E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (3 page)

He had heard the good news, and a connection with some other shadows who passed across his peripheral vision at the public school he now attended; even if many remained immune to the message he heard in the subliminal signals coming through on his mother’s radio. As schoolmate Toni Hentz told biographer Christopher Sandford: “He was dirt-poor, wore britches [to school] and liked what we still called nigger music. You can imagine how it set him apart.” But if such antipathy affected Springsteen, he quickly learned not to let it show. Because he now had a secret he could call his own: “Music…provided me with a community, filled with people, and brothers and sisters who I didn’t know, but who I knew were out there. We had this enormous thing in common, this ‘thing’ that initially felt like a ‘secret.’”

Make no mistake, though, his (and others’) post-Sullivan epiphany placed him (and them) in immediate opposition with the town elders. Because, like it or not, he was stuck in “a real classic little town…very intent on maintaining the status quo, [where] everything was looked at as a threat; kids were [certainly] looked as a nuisance and a threat.” And the one immediate authority figure he could not avoid on a daily basis was his father, who had gradually seen his own life go down the drain and now thought he saw the mark of Cain on his increasingly willful son. What he
actually
saw was a grim determination from his galvanized seed that he would not end up like
that
:

The corrosive effect of witnessing a father’s impersonation of a pressure cooker night after night can only be imagined. In 1995 Springsteen suggested it might have been seeing his younger self staring back at him that actually set his father off: “Growing up, [it] was difficult for my Dad to accept that I wasn’t like him…Or maybe [that] I was like him, and he didn’t like that part of himself—more likely…[But] I was a sensitive kid…[and] for me, that lack of acceptance was devastating, really devastating.” The psychological scars were indelible enough to prompt a series of introductions to “Independence Day” on
The River
tour that were more intense than the performances of the song itself, perhaps because he had something important to communicate that the song merely hinted at:

This evidently wasn’t the only thing that scared Springsteen Junior at night. There was also the small matter of his father’s temper. In 1976, on the verge of pouring those feelings into his own compositions, he would perform a song at most concerts that he first heard on his mother’s radio back in the day, which spoke to him in a way that even The Beatles did not: The Animals’ October 1965 single, “It’s My Life.” And he would preface it with a rap that steadily built on a sense of urgency—and implicit violence—layer by layer, line by line, until he would explode into the song itself:

That rap was performed at a Red Bank show, when one suspects at least one family member was in the audience and knew whereof he spoke, the long-suffering Virginia, the elder of his sisters. Other nights he could be even more explicit, describing how close he and his father came to exchanging blows. One that Dave Marsh claims he heard began with Bruce talking about how his father “used to always come home real pissed off, drunk, sit in the kitchen,” and built up to Bruce expressing just how this made him feel, “I just couldn’t wait until I was old enough to take him out once.” Not that he ever did. Even at seventeen, he was a writer not a fighter. As to whether his father beat the crap out of his young charge, the fortunate son has kept decidedly schtum, though in recent years he
has
talked about the atmosphere of violence. In 1987, he told
Musician
’s esteemed editor, “The side of my work that is angry comes from that sense of [a] wasted life; so to a certain degree there’s a
revenge
motive going on,” a highly curious way of putting it. Later on, he would tend to drop into therapy-speak when suggesting how such experiences infused much of his work, post-
Darkness
:

If feelings of anger and violence took a long time to manifest themselves in song, he learned to feel differently about himself the minute he picked up an instrument: “When you’re young, you feel powerless…Your house, no matter how small it is, it seems so big. Your parents seem huge. I don’t believe this feeling ever quite leaves you. And I think what happens is, when you get around fifteen or sixteen, a lot of your fantasies are power fantasies…You don’t know how to channel that powerlessness—how to channel it into either a social concern or creating something for yourself. I was lucky. I was able to deal with it with the guitar.”

After his second Ed Sullivan epiphany, he again picked up that iconic instrument. This time he didn’t look half as dumb, while his fingers could now grip the neck. In fact, he held on for dear life as he set about learning the most important lesson, “Dig yourself.” It was a process that initially led him inward: “When I got the [first] guitar, I wasn’t getting out of myself. I was already out of myself. I knew myself, and I did not dig me. I was getting into myself.” Post-
Darkness
, he went further, venturing to suggest: “When I started to play, it was like a gift. I started to feel alive. It was like some guy stumbling down a street and finding a key. Rock ’n’ roll was the only thing I ever liked about myself.”

If The Beatles represented the vanguard, by the summer of 1964 there were whole battalions of British beat-groups flying the flag, overwhelming America’s airwaves. And if he quickly learned to embrace The Beatles
and
the Stones, whose own Ed Sullivan debut in October of that year was equally seismic, he also explored obscurer byways of the British sound. As 1976 covers of “It’s My Life” and “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” explicated, he was a huge fan of The Animals long after “The House of the Rising Sun” closed its doors. In 2004, he was still championing “the class-conscious music of The Animals…I didn’t have a political education when I was young…It was something that, in truth, I [only] came to
through popular music.” In 2012 he devoted a large chunk of a keynote speech at South By Southwest to lauding the Geordie lads:

He was also, by his own admission, “nuts about” Manfred Mann and The Searchers. And, though he only namechecked ’em once in those seventies interviews, he was clearly an early fan of Them, Van Morrison’s band of Belfast bruisers who gave American garage bands three of their most essential anthems, “Gloria,” “Baby Please Don’t Go” and “I Can Only Give You Everything.” Springsteen’s initial singing duties in his first proper band, The Castiles, would be on a Them U.S. A-side (“Mystic Eyes”). And at 1978 concerts he managed to namecheck one Them classic (“Lonely Sad Eyes”) while parodying the spoken intro of another (“If You and I Could Be As Two”), during the positively Morrisonesque “Sad Eyes” sequence to “Backstreets”: “I remember you standing on the corner, with your hair all up, in that pretty new blue dress that your baby bought you…Standing there with your sad eyes, your lonely, lonely, lonely, sad eyes…”
*
For now, though, the young Bruce was content to learn the three chords to “Gloria,” only mimicking the guttural snarl of an Eric Burdon, a Paul Jones or a Van Morrison in the isolation of his own bedroom.

When he did attempt to join his first high-school band, around 1965, it was as a guitarist, pure and simple. Apparently called The Rogues, they gave him a harsh lesson in economics: “I got thrown out of my first band because they told me my guitar was too cheap.” But it was all he—or,
more accurately, his mother—could afford. He certainly couldn’t afford to smash up a guitar at the end of a gig. Imagine then his shock when he saw his first British rock band in the flesh, if it really was The Who at Asbury Park. He later claimed how sometimes onstage he would “remember being at a Who concert at Convention Hall in Asbury Park in ’65…Maybe there’s a fifteen year-old kid who’s [also] thinking of playing the guitar…I want to inspire that guy.”

Actually, the first documented time The Who played the Convention Hall was in the summer of 1967, by which time Springsteen had found an all-American hero to replace Elvis in his pantheon of inspiration, and had embraced all three electric albums with which Bob Dylan revolutionized popular music and turned lightweight pop into solid rock. Bruce famously recalled his introduction to the nasal tones of Electric Bob when personally inducting the great man into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in January 1988:

This vivid account of that day is slightly at odds with versions previously given on
The River
tour. At a November 1980 show he claimed that, because
all he had in the car was “this junky speaker, I couldn’t hear what all the verses were. I couldn’t hear all the words. But I remember when he got to the chorus, I always remember that line that just asked, ‘How does it feel to be on your own?’” It articulated in one cogent phrase the rebellious spirit of the music he’d been listening to since he turned into his teens: