Bruce (15 page)

And so came the first stirrings of the band that would eventually be known as Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom. With the core of his still-forming band already rehearsed enough to play together, Springsteen fleshed out the party band—as he first called the project—by drafting John Lyon to sing and play harp, and then recruiting another band’s worth of musicians (John Waasdorp on keyboards, Williams on drums, Tellone on shaky, schoolboy saxophone, and West on congas) to double the parts.

As usual, Bruce held regular rehearsals to make sure the outsized band would have some sense of the songs and arrangements. Even so, the group’s real mission revolved around fun and just the right touch of strangeness. To make sure they looked the part, some of the musicians went to a secondhand clothing store in search of distinctive stage wear. When Lyon came back with the old pin-striped suit and vintage fedora of an old bluesman, Bruce howled with glee. “Hey, it’s Johnny Chicago!” he said. “What are you doin’ here, man?” Lyon, an expert in the legends of the great Chicago bluesmen, shot right back. “Don’t just call me
Chicago
, man. I’m from the
south side
.” And just like that, Lyon became Southside Johnny, and the blues vamp he led them through a few minutes later—a mainstay of the party band’s brief career—became “Southside Shuffle.” But what were they going to call their freak show of a band? At first they settled for West’s offhand suggestion of Bruce Springsteen and the Friendly Enemies. Then the more memorable Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom came up but not quite soon enough to make it onto the Sunshine
In posters. So Friendly Enemies they were, at least for the March 27 gig.

The band’s set at the Allmans’ sold-out show delighted the Sunshine In crowd, all of whom seemed entirely enraptured by the spectacle of singing baton twirlers and skit players, the silent quartet of Monopoly players, and, near the front of the stage, the mechanic (Upstage bouncer Eddie Luraschi) who sprawled beneath a motorcycle while carefully adjusting and tightening the engine’s spark plugs. Springsteen did his best to weird it up himself, dropping his guitar to dance with the backup chorus, donning a pair of heavy horn-rimmed glasses, and singing at least one song from a chair at the Monopoly board.

Watching from the wings, the night’s headliners were both tickled and impressed. “The Allmans were so cool,” remembers sax player Feigenbaum. “We were just local boys, but they were so welcoming. And Duane Allman was really into Steve’s slide playing. I remember him saying that Steve was the best slide player in the country, except for him.” After the show ended, Duane took Van Zandt aside to show him some more licks, and then set it up so the Friendly Enemies/Dr. Zoom would open for his group when its tour brought the Allmans back to Asbury Park in November. That show would never take place: the supremely talented but hard-living Duane Allman died in a motorcycle accident at the end of October.

When spring came, West transplanted the Challenger East factory to a funky wood-framed structure seventeen miles up the shore in Atlantic Highlands, so all of his electronics and the headquarters of Bruce’s music career went along with it. Most of the other musicians worked day jobs to make ends meet: Lopez labored in a boatyard, Van Zandt worked construction, and so on. Bruce, on the other hand, remained steadfast in his determination to never, ever work outside the music industry. So he earned money by playing solo acoustic sets at coffeehouses up and down the shore, and by playing second guitar in Van Zandt’s side project, the Sundance Blues Band, which also included Lopez, Tallent, Johnny Lyon, and, for a time, a guitarist named Joe Hagstrom. When the Upstage’s Tom Potter booked him for an electric show, Bruce drafted the rhythm section from his new band and performed as Bruce Springsteen and the Hot Mammas. West did his part by booking a couple shows for the party band everyone now called Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom. Not that
anyone mistook Dr. Zoom as an ongoing concern. The band made its official debut as the headliner of a triple bill at the Sunshine In on May 14 and then played a farewell gig the very next night at Newark State College.

Meanwhile, rehearsals continued for the big band, now dubbed the Bruce Springsteen Band as per Bruce’s new determination to make himself the obvious leader and front man.

The nine-piece Bruce Springsteen Band made its long-prepared-for debut on the afternoon of July 10 at the Brookdale Community College’s annual Nothings Festival. Three other West-managed bands (Sunny Jim, Odin, and Jeannie Clark) played warm-up sets. Anyone counting on the blistering sound of Steel Mill would have gone home disappointed (although the new band did cover “Goin’ Back to Georgia”), but the jazzier sound of the big band still left plenty of room for Bruce’s guitar explorations. The going got particularly hot during “You Mean So Much to Me,” a new original that began in a Van Morrison mood, and then climaxed with an intricately rehearsed Allmans-style harmonized-guitar workout for Bruce and Van Zandt, before doubling back to the horns-and-singers-laced final verse.

