I had a friend, Mark Romanski, who was in a band with the unfortunate name of the Chlan. Mark was a motorcycle guy, and a spill we took has kept me off bikes to this day. One day in 1966, Mark said, “Let’s go see the Beatles.” We took the bus to Shea Stadium in Queens, which might as well have been Belgium.
The screaming must have been less noisy than at the previous year’s show, because up in the second balcony we could hear the band fine. The very small speakers must have been pointing right at us. The band sounded just like the records, even without any stage monitors. They really were one of the greatest bands in history in every way. We found out later that the stadium wasn’t sold out. The first indication Beatlemania was coming to an end. In three years they’d be gone.
Asbury Park was a stopover between New York and Philadelphia, and the biggest acts played Convention Hall: the Who, the Doors, Jefferson Airplane.
I saw the Stones there, with the Texas Blues guitarist Freddie King opening.
There was only one hotel in town, the Berkeley-Carteret, which could have been the location for The Shining. After the show, the other kids wanted to look for the Stones. I was not big on this idea. We wandered the endless hallways until we came to an open door. In the room was Freddie King.
My brave comrades urged me forward. Go, they said, get his autograph. I never got the whole autograph thing, but I figured, Let’s get it over with. I knocked on the frame. “Excuse me, sir, but could we get your autograph?” He went over to the bed, picked up the pillow, and showed me a gigantic .45.
Never mind.
Never asked for another autograph, never again wanted to meet anybody I liked, and never played a Freddie King lick since.
It was during this period that I met Bruce Springsteen.
Battles of the Bands were regular events, happening every other month or so, so we may have met at one of those. I say that because we were two of the only bands that had Managers, and our Managers became friendly, so they must have met somewhere. But maybe that was later.
Anyway, I think we met at a Shadows gig at the Middletown Hullabaloo, formerly the Oaks, on the exact site of my old summer camp.
A bunch of scraggly, skinny guys with long hair came in, and I knew it had to be a band.
I went over to them during the break.
It was… what’s the right word… inauspicious? Because there was nothing auspicious about us yet. I was fourteen or fifteen, he a year older.
I was wearing a top hat in those days and a huge tie I felt obligated to wear (our drummer’s mother had made it), so he probably commented on my attire. Our band was good, so maybe the combination of sight and sound got his attention. I’m sure he invited me to see his band, the Castiles, wherever they were playing next. He didn’t have a phone.
The Castiles were from lower-middle-class Freehold, out west, not a town you’d frequent if you could help it. It was one of the towns where the greasers lived. The real hoods. The soon-to-be-big-time gangsters.
It couldn’t have been easy for Bruce and the other Castiles to be among the few long-haired freaks in town. Although they had the Motifs as local heroes.
In those days, if you met another guy who was in a band, you were friends. If you both had long hair, you were friends.
And if you both had long hair and were in a band, you were best friends.
That was it.
No thunder. No lightning.
Just two misfit kids who had found a common tribe.
It was the beginning of a lifelong brotherly love affair.
I would stay with the Shadows for only a short time. I had started playing guitar and wanted my own band. The minute I got moderately proficient, that’s what I did. Within a few months, we had morphed into the Source. Buddy dropped out and John Miller went to college and was replaced by Joe Hagstrom (real name) on bass.
Before John left and changed his name back to his mother’s pre-second-marriage name of Britton, he took me to the Red Bank House of Music, which had just gotten in their first Telecaster and was having trouble selling it. I played it and had to have it. The store gave me a good price, probably somewhere around a hundred bucks. I borrowed it from Nana Lento and became the first local Telecaster guy.
I found I had a talent for pulling songs apart and analyzing the pieces. This is where the craft of Arrangement, forever my favorite craft, begins.
Like the Mates and the Shadows, the Source started off playing songs from the top 40 Pop charts—it was the last time the charts were full of great Rock and Soul, not so strangely resembling a typical set of songs that would play in my Underground Garage radio format thirty-five years later. Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “Just Like Me,” Sam and Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Coming,” the Turtles’ “She’d Rather Be with Me,” the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” the Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting.”
What was different was that the Source was expanding the setlist to include tracks from the albums I had started buying that were being played on the new FM stations. But I didn’t mind the AM hits.
They were the coolest songs anyway. That’s why I refer to the ’50s and ’60s as a Renaissance period. When the greatest Art being made is also the most commercial, you’re in a Renaissance.
It continues to be fascinating to me that with all the corruption and payola in those days, the best songs somehow made it through. You can’t find half a dozen records that should have been hits but weren’t! Amazing, really. Let’s face it, just like Vegas—which we’ll get to in a minute—the music business worked better when the Mafia ran it!
The Source rehearsed in the McEvilys’ living room. Our backyards were diagonally across from each other.
Bands like the Source and the Castiles were different from other local groups because, like I said, we had Managers. Theirs was Tex: tall, gangly, cowboy hat, Colonel Tom Parker type. Ours was Bobby’s mother, Big Mama McEvily. The “Big” didn’t refer to her size. It referred to her status as the undisputed boss. Picture Ethel Merman in Gypsy, only tougher. I wish I’d kept her.
