The second show came a night later, with a featured slot at the Sunshine In opening for the UK’s Humble Pie, an up-and-coming group featuring vocalist Steve Marriott, late of the Small Faces, and Peter Frampton on lead guitar. The British group had just played a massive show at New York’s Shea Stadium (with Grand Funk Railroad topping the bill), but when it got to the Sunshine In during the midst of the BSB’s set, the jet-engine roar of applause and cheers greeting the hometown heroes left the headliners feeling more than a little queasy. When the opening set ended, Marriott, Frampton, and company scampered back to the stretch limousines and slammed the doors behind them. How could they follow such a devastating warm-up band? Should they even try? “The club manager had to come out and talk them back inside,” Feigenbaum says. “And I understood their problem. The audience didn’t want us to leave. We absolutely tore the place apart.”
Nevertheless, Humble Pie steadied its nerves and played a show hot enough to match the local band’s ovation. Egos assuaged, they thought again about this Asbury Park outfit and its potential for enhancing their own tour. “We were sitting around afterwards, and Frampton was talking to me. ‘We love you, we’re gonna do a world tour, we want you to open for us!’” Cherlin remembers. “He said he’d get us a deal with A&M Records (Humble Pie’s label) and help make us stars, but he was freaking out because he’d already said all that to Bruce, and he wouldn’t listen to him.”
Cherlin, who had never imagined hearing such talk being directed at him, marched up to West to find out what was going on. The manager shook his head and laughed. “He said, ‘Oh yeah, a major label, eh? Good luck! They’re gonna screw ya!’ And in a way he was right. But I was twenty-two, and Humble Pie was a big name already.”3
He wasn’t the only band member who walked out of the Sunshine In that night questioning West’s plans for the group. Still, the new band ripped through a string of shows in July, including a spectacular sixty-minute set at a daylong festival at the Guggenheim Band Shell in Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park in New York City. Kicking off with a gospel-blues arrangement of “C.C. Rider” which segued in and out of a jazzier reading of “Down the Road Apiece,” the band swung into a half dozen new originals that revealed how far Bruce’s musical vision had progressed in the previous six months. “You Mean So Much to Me,” with its effortless blend of rhythm and blues and southern guitar boogie, came next, followed by the rocker “C’mon Billy,” and then a Delores Holmes lead vocal on “I’m in Love Again,” a joyous Springsteen song that bypassed a similarly titled song by Fats Domino to evoke the girl groups of late 1950s and early 1960s R&B.
The harder-rocking party song “Dance, Dance, Dance” (more like a rougher “Dancin’ in the Street” than the Beach Boys song of the same name) roared in on waves of Bruce’s spiky guitar and bebop-inspired horn solos. Then the last two songs upped the ante even more. Dinkin’s composition (with an assist from Sancious) “You Don’t Leave Me No Choice” began with a two-minute piano improv, and then bloomed into a he-done-me-wrong tale that Dinkins sang over a double-fast minor chord progression propelled to mach speed by Lopez, all but beating his drums to death. From there the song grew wilder with a blistering Bruce guitar solo and then wilder still when Van Zandt, Feigenbaum, and Cherlin turned it into a four-way melee.
The band didn’t pause for breath before diving into its climactic number: a thirteen-minute version of another original crowned with a familiar name. As per “Dance, Dance, Dance” and “I’m in Love Again,” “Jambalaya” shared nothing with the Hank Williams song of the same name, other than its romantic vision of New Orleans. In fact, Bruce’s handwritten set lists usually, if not always, called the song “Jumbeliah,” either to clear up the confusion with Williams’s song (although he obviously didn’t care about doubling the Beach Boys, Fats Domino, and so on) or because he preferred the cruder spelling, or still showed the scars of his botched education. Built around a simple three-chord progression “Jambalaya/Jumbeliah” describes a girl who is “strong like a lion / Wild like a tiger,” who loves you so hard, “all you can do is / Roll over, roll over, roll over.” Once again, the music sings louder than the words, and the Van Zandt–written horn charts, combined with his slide guitar lines, the perfectly harmonized backing vocals, and Bruce’s own fast, articulate guitar solos, transform the song into an epic. “That was the song everyone talked about,” Cherlin remembers. “Our greatest hit. People asked for it, and we practiced it all the time.”
