Bruce Read online

  “So I’d have to tell him, ‘Push that pedal! Move the gearshift over there and now let out the pedal,’” West recalls. “Then the truck is grinding, and we’re lurching around the highway. But he got it going eventually, and as long as he didn’t have to stop, he was fine.”

  Bruce and West pulled into Esalen on December 30, not long after the other guys had driven through the gates. They dropped their luggage at the main lodge, then headed straight to the art barn to spend the next few hours shaking road dust off their fingers and toes. Then a smiling woman arrived with a steaming loaf of just-baked bread, presented on a cutting board with a crockery cup full of hand-churned butter. The group members made straight for the cutting board, eagerly consuming two-inch-thick slabs of the warm, herbal-scented loaf. Just beyond the open barn doors, they could see fluffy clouds drifting across the sky and rays of sun dancing on the surface of the Pacific. All so beautiful that no one in the group, not even the experienced potheads (everyone but Bruce) thought to wonder exactly what had given the bread’s aroma such a sweet, herbal undertone.

  “Big Sur pot was some of the best in the nation back then,” Albitz says. “And it was everywhere, so we used it for a lot of things.”

  It’s unclear how much the perpetually starved Bruce gobbled up, or what the rigidly self-controlled young man thought of his unexpected ascent through the leafy doors of perception. “All I know is that we all ate it,” Lopez says. “And things got a little strange.”

  That was it for the rehearsal. Lopez, Federici, Roslin, and Bruce put down their instruments in order to take a closer look at the hippie paradise they’d heard so much about. Bruce and Lopez drifted together across the institute’s main lawn, almost stumbling over a class of spiritual seekers wrapped in white sheets and squirming across the lawn. “Someone told us they were being amoebas, going through phagocytosis,” Lopez remembers. “So we’re walking away saying, ‘Aha! So that’s how you get to your inner self. How could we have missed that?’” The two musicians found a trail leading up toward the desert canyons in the hills above. They climbed through the brush and rocks for a while, feeling the silence in the air and the sun on their T-shirted backs. And it was all so strange and beautiful that when Lopez saw something wriggling in the weeds, he reached down, turned over a rock and found “this huge fucking Gila monster. That’s when Bruce and I freaked out and ran back down to Esalen.”

  • • •

  Steel Mill played a second show at Esalen’s art barn on January 2, then drove up to San Francisco to audition for Bill Graham’s bookers—one of twenty bands competing for a place on the city’s reigning promoter’s list of opening acts. These off-night cattle calls were regular events at the Fillmore West Ballroom, a low-cost evening ($2 a ticket) that came with instructions for the audience: drink, laugh, or enjoy. Bruce had an attack of nerves when he caught sight of the band Grin, led by a teenage phenom of a guitarist named Nils Lofgren.

  A Maryland boy, Lofgren dropped out of high school to pursue a music career in California, and was more shocked than anyone when Neil Young tapped him to play on his 1970 After the Goldrush album, and as a member of his touring band.3 At first Bruce was intimidated by the younger guitarist’s prowess. “No way am I playing after that guy,” he muttered after watching Lofgren toss off yet another nimble-fingered solo. He regained his composure in time for Steel Mill’s set, and once they met in person, Bruce felt instantly at ease. “When I met Nils, we kinda already knew each other,” he said. “We looked at music in the same way and cared about the same things.”

  Graham’s bookers were encouraging but noncommittal. No matter, as West had already booked a show at the College of Marin on January 10, and three days after that, they got a spot at the Matrix club, opening for Boz Scaggs. The San Francisco Examiner sent a critic named Phillip Elwood to cover the headline act. Instead Elwood devoted 90 percent of his review to Steel Mill’s set. “I have never been so overwhelmed by an unknown band,” he wrote, calling Steel Mill’s set “one of the most memorable evenings of rock in a long time.” The critic went on to praise Bruce’s songwriting, particularly the dramatic stops and starts, and gave special mention to Bruce’s “Lady Walking Down by the River,” for its compelling lyrics and a guitar-fired coda that Elwood described as “very, very heavy.”

