seventeen. By then he had already formed
his first band, the Castiles, and therefore
remained behind in Jersey, moving into a
scruffy one-room apartment above a drug
store in nearby Long Branch.
It was around this time that
Springsteen also began appearing
occasionally as a solo act at the Café
Wha? in Greenwich Village, the same
venue in which a similarly young Dylan
had first become recognised.
Reminiscing about this time spent
commuting between Asbury Park and
downtown New York Springsteen has
stated, ‘I was always popular in my little
area and I needed this gig badly. I didn’t
have anything else. I wanted to be as big
as you could make it... the Beatles, the
Rolling Stones.’
Too poor to pay for his own
entertainment, when he wasn’t working
he trod the boardwalks by the beach in
Asbury. Outgoing and talkative onstage,
in person he could be almost unbearably
shy, mumbling his conversation and
shuffling around in old clothes he looked
like he’d slept in.
‘Jersey,’ he later bemoaned in a Sounds
article in March 1974, was ‘a dumpy
joint. I mean it’s OK, it’s home, but... I
guess it just took a long time for someone
to think of something to write about it.’
It hardly seems credible now, but the
teenage Springsteen’s career nearly took
a very different course when, in 1968,
he received his draft papers into the US
army. With the US then involved in the
Vietnam war, like all new conscriptsBruce knew his chance of escaping the
conflict without being maimed or killed
was fifty percent at best, and years later
he confessed that he and his buddies went
out and got good and drunk the night
before they were due to be inducted.
Fortunately Springsteen flunked his
medical, in large part due to injuries he
had sustained in a motorcycle accident
some time before, and he returned home
that day fearing the reaction such news
would be greeted with by his ex-army
father. Instead of disparaging the boy,
however, Springsteen’s father merely
nodded and said, ‘That’s good, son.’
The subject was never mentioned again;
though it was something Bruce would
return to in his own mind a great deal
over the years, not least after news that
the drummer in his first band, the
Castiles, had been killed in the conflict.
In lieu of a military position,
Springsteen spent most of his youth
hanging out at a local teen club named
the Upstage – an avowedly alcohol and
drug free environment situated down by
the Jersey shoreline which, nevertheless,
stayed open till five every morning and
where any passing kid with enough nerve
could get up and play. This was where
Springsteen and his friends first played
as the Castiles, quickly followed by
similarly short-lived but evermore adept
outfits like Earth, Child, Steel Mill, Dr
Zoom & The Sonic Boom and, finally in
his early-twenties, the more prosaically-
named Bruce Springsteen Band, a
sprawling ten-piece back-up group (three
members of which would later form part
of his next legendary backing outfit, the
E Street Band). E Street was actually
where the mother of the band’s original
keyboard player, David Sancious, lived,
in the Jersey neighbourhood of Belmar.
Sancious had already left, however,
by the time the classic E Street Band
line-up had evolved. This line-up would
include Garry ‘Funky’ Tallent on bass,
‘Phantom’ Danny Federici playing organ
and accordion, Clarence ‘Big Man’
Clemons, a Virginia-born saxophonist
and former James Brown sideman who
joined in 1971, single-handedly replacing
an entire horn section and a trio of girl
back-up singers. There was also ‘Mighty’
Max Weinberg on drums, ‘Professor’ Roy
Bittan playing the piano and glockenspiel,
Bittan was the only non-Jersey boy,
hailing from Far Rockaway, New York
and finally the band was completed by
‘Miami’ Steve Van Zandt on rhythm
guitar and backing vocals– Van Zandt
was called ‘Miami’ because he had once
been to Florida.Bruce Springsteen in performance during 1975.