Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  “The bottom line is that we were obsessed with the same levels of detail,” Bruce recalls. “If someone cut their hair, if someone changed their shirt . . . it was about everything the performers were doing, thinking, breathing, eating, drinking, and seeing. And there was one other person who understood the significance of all these events in the same way that I did. And that person was Steve Van Zandt.” And although Van Zandt’s mother and stepfather8 lived a half hour and cultural world away in Middletown (“Freehold was the home of greasers and inlanders,” Bruce says. “When you got closer to the coast, it was more upscale”), the boys still found a way to spend endless hours together listening to records, stripping them down to components, and analyzing what made each part distinctive, from the lead vocal, to the rhythm guitarist’s chord inversions, to the drummer’s contrasting hi-hat patterns. “Steve was the guy you went to—every deep rock fan has one—who you don’t have to explain yourself to,” Bruce says. “You don’t have to explain why you’re so worked up that on this record the guy used a different guitar than on the last one, and it’s a betrayal of all that is good! All that is righteous in the world! And why did he comb his hair this way, then comb it that way? No! No! The wonderful argumentative minutiae of rock ’n’ roll came alive and on fire when we sat down together, and that continues to this day. If I ever want to revel in the oversignificance of anything that’s going on or we’re trying to do, Steve is my man. He’ll explain it all to me. And the worst part is that even if I disagree, I know exactly what he’s talking about. I can’t dismiss his argument out of hand, because I know exactly where he’s coming from.”

  The Castiles developed a small but devoted following in and around Freehold, including a collection of exactly forty-two high schoolers, most of them girls, who wrote and signed a petition demanding the group “get some recognition.” To wit: “The group has a sensational sound, and we protest against the fact that record companies and radio stations completely ignore these fantastic boys.” Such girlish enthusiasm was already wearing on Marziotti’s twenty-nine-year-old nerves, so when a moist-eyed fan cornered him after an early May gig at the Le Teendezvous club and asked “Are you Brucie’s daddy?” the bass player had enough. “I told Tex they could stand on their own now,” he says. Marziotti stuck around long enough to run the much more age-appropriate bass player Curt Fluhr through the basics of their set, then bid the group farewell.

  Fluhr had been a Castile for less than two weeks when he accompanied the others to the Mr. Music recording studio in Bricktown, New Jersey, to cut both sides of the Castiles’ first single, a pair of original songs credited to Springsteen-Theiss. The A side, a high-spirited breakup song called “Baby I” with a distinct Carl Wilson9 touch to the guitar work, makes light work of its romantic brush-off, breezily informing its femme fatale that her faithless services will no longer be required, as the singer, “Got somebody new / Somebody better than you / Somebody who’ll be true.” But while all’s fair in adolescent love and pop songs, the flip side, “That’s What You Get,” anticipates a legion of Bruce’s subsequent songs, with gloomy verses in which one man’s lie of a life results somehow in the untimely death of his girlfriend, which shocks but doesn’t surprise the narrator. “That’s what you get for loving me,” he concludes in the chorus.10 What they got for recording the single added up to an impressive showpiece for friends, a calling card for bookers, and not much else.

  The single also featured the band’s new drummer, Vinny Maniello, tapped to replace Bart Haynes when the older boy, then completing his senior year at Freehold Regional, joined the US Marines, hoping to earn a better rank and assignment for having enlisted rather than waiting for the draft. Haynes knew he was destined to wind up in Vietnam with a rifle in his hands, but when he came home for a post–boot camp break, he made it all seem like just another goof, wearing his corporal’s uniform with all the authority of a kid on Halloween. “He was a tough kid, kind of drawn by happenstance,” Bruce says. “He was crazy, loose, and a very funny guy.” Handed a map of the world, Bart Haynes had absolutely no idea where to locate the obscure country for whose jungles and mountains he would soon be risking his life.

