Geoff Potter, Tom Potter’s nineteen-year-old son, was working alongside his stepmother at the door. “Ordinarily, you had all kinds of hubbub and noise between sets,” he says. “But he’s up there, playing free-form riffs. And within five minutes, you couldn’t hear a sound except for his guitar.”
A few of the musicians recognized Bruce from the Castiles’ days on the high school band circuit in the midsixties. Others had mentioned seeing an unfamiliar guitarist playing miraculously accurate renditions of Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck tunes around Ocean County Community College. But no one in the room expected this fusillade of power and finesse, especially with the visceral intensity he projected across the room.
After watching from the doorway for a few minutes, Margaret went down to the Upstage’s second floor Green Mermaid coffee-house looking for Sonny Kenn. “You’ve gotta get up here!” she told him. “There’s a guy playing guitar onstage, and he sounds just like Clapton!” Kenn followed her up the stairs, and although the sharp-dressed guitar hero looked doubtfully at the new guy’s rope belt and torn jeans (“He looked like fuckin’ Tiny Tim,”1 Kenn says), he kept watching and listening. And when Upstage regular Big Bad Bobby Williams hit the drums, with the Motifs’ former bassist, Vinnie Roslin, on his heels, the trio’s rollicking blues cut right through Kenn’s skepticism. “It was kinda cool,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, he’s got it!’ Somehow that skinny kid was larger than life!”
Indeed, the knots of chatterers from a few minutes earlier now crowded the stage, with a steady stream from the Green Mermaid and Cookman Avenue rumbling up the stairs to press against their backs. Watching from another corner of the room as the blues jam they called “Heavy Bertha” evolved into Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” Potter’s right-hand man, Jim Fainer, was starstruck. “You couldn’t take your eyes off of him,” Fainer says. “Bruce had this presence. The hairs on the back of your neck would tingle. He had an instinct, a gift.”
Vini Lopez knew that already, thanks to his trip to Long Branch the previous Saturday night. The drummer sang Bruce’s praises to Danny Federici, the Downtown Tangiers Band keyboardist who had already agreed to team with Lopez in a new band. But neither of them heard another whisper about Bruce until they got to the Upstage a week later. When Lopez caught a glimpse of him leading a jam on the bandstand, he nudged Federici: “That’s the guy!” They double-timed it to the edge of the stage, where the set had just come to an end. Lopez waved at Bruce and climbed up to invite him to stick around for another set. Bruce, just getting warm, smiled. “Let’s go!” So Lopez climbed behind the drums. Bruce called for a twelve-bar blues and Lopez, with Federici perched behind the keyboard and Roslin hanging in on bass, launched into another improv. The guitarist made up some words to fill in the verses, and when his fingers stretched up the Les Paul’s neck, the other three followed into a more intense instrumental passage. Almost instantly they were playing in unison, Bruce’s ardent leads weaving with Federici’s elaborate organ parts, Roslin’s steady bass thrum, and Lopez’s wild drum attack. It went on for forty-five nonstop minutes, drifting through songs, styles, and rhythms. The crowd members who weren’t pasted against the stage were dancing and spinning across the floor. When Bruce sweated through his T-shirt, he peeled it off and tossed it, splat, into the corner of the stage.
When they finished an hour later, the drained musicians went downstairs to the Green Mermaid, where they sat around a red-and-white-checked table and beamed happily, fingertips still vibrating. Finally, Lopez voiced the thought that first occurred to him when he saw Bruce playing with Earth.
“Oh geez, let’s make a band.”
• • •
Bruce could sense that something big had pulled into the station. He’d wanted to play with guys as committed to their music as he was, and here they were. Better yet, Lopez had already met a local entrepreneur eager to serve as the group’s patron and manager. Lopez took Bruce to meet the guy, a surfboard manufacturer named Carl “Tinker” West, and invited him to check out their next informal performance, scheduled to be the main attraction at the Upstage’s after-midnight jam session the next Saturday night.
