Robert Santelli
Robert Santelli, a product of the Jersey Shore, has written extensively about Springsteen, blues, and rock. In January 1994 he joined the staff of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland as assistant curator. Since 2000 Santelli has been the deputy director of public programs for Experience Music Project in Seattle. He is the executive editor of the American Music Masters series, published by Wesleyan University Press; the coeditor of Hard Travelin’: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie (1999); American Roots Music (2001); Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey (2003), The Appalachians: America’s First and Last Frontier (2004); and the author of The Best of the Blues: The 101 Essential Albums (1997), The Big Book of Blues: A Biographical Encyclopedia (2001), and Guide to the Jersey Shore (2003, 6th ed.). He also wrote the liner notes to Badlands: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska (2000) and edited Songs, the complete collection of Springsteen’s recorded album lyrics (1998; 2003). He has written for Rolling Stone, the New York Times, CD Review, Downbeat, Backstreets, Asbury Park Press, and New Jersey Monthly. The following selection is from Backstreets: Springsteen—The Man and His Music (1989; 1992).
Twenty Years Burning Down the Road: The Complete History of Jersey Shore Rock ’n’ Roll from Backstreets: Springsteen—The Man and His Music
■ MENTION THE ENGLISH CITY of Liverpool to the average soul on the street, and chances are the first vision that will pass through his or her mind is that of four mop-topped lads called the Beatles. Try it sometime. Ask your mom or dad, or your boss. Ask the postperson, or the middle-aged woman in the supermarket.
Liverpool isn’t known or remembered as an important prewar sea-port, which it was, or for its soccer team. It’s known to the world as the city where the Beatles originated. It’s practically impossible to separate this glum, working-class city from the legacy of the Beatles, and vice versa.
Mention Asbury Park, New Jersey, to that same person, and it’s a good bet that they’ll say something like “Asbury Park? Yeah, that’s the place where Bruce Springsteen comes from.” Granted, that’s not entirely accurate, because Springsteen was, of course, born and raised in nearby Freehold (although at times in the late sixties and early seventies, he did reside in Asbury Park, and he certainly spent much time playing the city’s clubs and bars).
1Nonetheless, because of Bruce Springsteen, Asbury Park has earned a secure place in rock history books. The city’s rich past as a prewar seaside resort, with once-beautiful beaches and a bustling boardwalk, and the nationally reported race riots that tore through the city and devastated its downtown shopping district in 1970 are both, historically speaking, secondary to the city’s relationship to the man they call the Boss. The fact is, Asbury Park is inextricably linked with Bruce Springsteen, and vice versa.
There are other similarities that, in a way, make Liverpool and Asbury Park sister cities. Each is a city whose past is brighter than its present. In each, unemployment remains high, decay is dominant, and the landscape can best be painted in shades of gray. True, there is much talk about a renaissance or rebirth of Asbury Park. And over the past couple of years the city has striven hard to initiate a massive facelift and implement a more positive image. Yet, sadly, Asbury Park largely remains the same Asbury Park that Bruce Springsteen pinpointed so forcefully in his early music.
Interestingly, ever since Springsteen came to prominence, the media have possessed a somewhat morbid fascination with Asbury Park. To many journalists, photographers, TV reporters and filmmakers, Asbury Park has routinely symbolized a particular slice of America’s underbelly, a place just brimming with the kinds of stark, gloomy images from which great works of art, literature—and music—originate.
The idea was always that if you could understand the environment (Asbury Park and the rest of the Jersey Shore) of the artist (Springsteen)—namely, the seaside bars and blue-collar beer joints, the boardwalk amusements and pizza parlors, the lonely streets and broken dreams—then you’d appreciate more fully the artist’s art (Springsteen’s songs). To a large degree, this is true. Few American songwriters have been able to take such detailed images of the American Dream, as well as the tales of hardship and disappointment that accompany them, and imbue them with the universality that Bruce Springsteen has. Springsteen took from all around him. He transformed the characters that hung out in Asbury Park’s bars and boardwalk into song personalities that symbolized life’s struggle. He worked his impressions of Asbury Park and the rest of the Jersey Shore into his lyrics in such a way that the songs weren’t about Asbury or Jersey, but about America and about you and me.