Sadly, they had played the entire set to an audience consisting of a tiny handful of friends and one or two passersby. “Tinker said, ‘Man, we’re going to play at Lincoln Center!’ And we thought like, yeah! The big time!” Bruce says. “But then there wasn’t any audience there.” The contrast between Bruce’s glory-cloaked expectations for the Lincoln Center show and what actually happened still makes him cringe. “When I go to the city and see that place, I still say”—putting on his grimmest voice—“Oh. There it is.”
SEVEN
SOMEBODY ELSE WHO WAS A LITTLE CRAZY IN THE EYES
BRUCE REMEMBERS MEETING HER NEAR the beach during the summer of 1971. “She was working in a little stand on the Asbury boardwalk,” he says. “She was great. Italian, you know. And funny! Just so funny.” Diane Lozito describes it a bit differently, recalling that they first encountered each other at the Upstage’s Green Mermaid coffeebar. Her boyfriend, Billy “Kale” Cahill, a law student who worked as an Asbury Park lifeguard during the summer, had met Bruce through some friends a few weeks earlier. Cahill, for all his law school smarts and squared-away lifeguard squint, spent his free time pursuing his interests as an enthusiastic beer drinker and fearless perpetrator of mayhem. Bruce took to calling him Wild Billy, and after he got to know Kale’s sixteen-year-old girlfriend, he dubbed her Crazy Diane. Anyone who dated Kale, he said, had to be crazy.
Somewhere in the wee hours one night, Bruce, Cahill, Lozito, and one or two other friends skipped out of the moist heat of the Upstage and decided to take a predawn swim at one of the lakes scattered around Monmouth County. Whether they went to Freehold’s Lake Topanemus—known popularly as Greasy Lake in honor of the suntan lotion slick that glinted on its surface during the summer—or the heavily wooded Lake Carasaljo on the edge of Brick Township, is no longer clear. Cahill leaped into the black water from the high rocks on the shore, and somewhere in the darkness, a magnetic charge sparked between the petite, dark-haired Diane and Bruce.
When Cahill went back to law school a few weeks later, Bruce called Diane and took her out to dinner. They spent the night together but quickly reined themselves in again, hoping to avoid hurting Cahill, their mutual friend. But as the next days and weeks unwound, the charge proved too powerful to ignore. “Bruce and I got together,” Lozito says. “He was twenty-two1 and when he wasn’t onstage, he was shy and quiet. But it was cool to be introverted, and I thought he was perfect.”
But as ever, no girlfriend could rival the pull of his music. When Tinker West moved the center of his surfboard and music productions up the shore to the Highlands2 that spring, Bruce followed, moving into the front room of a house located right across the street, a bungalow occupied by friend Louie Longo and his fiancee, Dorothea “Fifi Vavavoom” Killian, who had been part of the Dr. Zoom chorus. “Bruce was such a good influence,” Killian says. “He didn’t drink or do any drugs; he just practiced all the time.”
The long nights of rehearsing and playing in the clubs ate into Bruce’s daylight hours, but, as Killian recalls, he still found the energy to bond with Dennis Palaia, a neighborhood kid who shared his older neighbor’s love for baseball. “Bruce slept a lot during the day, but any time that boy knocked on our screen door, he’d drag himself outside, barefoot and in cutoffs, to have a catch. Literally, anytime Dennis asked, Bruce came out to play.”
Bruce, for all his rock ’n’ roll hair and muttonchops, not only bonded with young Dennis but also became a local hero when Tinker rented Bruce a cheap spinet piano to play and wri
te on at home. Bruce rode in the pickup truck to the music store, helped load it into the back, and when they got to the Highlands turnoff, he climbed into the back so that he could pound on the keys as they came rumbling to Locust Street. The carnival sound of music in motion called all the kids out of their houses, and they chased the musician all the way to his house, where the bigger kids helped push the instrument to its place in the enclosed sun porch.
The former social outcast now had friends and admirers up and down the Jersey Shore. But he lost the patience of Tinker West in the last few months when the manager’s skepticism about the big band’s future eclipsed his belief in its leader’s talents. The going got especially tough in the fall when they booked some shows in the Springsteen-loving college town of Richmond, Virginia. Those trips were always a moneymaker during the lean, mean Steel Mill days, but now the same trip would cost multiples more in food, gas, and hotel room bills. How much sense would it make, Tinker wanted to know, to travel that far and work that hard just so everyone could clear $50 or at most $100?
