by Daniel Wolff
A lot of the kids at the Upstage weren't even curious enough to see what had happened. "The best parts of those days was playing," says drummer Vini Lopez: playing till dawn and then a bunch of the musicians would "just sleep on the beach." There wasn't room for anything much except music. "We were so obsessed with getting at the mystery of it— learning how to do it— that really took up almost all your time," Sancious says. "Learning how to play guitar, learning how to play the keyboards, writing music, making some money so you could buy the guitar— so you could buy the guitar strings!"
Steve Van Zandt barely recalls the 1970 uprising. He knew the West Side burned, but what mattered at the Upstage, he says, wasn't politics or social issues but "some kind of sacred, mystical, shaman thing": the heart of rock 6k roll. The core group of musicians were on a quest, sure that the heart still beat somewhere down under the current pop hits, back among the songs of their adolescence. They searched not only the Beatles catalog, but less well-known sounds like the passionate R6kB of Gary "U.S." Bonds and the sweet inner-city edge that connected Frankie Lymon to Phil Spector's Wall of Sound. They returned to Elvis, whose comeback TV special aired two years before Asbury burned and reminded the tie-dye crowd of their black-leather history. There was Roy Orbison, Sinatra from their parents' day, and beyond that, a dim pantheon— Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson— whom they knew mostly because someone had covered a cover of a distant, down-home masterpiece. "I was doing research" is how Van Zandt puts it. "I was going back, studying the blues guys, rediscovering the R6kB guys, a lot of the fifties guys." If the crew at the Upstage didn't pay much attention to Asbury's racial uprising, there's an ironic reason: they were too caught up in traveling back through America's racial history— from rock 6k roll to the beat of slavery.
No one was more obsessed than the long-haired guitar hero, Bruce Springsteen. A working-class kid out of Freehold, he lived, breathed, and dreamed the music. As a teenager, he'd played the underage Hullabaloo clubs in a band called The Castilles. Then, he'd founded Child, which according to its bass player "was going to do original songs in a style that was close to what Cream and Jimi Hendrix were doing." That had evolved into Steel Mill, a heavy-metal unit, guitar-driven.
"We used to play from Jersey down to Carolina," Springsteen remembers. "For a lot of colleges . . . I don't know how many." The spring of the killings at Kent State, as antiwar protests closed campuses across the country, Steel Mill was touring Ocean County College, Monmouth College, down to Richmond, Virginia, back to the Ice Palace in Bricktown and the Clearwater Swim Club in Atlantic Highlands. In a way, the venues were an extension of the Upstage: an alternative circuit that was neither the white Top Forty beach bars nor the black inland R & B clubs. "We were popular in a small area" is how Springsteen puts it. "It was a band that rocked. It got you on your feet, set you in motion, and kept you there."
Not quite two weeks after the 1970 uprising, with the West Side still smoldering and disturbances about to break out once again, Steel Mill played Asbury's boardwalk. The venue was a recently remodeled rent-a-car garage now called the Sunshine In. Its manager saw Steel Mill as a perfect booking because the band's "following reaches into the thousands." Even in troubled times— or maybe especially in troubled times— rock 6k roll was one of the few things that could draw an audience into the ravaged city. When Steel Mill played the Sunshine In, one patron recalls, the place was "jam-packed. Jam-packed! People spilling out into the streets."
Steel Mill's local popularity was spreading. The previous winter, the band had driven across country to California, where it had earned a rave review for an appearance at the Matrix Club in Berkeley, auditioned for rock impresario Bill Graham at the Fillmore West, and even been offered a recording contract. But for Springsteen, something about the music still wasn't right. He found himself searching for a sound that, as he put it, "rocks a little differently— more in the rhythm and blues vein than rock 6k roll." It needed to include a blistering lead guitar like Ten Years After, plus the hokum and party atmosphere of the boardwalk. But Springsteen also wanted the feel of the soul music that he and Van Zandt loved. Or, more specifically, the feel that the Irish rocker Van Morrison had gotten on that summer's His Band and the Street Choir— a fusing of R6kB sounds with Woodstock perceptions.
