E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (4 page)

“Like a Rolling Stone” (and the album it introduced,
Highway 61 Revisited
) certainly had as pronounced an effect on American popular song, and culture, as had Elvis and The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. For one, as Bruce went on to explain at Dylan’s induction, it demonstrated someone who “was a revolutionary. The way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind and showed us that just because the music was innately physical, did not mean that it was anti-intellect. He had the vision and the talent to make a pop song so that it contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve, and…changed the face of rock ’n’ roll forever and ever.”

For the next year and a half Bruce immersed himself in All Things Dylan. He also undoubtedly soaked up the various Byrds cover versions that AM disc jockeys generally found easier to stomach; and presumably Them’s stunning recasting of “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue,” to which he later tipped a hat with the Bruce Springsteen Band’s February 1972 rendition. But, as he fully admitted to
Crawdaddy
founder and Dylan authority Paul Williams, he never felt the slightest inclination to venture back into Dylan’s preelectric phase. His reneging from folk music was the point at which
this
apostate tuned in:

By the time he was picking up the likes of
Blonde On Blonde
, an expensive double-album in a fold-out sleeve, Bruce finally had a little money of his own, which he’d earned from playing locally as the rhythm guitarist in The Castiles, named after a dodgy brand of cigarillos. He had apparently reached at least some kind of rapprochement with his bemused parents, one that enabled him “to play weekends somewhere and make a little extra dough…which is what my parents used to say that I could do. That was allowed.” At the same time he had started doing some intensive homework, though not the kind his parents still hoped for: “I remember going to see bands when I was a kid, watching the musicians from real close up, studying the way they moved their hands, then going home and trying to copy them.” He had got himself into The Castiles after he spent an intensive forty-eight hours learning how to replicate the guitar on “The Last Time,” the Rolling Stones’ breakthrough single—which was in itself quite a trick, because the guitar had been double-tracked.

The Castiles were the quintessential high-school band, with Springsteen the junior member content (for now) to stay in the background. But that diffident demeanor was revealed to be largely a front the minute they stepped out to perform. As bassist Curt Fluhr has recalled, “Put him onstage with a guitar and he lit it up. It was like somebody had plugged him in.” They provided him with his first band of brothers; though the Castiles’ frontman, George Theiss, was more interested in impressing Bruce’s elder sister than becoming
his
blood brother.

Remarkably, given how such bands rarely retained their shape for very long when cars and girls entered the frame, The Castiles lasted from 1965 right through August 1968. In May 1966 they even cut a record; albeit just for themselves. The two-sided single, “Baby I” b/w “That’s What You Get,” meant to demonstrate the something they’d got, was a curiously half-assed affair. Both songs, according to their indulgent manager Tex Vinyard, were
“written in the backseat of a car…on the way to the studio…at the Bricktown Mall shopping center. George and Bruce wrote those. It was a rainy Sunday. [And] we had no extra strings, so through two-thirds of the songs there’s no E string.” Further compromises were required when they got there, as Springsteen himself recently revealed:

It has to be said that even in the unprepossessing pantheon of first formative efforts by later legends, The Castiles’ offering is particularly wretched. And if it convinced a young Springsteen that maybe they should get more serious, he was always fighting an uphill battle. He did at least convince the others to let him sing some songs: “Everybody in the band felt that I couldn’t sing at all. I think I got to sing one Dylan song. Over the years I started to sing a little bit more, [until] eventually…we ended up splitting…the vocals.” It proved a wise move, because as Vinyard notes, “Soon, we let Bruce sing ‘Mystic Eyes’ and The Who’s ‘My Generation’. That’s how we got the booking in New York.” He is referring to a brief residency at the fabled Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village, which was probably the full extent of the others’ musical ambitions. For Bruce, though, it was just a beginning:

The Castiles had run their natural course by the spring of 1967, as the prospect of graduation loomed and real life could begin. But still they persevered. By now, it was clear that Springsteen had no intention of giving up on his dream, even when he became a target for conformists to
rag on, verbally
or
physically. As he informed
The Advocate
in 1995, “I was brought up in a small town [where] anybody who was different in any fashion was castigated and ostracised, if not physically threatened…Me and a few other guys were the town freaks—and there were many occasions where we were dodging getting beaten up ourselves.”

Unfortunately, he was ill-equipped to defend himself, something he had learned at the tender age of ten, as he revealed to a Berkeley crowd one night in June 1978: “You usually stop fighting by the time you’re 18 or 19, I stopped when I was about 10 ’cause I got beat all the time, these hands just were not dangerous weapons, you know. I remember I got in a fight with this guy, I beat the hell out of his hood with my forehead, you know (chuckles). Put dents into the thing.”

