Born to Run (19 page)

Without access to enough bail money, we’d have to do what we did
best and play a “Free Mad Dog” concert. It was booked at the Clearwater Swim Club in Middletown, New Jersey. Several thousand showed; we’d imported a drummer from Richmond, rehearsed him thoroughly and were ready to gig. The night began uneventfully, but trouble started when the
Middletown police sent a plainclothes narcotics officer to stroll through the crowd and bust those smoking nature’s
weed. The crowd, sensing strength in numbers, did not stand for this and threw the narc, clothes and all, into the swimming pool at the center of the complex. Tempers began to rise and the situation escalated when the police chief of Middletown sent over a bus full of officers in their newly acquired SWAT gear to make sure this thing got shut down on the button. We’d always play a little longer than
usual and in this case it was perceived as provocative criminal intent. The power was cut (déjà vu all over again). Tink, living up to his name, found a bypass to restore electricity to the stage. The crowd cheered. That did it. The cops stormed the place with billy clubs flailing; some of the police came up the front side of the stage and challenged the band members. A little skinny officer was
poking at me in the gut and yelling, “C’mon, motherfucker, c’mon.” I turned to notice Danny lifting the very expensive Marshall amplifier head off his large stack of cabinets. I saw some officers approaching the stage from the rear, then I saw Danny’s speaker stacks “accidentally” go tumbling over upon them. (This would feel roughly equivalent to a box of eight bowling balls rumbling over on your
ass.) Some got trapped underneath, crawled out howling and took off. Another officer leapt onstage, immediately grabbed Danny’s arm and tried to place him under arrest. Flo, Danny’s Jersey-girl-to-the-bone wife, leapt onstage and grabbed her man’s other arm. A Keystone Kops tug-of-war ensued, with Danny playing the part of the rope between his wife and the officer as he resisted arrest. A big kid
I’d seen at a few shows climbed on the stage, approached the officer to within inches of his face and let loose with the popular invective of the day: “Pig, pig, pig, pig,” etc. . . . The officer flipped, let Danny go and leapt off the stage, chasing this kid into the crowd. “Phantom Dan” slipped away into the night.

For a week the local papers were filled with “ROCK ’N’ ROLL MELEE!” headlines.
Guns and knives were reportedly found under the stage (not true);
a police chief was allegedly assaulted with an amplifier (true). The ACLU came down, investigating “police brutality,” and everybody was happy. We all hid out, but then a permanent warrant for Danny’s arrest was issued for assaulting a police officer. We now had no drummer and no organ player. With the money we made from the catastrophic
Middletown swim club fiasco we were able to bail Vini out of jail in Virginia. Now, what were we going to do about Danny? He did not want to surrender. It was understandable; police treatment for longhairs in sixties New Jersey could be rather intemperate. We’d all heard of a dark hole in the Freehold jail where you would reside naked as an ape until you agreed to let the jail barber give
you the standard con’s haircut. No, compassionate treatment was not a sure thing, so Danny stayed on the run. Problem: we needed to play and we were booked for a big show at Monmouth College in the upcoming weeks. As the date closed in we tried several replacement organists, none quite up to snuff. Finally, the Phantom said he would chance playing. Once we were onstage, we figured, the police wouldn’t
dare arrest him in front of three thousand screaming hippies. That became our plan.

The night arrived and all we had to do was get Danny in and out of the gym without the cops all over us. We set up; the crowd entered; Danny was hidden in the backseat of a friend’s car in the gym parking lot waiting for the high sign. At five minutes before our eight o’clock start time, I slipped out the back
door, tapped on Danny’s rear window and uttered the password, “Showtime.” All I heard was “I’m not coming.” Huh . . . ? “I’m not coming. There are cops all over the place. I’ve seen them on the roof.” I stood up, looked around; all I heard was the chirping of the crickets in the nearby trees. I scanned the roof. Nothing. I searched the parking lot. Nothing. Then Danny rolled down his window and the
smell of something pungent and sweet wafted into the night air. Danny had smoked himself into a mild state of paranoia. I explained to him in clear language that he would be leaving the vehicle. His safety would be in my hands, and he would be fine.
Following the usual Phantom complaining, begging, cajoling and my stepping into the tiring shoes of the voice of reason, he got out of the car and,
unimpeded, we entered the building.

The minute we were in the door, Danny’s friend “Party Petey,” another local organ grinder, greeted him with a boisterous shout-out: “Daaaannnnyyyy!” He was coldcocked seconds later by Mad Dog Lopez, and we had to step over Party Petey to get to the stage. We blasted into “The Judge Song,” and the concert was rollickingly under way. We danced in our shoes, congratulating
ourselves on our brilliance at putting one over on the local PD. Nobody but nobody would bust Danny in front of this crowd. At the end of the evening in a gesture of hippie solidarity I pulled the “brothers and sisters” out of the audience until the stage was an undulating mass of glazed eyes and tie-dye. Danny slipped away from his organ, off the front lip of the stage and out the front
door, still free. Power to the people! But at what a fucking exhausting cost. We couldn’t continue on like this, so we convinced Danny to turn himself in the following week. We bailed him out, and there was a small trial, my memory being everything ended up a wash. That was it. I’d had enough. Outlaw days over.

Steel Mill with Steve and me continued to be great fun. Besides the enjoyment of having
my pal by my side, Steve had an aggressive, bold style as a bassist, and he added some nice vocal harmonies. I’d always doubted myself as a singer. I felt I didn’t have enough true tone and range. I didn’t give myself credit for being able to immerse myself in what I was singing. Joe Strummer, Mick Jagger and many of the great rock ’n’ roll and punk front men did not possess great voices but
their blood-and-guts conviction, their ownership of their songs, made up for it and lent them deep personal style. Still, I thought we could improve our band in the area of our lead vocals and I was willing to step back as full-time singer to do so. There was a fellow named Robbin Thompson in a great group out of Richmond called Mercy Flight. I thought he had one of the best undiscovered rock voices
I’d ever heard. He was a cross between John Fogerty and Rod Stewart and
fronted his band with a lot of power and style. Raiding another group for their best guy, particularly a group you know, is not a very neighborly thing to do. I didn’t lose too much sleep over it. I wanted the best group I could imagine. I told the rest of the band my idea; they didn’t think it was necessary, but they deferred.

Robbin Thompson came north and for a while we were the Sam and Dave of hard rock. It was a good band. Probably not as good as our original four. Robbin was a great vocalist, but there was something in the tightness of the smaller unit and the ownership of my material that ultimately made us better suited to have me singly fronting the band. It was another lesson learned and one I would revisit
again thirty years later with the E Street Band.

I had stylistically outgrown Steel Mill’s heavy rock, roots ’n’ boogie. I was listening to Van Morrison, and Joe Cocker’s
Mad Dogs and Englishmen
, and was interested in returning to my soul roots. I talked to Mad Dog and Steve about moving forward with me into something completely different, a ten-piece horns-and-singers-augmented rock and soul
band, playing nothing but new original material.

I’d recently been to Upstage and heard a young black keyboardist who floored me. He was sixteen years old and one of the greatest musicians I’d ever heard in Asbury Park. Davey Sancious had pure musical genius and incredible stage presence. He was a star in the making and I wanted him in my band. David had the courage to cross the tracks and enter
the primarily white rock world of the Upstage Club in search of musical adventure. In turn he was a completely new presence on the scene and stirred enormous excitement. There was some drifting back and forth across the color line in Asbury in those days, but not a lot. Garry Tallent played with Little Melvin and the Invaders, an all-black soul band with a young Clarence Clemons on sax, in the
black clubs surrounding Asbury. I’d wander over to the Orchid Lounge on Springwood Avenue when they brought in my favorite soul acts. As a white man at the Orchid, you were an oddity but never hassled.
We’d all shop at Fisch’s clothing store, the premier superfly outlet in the black community. The riots changed all that. They made the two communities more suspicious of each other, burned Fisch’s
down to the ground and made a trip to Springwood a lot less welcoming, but they also seemed to throw the more musically adventurous into each other’s arms. Davey joined my new Bruce Springsteen Band and I left my days of long-haired, guitar-slinging glory behind.

