Boss

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band - The Illustrated History

Gillian G. Gaar

• Publisher: Voyageur Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780760351277
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

Find out how legendary musician Bruce Springsteen earned his monicker. There's only one Boss; his story is revealed here.

Bruce Springsteen is a platinum-shifting, stadium-filling rock star, but he is also more nuanced than that. He is a man of the people, making conventional-and-proud-of-it rock music aimed at the American working class.

A supreme songwriter, Springsteen is a rock 'n' roll legend, and this lavishly illustrated book is an examination of his life and music. A comprehensive overview of a fascinating and unique artist, Boss: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band - The Illustrated History is a tribute to Springsteen's body of work, from the rock anthem Born to Run to his sepia-toned analysis of working-class misery, The River. There's Springsteen's gnarly, Bonnie and Clyde-style tableaux Atlantic City, as well as his debunking of guys' yearnings for youthful Glory Days. Throughout it all, Springsteen has demonstrated that he knows how to create a classic track. Find out once and for all why his nickname is The Boss.

1 GREETINGS FROM ASBURY PARK

Working-class hero. There couldn’t be a better name for Bruce Frederick Springsteen.

Springsteen mythologized the lives of ordinary people in his songs and made them seem extraordinary. The rebels. The drifters. The lost souls who yearned to escape their impoverished surroundings. But the myths were all grounded in reality, a reality drawn from the fabric of Springsteen’s youth.

His father, Doug Springsteen, was born and raised in the small township of Freehold, New Jersey, a half hour’s drive inland from the Jersey Shore, almost fifty miles south of New York City. He dropped out of high school to take a job as a laborer, then joined the army in 1943, when he turned eighteen, at the height of World War II. Perhaps his years in the service dulled his sense of ambition; perhaps he had little to begin with. But after his hitch, he couldn’t summon up the energy to do much more than live off his veteran’s benefits—until one night in 1946 when he went on a double date with a friend and met Adele Zerilli.

Zerilli’s parents emigrated from Italy, and she and her two sisters were born and raised in Brooklyn. Her father became a lawyer, but he was later sent to prison for embezzlement. Before his incarceration, he managed to purchase a farmhouse just outside Freehold for his three daughters to live in, his wife having divorced him in the wake of the scandal. Zerilli was working as a secretary when she met Doug Springsteen and was underwhelmed by his immediate offer of marriage, telling him he would have to get a job before she’d even consider his proposal. Doug promptly went out and secured a job at a Ford auto plant in Edison, New Jersey, and the two married on February 22, 1947. Bruce arrived on September 23, 1949, born in Monmouth Memorial Hospital in Long Branch, New Jersey. In 1951, Virginia (whom everyone called Ginny), was born, followed by a second daughter, Pamela, in 1962.

Springsteen and Clemons at RAI Congress Hall in Amsterdam, Holland, on November 23, 1975. It was the band’s first time overseas, and Springsteen was nervous about how he would be received. Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns

After Virginia’s birth, the family moved in with Bruce’s paternal grandparents. Bruce’s father had had an older sister (also named Virginia) who died at age five when she was hit by a truck, and her parents, Fred and Alice Springsteen, had been devastated by the loss. The two doted on their first grandchild, to the point that Bruce’s sister—the second Virginia—felt neglected. Springsteen admitted in biographer Peter Carlin’s 2012 biography Bruce that his role was “to replace the lost child … which is an enormous burden.” The family regularly went out to Saint Rose of Lima cemetery, where Virginia Springsteen had been buried in 1927, to tend her gravesite.

Doug Springsteen tended to drift from job to job, working in various factories, as a security guard or as a truck driver. It was up to Adele Springsteen, the one with a steady job, to provide some measure of security. Bruce was especially close to his grandfather; the two spent a lot of time together, fixing the broken radios that they found thrown away in the neighborhood. But discipline was lax when his mother wasn’t home, and Bruce often stayed up late at night, sneaking out to watch television when everyone else was asleep.