By the start of the fall, Bruce and Tinker found a compromise: they’d play smaller shows with the five-piece core band, and then bring back the horns and singers for the more important gigs. But Tinker still didn’t see the wisdom in saturating the market with a lot of small club dates, so when Bruce decided to take a long-term residency at the Student Prince, they reached an impasse. Tinker would stay on as the band’s technical manager and sound designer. But his management days were over.
The five-piece Bruce Springsteen Band (Bruce, Van Zandt, Tallent, Sancious, and Lopez) held down the tiny Student Prince stage every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night from the start of September through the middle of October, and then called in the horns and singers to take the full band to a headlining show at the University of Richmond. But the good cheer of the reunion soon collapsed beneath the weight of mini-disasters that began moments after the band got into town. Lopez, Cherlin, and a few other band members got menaced by a knife-wielding drug addict. When the trumpet player bitched too much about West, who had promised to get the band more ordinary (and less treacherous) digs, the superloyal Lopez socked the trumpet player in the lip, causing another abrupt resignation. Meanwhile, Delores Holmes got beaten up by her boyfriend, and when Bruce took her to the emergency room he wound up staying with her so long that they had to delay the show by hours.
So marked the beginning of the end of the big band. The five-piece Bruce Springsteen Band played regularly at the Student Prince through the middle of December, often airing out new Springsteen compositions. As ever, his songwriting pace seemed astonishing. But now the caliber of his work hit a new course, too. “I just started to drift back toward soul music, which was always very popular on the shore,” he says. “I kind of had run through my guitar phase and was now interested in ensemble playing and interested in grooves and things that swung more. I’d studied all those soul band leaders, and for me it was a natural sort of progression. From that you can see where the E Street Band came out of.”
Just give a listen to the songs that came to dominate the setlists of the Bruce Springsteen Band’s shows during the last weeks of 1971 and early months of 1972. “Down to Mexico” rides a tide of Sancious’s organ into a joyous groove that moves as smooth and fast as a car speeding southward on a cloud of dust. “All I Wanna Do Is Dance” rolls on chiming power chords, while other songs display Bruce’s expanding range as a lyricist. “Look Toward the Land” describes a dream world of gypsies, sailors, and Mississippi boatmen imagined by an outsider determined to find his way to the center of the circle. “I wanna be / stealing diamonds from the rich men to throw in the sea,” he sings. “Ballad of Jesse James,” alternately known as “Don’t You Want to Be an Outlaw,” sounds even more striking, given its place among the first of the many songs that Bruce (still dreaming of Brave Cowboy Bill) would set in the mythic Western frontier.
Bruce built a stunning performance piece out of a mostly improvised two-chord vamp that came to be known as “I Remember.” As captured in a club performance that winter, the tune comes off like an old-fashioned soul burner, rising from a whisper to a roar, only to fall back and then rise even higher as Bruce explores all the facets of passion, guilt, and hope. The song’s climax comes in the midst of a recitation by an increasingly ardent Bruce, describing a chance encounter with an ex-girlfriend, as the band keeps pace with the swelling fire in his voice: “And I said, ‘Darlin’ I want ya, I’m feelin’ so bad.’ An’ she said, ‘No, honey, I just can’t make it’ . . . But I love ya! ‘I just can’t make it!’ ‘I love ya!!’ ‘Won’t you come on home?’ And she said, she said, ‘Baby, I’m comin’ home, I’m comin’ home, I’m comin’ home!’ ” Then he shouts it himself, his voice equal parts surprise and triumph. “Baby’s coming home!”
The music rockets skyward again, Bruce’s own guitar going off like fireworks across a murky summer night.
• • •
As Bruce strained toward some kind of glorious future, his life still took place in a dying city. Long segregated along racial lines—the African-American community and other nonwhites lived almost exclusively on the town’s tumbledown west side—Asbury Park’s beachside businesses were notorious for keeping African-Americans from all but the lowest-echelon jobs. Tensions had been on a low boil for years, but the combination of a heat wave, cutbacks in social programs, and a jobs shortage touched off days of on-and-off rioting that burned significant pieces of the west side before turning on the city’s business district. The wave of destruction, and the racial and social conflicts that remained unresolved, reduced Asbury Park to a scorched shadow of its once-prosperous self. With retail businesses decamping for suburban malls and tourists content to stay on the turnpike until they found less troubled vacation spots, the town took on a scary, nihilistic chill.
