Bruce’s songs had become even more cinematic with “Born to Run,” and the unique combination of elements in his art—a little Dylan, a little Orbison, some James Brown and Van Morrison—kept the cognoscenti off-balance. Onstage, we were a Rock and Roll Rat Pack with me in the Dino role and Clarence a Sammy on steroids.
We had the best light man in the world, Marc Brickman, a street character from Philly. I called him Mookie after we saw Mean Streets. Mookie’s talent made the songs come alive. He heightened the drama. He made the audience pay attention. And all of it was done with a couple of friggin’ Christmas bulbs and a flashlight.
The Roxy had been opened back in 1973 by Elmer Valentine and Lou Adler.
Elmer was a cop in Chicago who “retired” under murky circumstances in the early ’60s and took a trip to France, where some friends took him to a new thing, a “discotheque” called Whisky a Go Go. It was a club where a DJ played records and people danced, an adult version of the ’50s “record hop,” where famous radio DJs appeared in high school gyms.
Elmer liked the idea so much that he came back, moved to LA, and opened his own Whisky a Go Go in the heart of the Sunset Strip. He immediately changed the concept to include live music and installed Johnny Rivers and his group as his house band. Everyone played there: the Byrds, Love, the Doors, Buffalo Springfield.
The Whisky started a nightlife empire. Elmer opened the Trip and, with Lou Adler and Mario Maglieri, the Rainbow Bar and Grill, and the Roxy, which replaced the Whisky as the showcase club for up-and-comers. Including us.
After our Roxy shows, I hung out with Elmer, who took a liking to me. He took me to the exclusive On the Rox club upstairs and threw a Hollywood party at his house in our honor, where he poured me my first hundred-dollar wine.
I didn’t know wine could cost that much or taste that good.
He also loaned me one of his beautiful girlfriends for the night. I mean literally. The whole experience was surreal.
It was like walking through a movie. I felt like Peter Fonda in The Trip, minus the acid. Or like Psych-Out come to life. Jack Nicholson was standing right there!
The LA women were exactly what every Jersey boy dreamed about. Friendly, beautiful, openly sensual, casually sexual, surprisingly intelligent, totally in control of their own destiny, no games, no talking them into anything. They were just there to have a mutually enjoyable experience with you.
They actually made eye contact instead of avoiding it like the East Coast girls, who mostly still treated sexual pleasure as something reluctantly tolerated instead of sought after.
It was a little intimidating at first. You could see why societies down through the millennia had done everything they could to discourage women’s true liberation. Unleashed female sexuality is an awesome force of nature. They fully expected to get their orgasms just like you did, so you had to bring it! Fortunately I had developed an early habit of making sure the girls came first, so I left them with nice thoughts about Italian kids from New Jersey. Richie Sambora would thank me later!
LA in the ’70s was a rare magical paradise that made this mostly miserable life worth living. Elmer was conscious of that. He knew how to make your day. Loved him a lot.
As close as we were, I didn’t find out his single most amazing achievement until I was doing research for my radio show thirty years later.
When he built the Whisky, he had no perfect spot for the DJ booth, so he built a see-through plexiglass cage and suspended it over the dance floor. On opening night, the female DJ didn’t show, so Elmer drafted the cigarette girl, Patty Brockhurst, to spin the discs. Mad Men didn’t make it up.
Patty was West Hollywood uninhibited. The fact that she had a miniskirt on in a glass cage didn’t bother her at all. As she played the records, she danced to them, much to the salacious thrill of the boys below. The crowd loved it so much that Elmer built two more cages. One of the girls, Joanna Labean, created the costumes of fringed skirt and white boots. And that’s how my lifelong friend Elmer Valentine invented the go-go girl!
Now that’s a legacy! Fuck everything else.
My first trip to Cali included a memorable encounter with LA’s finest, when I crossed the street and two patrol cars came screeching up. I was ordered against the wall by four cops with guns drawn—for jaywalking!