When Bruce was old enough for school, his mom decided it was time the family had a home of their own, and they moved to a house a few blocks away. (They would move again after Pamela was born.) He was sent to Saint Rose of Lima School, a Catholic institution, but it was an uncomfortable fit. Bruce rebelled against the school’s many rules and spent a lot of time in the principal’s office. (He later claimed a nun once forced him to sit in the trash can next to her desk because he’d been misbehaving.) He was rarely in trouble for fighting with other boys, though; it was the system he rebelled against.

He played Little League baseball, but by 1957 his primary interest became music. It helped him break out of his self-imposed shell. “I tend to be an isolationist by nature,” he told Rolling Stone in 1992. “Then music came along, and I latched onto it as a way to combat that part of myself.” And the reason behind his new passion could be summed up in a single name: Elvis.

There had always been music in the Springsteen household. The radio was usually on, his mother and her sisters enjoyed dancing to music, and Bruce occasionally fiddled with the spinet in his aunt Dora’s living room. But no one galvanized him like Elvis Presley, who gave three incendiary performances on The Ed Sullivan Show on September 9 and October 28, 1956, and January 6, 1957. The last appearance was likely the one Bruce saw; the previous gyrations of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll on Ed Sullivan had so scandalized audiences that the television cameras were kept fixed firmly above his waist for the January appearance.

To Bruce, it looked like Elvis was having a ball, and he couldn’t wait to join in. “It looked like he was playing, like a child is drawn to play,” he told Carlin. “It looked like so much fun. Imagine throwing out all the self-consciousness that’s sort of like a blanket over you. What would happen if you threw all that off for two and a half minutes, three minutes, as a performer!” Unlike other parents of the era, Bruce’s mother shared his interest in Elvis, and she agreed to get him a guitar when he asked for one. But his first round with the instrument ended in a stalemate. His mother rented an acoustic guitar from a music store, where Bruce went to take lessons, but, typically, he resisted formal training. He quickly lost interest in learning how to play the instrument.

But music nonetheless became an all-consuming passion. He kept his ear glued to the radio, picking up New York City stations such as WINS and WMCA, absorbing the likes of Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Sam Cooke, Roy Orbison, Ray Charles—the cream of popular radio. (He was tickled that Philadelphia vocal group the Orlons did a song with the same name as the road he lived on: “South Street.”) On June 29, 1962, his mother took him and his sister to their first concert, a Dick Clark package show in Atlantic City, New Jersey, featuring the Shirelles, Freddy Cannon, and Bobby Rydell, headlined by the King of Twist himself, Chubby Checker.

In 1972, the year Springsteen signed with his first manager, Mike Appel. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

By the following year, Bruce had developed a feeling for the power of rock ’n’ roll. It would now be the Beatles who would firmly propel him back to the guitar. When he first heard the Beatles’ breakthrough hit in America, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” while riding in the car with his mother, he was so excited he jumped out and ran to the nearest phone to call his girlfriend and tell her about it. He watched the Beatles when they appeared on Ed Sullivan in February 1964, and the band’s subsequent flurry of hits, the high-spirited antics in their first feature film, A Hard Day’s Night, and the influx of other British Invasion acts that followed (the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Animals), made Bruce determined to pick up the guitar again—and stick with it this time.

He spent $18 of his hard-earned money on an acoustic guitar and, armed with a copy of the songbook 100 Greatest American Folk Songs, from his older cousin Frank, set about learning his craft. The first song he learned was “Greensleeves.” The song was in E minor, which, he noted to his biographer and friend Dave Marsh in spring 2006, had a major impact on his later work: “I started off in a minor key, and that led me down that road ever since.”

By the end of the year he was accomplished enough that he knew he needed a better instrument, and his mother took out a loan in order to buy her son his first electric guitar, a black-and-gold Kent model (made in Japan), for Christmas 1964. The first rock song he learned to play on it was “Twist and Shout,” originally by the Isley Brothers and widely popularized by the Beatles.

