Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (60 page)

And so from the Kent I went to a blue solid body Epiphone—which I have one of, actually, and I should give you that one, because there are a lot of pictures of me playing that thing in the Castiles.

Then I went to a Fender Stratocaster, which was also Ray’s—which I didn’t think sounded as good as the blue Epiphone, but it looked better, and I just decided I was gonna play it.

We also have the copy of the Castiles recording, the two songs you guys recorded. What was that like when you went into those sessions?

It was a tiny little room, maybe half the size of this living room, which is not that big, and they couldn’t stand any volume whatsoever going into the microphones. We had to turn all our amps to the wall and literally put covers over them. And the guitars sounded real klinky, because we had the volume turned down to “one”—we couldn’t get any distortion or speaker sound out of it. The recording studio was not set up in those days for any kind of overdrive; they just simply weren’t ready to record rock bands in Bricktown, New Jersey, in 1965.

But it was a big deal. We saved up—I think it cost us, I don’t know, $300 or $100, some enormous amount, what we thought was an enormous amount of money. We saved it up, did a session where we cut those two songs. Of course, they give you your two-track, which we recently found, and they give you the acetates, the little tiny 45-sized acetates. And some of those survived, also.

We also have a lot of stuff from various clubs you played back then. What was the Upstage Club like?

The Upstage Club was an anomaly. It was a bit of a freak because it was on Cookman Avenue in downtown Asbury Park, and they served no
booze. It was open from eight until
five in the morning
. I’m not sure how they did it! I mean, they simply allowed teenagers to be out ’til five a.m. I don’t know if they paid the cops off or what the story was. But it was closed between twelve and one. The guy was sort of an old-school bohemian, Tom Potter, and his wife played the guitar. He would throw everyone out for one hour and then let everybody back in.

Its importance was because it was open so late, and because it had a bit of a hip vibe, and bands, when they came down to the Shore to play—it was a place where bands came from Long Island, from Pennsylvania, all over, in the summertime—at the end of their gigs, they would go to the Upstage. And so you had a moment when every musician in the immediate area would show up there at some point, and the thing to do was, of course, to play. So you saw everybody get up and play, just people from all over. And everyone was waiting for the next—who was gonna be the gunslinger? Everyone was waiting for the gunslingers to come in.

I came in from Freehold one night, by that time I had quite a bit of playing experience, and I got up on stage one night. There were no amps; the amplifiers were
in the walls
. So imagine, you’re standing in front of a huge wall, and behind you is just, I don’t know, 50 or 100 ten- or twelve-inch speakers. And in front of you there’s a little deck where you plug in. There are no amplifiers in sight. You would plug in, basically, to the wall, and this huge sound would come roaring out. It was a pretty creative idea—I’ve never seen it done again [
laughs
], and I don’t think I will!

But anyway, no one had to bring any equipment. That was the point: all you brought was your guitar. And you plugged straight in, and you gathered a group of musicians—“In a half-hour I’m gonna …” and you had somebody [say], “Yeah, man, I’ll play the drums,” or “I’ll play …” you know, you picked up whoever was there, and played, and demonstrated your wares for whoever was around. That’s the way a lot of musicians met. I met most of the E Street Band there, and Southside Johnny. So it was a very pivotal place.

What was the Sunshine Inn like?

The Sunshine Inn was a huge, empty garage which had originally been a Hullabaloo Club. When
Hullabaloo
was on television, they franchised the clubs and these clubs swept the nation—or at least the East Coast at that time—and every down-on-your-luck supermarket or
parking garage become a Hullabaloo Club. The Hullabaloo Club was in a supermarket in Freehold. In Asbury Park it was in a big old parking garage. And basically they went in and put up a lot of black lights—which no one had ever seen then. I remember the first time my buddy and I went in at Asbury Park, we went in and our shirt lit up, we went, “… Whoa!” [
Laughs
] “Wow! … This is, like … This is special!”

