Bruce (7 page)

As was the Castiles’ founding drummer and US Marines corporal, Bart Haynes, who on October 22, 1967, was on patrol with his unit in the Quang Tri Province when North Vietnamese soldiers let loose a shower of mortar fire on the American troops. Haynes was killed in the barrage, and when word of his death hit Freehold a week later, Bruce and the other Castiles found it difficult to absorb the shock. Particularly George Theiss, who only a few days earlier had a vivid dream about his friend. As Theiss told Kevin Coyne, his subconscious had concocted a ringing telephone, which Theiss reached out to answer. The voice on the other end belonged to Bart Haynes, coming through the static with one eerie message: “I’m all right . . . I’m all right.”
¹²

A
T THE START OF 1968,
the Springsteens seemed to be on the upswing. Bruce was midway through his first year at Ocean County Community College (subsequently called Ocean County College), focusing his studies on English and earning good marks in his writing classes.
¹
Doug settled into his new job at the Lilly cup factory, which gave the family more financial stability and his days a sense of structure. Doug could trudge through days, even weeks, dull eyed but determined. Then he’d wake up tangled in his own sheets and barely find the energy to pull on a shirt and coat and find the door. That would pass, and with another dawn, he’d wake up on the ceiling and pinball through the next week, frantic and unpredictable. “With everything going on, we had no idea what was mental and what wasn’t mental,” Ginny Springsteen says. Her
mother nods sadly and then alludes to an event that makes them both cringe. Adele comes back with another cryptic “Oh, and remember when . . .” but all they’ll share about that are rolled eyes and a few dark laughs. “He just wasn’t right,” Adele says finally. “That poor man.”

Sometimes trouble came out of a clear blue sky. One evening that winter the family was settled into their postdinner routine—Doug in the kitchen; Ginny, Adele, and Pam watching TV in the living room; Bruce headed up the stairs to his room—when someone out on South Street pointed a gun at the Springsteens’ front door and pulled the trigger. The bullet tore through the front door and smashed into the wooden bannister an arm’s reach from where Bruce was climbing the stairs.

What the
hell
? They still don’t know. Maybe it had something to do with the growing racial tension in town. Or maybe the work of a random madman or a joke gone terribly wrong. “I think the police came,” Bruce says. Whatever it was, he certainly didn’t take it personally. “I was a kid then, so I mostly thought it was exciting,” he says. “It was just strange.”

One Sunday morning a few weeks later Bruce fired up his motorcycle to give Ginny a ride to a friend’s house, dropped her off, and turned for home, the soft spring air in his trailing curls. He was nearly home when a man driving his son home from church in a large sedan failed to see the motorcyclist headed his way on Jerseyville Avenue. Bruce got tossed over the hood and landed headfirst on the pavement. When patrolman Lou Carotenuto got to the scene, Bruce was on the sidewalk, conscious but dazed and cradling the knee that now poked through his torn and bloodied jeans. “He was rubbing his knee, but he kept saying, ‘I’m fine! I’m fine!’” Carotenuto says. “Just like Doug would have done.” With Bruce’s eyes glazed, bloodied knee swelling visibly, and his responses fuzzy at best, Carotenuto called for an ambulance, which rushed the mostly unconscious teenager to a hospital near Asbury Park. There, the emergency room staff cut off his blood-soaked jeans and presented Bruce to an older doctor whose patience for beaten-up teenaged hippies had obviously run short.

Presented with a bloodied, semicoherent adolescent, the doctor glared at his patient’s shoulder-length hair and muttered that maybe the hippie deserved what he got. The physician stayed long enough to diagnose a concussion, and ordered that Bruce be held for observation and more
tests. Fretting both about her son and the astronomical cost of hospital care, and then presented with a police report that set the blame for his accident squarely on the other driver, Adele hired a lawyer to prepare for litigation in case the man’s insurance company refused to pay. She learned quickly that their chances in civil court would improve dramatically if Bruce appeared on the stand looking like a clean-cut American. When Doug returned to the hospital with a barber in tow, Bruce screamed bloody murder. “Telling him that I hated him, and that I’d never forget,” Bruce recalled onstage during the 1980s. Even now Adele seems horrified to recall the episode, though they were just trying to help keep the family—and particularly her son—afloat. “Everyone was making fun of him!” she says. “But we felt so terrible. I never thought that he would feel that bad.” However, with three children to feed and all the regular bills to pay, the family needed the money more than Bruce needed his hair.