West showed up as promised, and after getting a firsthand look and listen at Bruce’s guitar playing, and the way the young musician injected his own high-octane mix of fury and joy into every note, he realized Lopez hadn’t been exaggerating. “That guy’s got it,” he said after the set. “That’s someone I want to watch; he’s the real thing.”
No small compliment coming from the twenty-eight-year-old West, an Asbury Park newcomer who knew a lot about a surprising number of things and took obvious pleasure in sharing his unvarnished opinions. Also, West had a charisma that called out to young men with more ambition than they knew what to do with. “Once I met him, I realized he was someone to learn from,” says Billy Alexander, who became one of West’s top lieutenants. “What can’t he do? Not a lot. So whatever I could do to get in his company, I did.” And Alexander always knew how to back down anyone tempted to challenge his boss’s decisions. “I’d say, ‘Look, I know you’ve got your opinion. But don’t go in there half-cocked, because Tinker really is a rocket scientist.’”
Indeed, West had worked as an aerospace engineer for the Wyle Laboratories in El Segundo, California. But no amount of military starch could stiffen West’s enthusiasm for hanging out with beatniks, musicians, and other beach-dwelling members of LA’s surfing demimonde. West liked his fun. He surfed, played guitar, and followed a rigorous course of study in order to master the conga drums. He built amplifiers and then became expert at acoustic design. At the same time, West channeled his aeronautics expertise into the world of surfing, designing and building a series of fast, lightweight boards most striking for their adjustable, removable skegs, or fins.
Thus began the Challenger Surfboard Company, which followed its creator to San Francisco in 1965, where West witnessed the growth of the city’s hippiefied music scene. So in 1968, when he decided to expand the Challenger brand’s grasp of the East Coast market by building a factory on the Jersey Shore, West had no doubt that he would find a similar scene around Asbury Park’s boardwalk. Instead he found touristy bars, cover bands, and a scene that, in his hawk-sharp eyes, amounted to “total bullshit. No creativity. No original songs. I was bored as shit.”
A visit to the Upstage, along with a good chat with Tom Potter, made him more hopeful. And when Potter introduced West to Lopez at the Green Mermaid one night, West made a proposition: if Lopez could put together a band that could play original songs in an interesting way, he would not only manage the group and build it a top-notch amplification system but also give it a permanent rehearsal space in the back of the Challenger factory.
He formalized the offer when Lopez brought Bruce to the factory a day or two after West saw the Upstage jam. All they had to do now, he declared, was become the best fucking band anyone had ever heard. “You guys can do the music,” West declared. “I’ll take care of the bullshit.”
They all shook hands and set to work.
• • •
Bruce, Vini Lopez, Danny Federici, and Vinnie Roslin moved their amps into an unused room in the Challenger East factory, a low-slung concrete bunker plunked into a strip of utilitarian factories and warehouses on a hill in Wanamassa, just west of Asbury Park, and formal rehearsals started first thing in the morning. And they would continue, West decreed, until the end of the factory’s workday. He didn’t care how good they thought they were or how important they thought it was to spend hours staring at the horizon while dreaming up godly riffs. That was shit they could do on their own time. “If I’ve gotta work, you’ve gotta work,” he told the four musicians. “So if I’m out there sanding a surfboard, I better be hearing you guys making music in here.”
Billy Alexander helped enforce the policy. “If the music stopped for too long, either Tinker or I would go crack the whip. I’d knock on the door and poke my head inside. ‘What are you guys up
to? We’re still making surfboards out there!’ And none of them ever complained. They loved it.”
So the group members kept office hours, learning Bruce’s songs, putting their heads together to work out arrangements (the classically trained Federici proved especially helpful here), and then playing the tunes over and over until the chord progressions, abrupt stops, and surprise starts were tattooed into their fingertips. And when the formal practice was done, they spent hours blazing through the blues and rock standards they knew from other local bands or learned off the radio. Often these would inspire some other chord pattern, which proposed its own melody that Bruce established on his guitar before belting out a phrase or two he’d been carrying in his imagination for the last few days.