  The rest of the Castiles spent the next year struggling to hone their music and work their way up into the better beach clubs, teen clubs, and possibly a concert stage or two, even if at the bottom of a dozen-band lineup. The concert bookings never quite worked out, but Vinyard did manage to land them a semiregular series of shows at the Cafe Wha?, one of the best-known (and now iconic) rock ’n’ roll venues in New York’s Greenwich Village. Almost all of their sets at the club took place during the afternoon shows presented for the city’s teenagers. But playing the same stage that helped launch both Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, the latter of whom had played the club just months earlier, was no small thing. So while most of the area’s other Beatlemania-bred bands had either surrendered their ambitions or broken up, the Castiles had evolved into a solidly professional unit, thanks equally to Bruce’s ever-improving chops, Theiss’s growing poise as a front man, and the strong three-way harmonies by Theiss, Popkin, and Bruce. The addition of organist Bob Alfano, who had mastered the swirling blues-meets-gospel favored by California’s new breed of psychedelic rockers, gave the band an even more complex sound.

  As 1966 gave way to 1967, and the once shaggy youth culture tipped toward full-blown psychedelia, the Castiles all kept pace. Bruce’s wardrobe took on wild colors and flowery designs, while his black curls grew into a curtain over his eyes and a waterfall down his shoulders and neck. An eager student of the rock ’n’ roll performances on TV—the Who’s literally explosive (thanks to the firepower-hungry Keith Moon and guitar-splintering Pete Townshend) performance on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was a huge eye-opener—Bruce took to starting the shows perched on a tall lifeguard chair, which he would leap from at some dramatic moment. He also added flash to the group’s Catholic Youth Organization show at St. Rose of Lima in April by rigging the stage with a strobe light, smoke bombs, and more. When they got to their climactic number, Bruce nodded to a friend to switch on the strobe and then ignite the smoke bombs. When the smoke cleared, Bruce climbed on top of his amplifier and used his guitar to smash a specially purchased vase of flowers into petal-strewn rubble. The kids roared, and the smoke-sheathed Bruce felt like a visionary psychedelic artiste until a few minutes after the cafeteria lights came up. That’s when his eighth-grade geometry teacher came up and patted him on the back. “Bruce!” he proclaimed, “that was very nice.”

  Such displays of intergenerational warmth were increasingly hard to come by. By the middle of 1967, Freehold, like virtually every other crossroads, town, and city in the nation, had spiraled into opposing camps: parents against kids, hawks against peaceniks, traditionalists against progressives, whites against blacks, and on and on. So maybe Bruce shouldn’t have been surprised when he walked into Freehold Regional on June 19 to collect his cap and gown for the evening’s graduation ceremonies, only to be told that he would be barred from the auditorium unless he got his shoulder-length hair cut. Bruce turned around and marched out the front door to catch a commuter bus up to New York so he could spend the afternoon checking out bands in the Greenwich Village clubs.11

  The crowning irony, of course, was that Bruce’s wild hair and clothes signified nothing about actual vices he might have had. Hobbled by his grandparents’ odd ways and repulsed by his father’s smoking and habitual drinking, Bruce treasured his sense of control too much to risk destabilizing himself with drugs, alcohol, and psychosocial anarchy. So while his hair made him seem freaky to his parents’ generation, Bruce’s stubbornly sober habits also set him apart from the hazy-eyed hippies he moved among. And while teenage Bruce could summon some energy for politics and the antiauthoritarian sentiments of the day, those interests were less philosophical than visceral. “It was very real,” Bruce says. “Generationally, everything was politicized. I didn’t know anybody who didn’t at least feign interest. If
you didn’t, you had to adopt a pose of some sort.” And in Freehold, a nontraditional haircut and an untucked, flowery shirt were enough to put a target on your back. Even now, Bruce’s 1960s image is enough to reawaken suspicion among some former police officers. “He used to run the street with the rest of ’em!” says ex-patrolman (and subsequent chief of police) Bill Burlew. “He had the long hair; he used to hang out with [the] Street People [a known gang in Freehold].” When a chorus of disagreement rises around him in Joe’s Barbershop, Burlew can only shrug. “Ahh, maybe he was just a typical kid.”