“It was natural right from the beginning that when people wanted to learn more about Bruce, that they came to Asbury,” said one local. “It’s not much to look at, I know, but for rock ’n’ roll it’s a great place. It’s a rock ’n’ roll town if there ever was one. And it’s really pretty spiritual. I mean, you don’t go visiting the town where Jackson Browne came from, do you?”
Actually, the media fascination with Asbury Park began more than a decade ago—in 1975, to be precise. And it started with the biggest of bangs. What longtime Springsteen fan can ever forget that amazing week in October when the covers of both
Time and
Newsweek were graced with the face of Bruce Springsteen? Before that came the cover story on Bruce in the now defunct but at the time critically praised magazine
Crawdaddy.2 And there were others. It was part hype and part intrigue, but all of a sudden Asbury Park was being touted the same way Liverpool was some ten years earlier.
“It was really weird,” said Southside Johnny in an interview a few years ago. “You had photographers and reporters poking their heads into clubs and looking for God knows what. Nobody ever paid attention to Asbury Park or the musicians who played there and lived there before. Some people never got the hang of it.”
The world found out about Bruce Springsteen’s roots and about Asbury Park. And in the process, some of the more astute observers discovered a music scene that was vibrant and rich with bands. There was Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. There was Cahoots. There were Lord Gunner, the Shakes, and Cold, Blast, and Steel.
3 They were the local stars in the local clubs. Few of them had ever ventured beyond the Jersey Shore with their guitars and amps. It was strictly a homegrown rock scene. While popular music in the mid-seventies began flirting with disco, and rock was caught with a bad case of the blahs, the music heard in Asbury Park clubs—like the Stone Pony—revolved around rhythm and blues and sixties soul. Outside the scene, such influences were considered dated and passé. But in Asbury Park, R&B-based rock was hot and sassy.
Also, blues was big, especially in the late sixties, just as it was in San Francisco and England. It was an easily adaptable style of music, and it lent itself to jamming. Jamming was what Asbury Park’s legendary club, the Upstage, was all about. In fact, if any one element was (and still is) most representative of the Jersey Shore music scene in general and Asbury Park’s in particular, it was the concept of late-night jams and sitting in. It began at house parties, moved to the Upstage in the late sixties and later to the Stone Pony as well as a whole slew of other clubs such as the Student Prince, the Fast Lane, Mrs. Jay’s, and the High Tide Cafe.
Right from the very beginning, there were some bands that began overshadowing the others. Down around Asbury Park, Sonny and the Starfires ruled. Sonny Kenn, a guitarist influenced by the likes of Link Wray and Lonnie Mack, was the bandleader and frontman. The Starfires’ backbeat was kept by a self-taught drummer named Vini Lopez. Out in the Freehold area, it was the Motifs, the band that came closest to turning professional and reaching beyond the Jersey Shore, and the Castiles, which included two respected guitarists, George Theiss and Bruce Springsteen. Up in Red Bank, The Source, led by Steve Van Zandt, was making itself known by playing in local battle-of-the-bands contests and playing high school dances.
To take advantage of the wealth of young rock talent at the Shore in the mid-sixties and of the seemingly insatiable appetite of kids there for live rock ’n’ roll, a host of nonalcoholic teen clubs sprouted throughout the area. The Hullabaloo chain of teen clubs was especially popular. Sonny and the Starfires became regulars at the Asbury Park Hullabaloo club. Here is how Sonny Kenn remembers those days:
“We wore gold lamé suits and fancy boots, and we had Ampeg and Fender amplifiers. We’d get up there onstage at around 8 P.M. and we’d play 55 minutes with a five-minute break. Then we’d go back and play again. It was just enough time to have a cigarette and a soda. We played there all summer and gained a tremendous amount of experience. By this time Vini [Lopez] had introduced me to this kid from Garden Grove,
4 Johnny Lyon [later known as Southside Johnny], and he started coming to all our gigs and practice sessions. Whenever we played at Hullabaloo or a school dance or something, he’d go out in the audience to make sure our amps were turned up high enough.”