Playboy wanted to do a profile of me, and I brought Jimmy Iovine with me to the interview. The interviewer asked why Jimmy was there. “He’s one of my guys,” I said. Anything went. We were hot. It was fun to be hot. No worries. No rules.
Marty Scorsese invited us to a special screening of Mean Streets, partly because of the line in Bruce’s “Jungleland,” “wounded, not even dead,” which was how the movie ended.
He also showed us some dailies of the new film he was starting to work on, New York, New York. Jon Landau was friends with Jay Cocks, who would become a lifelong, important friend of mine, and Jay was friends with Marty. It had been Jay and his wife, Verna Bloom, who had introduced Marty to Bobby De Niro.
In those days Bruce always wanted me with him. I was like his little brother, and he knew I was always watching his back. It was always a complementary relationship. He was—he is—a year older, and very much a mentor when it came to the Art and the Business. But there were some things that I did better, like arranging songs, and I always had more street smarts. I was—I am—much more connected to the social world, because I had to work in it, where he was always a bit distant, focusing on creating his own world and living in it.
I drove back from the screening with Marty in his new Lamborghini, and we talked about Marty showing Francis Ford Coppola the Robert De Niro scenes from Mean Streets, which convinced Francis that De Niro would be his perfect Young Vito. It was the type of conversation with the type of guy I’d looked forward to my whole life. Things were finally starting to make sense.
One of my big regrets was not staying in touch with Marty. Even though our paths would cross every few years, we never really had a chance to become the close friends we should have been.
We were still in LA when Bruce made the cover of both Time and Newsweek. In the same week! I couldn’t believe it. There was my friend, a local freak, misfit, and outcast like myself, on the covers of two of the country’s biggest magazines. That had only happened for a president or two, maybe an astronaut and a few popes!
I remember the Newsweek reporter asking the oddest questions, trying to trip us up. She thought we were fabricated, out of central casting. She could not possibly have conceived of the amount of work we had put in, ten years by then, to be secure enough with our craft to appear casual and inevitable.
I bought out both magazines at the newsstand and handed them out to everybody around the Sunset Marquis pool. Bruce was embarrassed to death. He ran and hid in his room and had a nervous breakdown. After all the work he’d put in to make sure he controlled his own destiny, he felt it slipping away. How quickly Fate can deal new cards.
He’d end up climbing up to his billboard on Sunset Boulevard and painting a mustache on himself or something like that.
I loved the covers. While Bruce always had an inner confidence that he’d make it, I didn’t. Validation like that was a big relief to me. And to my parents, who could no longer deny that we were onto something.
But then again, that’s exactly why I don’t like being out front. You gotta deal with shit like that!
Back in New York, Jimmy Iovine told me he had a key to the Record Plant. “We should sneak in after hours and do some demos for the Jukes,” he said.
We went in with the band as they were. Kenny “Popeye” Pentifallo, Kevin Kavanaugh, Alan Berger, and Billy Rush. We had horn players coming and going, so I don’t remember how or why we ended up getting a horn section from Philly on the actual record.
It was hard to get used to how bad the studio sounded. All I wanted to do was start with how a band sounds when you walk into a room. I thought the outboard equipment (equalizers, compressors) were making things s
ound phony, so I had Jimmy turn them all off. When I wasn’t looking, Jimmy unscrewed all the bulbs and used the equipment anyway. It wasn’t the outboard stuff, as it turned out. It was the fucking ’70s. Everything sucked.
How different was radio back then? Steve Popovich sent the demos to Kid Leo, the biggest DJ on the biggest station in Cleveland, and the maniac broadcast them and told his audience that Bruce wasn’t the only thing happening in Asbury Park. There was a scene.
So since we were already getting airplay, wouldn’t it be nice if we actually had an album?
The deal took forever. Luckily, Southside and I were having a good summer at Monmouth Park Racetrack, where his old man (picture Ernie Kovacs) was teaching us how to read the racing form. So whatever Jimmy couldn’t steal, we paid for with our track winnings.
