4th of July, Asbury Park

by Daniel Wolff

  In fact in this, Asbury Park's centennial year, you could argue that the change over the past hundred years had been more stylistic than anything else. Instead of matched teams of carriage horses trotting down Ocean Avenue, shiny convertibles cruised the strip. Instead of women twirling parasols, there were girls in bikini tops and shorts, their fingernails glowing under the streetlights. The tough crowd that had managed to find beer in the nineteenth century had transposed into greasers, arriving in the roar of Harleys. Instead of listening to brass bands, long-haired teens gathered at a club called Mrs. Jay's Heart and Mind Machine. "Tonite," its July 1970 ad proclaimed, "forget about the war . . ."

  July 3, fireworks flared and boomed and fell back into the dark ocean, as they had almost every Independence Day weekend since the town was founded. Tourists and local families clapped from the boardwalk. Some old-timers might still remember when these "guests" would have walked home to one of the grand hotels where they'd rented rooms for the season. But those days— and hotels— were long gone. The seven-story, 364-room Monterey Hotel had been demolished in the mid-sixties after a decade and a half of continuous financial problems. Now, most of the crowd got in their cars and drove back to the suburbs. And while there was still Steinbachs, Levin's "King of Values," and the College Shop, "Monmouth and Ocean County's Only Women's Haberdasher," the era of Asbury Park being a premier commercial center was also over. There was downtown parking for a thousand cars, but the spaces were rarely filled.

  July 4, 1970, was perfect: sunny and in the eighties. The Asbury Park Press went onto Cookman Avenue and conducted a patriotic survey. How many people could quote any part of the Declaration of Independence? No one, as it turned out. As one shopper put it, "We may not know much, but we mean well." By midday, the beaches were thick with sunbathers. Transistor radios formed a chorus of the latest pop hits: the laid-back, summertime feel of "Groovin'" by the Young Rascals; the Association's "Windy." Just offshore, surfers pretended they were in California, waiting for the big wave that never quite came.

  As dusk fell, some of these same kids began to line up outside Convention Hall. Asbury had long since lifted its rock &L roll ban: the music was too popular to ignore. The Rascals and the Association had played Convention Hall, as had acts ranging from Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels to Motown's Temptations to San Francisco's Jefferson Airplane. For this Fourth, Convention Hall had booked the British group Ten Years After. The band had a Top Twenty album on the charts but was best known for having played Woodstock a year earlier. Back then, Asbury might have been threatened by the counterculture that Ten Years After represented. But by 1970, Woodstock was a movie playing over at the Strand in Lakewood; the antimaterialistic Summer of Love had already been bought and sold; the Beatles were breaking up. Asbury may not have approved of the longhaired kids in bleached jeans and tie-dyed shirts, but they posed no danger. And the blues rock of Ten Years After— the psychedelic pounding, Alvin Lee's ten-minute-long guitar solos— were already mostly a reminder of what had never quite been.

  In some ways, rock & roll had become just another boardwalk attraction, bringing in much-needed cash. Tonight, there wasn't likely to be much mixing of races: Ten Years After's appeal didn't extend across the tracks. After the Convention Hall concert, some of the hippest kids— their ears still ringing from the cranked-up guitars— would walk inland a few blocks to the deserted business district. On Cookman Avenue, they'd pass Steinbachs, closed for the night, and find their way to the Thorn McAn shoe store, also closed. There, by an unmarked side door, they'd form a line while a woman screened the crowd and took admission.

  Once she let you in, you climbed a flight of steep stairs to a coffeehouse called The Green Mermaid. The Mermaid modeled itself on the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early sixties. The waitresses wore T-shirts that read I EAT THE GREEN MERMAID AT UPSTAGE. The coffee came in little cracked cups, and local singers played covers of Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan. Like The Head Shop on the ground floor of Asbury's Lincoln Hotel, or The White Rabbit espresso house, The Green Mermaid offered a quietly stoned alternative to Asbury's honky-tonk.

  But there was more. At the rear of The Green Mermaid was another door and another long set of stairs. They led to the Upstage: the real attraction for most of the kids who managed to get in. It was a storage room: a windowless, black hole. Its walls were painted with Day-Glo images that seemed to move under the strobe light. "At first glance," one regular recalled, "they looked like mountains and stuff, but then you started noticing peoples' legs and heads, tongues." Built into one whole wall was a mixed-matched bank of beat-up speakers. And in front of that waited a line of amplifiers, microphones, and a drum set.