The guitar became his obsession. His days at Freehold Regional High School were just something to get through until he could return to playing, up in his room, ignoring his father’s shouts from downstairs about the noise. Despite Doug Springsteen’s protests, Bruce continued to practice, even when his father pounded the ceiling with a broom handle in a vain attempt to get his son to quiet down. It was just one of many disagreements that would arise between father and son during Bruce’s teenage years. His music was too loud. His hair was too long. When Bruce tried racing through the family kitchen, only to be stopped by his father’s request to sit down and talk with him as he worked his way through endless cigarettes and a six-pack of beer, Bruce would sigh, knowing that the best intentions would invariably lead to yet another argument. Springsteen later worked his father’s admonitions into his stage raps. “We’d start talking about nothing much,” he said during one show in 1976. “How I was doing. Pretty soon he’d ask me what I thought I was doing with myself, and we’d always end up screaming at each other.”

But music was always there. By the spring of 1965, he’d landed a spot in a local band, the Rogues, as a rhythm guitarist, and he played a handful of shows with the band. But he was subsequently kicked out of the group, ostensibly over the poor quality of his guitar. Dragging himself back home, he learned how to play the Rolling Stones’ “It’s All Over Now” to console himself.

His sister Ginny was dating a fellow Freehold student named George Theiss, lead singer and guitarist in a band made up of high school friends who started out under the name the Sierras. The band even had a manager, Gordon “Tex” Vinyard, who lived next door to the band’s drummer, Bart Haynes. He had gotten to know the group after complaining about their noisy rehearsals. After meeting the boys, he took a liking to them and agreed to help them out, even finding them a bass player, twenty-eight-year-old Frank Marziotti, who owned the local Chevron station; despite the age difference, he fit in well. Vinyard also offered his own living room for rehearsals. The Sierras soon took on the name Castiles, after a popular shampoo.

When Bruce learned the Castiles were looking for a lead guitarist, he offered his services and came by Vinyard’s house one night to audition, with Theiss in attendance. Bruce was then invited back to play with the full band, which also included vocalist Danny Hyland (later replaced by Richie Goldstein and then by Paul Popkin). Bruce made sure he had a couple other songs under his belt before he returned and won over the group with his skill. He was in. “I guarantee you that once I had the job, I went home and started to woodshed like a mad dog,” he told Carlin.

The Castiles played the teen dance circuit in the area: school dances (including some held at Saint Rose of Lima), pizza parlors, the Freehold Elks Club, and battle-of-the-bands contests. “So many styles were overlapping at that point in time that you would have a doo-wop singing group with full pompadours and matching suits set up next to our band playing a garage version of Them’s ‘Mystic Eyes,’ set up next to a full thirteen-piece soul show band,” Springsteen recalled of the latter events. One especially memorable date was at the Marlboro State Psychiatric Hospital. “This guy in a suit got up and introduced us for twenty minutes, saying we were greater than the Beatles,” Springsteen later cracked, “then the doctors came up and took him away.”

The Castiles avoided covering the Beatles—too many other groups were doing that—but didn’t hesitate to play songs by other British Invasion acts. One black-and-white promo shot shows the group in matching outfits: white ruffled shirts and dark vests, with everyone’s hair (except for Marziotti’s) falling into their eyes. They stand with their arms folded, staring down at the camera, trying to look tough. The matching outfits wouldn’t last long; later promo photos show them in jeans, slouching, though even with their long hair they’re more clean cut than scruffy.

In 1966 Marziotti moved on, and he was replaced by another high school student, Curt Fluhr. Haynes also planned to take his leave. Having finished high school, he joined the US Marines and was sent to Vietnam (where he would be killed in action in October 1967). He was replaced in the band by Vinny Maniello. The two new Castiles joined just in time for the band’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Greetings from Asbury Park
• 2 From Jersey to Jungleland
• 3 “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.”
• 4 Prove It All Night
• 5 I’m on Fire
• 6 57 Channels (and Nothin’ On)
• 7 The Rising
• 8 Jesus Was an Only Son
• 9 Land of Hope and Dreams
• Selected Discography
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright Page