Born to Run (16 page)

I had friends who were real drug-experimenting radicals and then I had my construction-worker brother-in-law, who, with the exception of bashing a few longhairs like myself, had no “sixties” experience whatsoever. He remained his whole life a man of the fifties (with greatly increased tolerance,
however). I was a faux hippie (free love was all right), but the counterculture stood by definition in opposition to the conservative blue-collar experience I’d had. I felt caught between two camps and I didn’t really fit in either, or maybe I just fit in both.

Last of the Bar Bands

The Pandemonium Club, the Shore’s newest nightclub, had opened at Sunset Avenue and Route 35. That put it right
at the bottom of the hill from the surfboard factory. We could walk there. You played on a small stage right behind the bar, with a small alley of booze bottles, ice, beer and bartenders all that separated you from the patrons sitting at the bar. The bartender’s ass (a great one made the night slip on by), the bar, the stool huggers, those standing gathered around the bar, some tables and the dance
floor were all spread out in a 180-degree panorama around you.

The Pandemonium did not have to work very hard to live up to its name. It drew an eclectic and often incompatible clientele. Truckers rolling home up Route 35, kids from Monmouth College, summer “bennies” there for the sand and surf of the Shore, hippies who’d come to hear the music and barflies of all shapes and sizes gravitated
to the Pandemonium’s currentness and pseudo-ritzy décor. Many of these patrons were culturally at odds. You could go to the Pandemonium to listen to music, be congratulated on a recent set
and
get hassled for the length of your hair by some long-haul trucker, preppy football player or polyester-laden Mafia wannabe out of Long Branch. It was usually cool . . . but not always.

When you play a bar
inches behind the bartender you witness the unfolding of human events from a unique perspective. The formula was always familiar; the timing was all that changed.

Woman + booze + man + booze + second man + booze = brawl.

I would bemusedly watch this play out night after night until chairs were thrown, punches were landed, blood was spilled, female faux shock was registered and bouncers swarmed.
You could read it like a gathering storm. This was how some gals got their kicks. Sometimes you could warn the bouncers and they would cool it off before the first punch was thrown.
But it often hit with the suddenness of a summer squall and was over just as quick. Cut to the last scene: bouncers breathing heavily, their sweaty shirts torn asunder; random small bloodstains; a gawking crowd gathering
in the floodlit parking lot; the celebratory red lights of local law enforcement turning faces muted red; the cops hauling the disheveled revelers away. Everybody goes home.

One Giant Leap for Mankind

July 20, 1969, the night man first walked on the moon, was our first night of a weeklong booking we had at the new club. This was a gold mine for us and we needed to do well. If we could make a
steady booking out of the Pandemonium, some of the living hand-to-mouth would be taken out of our lives. We could concentrate on writing, rehearsing and maybe even recording a few of our own tunes. The Pandemonium was managed by “Baldy Hushpuppies.” He was so named because he was a hopelessly middle-aged swinger type who was bald and wore Hush Puppies. On this particular evening, Baldy Hushpuppies
was out of town and Son of Baldy Hushpuppies, his kid, was running the joint. It just so happened the band was scheduled to start a set exactly as the first manned moon landing was occurring, 10:56. Half the small crowd of thirty or so wanted us to start playing and half wanted us to solemnly observe this epochal moment in human history. We’d start and some would run to the bar shushing us as the
landing grew near; we’d stop and some would complain that the band wasn’t playing.

Ultimately we decided, “Fuck the moon landing, that’s just a trick of ‘The Man’; fuck you, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, let’s rock.” Myself, Mad Dog Lopez and Danny were in favor of boogying. The holdout was bass player Little Vinnie Roslin, a bit of a sensitive techie, a man of science, who said we were full-of-shit
cretins ignoring history and he would have no part of it. He put his bass down and walked offstage. He was right, but
the line was drawn. A small black-and-white television in the corner of the bar was all they had broadcasting the event. It was surrounded by a small group of pro–moon landing clientele, glued to the fuzzy images being sent across two hundred and forty thousand miles of space.
The fuck-the-moon-landers were all huddled over their stew at the bar near us.

Finally Mad Dog had had it. He shouted into his microphone, “If somebody doesn’t turn that fucking TV off, I’m coming over and putting my foot through it.” Upon hearing Vini’s throw-down, Son of Baldy Hushpuppies came barreling around the bar and explained to Vini that it was his TV and Vini had better shut the fuck
up or we’d all be out on our asses. Mad Dog Lopez did not, and does not, cotton to such talk. Attired typically and eccentrically in a Chinese robe and nothing else that evening, Vini managed to get in a minor scuffle with SOBH. We were fired on the spot. Six nights of a good-paying, close-to-home bar gig vanished into thin air up Vini’s Chinese robe. We walked back up the hill, pissed, everybody
giving Vini the silent treatment for blowing the gig. We would not be much longer for the Shore bar circuit anyway. The concert business awaited.