The first band I saw in the Hullabaloo Club was Sonny and the Starfires—Sonny [Kenn] still plays in the area—and so on the drums was “Mad Dog” Vincent Lopez. Sonny was this great R & B player: fabulous blond hair, handsome guy, hair slicked back, just a stone-cold rocker. Just really something to see. And they were very big in the area at the time; to us, we thought they were gods.

After the Hullabaloo Clubs all, of course, tanked after two or three years or however long it took for that to run its course, then all of a sudden this place became the Sunshine Inn. Run by a guy I believe named
Mr. Fisher
, who was really strange and kind of funny—classic New Jersey small-town shyster. Once again, because I played, I became friends with everybody, and I saw quite a few acts there. They had quite a few national acts: Allman Brothers, Humble Pie, Black Sabbath … I first saw Peter Wolf and the J. Geils Band there, and we opened for some of these acts from time to time.

I think we have a poster for you guys opening for Humble Pie
.

Yeah, we opened for Humble Pie. That was usually with Steel Mill, and I had this band Dr. Zoom, we opened for somebody.

I was gonna ask about them, because it sounds like those shows were really interesting and different with the Monopoly players ad all that
.

It was just weird—I have no idea what it was about. We might have gotten the idea from, like
Mad Dogs and Englishmen
or something at the time. But it was just this huge band of all local musicians. And the people we liked but who didn’t play anything, we just found something for them to do, like play Monopoly, or some sort of stunt on stage. It was really just a result of boredom [
laughs
], and people hanging around with nothing to do and no band at the time, I guess. It was fun. We had a big chorus, people’s wives and girlfriends sang, and it was just an outgrowth of the little local scene.

We have a poster for a benefit you did for George McGovern in ’72. Between seeing that and knowing what you did this year for Barack …

I started early! [
Laughs
]

I was going to say, did you always know rock ’n’ roll was going to influence politics?

Yeah, even as early as those days. Because you forget, we were products of the ’60s, and even as a young person, that brought with it a good deal of social consciousness even in Freehold, New Jersey, and in our little town. And so we searched for ways to be involved. I know we did a benefit to bus protesters to Washington to protest against the Vietnam War. We did the thing for McGovern. Here and there we just sort of found ways. And I wrote some political music back in those days with Steel Mill—it was very much a natural part of the rock ’n’ roll scene.

We have the John Hammond audition tapes—what do you remember about those sessions?

Last of the old-school recording sessions: the people working were all in suits. I probably caught the very last of the ’50s/’60s-style recording business. John would be there, and he always had a suit on, and the engineers and everybody else—my recollection, they were still dressed for work. It was very probably the last of the ’60s style of recording sessions where you came in, and there’s a mic set up, and you got in front of it, you played your songs, and played the piano. I listened to what John had to say, which was just general encouragement, and it happened in an evening, and that was it.

One of the other audio things we have is the audio from the show at the Harvard Square Theater, the one that Jon Landau ended up writing about … Do you remember anything about that show?

I remember that Bonnie Raitt was kind enough to allow us to open up for her in those days, which we were (and remain) deeply thankful for. Because very few people would. It was hard to get on the bill with someone—we had a natural tendency to play longer than we should, and the band was very, very good. She was great, and Jackson Browne let me open up for him. We opened up for Sha Na Na; we opened up
for Brownsville Station, Black Oak Arkansas. We were on a lot of unusual bills, just because they sent you wherever somebody would let you on. In those days there was no discernment between genre. You know, there wasn’t a heavy metal show—everything was all mixed up together. We opened up for the Eagles one time. Mountain, Chambers Brothers … you did a lot of unusual gigs like that in the early days.

But the Harvard Square Theater, my main memory of it was that it was a really good show, people liked us a lot. I think we really shook the house down—it was just a good night. I didn’t meet Jon that night; it was just a good night in Boston.

And we have the audio from the 1978 show at the Agora in Cleveland, which was WMMS’s tenth anniversary. Since this is in Cleveland, maybe you’d want to talk about Cleveland and what it’s meant to you, the support early on in your career
.