The long days and nights spent thinking the same thoughts and breathing the same air became a crucial part in weaving the players’ individual tastes and personalities into a dense, unified sound that was equal parts Cream, Steppenwolf, and especially Rhinoceros, the little-known group that Earth had pretended to be during the filming of NYPD: Now You’re Practically Dead. A sort of supergroup featuring veterans from Iron Butterfly, the Electric Flag, and the Mothers of Invention, Rhinoceros didn’t sell a lot of records following its 1968 debut, but its combination of heavy guitars, gospel organ, and soul-influenced vocals turned more than a few shaggy heads on the East Coast music scene. Including Bruce and his friends.
Bruce’s new band wore its influences as vividly as any other set of not-quite-formed adults. But the four had the chops to pull it off and the personalities to make it their own. The tall, muscular Lopez radiated a restless energy that made him a magnetic presence onstage, where he attacked the drums with power and panache, doubled on recorder, and belted note-perfect high harmonies. Lopez also came with an aggressive, at times explosive, temper that made him something of a menace everywhere else. “But the only reason I ever got into fights was to protect my friends,” he says. “And I wouldn’t back down for anyone.”
Federici, on the other hand, was a cherub-cheeked prodigy who escaped the discipline of his classical training in a haze of pot smoke and occasionally dangerous pranks that became all the more explosive when he developed a fascination for electronics. Not that he needed external power to spark his sillier moments. Consider the afternoon Federici tried to move from one house to another, with the backseat of his car crammed full of clothes and the front seat weighed down with a large planter holding the bristling marijuana plant he’d been tending all summer. Realizing that he had some clothes waiting at a dry cleaner in downtown Asbury, Federici skidded into the nearest empty stretch of curb and dashed out to collect his shirts. Back on the sidewalk a few minutes later with wire hangers hooked over his thumb, Federici discovered that his car had vanished. Thieves, he reasoned. And now that they had not only his car but also his shirts, jeans, underpants, and socks, he had no choice but to dial the police.
As it turned out, the authorities had already located Federici’s car. In fact, they’d found it right where he had left it, parked smack in front of a fire hydrant. With an enormous marijuana bush perched in the passenger seat. No matter. Federici marched right into the police station, only to be promptly arrested. When his mom bailed him out a day or two later, he came away with his car and his clothes. And he always knew where he could find more pot.
Roslin had been part of the Freehold music scene longer than Bruce. An original member of George Theiss’s pre-Castiles band, the Sierras, Roslin moved into the Motifs, the band that often bested the Castiles in the midsixties battles of the bands. Whether the Motifs were actually better—or simply profited from having Jersey Shore musician and frequent battle-of-bands promoter Norman Seldin as their manager—was a bit of a controversy back in the day, but Bruce never doubted the Motifs’ primacy in Freehold. “They were jaw dropping,” he says. “I’d never stood near or seen anything up close that good.” A bit older and more established in adulthood, Roslin preferred to keep his own place outside the factory. But he had the right look and feel for the band.
The group spent a month working on its small repertoire of Springsteen originals, with a few choice covers, including Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile,” and “Crown Liquor,” a Billy Chinnock tune that Lopez and Federici had played in another previous band, the Moment of Truth. Musing on a name for their new group, they came up with Child, signifying a new beginning; a band whose music would sound fresh and unspoiled.
Now all they needed was a gig. West walked the few blocks down Sunset Avenue to the Pandemonium club, a new addition to the Shore Motel on Route 35, returning with a contract for a three-night stand starting on Wednesday, April 2. The group would be the only act on the bill and thus responsible for three or four sets of music. But stretching tunes to the thirty-minute mark and beyond was second nature to experienced jammers, so no problems there.
When it came to preshow anxiety, they simply focused on the individual successes they’d had already. “We were like an all-star band,” Lopez says, and when it came to the Jersey Shore in 1969, he wasn’t wrong. So April 2 arrived, and while no one can recall exactly what the band played during that first show, it did draw a respectable crowd, many of whom went away feeling excited enough to come back the next night with their friends in tow. By Friday night, the crowd flowed into the street and around the corner. Club owner Mickey Eisenberg didn’t let West leave that night until he agreed to bring his band back for a five-night stand the week after, with an encore show on April 20.