The competition between bands at the Jersey Shore in the mid-sixties was certainly keen, but it was not cutthroat. Instead, there was a subtle yet strong bond between musicians that later made the Upstage experience such a valuable one for them. Despite the occasional squabble, such camaraderie allowed for the frequent trading of ideas and riffs, and enabled musicians and bands to grow.
Even though the mid-sixties saw the rise of a large number of bands at the Shore, few groups played anywhere but the Shore. What with teen clubs, high school and CYO dances, and battles of the bands, of which there were many, there were plenty of places to perform locally without having to venture to New York.
One group, the Castiles, had more drive than most. It also had a manager, Tex Vinyard, who took it upon himself to push the group musically and force it to seek brighter horizons. Because of him, the Castiles were one of the few mid-sixties Shore bands to make a record (a self-produced, self-recorded single, “That’s What You Get” backed with “Baby I”). Vinyard also worked the Castiles into a regular set of gigs at New York’s legendary club, the Cafe Wha?, where groups like the Blues Project and artists such as Jimi Hendrix and Bill Cosby got their start.
“Tex was a big ego builder,” George Theiss remembers. “He would sit there and tell you how the girls were going crazy over you. At 16 or 17, that’s just what you wanted to hear. He made sure we were confident.”
Confidence. That’s the key word. Vinyard instilled a sense of sureness in the Castiles, especially Springsteen, that never really left them. Vinyard also exposed the group to a whole new level of rock in New York City that most other Shore bands missed during this era. Such things enabled Springsteen to leave the Castiles when the Jersey Shore music scene was about to enter a new stage in the late sixties and to form his own bands fueled by his own rock visions.
From this point on, it was Springsteen who set the pace, who broke the most new ground, and, as Theiss says, who acted “as if he already had a plan . . . and knew exactly where he was heading.”
Much has been written about the Upstage. “It was really a unique place, the Upstage,” said Van Zandt. “I’ve never ever run across another club like it anywhere else in the world.”
“Everybody went there ’cause it was open later than the regular clubs and because between one and five in the morning you could play pretty much whatever you wanted, and if you were good enough, you could choose the guys you wanted to play with,” wrote Springsteen in the liner notes for I Don’t Want to Go Home, the debut album of Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes.
“It was like going to school,” recalled Sonny Kenn a few years ago. “Upstage, when you think about it, really was a school. Better yet, for those of us who used to play at Hullabaloo and the teen clubs, it was almost a college of sorts.”
The entire Jersey Shore music scene revolved around the Upstage for the two years or so in the late sixties that it was open. Run by Tom and Margaret Potter, it was a meeting place, a proving ground, and a musical laboratory all in one. More groups were formed there, and more groups broke up there, than anywhere else.
Musicians at the Upstage were part of a large pecking order. The best—Springsteen, Van Zandt, and other guitar players like Billy Ryan, Ricky DeSarno, and Sonny Kenn, drummers such as Vini Lopez and Big Bobby Williams, harp players like Southside Johnny, and keyboard players such as David Sancious—had first dibs on stage time. Other musicians worked their way onstage when they were good enough to play with the first team.
The Upstage acted as a springboard for what was to follow at the Jersey Shore in the 1970s. No one could ever have deliberately planned a club so crucial to the development of so many musicians. The incredible thing is that it worked. The informality, the competition, Tom Potter’s zany, slapstick-like organizational skills, and the madness that never really surfaced long enough to blow the whole thing out of control, all created an atmosphere of intense apprenticeship.
It was during this time that Bill Chinnock’s Downtown Tangiers Band gained notoriety and respect as far north as New York, that Maelstrom (Southside on bass and harp, Kenn on guitar, and Ronnie Romano on drums) practically became the house band at the downstairs coffeehouse section of the Upstage, and that Steel Mill, the first of the truly great Shore bands, was born.
Steel Mill’s best lineup was Springsteen on guitar and vocals, Steve Van Zandt on bass, Danny Federici on organ, and Vini Lopez on drums. On a bad night Steel Mill was still the best outfit on the Shore, perhaps in all of Jersey. On a good night, the band was, well, simply amazing.
