the neighbors!” Ginny Springsteen says. “We lived in a duplex, and they were right next to us.” For his sister, for Adele, for Theiss, and for all the other neighborhood kids who knew Mr. Springsteen well enough to bid him hello when they entered the kitchen, the father-son static seemed par for the generational course. “Nothing happened out of the ordinary. He wanted Bruce’s hair short, and Bruce wanted it long,” Ginny says. She thinks some more. “Maybe to us it wasn’t that big of a deal, but obviously to Bruce it was.”
Doug may not have understood his son but he definitely feared for his future. He certainly didn’t know how to protect the boy from the hard truths waiting to greet him once he got out of school and faced up to the working man’s world. It had made sense for Doug to abandon his education to take up with the rug factory: the Karagheusian employee rolls touched nearly every family in town. But World War II had disrupted that career path, and nearly twenty-five years later, Doug still hadn’t found a career he could stick with. Once the very picture of a prosperous working-class town, Freehold saw its fortunes take a dark turn when the Karagheusians, who had once employed more than four hundred residents, abandoned Freehold in 1961, moving their factory to North Carolina, where labor came cheap. With the town’s other factories either gone or on their way out, and all the tertiary shops, restaurants, car dealerships, and so on collapsing in their wake, laborers like Doug were left to fight over the scraps. “It felt like the death of the town,” says Freehold native, historian, and journalist Kevin Coyne, whose own grandfather’s thirty-two-year commitment to Karagheusian ended with a pink slip and two weeks of severance pay. “There was a lot of bitterness. A sense of broken promises. Of loyalty unrewarded.”
Douglas Springsteen eased his pains with his cigarettes and six-pack. For him to see his son come up the back-door steps, guitar in hand, his long hair so unkempt, his clothes so flashy, and his youthful face so untroubled, whispering “Hey, Pop” on his way up to his room grated against the open wounds in his psyche. Needing to prepare his son to confront the bleak grind that had claimed him, Doug stiffened in his chair and asked Bruce to come back and chat for a bit. The music and applause fast fading from his ears, Bruce would lay down his guitar, grit his teeth, and walk dutifully back into his father’s charred vision of the world.
For years friends have wondered if Doug lashed out at his son with fists or an even more toxic form of psychological cruelty. The best-intentioned people whisper words like abuse and brutality. What got lost over the years is that Doug’s gruff demeanor was the thinnest veneer over his own torment. And while he was ashamed of his weakness and desperate to keep his oldest child from suffering the fate he’d been dealt, it was all but impossible for Doug to connect with Bruce in a meaningful way. So it wasn’t the lectures, criticisms, and occasionally heated arguments that cut into Bruce’s skin. It was the vacancy that swam into his father’s eyes whenever he came into the room. When Bruce turned toward his father hoping to see something—a spark of affection, pride, a glimmer of love, a nod of recognition, even—only emptiness stared back.
• • •
The Castiles rolled into 1966 at a good clip, playing a steady stream of teen dances, and then working into the battle-of-the-bands competitions that pitted local groups against one another in judged (if at times suspiciously) contests for cash and prizes that sometimes included opening spots for famous acts. Those bigger breaks didn’t always materialize, even for the supposed winners. But the shows did allow the aspiring bands to meet, compare acts, and build a musical community that went beyond their own schools and towns. When Bruce met a skinny, quick-witted guitarist from the Shadows at Middletown, New Jersey’s Hullabaloo Club one night, they didn’t have to chat long before he realized he’d met a rock ’n’ roll soul mate.