In Asbury, the implications of that blend went beyond the musical. Steel Mill's sound was powerful enough to bring the hippie crowd into the ruined city. But it was primarily a white party. To add R6kB flavor was to remind the audience not just of rock 6k roll's multiracial past but also of the complicated world right outside. Springsteen didn't hang on Springwood the way Tallent did; his love for soul music came mostly off records. But for Springsteen to achieve the mix he heard in his head, his dream band would have to integrate in a way Asbury Park never had.
One night in late 1970, Davey Sancious came into the Upstage and found Tallent and Springsteen "standing next to each other at the top of the stairs and talking about this jam session they're trying to organize for the one o'clock start up." Garry introduced the sixteen-year-old Sancious to the twenty-one-year-old Bruce: "This is my friend, Dave. I met him a couple of weeks ago, and we did something. A really good keyboard player." (Garry and Davey were in a short-lived band called Glory Road.) Then Tallent added, "You want to sit in with us?" Sancious's one word answer was yes.
That first night, Sancious recalls, "We ended up playing for hours. We did this one jam that lasted for hours and hours." If Sancious was, in his own words, "blown away" by Springsteen's chops, the feeling was mutual. "When we first played together," Springsteen says, ". . . he was a real wild man. He had that rock 6k roll thing in him— it always seemed like he might be the next Jimi Hendrix. He had the potential to be that." As Sancious remembers, after they'd finished playing, "closed this place up, then we just hung out and talked. [Bruce] had a band called Steel Mill, which was very popular. He said, 'I'm thinking about breaking the band up, and I'm going to start something new. And, uh, I want to know if you'd, um, be interested in being in it?' And I was, like, 'Yea! Absolutely!'"
Even as Springsteen was trying to form a funkier, integrated band, Asbury's racial situation was getting worse. Sancious remembers the West Side after the rebellion: "Just razed. Buildings burnt out. And after they put out all the fires and stopped it, they bulldozed it. They leveled so much of it . . . like a ghost town." In response to the uprising, the Ku Klux Klan had reappeared. The Klan had stayed active in central Jersey, Springsteen recalls, but it hadn't been "needed" in Asbury Park for fifty years— not since its values had triumphed in local elections. Now, crosses burned across New Jersey: in Hightstown, Princeton, Long Branch, and Neptune. On March 13, 1971, three Klansmen were formally accused of the Hightstown and Princeton incidents. That night, a six-by-four-foot cross blazed in downtown Asbury. It was strung up right on Cookman Avenue in John F. Kennedy Park— eight feet in the air and pointing south so Ocean Grove could see the flames across the polluted waters of Wesley Lake. Police Chief Thomas Smith called it "an isolated incident" and "a prank."
Other members of Asbury's police force made some attempts at healing the divided town. During the rebellion, police sergeant Joseph Monteparo had appeared on the David Susskind television show and gotten into a shouting match with Donald Hammary. The police accused Hammary of having helped incite the riots. Now, community seminars were set up so that black leaders and white police could talk through their grievances. Hammary and Officer Monteparo had even uncovered some begrudging admiration for each other. Then, on a Saturday night in late April, Sergeant Monteparo was stabbed to death on Springwood Avenue. His killer was a former mental patient and a black man. Chief Smith immediately assured the public that it wasn't a racial incident, and Officer David Parreott would eulogize Monteparo as his "liaison not only with the white community, but also with the hard-nosed white police officers." But at three A.M. on the morning of Monteparo's massive funeral, a kerosene-soaked cross was set on fire at Hammary's place of employment, MC
AP.
In the midst of all this— or maybe it's more accurate to say on its outskirts— Asbury musicians were developing what would come to be called the Shore Sound. The week of the MCAP cross burning, a new band debuted at a dingy little Asbury club, The Student Prince. Led by Van Zandt, including Tallent and Lopez as well as John Lyon (already better known as Southside Johnny), the all-white Sundance Blues Band aimed to play "a lot of roots, and the rock and roll that evolved from blues roots." That in itself was something of a departure: a back-to-basics sound that shed the ornate decoration of seventies rock. In addition, Van Zandt declared that this band wouldn't play the hippie alternative college circuit but the shore bars. Usually, Van Zandt acknowledged, that meant having to "sell out" by playing Top Forty. But he thought it might be possible to get the drinking crowd to listen to "something a little more fulfilling and challenging." The Sundance Blues Band was a crossover move for the long-haired Upstage musicians: out of the windowless psychedelic room and back toward their working-class roots. Within a couple of months, the band was performing with Springsteen, and though it all proved to be a temporary alignment, the idea— an ambitious bar band— pointed the way to the future.
