Born to Run (14 page)

We proceeded as follows:

STEP 1:
Make a mess out of your forms. Let them know they’re trying to corral a drug-addicted, gay,
pathologically bed-wetting lunatic who can barely write his name into the US military.

STEP 2:
Make them believe it. Act the mumbling, bumbling, swishing, don’t-give-a-fuck-about-orders freak on STP, LSD and anything else you can get your hands on—a hippie-outcast, destroyer-of-troop-morale, corroder-of-discipline, much-more-trouble-than-you’re-worth, get-the-fuck-out-of-here joke of a recruit.

STEP 3:
Previously, have a bad enough motorcycle accident to truly scramble and concuss your brains, making you a medical risk on the battlefield. Fill in that section of the form truthfully, go home and
receive your 4F—physically unfit. (I tried it all, but in the end, that was my classification.)

We drove to Newark that morning on a bus filled with mostly young black kids out of Asbury Park.
Almost everybody had a plan. I sat next to a strapping blond rah football player in a quarter-body cast he confided to me was totally bogus. There were draft boards, especially in the South, where this shit would not fly and your ass would be delivered straight to boot camp. But Newark had the reputation of being one of the easiest draft boards in the country. I guess it was. An amazing percentage
of the guys on the bus were rejected because they pulled some personalized version of the above-mentioned shtick. At the end of the day, after we’d all driven the US Army around the bend, there was a small table at the end of a long, empty hallway. There sat a bored young soldier looking at you like he was about to give you the worst news of your life. “I am sorry to inform you but you have been
judged unfit for military service.” Looking back down at his paperwork, he’d add, “You may enter through the next door if you’d like to sign up for some voluntary service.” Behind that door was one very empty room. You were then handed a ticket that allowed you a free meal, for being a good sport and taking the ride up, at a restaurant two blocks down the street. We all skipped over there, our feet
barely touching the ground. We stepped into a lovely sunlit diner. The smiling host at the door greeted us like we were his long-lost millionaire cousins and escorted us to a set of stairs that led down into a dank basement room. There at one long, musty hardwood table with my fellow yella bellies, I had some of the worst food and one of the best meals of my life.

The bus ride out of the city
was pandemonium. There were many fine young black women on the summer streets of Newark and my Asbury Park brothers let them know they were appreciated. Many had been called, few had been chosen. The bus door hissed open in front of the Asbury Park train station, discharging Mad Dog, Little Vinnie and myself, all now free men,
intact, with our lives, wherever they might lead, in front of us. As
the bus pulled away, the street turned quiet. We’d been up together for three solid days. We looked at each other, exhausted, shook hands and went our own ways. I felt relieved but I also felt like crying. I hitchhiked the fifteen miles back to Freehold. With days of no sleep and little food, wired and weary, I walked up onto the back porch and through the kitchen door of my house to my father.
I called my mom in, told my parents where I’d been, that I’d hid it from them so that they might not worry and out of embarrassment that New York George and my big music plans had come to nothing. I told them I failed my draft physical. My dad, who often dismissively uttered the words “I can’t wait ’til the army gets ahold of you,” sat at the kitchen table, flicked the ash off of his cigarette, took
a puff, slowly let the smoke escape from his lips and mumbled, “That’s good.”

As I grew older, sometimes I wondered who went in my place. Somebody did. What was his fate? Did he live? I’ll never know. Later on in life, when I met Ron Kovic, author of
Born on the Fourth of July
, or Bobby Muller, one of the founders of the Vietnam Veterans of America, both men who fought and sacrificed, returning
from the war in wheelchairs, men who became strong activists against the war, I felt a duty and a sense of connection. Maybe it was another dose of my survivor’s guilt or maybe it was just the common generational experience of living through a war that had touched everyone. It was New Jersey men like them who went and fought in my place. All I know is when I visit the names of my friends on the
wall in Washington, DC, I’m glad mine’s not up there, or Little Vinnie’s or Mad Dog’s.

SIXTEEN

THE UPSTAGE CLUB

Tom Potter was a fifty-year-old salt-and-pepper-haired, big-gutted, pirate-belt-wearing, sexually preoccupied, goateed boho who opened and ran the strangest music club I’d ever seen. His wife, Margaret, was a pixie-cut-wearing, sexually ambiguous, guitar-playing beautician and bandleader for Margaret and the Distractions. She had a very young, boyish appearance and I didn’t
initially make Margaret out for a gal until I saw the little round tit popping out from her T-shirt and resting upon the upper body of her Telecaster guitar as she wailed Tommy James’s “Mony Mony” in the upstairs room of the Upstage Club. A more fabulously incongruous husband-and-wife team I have yet to come upon.