I remember going to see the band in concert at Ocean County College in Toms River, New Jersey. It was a typically hot and humid night at the Shore. I think it was August 1970. The gymnasium was packed with sweaty, anxious souls. The word had spread about Steel Mill. Anticipation filled the air. Even though Springsteen had briefly attended Ocean County College, and Toms River is part of the Jersey Shore, it wasn’t part of Steel Mill’s true stomping grounds. Many people in the audience that night had only heard about how good the band was supposed to be.
For the two hours or so that Steel Mill played, Springsteen and company simply overwhelmed everyone on the other side of the stage. Had his brand of blues-rock been available on record at the time, or had that concert been somehow made into a live album and rushed to radio stations and record stores, it would have rivaled Led Zeppelin’s best, I swear.
People who had seen Steel Mill for the first time walked out of that show as if they had participated in a mystical musical experience. Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, saw the future of rock ’n’ roll four years later in 1974. A lot of us at the Shore saw it that night.
There were other fine bands at the Shore during this time. Southern Conspiracy was one. Sunny Jim was another. Both opened for Steel Mill on a regular basis. It was an era of shared apartments and skimpy meals, and of free outdoor concerts at local parks and at Monmouth College in West Long Branch, when the weather was good.
It was also an era of restlessness. Steel Mill made a trip to California and played the Fillmore West. Afterwards, rock impresario Bill Graham offered the band free recording time. They recorded three songs for him but turned down his contract offer. Back in Jersey a few months later, Springsteen formed Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom, which represented a classic case of musical absurdity and was the result of wild experimentation never before seen at the Shore.
Musicians came and went. Garry Tallent, David Sancious, Southside Johnny, and others left Asbury Park and headed to Richmond, Virginia, a town that became a home away from home for Asbury Park players. Others split for California, Colorado, and New England. Springsteen’s restlessness is well documented. He broke up Steel Mill. He formed the Bruce Springsteen Band. He broke up the Bruce Springsteen Band. He became a folksinger. He commuted to New York’s Greenwich Village and played the clubs there. And then he got a recording contract.
Springsteen’s signing with Columbia Records was enough of an event to bring most everyone back to Asbury Park in 1972 and 1973. The scene, which had become disjointed and lost its purpose, was about to be righted.
“Bruce needed a band to make Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. with,” recalled Garry Tallent. “So the word went out and people came home.” A new version of the Bruce Springsteen Band was formed, the record was made, and the boys hit the road to promote it.
“It was an interesting time,” remembers Big Danny Gallagher, who acted as the band’s road manager. “We played all these weird places and drove hundreds of miles to do it again the next night. Nobody saw much in the way of money. We practically starved.”
Back home, musicians, caught up in the enthusiasm of one of their own actually making a record and going on tour, formed new bands and hoped to follow in Springsteen’s footsteps. One such group was the Blackberry Booze Band.
“The kind of music we played was blues,” says David Meyers, the Booze Band’s bass player. “Steve [Van Zandt] was in the band and so was Southside. We played the kind of stuff that might have been heard during the Upstage days, but we did it with more polish, I think. We also played a lot of material that no one else had ever heard before. We were a band rather than a bunch of musicians that simply showed up and jammed, although at times that did happen when friends asked to sit in.”
By this time a new club had opened up on Ocean Avenue in Asbury Park, called the Stone Pony. Its owners were looking for a house band that would draw locals to the club on a regular basis. Using some of the ideas worked out in the Blackberry Booze Band, Miami Steve Van Zandt and Southside Johnny formed just the group the Pony was searching for, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes.
Van Zandt, who had toured with the Dovells after Steel Mill broke up, and who had always been infatuated with black music, formed the Asbury Jukes around a horn section and a pepper-hot rhythm section. Not prepared to take center stage himself, he gave that task to Southside. Armed with a blazing harp and an encyclopedic knowledge of blues and R&B, Johnny sang and moved like his heroes—Jackie Wilson, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, and Ray Charles—and the Pony began to fill up.
When Springsteen and his band came off the road, they found the Stone Pony the place to hang out. Gradually, the club became the unofficial meeting place of Jersey Shore musicians, especially those with strong links to Asbury Park.