By the fall of 1971, the gloom had taken root at the Upstage. “There were so many needles around, so much speed and heroin, that everyone I knew, except the guys with Bruce, had hepatitis C,” says Upstage staffer Bobby Spillane. “We’d shoot anything we could get into a needle. Beer, wine, meth.” The incursion of hard drugs, says Sonny Kenn, drained the club’s once-electric atmosphere until it felt positively woozy. “People used to come and dance, or at least focus on the music,” Kenn says. “But by the end, they were crashed out in front of the stage. The music was just a background to their own hallucinations.”
Meanwhile, Tom Potter’s drinking, and all the erratic behavior it inspired, had grown so corrosive that he lost interest in reining in staff weirdos such as Eddie Luraschi, who delighted in replacing the vintage cartoons Potter projected onto the wall between sets with a hardcore porn movie that centered around a helpless woman being raped by an escaped convict. “It was sick, and there were girls in the crowd,” Albee Tellone says. “Guys would be going up to him, saying, ‘Dude, what the fuck’s wrong with you?’ But he’d be laughing, running it backward and forward. That wasn’t normal behavior, and Potter wasn’t sober enough to stop him.”
Potter let the Upstage’s lease expire at the end of October, with enough warning to plan a few closing shows. Bruce and his band showed up to jam the night away on October 29, but they couldn’t make it to the actual closing night on October 30: the Bruce Springsteen Band had already booked a show at Virginia Commonwealth University that night. Both of the band’s backing singers (Delores Holmes and newcomer Francine Daniels) performed, but the horns were history, and the singers wouldn’t return. Bruce’s dream of leading his own R&B-style rock ’n’ roll orchestra crumbled. “We had a lot of pretty good music,” he reflects. “It was just something where I built up a big audience playing heavier riff rock, prog rock. And I realized that’s what people like, and they didn’t like rhythm and blues. So that was what I liked, but it tore my audience to pieces, and that was the end of that.”
No one knew that Bruce had already established contact with a producer in New York who would soon devote himself, at the cost of
virtually every other aspect of his life, to making this spindly guitar player from the most misbegotten stretch of New Jersey shoreline into the biggest rock ’n’ roll star on the planet. Which is the sort of thing a lot of big-city hustlers say to a lot of starry-eyed small-town kids. But there was a big difference between all those guys and Mike Appel. Because Mike Appel meant every syllable of what he said.
• • •
Tinker West may have washed his hands of his management duties, but that didn’t end his belief in his twenty-two-year-old ex-client, or his sense of responsibility for his well-being. Chatting with Pat Karwan, a music industry friend who played guitar with the critically reviled but popular bubblegum band the 1910 Fruitgum Company, West started talking about this incredible kid he’d been managing who needed to find a good, professional manager. Karwan mentioned a couple of industry pals who were, in fact, looking for a talented kid to take on. Mike Appel and Jimmy Cretecos were young contract songwriters at Wes Farrell’s Pocketful of Tunes publishing company, he said. They had written a bunch of songs for Farrell’s central project, the imaginary band at the center of ABC’s popular The Partridge Family sitcom, and were looking to expand into production and management. It would certainly be worth setting up an introduction.
Given Karwan’s endorsement, and then a call from West, Appel agreed to meet with the unknown songwriter in the early evening of November 4, 1971. Tinker collected Bruce in his pickup truck and drove him up the Garden State Parkway to the midtown Manhattan corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Madison Avenue, where Appel (Cretecos wasn’t present for the first meeting) ushered the pair to the writer’s room in Farrell’s offices. They perched on chairs and talked while the ragamuffin musician propped an acoustic guitar across the thighs of his shredded jeans. West made his pitch to Appel, assuring Appel that Bruce wrote incredible songs, played a sizzling guitar, had a great voice, and exerted this kind of magical hold on audiences. And not just in his hometown; he’d seen it in cities all over the East Coast and in California too. Bruce, meanwhile, sat silently in his chair with West’s acoustic Martin D-45 clutched to his chest. Baby faced but every bit as astringent as Tinker, Appel asked the guitar player what had brought him to his office in particular. Bruce shrugged. These days he felt like a big fish in a small pond, he said. Now he had to get himself into the ocean, or else he’d never earn a shot at the bigtime.
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