  Bill Graham called the next day, reaching Lopez at the Oakland home of Linda Mendez, a friend of West’s who had agreed to put up the band. Graham congratulated Lopez on the Examiner review and then offered the group a gig opening for blues guitarist Elvin Bishop at the Matrix. The gig came with a slight hitch: they’d have to get their shit together and be onstage playing in, let’s see, three hours. Or slightly less. Three hours and one frantic journey across the Bay Bridge later, Bruce counted off the first song, and Steel Mill was back onstage, playing with all its might.

  The pay didn’t amount to much: Roslin recalled earning a hefty $5. But the electric feel of playing at the epicenter of America’s rock scene kept them going, while the burgeoning following they could command at one or two of the nearby colleges kept their hopes up. Who knew where all of this might lead? As long as the group could up its game while also establishing a foothold in the West Coast’s most important rock ’n’ roll city, it all made sense.

  Except for the increasingly pinched mood within the band. Most of the problem seemed to stem from Roslin, who had been spirited off by a pair of limpid-eyed girls who offered to share their apartment, their drugs, and (it would seem) themselves with the handsome bassist. Roslin didn’t hesitate, and found his new setup to be so diverting that he frequently spaced on band rehearsals, meetings, and even the occasional preshow sound check. None of this made his bandmates happy. And front man Bruce, with all of his endless, obsessive energy, was particularly irate.

  If Bruce seemed especially moody in California, it often had something to do with his semiregular journeys to see his parents and baby sister in their new home in San Mateo. Doug, Adele, and Pam had arrived in the Bay Area the previous summer, and after a frustrating day or two exploring neighborhoods around the city, Adele found a real estate office that looked similar to the one where she had worked for so long in Freehold. Asking the first realtor she saw to point them to where “people like us live,” she followed directions to the blue-collar suburb on the peninsula south of San Francisco, where they rented a small apartment. Doug found a job driving an airport shuttle bus, and though his darker visions continued to resist the endless sunlight of their new home, a kind of optimism drifted in. “It did seem better,” Bruce says. “They had a better life, to my eye.” And yet Doug’s days still ended in the dark, smoky isolation of his lightless kitchen. “We became very close by our standards, but he never really changed,” Bruce says. “It was just his lay of the land.” And yet Bruce had to reach out. “I do remember the one time Bruce gave my dad a hug,” Pam Springsteen says. “I think he was leaving after a visit. And that was a real moment.”

  • • •

  Weeks turned into a month. Then it was mid-February, and Steel Mill was still in the Bay Area, hustling from one low-paying gig to another, still hoping to find a serious break. Which seemed to beckon when Bill Graham asked Steel Mill to perform an in-studio audition for his new Fillmore Records label. The band ripped through onstage favorites “Goin’ Back to Georgia” and “He’s Guilty,” with “Cherokee Queen” representing the newer stuff and the piano-led, harmony-filled country ballad “The Train Song” to show off the band’s musical diversity. Graham came into the studio beaming, saying he’d heard enough to offer Steel Mill a full recording contract. Which sounded dreamy until it turned out that the advance Graham had in mind was only $1,000. For which Graham also expected to claim the publishing rights to Bruce’s songs, thereby controlling how they would be used and claiming the lion’s share of money they generated in perpetuity. West gave the band members a chance to kick it around for themselves, but his opinion of the offer was obvious. “Graham wants Bruce’s publishing? No wa
y I’m letting anyone have that. That’s Bruce’s fuckin’ pension plan, right? And it’s not mine to sell.”

  West’s argument swayed Bruce, although he certainly did like the sound of coming home with a record deal. Lopez didn’t feel right about trying to talk his bandmate out of his song publishing, though he was also eager for the band to be stamped with Bill Graham’s approval. But it fell to Roslin to try to argue his bandmates and manager into accepting Graham’s proposal, no matter how stingy. “Let’s just take the deal and go from there,” the bassist said, speculating on how Graham’s imprimatur would enhance their price for gigs, which would in turn enhance the value of the songs Bruce would write even after they scored a better deal somewhere else. But Bruce had already made up his mind. After the meeting, he called Lopez aside to tell him the news: Vinnie Roslin had to go.

