Bruce Read online

  • • •

  It began as a dreamy, late-summer afternoon. Warm, but with a breeze off the ocean and acres of New Jersey kids splayed across the sloping lawn. The show started at five o’clock with sets by two local bands, Task and Sid’s Farm, and then a final warm-up set by Jeannie Clark, who juiced up her usual folk repertoire with the help of Van Zandt on lead guitar, bassist Garry Tallent, and an Asbury Park blues singer-musician named John Lyon. The police presence outside seemed thicker than usual, but welcome to the Middletown Police Department’s jurisdiction. “Middletown was famous for having no crime,” says native boy Van Zandt. “And having no black people. And having the classic sort of suburban/authoritarian order.” Eager to be forearmed in the event of a revolution, Middletown police chief Joseph McCarthy bought an inventory of riot helmets, clubs, shields, and other weapons for his force. And after receiving a few complaints from neighbors upset about the noise rising above the trees from Clearwater’s summer concerts, McCarthy figured this end-of-summer music fest would be an excellent opportunity to try out the new gear. “Like Halloween, I guess,” Van Zandt continues. “They had no use for it. But here they are.”

  Just like the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968. Like the May 1970 Kent State University demonstration that Bruce’s girlfriend Pam Bracken, a sophomore at the school, had ventured into moments before the National Guard opened fire and killed four unarmed students. Bracken ran for her life that awful day, and now, just four months later, nearly five thousand rock ’n’ roll fans had herded together to hear loud music, suck up their secret stashes of whatever they had, and forget all about Middletown’s just-imposed ten o’clock p.m. curfew. “It was the playing out of the generation gap,” Van Zandt says of what transpired that night. “In a physical way.”

  Steel Mill, with Hazlett perched at Lopez’s drums, hit the stage close to eight and launched into its usual set, alternating exhortations to fun, sex, heartbreak, runaway trains, and dancing in the streets with the feverishly subversive tunes Bruce had been writing for more than a year. The party packed tight across the hillside and tighter still on the patio near the stage, ecstatic with the music and comradeship. Maybe a few kids got busted for flagrant pot smoking or wine guzzling. So it goes. And if the crowd’s temperature spiked at all, it had more to do with Bruce’s intense performance. Dressed in a sleeveless white T-shirt and his usual rope-belted jeans, he fed off the crowd’s energy, his voice entwined with Thompson’s, his guitar leads pinwheeling from one verse to the next.

  “Bruce was always set apart by that magic he had,” says Joe Petillo, the Upstage guitarist who had come out to see his Steel Mill pals do their thing. He’d seen Bruce play; he’d traded solos with him at the Upstage. But from the middle of the crowd, Petillo felt the awe rising in him. “When he stepped onstage, he took charge. You knew something special was happening.”

  And it did. Right up until the second hand on Chief McCarthy’s watch swept the hour past ten o’clock. Singing and playing at center stage, Bruce knew he was pushing the limits. “There was this ‘If you play one minute past’ . . . thing,” he says. “And, of course, we played one minute past, because that’s what we did.” In moments, the Middletown police, in full riot regalia, appeared at the top of the hills surrounding the Clearwater pool. “It was like a classic Western,” Van Zandt recalls. “You look up and see all this riot gear all around the place. And at some point, they just descended.” They came in, batons swinging, headed for the stage where Bruce and band were ripping into the first chords of the night’s closer, “He’s Guilty.” Of all songs.

  “My recollection is that people were smoking dope in the crowd, and somebody tried to make a bust,” Bruce says. “They threw the cop into the pool, and that’s what started the whole thing off.”

  All of which took place just as Bruce and Thompson were getting into the first verse: “We’re here to try this boy for his crime,” they shouted. “Jury all got up in their chairs / He’s guilty! He’s guilty! Send that boy to jail!”

  “The band was rocking! The people were rocking!” recalls Bill Alexander, back to running Steel Mill’s stage crew during the summer break from college. Then the PA system went dead: the cops had pulled the plug, thereby cutting the amps and the internal fans that kept the overheated electronics from melting. An enterprising crew member snuck behind the police to reconnect the wires, spurring a wild roar from Bruce as he kicked the band back into gear.

