Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Bruce’s rock ’n’ roll rebirth didn’t end on the stage. An increasingly regular presence at the Upstage in early 1971, the shy young stranger who had marched up the stairs two years earlier had been replaced by a domineering presence. “He’d actually hog the spotlight,” recalls Albee Tellone, a multi-instrumentalist who played regular folk sets at the Green Mermaid. “He’d do George Carlin routines he’d memorized, or perform movie scenes, doing all the dialogue himself. Bruce had this incredible charisma, and he loved joking around.”

  In his more personal moments with girlfriend Pam Bracken, Bruce could be every bit as engaging. “He told great stories, but he never gossiped,” she says. “I thought that was sweet.” But even as Bruce swept her up in his ambition and discipline, Bracken could also intuit the emotional turmoil fueling his determination. Something other than an early adopter of feminist principles, Bruce expected his girlfriend to tend to his (and sometimes his bandmates’) laundry, and then sat impatiently while she produced the burgers, roasted chicken, and spaghetti-and-meatball dinners he required. When he broke a front tooth in the surf at Bradley Beach, Bruce called Bracken, commanding her to grab the bottle of Excedrin in her bathroom, and bring it now! “I guess he was in a lot of pain,” she says, recalling the angry flash in her boyfriend’s eyes when she found him bloodied and defeated on the boardwalk.

  As desperate for the comforts of emotional intimacy as he was terrified by its requirements, Bruce veered between fits of jealousy and barely secret bouts of faithlessness. As Bracken recalls, Bruce could never resist a woman in need of help or succor. Robbin Thompson had been engaged to be married when he moved into the Challenger factory, but when his wife-to-be followed him to Asbury Park a week or two after he relocated, their already-unstable relationship shattered. Overwrought and confused, the young woman turned to her ex’s friend-roommate-bandmate for comfort. “To my dismay,” Thompson says. “But it wasn’t like Bruce poached her or anything. We broke up, and someone else was there.”

  That nuance didn’t do much for Bracken, who found it difficult to accept her boyfriend’s sheepish story about lending Robbin’s bereft girlfriend some emotional support in the midst of her trying time. In fact, Bracken reacted so heatedly to Bruce’s news that their argument escalated into a screaming match that ended when Bruce slapped her hard across the face. Hurt and outraged, Bracken tore open the front door and took off down the street. She soon had Bruce running at her heels, wailing that he was sorry and had smacked her only because he feared she might become “hysterical.”

  Bruce’s relationship with Thompson’s ex-girlfriend ended within a week or two, which sent him back into Bracken’s arms, albeit with a stern command that she stay away from his shows from that day forward: “Your mom didn’t go to your dad’s job, did he? Why do you need to watch me do my work?” Bracken shrugged. “My dad, obviously, wasn’t a rock ’n’ roll musician.” She already knew what was bothering him, anyway. “I got in the way of his meeting other women.”

  Elusiveness came naturally, so Bruce felt comfortable ricocheting from one friend’s sofa to another’s disused bedroom, to a new girlfriend’s apartment. He rarely stayed in one place for more than a month, so his friends and fellow musicians often had to struggle to track him down. And though Bracken knew when her on-again, off-again boyfriend was avoiding her, she found it impossible to stay angry at him. Not just for his talent and looks but also because she could sense the wounds he tried to keep hidden. He rarely mentioned his family to her, and although he doted on his young nephew (Ginny’s son), Bracken met Ginny only once during the two-plus years she spent in Bruce’s company.

  Bruce did take Bracken to a family get-together at his grandfather Zerilli’s home, still referred to as the House on the Hill, once the home of his mother, Adele, and her sisters, Dora and Eda, during their teenage years. Their wayward father, Anthony Zerilli, had made it his own when he got out of prison in the 1940s, and the Englishtown, New Jersey, farmhouse had served as his home ever since. No longer allowed to practice law, Anthony had built a new career in tax accountancy and enough other side businesses1 to not only earn a comfortable living but also gain the eminence to work among foreign trade delegations and the like. Regarded among the family as a tycoon, Anthony played the role to the hilt, particularly when he was hosting a family function. Noticing the throngs of relatives clustered on his grandfather’s lawn, Bruce rolled his eyes, recalling how some distant cousin had once paid a visit to the Zerilli patriarch and had come away with one of the old man’s cars. “They’re all hoping someone else gets lucky too,” he grumbled.

  Inside the house, Bracken noticed a formal dining room with a lavishly polished table that could easily seat a dozen. From there, Bruce took her into a small sitting room where an older lady perched in a creaky rocking chair, speaking rapidly in Italian, and introduced her to Adelina, Anthony’s first wife, and Bruce’s grandmother.2 When she saw her grandson approaching, she waved him closer and took his face in her hands. “She kept pinching Bruce’s cheeks and going, ‘Sweet-ah! Sweet-ah!’” Bracken recalls.

  When Anthony greeted his grandson, he took Bruce and Pam into a barn where he stored the treasures he’d gathered during his career. Opening a bureau drawer, he sifted the contents until he came up with a tin souvenir spoon that had been presented to him by some European dignitary. “It seemed silly to me,” Bracken says. Bruce smiled, nodded a thank-you to his grandfather, and walked away without another word.

  • • •

  As the winter of 1971 bore down on Asbury Park, Bruce dug in with the circle of musicians he’d met through the late-night jam sessions at the Upstage. Most of the Steel Mill gang stayed close, particularly Van Zandt. But now Bruce’s orbit also included Big Bad Bobby Williams, folk-rocker Albee Tellone, the blues singer-bassist-harp player John Lyon, Irish bluesman Big Danny Gallagher, Upstage bouncer Black Tiny (built “like a Pepsi machine with arms and legs,” according to his Upstage colleague Jim Fainer), and feral orphans-turned-Upstage regulars John and Eddie Luraschi. Also, bassist and walking rock ’n’ roll encyclopedia Garry Tallent and the classically trained David Sancious. And more, too, each toting his own small legend and oddities. And as beachside musicians hunkering down in the chill of the off-season, hardly any of them had two $10 bills to rub together. “We couldn’t go out to the bars, we could barely buy a six-pack, let alone drugs,” says Tellone, whose Sewall Avenue apartment (shared with Van Zandt and Lyon) became a gathering place for the scruffy young longhairs, particularly on the nights they hosted their weekly Monopoly games. Dubbed Cutthroat Monopoly, the game they played was as hotly competitive as it was spiked with absurdist rules, inside jokes, and enough improvised twists to render it a dice-driven satire of capitalism, authority, and random cruelty. Hand-drawn additions to the Community Chest and Chance cards assigned turns of fate cribbed straight from the headlines in the Asbury Park Press. Draw the Race Riot! card, and your little green houses and smart red hotels would be reduced to ashes. Pick another wrong card, and you’d be the victim of a police bust that would cost thousands in fines and legal fees. A luckier player would draw the Middletown police chief McCarthy card, thereby gaining the power to arrest and imprison any other player at any time.

  But of course that’s just where the fun began, since the most crucial gaming took place outside the boundaries of the Monopoly board. Few could rival Bruce’s powers of persuasion, and he won more games than anyone else—although his dominance may have had just as much to do with the unique talent John Lyon described to Time writer Jay Cocks in 1975: “[Bruce] had no scruples.”

  Bruce also came to the games with his antic sense of humor and a romantic’s eye for dramatic action. As he described it, the scene unfolded like a comic opera, populated with outsized characters and life-or-death struggles. Anyone who didn’t already have a Bruce-generated nickname soon wore his own custom-tailored tag. “It was the formation of a group identity,” Van Zandt says. “All the sudden we became a rock ’
n’ roll Rat Pack. It just kinda happened, and I very consciously encouraged it because I’m a band guy. A Rat Pack guy.”

  • • •

  The emphasis on group identity made it easier for everyone to work in whatever pairings, groupings, and settings that might come up. For a time, Bruce seemed to turn up everywhere: acting as the center of electric jam sessions at the Upstage’s third floor and serving in acoustic jams (most often as a part of Albee Tellone’s Hired Hands) in the more laid-back Green Mermaid coffeehouse. Van Zandt and Williams formed a band known variously as Steve Van Zandt and Friends, the Big Bad Bobby Williams Band, and/or the Steve Van Zandt and Big Bad Bobby Williams Band. Whatever they were called, the band also boasted Garry Tallent on bass, David Sancious on keyboards, and the baby-faced blues nut Johnny Lyon on vocals and harp, with Springsteen occasionally showing up to add second guitar and vocal harmonies.