By this time, the spring of 1971, there was no denying that rock 6k roll had become big business. Bill Graham, announcing the closing of his Fillmore East and West, said the music was "joining America. It's General Motors." Asbury Park reaped some of the benefits— events at Convention Hall and places like the Sunshine In drew much needed tourists— but the scene still made the city fathers nervous. That summer, the popular James Gang played the Sunshine, and some twelve hundred teenagers showed up. "We had to fight our way to get through the doors," acting city manager Sicilino testified. Inside, they found "open drinking and smoking of 'home-made cigarettes.'" Mayor Mattice wanted the year-old club closed down, and the police made the owners cancel Ike and Tina Turner's R6kB concert for fear "it might cause racial tensions."
Springsteen had finally managed to put together a band that would "rock a little differently." Featuring a horn section that turned out early-sixties soul lines, the ten-piece unit incorporated the soul sound of Springwood Avenue as brought over by Tallent and Sancious. "Basically," Tallent remembers, "we would have been happy to have been Van Morrison and his band." To back up his vocals, Springsteen had put an ad in the local paper: GIRL SOUL GOSEPL [sic] SINGERS (2). When Delores Holmes and Barbara Dinkins showed up to audition, Holmes was frankly scared. It was late at night, they'd left the black part of town, and the surfboard factory looked deserted. "Maybe," Holmes told Dinkins, "they're bringing us up here to rape us!" Years later, Springsteen can only imagine what it must have been like for the singers to cross Asbury's racial lines.
The resulting Bruce Springsteen Band played mostly local gigs that summer and fall, including regular weekends at The Student Prince over at 911 Kingsley. Springsteen has called it "the darkest, dingiest, dampest place you ever seen." They played for the door, and as he and Van Zandt would joke later, "We split $13.75 between us." While the sound was funkier than Steel Mill's had been, Sancious admits that at the clubs they played "the only black people would be us in the band." Asbury's boardwalk was still segregated— enough so that just having Sancious and the girl singers was making a statement. The band didn't dwell on it. "It wasn't like we had this thing of, like, okay . . . we're the only integrated band," Sancious recalls. "We never said, let's present some picture to society: look at us, we're cool, why can't you do it? Nothing like that. Ever. Just five or six guys playing this music and just having a ball." Delores Holmes recalls being in the Bruce Springsteen Band as "the safest that I ever felt in my life."
But the tensions of the outside world inevitably filtered in. Holmes remembers that after she brought the band by to meet her father, he took her aside. "Don't you bring those people in my house again!" They were long-haired, they dressed funny, and they were white. Springsteen's small but devoted following had its own problems with the mix. Holmes describes trying to get through the crowd to the stage at a concert in Richmond, Virginia, as "the first time I really encountered prejudice. Nobody called me the N-word, but they might as well have."
By winter, the band had broken up— not from these outside pressures but because there wasn't enough money to pay everyone. The core musicians continued to play together: Springsteen, Van Zandt, Tallent, Lopez, Sancious, and keyboardist Danny Federici. They'd also met Clarence Clemons, the black saxophonist from Tallent's time with Little Melvin and the Invaders. Clemons would eventually personify Springsteen's integrated E Street Band and, mythically, lead them to success. But at the time, success looked a long way off. Everyone except Springsteen had day jobs, and soon even this smaller band had to break up. During the winter of 1971, Springsteen went back out to California (where his parents had moved), played some solo shows, then came back East, where he moved into Tom Potter's old apartment, two doors down from the Upstage. Tom had moved to Florida, Marge was working as a hairdresser on Main Street, and the Upstage had closed: another victim of Asbury's hard times. Springsteen's apartment on Cookman was over an abandoned beauty salon. "Amidst the old hairdryers and washing sinks," Springsteen remembers, "I wrote the songs that comprised Greetings."