  As was the Castiles’ founding drummer and US Marines corporal, Bart Haynes, who on October 22, 1967, was on patrol with his unit in the Quang Tri Province when North Vietnamese soldiers let loose a shower of mortar fire on the American troops. Haynes was killed in the barrage, and when word of his death hit Freehold a week later, Bruce and the other Castiles found it difficult to absorb the shock. Particularly George Theiss, who only a few days earlier had a vivid dream about his friend. As Theiss told Kevin Coyne, his subconscious had concocted a ringing telephone, which Theiss reached out to answer. The voice on the other end belonged to Bart Haynes, coming through the static with one eerie message: “I’m all right . . . I’m all right.”12

  THREE

  AS MY MIND BENDS CLOUDS INTO DREAMS

  AT THE START OF 1968, the Springsteens seemed to be on the upswing. Bruce was midway through his first year at Ocean County Community College (subsequently called Ocean County College), focusing his studies on English and earning good marks in his writing classes.1 Doug settled into his new job at the Lilly cup factory, which gave the family more financial stability and his days a sense of structure. Doug could trudge through days, even weeks, dull eyed but determined. Then he’d wake up tangled in his own sheets and barely find the energy to pull on a shirt and coat and find the door. That would pass, and with another dawn, he’d wake up on the ceiling and pinball through the next week, frantic and unpredictable. “With everything going on, we had no idea what was mental and what wasn’t mental,” Ginny Springsteen says. Her mother nods sadly and then alludes to an event that makes them both cringe. Adele comes back with another cryptic “Oh, and remember when . . .” but all they’ll share about that are rolled eyes and a few dark laughs. “He just wasn’t right,” Adele says finally. “That poor man.”

  Sometimes trouble came out of a clear blue sky. One evening that winter the family was settled into their postdinner routine—Doug in the kitchen; Ginny, Adele, and Pam watching TV in the living room; Bruce headed up the stairs to his room—when someone out on South Street pointed a gun at the Springsteens’ front door and pulled the trigger. The bullet tore through the front door and smashed into the wooden bannister an arm’s reach from where Bruce was climbing the stairs.

  What the hell? They still don’t know. Maybe it had something to do with the growing racial tension in town. Or maybe the work of a random madman or a joke gone terribly wrong. “I think the police came,” Bruce says. Whatever it was, he certainly didn’t take it personally. “I was a kid then, so I mostly thought it was exciting,” he says. “It was just strange.”

  One Sunday morning a few weeks later Bruce fired up his motorcycle to give Ginny a ride to a friend’s house, dropped her off, and turned for home, the soft spring air in his trailing curls. He was nearly home when a man driving his son home from church in a large sedan failed to see the motorcyclist headed his way on Jerseyville Avenue. Bruce got tossed over the hood and landed headfirst on the pavement. When patrolman Lou Carotenuto got to the scene, Bruce was on the sidewalk, conscious but dazed and cradling the knee that now poked through his torn and bloodied jeans. “He was rubbing his knee, but he kept saying, ‘I’m fine! I’m fine!’” Carotenuto says. “Just like Doug would have done.” With Bruce’s eyes glazed, bloodied knee swelling visibly, and his responses fuzzy at best, Carotenuto called for an ambulance, which rushed the mostly unconscious teenager to a hospital near Asbury Park. There, the emergency room staff cut off his blood-soaked jeans and presented Bruce to an older doctor whose patience for beaten-up teenaged hippies had obviously run short.

  Presented with a bloodied, semicoherent adolescent, the doctor glared at his patient’s shoulder-length hair and muttered that maybe the hippie deserved what he got. The physician stayed long enough to diagnose a concussion, and ordered that Bruce be held for observation and more tests. Fretting both about her son and the astronomical cost of hospital care, and then presented with a police report that set the blame for his accident squarely on the other driver, Adele hired a lawyer to prepare for litigation in case the man’s insurance company refused to pay. She learned quickly that their chances in civil court would improve dramatically if Bruce appeared on the stand looking like a clean-cut American. When Doug returned to the hospital with a barber in tow, Bruce screamed bloody murder. “Telling him that I hated him, and that I’d never forget,” Bruce recalled onstage during the 1980s. Even now Adele seems horrified to recall the episode, though they were just trying to help keep the family—and particularly her son—afloat. “Everyone was making fun of him!” she says. “But we felt so terrible. I never thought that he would feel that bad.” However, with three children to feed and all the regular bills to pay, the family needed the money more than Bruce needed his hair.