Dusk ’til dawn, eight p.m. to five a.m.: those were the operating hours
of the
Upstage Club on Cookman Avenue in Asbury Park. Tom closed the joint for one hour between twelve and one a.m. to sweep out the refuse and get fired up for the night shift. With no booze and theoretically no drugs, the place was a unique all-night haven for Shore street life through the late sixties. The two floors of the club consisted of an upstairs jam floor and downstairs coffeehouse, all dementedly
decorated by Tom himself. The interior scheme was mainly a lot of glow-in-the-dark paint and black light, and featured a papier-mâché Day-Glo mermaid who swung swimming from the ceiling. Tom, a self-fashioned beatnik artist, was dictator, top banana and big dog there and he let his impulses run wild. He was a loud, yelling, throw-your-ass-down-the-stairs-and-out-the-front-door, very funny guy
if he liked you. If he did not, he was unpleasant to be around.

Asbury Park was not my turf, though I’d visited there throughout the fifties with my parents on holiday weekends. By the late sixties, it had faded from its onetime Victorian splendor into a deteriorating blue-collar resort. The upside of Asbury’s decline was it had become a bit of an open city. Gay bars sat next to all-night juke
joints, and with the race riots of the near future yet to come, there was a little bit of anything goes. The Castiles had never played there. Ocean Avenue was all bars and beach joints for the over-twenty-one summer drinking set; phony IDs were sold at a premium, and the whole layout felt like a working-class, fading, faux Fort Lauderdale.

When I walked into Upstage, I walked in cold. No one
had ever laid eyes on me or seen me play. I’d heard you could jam there. Along with the strange hours, Tom Potter’s stroke of genius was that at the end of a long rectangular box of a room, two flights above a shoe store, he had built a small stage. Behind that stage, the wall from one side of the room to the other was honeycombed with ten-inch, twelve-inch and fifteen-inch speakers. An unforgiving,
solid and real “wall of sound.” The amplifier heads were built into a small cabinet at your feet, so all you had to do was bring your guitar, reach down and plug in. No other equipment was necessary. This innovation and the club’s unusual opening and closing times made it a
mecca for musicians on the Shore scene. Every band that came into the area to play the Jersey Top 40 clubs ended up at the
Upstage playing the music they really loved ’til dawn. In summer at three a.m. there was a line outside the door waiting to get in. It was an incredible clearinghouse for musicians.

The first weekend I was there I saw Dan Federici and Vini Lopez in a group fronted by guitarist Bill Chinnock, the Downtown Tangiers Rock and Roll, Rhythm and Blues Band. The place was a steaming sauna of summer bodies
and I knew I’d found my new hang. A few weeks later I returned with my guitar (cue the theme music from
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
). I waited. The club was not yet full. Someone told me you had to book a jam “slot” with Tom Potter. It was like booking a table at the pool hall. They’d write your name on a list and say from two to two thirty a.m., you had your shot if you could find musicians
to sit in with you. My moment arrived and I walked to the stage, the drummer and bass player agreeing to stay on duty for my half hour. I plugged into Tom’s mighty wall, stood back and kicked into “Rock Me Baby,” cutting loose with everything I had. I fried the paint off the place with all the guitar pyrotechnics and wizardry my eighteen-year-old fingers could muster. I’d had a lot of playing experience
by now, but in Asbury I was the Man with No Name, a stranger who was in the process of burning your club down. I watched people sit up, move closer and begin to pay serious attention. I saw two guys pull chairs onto the middle of the dance floor and sit themselves down in them, arms folded across their chest, as if to say, “Bring it on,” and I brought it. The insane wall of speakers was vibrating
so hard I thought the whole place might just cave onto the shoe-store sales floor below. It all held for thirty scorching minutes of guitar Armageddon, then I walked off.

