I didn’t realize it until years later, but we unwittingly redefined “bar band” forevermore to mean Soul-based Rock, usually with horns. That’s not what it meant when we started. It was originally derogatory, an insult for bands that couldn’t make it in the music business. It meant, among other things, that their song list was restricted to the top 40.
Rolling Stone used to have a feature where they would review one live show per issue on the back page. In 1976, for the first time, they wrote about an unsigned band, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes at the Stone Pony, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays!
After that, “bar band” (and its British version, “pub rock”) would be used to describe acts like Graham Parker and the Rumour, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds, Mink DeVille, Huey Lewis and the News. “Bar band” became a compliment for working-class bands who were proud of their traditional roots.
The audience became so used to hearing music they didn’t yet know that for years after, national and even international bands with new albums would play the Pony first. They knew they’d have an audience who could react to new music in real time.
It would never be the Kaiserkeller or the Cavern, the Marquee, the Crawdaddy Club, or the Club a’ Gogo.
But it was pretty damn cool for Jersey.
eight
The Boss of All Bosses
(1974–1975)
Greatness isn’t born, it’s developed. It’s a decision you make every hour or so.
—THE UNWRITTEN BOOK
“We’re doing better than your wildest dreams,” I said. “Three nights a week, a thousand people a night. We need to make a change.”
Stone Pony owners Butch and Jack were scary dudes. The smaller one was six foot five, 280 pounds. They were picking up cases of beer and tossing them to each other for storage like they were cereal boxes.
“What do you got in mind?” asked Jack.
“We want to go to three sets a night from five,” I said. “And before you answer, this isn’t a negotiation. Agree or we’ll go across the street and take the crowds with us. Gabeesh?”
They stopped tossing for a moment and looked at me like I was lunch. Long pause. They started tossing again. Slow smiles. Butch spoke. “OK.”
And just like that, we made history a second time. Not only were we the first bar band in New Jersey to play whatever we wanted, but we were the first to break the ironclad five-sets-a-night rule. Our sets became more like what signed bands would do at showcase clubs like the Bottom Line in New York or the Roxy in LA.
I was good at doing business when I had to. The only problem was that I hated it. I wasn’t sure what my purpose was on this planet, but it wasn’t to become a fucking businessman. I knew I had to find the Jukes a real Manager and Agent.
Good Managers are the hardest to come by, and in my opinion they are the most crucial factor in a band’s success. The Mount Rushmore of Artists had a Mount Rushmore of Managers: Colonel Tom Parker, Brian Epstein, Andrew Loog Oldham, and Albert Grossman. Rock would be unthinkable without Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan, and yet everyone in the business laughed at, passed on, or ignored all of them at first. What’s the main job of a Manager? Advocacy. If it wasn’t for the advocacy, belief, and salesmanship of those four Managers, who knows how history would’ve been different?
Managers get paid, of course. Management takes 10, 15, even 20 percent of the gross. Agents get 10 percent. The whole concept of gross points is stupid and unfair, but that’s the way the business mostly runs, and it’s one reason Managers and Agents can do better than their Artists. The difference between Managers and Agents was and is that Managers, the better ones, usually have to invest in their Artists in the beginning, while Agents usually don’t.
But without the right Manager, you are inevitably going to have a problem. Most critics would rank the Kinks third or fourth among British Invasion bands, after the Beatles and the Stones. So why were they never as big as the Who? Because their management was busy producing the Troggs when the Kinks toured America. The tour devolved into chaos. The band didn’t get paid. They fought with each other onstage. Ray Davies traded punches with a union guy on The Dick Clark Show, which led to a ban from the United States for the most important four years of their prime, 1965 to 1969.
That’s what happens when you don’t have the right management.
