I believe your mind cannot remember your most extreme emotions, one way or the other. That’s why every time you walk onstage and hear that roar, it’s like the first time.
If you truly remembered how bad every tragedy felt, you’d walk around crying all the time. And if you truly remembered how good sex was, you would get absolutely nothing done.
And then, suddenly, there it was… the House That Benny Built! (Don’t call him Bugsy!)
The Flamingo, baby!
It was thrilling. I had read so much about it that I felt like I’d come home.
The Dovells stayed at the hotel gratis, while we were put up in some cheap motel off the Strip. Even so, I am glad I caught the last year the Mob ran Vegas.
First of all, there were vast tracts of land in between the casinos. Now you can walk the whole Strip rooftop to rooftop. Back then, the town was designed to make money strictly from gambling. Everything else existed to keep you there.
Rooms were around $20. There would be ridiculous all-you-can-eat buffets for like $3.95. With steak and lobster. The lounges and all the entertainment venues were five or six bucks. And Frank Sinatra might walk in spontaneously and entertain you for an hour.
Hookers were technically illegal in Clark County, but that was probably legislated to boost tips to the concierges, bellboys, doormen, parking lot guys, cabdrivers, and probably the janitors, all of whom had a few phone numbers for you.
The drummer bought me my first hooker. Man, was that fun! Why sex isn’t legal everywhere I’ll never understand. We should learn from the Netherlands and most civilizations through the centuries. Hookers are Angels of Mercy. Sex work is God’s work. They are nurses for the socially retarded, therapists for the terminally shy, healers for the physically handicapped. They should be respected and protected from traffickers and pimps.
But Vegas wanted every penny gambled. Everything was a loss leader meant to keep you at that table for just one more hand, one more spin, one more roll of the dice. With no revenue from rooms, food, or entertainment and with the Mob probably skimming 25 percent off the top, everybody still got rich!
I couldn’t wait to get to the tables to try out the Gambling Craft I had been studying under John Scarne.
I chose blackjack, although craps was the most fun. I played all seven hands. I was wiped out in about thirty minutes. Over two weeks, I continued practicing my gambling trade in all its forms, winning some, losing more. Cured my love of gambling forever.
Onstage, we opened for Frankie Valli one week, Fats Domino the next. I learned Fats was so in debt to the Mob he had to play Vegas every month, and one of the Four Seasons couldn’t leave at all.
I was so visibly into the whole atmosphere I must have been glowing. The stage manager took a liking to me and offered a tour behind the scenes.
One afternoon, we went all the way up behind the top balcony. A pinspot picked out a tiny figure onstage, and as the soundcheck began I heard the last kind of music you would ever associate with the Flamingo or Las Vegas. I thought I was hallucinating. You know that weird feeling you get when you hear or see something but it’s so out of context you’re not sure it is what it is?
It was… Robert Johnson?
“You’d better come on, in my kitchen, because it’s gonna be raining outdoors.”
“Who’s that?” I asked the stage manager.
“Dion,” he said.
“‘Runaround Sue’ Dion?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
I ran down and introduced myself. We hit it off right away. “Man,” I said, “you ought to do something with that. First of all, you’re great at it. But also, nobody would expect that from you.” When I thought about it later, I realized it fit perfectly with what he’d always done. “Ruby Baby,” “Drip Drop,” “The Wanderer,” all Blues.
Unlike some of the other pioneers, Dion refused to be put out to pasture. He never stopped recording, growing, exploring. The difference was he had deep roots he could rely on. That’s one of the best things about Art. It speaks to you in a different way every time you visit.
Dion must have been watching the Dovells show from the wings, because afterward he asked if I could play the last couple of shows with him, including Dick Clark’s New Year’s Show at the Deauville Hotel in Miami Beach, where the Beatles had played their second Ed Sullivan Show and where the Dovells got their name.
The Dovells wanted to manage me. They swore I was destined for greatness. I didn’t see it. After a year on the road, the only destiny I was interested in was going home to New Jersey.