There were places that were pockets of support. And my parents did a strange thing, which was they moved away from me in 1969 [
laughs
]. Usually you leave home—my parents left home! My sister and I remained in Freehold. My sister was 17 and just had a baby and married a local guy in Lakewood, and so she stayed behind. And I stayed behind for a couple of reasons. One is that I was financially independent at the time, to the tune of 20 or 30 bucks a week, which was all you needed in those days as a 19-year-old kid to live on. My parents had nothing. When they left for California, they had 3,000 dollars—every cent they had; they had all their stuff piled on top the car (I might have sent you the picture; if not, I’ll send it to you). They didn’t have enough money to stay in motels when they crossed country. They slept in the car very often. They literally slept a night in a motel and then a night or two in the car.

I tried to go out there at one time, and I couldn’t make it. Once I got to California, my value was zero—I was worthless in California, because I had no reputation. But in New Jersey I could make that 20 dollars down at the Upstage on a Friday night, or the Student Prince, or someplace where it was just enough to get me by through the next week. We had the band, so we all lived together and pooled our resources for rent. And, at 19, I was independent, if that’s what you could call it.

So we had certain places that supported us. In the beginning there was New Jersey, in this immediate area; and Richmond, Virginia, and that was with Steel Mill. We literally wouldn’t have survived otherwise.

Then when the band started playing and touring—in the beginning, they don’t pay you any money. Very often you play for free. So Cleveland became a place, because it was such a big rock ’n’ roll town, where we developed an audience very early. Cleveland, Philadelphia … Texas, believe it or not: Austin, Houston … There were a few cities where we developed strong early audiences, and Cleveland was a
big
one that kept us going for quite a few years.

The radio station WMMS really got behind you guys too
.

Right, a lot of it had to do with the stations backing you. In Philadelphia, there was a guy called David Dye, he came down—it was in the strange days when a guy could come down from the radio station, just the DJ could come down. He could see you play to 15 or 20 people—nobody. You could
be
nobody, and that night on your way out of town you could turn on the radio and hear this guy play your record if he liked you. And the next time you came into town, there were 40 people there instead of 15. And so, the support of the old-school radio stations was enormous and incredibly important. It was where the band’s live experience paid off. Because when we came into town initially, we played to nobody.
Nobody
came to see us—ten, 15 people. No one knew who you were. So when the DJs came down, and with the free format that still existed at that time, they went back and they began to play your records, then next time you came out there were more people there.

It was a very organic, grassroots growth that you were able to get going in those days. It was a combination of the bands’ excellence in live performance and a system that could
respond
to that excellence. [These days], a guy could come down, love you, and say “You’re great! I’ll never
play
you, but you’re fabulous.” [
Laughs
] “You’re never gonna get on the radio, but you’re a genius!” I’ve heard people say that.

So it was a combination of a place in time when our power live was able to affect one person, who was then able to go out and affect his community through the ability to simply play your records on the air. It was a very different day and age. The music business was much smaller, there was no entertainment media, there was no entertainment culture, there was no coverage of rock music on television—very little, you had
American Bandstand
, and
Midnight Special
or something. It was still a novelty in your daily newspapers, major newspapers, it was still consigned to a little space. It was a very different kind of business. The upside was you had quite a bit of room to grow, experiment,
and get your act together before the big spotlight hit you—if it was ever going to.

One part of the exhibit is devoted to
Born to Run
, and I read in one of the books that you weren’t happy with the album when you first delivered it
.

No, but I don’t know if I would have been happy with anything, because I was just generally not that happy. My expectations—the sound I heard in my head was not one that was physically reproducible [
laughs
]. Of course, I wasn’t aware of this at the time. I had no record-making knowledge. We had around us people who had
some
. The record probably wouldn’t have gotten made without Jon Landau stepping in at the time, so that was enormous. Because we got stuck in the studio. I just worked on it for a long time, and I just couldn’t hear it by the time it was done. I’ve had that happen with other records. Doesn’t happen now, because we make them quickly. But in those days we made them very slow because I was hyper-conscious, a very self-conscious young kid. I hadn’t gotten used to hearing the sound of my own voice, so it disturbed me; I hadn’t gotten used to the use of the studio to get the most out of it that I wanted.