Bruce Read online

  • • •

  In mid-June Bruce’s parents quit their jobs, packed their belongings and youngest daughter, Pamela, into their car, and left Freehold for what Doug swore would be the last time. The departure hadn’t been easy. Doug’s moods had been cycling into the red zone that spring, and for a time, Adele worried that something terrible might happen on the long drive to the opposite coast. “He was thinking things that just weren’t true,” she says. “Now everybody’s bipolar. But then . . .” she trails off. “Let’s just say there are a lot of stories,” Ginny says.

  Finding himself alone in the South Street house, Bruce felt as relieved as he was sorry to see them go. “It was tough because I’d been so close to my little sister,” he says. But just as he understood the ferocity in his father’s need to get himself away from the family ghosts in Freehold, Bruce felt just as eager to shake off his parents’ expectations—particularly the ones that had sent him to community college—and see where his own ambition, and the internal currents that fed it, would take him.

  Only a few weeks later, Bruce saw Pam Bracken sitting at the bar of the Student Prince club in Asbury Park. Just home from her freshman year at Kent State University, Bracken noticed Bruce drinking a soda pop at the bar and felt smitten by the sweet, flirtatious young musician. Bracken was particularly charmed by the contrast between his notoriously decadent profession and his relatively reined-in habits. As Bruce made clear when they spoke, he didn’t curse, drink, or take drugs. He just seemed so nice. So when Bruce invited Bracken up to Freehold for lunch the next day, she said she’d be there.

  She knocked on his door almost exactly on time. Then Bracken knocked again. No sounds emerged from inside. Finally, a dream-dazed Bruce came out and sat down on the stairs. He was really happy to see her, he said. He was a little sleepy but knew what would fix that: a quick walk to the bakery to pick up a crumb cake and bring it back home for the guys. So off they went, the picture of young romance, strolling through a bright summer day. “Years later,” she says, “Bruce told me that the real reason we had to go out was so the other woman he met that night could get out of his room.” And yet they grew close, and then serious enough to take them through most of the next two years, with long spells of separation due to her collegiate schedule, his footloose career, and the emotional trip wires hidden behind Bruce’s dark if always hopeful eyes.

  Given two months of prepaid rent in his family’s deserted home, Bruce opened the bedrooms, sofas, and floors to his bandmates. Both Lopez and Federici moved in for the summer, and they commuted to the Challenger factory to rehearse for their upcoming shows. Meanwhile, the group’s summer schedule became a pattern of packed, sweaty performances at the Pandemonium and a handful of other clubs on the sandy stretch between Sea Bright and Asbury Park. Which meant that Child could generate income, even before it became the festival circuit fixture that West intended it to become. But West still had his master plan, so when his old California electronics compadre Doug “Goph” Albitz sent over a pass to the three-day music-and-arts fair scheduled for mid-August in White Lake, New York, he also passed along an open invitation for West to bring his new band to play on the side stage the clown/activist Wavy Gravy would manage with the members of his Hog Farm Collective. Unfortunately, Child already had a booking for the same three nights at the Student Prince on Kingsley Street. Knowing it would be a mistake to alienate the club’s owner—and, like everyone else, having no idea exactly how big an event Woodstock would turn out to be—West left the band in Asbury Park and drove up to the festival by himself.

  “And they had such crap up there,” he grumbles. “I was walking around thinking, ‘Fuck! I’m an idiot! Why’d I leave the band in New Jersey?’ And I was right about that, of course, because if I could have had Springsteen at Woodstock, it would have been all over. Years of bullshit totally avoided. But the band was booked, we needed the money, and that was that.”

  It’s impossible to say how the Aquarian-spirited, mud-and-acid-soaked crowd at Woodstock would have responded to the full-throttle rock ’n’ roll by Bruce and Child. But it took only a week for one of the festival’s biggest stars to register her overwhelming approval of the aspiring young musician. Not that Janis Joplin ever heard Bruce play a note of music. But when the psychedelic blues singer came to perform at the Asbury Park Convention Hall on August 23 and glimpsed the nineteen-year-old guitar player watching from the wings with Lopez, Roslin, and West, she didn’t hide her enthusiasm. “When she finished her set, she came offstage, saw him, and gave one of these, ‘Where have you been all my life’ looks,” Lopez says.