Then Ginny, in the midst of her senior year in high school, got pregnant. That her then boyfriend, Michael “Mickey” Shave, was a professional rodeo rider did not help her parents confront the social and religious stigmas attached to out-of-wedlock teen pregnancies. But Ginny’s predicament was by no means a first in their corner of Freehold, or in the family itself, so Adele took a deep breath and did what had to be done. The young couple were married in a small ceremony, the family had a party to celebrate, and the youngsters braced themselves for a premature adulthood that would test them both in ways that no teenager could imagine.
²

Back in Doug’s midnight kitchen, one thought gripped him, then wouldn’t let go: he’d had enough. Enough family history, enough probing eyes, enough Freehold. Imagining sunny skies and a shore as far from New Jersey as possible, his thoughts turned to California, the traditional destination for East Coast refugees in search of a fresh start. “He just wanted to get out,” Adele says. “I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to leave Ginny because she’d just had her baby, and I had worked for the same man for twenty-three years. But Douglas said, ‘I’ll just go without you, then.’” Sensing the desperation in his voice, Adele could not deny
her husband’s need. So they agreed: it might take some time—probably several months—to save the money they’d need for such a big move. But they would go. And as Doug made clear, he was never coming back.

• • •

In late September 1968, Tex and Marion Vinyard invited the Castiles and their friends to what had become a regular party at their house: a joint celebration to mark the birthdays of Theiss and Bruce, born one day apart. On the surface, it was quasifamily business as usual: a big cake, sandwiches, chips, the usual array of Foodtown soda pop. The snapshots in Marion’s scrapbook—the pages titled “19th Birthday Party for Our Boys, George and Bruce”—reveal a house full of skinny, long-haired boys, all freshly washed and (except for Theiss) shaved, dressed in their nicer pants, ironed shirts, and collegiate sweaters. In one picture, a heavily bearded Theiss is a vision in late-sixties rock glamour, his shirt unbuttoned to reveal his naked chest, the arms of a willowy blonde draped over his shoulders. In another, a shirt-and-sweater-vest-clad Bruce sits cross-legged on the floor, bent over an acoustic guitar while a young woman gazes raptly from a respectful distance. Reminded of the disparity between the photos of the Castiles’ front man and lead guitarist, Theiss laughs. “Yeah, it’s pretty telling. That’s pretty much how it was.”

What doesn’t come through in the warm tableau is that the Castiles had broken up just weeks earlier. Perhaps the most surprising thing was that they had managed to stay together for so long. “We started out as little Freehold greasers, and we all ended up as long-haired hippies,” Bruce says. “We were all just growing up and changing. I do remember we had some feelings between us, but I don’t even remember what it was about. I was either starting to sing, or maybe we wanted to play different music.” Probably both. Deep in the thrall of singer-songwriters Tim Buckley and Leonard Cohen, Bruce had spent the winter filling notebooks with his poems, such as the dreamy “Clouds” (“As my mind bends clouds into dreams / That I like as the sun disappears into / The night I look and you have gone”) and the so-surreal-it’s-real “Slum Sentiments” (“Golden horses ride down the city streets / Starving children clutter beneath their feet / ’Cause they haven’t had enough to eat”). In “Until the Rain Comes,” Apollo himself thunders across flaming clouds in service of
a revelation: “Upon reaching the ancient age of 18 I have found / What is round isn’t round at all, and what is up may be down.” All very deep and romantic, and just the thing for a young troubadour with trouble in mind and a guitar in hand. Heading into the spring with a new repertoire of acoustic songs, he had played a few solo shows at the Off Broad Street Coffee House in Red Bank, and felt an entirely new charge standing alone with only his guitar, voice, and innermost thoughts to offer.

At the same time, the Castiles, all graduated from high school and moving into college or the professional world of entry-level jobs and training programs, were losing steam. According to the rock ’n’ roll calendar, the split was more than due: teenage bands are supposed to be transient creatures. But even inevitable change can be jarring, and by the middle of July, Bruce and Theiss could barely speak to each other. Sometimes they bickered onstage. And at one mid-July show at the Off Broad Street, a fan took a picture that captured a pissed off-looking Bruce hoisting his middle finger to a visibly cranky, microphone-wielding Theiss. Things were clearly not well in the Castiles’ world. And that was before the Freehold police got involved.