Producing a record is like directing a movie or executive-producing a TV show. You’re in charge. And while producing has psychological, creative, and business aspects, there are logistical responsibilities hanging over everything. The physical record is really four parts—composition, arrangement, performance, and sound. You want the first two done before you get to the studio, especially back in those days, when the clock was running to the tune of $150–$200 an hour.
Southside turned out to have a very recordable voice, and Jimmy did a great job. He had a habit of getting up extremely early—that just seemed to be his natural clock—and that led to a habit of dozing off during our sessions, which might start at midnight. I’d wake him up to rewind the tape and then he’d check back out. The hours were no fun for him. I loved him all the more for doing it.
For free of course, by the way. Although I gave Jimmy the first percentage point he ever received. I made it a regular policy to give all my Engineers points after that. And like me, they’re all still waiting to collect.
I Don’t Want to Go Home took about three weeks mixed.
On that first album, I began my lifelong habit of proudly wearing my influences on my sleeve, bringing in ’60s Artists as a way of showing my gratitude and reminding the industry and the audience that they were put out to pasture way too soon. We were hoping to expose them to a whole new generation.
Jimmy and I would go to Umberto in Little Italy after the sessions and strategize taking over the world. This was only a year or two after Joey Gallo got whacked there.
Jimmy says to me, You’re a natural at this producing thing. You should do more. Like who? I say. I don’t know, he says. Let me think about it.
He set up a meeting with Joey Heatherton. I had lunch with her and she looked unreal. I suggested to her Lorna Bennett’s Reggae version of “Breakfast in Bed,” originally done by Dusty Springfield. She loved it but it never happened. Very sorry about that.
Then one night Jimmy brought up Ronnie Spector, who was in some kind of early retirement. I suggested we try her on the Jukes album first to see how it worked out.
Then I was talking to Popovich about how much I love New Orleans, and I told him I just wrote a Lee Dorsey / Allen Toussaint song for the Jukes. “Let’s get Lee Dorsey,” he said. We dragged him out from under the car he was working on in New Orleans (a scene later re-created by Bruce, unknowingly, in one of his videos). On one of our trips, the E Street Band played Lee’s Ya-Ya Lounge to help him out. He wouldn’t join us onstage until he sold every bottle of beer he had.
Not only did Steve Popovich tolerate us putting our heroes on the records, he encouraged it! I realize now nobody else on earth would have done such a crazy, blatantly uncommercial thing. He did it because it was cool. And he knew what cool was. And didn’t give a fuck what the rest of the industry thought. He was a miracle. The perfect guy at the perfect time.
Like most first albums, our material came straight from our Pony sets. We had R&B like Solomon Burke’s “Got to Get You off My Mind,” Buster Brown’s “Fannie Mae” (stolen note for note by the Stones for “The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man”), Ray Charles’s “I Choose to Sing the Blues,” and an album track from Sam and Dave, “Broke Down Piece of Man.” We added some comic Doo-Wop for Popeye, I wrote three songs, and Bruce wrote two.
Not a bad first production, considering I jumped in and learned on the job. It even won an award or two. Credit should go to Jimmy, who always knew more than he appeared to know. Like all southern Italians.
Looking back, I have only one thought.
Since we paid for the first Jukes record ourselves, how come we’ve never seen one dollar in royalties?
Anybody know a good lawyer?
eleven
This Time It’s for Real
(1977)
Brewster: You’re a very bad man, Walker, a very destructive man! Why do you run around doing things like this?
—CARROLL O’CONNOR TO LEE MARVIN, POINT BLANK (1967)
The crowd had been building for months.
Building toward this night.
New Jersey in general and Asbury Park in particular hadn’t had a lot to cheer about lately. A malaise had been suffocating the country since Nixon’s reelection in ’72. Not quite the Great Depression following the Roaring Twenties, but in some ways worse.