  But as Bruce became serious about organizing his new band, virtually all of Williams’s bandmates defected to the new enterprise. No surprise about Van Zandt, given the two guitarists’ friendship. But then Garry Tallent took his bass to the Challenger factory, with Sancious fast on his heels, leaving a chagrined Williams to wonder what had just happened to his band. “He was hanging around in this bar going, ‘Motherfucker!’” Tellone says. “When someone asked him what he played, he said, ‘Second fiddle!’” But in the wake of Steel Mill, they all knew which bandleader had the best shot at actually hitting the big time. So when it came to hiring musicians in the winter of 1971, Bruce Springsteen was going to get what Bruce Springsteen wanted.

  West put an ad in the Asbury Park Press in pursuit of female singers and horn players, and auditions started soon after. A stream of musicians came in to try out, including one flame-haired high schooler from Deal, New Jersey, who had already started sneaking into bars to sing with local bands. Bruce and West liked her chops but eventually had to break it to young Patti Scialfa that she needed to grow up a bit, maybe even graduate high school, before she’d be old enough to go on the road with them.

  The candidates who made it further into the process heard Bruce’s impassioned speeches about Van Morrison. The Irish bandleader’s meld of rock, blues, jazz, Celtic, and gospel music should be this new band’s musical north star, Bruce said. He ran saxophone player Bobby Feigenbaum through Morrison’s songs, then sealed a deal with gospel singers Delores Holmes and Barbara Dinkins by putting on a Morrison album and asking them to improvise backing parts. Still, Dinkins thought that Bruce was most impressive for the power of his own compositions. “I was in awe of his original songs,” she says. “He had all this wavy hair and these muttonchop sideburns, but he wrote those songs from his heart and spirit. I knew instantly that he was something special.”

  Once the singers had signed on, Bruce made certain that his gang of grungy young rock ’n’ rollers treated them with the deference they deserved. “Bruce had met the women in a church, and when they first came by, he told me to be careful about what I said in their presence” says Tom Cohen, lead guitar player for the West-managed Odin. “So he’d say, ‘Ah, these ladies, man. You don’t wanna be caught cursing and swearing around ’em. They’re proper.’”

  Bruce ran some other musicians through a series of acoustic and electric jam sessions he played—sometimes booked and promoted as a Bruce Springsteen Jam Concert—at the Upstage and the Green Mermaid. Jazz trumpet player Harvey Cherlin signed on to join Feigenbaum in the horn section, and the entire band—Bruce, Van Zandt, Tallent, Sancious, Lopez, Feigenbaum, Dinkins, and Holmes, with occasional guest shots from West and his congas—took up a typical Bruce rehearsal schedule of four or five multihour sessions each week. “It was like a job,” Feigenbaum says. “But when we performed live nobody was better rehearsed. We were tight.”

  In early March West got a call from the manager of the Sunshine In, hoping to book Steel Mill to open for the Allman Brothers on March 27. Undeterred by the news that Steel Mill had broken up in January, Fisher revised his offer: “Just get me Springsteen, and I don’t care who backs him up.” When Van Zandt, a huge Allmans fan, heard the news, he insisted that his friend take the gig, even if the real big band needed a few more months of work before attempting to claim Steel Mill’s title. Bruce thought back to Joe Cocker’s overflowing stages of Mad Dogs & Englishmen. If they didn’t care who he played with, then he’d play with everyone he knew. Including the ones who couldn’t play a note of music.

  And so came the first stirrings of the band that would eventually be known as Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom. With the core of his still-forming band already rehearsed enough to play together, Springsteen fleshed out the party band—as he first called the project—by drafting John Lyon to sing and play harp, and then recruiting another band’s worth of musicians (John Waasdorp on keyboards, Williams on drums, Tellone on shaky, schoolboy saxophone, and West on congas) to double the parts.