  Chief McCarthy, realizing that the hippies had shoved his officers aside and defied his own chiefly orders, leaped with outrage. The obvious solution: arrest everyone in sight. Within seconds, every member of Alexander’s stage crew had been shackled and shoved, hard, toward the riot vans idling in the center of Route 36. Alexander, who had somehow avoided the many arms of the law, ran to the back of the stage, only to be confronted by a fire-cheeked cop who grabbed a fistful of Alexander’s shirt and pointed to the amps.

  “Chief McCarthy wants that stuff offa there!”

  “How am I gonna do that?” Alexander shouted back. “You just arrested all my guys!”

  “I don’t give a crap!”

  “You’re being an ass!”

  This last observation, while arguably correct, also proved to be a strategic error. An instant later, Alexander wore shackles around his wrists, while a meaty forearm pinned him to the wall. “You’re under arrest!” the cop shouted.

  “What are the charges?”

  A six-battery flashlight cracked against Alexander’s forehead.

  “There’s your charges!”

  Back onstage, Bruce, Van Zandt, Thompson, and Hazlett held on to the groove until the police regained control of the plugs, stopping the music cold. Which, amazingly, did nothing to loosen Bruce’s grip on the crowd as he stood alone at center stage, clapping his hands over his head and bellowing into the air, “He’s guilty! He’s guilty! Send that boy to jail!”

  Tom Cohen, who played guitar in a West-managed group called Odin, saw it all from the midst of the crowd. “It went very quickly to being total chaos. We thought the revolution was gonna happen right there and then.” Except for one thing: no one could take their eyes off of Bruce, still clapping and shouting at center stage. “There’s no music. There’s no power,” Joe Petillo says. “And he still has thousands of people in the palm of his hand.”

  From the stage, that realization was both thrilling and terrifying. “That was the first time we realized how much influence the band had over the audience,” Thompson says. “People were really getting hurt, our equipment got damaged. But that audience looked like they would have done anything we asked.” In Bruce’s eyes, they were already doing it. “We were young rock ’n’ roll punks,” he says. “All the other stuff was in the air, but, really, we were just interested in music . . . Literally, I just wanted to keep playing. There wasn’t anything beyond that, you know.”

  Except for the Middletown Police Department. “The police jumped up on the front of the stage,” Bruce says. “And they were yelling at everybody and swinging the clubs and stuff. There was a lot of chaos going on in the front. I turned around, and it was all going on behind me too. And Danny was in a mess.” Indeed, a few cops decided to clamber up the back side of the stage, but when they grabbed onto the amplifiers and started to climb, a stack of speakers came tumbling down, smacking Chief McCarthy in the head before pinning the climbers to the ground. Looking up to see Federici at his Hammond B3, the cops reached the obvious conclusion: “That blond hippie just threw the speakers on us!” But would the baby-faced organist even think of doing such a thing? Many onlookers don’t remember it that way. But Van Zandt has no doubt. “Oh, Danny did that,” he says. “How do I know? Because I saw him do it. I was standing right next to him. It was the PA stack, and he elbowed it right over on them.”

  No wonder the cops were so angry.

  “Arrest that asshole!”

  When Federici glanced down to see a wave of bruised, furious policemen hurtling at hi
m, he launched himself across the stage, hit the ground at a sprint, and didn’t stop until he was lying beneath a blanket in a car belonging to Steel Mill crewman Greg Dickinson, who drove the panicked organist to hide out at his place, with his wife, Flo, and their infant son, Jason.

  Meanwhile, Bruce and the others hid under the stage, hoping to avoid the brunt of the police attack. Hearing that the cops planned to confiscate their gear, they leaped into action, hurling amps, instruments, wires, and the sound mix board into the back of West’s truck. Bruce and Hazlett jumped into the front seat, and the three guys rolled out the back entrance. Once they got to the open road, they trailed into silence, trying to work out what had just happened and what they could do next. They avoided the Challenger factory, thinking that it would be destination number one for any Middletown cop intent on locking up the band or its gear.