The full name of Springsteen's first record was Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ. The cover was a classic tourist postcard of the city, complete with glimpses of the boardwalk and a packed beach. It was an up-front acknowledgment of where he was from— and where he was from had almost no rock 6k roll glamour. Not only was it Jersey, that industrial mix of suburbs and swamp, but it was some crumbling shore town way past its prime. Columbia Records signed Springsteen as a solo act in the singer/songwriter mode of Dylan or James Taylor, and he made what he calls "primarily an acoustic record with a rhythm section." The rhythm section consisted of his old Asbury band, and they added another layer of sound to songs that already gloried in excess. The lyrics Springsteen wrote in that empty beauty salon looked at the world through a smeared, poetic lens that owed a lot to the Upstage. "Your cloud line urges me," Springsteen shouts in his rough voice, "and my electric surges free." There isn't time to figure out if this makes any sense: the music boils and bubbles, and characters emerge out of the stream of words only to slip right back under. "We get into those great funky riffs" is how Springsteen put it at the time, "that Gary U.S. Bonds stuff that is lost forever in the annals of time. You can get into that groove, get it there, and sing weird words to it, too!"
The band went on the road to support Greetings after its release in January 1973. President Nixon was starting his second term, promising "peace with honor" in Vietnam. In Asbury Park, another cross had been burned, this one on Willie Hamm's front yard. The city had finally made the last payment on its debt of nearly $11.5 million that dated back to Mayor Hetrick's reign. There had been almost no beachfront improvements since then. The Casino had burnt in the mid-1960s and still wasn't fully repaired. The city had poured more than a million dollars into Convention Hall, but the ocean still ate away at its foundation. Over by Deal Lake, what had been billed as "the world's largest swimming pool" caught fire and had to be closed. And the city couldn't lease its paddleboat concession because Wesley Lake was too full of garbage. That May, reformers finally defeated the seventy-one-year old Joe Mattice. He'd been in the job sixteen years and was facing an eighty-seven-count indictment for " conspiring to retain political control in the Democratic Party." He eventually pleaded guilty to falsifying names on petitions: helping the dead to vote.
That summer Asbury tried to revive its baby parade, last held in 1949. Though there were three hundred entries and what the paper called "one of the biggest crowds in years," few residents were fooled. If the sun was out and the day hot, Asbury's beach could still draw tourists. A fifth of the city's income— about a million dollars annually— came from rent on ninety boardwalk concessions, but it wasn't nearly enough to meet expenses. In 1974, city employees would be forced to take a ten percent wage cut. As a
member of the Beachfront Association of boardwalk concessionaires put it, "We have no money, and the city has no money."
Given this depressing picture and the poor sales of a record he'd called Greetings from Asbury Park, it would have been understandable if Springsteen had shied away from small-town subject matter. But his second record, The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle, does just the opposite. Its "cast of characters," Springsteen would later say, "came vaguely from Asbury Park at the turn of the decade." You can hear it in the opening cut, "The E Street Shuffle," which refers obliquely to the West Side uprising: "The heat's been bad," Springsteen sings, "since Power Thirteen gave a trooper all he had in a summer scuffle." The teenagers hang in a club called Easy Joe's, "where all the riot squad goes." The record came out of a time, Springsteen has written, when he "watched the town suffer some pretty serious race rioting, and slowly begin to close down."
What Springsteen watched wasn't just beginning. It had started decades before. And it wasn't simply that the city was closing down. For Springsteen and his friends, Asbury was opening up. Because of its failing economy, rents were low enough for the band members to afford, if barely. Because the city was desperate for business, the Upstage and the shore bars had been allowed to operate, late and noisy and disreputable as they were. What was closing down was the old Merchants' Vision. And that left room among the ruins for something new.
Springsteen's "E Street Shuffle" is based on "Monkey Time," an R6kB summer hit from ten years earlier. Its recycled funk is all about how kids manage to survive by dancing on the wreckage of the past. But it's on the album's second cut that Springsteen makes Asbury his own. The song is a piece of romantic journalism, its title a kind of dateline: "4th of July, Asbury Park [Sandy]." Like Stephen Crane's early reporting, Springsteen is covering a dream landscape we all recognize; he calls it "Little Eden." As fireworks rain down on the city, his throaty voice describes the scene. "Switchblade lovers" drive the circuit, "wizards" play pinball in the arcades, the boys from the Casino dance with their shirts open, and greasers sleep on the beach. The girls either flirt in the shadows under the boardwalk or dance in "them cheap little seaside bars." The details are realistic, but you know this scene even if you've never spent a summer on the shore. You know it from the movies, from a century of postcards and parlor music, from the calliope sounds in the background. Springsteen calls it the carnival life. It's the older, failing, fading America.