A booking at Le Teendezvous followed in early May, and served as a precursor to the pair of larger, outdoor shows that West figured would launch them into a career orbit well beyond the seaside bars and teen clubs of central New Jersey. “The strategy was to play big shows in parks, San Francisco–style,” he says. West had already built the group a sound system designed to take on park-sized venues, and with a vibrant performer like Bruce going off like a Roman candle at center stage, Child would make all of those laid-back California bands seem translucent.
They started on Saturday, May 3, with an afternoon-long minifestival in Long Branch’s West End Park. West hired a couple of other bands to play opening sets, and given a warm afternoon and a $1 ticket, the show attracted something like a thousand music fans. Child cleared $1,000—amounting to several nights of club work—but even more important to West, however, was giving the band a chance to feel and hear itself in front of such a large crowd.
“Bruce was a little insecure at first,” West says of his star’s first steps on the bigger stages. “Then once he started playing these shows, you could see something going on. He fed off the buzz. And once you’ve got people screaming at you, you begin to think you can do anything.” Bruce got another dose of crowd worship on May 11 when the band went back to Long Branch to close a daylong music festival held on the great lawn at Monmouth College. The school set up the bands on a concrete patio outside the doors to Wilson Hall, about thirty concrete steps above the sunny lawn where the audience sat, danced, and tossed frisbees. But when West and the group set up their gear on the patio, the warm, sun-splashed afternoon took on a new charge. “I just went up to sit by the stage,” says Barry Rebo, a Monmouth student who had heard about Bruce from a friend who’d seen an Earth show the year before. “Suddenly all these kids came running up and flooded the stage.”
Surrounded by a mob of stomping, cheering fans, the patio unexpectedly broke out into a scene of Beatlemania-like proportions. But as viewed in the post-1968 era of riots and public violence, the scruffy, underfed teenagers at its core all experienced the same dread sense that the scene could careen out of control. Lopez, Federici, Roslin, and Bruce backed away from their instruments and, as one, charged into the entrance to Wilson Hall, slamming the door behind them. They had only a minute to stammer at one another until the door flew open again and an incredulous Tinker West stepped inside. “Showtime!” he barked. “So why don’t you assholes get out there and make some music?”
Off they went.
A great cheer went up, and with instruments in hand, they kicked off a blast of high-volume rock ’n’ roll. The songs were largely unfamiliar: Many were Springsteen originals, some less than a week old. But it was impossible for a campus full of church-raised small-town kids to miss the unholy outrage fueling “Resurrection” ’s alternating currents of cathedral organ and full-band attack. “Special low price on three Hail Marys!” Bruce shouted between the end of one verse and the launch of another solo. “My soul is clean again. Hey!”
The crowd danced and leaped to the rhythm, and they called Child back for three encores, all of which put the icing on a “wild, mind-bending show,” according to the Monmouth College’s newspaper review. “They literally rocked and blasted out the entire area.” Better still, the story continued, complaints about the noise came from homes as far away as Norwood Avenue nearly a quarter of a mile away. Afterward, Rebo walked over to where the band was unhooking the amps and looping up the electrical cords and introduced himself to Bruce, who seemed, Rebo recalls, entirely stunned. “He was obviously shocked by the response. And when we talked, he couldn’t look me in the eye, which was weird because he’d just been so dynamic on the stage. I’d never seen someone become an entirely different animal like that.”
The band did nearly as well at a free outdoor show mounted 350 miles south of Asbury Park, in Richmond, Virginia. The gig had been set up by Billy Alexander, West’s once-and-future lieutenant, who had moved down to go to college. Quickly expert in the ways and means of the college town’s clubs, bars, and frat parties, Alexander convinced West to let him set up a free show in a park—ostensibly to help celebrate the end of the school year but mostly to prime the Richmond market for a series of paying gigs he’d set up for the start of the new school year. The free afternoon show attracted between four hundred and five hundred rock ’n’ roll fans, impressing them enough to lay the foundation for a rock-loving market that would help sustain the group, and Bruce, for years to come.
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