TWENTY

ENDLESS SUMMER

At the factory life went on. Mad Dog and I had learned to surf from the kids who came in to have their boards worked on and for a while, we got seriously into it. This led to a lot of sleeping on the beach underneath the pilings at North End Beach in Long Branch. Mad John’s Surf Shop was on the pier above us and if it rained you’d find us jammed and crumpled like sardines
in our sleeping bags with the other homeless surfers squeezed in amongst the surfboards inside the shop. Come morning we’d stumble out into the mushy Jersey surf for a day of water and waves. We surfed from dawn ’til dusk and I had a couple of the nicest summers of my life. It was all music, girls and waves, just like the song said. I had a secondhand Challenger Eastern long board I really learned
how to ride. I loved that board and had the most fun I’ve ever had in the ocean on it. When the short board revolution hit, I felt pressured to pick up a six-foot rocket ship. Tinker built ’em because it was
what the young surfers wanted, but he was stone-cold old-school and never liked ’em. When I first caught a wave on mine, it was so surprisingly fast and maneuverable, it came shooting right
out from underneath my feet. Whoa, Silver. I broke my front tooth on it as a landlocked and stunned Steve Van Zandt watched from the shore at Bradley. I walked up on the beach, looked at Steve and said, “Something don’t feel right, there’s too much air.” Stevie, his eyes as big as dinner plates, said, “Your tooth is broken, your front one.” For the first time in my life, I visited a dentist (previously,
it’d been my old man with one end of a string tied to the doorknob and the other to my loosening tooth). He capped my tooth and straightened my other front one, readying me for the big time.

Later that fall, I nearly drowned in hurricane surf I should never have been out in. Mad Dog and I had sat on the beach all morning debating whether to go out or not. Finally around noon some cowboy bopped
along and talked us into going out with him. We were having a blast; then an outside set rose on the horizon. I paddled like a windmill, immediately rediscovering my faith in Catholicism as I prayed like never before: “Lord, please let me slip over the peak of this monster.” No dice. I got pounded, thrown toward the rock jetty and dumped on by two more outside crushers; my surfboard was instantly
stripped from my hands in the pre-surfboard-leash 1970s. My poor swimming barely saved me as I crawled up onto the sand, like the first creature slipping out of the pre-Jurassic soup, bruised and hurting. I lay there for a long time, breathing in gulps, my heart pounding, thanking the God I did not believe in. Aloha, Hawaii. There would be no fifteen-foot pipeline for me.

•  •  •

We held auditions
for singers for the Bruce Springsteen Band, my new calling card, at the factory. Brave young women answered our ad in the
Asbury Park Press
, driving up into the dark industrial wilderness toward what must have looked like a rapist’s paradise just to test their talents. We had
Vegas-style songbirds; opera singers; horrible, hilarious pre-karaoke wannabes who tested our good manners and self-control.
I even spoke on the phone to a high school–age Patti Scialfa, dispensing the fatherly advice that this was a traveling gig and it’d be best for a young lady to stay in school. Finally a couple of good black gospel singers from the west side of Asbury, Delores Holmes and Barbara Dinkins, wandered in and perfectly fit the bill. The horns were even harder to find. “Jazzbos” ruled and it was simply
tough finding guys willing to play rudimentary R & B parts for no cash. We did it and it was a good band.

I wrote “You Mean So Much to Me Baby,” later covered by Southside Johnny and Ronnie Spector on Southside’s first album. We played maybe a dozen shows and I found it was impossible to keep a band of that size financially together at our stage of the game. I learned early that people pay for
the franchise name. Steel Mill was no longer and neither was my drawing power. The Bruce Springsteen Band, even billed as “formerly Steel Mill,” did not attract the same life-sustaining numbers my old band did. I’d declared democracy and band names dead after Steel Mill. I was leading the band, playing, singing and writing everything we did. If I was going to carry the workload and responsibility,
I might as well assume the power. I didn’t want to get into any more decision-making squabbles or have any confusion about who set the creative direction of my music. I wanted the freedom to follow my “muse” without unnecessary argument. From now on, the buck would stop here, if I could make one.

I look back on this as being one of the smartest decisions of my young life. I’ve always believed
the E Street Band’s continued existence—and it’s now been forty-plus years since its inception—is partially due to the fact that there was little to no role confusion amongst its members. Everyone knew their job, their boundaries, their blessings and limitations. My bandmates were not always happy with the decisions I made and may have been angered by some of them, but nobody debated my right to
make them. Clarity ruled and allowed us to forge a bond based on the principle that we worked
together, but it was my band. I crafted a benevolent dictatorship; creative input was welcomed within the structure I prepared but it was my name on the dotted line and on the records. Later, when trouble came knocking, it came my way. So the last word was going to be mine from here on in. Even then,
problems arose, but we had in place a reasonably well-defined system to contextualize and deal with them.