  “Some whispering attention was paid, I guess,” Bruce recalls. “I was nineteen, had hair to my shoulders, was a big local star and carried myself like that.” But Joplin didn’t have a chance to say anything before her road manager grabbed her by the shoulders and steered her back to the stage to perform her encore. At which point Bruce turned to his friends with what West describes as “that deer in the headlights look.” According to West and Lopez, Bruce had no intention of getting to know the San Francisco–based blues singer any better. Instead, they both recall him stage-whispering, “I’m gettin’ the fuck out of here!” and jogging down the hall to a fire door, through which he shoved his way out onto the boardwalk and beyond.

  When Joplin finished her last song, she beelined back to where Bruce had been standing. Finding him gone, her brow knit in a combination of surprise and disappointment. “Where’d he go!?” she shouted to West, Lopez, and Roslin. Lopez pointed to the fire door down the hall: “He went thataway!” Joplin clattered off to her dressing room. A few minutes later, the manager of her coheadliner, James Cotton, approached West in the hallway. “C’mon, Tinker,” he said. “Janis really wants to fuck Bruce.” West shrugged. “What could I do? I just said, ‘Sorry, he’s outta here.’ ”

  • • •

  With Federici and Lopez stationed across the hall from his own room, the Springsteen house became a kind of all-musicians frat house, with endless hours invested in spinning records, fiddling with Federici’s CB radios, and tearing off for impromptu journeys to the shore to surf, check out the boardwalk, or catch someone else play at one of the seaside bars. Bruce, meanwhile, had the gastronomic sophistication of a feral dog, feasting on Velveeta-and-mayonnaise sandwiches, or the glistening fried chicken at the Tasty Dee-lite drive-through. Vegetables rarely made an appearance, and dessert was often a heaping bowl of what Pam Bracken recalls as “this disgusting strawberry-flavored goop” that Bruce enjoyed with generous shplorts of Reddi-wip. When Bracken surprised him one night with a bowl of fresh-cut strawberries and cream, he took one bite, recoiled, and pronounced it “terrible.”

  Introduced to the rest of Child’s extended family of helpers, friends, and hangers-on, Bracken felt increasingly at home with her dashing boyfriend’s circle. West was particularly friendly, telling Bracken to consider herself part of the organization, welcome anywhere they played. Bracken felt delighted until Bruce stalked over, eyes ablaze. Why had she been talking to Tinker for so long? Why did she look so happy when she was with him? Even a glimmer of warmth passing between Bracken and another man was enough to send him into a rage.

  “Bruce really didn’t like having anyone else pay attention to me,” she says. “If he thought I was having fun talking to some guy, he wouldn’t even talk to me about it. He’d say, ‘This relationship is over!’ and I’d get the cold treatment for the next day or two.”

  The rent on the South Street house ran out in September, and the guys moved their stuff back into the Challenger factory, where West had installed new bathrooms and a few portable cots for their sleeping bags. Living rent-free with the band’s gear immediately at hand was a close-to-perfect setup for a young man so eager to build his future. Then Bruce remembered the toy trains that Fred and Alice had given to him when he was a small boy.

  Bruce hadn’t played with them for years. But that was the one relic that meant the most to him; something he coul
d pass along to his own son, if he ever had one. He’d stored them in the South Street house’s attic for safekeeping, then forgotten them. He called the landlord asking to pick up his old toy, but the guy gave him a flat no. The house was his property, he snapped. And now that the Springsteens had stopped paying rent, everything in the house was his property too.

  Stymied and furious, Bruce drafted Lopez to accompany him on a guerrilla-style rescue operation. The house was empty, the doors locked and windows shut tight. Bruce tried all of his usual tricks: shimmying up to his second-floor bedroom window, climbing across the roof—searching everywhere for a point of entry and finding nothing. Unwilling to break a window, Bruce sat in the darkness for a while, got back into Lopez’s car, and rode stonily down Route 35, the road leading back to the Challenger factory, his guitar, and whatever else lay in his future.