  He’d always been an odd man out. For all the dynamism Federici and Lopez put into their playing, Roslin struck Bruce increasingly as a bystander. He had a steady hand on the bass but, to Bruce’s ears, not much more. Meanwhile, Roslin’s stoic demeanor onstage added nothing to the band’s energy. And he’d been even less on point since he’d taken up with Bambi and Thumper over there in San Francisco. All those missed rehearsals and sound checks had taken their toll: blown cues, forgotten riffs, and, sometimes, entire songs performed with bass lines that bore no relationship to what everyone else played. Given his role as protector/hatchet man for Bruce, Lopez knew it fell to him to give the bass player the bad news. “Bruce didn’t do stuff like that,” he says ruefully. “He relied on me for certain things, so I’d just do it.” Lopez peers at his shoes as he recalls the rest of the episode: How the news pinned Roslin to the back of his chair, and how he wept and begged for another chance. “But there was no going back,” Lopez says. “There never is any going back.”

  Nearly two months into their West Coast residency, West, Bruce, Lopez, and Federici agreed that their momentum in San Francisco had sputtered. With cash running perilously short, they booked a two-night gig in Richmond, Virginia, at the Free University’s student center. But who would hold down the bass end of the music when they got there? At first Bruce made like he hadn’t given it any thought at all. But when Lopez suggested pulling in Bruce’s frequent wingman Steve Van Zandt, the guitarist nodded happily. They called back to New Jersey, and Van Zandt didn’t have to think about it. He would meet them in Virginia, where he might get an hour or two to rehearse with the rest of the band before the first set began on February 27. “I figured, yeah, sure, why not?” Van Zandt remembers. The prospect of switching to bass, an instrument he’d rarely if ever played, didn’t slow him down for an instant. “It’s just not that big a deal with a hard rock band, you know.”

  Back on its usual circuit of clubs, universities, and opening slots, Steel Mill continued to fill the nightclubs and draw well at the schools, particularly at Monmouth College and Free University, where the group could attract crowds in the thousands. Local media attention started to flow too, especially after West invited a handful of writers, critics, disc jockeys, and other music industry insiders to an open rehearsal at the Challenger factory on April 11. Joan Pikula, an Asbury Park Press feature writer, came through four days later with a lengthy profile (“The Steel Mill Blazes Trail for New, Talented Musicians”) describing them as musically innovative pioneers. “They’ve proven there is a following here for people with skills,” Pikula wrote, concluding that Steel Mill might even make the Jersey Shore the country’s next rock ’n’ roll mecca.

  For a time, Bruce took for granted that Steel Mill could take him as far as he wanted to go. The band was his future. “We played to thousands of people, with no record out,” he says. “It was incredible. Auditoriums and gymnasiums filled. We didn’t play a lot, but those were shows where you would come home with five hundred dollars in your pocket, and you could live on that for months. For a local band, that was big success. And in the area, we were big local stars.”

  Pikula wrote an even more impassioned story in mid-June when Steel Mill opened for the successful rockers Grand Funk Railroad. The Detroit band would soon set a new record for selling out New York City’s Shea Stadium: what took the Beatles eighty days to do in 1965 took GFR seventy-two hours in 1971. For now, though, Grand Funk was still playing local arenas. When its scheduled openers the MC5 (the Detroit-based protopunkers whose just-released second album had been produced by a recent Brandeis University graduate named Jon Landau) had to cancel, Steel Mill took the last-minute invitation to fill in at Bricktown’s Ocean Ice Palace.

  According to Pikula’s impassioned review, headlined “Rock and Inequity,” Steel Mill blew the bigger band off the stage. To drive home her point, Pikula focused her critical microscope on the bands’ respective leaders. “[Grand Funk’s Mark] Farner is slick; what he writes is solidly mediocre, as is his playing,” she wrote. “Springsteen is neither slick nor mediocre. His music is fine, diverse stuff which blends an infinite variety of musical idioms . . . and his playing, inventive, finely shaded, and clean, is superb.”

  Granted, Pikula’s sense of the evening might have been influenced by her loyalty to the guys she had just gotten to know. She also took care to delineate Farner’s ability to inspire an arena full of fans to raise their fists and make other quasi-revolutionary gestures. However, Grand Funk’s rhetoric struck her ears as hollow, whereas the passion in Steel Mill’s music prompted the crowd to not just dance off its frustrations but also to focus on the ideas and images in the lyrics. “Steel Mill made the music,” she wrote. “Grand Funk got the money. Therein lies the inequity.”