  Margaret and Tom Potter ran the Upstage. Margaret usually started the music around nine by playing with her own group. Then, at midnight, the local players would put together that night's house band. They sorted through musicians the way you'd pick a ball team out on the sandlot. You needed a drummer, a bass player, and a rhythm guitarist, and every night there was a jam leader. Upstage regular Steve Van Zandt remembers, "They paid you five dollars. [But] you had to earn your way into the band."

  The shore had lots of clubs where you could hear rock & roll, and many had try out nights or open mikes. But the Upstage was unique. The standing wall of amps, the chance for anyone to walk in and play, the resulting competition, made it more like a drag race than a business. There were no limitations on what you could play and no big payday if you succeeded. The way Margaret Potter put it, the Upstage was special "because it was a place for the local musicians— young kids— to find themselves."

  A little behind the times, tough, working class, this was Asbury Park's counterculture. The Upstage was not only counter to the nine-to-five world (its nine-to-five ran from nine at night till five in the morning), but also counter to the typical shore bar. On the boardwalk, people mostly wanted to hear covers of Top Forty hits. The bands had to be able to do an okay version of "Groovin'" or "American Woman" by the Guess Who. At the Upstage, the audience came to hear what it didn't know. In April 1970, a local reporter described the crowd as members of "what's come to be known as the Woodstock Nation . . . [or] the tribe." They wanted "plenty of floor, plenty of freedom, plenty of good music, and no hassle."

  If you were picked to be part of the jam band at the Upstage, you played all night. Typically, the leader would set up some basic three-chord progression with a plain, drum-heavy beat. Sometimes there would be a singer, sometimes not. What the crowd waited for was the lead guitarist, the "glory hog," who would crank up the volume on his amp, step in front of the band, and rocking his head in ecstasy, wail into his solo, playing what sounded like all the notes he knew as fast as he could find them. After he ran out of steam, the next guitarist would take over— and the next— and the next. For eight hours, the kids would vie with one another to see who could cut the most sizzling lead.

  By that summer, the acknowledged star of this scene was the twenty-year-old Bruce Springsteen. With a jutting jaw and long, sun-bleached hair down to his shoulders, Springsteen looked the part. "He was," Van Zandt recalls, "the most single-minded of anyone I ever met." And Margaret Potter remembers Springsteen standing out at the Upstage for "his desire and his straight, right down the line approach to music." He'd plug in to the wall of amps, one fellow musician recalls, and "do these blues songs where he'd make up these lyrics off the top of his head. He had this one called 'Heavy Louise.' He was famous for it 'cause it would go on and on and on. He'd make up like nine stanzas of improvised lyrics . . . and he'd intersperse these made-up lyrics with these burning guitar solos."

  The music wasn't "revolutionary," Van Zandt admits. "We were anachronistic. Retro." That was partly because Asbury was a kind of backwater. But also, Springsteen and the other kids in his generation of rock 6k roll had a sense that, as Van Zandt remembers, "everything good had been done." If Asbury Park's heyday was over, so, it seemed to them, was rock 6k roll's. There had been the founding fathers: L
ittle Richard, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Bill Haley. After that revolution had come the British invasion— the Beatles, the Stones— which had led to groups like the Grateful Dead and Ten Years After (whose very name implied the distance from rock's first burst of energy). But what did that leave? As Van Zandt puts it, by 1970 the Upstage regulars felt as if they "had missed the boat." They kept the dream alive mostly through imitation: "One was [Jeff] Beck— and [Jimmy] Page— and we had a couple of Alvin Lees— and occasionally Santana."

  "There was an audience there," Van Zandt states. "You had a couple of hundred people, sometimes. But I swear half of them were musicians. 'Cause after everybody's gig ended at two in the morning, they'd go into the Upstage." While one of the long improvs rolled out, most everyone who wasn't playing danced. Not the tight strut that went with soul music, or the more controlled steps that people were doing to Top Forty songs, but a languid, wheeling hop and skip that paid less attention to the beat than to the texture of the loud, loud music. Boys bent at the waist so their long hair would cover their faces, and girls spread their arms in euphoria, letting their floor-length dresses spin like the old carousel.