  • • •

  Living (mostly) and rehearsing in the factory, the band worked constantly. And not always on music, if the surfboard shop got overwhelmed by orders. Conscripted to the factory floor, the musicians, including Bruce, would spend the next few hours pulling, sanding, and applying epoxy to Challenger boards. Mostly, though, West left the band to pursue its music with no distractions. And when the occasional hassle did emerge—such as the abrupt discovery that a band from Long Island, New York, named Child had also produced an original album under that name—they went to the Inkwell Coffee House in Long Branch, ordered some beers (Pepsi for Bruce) and burgers, and dispensed with a series of imperfect names, including Moose Meat, Locomotive, and the Intergalactic Pubic Band. Mercifully, Lopez’s longtime pal Chuck Dillon came up with a tougher, cooler name, Steel Mill.

  Down in Virginia, Billy Alexander took time away from his studies to spearhead the group’s popular campaign in Richmond, setting up a series of bookings that took them to venues including multiple shows at the City’s Free University and Virginia Commonwealth University, and then to a pair of late-November gigs at the 3,500-seat gymnasium, opening one night for a group of ambitious jazz rockers called Chicago Transit Authority and the next for heavy-metal heroes Iron Butterfly.

  Steel Mill’s ascent in the college towns of central Virginia gave the group another boost. In fact, its reputation in Richmond was so strong that it ended up playing after the headliners from Chicago. But for Alexander, who had helped build the band’s sound system and had been present for its rehearsals and shows, the moment of clarity came at the Free University gig on November 20. It was early in the set, just as the band kicked into “Goin’ Back to Georgia,” a bluesy southern rocker Bruce wrote while in an Allman Brothers state of mind. Launching on a thunderously deep E chord, “Georgia” built into a full-throated Springsteen vocal, punctuated with spiky guitar riffs that touched off more rumbling fills from Lopez’s drums, answered by organ riffs played out above Roslin’s rumbling low end. Then the entire outfit pivoted back to the chorus, sung in three-part harmonies every bit as precise as the instruments had been anarchic.

  “I swear the hair stood up on the back of my neck,” Alexander says. “Everything just connected. The crowd was berserk, and Bruce was just beaming. It was like he knew. He’d taken a massive step. And the next step would take him into outer space.”

  FIVE

  BREAK OUT THE GUNS AND AMMO, EVERYTHING’S GONNA BE JUST FINE

  BRUCE’S VERSE WRITING HAD ALREADY come a long way from the romantic poems and singer-songwriter experiments he’d crafted in his high school and college years. No longer splayed among the diaphanous ladies, drifting birds, and starving children of his post–high school imaginings, Bruce looked to his own boyhood and the plague of draft notices, cops, teachers, and priests that haunted his adolescence.

  And while most of his late-sixties lyrics seem less than fully formed, the visceral crunch of the music throttled the listener. “Sister Theresa,” performed with a lone guitar and Lopez’s bell-clear recorder, projects the passion of faith into unabashed eroticism. “You say you’re married to Jesus Christ / And that he’s in your bedroom every night,” Bruce sings. “Come with me for a while / I promise I’ll make you smile.” The tune often served as a bookend with “Resurrection,” a fan favorite thanks to its fire-and-brimstone attack on Catholicism. Yet neither of those songs packed the wallop of “The Wind and the Rain,” an outraged breakup tune with a hurricanic climax that had the unsettling habit of coinciding with large-scale police busts, unexpected cloud bursts, and, on one breathtaking night, a lightning strike on the building they were playing. “Whoosh! It just exploded through the room,” Lopez says. “It caused this chain reaction of sparks . . . like lighting a chain of sparklers.”

  Bruce also wrote a litany of antiwar songs: “We’ll All Man the Guns,” “The War Is Over,” “The War Song,” and more. But the lyrics were often undermined by their author’s righteous indignation. “America Under Fire,” for instance, describes the home front as a circle of hell populated by “conquered freak soldiers,” lovers “all turned to whores,” and streets chockablock with men who are both blind and “viciously insane.” And if those horrors hadn’t driven home the world-gone-wrong idea, the song’s climactic coda of “America the Beautiful” includes a sarcastic recitation of the chorus to the Mickey Mouse Club theme song.

  Clearly, Bruce’s lyrics lagged behind the power of his music. But even at this awkward age, his authorial ambition is striking, particularly when it came to defying the conventions of rock ’n’ roll songcraft. “Bruce started writing these . . . odd combinations of things,” Steve Van Zandt says. “Epic, long songs. I don’t remember anyone else going through all those chord changes. Maybe the Mothers of Invention, but I don’t think he was a big fan of theirs.” Bruce remembers being swept up in the Allman Brothers. “It was almost southern rock, some of them,” he says. “Prog rock, southern rock. There was an amalgam of things, I think, at the time, Allman Brothers were very influential. But the interesting thing about those songs is that the arrangements were quite complex.”