I made some new friends that night. The two guys on the chairs were Garry Tallent and Southside Johnny; downstairs in Tom Potter’s office, I had my first conversation with a freckle-faced Danny Federici. He introduced me to
his wife, Flo, also freckle-faced and wearing a blond bouffant wig. Danny hailed from Flemington, New Jersey, and was the same
bemused, nonchalant character I would stand next to on his deathbed many adventures and forty years later. I was a hit. There were many very good guitar players in Asbury Park—Billy Ryan was a real blues master; Ricky Disarno had Clapton down. They had great tones and
technique but the stagecraft, the singing and the front man skills I’d built up in my apprenticeship with the Castiles moved me ahead of the pack. I would address you, excite you and play guitar like a demon, demanding that you respond.

I shortly ran into Vincent Lopez in the coffee shop on the first floor; head shaved near bald, fresh out of jail, he felt the need to explain his appearance to
me (the jail) and then asked if I was interested in joining a version of his group, Speed Limit 25. I was a free agent at the time, and Speed Limit had an Asbury Park rep and was making money. I needed some of that. I liked the Asbury scene and so I said, “Sure, let’s see how it goes.” A few rehearsals with some of the other Speed Limit members didn’t quite click so Vini and I decided to put together
something ourselves. Vini knew Danny from Downtown Tangiers, so we all gathered with bass player Little Vinnie Roslin from the Motifs in a cottage on Bay Avenue in Highlands, New Jersey, and started working. This was the band that would initially call itself Child, then morph into Steel Mill, then the Bruce Springsteen Band, and eventually become the core of the original E Street Band.

The accidental
presence of a club like the Upstage in Asbury Park was a unique and invaluable resource for the local music scene. I brought Steve Van Zandt there. He wowed them too. Steve and I were the best lead guitarists and front men in the area, and our presence in the club led to the gestation and formation of many bands that became the center of the Asbury Park music scene. With Big Bad Bobby Williams,
a three-hundred-pound earthquake of a drummer, and Southside Johnny, Steve started the Sundance Blues Band. Steve and Johnny were deep into the blues and created a powerful unit that played throughout the Shore. Southside Johnny was from Ocean Grove, the Methodist camp town next to Asbury Park. He was our local king of the blues, ergo his sobriquet “Southside.” He was a softhearted,
crabby closet
intellectual, very soulful and slightly unhinged, but he knew everything about the blues and soul artists, their careers and their records. He came from a home with a serious record collection and had immersed himself in the bible of R & B and soul music. We all met down at the club.

Homesteaders

At home, my father finally decided he’d had enough. The town and his illness had beaten him. He decided
he was going to go to California to start a new life. He wanted my mother and all of us to come along but said he’d go alone if he had to. Freehold, New Jersey, would not have Doug Springsteen to kick around anymore. My sister Virginia decided to stay in Lakewood with her new family. I decided to stay in Freehold, where I could make a small living on my already growing reputation as bar band
king.

Six months later, in 1969, at nineteen, I stood in our driveway, waving as my parents and little sister Pam pulled away. They had all of their belongings packed on top of their 1960s Rambler. They took $3,000 with them, all the money they had. They slept a night in a motel and two nights in the car and drove three thousand miles, East Coast Okies headed for my father’s promised land. With
the exception of my dad in the war, none of us had lived outside of Central New Jersey. Our only source of information about the West Coast was a hippie girlfriend of mine who told my parents to go to Sausalito, the artsy tourist trap near San Francisco. When they got there, they realized it was not for them. My mother claimed they pulled into a gas station and asked the attendant, “Where do people
like us live?” He answered, “You live on the peninsula,” and for the next thirty years, that’s what they did. In a little apartment in San Mateo, they tried for a new beginning.

When my father announced his plans to leave for California, my sister Virginia was seventeen, with a new child, couldn’t make toast and had a new rough-and-tumble husband. I was living at home on the twenty bucks a week
I made from playing. If we chose to stay, we would have to fend for
ourselves. It is her greatest regret and the single thing in life she still feels guiltiest about. But off they went with my little sister in tow. My mom and pops were bound by an unknowable thread. They’d made their deal a long time ago; she had her man who wouldn’t leave and he had his gal who couldn’t leave. Those were the
rules and they superseded all others, even motherhood. They were two for the road. They would never part. This was how it began and this was how it would end. Period. My father was able to draw from my mom, a saving and selfless mother, her own ambivalence about family. In this uncharitable terrain, strange bedfellows are regularly made. They wanted us with them. They asked us to go. But they could
not
stay
.