“It filled a gap,” says Kevin Kavanaugh, an original member of the Asbury Jukes who still plays keyboard in the band. “When the Upstage closed, there was really no place where you knew you could go on a given night and find plenty of musicians. The Pony became that place.”
It was in 1976 that the music scene of the Jersey Shore, particularly in Asbury Park, had matured into one worthy of national attention. Springsteen’s Born to Run, released the year before, had been critically acclaimed in virtually every nook and cranny of the rock media. The Time and Newsweek stories had introduced him to mainstream America. All the hype that surrounded Springsteen nearly destroyed his career, but it did wonders for Asbury Park and the Stone Pony.
When record company executives came looking for another Springsteen in the back alleys and beer joints of Asbury, they almost certainly wound up at the Pony, where they were introduced to the Asbury Jukes. Springsteen praised the band and helped open important doors at Epic Records. Soon Southside and the Jukes had a record deal. On Memorial Day 1976 they celebrated the release of I Don’t Want to Go Home with a Stone Pony concert broadcast live on the radio.
David Sancious, who had left the E Street Band, along with drummer Boom Carter, to start a solo career as a jazz-rock fusion artist, also scored a record deal. His album, Forest of Feelings, although not nearly as commercially popular as I Don’t Want to Go Home, scored high critical marks nonetheless.
Other Asbury Park-based bands such as the Shakes, Cold, Blast and Steel, Lord Gunner, and the Cahoots scrambled to be the next in line. None ever did land a contract, but they came close. All this added up to what many locals consider the heyday of Jersey Shore music. Asbury Park was, in a word, music-rich. It was primarily a rock-R&B blend that one heard echoing out of area clubs, flavored with the sounds of a saxophone and the gritty vocals of a lead singer well versed in soul and Motown. Black leather jackets, newsboy caps, and earrings were in. Bands like Paul Whistler and the Wheels and the Shots kept the musical momentum strong.
Eventually the scene diversified enough to allow bands such as Kinderhook Creek, with deep-seated ties to country and Southern rock; Salty Dog, the Shore’s answer to heavy metal; and Sam the Band, perhaps the best Top 40 bar band, to develop large, devoted followings.
One would have thought, though, that with all the musical energy coming out of the Shore and with the large number of bands—and good bands at that—vying for a chance at stardom, at least one or two other outfits would have signed their names on record contracts.
“You have to take into consideration the ‘Springsteen curse,’ ” says one prominent Shore musician who asked to remain anonymous. “As much as Bruce was good for the local scene, he was also bad for it. Every band that was worthy of a recording contract in the late seventies was branded a Springsteen clone, it seemed. That’s why nobody got signed in those years. Record companies heard you were from Asbury Park and right away they shut their doors. The hype was over. A lot of good bands were denied their chance to get a deal because of the whole Springsteen bit. Now don’t get me wrong. I ain’t saying it was his fault. It just happened that way.”
Consider the case of Billy Chinnock. An Upstage veteran and longtime member of the Shore music scene, it was Chinnock’s bad luck to be labeled an Asbury Park artist with an R&B-styled sound that closely resembled Springsteen’s. Chinnock even looked and sounded like Springsteen at times. But worse, even though he was one of the precious few to sign a recording contract in the late seventies (with Atlantic), what did he call his debut album? Badlands.
“I had no idea Bruce had a song with the same name,” said Chinnock in an interview. “I couldn’t help it that I sort of have the same features as he does. And we came from the same roots, so why should my music sound all that different from his?
“It was like no matter what I did or where I turned, there was this Bruce-ghost following me. I knew I’d never get the proper attention in Jersey, so I moved to New York, then Maine, then back to Jersey, and finally to Nashville. It was there that I got a record company (CBS Associates) to take another look at my songs. It took a long time and a lot of running.”
Gradually, disappointment and frustration began to take a toll in Asbury Park. Bands broke up. Some musicians turned away from music altogether. Disco was hot elsewhere in America, so many club owners sought out DJs or Top 40 dance bands to fill the dance floors on the Shore. Even the Stone Pony began booking cover bands.