  Bruce marveled at the story. “That was a biggie,” remembers his longtime friend Lance Larson, a stalwart Asbury Park musician. “He dusted their fuckin’ doors, and when the newspaper said he was way better than this big, established star, well, Bruce was incredibly proud of that.”

  He had more to be proud of during the summer of 1970. Steel Mill drew four thousand fans to an outdoor show held at the Clearwater Swim Club in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, and then scored a few big paydays at a series of end-of-term events at the usual Virginia colleges. They returned to Richmond for a huge summertime blowout held on the top deck of the Seventh and Marshall Streets parking garage in downtown Richmond, supported again by Mercy Flight, a local band whose entire lineup, from manager Russell Clem to drummer “Hazy” Dave Hazlett, had become friendly with the Steel Mill crowd. The group’s lead singer, Robbin Thompson, developed a friendship with Bruce, who often slept in his apartment when Steel Mill came back to play another series of shows in Richmond. So when the garage show ended, they went off together and, as usual, talked about music deep into the night.

  Bruce admired Thompson’s vocal power and onstage charisma, and as he began to feel overburdened by the many demands he faced in Steel Mill, he asked his friend if he might consider auditioning for a spot as co-singer and front man for Steel Mill. Thompson absorbed the invitation in shades of disbelief. “Bruce was obviously the group’s front man, so why did he need me?” The rest of the group shared his confusion. If all the crowds and critics declared themselves transfixed by Bruce’s singular skills as a guitarist, performer, and lead singer, why bring in another front man to crowd him out? “It was an odd move,” says Van Zandt. And yet, he continues, not surprising, given the number of options the group’s chief writer, singer, lead guitarist, and music director could claim. “Bruce didn’t know what kind of role he wanted to play. Because it’s annoying to be that multitalented. So he was the front man, and the guitar hero, and the writer. And sometimes you’re better off doing one fuckin’ thing right.”

  After a week of rehearsals, Lopez, Federici, and Van Zandt could see his point. On the last day of Thompson’s tryout, Bruce gathered his three partners in one of the factory’s storage rooms to talk it all over. It took only a few minutes for the band to stream back into the band room and tell Thompson he could join up immediately if he still felt like it. Thompson did. He quit school the ne
xt week, packed up his belongings, and drove back to New Jersey.

  The group returned to Richmond in late August, then drove overnight to Tennessee to play a set at the Nashville Music Festival, where the crowd of fifty thousand fans included more than a handful of record company executives. The promoters had also tapped Steel Mill to serve as the backup band for Roy Orbison’s headline set, much to Bruce’s and Van Zandt’s fan-boy delight. When the executives swooped into the group’s dressing area to shake hands and congratulate everyone for their good showing, Thompson noticed something the others either didn’t see or simply didn’t acknowledge.

  “These people were saying, ‘Hey, so-and-so record company is here, that’s the guy talking to Tinker and Bruce,’” he recalls. “And as I was watching that go down, I realized that the guy—and all the other people talking about Steel Mill—were really there to see Bruce. And that was a little flag to me. ‘Ah, I get what’s going on here.’” For all that Steel Mill presented itself as a band consisting of five equal members, everyone could recognize the one guy who mattered more than everyone else. “And I never forgot it.”

  Back in Richmond, the group played another few shows before Lopez wandered off with the wrong girl, only to be roused at four in the morning by gun-wielding cops. Someone in her house had six pounds of marijuana hidden in his room, and now everyone in sight faced felony drug trafficking charges. Given the seriousness of the drug dealing charges, the only way Lopez would see the light of day in the next five or ten years would involve the labors of professional legal representation. Steel Mill didn’t have immediate access to that kind of money, but the members knew where they could get it. With a summer-ending show set up for Friday, September 11, they could declare the evening a benefit and send their proceeds down to Vini in Virginia. Thompson’s former bandmate Dave “Hazy” Hazlett could play Lopez’s drums. To make matters all the more promising, they’d be performing at the same venue where they had drawn four thousand fans in mid-June: the Clearwater Swim Club in Atlantic Highlands.