  It was an overwhelmingly white crowd. Davey Sancious, a black kid from Belmar, laughs at the memory of trying to move to the unsubtle, heavy beat of Steppenwolf s "Born to Be Wild." The jam band at the Upstage didn't play Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," the kind of syncopated groove that dominated West Side parties that summer. "The only black music being played in there," Sancious recalls, "was by white kids who were fans of black music and trying to learn how to play it." And most of them were more into Iron Butterfly's narcotic "In-A Gadda-Da-Vida" and Cream's "White Room." It was music that fit the windowless, insulated Upstage; music that aspired to create its own, quasi-mystical scene; music designed to set you apart from the troubles going down in the outside world.

  Margaret Potter's club promised to be a safe zone from, among other things, Asbury's simmering racial scene. Still, the first few times Sancious ventured into the Upstage, he was careful to go with friends: one white and one black. Cookman Avenue, after all, was across the tracks. "I was nervous about it," he remembers. "It wasn't a place where black people went."

  Sancious knew the geography of segregation, having grown up on the West Side. His father— an electronics engineer— taught radar and helped maintain the missile system at Fort Monmouth. His mother was a schoolteacher in Neptune. One day, when Davey was five, the family moved. "I put all my toys in this cardboard box and got in the car and drove eight miles to Belmar. And pulled up in this new neighborhood . . . We went from lower class— we weren't poor, but it was a real struggle . . . we went from that to, suddenly, it was like Ozzie and Harriet. . . Instead of going to school and worrying about fighting, you could actually go to school and learn something." After that, when Sancious returned to Asbury, the kids called him a "Belmar boy."

  Springwood Avenue remained the center of black culture on the northern shore: the place to get a haircut, to hear the news, to listen to or play music. Davey's father would take him to the Orchid Lounge, a Springwood Avenue club an eighth of a mile and a world away from the Upstage. The Orchid Lounge was a grown-up place that drew top-name jazz acts: Jimmy Smith, Jack McDuff, Lonnie Liston Smith. The crowd dressed for a night on the town: men in dark suits with ties knotted just so, women with perfume so dazzling it took a while to notice their smart hats, the tight string of pearls. "It was like black folks being turned out," Davey recalls, "happy about having someplace to go. I don't remember seeing a white person in the Orchid Lounge." The owner would sometimes let the ten-year-old Sancious jam there. One of the musical thrills of his young life was having Lonnie Liston Smith lean over and show him a certain jazz chord that he'd been trying to figure out for weeks.

  As he got older, Sancious began playing keyboard in a constantly changing lineup of R6kB bands. "Back then, it was five sets a night, forty minutes on, twenty off . . . You'd go out in the car and smoke a thing, have a drink, whatever you're doing. 'Ah, man! Fourth set!'" This crowd wanted covers, too, but unlike the boardwalk clubs, here you had to know how to play James Brown, the Temptations, the Delfonics. You'd stretch out a three-minute radio hit for as long as people kept dancing. It was an almost totally segregated scene. "[White] kids," Sancious recalls, "didn't really stray. You couldn't just walk up Springwood and see what was going on . . . [That was] the kind of thing that would get people pissed off."

  Which is why Sancious was cautious about crossing over the other way— to the Upstage. Even recognized local R6kB bands, such as Tony Blair and his Soul Flames, didn't work Asbury's beachfront. Blair had sung with Lloyd Price and with the Drifters, had cut four records, and had played all over the country, including at white clubs in other shore towns. But he couldn't get a gig a few blocks east of where he lived on Munroe Avenue. "The owners of the clubs won't hire me . . .," he had told the paper in the late 1960s, "because my group is all Negro . . . They're afraid some of our Negro followers might come into their places."

  What finally drew Sancious into the Upstage was the music. You could hear soul, jazz, and R6kB in black Asbury; in fact, it cut across generational lines. Sancious remembers when he and his father first heard Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools" on the car radio: his father pulling over till the song finished, then driving straight to the local record store to buy the single. But Sancious got fascinated by a different kind of music. One afternoon his brother brought home the first Jimi Hendrix album, and the two of them sat in their Belmar bedroom and played it straight through. "Nobody," Sancious says, "had made sounds like that! Forget about the sonic thing— the textures he was making— his guitar playing was just breathtaking . . . I sat there on the edge of the bed," he recalls, "staring at the cover, trying to read it and understand."