As I set out to find the Jukes a real Manager and Agent, I was still acting as de facto Manager. I figured I needed something to make it more fun. An assistant! Just as a joke really. I drafted Obie Dziedzic, our number one fan, to be my first assistant. She turned out to be great, actually, a perfect buffer. She had that Big Mama McEvily quality of taking no shit from anybody. And like Big Mama, she was physically imposing enough to keep anybody in their right mind from fucking with her—and therefore me.
Bruce was recording what could have been his last record for Columbia. He was fighting for his life.
“Come check it out,” he said. I made the trek up to 914 Sound Studios in scenic Blauvelt, New York, owned by the legendary Engineer and Producer Brooks Arthur. Not the happiest of memories, since that’s where I got kicked out of the band. Bruce was there with Mike Appel, Mike’s partner, and a new guy nobody introduced. It turned out to be another visitor, the writer Jon Landau.
They had been working on one song for weeks. Maybe months.
It sounded like it.
The song was like nothing Bruce had ever done before. This thing was produced, baby!
They were rightfully quite proud of it. Even Mike Appel was in a good mood.
There’s the baritone sax fifths from “Loco-Motion”!
There’s the Motown glockenspiel!
There’s Phil Spector’s doubling of everything!
There’s Duane Eddy’s baritone guitar riff! (He actually used a six-string bass.)
It was called “Born to Run,” and it was a hurricane of sound. More aggressive and more Rock than Spector’s wall because of the central guitar riff, which Spector never had.
And quite a complex arrangement, the most ambitious I’d ever heard Bruce do. It brought me back to Steel Mill, where he wrote almost stream-of-consciousness songs that moved unpredictably from part to part.
When we were kids, bands were measured by their ability to imitate hits. Bruce was never great at that. He heard things differently.
As he gained more experience, he came to understand basic theory, the so-called rules that so-called normal Arrangers live by. But it never limited his creativity.
The “Born to Run” bridge sections show how his imagination-gone-wild arranging style, which had been on full display since “Kitty’s Back” an album earlier, was now working within basic rules, such as returning to the beginning key. That’s what kept the middle section both exciting and coherent.
As impressed as I was, I thought the middle section was too complex for Pop. I kept that to myself. He didn’t need the Pop charts at that time anyway.
I did comment on one thing, however.
Bruce walked me out of the control room, still glowing with pride. I was thrilled for him. A major breakthrough. And just in time.
“Man,” I said. “That is something else!”
“It’s been a lot of work, but it’s been worth it.” He nodded.
“That’s such a new chord change for you, that minor chord in the riff. It’s so Roy Orbison, which goes well with your new singing style.”
He stopped walking. “What minor chord?”
“In the riff. It’s great. Like something the Beatles would do.”
“You’re trippin’!” His smile was starting to slip. “There’s no minor in the riff!”
“What do you mean? Of course there is!”
“Here,” he said, throwing me a guitar, “play it!”
I played it.
“That’s not what I’m doing,” he said. He took another guitar and showed me.
“That’s cool,” I said. “
But that ain’t what’s on the record!”
Without boring you nonmusicians too much, he had been bending the fifth note of the riff, the minor third of the 4 chord, up to the major third of the 4 chord, à la Duane Eddy. But the reverb was obliterating where he was bending the note to, so all you heard was where it was coming from.
They had been working on it so long that they thought they were hearing what Bruce intended. But it wasn’t really there.
“Oh my God,” he said, finally understanding. Into the control room he went with the bad news. If they hadn’t already thrown me out of the band, they would have thrown me out again.
Either Mike Appel or one of the few believers left at Columbia sent “Born to Run” to Bruce-friendly DJs, including Richard Neer at WNEW in New York, Kid Leo at WMMS in Cleveland, Ed Sciaky at WMMR in Philly, Charles Laquidara at WBCN in Boston. They started playing the hell out of it. Leo ended his shift with it every Friday to send his audience into the weekend inspired. It saved Bruce’s career, at least temporarily.