But I’d be going back in style!
I absolutely fell in love with Miami and the entire tropical lifestyle. I’ll never really understand why I didn’t move there permanently at that time.
Since I couldn’t live in it, I decided to take it with me. I started wearing Hawaiian shirts and Frank Sinatra / Sam Snead hats and continued to do so when I got back to Jersey in snowy January. Bruce christened me “Miami Steve.”
Later, when I became the slightly more serious Little Steven, I would bequeath the entire look to Jimmy Buffett, who I hear has done quite well with it.
seven
Asbury Park—Doubling Down!
(1974–1975)
I still remember, baby, those wild, desperate times,
Making love in crazy places, while the town around us died,
I played on broken stages, I watched the lonely cry,
You danced in iron cages, for the boys with hungry eyes,
All those wasted lives…
—“I’M COMING BACK,” SOULFIRE
A light summer rain fell through the fog that rolled off the ocean. Southside Johnny and the Kid walked down Cookman Avenue, heading east from the neutral zone of Upstage toward the saloon-circuit part of town, where freaks, misfits, and outcasts, and the freedom they represented, had never been welcome.
It wouldn’t be quite as dramatic as the walk Bruce and I would take eight years later through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin, but it had the similar tingle of trepidation that tickled your balls. You knew you were entering a world where you did not belong.
And trust me, the wall that kept us renegades separated from the bar bands protecting their turf on that saloon circuit was almost as real as the one in Deutschland.
Asbury Park was a crippled ghost town. Its once-proud Boardwalk managed to continue functioning at subsistence level on the weekends. The Ferris wheel, bumper cars, and Madame Marie Castello’s Fortune Telling staggered on. The smell of cotton candy, salt air, and stale popcorn somehow remained year-round.
Decades of neglect had run the place down, and then things had gotten worse. The town had always had an uncomfortable relationship between the races, black on the west side of the railroad tracks, white closer to the ocean. The riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. had further divided the town and killed it as a resort town forever.
Which added up to cheap rent for us.
I remember being the only guy in the classic gigantic movie theaters watching blaxploitation movies before they tore those beautiful palaces down. I was such a regular I became friends with the projectionist, who showed me how to thread the reels so he could take a break.
When I got home from the oldies circuit, it was January 2, 1974, and I was looking for some steady action. I had some ideas for a new band, but I needed a spark. It would come a few months later, when Bruce, Southside, and I went to see Sam and Dave at the Satellite Lounge.
It was a black club and mostly a black crowd, and Sam and Dave were ridiculously good. Seeing them in that small club, up close, playing “Soul Man,” “Hold On, I’m Coming,” “I Thank You,” and the rest was truly revelatory. We went up afterward and said hello. They were nice, if a little curious about why these white Rock kids were so enthralled.
And that was that. Another epiphany. Johnny and I would become the Rock version of Sam and Dave, with double lead vocals and Rock guitar, integrated with horn
s. Not Jazz horns or Chicago horns or Blood, Sweat, & Tears horns. Something harder. Stax. Motown. Or what Allen Toussaint was doing in New Orleans. Simple but powerful.
We wanted to be the ultimate bar band. Our version of the Beatles at the Top Ten Club in Hamburg or the Cavern Club in Liverpool. The Stones at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond. The Animals at the Club a’ Gogo in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The Dave Clark Five at the South Grove Youth Club in Tottenham. The Who at the Goldhawk Social Club in Shepherd’s Bush. But with horns.
Even though the Renaissance was over, we thought the old rules still applied. We still thought, naively, that we needed an original identity to justify our existence. Well, now we had one.
Now we had to find a venue.
So Southside and I took that walk.
The Stone Pony, at 913 Ocean Avenue, was as run-down as the rest of town. By late 1974, the roof was half-caved-in from a recent hurricane, and the owners planned to squeeze out whatever they could from the remaining summer season and then shutter the place for good.