  Hendrix had learned his chops as a journeyman R6kB player and was as much a part of the black tradition as Lonnie Liston Smith. But in order to pursue the sound he was after, he'd ended up moving to England. And when he crashed into the American consciousness, it was as a weird variation on the British guitar hero. His sly, stoned voice, his feverish solos, and the rage of his controlled feedback might as well have been the sound of inner cities going up in flame. At the same time, Hendrix seemed to offer an alternative both to the ghetto and the middle class: a psychedelic cool that was neither Belmar nor Springwood but incorporated both. "That was it," Sancious recalls. "I got very serious about guitar. Right on the bed there."

  Hendrix grabbed him and led him to the Upstage. In 1970, a sixteen-year-old high school dropout, Sancious had decided to dedicate himself to music full-time. The whirling, stoned-out freakiness of the room above Thom McAn's was as close as he could get to being inside a Hendrix album. It replaced the question of what color you were with Jimi's untranslatable gauge of hipness, "Are You Experienced?" Years later, Sancious would try to describe the racial dynamics at the Upstage. "There was a sense of," he says, groping for words, "a little sense of community, actually. Like, you're not going to get that trip put on you here . . . We just thought: we're all here, we're all together, let's have a damn good time! And all the stuff you put up with out in the world— if you just went out in the street . . . being called a name or being disrespected in a store or being suspected of something or whatever— that stuff went on all the time, every day. But amongst that scene of people, especially the musicians . . . there was no funky racial vibe at all. Not at all."

  So, on the Fourth of July, 1970, the tribe could walk from the Ten Years After concert at Convention Hall through the empty business district to the Upstage and there, dream its own promised land. Meanwhile, on the West Side, there were two black teen dances this Saturday night: one at the Community Center and another a few blocks away at the Catholic church. Which left Springwood unusually quiet. Donald Hammary closed up his father's billiard hall early because business was so slow. He passed the time out in front of Cuba's, hanging with that crowd that worried Mr. Polite. A few kids, Ha
mmary recalls, were "running and chasing each other, throwing bottles and these things." Routine on the West Side. A traditional Fourth.

  At some point, a car with a white guy driving stopped at the light. "Boom! Bottle hit the car. By accident," says Hammary. "He looked and— voom— took off! And everybody laughed. 'Ha, ha, ha,' you know?" Another car came down Springwood, a convertible, and some of the kids decided this was a good joke. They raised a garbage can and dumped it in. Still no big deal, Hammary insists. A guy known as Easy Living stepped out of Cuba's, saw what was happening, and told the kids to cut it out. Which they did for a while but were soon back at it. "They were hitting black cars and white cars. Any kind of car. And laughing! . . . We sit there watching, paying no mind. Then, next thing you know, one of the kids is up on the roof [with] bottles full of water. Waiting for a convertible to come. Ditta-da-ditta-da-ditta!"

  Someone called the cops. By the Fourth of July, 1970, Asbury's force of fifty policemen included twelve blacks. These were typically assigned to Springwood and the West Side, just as Tommy Smith had been back in the day. When the two black officers pulled up and asked the people to move along, there wasn't much response. So one of the patrolmen went to a pay phone and put in a request: "I need some back-up here. Ackers and Springwood." The crowd waited; the cops waited. According to Officer David Parreott, white policemen often wouldn't respond to calls from Springwood; they considered it the black cops' turf. When the crowd realized that no one was coming, they pressed forward. One of the officers pulled his gun, told everyone to get back, and began waving his piece in the air. His partner got on the phone, again. Still no response, and the crowd kept growing.

  At a little past midnight, both teen dances let out at the same time. West Side dances drew kids from up and down the shore: African-Americans from Red Bank, Long Branch, Toms River. Now, Hammary recalls, "You could see how they were coming together. They all met on Springwood." From down the avenue, they reminded him of ants: how they milled and joined and turned into a single body. That body headed for the crowd already too big for the patrolmen to handle.