  Thankfully, the postshow raids didn’t happen. Instead the police cleared the area and filed an arrest warrant for Federici, who had vanished so completely that he earned the nickname he’d carry for the rest of his life: the Phantom. Poor Alexander—battered beyond recognition by the time Middletown’s peace officers hurled him in the back of their riot van—filed a civil suit against the city’s police force, while the American Civil Liberties Union launched an investigation into the circumstances of the two dozen arrests made for drugs, alcohol, and what the police called “assaults.”

  Alexander’s plight enraged the rest of Steel Mill, and the entire organization held emergency meetings to talk through what had happened and put together a list of witnesses and evidence. But when Alexander, accompanied by his attorney (who doubled as his uncle) met with the Middletown police, he limped away with nothing but threats and warnings. “I heard McCarthy say, ‘If your client doesn’t drop these charges, we’ll produce guns, knives, whatever it takes. And we’ll put him away for a long time!’” Alexander says. True to their word, the police leaked news that their postconcert search beneath the stage had led to the discovery of a sack full of drugs and weapons, apparently stashed by a band that had forgotten the many available hiding places in the nooks of their own vehicles and packing crates. Given a stern warning from his uncle lawyer (“Do you really wanna go to jail for the rest of your life?”), Alexander dropped the civil case, to his everlasting regret.

  For Bruce, just days away from his twenty-first birthday, the show left an indelible mark. He’d spent most of the evening reveling in the energy of another large and excited audience. But the show’s ugly end, and the eager brutality of the Middletown police, hit him hard. “This political thing with Steel Mill,” he said to Tom Cohen a few days later, ticking off the many tunes he’d written about stopping the war, bucking the authorities, and changing the world. “We always talk about the revolution, but nobody really cares. Nobody does anything. They just wanna talk about it.” The next revolution song Springsteen wrote—probably with Robbin Thompson’s help—was called “Change It.” Only this time the cry for social revolution came drenched with sarcasm.

  “Everybody’s saying their favorite sayings, everybody’s singing their favorite songs,” the tune began. “Everybody’s got a favorite game they’re playing, well, ha, we’re all right, but I guess we’re all wrong.” Moving on, the lyrics became increasingly acerbic. “So take LSD and off the pigs . . . Break out the guns and ammo, everything’s gonna be just fine . . . all you gotta do is hang around.”

  Bruce’s enthusiasm for fist-in-the-air rhetoric had vanished. It was time to think again about Steel Mill’s strengths, limitations, and the wide-open future. So while the band continued performing throughout the fall, Bruce also renewed his trade in solo coffeehouse gigs. He’d toss the money back to the band’s central kitty, but his mind was drifting in another direction.

  SIX

  FOR PERSONAL REASONS THIS HAS TO BE MY LAST SONG

  BRUCE AND STEEL MILL STAYED off the stage for nearly a month after the Clearwater disaster—a break that had as much to do with Lopez’s ongoing residence in the Richmond jail as it did with the group’s smashed equipment and the sting of real and psychic wounds. Reemerging from the Challenger factory in early October, the band bolted to Richmond to play a lukewarm opening set for the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. On the plus side, they reconnected with Lopez, just released from jail, and that made the trip worthwhile.

  Back on the Jersey Shore a couple of days later, Steel Mill played another sold-out show at the Monmouth College gymnasium, where the still-at-large Danny Federici nearly got nabbed by marauding Middletown police at the end of the set. Fortunately, the cops underestimated the group’s canniness when it came to evading the law. As Lopez remembers: “Bruce got everyone [at the front of the crowd] to come up onstage, then fellow Asbury Park musician Davey Sancious took over the keys, and Danny disappeared.” The Phantom strikes again. Next, they went back to Richmond for a pair of shows in late October, and then waited a month for a headline set at Newark State College on November 25. Two days later, Steel Mill opened for Black Sabbath and Cactus at the Sunshine In, a new addition to the circuit near the Asbury Park boardwalk.

  At first the lags between shows puzzled new member Robbin Thompson. But the concerts they did perform often drew crowds many times larger than most Jersey Shore bands would face in a week of nightclub shows. The Monmouth College show brought in four thousand Steel Mill fans, many of whom spent two or more hours waiting in a heavy rain to get as close to the stage as possible. When Thompson saw the stack of cash waiting for them after the show, he was flabbergasted. “We’d made more than three thousand dollars, and it was literally, ‘Here’s ten for you, ten for you, ten for me, ten for you . . . ’” he says. “I made five hundred dollars and it was shocking. I’d never made as much money with a band before. The only problem was that we probably wouldn’t work again for a month.”