Mike then mortgaged his house to pay for the album. Even given the single’s success, Columbia was still considering dropping Bruce. John Hammond had been moved aside, and Clive Davis had gotten bounced after some stupid scandal. The label was sending promotion men into radio stations to take Bruce’s records out and put in records by their new kid, Billy Joel. No shit.
There were more complications within Bruce’s camp. Appel was unsuccessfully pretending to tolerate Landau’s presence, which Bruce was suddenly insisting on. And Jon, attempting to assert some control, had moved the sessions to the Record Plant in Manhattan.
One afternoon, Bruce and I were in his apartment in Long Branch. He was always broke, and I usually had a couple bucks in my pocket to give him. I would say loan, but that would falsely imply he paid it back.
“You’ve got a Manager and a record company now,” I said. “That’s big-time. Where’s the money? What kind of deal do you have?”
He dug out a copy and showed it to me.
“Man,” I said, “am I reading this right? It looks like Mike is taking 50 percent.”
The only other fifty-fifty deal I had ever heard of was the one Elvis signed with Colonel Tom.
I got the impression that Bruce had never looked at it. I’m not even sure he had a lawyer when he signed it. I started asking more questions. And then he started asking questions.
It wasn’t personal. I liked Mike when I first met him and I like him now. I just didn’t like him when he was throwing me out of what was going to be the band back in 1972. And even then he was actually doing me a favor. All I missed was traveling around the country in a fucking station wagon.
The real problem with Mike, ultimately, wasn’t just the issue of money. Mike came from the tough-guy camp. Lots of management guys in the ’50s and ’60s were either Mob related or just as tough as the Mob because that’s who they were dealing with.
The business was full of them. Peter Grant and his hit man Richard Cole beat up Bill Graham’s security guys. Don Arden hung competitors out windows. Mike Jeffery may have had Jimi Hendrix murdered and then got blown up in a plane.
Even Colonel Tom and Albert Grossman were in the tough-guy group. The colonel had possibly killed somebody in his native Netherlands. And who can forget that wonderful image of Grossman and Alan Lomax rolling around in the grass field of the Newport Folk Festival after Lomax declared the Paul Butterfield Blues Band didn’t belong there?
But their time had come and gone. The modern Managers are more like David Geffen, Irving Azoff, and Jon Landau. Intellect over muscle. Persuasion over threat.
Plus, Bruce had discovered publishing and found out he didn’t control his own songs. A lawsuit ensued, and things were gonna get worse before they got better.
I continued trying to get out of the Jukes business. I met Steve Leber and David Krebs, who managed Aerosmith and KISS and had invented the Rock T-shirt, for promotional purposes only at first, with no thought of selling them. I met Tommy Mottola, who had Hall and Oates and a few others. He had a little bit of that tough-guy thing I liked.
While I was mulling that decision over, I started meeting all the Agents.
Every single one of them started the conversation the same way. “So, you’ve probably already met with Frank, but here’s what we can do…”
By the time the fourth guy said it, I was thinking, Whoever the fuck this Frank is, that’s the guy I want.
Frank turned out to be Frank Barsalona, the third of the five important guys that would change my life, and another lifelong friend.
After brief semistardom in childhood as an urban yodeler (you heard me right), Frank became a very young Agent at General Artists Corporation (GAC) when Rock was merely a tiny department next to the janitor’s closet. The real Agents were dedicated to the “real” showbiz of the time—movies, TV, and singers of Popular standards.
One day, early in 1964, GAC’s Rock guy quit, and Frankie made one of the biggest moves of his life. He told the boss he’d like the job. The boss laughed at the kid’s chutzpah but cared so little about the teenage market that he tossed him a booking book and said, “Go ahead, kid, knock yourself out.”
The conventional wisdom at the time was that Rock and Roll was pretty much over. Elvis had been drafted. Chuck Berry was in jail. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper had died. Dion became a junkie. Eddie Cochran was killed and Gene Vincent crippled in the same car accident. Bo Diddley went to Texas to become a US marshal. Little Richard saw Sputnik, considered it a sign from God, and became a preacher, and Jerry Lee Lewis was blackballed because people thought he had married his fifteen-year-old cousin (she was actually thirteen).