The troubled teenager was increasingly drawn to the bright neon lights of the Big City—where this boy could be free—and after those nights at the Wha (and possibly before) he began to bunk off school, hopping a bus to midtown. As he told one audience in January 1985, “I grew up in this small town. When I was sixteen, man, I hated that town; it seemed so narrow-minded and small-minded. I used to get on the bus, take Lincoln Transit to New York City. It used to feel so great when I got out at Port Authority. It was like, ‘Oh, man, nobody owns me up here.’” He was invisible. No secrets to conceal.

To preserve that new-found sense of autonomy he would sometimes stay out all night, even after he took the bus back from the city: “I used to have a sleeping bag stashed out in these woods, under these rocks…and sometimes if it got too late, I’d go out there and just unroll it and sleep in my friend’s car, sleep out there under the trees. That spot, sometimes it felt more like my home did than my house did. I guess, everybody needs someplace to go when they can’t go home.”
*

If he was ill-prepared for a father’s fury, or fisticuffs with one of Jersey’s more conformist thugs, he was even less ready for military service. Unfortunately for smalltown America, the battle outside a-ragin’ was not only in their homeland, but also in the badlands of Vietnam. The specter of war loomed over all of his generation, and for him a college education, the one cast-iron way to beat the draft, seemed unlikely. Yet beating the draft was something he knew he had to do—“When I was seventeen or
eighteen, I didn’t even know where Vietnam was. [I] just knew [I] didn’t wanna go and die!”

The first thing he needed to do was graduate high-school, which he did. His band even played the Seniors Farewell Dance ten days before graduation. But then he began the actual day, June 19, 1967, by skipping the graduation ceremony altogether, only for it to end with his father making one last, futile attempt to bring his son under his command:

Though he had shown absolutely no aptitude for formal education—perhaps because he never quite saw the point, once churlishly complaining “they always talked to your head, they could never figure out how to talk to your heart”—by September 1968 he had enrolled himself at the Ocean County Community College “in a liberal arts course,” a situation of which the Jersey Selective Service Board were promptly advised. He was off the hook for now, but as he related in his first-ever interview as a CBS artist, he no more fit in at Ocean County than he did in Freehold:

He preferred to castigate his fellow students and their conformist outlook rather than address his own failure to knuckle down and learn. He was still blaming them in 1984 with the world at his feet, “I didn’t really fit in. I went to a real narrow-minded school where people gave me a lot of trouble and I was hounded off the campus—I just looked different and acted different, so I left school.” His parents must have despaired. His father, who had served in World War II, knew only too well that his son was not cut out for “fighting off the Vietcong.” And once the Jersey Selective Service Board were notified of his absence from college, he was summoned to a conscription exam in Trenton. Fortunately for him, the reckless side of his character had recently resulted in a “roadside jam” between his motorbike and another vehicle, and he had come off worse. He was judged 4–F, a physical wreck, unfit to serve. He returned home to give his parents the bad news. All his father said was, “Good.”

The summer before he arrived at Ocean College the other members of The Castiles finally accepted the inevitable. They had always seen the band as an enjoyable hobby, while their now-leader increasingly viewed music as his Mission in life. They also seemed slightly uncomfortable with the type of material he had started introducing into the set after they all, save the younger Bobby Alfano, graduated from high-school. Covers of Moby Grape’s “Omaha” and The Blues Magoos’ “One By One” sat uneasily with the likes of “See My Friends” and “Eleanor Rigby,” two of a handful of songs George Theiss now sang at their shows. In August 1968, the band played two farewell shows in Red Bank and Shrewsbury, and that was that. As George Theiss informed
Backstreets
, by that time “a couple of the guys were going to go to college. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Bruce was already working on his next thing. He was already jamming with the guys he would form Earth with. So…he just took on what bookings we had and went on.”

As of the summer of sixty-eight, Bruce Springsteen considered himself a working musician. Which meant, one, he hung out with other
musicians and, two, he stopped absorbing influences from the radio and began experiencing them directly, sometimes from seeing successful acts in person (when The Doors came to the Convention Hall in August 1968, Bruce made sure he was there); other times, by sitting and watching the competition at the local afterhours clubs where time did not hang so heavy on his hands. He would later claim his infatuation with Dylan also stopped right about then, telling Paul Williams “I was into
John Wesley Harding
. [But] I never listened to anything after
John Wesley Harding
.” (He was not alone.)

At around the same time he tuned out the AM radio station/s that had served as mentor and muse for his entire time as a teenager: “AM radio was fine right up until about 1967, when FM came in and started to play long cuts, without any commercials, and you could see the disappearance of the really good three-minute single.” Springsteen did not immediately mourn this loss. In fact, he seems to have embraced the new gestalt, making his new combo, Earth, the FM equivalent of the strictly-AM Castiles. Modeled along the lines of great British three-piece bands like The Who (sic), Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Earth may have been devised to make Springsteen its all-singing, all-playing focal point, but the songs of Cream, Hendrix and the Yardbirds would be its credo. (The one surviving set-list contains three Hendrix songs and no less than seven drawn from Cream’s repertoire.)