The death of the 1920s was the death of a hedonistic society that could not have gone on forever without violating the philosophy that life is supposed to suck, which I believe was spray-painted on the side of the Mayflower.
The death of the ’60s was far more profound. It was the death of a dream of a better society, a new way of living and thinking. The hippies were going to finally implement the ideals of the Founding Fathers. We may not have had their intellect, but goddamn it, we had their spirit!
And then that dream disintegrated, with the assassination of one hero after another, the uprising of a frustrated black population (riots, they were called, but they were really a matter of a seventh of our population waiting for the Civil War to end—still are), and the systematic dismantling of activist groups working toward a more equitable society, from the American Indian Movement to the Young Lords to the Black Panthers.
And just for good measure, Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard, which would begin a fifty-years-and-counting decline in the purchasing power of our currency, directly leading to the permanent malaise we all now live with.
Jersey needed some good news.
And it came. A local hero, Bruce Springsteen, was signed. That hadn’t happened since the Critters in 1965. Now a second act, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, had followed. One local celebrity was a surprise. Two were a scene!
Another local boy, a crazy renegade record executive from Freehold named Steve Popovich, who would have everything to do with the success of the Jukes, was going to broadcast the news of this new scene to the entire nation to celebrate the debut album.
A national broadcast out of Asbury Park? Impossible. But there it was.
The first thing the regulars at the front of the long line extending down the boardwalk toward the Empress Hotel noticed was the new faces.
New names too. Not just the Boss, but the King (Jon Landau), the Godfather (Frank Barsalona), the Duke (Dave Marsh), and one obvious gangster, Kid Leo (Kid Leo), who made the Fonz look like Mother Teresa.
Was this a Rock concert or a prizefight?
Ronnie Spector and Lee Dorsey, who were guests on the first Jukes album, were there, and we started the show with a bang.
As the national broadcast approached, Iovine suggested I write a new song for the occasion. It was strange request. Open the show with a song not on the album we’re promoting? It didn’t make sense, but I liked the idea. It was a good example of his instinctive genius, which would soon make him the big success he became.
What we couldn’t have known at the time was that this innocent request would profoundly affect my songwriting for the rest of my life.
Up until “This Time It’s for Real,” I had been writing typical Soul-based Rock songs. But the unusual circumstance, a national broadcast introducing us to the world, called for a more auto
biographical approach. My first.
It was a major turning point in my artistic life, the archetype of the style that would inform all my work in the ’80s. I summoned up all my suppressed feelings about our circumstances. The hopelessness of being late for the party, the underdog status of New Jersey, the frustration of nobodies wanting to be contenders. It all came pouring out, a desperate reach for salvation, a last chance at the title.
I will always be grateful to Jimmy for inspiring me. The song was different. It stood out. It wasn’t written with another group or artist in mind. It was written for the Jukes.
After the broadcast, the Jukes hit the road for a combination of clubs and festivals. I came and went, sometimes joining them onstage for a few songs. The first festival I ever played was in Cleveland. I was always claustrophobic and never liked crowds. I didn’t know the protocols of festivals, where you’re supposed to tolerate drunken cowardly pussies throwing shit at the stage. When a drunk threw a bottle at the stage, missing Johnny by an inch, I jumped into the audience and went after him. Lucky for me, security got to him before I did.
The Jukes were building a lifelong audience the old-school way, one gig at a time. We were getting better every day and were anxious to get back into the studio.
And then we were, this time in the hallowed halls of the old CBS studios on Fifty-Second Street, a huge soundstage where many classics had been cut. Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” Count Basie, early Sinatra. The room was so big we actually beat the claustrophobic ’70s curse.
First albums are always easy. You’re recording your live show, probably one you’ve been doing for years. Add a new song or two, and you’ve got it. Second albums are made up of new songs that haven’t been road tested.
This proved challenging for the journeymen Jukes, whose lack of studio chops started to show.
Unrequited Infatuations Page 11