EIGHTEEN

STEEL MILL

We found out another group had registered the name “Child,” so, at a late-night brainstorming session at the Inkwell Coffee House in the West End neighborhood of Long Branch, New Jersey, we searched for a new band name. The Inkwell was a longhair-friendly local institution one block in from the Long Branch beachfront. Its proprietor was “Joe Inkwell,” a Hitlerian presence who
would take the skin off of you for looking at him the wrong way. Nevertheless, he and I got along great and the place was a safe late-night haven for weirdos of all stripes. It was done up inside completely Beat generation. You could grab a cheeseburger, flirt with the blue-jeans-and-black-leotard-clad waitresses and spend a little time in an environment where you felt reasonably secure you would
not be under attack, except possibly by the owner. I think it was Mad Dog who volunteered Steel Mill. That was the direction we were going in. It was blue-collar, heavy music,
with loud guitars and a Southern-influenced rock sound. If you mixed it up with a little prog and all original songs, you had Steel Mill . . . you know,
STEEL
MILL . . . like
LED
ZEPPELIN . . . elemental-metal-based, bare-chested,
primal rock.

We started playing long guitar-crunching concerts under that name and we began to draw and draw big. First hundreds, then thousands came to impromptu appearances in parks, at the local armory, at the Monmouth College great lawn or college gymnasium and any other location that would hold our growing tribe. We became something people wanted to see. We had a raw stage show and songs
that were memorable enough for people to want to come back, hear them again, memorize their lyrics and sing their choruses. We began to attract and hold real fans.

Tinker took us down to the University of Richmond in Virginia, where he had a few connections. We played for free in the park, gave the locals a taste of us and then got hired for school events. We became enormously popular in Richmond,
drawing up to three thousand people at our Southern concerts, with
no
album to our name. Our voodoo had worked outside of the Garden State! We opened up for Grand Funk Railroad in Bricktown, New Jersey, stole the house and headed south, where we opened for Chicago, Iron Butterfly and finally for Ike and Tina Turner at the Virginia War Memorial. We quickly built ourselves a second home in Richmond.
Now we had two cities we could play quarter-annually, charging a buck at the door and coming home with thousands of dollars that would get us through the dry times. The catch was you could not overplay either area and there were only two! Once every four months was a lot. We’d become too big for the bars, too small for the big time, so we became a strange victim of our own local success. We could
draw thousands when we played but in order to keep interest and our value up, we had to make ourselves scarce. We scouted around for a few more locations, opening for Roy Orbison at a festival in Nashville, Tennessee, playing in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but it was our Jersey and Virginia fans who kept us in subs and cheeseburgers. The long
weeks in between shows gave us a lot of time to practice,
refine our band and settle into the unique position of authentic neighborhood superstars while remaining totally unknown outside of our given areas. So . . . what to do?

Go West, Young Man

Tinker always regaled us with tales of San Francisco. Hell, it was 1970. Let’s get out there and show them what we can do. We’d played with and done well against national bands for a year now. Bring on the
big guns, the San Francisco groups. We were cocky as hell and sure we were good enough to make our mark anywhere. We felt we were the best undiscovered thing we’d ever seen, so we begged Tinker to take us to where the hippies ran free. A deal was struck. Tinker said if we each saved one hundred dollars and copyrighted our originals for their protection, he’d lead us to the far coast. Danny and I sat
for two hours one evening at our dining room table and only managed to get one song onto staff paper. We figured, “Fuck it, just fill in the rest with a bunch of notes; Tinker will never know.” That’s what we did. We held one final concert at the surfboard factory for seed money, built a plywood box that would sit tucked inside Tinker’s flatbed, covered it with an army tarp to protect the equipment
from the rain and set up a separate station wagon (Danny’s) with mattresses and water for the drivers’ rest and recuperation. With these two vehicles, a hundred dollars each and a prayer, we would make the great crossing in three days. We had a paying New Year’s Eve gig at California’s Esalen Institute in the mountains of Big Sur. Esalen was one of the first human-potential spas in the United
States. At that time, no one had ever heard of such a thing. It was just a gig for us, and we didn’t have a clue as to what we were walking into. With the exception of Tinker and our short trips around the Southeast, none of us had ever been out of New Jersey.