The second show came a night later, with a featured slot at the Sunshine In opening for the UK’s Humble Pie, an up-and-coming group featuring vocalist Steve Marriott, late of the Small Faces, and Peter Frampton on lead guitar. The British group had just played a massive show at New York’s Shea Stadium (with Grand Funk Railroad topping the bill), but when it got to the Sunshine In during the midst of the BSB’s set, the jet-engine roar of applause and cheers greeting the hometown heroes left the headliners feeling more than a little queasy. When the opening set ended, Marriott, Frampton, and company scampered back to the stretch limousines and slammed the doors behind them. How could they follow such a devastating warm-up band? Should they even try? “The club manager had to come out and talk them back inside,” Feigenbaum says. “And I understood their problem. The audience didn’t want us to leave. We absolutely tore the place apart.”

Nevertheless, Humble Pie steadied its nerves and played a show hot enough to match the local band’s ovation. Egos assuaged, they thought
again about this Asbury Park outfit and its potential for enhancing their own tour. “We were sitting around afterwards, and Frampton was talking to me. ‘We love you, we’re gonna do a world tour, we want you to open for us!’” Cherlin remembers. “He said he’d get us a deal with A&M Records (Humble Pie’s label) and help make us stars, but he was freaking out because he’d already said all that to Bruce, and he wouldn’t listen to him.”

Cherlin, who had never imagined hearing such talk being directed at him, marched up to West to find out what was going on. The manager shook his head and laughed. “He said, ‘Oh yeah, a major label, eh? Good luck! They’re gonna screw ya!’ And in a way he was right. But I was twenty-two, and Humble Pie was a big name already.”
³

He wasn’t the only band member who walked out of the Sunshine In that night questioning West’s plans for the group. Still, the new band ripped through a string of shows in July, including a spectacular sixty-minute set at a daylong festival at the Guggenheim Band Shell in Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park in New York City. Kicking off with a gospel-blues arrangement of “C.C. Rider” which segued in and out of a jazzier reading of “Down the Road Apiece,” the band swung into a half dozen new originals that revealed how far Bruce’s musical vision had progressed in the previous six months. “You Mean So Much to Me,” with its effortless blend of rhythm and blues and southern guitar boogie, came next, followed by the rocker “C’mon Billy,” and then a Delores Holmes lead vocal on “I’m in Love Again,” a joyous Springsteen song that bypassed a similarly titled song by Fats Domino to evoke the girl groups of late 1950s and early 1960s R&B.

The harder-rocking party song “Dance, Dance, Dance” (more like a rougher “Dancin’ in the Street” than the Beach Boys song of the same name) roared in on waves of Bruce’s spiky guitar and bebop-inspired horn solos. Then the last two songs upped the ante even more. Dinkin’s composition (with an assist from Sancious) “You Don’t Leave Me No Choice” began with a two-minute piano improv, and then bloomed into
a he-done-me-wrong tale that Dinkins sang over a double-fast minor chord progression propelled to mach speed by Lopez, all but beating his drums to death. From there the song grew wilder with a blistering Bruce guitar solo and then wilder still when Van Zandt, Feigenbaum, and Cherlin turned it into a four-way melee.

The band didn’t pause for breath before diving into its climactic number: a thirteen-minute version of another original crowned with a familiar name. As per “Dance, Dance, Dance” and “I’m in Love Again,” “Jambalaya” shared nothing with the Hank Williams song of the same name, other than its romantic vision of New Orleans. In fact, Bruce’s handwritten set lists usually, if not always, called the song “Jumbeliah,” either to clear up the confusion with Williams’s song (although he obviously didn’t care about doubling the Beach Boys, Fats Domino, and so on) or because he preferred the cruder spelling, or still showed the scars of his botched education. Built around a simple three-chord progression “Jambalaya/Jumbeliah” describes a girl who is “strong like a lion / Wild like a tiger,” who loves you so hard, “all you can do is / Roll over, roll over, roll over.” Once again, the music sings louder than the words, and the Van Zandt–written horn charts, combined with his slide guitar lines, the perfectly harmonized backing vocals, and Bruce’s own fast, articulate guitar solos, transform the song into an epic. “That was the song everyone talked about,” Cherlin remembers. “Our greatest hit. People asked for it, and we practiced it all the time.”

Sadly, they had played the entire set to an audience consisting of a tiny handful of friends and one or two passersby. “Tinker said, ‘Man, we’re going to play at Lincoln Center!’ And we thought like, yeah! The big time!” Bruce says. “But then there wasn’t any audience there.” The contrast between Bruce’s glory-cloaked expectations for the Lincoln Center show and what actually happened still makes him cringe. “When I go to the city and see that place, I still say”—putting on his grimmest voice—“Oh.
There
it is.”

B
RUCE REMEMBERS MEETING HER NEAR
the beach during the summer of 1971. “She was working in a little stand on the Asbury boardwalk,” he says. “She was great. Italian, you know. And funny! Just so funny.” Diane Lozito describes it a bit differently, recalling that they first encountered each other at the Upstage’s Green Mermaid coffeebar. Her boyfriend, Billy “Kale” Cahill, a law student who worked as an Asbury Park lifeguard during the summer, had met Bruce through some friends a few weeks earlier. Cahill, for all his law school smarts and squared-away lifeguard squint, spent his free time pursuing his interests as an enthusiastic beer drinker and fearless perpetrator of mayhem. Bruce took to calling him Wild Billy, and after he got to know Kale’s sixteen-year-old girlfriend, he dubbed her Crazy Diane. Anyone who dated Kale, he said,
had
to be crazy.

Somewhere in the wee hours one night, Bruce, Cahill, Lozito, and one or two other friends skipped out of the moist heat of the Upstage
and decided to take a predawn swim at one of the lakes scattered around Monmouth County. Whether they went to Freehold’s Lake Topanemus—known popularly as Greasy Lake in honor of the suntan lotion slick that glinted on its surface during the summer—or the heavily wooded Lake Carasaljo on the edge of Brick Township, is no longer clear. Cahill leaped into the black water from the high rocks on the shore, and somewhere in the darkness, a magnetic charge sparked between the petite, dark-haired Diane and Bruce.

When Cahill went back to law school a few weeks later, Bruce called Diane and took her out to dinner. They spent the night together but quickly reined themselves in again, hoping to avoid hurting Cahill, their mutual friend. But as the next days and weeks unwound, the charge proved too powerful to ignore. “Bruce and I got together,” Lozito says. “He was twenty-two
¹
and when he wasn’t onstage, he was shy and quiet. But it was cool to be introverted, and I thought he was perfect.”

But as ever, no girlfriend could rival the pull of his music. When Tinker West moved the center of his surfboard and music productions up the shore to the Highlands
²
that spring, Bruce followed, moving into the front room of a house located right across the street, a bungalow occupied by friend Louie Longo and his fiancee, Dorothea “Fifi Vavavoom” Killian, who had been part of the Dr. Zoom chorus. “Bruce was such a good influence,” Killian says. “He didn’t drink or do any drugs; he just practiced all the time.”

The long nights of rehearsing and playing in the clubs ate into Bruce’s daylight hours, but, as Killian recalls, he still found the energy to bond with Dennis Palaia, a neighborhood kid who shared his older neighbor’s love for baseball. “Bruce slept a lot during the day, but any time that boy knocked on our screen door, he’d drag himself outside, barefoot and in cutoffs, to have a catch. Literally, anytime Dennis asked, Bruce came out to play.”

Bruce, for all his rock ’n’ roll hair and muttonchops, not only bonded
with young Dennis but also became a local hero when Tinker rented Bruce a cheap spinet piano to play and write on at home. Bruce rode in the pickup truck to the music store, helped load it into the back, and when they got to the Highlands turnoff, he climbed into the back so that he could pound on the keys as they came rumbling to Locust Street. The carnival sound of music in motion called all the kids out of their houses, and they chased the musician all the way to his house, where the bigger kids helped push the instrument to its place in the enclosed sun porch.

The former social outcast now had friends and admirers up and down the Jersey Shore. But he lost the patience of Tinker West in the last few months when the manager’s skepticism about the big band’s future eclipsed his belief in its leader’s talents. The going got especially tough in the fall when they booked some shows in the Springsteen-loving college town of Richmond, Virginia. Those trips were always a moneymaker during the lean, mean Steel Mill days, but now the same trip would cost multiples more in food, gas, and hotel room bills. How much sense would it make, Tinker wanted to know, to travel that far and work that hard just so everyone could clear $50 or at most $100?