  The sprawling “Garden State Parkway Blues,” for instance, aggregates three or four distinct songs—different sounds, different styles, different voices—all knit together by instrumental pieces and various solos. Often stretching to thirty minutes or more in performance, “Garden” begins with a pleasant, midtempo rock groove accompanying a wry portrait of one working man’s journey from his bed to breakfast (“Whoa, my Kellogg’s Corn Flakes are my very best friend!”), to the driver’s seat of a cheap used car that refuses to respond to the ignition key. “But I don’t care . . . it’s really got a heart!”1

  The chorus introduces an increasingly frantic chant of “Punch in at nine, punch out at five,” which transitions into double-speed guitar solos, and then back to a spoken-word segment about unpaid bills and unfulfilled obligations. From there it is back to a full-throttle guitar-and-drums vignette describing an endless highway packed with “two-eyed monsters,” to a dreamy, voice-and-recorder fantasy featuring Douglas Fairbanks, Peter Pan, the guards at Buckingham Palace, and the Hell’s Angels’ notorious leader, Sonny Barger. Then come the clipper ships, chariots, sunlight soldiers, and an unnamed guy who refuses to steer his car up the on-ramp. The band eases into a three-chord vamp (repurposed three years later as the coda of “Kitty’s Back”) and the dream world finds form in a musician who skips away, instrument in hand: “playing with his guitar singing, he goes down upon the green hillside . . . and sunlight soldiers dance and sing before your very eyes.”

  “Garden State Parkway Blues” may not be Springsteen’s most successful attempt at picaresque writing, but even Born to Run’s ten-minute mini-epic “Jungleland,” with its superior sense of narrative and restraint, can’t touch the daring that went into “Parkway” ’s twisty, modular structure. Bruce dismissed his Steel Mill songs not long after, and hasn’t played a note of them in public in more than forty years.2 Now he concedes the songs were “fun,” and he still hears the connections to the work that would come. “I ended up tightening things, like in
‘Rosalita’ and some of those early things that really had twists and turns,” Bruce says. “I was always interested in that a little bit, you know. But I tell you what, Steel Mill played it for a long time and people liked it.”

  Tinker West certainly did. Bruce was just on the threshold of his songwriting career, no one could say how far he and Steel Mill might go. And with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, and a paisley cloud of other bands adrift in San Francisco, with music industry types giving laid-back chase, Tinker knew exactly where to find the most reliable launching pad.

  • • •

  West’s first call went to Doug “Goph” Albitz, last seen working with Wavy Gravy at the Woodstock festival in August. He spent most of his time running the kitchens at the oceanside Esalen Institute a couple hours’ south of San Francisco in Big Sur. A favorite meditation/getaway spot for California’s most gilded hippies, Esalen’s mix of exclusivity and aquarian ideals attracted some of the era’s most popular artists and musicians. The Beatles, minus Paul McCartney, had meditated in Esalen’s emerald hills. Bob Dylan also came through, blazing the way for Simon and Garfunkel, Arlo Guthrie, and Joan Baez. Most ended up performing in the institute’s ocean-view art barn. And when Goph noted that the institute still needed a band for its End-of-the-Sixties New Year’s Eve party, it all came together.

  They set out the day after Christmas in a two-car flotilla, West and Bruce in West’s reconditioned 1948 Ford pickup, while Roslin, Lopez, and Federici rode in a station wagon. They traveled to Memphis, then got separated when an exhausted West, who had been piloting the truck for fifteen hours, hit his limit. He wheeled to the shoulder and told Bruce it was his turn to take the wheel.

  Bruce knew this moment would come but still had no real idea how to pilot an automobile. He’d avoided steering wheels ever since his sole attempt to learn from Doug had left him feeling humiliated. “It sort of was like one shot, you’re not doing it, you’re done,” Bruce says. The few hours he’d spent piloting Pam Bracken’s automatic transmission sedan around the Challenger factory’s parking lot hadn’t prepared him to work the aged pickup’s herky-jerky manual transmission.