  Indeed, the Thanksgiving gigs at the end of November were the group’s final shows of 1970. Not long after, Springsteen traveled west to spend the Christmas holidays with his parents and sister in San Mateo. There he spent his time doting on his kid sister, consuming Adele’s pasta and roasted chicken, and sharing the late-night silence with Doug.

  Away from the usual faces and sounds, Bruce’s rock-burned ears yearned for new music. Picking up on the FM radio stations in the South Bay, he felt enraptured by Van Morrison’s new His Band and the Street Choir, and then fell hard for Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen, a live recording of the two-dozen-strong band Cocker had hauled around the United States the previous winter and spring. And while they were very different artists, with Morrison’s exacting yet spiritual soul music contrasting with Cocker’s shambolic gospel-soul, the two had similarly expansive visions, crowding their songs with horns, gospel singers, and multiple soloists. More than anything, both bands went at their music like evangelical preachers, throwing every fiber of themselves in the air knowing that music’s righteousness would carry them up into the realm of the sacred. And after all the thump-and-snarl of Steel Mill, all the fist-in-the-air lyrics and guitar-bass-drums-organ, these new records presented entirely new possibilities.

  The swing of old-fashioned rhythm and blues; the lockstep funkiness of James Brown; the seemingly endless possibilities that went along with a larger lineup of musicians, sounds, and inspirations. Asbury Park overflowed with musicians capable of playing all of it—including, of course, the members of Steel Mill. But with so much change already flowing through him, Bruce couldn’t imagine building a new band around Steel Mill’s name and the expectations it evoked. So when the first light of 1971 fell on California, Bruce had already decided it for himself: Steel Mill was finished.

  • • •

  Bruce broke the news a day or two after his return to New Jersey in early January. Back at the Challenger factory, he found Lopez and Federici in their rooms and told them directly: Steel Mill would grind and roar no longer. Lopez recalls being “surprised and dismayed” by Bruce’s abrupt (and undiscussed) decision, but before he could respond, Bruc
e held up a hand and told him not to worry: “He said, ‘I’m going in a new direction, and I want you to be my drummer,’ ” Lopez says. Federici received no such guarantee; he wouldn’t play in a Springsteen-led band for nearly two years, much to his frustration. Thompson, who only months earlier had ditched his pals in Mercy Flight to join Springsteen’s band, felt shocked by the news yet unsurprised to hear it. “It wasn’t like our momentum was fading,” he says. But he’d seen it coming since he watched the record company execs flocking around Springsteen at the daylong showcase in Nashville.

  Tinker West, who had invested so much of his own money into building Steel Mill’s career and reputation, took it the hardest. “I figured, look, we’ve been doing this for two and a half years, now we’ve finally got it to where guys are starting to make offers, it’s going the way it’s supposed to be,” he says. “We’re starting to pull down four thousand or five thousand a show. But then I thought, ‘Well, I’ll always be able to find another way to make money.’ And Springsteen’s a talent. He wanted to be able to write stuff for a ten-piece band. What the hell are you gonna do? I’m not gonna start screaming at him.”

  Steel Mill had one more scheduled gig to play, a club show at South Amboy’s D’Scene on January 18 and then booked a pair of farewell shows at the Upstage on January 22 and 23. Both of the Upstage concerts sold out instantly, and given the litany of friends, neighbors, and compatriots who got through the doors, the floor became a solid mass of shoulders and upturned faces, all dripping sweat in the triple-digit temperatures. The encores went on for nearly forty minutes, climaxing with a wall-shaking “Resurrection” that still didn’t satisfy the stomping, cheering audience. When they came out for the last time, Bruce stepped to the mic to introduce what would be the band’s final encore. “For personal reasons,” he declared, “this has to be my last song.” He counted off the intro and launched once again into the song that described the twenty-one-year-old’s own progress from Catholicism’s darkest fantasies to the spotlit valhalla of the stage. “Hail, hail resurrection!” he sang. “I’ll say my prayers to the earth and the sun / Hail, hail resurrection!”