  Then Ginny, in the midst of her senior year in high school, got pregnant. That her then boyfriend, Michael “Mickey” Shave, was a professional rodeo rider did not help her parents confront the social and religious stigmas attached to out-of-wedlock teen pregnancies. But Ginny’s predicament was by no means a first in their corner of Freehold, or in the family itself, so Adele took a deep breath and did what had to be done. The young couple were married in a small ceremony, the family had a party to celebrate, and the youngsters braced themselves for a premature adulthood that would test them both in ways that no teenager could imagine.2

  Back in Doug’s midnight kitchen, one thought gripped him, then wouldn’t let go: he’d had enough. Enough family history, enough probing eyes, enough Freehold. Imagining sunny skies and a shore as far from New Jersey as possible, his thoughts turned to California, the traditional destination for East Coast refugees in search of a fresh start. “He just wanted to get out,” Adele says. “I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to leave Ginny because she’d just had her baby, and I had worked for the same man for twenty-three years. But Douglas said, ‘I’ll just go without you, then.’” Sensing the desperation in his voice, Adele could not deny her husband’s need. So they agreed: it might take some time—probably several months—to save the money they’d need for such a big move. But they would go. And as Doug made clear, he was never coming back.

  • • •

  In late September 1968, Tex and Marion Vinyard invited the Castiles and their friends to what had become a regular party at their house: a joint celebration to mark the birthdays of Theiss and Bruce, born one day apart. On the surface, it was quasifamily business as usual: a big cake, sandwiches, chips, the usual array of Foodtown soda pop. The snapshots in Marion’s scrapbook—the pages titled “19th Birthday Party for Our Boys, George and Bruce”—reveal a house full of skinny, long-haired boys, all freshly washed and (except for Theiss) shaved, dressed in their nicer pants, ironed shirts, and collegiate sweaters. In one picture, a heavily bearded Theiss is a vision in late-sixties rock glamour, his shirt unbuttoned to reveal his naked chest, the arms of a willowy blonde draped over his shoulders. In another, a shirt-and-sweater-vest-clad Bruce sits cross-legged on the floor, bent over an acoustic guitar while a young woman gazes raptly from a respectful distance. Reminded of the disparity between the photos of the Castiles’ front man and lead guitarist, Theiss laughs. “Yeah, it’s pretty telling. That’s pretty much how it was.”

  What doesn’t come through in the warm tableau is that the Castiles had broken up just weeks earlier. Perhaps the most surprising thing was that they had managed to stay together for so long. “We started out as little Free
hold greasers, and we all ended up as long-haired hippies,” Bruce says. “We were all just growing up and changing. I do remember we had some feelings between us, but I don’t even remember what it was about. I was either starting to sing, or maybe we wanted to play different music.” Probably both. Deep in the thrall of singer-songwriters Tim Buckley and Leonard Cohen, Bruce had spent the winter filling notebooks with his poems, such as the dreamy “Clouds” (“As my mind bends clouds into dreams / That I like as the sun disappears into / The night I look and you have gone”) and the so-surreal-it’s-real “Slum Sentiments” (“Golden horses ride down the city streets / Starving children clutter beneath their feet / ’Cause they haven’t had enough to eat”). In “Until the Rain Comes,” Apollo himself thunders across flaming clouds in service of a revelation: “Upon reaching the ancient age of 18 I have found / What is round isn’t round at all, and what is up may be down.” All very deep and romantic, and just the thing for a young troubadour with trouble in mind and a guitar in hand. Heading into the spring with a new repertoire of acoustic songs, he had played a few solo shows at the Off Broad Street Coffee House in Red Bank, and felt an entirely new charge standing alone with only his guitar, voice, and innermost thoughts to offer.

  At the same time, the Castiles, all graduated from high school and moving into college or the professional world of entry-level jobs and training programs, were losing steam. According to the rock ’n’ roll calendar, the split was more than due: teenage bands are supposed to be transient creatures. But even inevitable change can be jarring, and by the middle of July, Bruce and Theiss could barely speak to each other. Sometimes they bickered onstage. And at one mid-July show at the Off Broad Street, a fan took a picture that captured a pissed off-looking Bruce hoisting his middle finger to a visibly cranky, microphone-wielding Theiss. Things were clearly not well in the Castiles’ world. And that was before the Freehold police got involved.