It was perfect.
For once the owners weren’t in a position of strength. For once they couldn’t demand that we wear suits and play what had become mostly mediocre top 40 Pop songs. In that half-caved-in roof I saw an opportunity. “Give us your worst night,” I said. “We’ll charge you nothing. Niente. Zip. We take the door, you keep the bar. But we play whatever we want.” They agreed.
We couldn’t have known that one move would alter New Jersey history forever.
Our band played an odd combination of Rock and Soul. A typical set included “Something About You” (by the Four Tops), “Hey Pocky A-Way” (the Meters), “I’m Not Talking” (the Yardbirds), and “Little by Little” (Junior Wells). Plus some Sam and Dave, of course.
We even introduced Reggae to the Jersey shore. The Harder They Come had come out. Its soundtrack was like Reggae’s greatest hits, and some made it into our set: Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” and “Struggling Man,” Toots and the Maytals’ “Pressure Drop,” the Slickers’ “Johnny Too Bad,” a few others.
Each night we played five sets, starting around ten and going until three in the morning. Forty-five on, fifteen off. We would also control the DJ’s music before we started and in between sets to keep the vibe consistent.
The only band I knew of that had worked harder than we did before making it was the Beatles.
The first time I interviewed Ringo Starr for my Underground Garage show, he told me about his pre-Beatles gig with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes (is that a great name or what!), and how they alternated sets with the Beatles in Hamburg, six sets a night each, twelve hours a night, seven nights a week—for months at a time!
That’s Fucking Work.
That’s how you build stamina. That’s how you learn how to perform. That’s how you learn each song’s effect on an audience. But it’s more than that.
Listening to records, no matter how many times, is one thing. Physically playing them over and over is another. The songs get into your bloodstream and muscle memory.
That’s one of the reasons the Beatles became such great writers. This was 1960 to 1962, and there just weren’t that many songs to choose from. They knew everything that got released. All ninety-nine bands in Liverpool were playing the same songs, which is why they stretched into obscurities like “Devil in Her Heart” and B-sides like “Boys.”
It’s also why when John Lennon and Paul McCartney started writing, they looked beyond the four or five chords of the pioneers’ songbook they had mastered so well. The incredibly inventive B-sections of verses and bridges of their earliest hit records, combined with their seemingly infinite wealth of great melodies, came from the intense repetition of those foundational songs, which transformed their influence from observance to DNA.
Our audience became the most sophisticated bar audience in the country because they got used to responding to songs they’d never heard before. We would always start the first set with a new song, which we would repeat in the final set.
When we threw in an original, we disguised it under a different name. We’d say that “I Don’t Want to Go Home” was a B-side of a Drifters’ single. Half the crowd had never even heard of the Drifters, so we got away with it.
Plus, the drinking age had recently been lowered to eighteen, so maybe the kids were just happy to be in a bar for the first time!
We made sure the songs were danceable because that was our job. If the audience danced, they drank. They didn’t dance, you were out of work.
The job was harder than a decade before. Thanks to Bob Dylan’s influence on Rock Artists’ intellect and the ever-evolving imaginations of groups like the Beatles, the Byrds, and the Who, Rock audiences had stopped dancing and started listening.
But they still danced in the bars.
The first week we had about fifty people. The second week, a hundred. The third week, two hundred. The fourth, you couldn’t get in.
They fixed the roof.
We went to a second night. Then a third. Then they expanded the place by adding an extension to the back wall.
By the end of the summer, we were pulling in a thousand people a night, three nights a week, at three dollars each. Relative to my overhead, I was as rich as I would ever be in my life.
Meanwhile, Bruce’s first two albums had come and gone in a flash. He’d moved to Long Branch by then, but no sales meant he couldn’t play the showcase venues that recording bands played, so he returned to Asbury to hang around with us.
He fit easily into what we were doing. The songs were mostly familiar to him, and he played along and sang whenever he felt like it.