One of the first tests they threw at Frank was the difficult, perhaps impossible, job of booking a group from England. One of the agency’s big relationships, Sid Bernstein, was all hot about these Brits. If it had been anybody else, they would have ignored him entirely. There had never been a successful anything out of England.
The bosses gave it to the kid, so he’d fail and go back to the mail room where he belonged.
Frank talked a Washington, DC, promoter into booking the English group, who happened to be the Beatles, and went down and witnessed the insanity that followed. He decided that not only was teenage Rock not over, it was just getting started.
He quit GAC a month later and started Premier Talent, the first agency dedicated to Rock, and single-handedly changed the world.
I’ve started to write a book about him a thousand times, and still hope to, but here is how Frank created the infrastructure of the Rock era, which flourished for thirty years:
• He introduced the game-changing concept that the first thing that matters is how good a band is live. Records and radio success will follow. This was a completely original thought.
• He divided the country into regions like Salvatore Maranzano did for the Mob.
• Like Charles Luciano did for the Mob after he whacked Maranzano, Frank stopped using the old Mustache Pete promoters, who hated Rock and were mostly thieves. He put in Young Turks like Don Law in Boston, Larry Magid in Philly, and Ron Delsener in New York, who owed their careers to him.
• He introduced the concept of longevity by telling the promoters they would lose money on a new band’s first tour, break even or make a little on the second, and make money every tour after that. Sacrifice would be rewarded with loyalty.
The results were amazing. What had once been a novelty was suddenly a legitimate business. Well, maybe not fully legitimate, but a real business. With a future.
I started calling Frank the Godfather. Capo di Tutti Capi. Boss of All Bosses.
Frank immediately took on the Jukes. I had an ulterior motive. Bruce was at the William Morris Agency, and from what I could see they were not in Frank’s league.
I wanted Bruce with the Godfather, the best with the best, and started making moves to make it happen.
Dion was doing an album with Phil Spector i
n Los Angeles, and he invited me to a session. Spector sessions were as legendary as the music that came out of them.
I wanted to bring Bruce, but I was a bit trepidatious, as the Cowardly Lion might say.
The press had been making a big deal about the Spector influence in “Born to Run,” though in fact it was just one of a number of elements in the production. I wondered how Spector would react. Would he see it as a tribute? A rip-off? He didn’t have the most stable reputation even then.
Still, a Phil Spector session at Gold Star with the Wrecking Crew! Engineered by Stan Ross or Larry Levine! Only Jack Nitzsche was missing.
I had to take the chance.
Dion walked us in and put us on the couch facing the studio. The board was behind us, which was a typical studio configuration in those days. That way, guests would be out of the way of the Producers and Engineers.
Spector comes in already talking a hundred miles an hour. He nodded in our direction and began a three-hour Don Rickles–style monologue that would have played well in Vegas.
They’d do a take every half hour or so, and the Engineer made slight adjustments, but the rest of the time Phil went around the room, musician to musician, making musical suggestions in the form of insults or just doing straight-out insults for the fun of it.
He started off with a gallon jug of paisano wine, which my grandfather used to drink, and it was gone by the end of the session.
And yes, he was waving his gun around threatening to kill Hal Blaine if he missed the fill going to the third verse again, occasionally screaming, “Don’t embarrass me in front of Bruce Springsteen!”
I felt bad for Dion, who was stuck in the vocal booth trying to make a serious record while everybody else was laughing their asses off.
I wonder if anybody ever filmed Phil doing his act. It was shtick, do a take, shtick, do a take, shtick, until it seemed like the song was literally an afterthought. Then, with five minutes left, he’d get a perfect take. The whole thing was a Spector rope-a-dope!
Unrequited Infatuations Page 9