I started going to Greenwich Village on the weekends. I didn’t know the history of the place yet, the Beat Poets and the other famous writers and artists that had frequented those twelve square blocks. All I knew was that Bob Dylan had lived there and written “Positively 4th Street,” which was enough for me.
Article about my band the Source announcing we would blow up our equipment after the show. The ad is about a different gig, a band battle that Bruce’s band was also in when we were still the Shadows.
The Courier
The Cafe Wha? on MacDougal Street (still there) had music around the clock, new bands in the day, more established ones at night. I took the bus in by myself, watched bands, learned what I could, drank alcoholic Brandy Bastards, and made it home for the awkward dinner with the family, as I became more and more of a disappointment.
The bands I saw were a year or two ahead of anything in New Jersey. I was absorbing, and stealing, all I could.
It was a surprise when I started running into Bruce there, the equivalent of running into a Jersey neighbor while on vacation in Sardinia.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“I come up to check things out.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Wow, I thought. This guy’s as crazy as I am.
We started hanging out and taking the bus into the city together. Before we went, we would go to his room and play records.
It was always a little scary, because we had to pass the kitchen, where his father would often be smoking and staring off into space, occasionally sipping on something. Like my dad, he seemed always on the brink of exploding into violence to vent a lifetime of frustration intensified by having a son who was one of New Jersey’s only freaks.
Bruce’s father would turn out to be a real sweetheart, just like my own. But those early days were tough going. We were an embarrassment to them. Failures they took personally.
Bruce and I would pl
ay each other our favorite records, and he would also play me songs he had written.
I had written only one song. Big Mama had a friend, another Big Mama type, with a terrible Pop song she wanted us to record. If we did, she said, we could record one of our own for the B-side.
Big Mama suggested I write something, so I did. It was called “Traveling,” a Rock song with a little Indian flavor, like what George Harrison was bringing to the Beatles. We recorded the terrible Pop song and put “Traveling” on the flip, but it was never released and all the test pressings have disappeared.
No great loss, believe me.
Bruce was taking writing much more seriously. He was already picturing himself as part of the business, even though we were in fucking New Jersey, where our chances of being discovered were only slightly higher than if we were in Tanganyika.
We both had the same crazy dream, but his was advanced dreaming. It was very encouraging.
As I mentioned, I discovered I had a gift for analyzing records and figuring out how they were put together. There turned out to be five crafts of Rock, and they weren’t as easy as the Stones made them look.
First Craft: Learn Your Instrument. As a Rock musician, you either get a few lessons in person or you study video of where guys put their hands. Being a front man (singing without playing) is a little more complex. Singing is the easy part. Sing along with your favorite records. But every singer is also an actor. Every lyric is a script, and every song is a movie, performed for the audience. Good singers make it seem like they’ve experienced what they are singing about, as if it’s true, whether it is or not. Some of the greatest singers of all time, like Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, and Whitney Houston, never wrote much at all, if anything, but their songs seem autobiographical. While you don’t have to take acting or dancing lessons to learn how to inhabit a song, it wouldn’t hurt.
Second Craft: Arrangement. Make a list of your favorite songs and then find three or four other guys or girls who share the same vision. That will help you form your band. But now you have to dissect those songs. Your dissection should include an understanding of the lyrics, as Rock is basically a storytelling medium. But arrangement is about asking other questions. What are the chords? What are the instruments being used? What is each one doing, exactly? You will learn which instruments to include and how to configure the song: the verses, the chorus, the bridge, the solo. The rules are there to break. Some songs may start with a chorus, like the Beatles’ “Help!” Some songs may not have a bridge, like the Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night.” Some songs may not have a bridge or a solo, like the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.” But understanding how songs are built is central to the craft of arrangement.
Third Craft: Performance. So you’re feeling pretty good about your ability with your instrument (though you never stop getting better), your band has learned its favorite fifty songs, and you are ready to get out of the garage. Find a place to play. A venue. If you’re over eighteen, it will most likely be a bar. If you’re under, you will have to figure it out. Playing live is a whole different animal from rehearsal. It accomplishes three important things. You will learn what effect each song has on the audience, you will learn how to interact with an audience, and you will learn how to interact with your band.
Fourth Craft: Composition. You can now take what you’ve learned from arrangement and performance and start writing songs. There are really no rules here, but I would make one suggestion. Write with purpose. What do you want the song to do? To be? Do you want it to make people dance? Laugh? Cry? Think? Is your song a question? An answer? A confession? Who are you talking to? Yourself? It helps to have some direction when you’re staring at an empty page or screen.
Fifth Craft: Recording. These days most people begin the recording process at home. We did too, usually with a cassette recorder in the middle of the room at rehearsal.
