Bruce (10 page)

Surrounded by a mob of stomping, cheering fans, the patio unexpectedly broke out into a scene of Beatlemania-like proportions. But as viewed in the post-1968 era of riots and public violence, the scruffy, underfed teenagers at its core all experienced the same dread sense that the scene could careen out of control. Lopez, Federici, Roslin, and Bruce backed away from their instruments and, as one, charged into the entrance to Wilson Hall, slamming the door behind them. They had only a minute to stammer at one another until the door flew open again and an incredulous Tinker West stepped inside. “Showtime!” he barked. “So why don’t you assholes get out there and make some music?”

Off they went. A great cheer went up, and with instruments in hand, they kicked off a blast of high-volume rock ’n’ roll. The songs were largely unfamiliar: Many were Springsteen originals, some less than a week old. But it was impossible for a campus full of church-raised small-town kids to miss the unholy outrage fueling “Resurrection” ’s alternating currents of cathedral organ and full-band attack. “Special low price on three Hail Marys!” Bruce shouted between the end of one verse and the launch of another solo. “My soul is clean again.
Hey!
”

The crowd danced and leaped to the rhythm, and they called Child back for three encores, all of which put the icing on a “wild, mind-bending show,” according to the Monmouth College’s newspaper review. “They literally rocked and blasted out the entire area.” Better still, the story continued, complaints about the noise came from homes as far away as Norwood Avenue nearly a quarter of a mile away. Afterward, Rebo walked over to where the band was unhooking the amps and looping up the electrical cords and introduced himself to Bruce, who seemed, Rebo recalls, entirely stunned. “He was obviously shocked by the response. And when we talked, he couldn’t look me in the eye, which was weird because
he’d just been so dynamic on the stage. I’d never seen someone become an entirely different animal like that.”

The band did nearly as well at a free outdoor show mounted 350 miles south of Asbury Park, in Richmond, Virginia. The gig had been set up by Billy Alexander, West’s once-and-future lieutenant, who had moved down to go to college. Quickly expert in the ways and means of the college town’s clubs, bars, and frat parties, Alexander convinced West to let him set up a free show in a park—ostensibly to help celebrate the end of the school year but mostly to prime the Richmond market for a series of paying gigs he’d set up for the start of the new school year. The free afternoon show attracted between four hundred and five hundred rock ’n’ roll fans, impressing them enough to lay the foundation for a rock-loving market that would help sustain the group, and Bruce, for years to come.

• • •

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 could 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.”