  As usual, Bruce held regular rehearsals to make sure the outsized band would have some sense of the songs and arrangements. Even so, the group’s real mission revolved around fun and just the right touch of strangeness. To make sure they looked the part, some of the musicians went to a secondhand clothing store in search of distinctive stage wear. When Lyon came back with the old pin-striped suit and vintage fedora of an old bluesman, Bruce howled with glee. “Hey, it’s Johnny Chicago!” he said. “What are you doin’ here, man?” Lyon, an expert in the legends of the great Chicago bluesmen, shot right back. “Don’t just call me Chicago, man. I’m from the south side.” And just like that, Lyon became Southside Johnny, and the blues vamp he led them through a few minutes later—a mainstay of the party band’s brief career—became “Southside Shuffle.” But what were they going to call their freak show of a band? At first they settled for West’s offhand suggestion of Bruce Springsteen and the Friendly Enemies. Then the more memorable Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom came up but not quite soon enough to make it onto the Sunshine In posters. So Friendly Enemies they were, at least for the March 27 gig.

  The band’s set at the Allmans’ sold-out show delighted the Sunshine In crowd, all of whom seemed entirely enraptured by the spectacle of singing baton twirlers and skit players, the silent quartet of Monopoly players, and, near the front of the stage, the mechanic (Upstage bouncer Eddie Luraschi) who sprawled beneath a motorcycle while carefully adjusting and tightening the engine’s spark plugs. Springsteen did his best to weird it up himself, dropping his guitar to dance with the backup chorus, donning a pair of heavy horn-rimmed glasses, and singing at least one song from a chair at the Monopoly board.

  Watching from the wings, the night’s headliners were both tickled and impressed. “The Allmans were so cool,” remembers sax player Feigenbaum. “We were just local boys, but they were so welcoming. And Duane Allman was really into Steve’s slide playing. I remember him saying that Steve was the best slide player in the country, except for him.” After the show ended, Duane took Van Zandt aside to show him some more licks, and then set it up so the Friendly Enemies/Dr. Zoom would open for his group when its tour brought the Allmans back to Asbury Park in November. That show would never take place: the supremely talented but hard-living Duane Allman died in a motorcycle accident at the end of October.

  When spring came, West transplanted the Challenger East factory to a funky wood-framed structure seventeen miles up the shore in Atlantic Highlands, so all of his electronics and the headquarters of Bruce’s music career went along with it. Most of the other musicians worked day jobs to make ends meet: Lopez labored in a boatyard, Van Zandt worked construction, and so on. Bruce, on the other hand, remained steadfast in his determination to never, ever work outside the music industry. So he earned money by playing solo acoustic sets at coffeehouses up and down the shore, and by playing second guitar in Van Zandt’s side project, the Sundance Blues Band, which also included Lopez, Tallent, Johnny Lyon, and, for a time, a guitarist named Joe Hagstrom. When the Upstage’s Tom Potter booked him for an electric show, Bruce drafted the rhy
thm section from his new band and performed as Bruce Springsteen and the Hot Mammas. West did his part by booking a couple shows for the party band everyone now called Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom. Not that anyone mistook Dr. Zoom as an ongoing concern. The band made its official debut as the headliner of a triple bill at the Sunshine In on May 14 and then played a farewell gig the very next night at Newark State College.

  Meanwhile, rehearsals continued for the big band, now dubbed the Bruce Springsteen Band as per Bruce’s new determination to make himself the obvious leader and front man.

  The nine-piece Bruce Springsteen Band made its long-prepared-for debut on the afternoon of July 10 at the Brookdale Community College’s annual Nothings Festival. Three other West-managed bands (Sunny Jim, Odin, and Jeannie Clark) played warm-up sets. Anyone counting on the blistering sound of Steel Mill would have gone home disappointed (although the new band did cover “Goin’ Back to Georgia”), but the jazzier sound of the big band still left plenty of room for Bruce’s guitar explorations. The going got particularly hot during “You Mean So Much to Me,” a new original that began in a Van Morrison mood, and then climaxed with an intricately rehearsed Allmans-style harmonized-guitar workout for Bruce and Van Zandt, before doubling back to the horns-and-singers-laced final verse.