Some people record all on their own. That’s both good and bad. There is a chance you’ll learn quite a bit and maybe create something fantastic on your own. But most of the time, it takes an army to make a great record. Prince may be the only exception in history to this rule, and even he had help on Purple Rain. Everybody else benefits from collaboration. Input from an objective Producer is always helpful. And band members. And Arrangers. I don’t care where a good idea comes from—I’ll take a suggestion from the studio janitor if it makes the record better. You need help to realize your potential. You can do everything completely by yourself, but most likely you will achieve supreme, profound mediocrity. That’s easy. These days everybody is doing that.
But what you want deep down in your soul is to do something great. We may not always achieve greatness, but we should always be reaching for it. Isn’t that our best way to show our gratitude for life itself?
Bruce played me his favorite records—Tim Buckley’s Goodbye and Hello, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks—and then an original or two, usually in that same Folk-type genre. Then we’d sneak out to Greenwich Village for more absorbing and more stealing.
My favorite band at the time was called the Source. I liked them so much I stole their name.
They were originally from DC but were living in the Village, where the action was. They would change their name to Kangaroo when they got signed.
John Hall, a future congressman I would help elect forty years later, was their genius bass player, and their guitar player was the amazing Teddy Spelios, the closest thing to Jeff Beck in our world. I still use the two-finger-picks-with-a-flat-pick style Teddy used when he played.
Aside from the mystery of his ridiculous talent, Teddy had the magic tone, a beautiful distorted sound. Bruce was a year or two ahead of me on guitar. I was catching up fast. But neither of us could figure out how Teddy got that tone.
We worked up the courage to ask him one day. He gave us a look to see if we were fucking with him, but he could see we were serious. “Just turn the amp all the way up,” he said, predating Spinal Tap by seventeen years. It didn’t work for us. Every time we tried it, the pickups would squeal bloody murder.
Then one day Bruce called. “I’ve got it!” he said. “I’ve got the tone!” I rushed over. He had found a weird guitar someone had thrown out that fed back the right way, sustaining a note rather than a horrible squeal. It was a major breakthrough.
He was having a tough time finding strings that were long enough because the guitar turned out to be a bass. But he played it for a while.
Bruce’s role in the Castiles had grown in the short time I’d known him. A guy named George Theiss had started off as the lead singer, but he had issues occasionally and would refuse to sing, forcing Bruce to step up.
For all our overlap, Bruce and I had our own inclinations, which were reflected in our bands’ repertoires. The Source played Rock-Pop like the Who’s first album (still my favorite), the Youngbloods, Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, the Hollies, the Kinks, the Stones, the Beatles.
The Castiles leaned moodier and darker. The Doors, Love, Them, the Yardbirds, the Animals. Between the two of us we had the new revolution covered. And those two complementary sensibilities would show up big-time thirteen years later on an album called The River.
Before John Miller, now Britton again, left for college, he came with me and Bruce to the Cafe Wha? one day to see Kangaroo. The guy who opened for them was a black guy doing wild things on his guitar with feedback—in a good way, like the Beatles had started doing and the Who were doing regularly. I didn’t pay much attention to his group, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, which seemed like an out-of-their-environment R&B group that had just dropped acid for the first time. The wild guitar player wouldn’t change back to his birth name of Hendrix until he got to England. I was much more interested and anxiously awaiting the new Kangaroo lineup, having heard they had recently added a girl singer.
In between John Miller leaving and Joe Hagstrom coming into the Source, I mentioned to the guys that I would like Bruce to be in the band. He ha
d mentioned having tough times in the Castiles every now and then. But the problem was the way we got to the gigs—our mothers took turns driving us. And since Bruce’s mother didn’t drive, he couldn’t seriously be considered for the band.
There was one brief intrusion of reality into my tunnel vision. Like every other guy my age who didn’t go to college, I got drafted.
Everybody had a different idea on how to get out of it. None of them appealed to me. I thought for a minute, Maybe I’ll go. But who was I kidding? I couldn’t take orders from anybody my whole life. When I got into the draft-board room, I decided to just deal with it.
My anxiety spilled out in a nervous monologue.
I said, “Listen, man. I don’t really have the brains to bullshit you, you know? I mean I’ve heard of people successfully doing that, but I just can’t get into it, man, so you’ve got to, you know, like, help me out here. I’m not that crazy about killing people, I’m being honest with you, as opposed to those guys in the other room, who, you know, can’t wait. They are looking forward to killing people, and I’ve got to believe that’s the cats you want. And the room is full of ’em. I, on the other hand, don’t have that thing that just wants to kill people. So you’re gonna have to explain this to me.”
We were the last group and it had been a long day. The guy from the draft board squinted. “Whaddya mean, son?”
“I mean, explain it, sir. What’s the story with Vietnam? Start there.”
“Well,” he says. “It’s Communists, boy!”
“OK,” I said. “So what’s a Communist and why are we killing them? And all the way over there?”
“Well, a Commie is a… a… a dictator and uh, bad people, son. Bad people. And we’re fighting him there so he don’t come here.”
Unrequited Infatuations Page 4