What saved the scene was the opening of a new club in Asbury Park, the Fast Lane. Its booking agent and manager, Jim Giantonio, sought out national acts when no one else would, and hired local bands which played original music to open for them. Almost overnight it became the Shore’s premier club. Not only did acts like Joe Jackson, the Ramones, Robert Gordon, and seemingly countless New Wave bands from Britain play the club in the early eighties, but “honorary” Shore groups such as Beaver Brown and Norman Nardini and the Tigers developed strong followings.
Giantonio actively encouraged area bands to focus on original music. He was, for example, responsible for pushing a band called The Rest, which included a lead singer named John Bongiovi (later to be known as Jon Bon Jovi), to deal seriously with its image and stage presence as well as its original songs. The result? The Rest became the best on the Shore in the early eighties.
The success of the Fast Lane prompted the Stone Pony to change gears and revert to its old policy of featuring original music bands. Another club, Big Man’s West, owned by E Street Band member Clarence Clemons, opened in nearby Red Bank. A whole new generation of Shore bands filled these clubs: Clarence Clemons and the Red Bank Rockers, Sonny Kenn and the Wild Ideas, Hot Romance, Cats on a Smooth Surface, Junior Smoots and the Disturbers. At the Pony, E Street Band members were back hanging out, and Springsteen would routinely show up on Sunday nights to sit in with Cats on a Smooth Surface. Suddenly the Shore music scene was back on its feet.
Sidenote: While all this was happening in Asbury Park and Red Bank, a hardcore punk offshoot of the Shore music scene sprouted in nearby Long Branch. The host club was the Brighton Bar. It permitted slam-dancing and gave the rowdiest punk bands a place to perform.
“Hardcore at the Shore is just a violent reaction to all the hype that surrounds Asbury Park and the bands that play there,” said The Mutha, owner of Long Branch’s Mutha Records and a leader of the local punk movement a couple of years ago. “We don’t want any part of that crap.” Brighton bands openly resented bands that played the Asbury Park/ Red Bank circuit and repudiated the R&B roots of the area in grand fashion.
Yet there were ties. John Eddie played the Brighton as much as he played Big Man’s West. So did Sonny Kenn. Little Steven was even known to sign in at the Brighton when he was at the Shore. And some very good bands came out of the scene, bands that, with the proper guidance, could have gone much farther than they did. One such group was Secret Syde. Another was the Wallbangers.
All this brings us to the present. The Fast Lane is gone, as is Big Man’s West. The Stone Pony has reclaimed its right to be called the Shore’s most prestigious rock club, though redevelopment plans for Asbury Park will probably mean the demolition of the club’s Ocean Avenue site. The Brighton Bar lives on. And there are some new clubs—the Deck House in Asbury Park, the Green Parrot in Neptune, Jasons in South Belmar—that regularly book the best local bands and carry on the tradition of the Jersey Shore music scene.
There is yet another generation of artists and bands worth noting, too. John Eddie is at the top of the list, and right behind him is Glen Burtnick. Then there are the Cruisers and LaBamba and the Hubcaps, two bands with strong links to R&B; the Fairlanes, the Shore’s best blues act; and new entries like Mike Wells and the Wage, Big Danny and the Boppers, Beyond the Blue, Baby Boom, and the World.
“The Shore music scene is still something special,” says Stone Pony DJ Lee Mrowicki. “Overall, the quality of bands is quite good, and you’ll never know who might jam on any given night. It’s a tight scene, too, just like it’s always been. Maybe that’s what makes it so special. If you play in a Shore band, I think you feel like you belong to something bigger than the three or four guys in your group. You feel like you’re part of a legacy or a tradition. Few other scenes have that. And I know most of us are pretty proud of it.”
Notes 1 Springsteen was born at Monmouth Memorial Hospital, Long Branch, New Jersey.
2 Crawdaddy! is back in circulation again.
3 For a look at the current Asbury Park music scene, see Gary Wien,
Beyond the Palace (Victoria, B.C.: Trafford Publishing, 2003).
4 Johnny Lyon grew up in Ocean Grove, a seaside community immediately south of Asbury Park.