It happened in the first week of August 1968. And while not every eighteen-year-old Freeholder had become enraptured by the drugs and weirdness that had become the definitive mark of their generation, the Freehold Police Department had already concluded that the stream of drugs flowing into town, and the enthusiastic consumption of same by young Freeholders, had grown to disturbing proportions. They weren’t exactly wrong. Marijuana had been remarkably easy to find since the summer of 1967, assuming you knew the right people. By 1968, those same people could also be relied upon to supply LSD, psychedelic mushrooms, amphetamines, downers, cocaine, DMT, crystal meth, heroin—the whole candy store. Naturally, the question of who was doing which drugs became a hot topic among the younger set. When some group of stoners started wearing necklaces strung with small, colorful discs (distributed originally as part of a cereal box game), you didn’t have to look further than a kid’s neck to figure out his or her drug of choice: green stood for grass, yellow was LSD, red for speed freaks, and so on. All good fun for the devil-may-care youth of Freehold until it turned out that one of their number was either a narcotics officer or someone yearning to
become one. Once the cops knew the secret, the necklaces did the rest of their work for them. It took about a week for them to put together the names, addresses, and drugs of choice.

The police cars rolled at four in the morning. They hit virtually every neighborhood in town, the officers pounding on family doors in the middle of the night, flashing their warrants, conducting their searches, collecting what they already knew they would find, and hauling the young lawbreakers off to jail. By the time the sun rose, the entire town was scandalized. “They were all living with their mommies and daddies, and the police came and took them out of their mommies’ and daddies’ houses!” Bruce recalls with mock horror. “That’s in the
middle of the night
! Who had ever
heard
of such a thing? There had been no busts before! That word, the act itself, was
unknown
. People were shocked!
Here in River City?
” The drama made a big impact on the Castiles, largely because Vinny Maniello, Paul Popkin, and Curt Fluhr got nabbed in the dragnet. “All I remember is that I woke up one morning and half the guys were gone,” Bruce says. “George and I were on the outside and said, ‘Well, this seems like a good moment to call it a day.’”

A day or two later, Bruce happened upon John Graham and Mike Burke, a pair of slightly younger musicians (they were sixteen or seventeen) from New Shrewsbury. Just finishing an unsatisfying run with a blues-and-Stones cover band called Something Blue, the bassist and drummer were on the hunt for a singer-guitarist when they overheard Bruce talking about the big drug bust in Freehold. The three musicians chatted for a while, and when they got to their mutual love for Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience—the best of the psychedelic blues bands, and both three-piece groups—
and
with a replacement band needed for the Castiles’ gig at the Le Teendezvous club on August 10, it all clicked together. “I was ready to power trio, you know,” Bruce says. “I think we rehearsed a night or two and played that weekend. And then there was no looking back.”

Calling themselves Earth (shortened from the original the Earth Band), the trio—which performed as a quartet whenever the Castiles’ gifted organist Bob Alfano hauled his Hammond to a show—built a repertoire from the most popular works of Cream, Hendrix, Traffic, the Yardbirds, and Steppenwolf, whose just-released single “Born to Be Wild” became one of Earth’s big set closers. Specializing in such jam-heavy songs
made it easy to play long shows, particularly given Bruce’s increasingly dynamic guitar work. Soon a pair of aspiring young managers named Fran Duffy and Rick Spachner convinced Bruce, Burke, and Graham to let them guide their nascent career and booked an assortment of shows to keep the band busy through the fall.

At the same time, Bruce, who still felt out of place in academic surroundings, surrendered to his parents’ pleas and registered for another fall term at Ocean County Community College. His new bandmates, both of whom grew up in a well-to-do town where education was taken seriously, helped keep him motivated. “They were smart, they seemed educated, and they had families that seemed educated,” Bruce says. “Those kids were going to college, which made them different than my Freehold buddies, who were going to Vietnam.” Crashing in the Graham family’s basement (where the band rehearsed), Bruce absorbed the leafy suburban zeitgeist of New Shrewsbury, and for a time tried on its expectations. Both Graham and Burke were enthusiastic readers and writers, so when they ran out of music talk, the three boys considered their literary futures. Temporarily fired up about his academic prospects, Bruce told his bandmates that he now planned to pivot from his two years at Ocean County and jump into the journalism school at Columbia University. Graham and Burke had no doubt that he could do exactly that. “He was very impressive and likable,” Burke says. “A very nice guy, funny, smart, and knowledgeable about music,” Graham says. “And onstage he was fearless.”