As it turned out, it was a lot more fun to be out of the music business than in it.
Back on his first album, Bruce had blown everybody’s minds by grabbing a postcard off the boardwalk and telling Columbia that that was his cover art. Greetings from Asbury Park? You gotta be kidding, they said. New Jersey was a punchline in an Abbott and Costello routine, not a place you brag about!
I figured if he had the balls to identify with Asbury Park, we should double down. I renamed the band Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. Stolen from the greatest harp player that ever lived, Little Walter and His Jukes.
I didn’t want to be the front man all the time, so I split the job with South. He wasn’t that crazy about the idea, but he got used to it.
Bruce didn’t get it at first. He was used to me fronting my own bands. And South was not an obvious choice. He was a crazy misanthropic manic-depressive who enjoyed being a grumpy, miserable, ne’er-do-well with no responsibilities—more W. C. Fields than W. C. Handy. But he surprised everybody by rising to the occasion.
Soon enough, it was clear that the Jukes had started a scene. The Pony was the hip place to be Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday nights.
The walls were sweating just like they described in the early British Invasion days. Cocaine hadn’t hit the suburbs yet, so it was mostly about booze, with an occasional joint in the parking lot.
I had stopped smoking ganja and hashish by then and had switched to Bacardi 151 rum to feed my Reggae habit. It was also better suited to my main preoccupation offstage, which was sex.
Girls were everywhere. Women’s liberation was at its peak. Girls would ask you to have sex. I know. Impossible. But it happened. I was there. At one point I had seven regulars in the area and was meeting new ones from North Jersey on the weekends. In between sets. In the office. With the cologne.
My rent was $150 a month, and that was the extent of my expenses. Mattress on the floor. One fork. One plate. One knife, which I got rid of after I rolled over just in time to stop a New Orleans model from plunging it into my chest. Whatever I did, I am quite sure the punishment did not fit the crime.
I’m not sure exactly why, but I suppose I am obligated to explain the origin of my unusual habiliments. On top of the obvious standard hippie/gypsy/troubadour garb, there was an incident that married the bizarre to the bazaar.
One night I was driving a girlfriend home from the Pony, three in the morning, four lanes, when a guy coming the other way crossed over. I switched lanes as quickly as I could, but he drifted right with me. Head-on collision. Not too fast, but I smashed into the windshield, and though I didn’t lose consciousness, I needed a few operations. After that, my hair never really grew in properly.
I asked Bruce what he thought. “You’ve been wearing these bandanas,” he said. “Just make it a thing.” I did.
We had been slowly working our original songs into the set, creating a unique identity, and felt we had earned the right to make a record. And it was now or never.
I asked Bruce what he thought about Columbia for the Jukes. He said to try Epic Records, which was a subsidiary. He had a guy in mind, Steve “Pops” Popovich, who used to be promotion at Columbia and then became vice president of A&R (that’s artists and repertoire, the guys who sign bands) at Epic. Good guy, Bruce said.
Pops not only immediately signed the Jukes but would become one of our most important working partners and one of my best friends for the rest of his life.
He was a legendary character, the last of the Old School promotion guys. His constant companion was a huge cassette blaster, which he used as a lethal weapon. God help the radio program director he caught in a crowded restaurant at lunchtime. The guy would be quietly sipping his piña colada one minute and then bam! Pops would slam the blaster on the table, hit play, and his latest soon-to-be-hit would come roaring out into the cat’s face. It was a beautiful thing to behold.
Pops started hanging around with us too. He was making the hour’s ride from Freehold and fell in promotion-man love with the whole idea of making riot-ravaged Asbury hip. He even loved the little Italian joint we always ate in, Richie’s, and wanted to franchise it.
The scene was picking up steam. Lines around the block every night, fighting to get in, and then seven hundred liberated maniacs dancing their asses off to Rock and Soul and Reggae they had never heard before.
Unrequited Infatuations Page 8