The night before we left for California, Mad Dog and I visited our local cinema to see
Easy Rider
. It was not such a good send-off. As
we watched the
story of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper’s journey across America, a slow, creeping dread overtook us. When Hopper was blasted off his motorcycle at the end of the film by a Cro-Magnon redneck, it dawned on us it might not be too friendly for folks like us out there. Tinker of course had taken that into consideration; no peace-loving hippies, we were armed. We had our cap-and-ball
pistols, all perfectly legal, in the cab of our truck. We’d run into “bad vibes”—an attendant who might not want to gas us up, a tension-filled roadhouse diner—but no trouble. Tinker spoke the common language of automotive mechanics. It’s amazing what a cross-cultural barrier breaker a little engine talk can be. We were in a vintage piece of hardware. People were curious about our old Ford truck
and what the hell we were up to. Tink could’ve broken the ice with the grand pooh-bah of the Ku Klux Klan with his laconic command of the mystical ways of the internal combustion engine. Tink had gearhead knowledge accompanied by a strange and mighty confidence that put folks at ease. If those should fail, he seemed like the kind of guy who might shoot you.

The morning came, the truck was loaded,
the station wagon prepared; I was twenty-one, and we were going west. West . . . dream time. West . . . California. That’s where the music was. The Haight, San Francisco, Jefferson Airplane, the Dead, and Moby Grape, one of Steve’s and my all-time favorite groups. West . . . free. Even my folks were there. I’d heard about the deserts, the palm trees, the weather, Seal Rocks, the great redwoods
of Muir Woods, the Bay, the Golden Gate . . . On our few phone calls, my mom had told me tales of their new life in the West. I hadn’t seen my parents and younger sister in almost a year. Back then no one could afford cross-country bus, plane or train travel. I’d never met anyone who’d been on an airplane. So here it was. It would be a combination family reunion and career juggernaut that would
set everything straight.

Our caravan of two left at dawn, rolling away from the surfboard factory, out of the industrial park and onto Route 35, over to 33 West, then to the New Jersey Turnpike South. It was winter and we’d take the southern
route across the country to avoid as much snow and ice as possible. We were seven: Tinker, myself, Vinnie Roslin, Mad Dog, Danny, a pal headed west who would
help drive and Tinker’s favorite living thing, J. T. Woofer, his dog. The cabin of Tinker’s forties flatbed comfortably held Tinker and me plus J. T. The rest of our travelers rode in Danny’s sixties vintage station wagon.

We had three days to get to California. We had no extra money for motels and no camping gear, so we would not be stopping. We would drive in rotating shifts around the clock,
pausing roadside only for food and gas. I didn’t drive . . . at all. I had no car, no license; at twenty-one my transportation was a bicycle or my thumb. I had hitchhiked everywhere I went since I was fifteen years old and had gotten very comfortable with it. When I say I didn’t drive, I mean I DID NOT KNOW HOW. I could not safely operate a motor vehicle. My old man never had the patience to teach
me, and after one sprint spinning and jerking my way through the Freehold Raceway parking lot, Tex himself had thrown up his hands and quickly quit too. I was completely incompetent behind the wheel. I was not counted as one of the drivers for this trip. That’s why we were glad to have the extra guy. There would be no “racing in the street” for me for a few years.

The trip was going well; then
we hit Nashville, Tennessee. Somehow in Nashville, Tink, J. T. and I became separated from the car of drivers with “Phantom” Dan Federici at the wheel. The story later was “We looked around and you were gone.” This created an enormous problem. All the drivers were with Danny. To make it to Big Sur, California, three thousand miles in three days from New Jersey, we
had
to drive around the clock.
To make it there New Year’s Eve for our date, the big wheels had to keep on turning. There were thousands of miles left and Tinker couldn’t do it himself; the dog couldn’t drive, so that left me. At midnight that evening Tink simply said, “I can’t drive anymore, it’s your turn.” I said, “You know I can’t drive.” Tinker said, “There’s nothing to it. Besides, you have to or we won’t make the only
job we have on the West Coast.” I got behind the steering
wheel of the big truck, an ancient behemoth, reminding one of the truck in Clouzot’s
The Wages of Fear
that hauled nitroglycerin through the jungles of Central America. What followed was so, so ugly: a massive grinding of fine vintage gears that left us jerking all over the highway, steering that left the huge truck with all of our band
equipment and everything of value that we owned in its hatch weaving barely within the lines of our lane. A head-on collision with the unknowing, trusting souls coming our way seemed imminent.